Editing Historical negationism (section)

===North Korea and the Korean War===
Since the start of the [[Korean War]] (1950–1953), the government of [[North Korea]] has consistently denied that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) launched the attack with which it began the war for the Communist unification of Korea. The historiography of the DPRK maintains that the war was provoked by [[South Korea]], at the instigation of the United States: "On June 17, Juche 39 [1950] the then U.S. President [[Harry S. Truman|[Harry S.] Truman]] sent [[John Foster Dulles|[John Foster] Dulles]] as his special envoy to South Korea to examine the anti-North war scenario and give an order to start the attack. On June 18, Dulles inspected the [[38th parallel north|38th parallel]] and the war preparations of the '[[Republic of Korea Army|ROK Army]]' units. That day he told [[Syngman Rhee]] to start the attack on North Korea with the [[Counterpropaganda|counter-propaganda]] that North Korea first 'invaded' the south."<ref>"U.S. Order to Start Korean War", Korean Central News Agency, 12 June 2000.</ref>

Further North Korean pronouncements included the claim that the U.S. needed the peninsula of Korea as "a bridgehead, for invading the Asian continent, and as a strategic base, from which to fight against [[Wars of national liberation|national-liberation movements]] and [[socialism]], and, ultimately, to attain world supremacy."<ref>Ho Jong Ho, Kang Sok Hui, and Pak Thae Ho, ''US Imperialists Started the Korean War'' (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1993), p. 11.</ref> Likewise, the DPRK denied the [[War crimes in the Korean War|war crimes]] committed by the [[Korean People's Army]] in the course of the war; nonetheless, in the 1951&ndash;1952 period, the [[Workers' Party of Korea]] (WPK) privately admitted to the "excesses" of their earlier campaign against North Korean citizens who had collaborated with the enemy&nbsp;– either actually or allegedly&nbsp;– during the US–South Korean occupation of North Korea. Later, the WPK blamed every wartime atrocity upon the [[United States Armed Forces|U.S. Armed Forces]], e.g. the [[Sinchon Massacre]] (17 October – 7 December 1950) occurred during the retreat of the DPRK government from [[Hwanghae Province]], in the south-west of North Korea.

The campaign against "[[Collaborationism|collaborators]]" was attributed to political and ideological manipulations by the U.S.; the high-ranking leader [[Pak Chang-ok]] said that the American enemy had "started to use a new method, namely, it donned a [[leftist]] garb, which considerably influenced the inexperienced cadres of the Party and government organs."<ref>Balázs Szalontai. "Captives of the Past: The Questions of Responsibility and Reconciliation in North Korea's Narratives of the Korean War", ''Inherited Responsibility and Historical Reconciliation in East Asian Context'', Jun-Hyeok Kwak and Melissa Nobles, eds., London: Routledge, 2013, pp. 165–82.</ref> Kathryn Weathersby's ''Soviet Aims in Korea and the Origins of the Korean War, 1945–1950: New Evidence from Russian Archives'' (1993) confirmed that the Korean War was launched by order of [[Kim Il Sung]] (1912–1994); and also refuted the DPRK's [[allegations of biological warfare in the Korean War]]. The [[Korean Central News Agency]] dismissed the historical record of Soviet documents as "sheer forgery".<ref>Korean Central News Agency, 19 January 1998.</ref>