Why Korea?

1/10/2026

Why Korea, indeed? This documentary actually has precious little to do with that peninsula. It’s purpose seems to be to use the Soviet backed North Korea and a whole load of other tangential communist advances throughout Europe to rattle a sabre at Moscow’s imperialist agenda. The Japanese occupation of Manchuria might have been a relevant place to start had we stayed in that part of the world, but that was just the start of a global assessment of ambitious politicians from Stalin, Mussolini and, of course, Hitler. The archive is impressive but the narration is repetitious in the extreme. Joe King must ask “Why Korea?” about thirty times during the first ten minutes without ever even beginning to answer the question. This entire film has a condescension about it that depicts plucky little