The battle between Trump and the Washington Crazies for control of the reins of empire continues, however, and the 'Krazy Korean' is relevant to that. I hope to get to that in a later article, but in the meantime, take note of the contradictory messages coming from the US. One minute, US Navy battle-groups are 'en route to North Korea'; the next they're heading in the opposite direction. One minute, THAAD missile systems are 'installed and operational in South Korea'; the next, Trump wants South Korea to pay for them. One minute, someone on the US National Security Council is telling NBC News that the US is considering 'decapitating the North Korean regime'; the next, Trump announces he'd be honored to meet Kim Jung Un... All of which has provoked the South Korean and Japanese governments to denounce Trump's confusing and contradictory statements. Is there a method in Trump's apparent madness?
I recently read The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia by James Bradley, a breathtaking panorama of US and Chinese trajectories from the Opium Wars in the mid-19th century to the birth of 'Communist' China and 'Pax Americana' a hundred years later. This naturally encompassed US involvement in Korea, so in this article I'd like to share some historical context that is either incomplete or missing from summaries of US-Korean relations I've seen online so far.
The US has a long history of propping up crazy Asian dictators - from imperial Japan to 'Christian' Chiang Kai-shek in 'New' China to Catholic Diem in the short-lived US invention of South Vietnam. 'North' Korea is similarly a US invention. After existing for hundreds of years as a sovereign country, Korea fell under Japanese imperial influence in the late 19th century. The Japanese had by then become the 'Yankees of the Far East' and so accepting were they of civilized Western ways (and Anglo-Saxon values in particular), that the US and British empires were able to convince the Japanese that they should expand their empire as a check against Russian economic expansion in the Far East and as a vehicle through which to 'Americanize' China and the wider region.
In 1882, the US signed a treaty with the Emperor of Korea, declaring that there "shall be perpetual peace between Korea and the US." If Korea was ever threatened by a third party, the US would intervene on its behalf. In the East, such commitments are both legally and morally binding. Not so in the West, however. Behind Korea's back, then-US president Theodore Roosevelt (whose family, like all the US patrician families, got rich illegally smuggling opium into China), gave Japan the green light to take over Korea in 1905 (under the fabricated pretext that if they didn't, the Russians would beat them to it) and use it as a staging ground to launch war on Russia. Bradley recounts this treachery in The China Mirage:
In March of 1905, when wave after wave of Japanese soldiers ran directly into Russian bullets during Japan's victory at the Battle of Mukden, Roosevelt wrote, "The Japanese are the most dashing fighters in the world!" For the first time in modern history, an Asian country was besting a white Western Christian country. Roosevelt wrote [Baron] Kaneko [Japanese envoy to the US] on White House stationery, "Judging by the state of affairs, all is going well and your army is advancing at full speed and power. Banzai!!" When the baron later arrived at the White House for a celebration of the Mukden victory, Roosevelt's "face shone with joy over the unprecedented victory." After his chat with Kaneko, Roosevelt told Secretary of War William Howards Taft, "I heartily agree with the Japanese terms of peace, insofar as they include Japan having the control of Korea." [p.72]The 'yellow peril' refers to the late 19th century realization in Anglo-American power circles that - sooner or later - the vastly more populous East Asia would industrialize and eclipse their Western-led global domination. And yet, it wasn't that which frightened them most - it was imperial Russia, a fear that echoes down to the present time.
Korea found few advocates. John Ford, the secretary of the American Asiatic Association, a major trade group, defended Japan's takeover of Korea because "the true peril of Asia and of the world is the Muscovite, and not the yellow peril."
Thus began Korea's descent into hell, and Japan's imperial march across the region. Only later would the US have a problem with this; at the time, Japan was being encouraged to apply a 'Japanese Monroe Doctrine for Asia' by Roosevelt - a doctrine that was guaranteed - financially, militarily and politically - by the Anglo-Americans. The Japanese occupied Korea, Nazi-style, for the next 45 years, during which time they also invaded and occupied Manchuria, northeast China, in 1931. They then spread further southwards into China in 1937, slaughtering millions of people as they went (35 million, according to Chinese sources).
By the time WW2 broke out, the Japanese war machine was heavily reliant on Californian oil, which then-US president Franklin Roosevelt (cousin of the first Roosevelt) was loath to choke off for fear the Japanese would declare war against the US at a time when it was focused on the situation in Europe. To hedge its bets, imperial Japan spread further south into Indochina and Indonesia to take over oil fields and other raw materials.
And that's where it crossed the Anglo-Americans' red line: the Japanese were eyeing up key resources in Western colonies. In a move they knew would collar Japan's regional ambitions, and thus likely be interpreted by the Japanese as a declaration of war, the so-called 'wise men' around Roosevelt (who we might today recognize as actors of the 'deep state') went behind his back to embargo oil shipments to Japan, which hadn't yet secured much-needed resources in South-East Asia, triggering its decision to attack the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. There is some debate as to whether or not Japan's surprise Pearl Harbor really surprised the Americans, but in any event, history records that once the US military entered the west Pacific, it planned to stay there.
While the rest of the world celebrated the end of the second 'war to end all wars', US elites watched aghast as 'dirty commie' Mao Zedong took control of all China by 1949, forcing their crazy Asian dictator (the actual Chinese one, Chiang Kai-shek) to flee to Taiwan, which the US then recognized as 'the real China'.
This brings us to the second US 'sell-out' of Korea. After the US invited the USSR to defeat the remnants of the Japanese military in N.E. China on its behalf ('better their boys do the fighting than ours'), the Soviets pushed the Japanese into the Korean peninsula, but only as far south as 38 degrees north, an arbitrary line drawn by the US that split Korea in two. As Bradley points out, "no one in the US thought to consult the Korean people about this division of their ancient land."
'Wise Man', by the way, is a moniker for the handful of US strategists at the State Department and elsewhere who did the most to chart American foreign (really, imperial) policy during and after WW2. These are the 'geniuses' who came up with the plans to 'contain' the USSR away from western Europe, and likewise China from its neighbors by re-instituting Japan as the region's dominant power. Bradley continues:
Koreans were even more outraged to learn that US officials would govern South Korea with help from the Koreans' former Japanese colonial masters. North Koreans watched uneasily as South Koreans who had cooperated with the Japanese occupation now helped the US gain influence on the Korean Peninsula. Koreans had just suffered 40 years of Nazi-like domination by the Japanese. North Korean leader Kim Il Sung had begun his military career fighting the Japanese in the spring of 1932, and his government was first of all, and above all else, anti-Japanese.One of the great ironies of this set-up to 'contain China' is that Mao wanted his country to be included in US post-WW2 development plans; he wanted US industry and capital to develop China, something that wouldn't begin until Henry Kissinger 'saw the light' in 1972.
A major concern of Dean Acheson's [then US Secretary of State] was reinvigorating the world economy after the devastation of WW2. In Europe, the US would adopt a program of economic aid called the Marshall Plan; in Asia it was known as Policy for Asia, National Security Council document 48/2. According to NSC-48/2, Japan would become Asia's industrial economy, fired by US companies. Washington would 'connect up' other Asian economies to Japan's industrial machine and as markets for Japanese goods (thus isolating and containing China). [...] Their plan called for Korea, Vietnam, and other Asian countries to be the supply/consumption machines within the US-Japanese orbit. The American military would provide an umbrella of security for Japan and keep the other Asian countries in line.
The Wise Men didn't understand that their Policy for Asia looked to many Asians alarmingly like imperial Japan's recent attempts at empire. To them, it was as if the US was green-lighting another era of Japanese dominance with American backing. When North Korean leaders realized that Washington wanted Japan to once again dominate Korea, they perceived a mortal threat. [...]
A good friend of English economist John Maynard Keynes, Acheson wondered if a huge Keynesian expansion of US military spending could prime the worldwide pump.
Acheson's top secret policy was laid out in National Security Council document 68, which called for something new in American history: an enormous US military encircling the globe to protect 'war-making capabilities' of its allies, a euphemism referring to countries with resources that American industry needed to manufacture arms to contain Communism worldwide. [...]
Acheson urged Truman not only to go to war in Korea with no congressional consultation, but also to send covert military aid to the French in Indochina for their war against Ho Chi Minh. With no debate - and none was sought - a Wise Man, rattled by events in Asia he little understood, committed the US to current and future wars. [p.344]
Kim Il Sung realized that the reanimation of his arch enemy (Japan) meant that the imaginary war-time line would become a permanent hard border. It's well-known that North Korean troops invaded (liberated from Japanese collaborators, in their view) the South, sparking the Korean War of 1950-1953. Left out of the narrative is the nature of the 'good guys' that the US rushed to defend. Australian human rights lawyer James O'Neil writes:
The US felt able to leave South Korea in 1948 because they had installed the US-educated Syngman Rhee as dictator. He ruled as dictators do, killing, jailing or driving into exile tens of thousands of his political opponents. Rhee was finally overthrown in a popular revolution in 1960. In scenes later to be replicated in Saigon in 1975, he was plucked from his palace by a CIA helicopter who ferried him to safety while the crowds converged on the palace.Reflecting the 'game theory' paranoia of the time, the US elite misread the North's invasion as a plot hatched in Moscow and Beijing to 'test' America's new global strategy and 'break out of containment'. Acheson was sure it was a ruse to distract from an imminent invasion of western Europe by Stalin. It wasn't. It was just the Koreans wanting their country whole again - and foreigners' influence gone from their peninsula.
Rhee also had ambitions to forcefully bring about the reunification of the two parts of Korea. Thanks to the scholarship revealed in Professor Bruce Cumings' two volume history of the Korean War we now know that the standard Western line about the Korean War starting with an invasion of the South by troops from the North is at best an approximation of the true history of the conflict. The truth is considerably more complicated.
For years preceding the Northern troops crossing the border in July 1950, Rhee had been staging incursions into the north, carrying out killings, sabotage and other forms of asymmetrical warfare. On the island of Cheju-do for example, as many as 60,000 people were murdered by Rhee's military forces.
In the summer of 1950, the North Koreans quickly overran nearly all of the South. The US raised a hue and cry, organized its first 'UN coalition of the willing', and countered with a combined force of over 1.7 million troops to defend the brutal regime of Syngman Rhee. They just as quickly pushed the North Koreans all the way back up the peninsula, past the 38th parallel, and approached the Chinese border. Despite being exhausted by decades of civil war and fighting the Japanese, 2 million Chinese troops - with a relatively small air force and no nuclear weapons - entered North Korea and pushed General Douglas MacArthur's troops out of North Korea, returning the status quo of the north-south divide by 1951.
O'Neill explains what this first 'war against communism' did to North Korea:
What is scarcely acknowledged in the West was the devastation the Korean War wrought upon the North. The US-led UN Command dropped more bombs on the North than the US had dropped in the whole Pacific theatre in World War 2. This included the dropping of 20,000 tonnes of napalm, a particularly gruesome way of killing people. This method was later used to equally horrific effect in Vietnam.All 78 North Korean cities were leveled, along with thousands of villages. The US quite literally wiped 'North Korea' from the face of the Earth. Another estimate puts the loss of North Korean lives at one third of the population - so, about 3 million dead. So the Korean War was hell for Koreans, but for the US deep state, North Korea's invasion of South Korea 'confirmed' to them that their policy of containing China was correct, and was the catalyst for transforming the US into a global empire. The Wise Men had powerful incentives to read the situation their way: if this was a global Communist plot to 'break out of containment', then both containment theory and practice were correct, justifying the reconfiguration of US military and industry to a permanent, global war-footing. Bradley continues:
We now also know that the US waged bacteriological warfare, building upon Japanese expertise garnered in their war on China and further developed by US scientists at Fort Detrick.
An estimated two million people, or 20% of the total population, were killed. The bombing flattened every city in the country. In addition, the bombing targeted irrigation dams on the Yalu River. The intention was to destroy the rice crop and thereby starve the population into submission. Only emergency assistance from, among others, the Soviet Union and China prevented widespread famine and death.
The irrational fear of worldwide communism as a result of the Wise Men's misunderstanding of a small Asian civil war persuaded Congress to dramatically increase funding for the military. Martin Walker wrote,Now we understand why North Korea distrusts the US so much. The message behind its apparent belligerence is simply: 'Stay Away!'The first defense budget presented by President Truman after the war began was for $50 billion, the precise figure Acheson had hoped for. The US Army doubled, to over 3 million men. The number of Air Groups doubled to 95, and were deployed to new bases in Britain, Libya, Morocco and Saudi Arabia. Everything changed with Korea. American diplomacy, defense budgets and military reach exploded across the globe.Bruce Cummings concludes,The Korean War was the crisis that finally got the Japanese and West German economies growing strongly, and vastly stimulated the US economy. American defense industries hardly knew that Kim Il Sung would come along and save them either, but he inadvertently rescued a bunch of big-ticket projects. [...]
The Korean conflict would transform the US into a very different country than it had ever been before: one with hundreds of permanent military bases abroad, a large standing army and a permanent national security state at home.
On the other side of the Pacific, through the distortion field of US 'strategic thinking', you see why North Korea is the 'gift that keeps on giving': from their perspective, it's the place that 'made America great'.
Today's situation, where a prosperous and westernized South Korea stands in stark contrast to an impoverished North, was exactly the reverse until relatively recently. 'Communist' North Korea rebuilt after the Korean war and was the economic success story. For all its secrecy, isolation, and 'weird ways', North Korea is still a pretty highly developed country.
It was only after South Korea removed its (actual) crazy Asian dictator in 1960 and became one of the 'Asian Tiger' economies by industrializing that foreign investment, development and 'democratization' took place in the South. In conjunction with later US-led international sanctions on the North, the Koreas' trajectories switched directions. The South today does best according to all the indicators of economic orthodoxy, but there's room for debate as to which population enjoys the better quality of life. The South may have wealthy elites and plenty of consumer goods, but it also has an overworked, stressed-out workforce, and based on numerous visitors' testimonies in recent years, North Koreans' love of country is substantially more genuine than 'forced'.
On May 9th, South Koreans go to the polls. If you remember back during the battle between Trump and Clinton for the US presidency, massive rallies took place at that time against the South Korean president, Park, after it emerged that she had assembled some weird clique conducting 'dark arts' to chart her government's course. Now Park has been impeached, triggering snap elections.
The upshot of the Park scandal last November and the current election campaign is that after 10 years of very pro-US rule in Seoul, the political climate in South Korea has swung back to seeking friendly neighborly relations with the North rather than continual antagonism. The leading contender for the leadership of South Korea is calling for the installation of THAAD to be delayed until after the election, which is why the US urgently wants it installed, before a new South Korean government can change its mind.
Others have written about the intrigues surrounding the installation of US missile systems in South Korea. The upshot of it is that it's happening - with or without a liberal, pro-peace government in Seoul, and regardless of who pays for it. Just as everyone knows that US missile systems in eastern Europe to 'defend Europe from Iran' were actually there to 'contain' Russia, everyone knows that US missile systems in eastern Asia to 'defend it from North Korea' are actually there to 'contain' China.
It's the same old 70-year-long US 'Policy for Asia'. And, judging by China's meteoric rise, it's still not working, and isn't ever going to work. But North Korea holds fond memories for the US 'wise men' of today, because their New World Order was born amid the charred corpses of millions of North Koreans.
Reader Comments
In fact, I don't believe there's enough money on this planet, to cover that cost. We need something other than MONEY, to repay those sins.
The BLOOD of the perpetrators comes to mind.
Kent
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In addition, 75% of the money for Hitler's military buildup for WWII came from very wealthy American businessmen. These Americans financed Hitler for the purpose of destroying socialism, social democracy and trade unionism everywhere in Europe, where they were becoming very popular:
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The US ultra-wealthy, by subversion of foreign governments and assassination of socialist leaders using the CIA, and by direct attacks against nations all over the world using the US military, murdering tens of millions of people , including 30% of the population of North Korea -- many by burning them to death with napalm -- imagine how that feels! -- these American corporate psychopaths have succeeded in fending off socialism. They have installed in its place what they call "austerity" -- reduction of government services to working people all over the world, so that in many countries we can barely survive, and in fact some of us die from hunger, homelessness, and lack of medical care.
Now in the 21st Century, these organized ultra-wealthy American (and Israeli, British, French, German and Saudi) psychopaths have hijacked the new millennium using the 9-11 false-flag terror attacks -- the "new Pearl Harbor" called for in the PNAC document -- as the pretext for destroying the nations of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen, murdering about 3,000,000 people, and impoverishing and displacing many millions more.
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It was US president Ronald Reagan who created Al-Qaeda (then called the Mujahideen) in the 1980s and gave them antiaircraft missiles to attack the socialist government in Afghanistan and create what he called "Russia's Vietnam".
But the raping of this country started back in 1981 when Andreas Papandreou (a Greek NSA agent) head of a socialist my ass political party called PASOK turned this country into a country of thieves, murderers and killers. For 30 years a bunch of raving lunatics were stealing
as much as they could and especially the money that the E.U. were giving for the development of this country. Let me summarize it for you : Greece is finished.
My Father and his older brother, (my 87 year old paternal Uncle), were both there. My father was en route to a Pro Baseball career but they both volunteered. My Dad's worked on B-26'S ('Invaders!')*- he was a ground crew engine mechanic - at forward operating bases as the B-26 in Korea was primarily used as a ground attack Bomber (its ancestor, WWII's A-20 was lkewise a light bomber and ground attack plane, akin to the role of the A-10 these days.) That's how we ended up here with the space program.
But my dad was no different than countless other America loving souls who had no idea what the real geopolitical reasons were. Likewise most Americans believed the US Lies behind the Lusitania; Pearl Harbour** and the Gulf of Tonkin. All were set ups for war. (Korea too, as I recall.)
Folks should read Fletcher Prouty's Secret Team, from 1974, for a real wake up call on what all of our US WWII through Vietnam Policies were really about: expending expiring ordnance and increasingly obsolete weaponry by selling them to our flunkie US Propped up Governments in Asia, (e.g.'s in article.) or Bay of Pigs, etc.
Note: During WWII, the Vichy French retained control of Vietnam, and the Vietnamese citizenry thought that the US would appreciate their help during WWII against Japan and against the Vichy/ (Nazi Collaborationist) Government. (E.g., the Michelin Rubber plantations deliveries went to Japan and Germany during WWII and Ho Chi Minh fought against them. See Prouty.)
Then, after 1954's Diem Bien Phu (the battle where the French lost their Colonial dominance of Vietnam,) what did the US and France do to thank them? They returned the Vichy Michelin plantations BACK TO Michelin!
Good points, and I love articles that teach me about stufff I should have known but didn't. I must qualify, however, as per footnote 2,
R.C.
* B-26 "Maurauders of WWII fame were different airplanes (medium bombers) nicknamed widowmakers by the Army Air Corp because of their ease of crashing, etc. (Contra, e.g., the B-17.)
** Niall, re your statement: "There is some debate as to whether or not Japan's surprise Pearl Harbor really surprised the Americans"
I must respectfully disagree. Read "Day of Deceit"; which awoke me to the fact that we were STILL being taught BLATANT lies in high school/college, etc. The UK had broken the Japanese codes in 1937 and we& they tracked the Japanese Fleet the whole way there (hence the obsolete battleships were there but not any of our Aircraft Carriers or their escorts (as I recall). (Shortly thereafter came battle of Midway which was first sea battle fought by ships 'over the horizon' from each other., framed up the commanding general and Admiral to be used as total scapegoats, (one committed suicide; the other died quickly; the US Congress, realizing its error, overruled their framed convictions and reinstated their ranks.... little difference it made to them, being dead.) That taught me how the US really treats its veterans, as reconfirmed with Agent Orange, Gulf War Syndrome, DU exposure, etc. At least our generation can find a much closer to true version of events in history than could our parents.
RC
In fact, Ho Chi Minh and his troops were responsible for saving the lives of countless American aviators shot down by the Japanese during WW 2. I believe the squadron was called the Flying Tigers and they were based in China, thus flying over Indochina, (Vietnam) going to and from their missions. Ho was supplied with everything he needed by the precursor of the CIA and was led to believe, the U.S. would look on his application to the League Of Nations, (precursor to the U.N. ) for autonomy of the Vietnamese people's after the war in gratitude.
Unfortunately for Ho, he did not realize at the time, the American propensity to LIE.
The rest is history.
Put it on THE TOP of your file. It is like a key to the true secret side behind all US events from the time of (and well before) WWII and Korean War- during which became an Ace fighter pilot, flying a P-38 Lightning in WWII, and also flying P-51's? 61's? F-86's? I don’t know, in combat missions in Korea.
How and why he got to where he did was because he was surely a genius, and well trusted, (e.g., he was US WWII (mostly*) Good Guy General Bradley's personal pilot) and he eventually worked as the USAF's, then the entire US Military's, liaison to the CIA, coordinating for them military equipment, both hardware and personnel (which the military thinks of as mere equipment.). (E.g., he's in the Film JFK, as Costner's Washington insider, played by Donald Southerland .) He got to the top of that profession for his love of America, that genius, and his integrity.
How did he get away with revealing as much as he did? He joined the military during WWII,(before the 1947 Nat. Sec. Act and its co creation of the CIA, the USAF as a separate branch from the Army, et al.) and never had to take one of those ‘National Security’ oaths. In contrast, see what Sibel Edmonds has had to say, and how she cannot name names. (Hell, I bet she heard all sorts of familiar names say all sorts of incriminating things regarding their roles in 9/11, but if she stood up as a whistleblower and named those names, that same ‘oath’ will result in her being tried in secret and off to jail for life.)**
Prouty did not have to face that risk, as he was in service before the CIA/NSA were formed in 1947 by Truman, who later expressly regretted it. Also, all that President Eisenhower could say about it (eight years after Truman) was when he left office in January 1961, and gave his speech warning our nation of the “Military Industrial Complex” (which was headed by what Prouty calls ‘The Secret Team’.) Getting on three years later, that selfsame ‘Secret Team’ whacked JFK. For example, the movie is on-point-true when it states that he (Prouty) was carted off to Antarctica on some nonsensical mission, by his boss (who was natural psychopath, and a major driving force behind the Vietnam War, “Edward Landsdale”(played by Dale Dye), and it’s in that book you will read how Prouty was in New Zealand coming home and he saw newspapers proclaiming Kennedy’s assassination, though their printing time was before the event. (History repeats: all the 9/11 reports of collapse of WTC-7 up to 30 minute before it happened.) They had shipped Prouty there because they feared his integrity would prevent the assassination.
A final point: most of the revelations of truth we have learned from the internet can still be found in your public library. They were simply ignored by the MSM and we (mostly) “bought that lie”, and even those who didn’t, had no idea of just how bad it had gotten by then.
If I were President, there’d be a Statue of that man, at everyplace there’s any homage payed to JFK.
R.C.
*It’s almost impossible for any general worth his salt to be a perfectly ‘good’ guy, as that doesn’t come with the job. (Rather, SOB is appropriately more typical.)
** Another reason that she still exists is that she is smart, too, and I guarantee she has let it be known to appropriate quarters that if she dies suspiciously, all sorts of information she’s received and surreptitiously copied, etc., which is in multiple attorneys’ and friends’ safes, will be released should anything happen to her. Same with Prouty, I am sure, despite his not being required to sign a National Security Oath.
RC
Thank you Niall for a great article.
My grandfather fought in the Korean war and was made General Mayor of the DPRK army towards the end. It's easier to understand their perspective when the scars run deep within the family. Hopefully articles such as this will open new perspectives for the Western people. It's usually never black and white.
Thanks Niall for such a great article.
New president wants South Korea to learn to say 'no' to America and improve relations with Kim Jong-un
South Korea has just elected a liberal president who favors rebuilding tattered relations with neighboring North Korea, which could signal a policy shift and mute heightened saber-rattling on the...R.C.