delong writes: Soviet support for Kim Il Sung-Kim Jong Il regime doesn't count as "hegemonism"? Absent the Soviet Union, it seems to me that the chances that a regime like that of Kim Jong Il maintaining power in North Korea would have been zero...
shorrock replies: If you bother to read the history, you will see that Soviet forces in NK after WW2 worked with and recognized indigenous self-governing organizations (local govts that sprang up throughout the peninsula after Japan's surrender) while the US saw them all as communist and banned them. Of course many of the local committees throughout the country were led & organized by communists, who were the only groups to openly oppose the Japanese colonialists and earned admiration and respect throughout the country because of that - remember, Kim Il Sung fought guerrilla warfare against the Japanese for years, while SK's longtime leader Park Chung Hee actually served in the Japanese military.
But Soviet military power had very little to do with keeping Kim Il Sung in control after the Korean War - that was all Kim's doing. In fact the USSR and NK fought bitterly over all kinds of things in the '50s and '60s and well into the '70s, when Pyongyang was much closer to Beijing than Moscow. If Delong can find a way to rewrite this history, or wants to believe otherwise, fine.
The fact is, NK was far more independent of the Soviets than SK ever was of the US, and because of the enormous US military and economic stakes in SK, the US had far more power to influence events there - and still does.
That's still a source of some embarrassment in South Korea, esp with recent revelations about Korean atrocities in Vietnam. During that war, there were actually more South Korean soldiers in South Vietnam than there were North Vietnamese. SK sent those mercenaries under pressure from the US. NK never did anything remotely like that for the Soviets. It almost broke diplomatic relations with Vietnam at one point during the height of the China-Vietnam animosity and even provided economic and some military aid to anti-Soviet governments in Africa that were aligned with China.
But this doesn't mean you shouldn't keep trying, Brad.
Brad DeLong