Socialist states, including North Korea, have showed a tendency of controling knowledge, philosophy and historical memories, and it seems such actions were intended to serve political goals laid out by the state or regime. North Korean historical studies for example, have served two important agendas: Supporting all the political, economic, social and cultural policies promoted by the government and also legitimatizing them afterwards, and securing the participation of the public in order to protect the interests of the state in any areas that involved the government. After the Moscow Conference, a negative perception of the Nationalist leaders who led the anti-Trusteeship movement was formed, while an anti-U.S. point of view was established after the Joint Soviet-American Commission failed to produce an agreement, twice. Both these turns of events squarely fall under the category of the aforementioned former. We can see how the North Korean leadership managed to ‘modify’ existing historical points of view and legitimatize a new one, using these historically important and significant events. The fact that North Korean historical studies did not set a goal purely academic and instead served a political agenda suggests that it would have had a hard time keeping an attitude devoted to objective presentation of historical events. Contemporary North Korean history books have been deifying and sacralizing certain early activists who joined North Korean leadership in the early years, while hiding their weak points and instead deprecating (or even ignoring) the achievements of certain groups and individuals other than those they supported. All these problems are inherited from the past, which was before the war. North Korean historical presentations before the Korean war shows us the origin of post-war historical studies. Examined in this article is the fact that the task of establishing a historical point of view could not escape the clutches of state interests and political agendas, and as a result, such circumstances formed the identity and tradition of North Korean historical presentation of past events.
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