I believe North Korea says something like "Korea (the only Korea that deserves being called Korea) exists as it always was meant to be, the Korea of the past was just the (flawed) predecessor to the perfected state that exists now." Or something like that. I'm not an expert.

In cases like this, tying parts of the modern nationalism to tradition and history is both valuable, but also generally itself a distortion and control of history. A fascist in Italy in the 40s can claim, "We as a people had been pushed from out path to greatness, but we can rebuild the Roman Empire to be what it was always meant to be, the Italy that we always have been."

It doesn't deny the complete existence of the past, but exploits it and twists it to say, "All the good parts of the past - for our definition of good, and even if they didn't exist - are actually parts of our modern revolution. All the bad parts were someone else."