U.S. Supported Mass Killing of Radicals in Korea
A crime is a crime, whether perpetrated in the name of Stalinism, fascism, capitalism or democratic socialism. However, although it is today, for instance, popular in Croatia to refer to the Bleiburg massacre (where Nazi collaborationists and some civilians were mercilessly killed) as an ostensible manifestation of the “criminal” nature of the Yugoslav social revolution itself, it is ignored that capitalism has always been steeped in blood and crimes, and that following the Second World War “democratic” capitalistic countries also settled accounts with the defeated in a horrific manner.¹THE KOREAN COLONIAL WAR
AND THE AMERICAN SUPPORT FOR MASS MURDER
Dan Jakopovich
(Novi Plamen, May-July, 2008)
A crime is a crime, whether perpetrated in the name of Stalinism, fascism, capitalism or democratic socialism. However, although it is today, for instance, popular in Croatia to refer to the Bleiburg massacre (where Nazi collaborationists and some civilians were mercilessly killed) as an ostensible manifestation of the “criminal” nature of the Yugoslav social revolution itself, it is ignored that capitalism has always been steeped in blood and crimes, and that following the Second World War “democratic” capitalistic countries also settled accounts with the defeated in a horrific manner.¹
Secret documents from the Korean War were recently published, revealing that in the mid 1950s the US authorised the killing of approximately 100,000 leftists, generally without any formal charges or trials whatsoever. The highest circles in the Pentagon and State Department classified this fact at the time as a military secret and concealed it from the public. In the words of the historian Jung Byung-joon, a member of the South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the American “army were at the crime scene and took pictures and wrote reports.” The head of the commission posited that the number of 100,000 leftists killed is very conservative. On the basis of some research it is believed, for example, that the majority of 300 thousand leftists and their sympathisers who were sent to concentration camps at the beginning of the war for “re-education” were killed. Prior to the beginning of the war, the American military government in South Korea banned the Korean Workers Party, and at the beginning of the war they cruelly suppressed practically all forms of leftist political activity that were discovered.
There are also evidence and indications of the direct US role in the killings. One North Korean report, for example, states that an American military advisor gave the order to kill approximately a thousand prisoners in Incheon in late July 1950. The American journalist Alan Winnington reported the allegations by a witness that American officers supervised mass executions in Daejeon. Colonel Rollins S. Emmerich later wrote in his report to military historians that he attempted to prevent the executions of 3,500 prisoners in the southern port city of Pusan but authorisation was nonetheless given from the head of the American command for the mass executions of leftists. Furthermore, for example, when the Far East commander and fanatical anti-communist General Douglas MacArthur was informed in a highly classified report of the execution of approximately 300 people near Daegu, including the murder of women and a 12- or 13-year-old girl who were thrown into a ravine (where hours later several were still alive and moaning), he did nothing. W. J. Sebald, the State Department liaison to MacArthur, confirmed in a cable to secretary of state Dean Acheson that MacArthur's command viewed the South Korean killings as an “internal matter” and that the American command had “refrained from taking any action” in this regard. This, however, is not entirely accurate. There were significant forms of cooperation with the executors so that, for example, the State Department told diplomats to avoid issuing comments about the reports in connection with the South Korean crimes, and the American ambassador in London, for example, characterised a report on the massacre in Dajeonu as a “fabrication,” while the American army later blamed North Korea for the massacre.
Those who are acquainted with the character of American foreign policy following the Second World War, American military interventions (of various types and intensities) and the crimes in China, Italy, Greece, the Philippines, during the Korean War (in which approximately 3 million people perished), Albania, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Iran, Costa Rica, Syria, Indonesia, British Guiana, Vietnam (approximately 4 million dead), Cambodia (approximately 600,000 peasants were bombarded prior to the arrival of the Khmer Rouge), Laos, Haiti, Guatemala, Algeria, Ecuador, the Congo, Brazil, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, East Timor, Ghana, Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, Angola, Zaire, Jamaica, the Seychelles, Grenada, Morocco, Surinam, Nicaragua, Panama, El Salvador, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq etc. (in quite a few of these countries, several times), this will not be surprising news. Ultimately, many more people perished in various US bombardments (almost as a rule, civilians), and it has been demonstrated, for example, that within the framework of the Indonesian massacres of leftists, the US provided lists of leftists to be killed to the Indonesian authorities (approximately half a million leftists perished in Indonesia during this period).²
How little has changed since then is demonstrated by the fact that tens of thousands of people are languishing in prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, often without trial, without any legal protection whatsoever and subjected to numerous forms of torture, while the number of deaths caused by the war in Iraq (according to Opinion Research Business) has already exceeded a million.
Although the British authorities in the Korean conflict played a somewhat more moderate colonial role, European states, especially the strongest such as Britain and France, cannot be exonerated from the innumerable direct and indirect crimes that are being perpetrated today in the name of capitalistic “democracy.” Among European administrations, Britain is the most shameless in maintaining its “old habits,”³ and in recent times France has revived its imperialism in countries such Congo-Brazzaville, Haiti, the Ivory Coast and Rwanda, not to mention various structural neocolonialist strategies.
A genuinely civilised, democratic society will neither perpetrate nor justify such crimes. The “ethics” of wolves (or “hawks”) generally prevail today.
1) See, for example, Richard Drayton, An Ethical Blank Cheque, The Guardian, May 10, 2005, and Patricia Meehan, Cruel Allied Occupiers, The New York Review of Books, October 25, 2007 (a review of Giles MacDonogh, After the Reich: The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation, Basic Books, 2007).
2) See the brilliant book on this subject by William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military & CIA Interventions Since World War II, Zed Books, London, 2003, p. 194.
3) See, for example, only in connection with the current highly illustrative direct British involvement in the torture of people in Uzbekistan, a book by the renegade former British ambassador in Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, Murder in Samarkand: A British Ambassador's Controversial Defiance of Tyranny in the War on Terror, Mainstream Publishing, London, 2007. For a broader review of British foreign policy following the Second World War, see Mike Curtis, Unpeople: Victims of British Policy, Vintage Books, London, 2004.
