This year marks the 75th anniversary of the official start of the Korean War, known as “the Forgotten War” in the United States, yet most commemorative events will only enforce our forgetting through a distorted narrative. It goes something like this:
On June 25, 1950, the Korean War began when North Korea crossed the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea. It was a brazen act of communist aggression, an unprovoked surprise attack against an independent democratic nation, that prompted President Harry Truman to call an emergency meeting with the UN to authorize sending US forces to Korea. Although the war ended in a stalemate on July 27, 1953, the US-led UN forces, alongside South Korean forces, were successful in containing communism and safeguarding freedom in both South Korea and the United States.
The truth is, however, that South Korea—the nation that the United States and United Nations had established in 1948 after a three-year American occupation—was not democratic; it was a brutal police state that would only become democratic after four decades of popular struggle. Its first president, Syngman Rhee, had also planned to cross the 38th parallel in an armed invasion during the months leading up to June 25. Rhee’s aspirations were by no means a secret. They were publicized in South Korean newspapers, and Rhee pleaded for the United States to fund his war effort. But in the US news media, censorship was the order of the day. The New York Times, for example, voluntarily suppressed information that South Korea had been planning to attack the north.
In South Korea, too, North Korea’s transgression on June 25 is central to its narrative of the war. It is so central, in fact, that most South Koreans call the war “yuk-i-o,” or “six-two-five,” instead of “the Korean War,” thus reinforcing June 25 as its defining moment, echoing Truman’s claim that it was a defensive and righteous war. According to Kim Dong-Choon, a sociologist and a member of the first Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Korea (TRCK) from 2005 to 2009, the phrase yuk-i-o “is intended to repeatedly remind South Koreans of who was responsible for starting the war and which forces and ideological groups made them suffer such a national tragedy.… No other country in the world that has ever waged war commemorates the day it began.”
North Korea’s name for the war is “the Fatherland Liberation,” a name that sounds more obviously propagandistic but points to the fact that neither Korea regarded the other as an independent country but rather as part of itself that needed to be freed and reunified. To say that the war started on June 25 erases everything that led up to it—namely, the civil war that had already claimed at least 100,000 lives.