MCViewPoint

Cool It, Donald

As Justin Raimondo succinctly chronicled this period:

…….the Korean war started during the American occupation of the South, and it was Rhee, with help from his American sponsors, who initiated a series of attacks that well preceded the North Korean offensive of 1950. From 1945­1948, American forces aided Rhee in a killing spree that claimed tens of thousands of victims: the counterinsurgency campaign took a high toll in Kwangju, and on the island of Cheju­do – where as many as 60,000 people were murdered by Rhee’s US­backed forces.

Rhee’s army and national police were drawn from the ranks of those who had collaborated with the Japanese occupation during World War II, and this was the biggest factor that made civil war inevitable. That the US backed these quislings guaranteed widespread support for the Communist forces led by Kim IL Sung, and provoked the rebellion in the South that was the prelude to open North­South hostilities. Rhee, for his part, was eager to draw in the United States, and the North Koreans, for their part, were just as eager to invoke the principle of “proletarian internationalism” to draw in the Chinese and the Russians.

As for this guff about “democracy”: whatever the US was fighting for, from 1950, when the war broke out, to 1953, when it ground to a halt, democracy hardly described the American cause.

We were fighting on behalf of  Syngman Rhee, the US­educated­and­sponsored dictator of South Korea, whose vibrancy was demonstrated by the  large­scale slaughter of his leftist political opponents. For 22 years, Rhee’s word was law, and many thousands of his political opponents were  murdered: tens of thousands were jailed or driven into exile. Whatever measure of liberality has reigned on the Korean peninsula was in spite of Washington’s efforts and  ongoing military presence. When the country finally rebelled against Rhee, and threw him out in the so­called April Revolution of 1960, he was ferried to safety in a  CIA helicopter as crowds converged on the presidential palace.

he was ferried to safety in a  CIA helicopter…This reminds me of the the final days of the second Vietnam, the first being Korea.

This was one of many attempts to stop the communist dominoes falling in SE Asia.  One of the many major failures of Allen Dulles/CIA foreign policy.

You have to give them a little slack,.  Dulles and the CIA had not had that much time to develop it’s government overthrow and assassination chops.

What started as saving the world may well end up with S Korea and/or Japan getting nuked.  It won’t matter that just one of our Trident subs could nuke N Korea into oblivion, not that they haven’t approached that by themselves.

Stockman says why do we have thousands of troops in Korea if one sub could knock out the North.

He should just stop at why do we have thousands of troops in Korea.

Years of antagonism, embargos and threats don’t make friends or convince others to do what you want.

You would have thought we would have learned that from that little Island to our South, Iran, Iraq, Russia, Venezuela, China…

War is a racket and in the end there are no winners.

We never hear much about the forgotten war nor why it started. Probably is a reason for that.

Be seeing you