Unhappy 70th anniversary Korean War

I can still remember my parents discussing the outbreak of the Korean War seventy years ago today, June 25, 1950. My 5 year old brain had trouble processing ‘war’. I thought we were still fighting WWII which I could barely fathom. In a sense we were.

The US and Russia liberated Korea from 35 years of Japanese rule in 1945. We promised Korea their freedom. But Korea became a pawn in the emerging Cold War and we divided Korea into two entities. This satisfied no Korean in the communist North or US aligned South. Seventy years on it still hasn’t.

Both governments brutalized anyone not in line with their quest to take over and unify Korea under their rule. Like China and Vietnam, Korea would likely have come under communist rule. So what? An October, 1946 survey showed Koreans favored communist rule 77% to 14% for the US backed tyrant Syngman Rhee, who had piled up thousands of dead commie sympathizers and a hundred thousand political prisoners in the South. The US even used defeated Japanese forces there to suppress dissent early on. Both sides made cross border incursions resulting in thousands of casualties in the five years leading up to the North Korean invasion that kicked the Korean War. Had the South invaded first, the US would have shouted ‘Right On’ and pitched in with aid.

The US kept Korea from being unified at a gargantuan cost. We used the Japanese model from WWII to inflict ‘total destruction’ on North Korea. We dropped more bombs on the North than we did on Japan. Roughly two million, 20% of North Koreans, vanished. The capital Pyongyang was reduced to 50,000 from a prewar 500,000 souls. Fighter pilots were ordered to strafe refugees fleeing southward avoiding US bombs because we feared they’d infiltrate the south with fighters. Bridges swarming with refugees were blown up. When we ran out of cities to destroy we blew up dams and reservoirs, flooding out the food supply.

Sixty-seven years later there is an armistice but no truce. North and South are still technically at war. And Uncle Sam, represented by a reality show host, is still threatening ‘total destruction’. Some folks today claim that destroying Confederate statutes represents erasing history. They should revisit the Korean War…where the history of monumental US war crimes was largely never reported, much less memorialized in statutes.