The world's complacency about North Korea’s nukes is inspired in large part by memories of stodgy Soviets who had the bomb for 40 years and never use… - Brian Reynolds Myers

[I]f Kim Il Sung had won the war, Korea today would not look like North Korea. I think it would still be a much less free and prosperous place than the South is now, but it would resemble China and Vietnam more than the North now does. Its system has been shaped by the need to distinguish itself, to seal itself off from the rival state, and to pursue nuclear armament.

What was once the nationalist Left is now the Nationalist left. The candlelight protests of 2016 are mythologized by Moon himself not as class struggle or anti-corruption drive but as the culmination of a long heroic fight for national liberation. The implication — kept tacit to let sleeping American dogs lie — is that by working with Washington against Pyongyang, Park Geun-hye betrayed the race, the minjok.

[M]emory politics are by definition political and shift accordingly. There was a time when both the South Korean left and North Korea were more interested in good relations with Japan than the right here was.