[Peace-discuss] This Is the One Picture All of North Korea Fears Most

Sun Oct 8 19:01:09 UTC 2017

The story that most Americans have heard of the Korean War is largely US propaganda - as some people saw at the time: see I. F. Stone, “The Hidden History of the Korean War’ (1952).

'In 1945 US troops arrived in Korea for what would become America’s longest-lasting conflict. While history books claim without equivocation that the war lasted from 1950 to 1953, those who have actually served there know better. By closely analyzing US intelligence before June 25, 1950 (the war’s official start), and the actions of key players like John Foster Dulles, General Douglas MacArthur, and Chiang Kai-shek, the great investigative reporter I. F. Stone demolishes the official story of America’s “forgotten war” by shedding new light on the tangled sequence of events that led to it. "The Hidden History of the Korean War" was first published in 1952—during the Korean War—and then republished during the Vietnam War. In the 1990s, documents from the former Soviet archives became available, further illuminating this controversial period in history.’

The leading historian of the war, Bruce Cumings, writes, "Because the top US commander in Korea had secretly told his superiors that South Korean military forces started the majority of fighting along the 38th parallel in 1949, with attacks from the South beginning in May and ending in December and with a near war in August, it was incumbent upon me to examine Stone’s thesis in any event. The South Korean commander of the parallel in the summer of 1949 was Kim Sok-won, a quisling who had chased after Kim Il Sung and other guerrillas in Manchuria in the 1930s, on behalf of the Japanese Kwantung Army—an army well known for provoking incidents, such as the one resulting in Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931. My main point, though, was that the commanders of the respective Korean armies had chosen different sides in the long anticolonial struggle against Japan, and it should not have been surprising that once they had the means to do so, they would again clash with each other. What is more surprising is the direct American role, during the US occupation of Korea from 1945 to 1948, in putting in power an entire generation of Koreans in the military and the national police who had served Japanese imperialism.” <http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2007/11/22/the-korean-war-an-exchange/>

A recent brief but accurate account: <https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/09/framing-north-korea/>. —CGE

> On Oct 8, 2017, at 1:36 PM, Karen Aram via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
> 
> “U.S. forces intervened under the guise of the United Nations.”
> 
> Who would have thought the US would be so deceptive as to use  the UN in order to deceive? 
> 
> 
> On Oct 8, 2017, at 10:28, Szoke, Ron via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> https://www.yahoo.com/news/one-picture-north-korea-fears-133500000.html?soc_src=hl-viewer&soc_trk=ma
>>> 
>>> This Is the One Picture All of North Korea Fears Most
>>> 
>>> Zachary Keck
>>> 
>>> Security, Asia
>>> 
>>> 
>>> <45389d79daf2e313c6bfd428abfbb563.jpeg>
>>> Air power destroyed the DPRK in the 1950s.
>>> 
>>> This Is the One Picture All of North Korea Fears Most
>>> 
>>> North Korea actually repaired the war damage faster than South Korea, which had been far less damaged during the war. A more enduring impact of the bombing is that it has been used as a propaganda tool by the Kim regime to instill hatred in all their citizens from a very young age. As Bruce Cumings explained: “Every North Korean knows about this, it's drilled into their minds.”
>>> 
>>> As tensions between North Korea and the United States reach a fever pitch, it’s worth remembering the origins of the hostility: the Korean War.
>>> 
>>> The general parameters of the war are well known. The conflict began when Kim Il-sung’s forces invaded South Korea in June 1950 with the tacit (if reluctant) support of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. Kim’s forces quickly overran their southern counterparts and were on the brink of unifying the peninsula before U.S. forces intervened under the guise of the United Nations. They quickly pushed the North Korean forces back across the thirty-eighth parallel and threatened to unify the entire peninsula until a massive force of Chinese “volunteers” intervened and pushed the American and South Korean forces back to the thirty-eighth parallel. Thereafter, the two sides settled into a stalemate that more or less persisted until an armistice was signed in 1953.
>>> 
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>>> 
>>> Less well remembered, at least in the United States, is that America waged a mercilessly air campaign against North Korea during the conflict. As the eminent historian on the war, Bruce Cumings,puts it: “What hardly any Americans know or remember . . . is that we carpet-bombed the North for three years with next to no concern for civilian casualties.”
>>> 
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>>> 
>>> Indeed, Maj. Gen. Emmett O’Donnell, who led the Far East Bomber Command of B-29s that participated in the bombings,described the plan as going “to work burning five major cities in North Korea to the ground, and to destroy completely everyone of of about 18 major strategic targets.” Curtis Lemay boasted that Strategic Air Command “burned down just about every city in North and South Korea both.” He alsoestimated that “over a period of three years or so, we killed off . . . 20 percent of the population.” And future secretary of state Dean Rusk, who also served in the State Department under the Truman administration, would say that the United States bombed: “Everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.”
>>> 
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>>> 
>>> The sheer number of explosives used is absolutely astonishing. As Tom O’Connor has recounted in Newsweek, the “U.S. dropped 635,000 tons of explosives on North Korea, including 32,557 tons of napalm.” To put this in perspective, throughout the entire Pacific Theatre in World War II, the United States dropped 503,000 tons of bombs. And that was throughout an area that was multitudes larger than North Korea (Japan alone is roughly three times the size of North Korea). Not surprising, then, that the historian Charles K. Armstronghas written, “The U.S. Air Force estimated that North Korea’s destruction was proportionately greater than that of Japan in the Second World War, where the U.S. had turned 64 major cities to rubble and used the atomic bomb to destroy two others.”
>>> 
>>> North Korea’s lack of industrialization limited the number of enticing targets for strategic bombing. Consequently, as Armstrong again points out, “By the fall of 1952, there were no effective targets left for US planes to hit. Every significant town, city and industrial area in North Korea had already been bombed.”This is barely hyperbole: the bombings destroyed 100 percent of Sinanju, 95 percent of Sariwon, 85 percent of Hungnam, 80 percent of Wonsan, and Hamhung, and 75 percent of Pyongyang.
>>> 
>>> Thereafter, American and allied aircraft turned their sights to North Korea’s hydroelectric plant and the the twenty dams in North Korea that controlled 75 percent of the country’s water, which was needed for agricultural and the production of rice. In May 1953, U.S. forcesknocked five of these dams out, causing massive flooding. It also put millions in North Korea at risk for starvation, although the worst of that was prevented because of a massive influx of food aid from the Soviet Union and China. The bombings did cause widespread electrical outages, and by the U.S. Air Force’s estimates destroyed all but 4 to 5 percent of North Korea’s railways.
>>> 
>>> As the official U.S. Air Force historynoted of this time period: “During the last year of the Korean hostilities, American air power executed the dominant role in the achievement of the military objectives of the United States and of the United Nations. . . . No single air operation so gravely affected the Communists as the simple destruction of two agricultural irrigation dams, for this operation, too terrible to execute in its entirety, portended the devastation of the most important segment of the North Korean agricultural economy.”
>>> 
>>> Most outside analysts are far more skeptical that the U.S. strategic bombing campaign had much impact on the course of the war. The political scientist Robert Papeargues that North Korea and China’s major concessions in 1951 were the result of the air campaign weakening their military forces’ ability to achieve their objectives (coercion by denial) rather than the strategic bombing (coercion by punishment). Many othershave argued that air power’s most effective contribution to the Korean War was in the interdiction of enemy lines. In particular, aircraft focused on destroying the bridges near the Yalu River to cut off Chinese and Soviet support. Still, since these bridges were often heavily defended by antiaircraft weapons, and the aircraft of the day had severe limitations, this campaign also had only limited success.
>>> 
>>> North Korea actually repaired the war damage faster than South Korea, which had been far less damaged during the war. A more enduring impact of the bombing is that it has been used as a propaganda tool by the Kim regime to instill hatred in all their citizens from a very young age. As Bruce Cumingsexplained: “Every North Korean knows about this, it's drilled into their minds.”
>>> 
>>> Related:
>>> 
>>> For more news videos visit Yahoo View, available on iOS and Android.
>>> 
>>> Zachary Keck (@ZacharyKeck) is the Wohlstetter Public Affairs Fellow at the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center.
>>> 
>>> This first appeared in August. 
>>> 
>>> Read full article
>>> 
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