{"id":91494,"date":"2017-05-01T12:00:52","date_gmt":"2017-05-01T11:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=91494"},"modified":"2017-04-29T14:19:03","modified_gmt":"2017-04-29T13:19:03","slug":"endless-atrocities-the-us-role-in-creating-the-north-korean-fortress-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/05\/endless-atrocities-the-us-role-in-creating-the-north-korean-fortress-state\/","title":{"rendered":"Endless Atrocities: The US Role in Creating the North Korean Fortress-State"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

26 Apr 2017 – <\/em>Paul Atwood, a Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, provides a concise summary<\/a> of the history that informs North Korea\u2019s \u201crelations with the United States\u201d and \u201cdrives its determination never to submit to any American diktat\u201d.<\/p>\n

Excerpts from Atwood\u2019s summary are here used as a framework, with other sources where indicated.<\/p>\n

Atwood notes it is an American \u201cmyth\u201d that the \u201cNorth Korean Army suddenly attacked without warning, overwhelming surprised ROK defenders.\u201d\u00a0 In fact, the North\/South border \u201chad been progressively militarized and there had been numerous cross border incursions by both sides going back to 1949.\u201d<\/p>\n

Part of what made the US\u2019s ultimate destruction of Korea (which involved<\/a> essentially a colossal version of one of the cross-border incursions) \u201cinevitable\u201d was the goal of US planners to access or control<\/a> \u201cglobal\u2026 resources, markets and cheaper labor power\u201d.<\/p>\n

In its full invasion of the North, the US acted under the banner of the United Nations.\u00a0 However, the UN at that time was \u201clargely under the control of the United States\u201d, and as Professor Carl Boggs (PhD political science, UC Berkeley) puts it, essentially was<\/em> the United States. (*) \u00a0 While it is still today the world\u2019s most powerful military empire, the US was then at the peak of its global dominance \u2013 the most concentrated power-center in world history.\u00a0 Almost all allies and enemies had been destroyed in World War II while the US strategically preserved its forces, experiencing just over 400,000 overall war-related deaths after Germany and Japan declared war on the US, whereas Russia, for example, lost tens of millions fending off the Nazi invasion.\u00a0 Boggs further notes that as the UN gradually democratized, US capacity to dictate UN policy waned, with the US soon becoming the world leader in UN vetoes. (154)<\/p>\n

In South Korea, \u201ctens of thousands\u201d of \u201cguerrillas who had originated in peoples\u2019 committees\u201d in the South \u201cfought the Americans and the ROK\u201d (Republic of Korea), the Southern dictatorship set up by the US.\u00a0 Before hot war broke out, the ROK military \u201cover mere weeks\u201d summarily executed some 100,000<\/a> to 1 million<\/strong> (74) (S. Brian Wilson puts the figure at 800,000<\/a><\/strong>) guerillas and peasant civilians, many of whom the dictatorship lured into camps with the promise of food.\u00a0 This was done with US knowledge and sometimes under direct US supervision, according to historian <\/a>Kim Dong-choon and others (see Wilson above for more sources).\u00a0 The orders for the executions \u201cundoubtedly came from the top\u201d, which was dictator Syngman Rhee, the \u201cUS-installed\u201d puppet, and the US <\/strong>itself, which \u201ccontrolled South Korea\u2019s military.\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0 After the war, the US helped try to cover up these executions, an effort that largely succeeded until the 1990s.<\/p>\n

At a point in the war when the US was on the verge of defeat, General Douglas MacArthur \u201cannounced that he saw unique opportunities for the deployment of atomic weapons. This call was taken up by many in Congress.\u201d\u00a0 Truman rejected this idea and instead \u201cauthorized MacArthur to conduct the famous landings at Inchon in September 1950\u201d, which \u201cthrew North Korean troops into disarray and MacArthur began pushing them back across the 38th<\/sup> Parallel\u201d, the line the US had \u201carbitrarily\u201d drawn to artificially divide Korea, where there was <\/a>\u201coverwhelming support for unification\u201d among the country\u2019s population as a whole.\u00a0 The US then violated its own artificial border and pushed into the North.<\/p>\n

China warned the US it would not sit by while the its neighbor was invaded (China itself also feared being invaded), but MacArthur shrugged this off, saying if the Chinese \u201ctried to get down to Pyongyang\u201d he would \u201cslaughter\u201d them, adding, \u201cwe are the best.\u201d\u00a0 MacArthur \u201cthen ordered airstrikes to lay waste thousands of square miles of northern Korea bordering China and ordered infantry divisions ever closer to its border.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was the terrible devastation of this bombing campaign, worse than anything seen during World War II short of Hiroshima and Nagasaki<\/strong> that to this day dominates North Korea\u2019s relations with the United States and drives its determination never to submit to any American diktat.<\/p>\n

General Curtis Lemay directed this onslaught. It was he who had firebombed Tokyo in March 1945 saying it was \u201cabout time we stopped swatting at flies and gone after the manure pile.\u201d<\/strong> It was he who later said that the US \u201cought to bomb North Vietnam back into the stone age.\u201d Remarking about his desire to lay waste to North Korea he said \u201cWe burned down every town in North Korea and South Korea too.\u201d Lemay was by no means exaggerating.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lemay estimated <\/a>the US \u201ckilled off\u201d some \u201c20% of the [North Korean] population.\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0 (For comparison, the highest percentage of population lost in World War II was in Poland, which lost approximately 16.93 to 17.22% of its people overall.)\u00a0 Dean Rusk, who later became a Secretary of State, said the US targeted and attempted to execute every person \u201cthat moved\u201d in North Korea<\/strong>, and tried to knock over \u201cevery brick standing on top of another.\u201d<\/p>\n

Boggs gives many examples of mass atrocities<\/strong>, one taking place in 1950 when the US rounded up \u201cnearly 1,000 civilians\u201d who were then \u201cbeaten, tortured, and shot to death by US troops\u201d, another in Pyongyang when the US summarily executed 3,000 people, \u201cmostly women and children\u201d, and another when the US executed some 6,000 civilians, many with machine guns, many by beheading them with sabers.\u00a0 He notes this list, just of the major atrocities, \u201cgoes on endlessly.\u201d (75)<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

US\/UN forces in Korea in tanks painted to look like tigers.<\/p><\/div>\n

When Chinese forces followed through on their threat and entered North Korea, successfully pushing back US troops, Truman then threatened China with nuclear weapons, saying they were under \u201cactive consideration.\u201d For his part, \u201cMacArthur demanded the bombs\u2026 As he put it in his memoirs:<\/p>\n

I would have dropped between thirty and fifty atomic bombs\u2026strung across the neck of Manchuria\u2026and spread behind us \u2013 from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea- a belt of radioactive cobalt. It has an active life of between 60 and 120 years.<\/em><\/p>\n

Cobalt it should be noted is at least 100 times more radioactive than uranium.<\/p>\n

He also expressed a desire for chemicals and gas.<\/p>\n

In 1951 the U.S. initiated \u201cOperation Strangle\u201d, which officials estimated killed at least 3 million people on both sides of the 38th parallel, but the figure is probably closer to 4 million [\u201cmostly civilians\u201d and \u201cmostly resulting from US aerial bombardments\u201d in which civilians \u201cwere deliberately targeted\u201d (54, 67-8), as were \u201cschools, hospitals, and churches\u201d (65).\u00a0 Estimates for the death toll also go \u201cmuch higher\u201d than 4 million (74)].<\/strong><\/p>\n

Boggs notes US propaganda during this time period (the US was a world leader in eugenics scholarship and race-based \u201clegal\u201d discrimination) dehumanized Asians and facilitated targeting and mass executions of \u201cinferior\u201d civilians: the \u201cUS decision to target civilians \u2026 was planned and systematic, going to the top of the power structure. \u2026no one was ever charged\u2026\u201d\u00a0 Some in the US forces, such as General Matthew Ridgeway, claimed the war was a Christian jihad in defense of \u201cGod\u201d.\u00a0 (54-5)\u00a0 Analysts at George Washington University, looking at US contingency plans<\/a> from this era to wipe out much of the world\u2019s population with nuclear weapons, determined a likely rationale for the US\u2019s doctrine of targeting of civilians is to \u201creduce the morale of the enemy civilian population through fear\u201d \u2013 the definition of terrorism.<\/p>\n

Atwood continues:<\/p>\n

The question of whether the U.S. carried out germ warfare<\/strong> has been raised but has never been fully proved or disproved. The North accused the U.S. of dropping bombs laden with cholera, anthrax, plague, and encephalitis and hemorrhagic fever, all of which turned up among soldiers and civilians in the north. Some American prisoners of war confessed to such war crimes but these were dismissed as evidence of torture by North Korea on Americans. However, none of the U.S. POWs who did confess and were later repatriated were allowed to meet the press. A number of investigations were carried out by scientists from friendly western countries. One of the most prominent concluded the charges were true.<\/p>\n

At this time the US was engaged in top secret germ-warfare research [including<\/a> non-consensual human experimentation]<\/strong> with captured Nazi and Japanese germ warfare experts, and also [conducting <\/a>non-consensual human experimentation on tens of thousands of people, including in gas chambers<\/strong> and aerial bombardments<\/strong>, with mustard gas<\/strong> and other chemical weapons,] experimenting with Sarin<\/strong>[, later including <\/a>non-consensual human experimentation], despite its ban by the Geneva Convention.<\/p>\n

Boggs notes the US \u201chad substantial stocks of biological weapons\u201d and US leaders thought they might be able to keep their use \u201csecret enough to make a plausible denial\u201d.\u00a0 They also thought that if their use was uncovered, the US could simply remind its accusers that it had never signed the 1925 Geneva Protocol on biological warfare. (135-6)<\/p>\n

A 1952 US government film <\/a>made to instruct the US armed forces on the US\u2019s \u201coffensive biological and chemical warfare program\u201d says the US can \u201cdeliver a biological or chemical attack \u2026 hundreds of miles inland from any coastline\u201d to \u201cattack a large portion of an enemy\u2019s population.\u201d\u00a0 The film shows US soldiers filling bio\/chemical dispersal containers for \u201ccontamination\u201d of enemy areas, and then a cartoon depiction of US bio\/chem weapons agents being delivered from US ships, passing over Korea, and covering huge swathes of China.<\/p>\n

Boggs notes \u201cthe US apparently hoped the rapid spread of deadly diseases would instill panic in Koreans and Chinese, resulting in a collapse of combat morale\u201d. (136)<\/p>\n

Atwood adds that as in the case of the Rhee\/US mass executions of South Koreans, Washington blamed the evident use of germ warfare on \u201cthe communists\u201d.<\/p>\n

The US also used napalm, a fiery gel that sticks to and burns through targets,<\/p>\n

\u2026extensively, completely and utterly destroying the northern capital of Pyongyang. By 1953 American pilots were returning to carriers and bases claiming there were no longer any significant targets in all of North Korea to bomb. In fact a very large percentage of the northern population was by then living in tunnels dug by hand underground. A British journalist wrote that the northern population was living \u201ca troglodyte existence.\u201d In the Spring of 1953 US warplanes hit five of the largest dams along the Yalu river completely inundating and killing Pyongyang\u2019s harvest of rice. Air Force documents reveal calculated premeditation saying that \u201cAttacks in May will be most effective psychologically because it was the end of the rice-transplanting season before the roots could become completely embedded.\u201d Flash floods scooped out hundreds of square miles of vital food producing valleys and killed untold numbers of farmers.<\/p>\n

At Nuremberg after WWII, Nazi officers who carried out similar attacks on the dikes of Holland, creating a mass famine in 1944, were tried as criminals and some were executed for their crimes.<\/p>\n

Atwood concludes it is \u201cthe collective memory\u201d of the above \u201cthat animates North Korea\u2019s policies toward the US today\u201d.<\/p>\n

Under no circumstances could any westerner reasonably expect \u2026 that the North Korean regime would simply submit to any ultimatums by the US, by far the worst enemy Korea ever had<\/strong> measured by the damage inflicted on the entirety of the Korean peninsula.<\/p>\n

Note:<\/strong><\/p>\n

(*) Boggs references: Boggs, Carl. The Crimes of Empire<\/em>. London; New York: Pluto; Palgrave Macmillan, 2010<\/p>\n

_____________________________________<\/p>\n

Robert J. Barsocchini<\/em> is an independent researcher and reporter whose interest in propaganda and global force dynamics arose from working as a cross-cultural intermediary for large corporations in the US film and television industry.\u00a0 His work has been cited, published, or followed by numerous professors, economists, lawyers, military and intelligence veterans, and journalists.\u00a0 He begins work on a Master\u2019s Degree in American Studies in the fall.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 countercurrents.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Atwood, a Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, provides a concise summary of the history that informs North Korea\u2019s \u201crelations with the United States\u201d and \u201cdrives its determination never to submit to any American diktat\u201d\u2026 In its full invasion of the North, the US acted under the banner of the UN. However, the UN at that time was \u201clargely under the control of the USA\u201d, and as Prof. Carl Boggs puts it, essentially \u2018was\u2019 the USA.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asia-pacific"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91494\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}