{"id":97193,"date":"2017-08-21T12:01:45","date_gmt":"2017-08-21T11:01:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=97193"},"modified":"2017-08-21T11:34:51","modified_gmt":"2017-08-21T10:34:51","slug":"why-does-north-korea-hate-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/08\/why-does-north-korea-hate-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Does North Korea Hate Us?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a> \u201cThe bombing was long, leisurely and merciless…\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

16 Aug 2017 –<\/em> And so we return to the Korean War, when North Korea was carpet-bombed to the edge of existence. The American media doesn\u2019t have a memory that stretches quite so far back, at least not under present circumstances. One commentator at MSNBC recently explained, for instance, that the tiny pariah nation \u201chas been preparing for war for 63 years.\u201d<\/p>\n

That would be since, uh, 1954, the year after the war ended. But the war wasn\u2019t mentioned. It never is. Doing so would disrupt the consensus attitude that Kim Jong-Un is a nuclear-armed crazy and that North Korea\u2019s hatred of the United States is just . . . hatred, dark and bitter, the kind of rancor you\u2019d expect from a communist dictatorship and certified member of the Axis of Evil.<\/p>\n

And now Donald Trump is taunting the crazy guy, disrupting the U.S.-maintained normalcy of global relations and putting this country at risk. And that\u2019s almost always the focus: not the use of nuclear weapons per se, but the possibility that a North Korean nuke could reach the United States, as though American lives and \u201cnational security\u201d mattered more than, or were separate from, the safety of the whole planet.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the concept of national security justifies pretty much every action, however destructive and horrifically consequential in the long term. The concept justifies armed short-sightedness, which equals militarism. Apparently protecting national security also means forgetting the Korean War, or never facing the reality of what we did to North Korea from 1950 to 1953.<\/p>\n

But as Trump plays war in his own special way, the time to explore this media memory void is now.<\/p>\n

I return to my opening quote, which is from a two-year-old story in the Washington Post<\/a>: \u201cThe bombing was long, leisurely and merciless, even by the assessment of America\u2019s own leaders. \u2018Over a period of three years or so, we killed off \u2014 what \u2014 20 percent of the population,\u2019 Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, told the Office of Air Force History in 1984. Dean Rusk, a supporter of the war and later secretary of state, said the United States bombed \u2018everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.\u2019 After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops.\u201d<\/p>\n

Specifically, \u201cthe U.S. dropped 635,000 tons of explosives on North Korea, including 32,557 tons of napalm, an incendiary liquid that can clear forested areas and cause devastating burns to human skin,\u201d Tom O\u2019Connor wrote recently in Newsweek<\/a>. This is more bomb tonnage than the U.S. dropped in the Pacific Theater during World War II.<\/p>\n

He quoted historian Bruce Cumings: \u201cMost Americans are completely unaware that we destroyed more cities in the North then we did in Japan or Germany during World War II.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so we start to open the wound of this war, in which possibly as many as 3 million North Koreans died, a number that would have been even higher had Gen. Douglas MacArthur<\/a> gotten his way. He proposed nuclear holocaust in the name of national security, figuring he could win the war in ten days.<\/p>\n

\u201cBetween 30 and 50 atomic bombs would have more than done the job,\u201d he said in an interview shortly after the end of the war. \u201cDropped under cover of darkness, they would have destroyed the enemy\u2019s air force on the ground, wiped out his maintenance and his airmen.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFor the Americans, strategic bombing made perfect sense, giving advantage to American technological prowess against the enemy\u2019s numerical superiority,\u201d historian Charles K. Armstrong wrote for the Asia Pacific Journal<\/a>. \u201c. . . But for the North Koreans, living in fear of B-29 attacks for nearly three years, including the possibility of atomic bombs, the American air war left a deep and lasting impression. The (Democratic People\u2019s Republic of Korea) government never forgot the lesson of North Korea\u2019s vulnerability to American air attack, and for half a century after the Armistice continued to strengthen anti-aircraft defenses, build underground installations, and eventually develop nuclear weapons to ensure that North Korea would not find itself in such a position again. The long-term psychological effect of the war on the whole of North Korean society cannot be overestimated.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why is this reality not part of the current news? In what way is American safety furthered by such willful ignorance?<\/p>\n

Cumings, writing recently in The Nation<\/a>, noted that he participated in a forum about North Korea in Seoul last fall with Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state in the Bill Clinton administration. At one point, Cumings brought up Robert McNamara\u2019s comment in the documentary The Fog of War, regarding Vietnam, that \u201cwe never put ourselves in the shoes of the enemy and attempted to see the world as they did.\u201d Shouldn\u2019t this apply to our negotiations with North Korea?<\/p>\n

\u201cTalbott,\u201d Cumings wrote, \u201cthen blurted, \u2018It\u2019s a grotesque regime!\u2019 There you have it: It\u2019s our number-one problem, but so grotesque that there\u2019s no point trying to understand Pyongyang\u2019s point of view (or even that it might have some valid concerns).\u201d<\/p>\n

And so we remain caged in military thinking and the need to win, rather than understand. But as long as we feel no need to understand North Korea, we don\u2019t have to bother trying to understand ourselves. Or face what we have done.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Robert C. Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based peace journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, <\/em>Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is still available. Contact him <\/em>at koehlercw@gmail.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

The bombing was long, leisurely and merciless. Dean Rusk said the USA bombed \u2018everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.\u2019 After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops. And so we remain caged in military thinking and the need to win, rather than understand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tms-peace-journalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97193","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=97193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97193\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}