askchapo

The US and friends dividing the peninsula to start with is a pretty critical element, and so is the US banning the People's Republic of Korea, which was directly responsible for surviving elements fleeing North and founding the WPK and DPRK. Also, the US, etc. were pretty plainly planning to take over the north because of how incredibly useful a land border with China would be.

It's also important to note that while the north was supported by the USSR, the USSR emphatically wanted them to have their own political leadership and organization rather than be a colonial appendage, something that even neoliberal historians who basically view East Germany as West USSR would often agree with. In the Korean War, the US of course characterized the threat of North Korea as the threat of Stalin, but this was a crass misrepresentation just like their completely, completely ludicrous claim of democracy in the South decades before they even had liberal democracy.

So you have this external objectively colonizing force running a military dictatorship, inventing a territorial border that was not agreed to, engaging in substantial violence in the south including suppressing the political organization of the local population, and then "accidentally" attacking the north and crossing its own fake border, and eventually the north (the only remaining place where Koreans actually led political organizing) decided to drive them out.

So you can definitely say that in some respects the North started the Korean War, but that's because the Korean War on their side was an anticolonial struggle against a force that wanted to take them over along with their existing repression in the south against the will of the local population.

Blowback talks about this and many other things in their Korean War season.