[Peace-discuss] Guest commentary

[David Green]

This commentary appeared in this morning's News-Gazette--
 
 
                        The history of the Korean War is distorted and exploited for political
ends
David Green
>Recent commemorations of the 60thanniversary of the
end of the Korean War have evoked standard rhetoric and rationalizations
regarding the righteousness of the United States’ role in that conflict. From
President Obama to columnist Max Boot to a local veteran writing on these pages,
the slaughter that the war entailed—at least 2 million soldiers and civilians
dead—is retroactively and perversely justified by South Korea’s subsequent economic
development and North Korea’s ongoing misery, respectively equated with what is
called freedom or lack thereof.
>This hindsight is contrived and morally specious; as a tool
of political propaganda by Obama, it is one of many examples of cynical
exploitation of militaristic sentimentality by our current Aggressor in Chief.
The historical narrative that is determined by Obama’s political opportunism is
empty of serious content and critique, as one would expect by this master of
fraudulent, manipulative, and hollow rhetoric.
>Historian Gabriel Kolko perceptively wrote in Main Currents in American History (1976):
>The Korean War was
essentially the internationalization of a civil conflict that had begun in 1945
immediately after Korea’s liberation from Japan and the artificial partition,
which the United States imposed in August 1945. The totalitarian regime (beginning
under Syngman Rhee in 1945 and ending not until 1987) that the U.S. funds left the nation in constant turmoil, with guerilla
warfare within the south itself and increasingly large scale combat between the
two sections along the 38thparallel in the year before the north
autonomously made the decision to reunify the nation in June 1950. Divorced
from the preceding five years of history, theories on the origins of the Korean
War become a part of the Cold War’s mythology.
>Part of what Kolko refers to is Rhee’s recruitment of those South
Koreans who had collaborated with the Japanese (who were notorious for
recruiting thousands of Korean women into sexual slavery) during the occupation
(1910-45), and the subsequent murder by Rhee’s forces of up to 100,000 leftist and
nationalist South Korean dissidents from 1945-48—with the help of their American
sponsors. 
>This American support for formerly collaborationist and authoritarian
elements was parallel to support for collaborationist and fascist forces in
Greece and Italy against former WWII resistance and leftist fighters during
that same period, always fraudulently justified by the Soviet threat. This
strategy also foreshadowed American support for the ruthless authoritarian puppet
Diem in South Vietnam against his own indigenous revolt, leading to a genocidal
American war (1962-75) that is increasingly distorted and rationalized by politicians,
including Obama, as living memories fade and opportunism knocks.
>The Korean War was a result of the imperial strategies of the
U.S. and Soviet Union, as well the Chinese revolution. Nevertheless, President
Truman had the options of either actively promoting a unification agreement or
leaving Korea to its own civil war, which would not likely have been joined by
either the Soviet Union or China. Instead he chose American aggression—aggravating
the subsequent loss of life, destroying the entire country, essentially leveling
every structure in North Korea, committing war crimes by bombing dams in North
Korea when there was nothing else left to destroy, and risking nuclear war. 
>It is to Truman’s credit that he resisted Douglas MacArthur’s
lunatic proposal to use nuclear weapons against China and fired the
megalomaniac general. However, it is to his discredit that his decision to use
anti-communism to justify American militarism and imperialism set in motion foreign
policies that have come to deadly and destructive global fruition for six
decades. As communist enemies have been conveniently and disingenuously replaced
by Muslims, the Orwellian basis of American militarism has been revealed as
part and parcel of the aggressive ambitions of American global capitalism and
multinational corporations—all, not incidentally, to the detriment of American
workers and our own freedom and democracy, as can be plainly seen now more than
ever.
>The Truman administration had momentous decisions to make in
this period from 1945 to 1953. American workers, accustomed to full employment and
labor activism during WWII, demanded a welfare state; unions were empowered to aggressively
support such ambitions, and strikes were frequent. These ambitions were consciously
subverted by massive government spending justified by military rather than
social goals, now known as “military Keynesianism.” Corporate propaganda
dominated the media and education in the 1950s. An extraordinary and ongoing climate
of fear was created and persists among the population of a country that has no
natural enemies and hasn’t been invaded in 200 years. Moreover, a massive
military-industrial complex that remains unaccountable to the American people
was perpetuated.
>The global and neoliberal legacy of the Truman era has
elevated the South Korean working class while decimating the American working
class. But since our own Civil War, the American working class has always been
the primary threat to and enemy of American elites, who are at heart vulgar
Marxists. As long as American workers continue to fight wars for global corporate
capitalists, they will continue to lose in their own struggle for freedom and
prosperity.
>    
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