The Korean War History Essay Research Coursework Paper (Essay Sample)

The Korean War
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Abstract
Korea used to be a very homogeneous country. Before the current division, the two Koreas shared 4000 years of common history, fought against the same foreign invasions, underwent the same artistic and philosophical influences. They spoke the same language, using the same alphabet. There was a very little difference between a Korean from Pyongyang and a Korean from Seoul until the last decades. But the Korean Peninsula history was a history of invasions: as bridge between the mainland China and the sea on one side, as gateway to Japan across the eastern extreme lands on the other side, these two major world powers, Japan and China, have long fought over the control of Korea. The last round was won by Japan Meiji who first established a protectorate in 1905, then an outright annexation in 1910. Japan's total control over Korea lasted until the end of the Second World War. Undeniably, the Japanese protectorate largely contributed to industrialize the entire Peninsula. It developed the economy, the administration and infrastructure, the education, so that some wealth could be generated producing positive results. But the Korean population had lived 35 years of total dictatorship, of denial of its identity and forced assimilation to the Japanese culture. Some resistance movements began to arise at that time, unleashing new revolutionary ideas; one of those movements would become the Korean communist movement, inspired by China, a Japan's old enemy, and encouraged by the Soviet Union, the communist revolutionary thinking spread throughout the Peninsula, from the north to the south of it. The Korean Communist Party established in the 1930s and started to mount a guerrilla resistance against the Japanese occupier. The leading figure of the communist resistance movement that history has chosen was Kim Il Sung, who will later become the "Great Leader" of North Korea. The Korean War (1950-1953) was the peak of the Cold War, mixed to a lack of resolution about a controversial question raised during the Second World War : the division of a nation and the antagonism between the Sino-Soviet block on the one hand, and the West and its allies on the other hand.