Who Really Started The Korean War?
Educate! History, Korea, US Imperialism
By Justin Raimondo, www.original.antiwar.com
April 20th, 2017
Note: Excellent review of history in the column below by Justin Raimondo but
of course a column cannot be a complete history.
The key thing I would emphasize more would be after WW II, the Koreans who
suffered from Japanese rule for decades were ready for democracy and had
formed democratic organizations, People's Committees, to organize and push
for democracy. These committees united and formed the Korean People's
Republic which put forth a progressive political agenda - a 27 point program
of employment, minimum wages, land reform.
When the war was over Generals Hodge and MacArthur would not even meet with
the Koreans. Instead the powers (US, UK, USSR and China) arbitrarily divided
the nation temporarily into two countries as part of ending Japan's
occupation. The US saw Korean calls for democracy as communism in their
paranoid fears of the Soviet Union and Red China. The US began working only
with Koreans who had supported the Japanese occupation. This immediately led
to revolts throughout Korea that lasted for five years. The US brought Rhee
in from the US on MacArthur's private plane from the US where he had lived
for 40 years. Rhee promised to work with those advocating democracy but then
assassinated them instead. This included railroad strikes, general strikes,
student strikes and riots as well as attacks on police and landlords as well
as martial law and mass arrests and slaughters by the government. One of the
the biggest revolts occurred on Jeju Island (which is revolting today
against a military base being forced on them). Hundreds of thousands were
killed by Rhee on Jeju. In memory of that massacre the Island is now known
as the Peace Island. Skirmishes with Korean resistors continued. Their
Korean allies from the northern part of their country came south to help. It
was this assistance that led to the necessity for a US invasion.
Further context - the US first invaded Korea in the 1860s and then again in
the 1870s as the US wanted a foothold in Asia with China as the big prize.
In 1905 Japan began its occupation of Korea as a deal made by the US with
Japan, so they would not oppose US control over the Philippines.There were
major revolts and calls for democracy around the time of the end of World
War I, the Koreans were ignored, and the global powers left Japan in control
of Korea.
It is an ugly history that has continued in this century with every
president. Now Trump is banging the war drum with threats, even threats of a
first nuclear strike.
Here is a more detailed review that brings it up to the Obama era of abuses:
North Korea and the United States, Will the Real Aggressor Please Stand
Down.
Forget the Trumanite mythology
The sixtieth anniversary of the "end" of the Korean war saw President Obama
attempt to rescue that classic example of interventionist failure from
history's dustbin. Addressing veterans of that conflict, he declared:
"That war was no tie. Korea was a victory. When 50 million South Koreans
live in freedom, a vibrant democracy.a stark contrast to the repression and
poverty of the North, that is a victory and that is your legacy."
This is a fairytale: it wasn't a victory, or even a tie: the US public was
disenchanted with the war long before the armistice, and Truman was under
considerable pressure at home to conclude an increasingly unpopular
conflict. As for this guff about "democracy": whatever the US was fighting
for, from 1950, when the war broke out, to 1953, when it ground to a halt,
democracy hardly described the American cause.
We were fighting on behalf of Syngman Rhee, the US-educated-and-sponsored
dictator of South Korea, whose vibrancy was demonstrated by the large-scale
slaughter of his leftist political opponents. For 22 years, Rhee's word was
law, and many thousands of his political opponents were murdered: tens of
thousands were jailed or driven into exile. Whatever measure of liberality
has reigned on the Korean peninsula was in spite of Washington's efforts and
ongoing military presence. When the country finally rebelled against Rhee,
and threw him out in the so-called April Revolution of 1960, he was ferried
to safety in a CIA helicopter as crowds converged on the presidential
palace.
The mythology that has coagulated around the Korean war is epitomized by
Obama's recent peroration, a compendium of uplifting phrases largely bereft
of any real history. When history intrudes, it is seen only in very soft
focus. The phrase "Korea reminds us" recurs throughout, like the refrain of
a pop song, but nowhere does this anonymous presidential speechwriter remind
us of the origins of this war. How did it come about?
The standard neocon-cold war liberal line is that the North Koreans, in
league with Moscow and Beijing, launched a war of aggression on June 25,
1950, when North Korean troops poured across the disputed What this
truncated history leaves out is that, in doing so, they preempted Rhee's own
plans to launch an invasion northward. As historian Mark E. Caprio,
professor of history at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, points out:
"On February 8, 1949, the South Korean president met with Ambassador John
Muccio and Secretary of the Army Kenneth C. Royall in Seoul. Here the Korean
president listed the following as justifications for initiating a war with
the North: the South Korean military could easily be increased by 100,000 if
it drew from the 150,000 to 200,000 Koreans who had recently fought with the
Japanese or the Nationalist Chinese. Moreover, the morale of the South
Korean military was greater than that of the North Koreans. If war broke out
he expected mass defections from the enemy. Finally, the United Nations'
recognition of South Korea legitimized its rule over the entire peninsula
(as stipulated in its constitution). Thus, he concluded, there was "nothing
[to be] gained by waiting."
The only reason Rhee didn't launch an attack was due to American reluctance
to supply him with the arms and aid he would need: war, when it came, would
be on America's terms, and our leaders had good reason to think it would
come sooner rather than later. Washington's policy was to keep Rhee supplied
with just enough arms to control the South. There is also evidence for
Congressman Howard Buffett's contention that the secret testimony before
Congress of CIA director Admiral Hillenkoeter proved US responsibility for
the war.
Buffett, Republican anti-interventionist from Iowa, went to his grave
demanding the declassification of that crucial testimony: alas, to no avail.
And yet what we do know is this: the US government had ample warnings of the
pending North Korean invasion, via intelligence reports sent to top cabinet
officials well before the June 25 commencement of large-scale hostilities.
Yet Washington took no action, either diplomatic or otherwise, to deter the
North Koreans.
On the other side of the equation, the Communist world was divided on the
Korea question, with Stalin skeptical of Kim il Sung's assurances that his
forces would achieve victory in three days. Russian policy was: military
aid, yes - Soviet intervention, no. China's Mao, on the other hand, offered
his support - which wasn't actually forthcoming, however, until the US
entered the war and advanced into North Korea itself.
Neither Stalin nor President Harry Truman were particularly eager to see the
conflict erupt, although both may have considered it inevitable. In which
case it was convenient, for propaganda purposes, to be able to portray the
enemy as having fired the first shot.
As to who did in reality fire that shot, Bruce Cumings, head of the history
department at the University of Chicago, gave us the definitive answer in
his two-volume The Origins of the Korean War, and The Korean War: A History:
the Korean war started during the American occupation of the South, and it
was Rhee, with help from his American sponsors, who initiated a series of
attacks that well preceded the North Korean offensive of 1950. From
1945-1948, American forces aided Rhee in a killing spree that claimed tens
of thousands of victims: the counterinsurgency campaign took a high toll in
Kwangju, and on the island of Cheju-do - where as many as 60,000 people were
murdered by Rhee's US-backed forces.
Rhee's army and national police were drawn from the ranks of those who had
collaborated with the Japanese occupation during World War II, and this was
the biggest factor that made civil war inevitable. That the US backed these
quislings guaranteed widespread support for the Communist forces led by Kim
IL Sung, and provoked the rebellion in the South that was the prelude to
open North-South hostilities. Rhee, for his part, was eager to draw in the
United States, and the North Koreans, for their part, were just as eager to
invoke the principle of "proletarian internationalism" to draw in the
Chinese and the Russians.
Having backed the Maoists during World War II, in cooperation with the
Soviet Union, the US had already "lost" China, and Truman was determined not
to "lose" Korea, too. In spite of the fact that he had ample warning of the
North Korean offensive, the President used this "surprise attack" to justify
sending American troops to Korea to keep Rhee in power, and in doing so
neglected to go to Congress for approval - or even give them advance notice.
Republicans were outraged: Sen. Robert A. Taft and others denounced this
usurpation of Congress's constitutional duty as a dangerous precedent that
would come back to haunt us - as it surely did in Vietnam, and continues to
do so to this day. In the months prior to the war, anti-interventionist
Republicans in Congress had succeeded in defeating the administration's $60
million aid package to the Rhee regime (by one vote!), but this was later
reversed on account of pressure from the well-funded China Lobby. Now Truman
had sent our troops to fight in a foreign war as if he were a Roman emperor
ordering his legionnaires into Gaul.
In defense of the administration, the liberals came out in support of the
war, with The Nation and The New Republic leading the charge: the antiwar
Republicans were "isolationists" and their alliance with "legalists,"
sniffed TNR, revealed a natural affinity, while progressives were burdened
with no such sentimental attachments to the Constitution. The editor of The
Nation red-baited Col. Robert McCormick's fiercely conservative Chicago
Tribune for being on the same side as the American Communist Party. What's
interesting is that the CP's former fellow-travelers, such as Henry Wallace,
Corliss Lamont, and the principals of the Progressive Party - which had run
Wallace for President with fulsome Communist support - rallied behind
Truman, reveling in the idea of a UN-sponsored war on behalf of "collective
security." Obama, it seems, commands a similar ability to inspire the left
to throw its vaunted antiwar credentials overboard.
Sixty years after the non-ending of the Korean war - there is, to this day,
no peace treaty - the lesson of that conflict is not, as Obama insisted in
his speech, that "the drawdown after the end of World War II left us
unprepared," but that involvement in other peoples' civil wars is never to
our benefit, or theirs. Sixty years have passed, and US troops are still in
South Korea, defending a country well-prepared to take care of itself -
sitting ducks if the North Koreans should ever launch an attack. Having
stifled every effort at peaceful reunification - including a promising
effort during the Bush era - Washington continues to enable the Korean
standoff, and in doing so perpetuates the North Korean regime, one of the
worst, if not the worst, in the world.
North Korea is dangerously unstable, with a significant movement within the
military against the rule of Kim Jong-un, the third member of the IL Sungist
dynasty to take the reins of power. There have been episodic reports of gun
battles between rival military units, and this, combined with North Korea's
dire economic straits, has the potential to spark an explosion sooner or
later - and inevitably draw in the South. Having isolated the North Koreans,
who have in turn isolated themselves, the West has limited its ability to
have much of an effect on the ground.
The two Koreas are very different, opposites in many ways, but one thing
unites them: an intense nationalism. This same nationalism resents the US
presence, whatever the pretext, and will one day find expression in a
successful national reunification. Until that day, the unfinished war and
its consequences will continue to be a thorn in our side.
