Korea

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Re: Korea

Post by blindpig » Tue May 14, 2019 3:28 pm

Anna Louise Strong
In North Korea: First Eye-Witness Report
2. In the Soviet Zone
KOREA, which is occupied by the American Army in the south and the Soviet Army in the north, is the center of acrimonious controversy on a basis of very few known facts. The few correspondents who have visited South Korea have had glimpses of great strikes and farmers' uprisings ruthlessly suppressed under an American Military Government. No correspondent until my visit, had travelled through the Soviet zone of North Korea at all.

The whole of Korea is thus what is called "iron-curtained" country. But who, one wonders put the curtain up? After I applied for a visa to North Korea and got it, I learned that the big American agencies did not want the news. They told me flatly that they preferred to get the tales of the Soviet zone from the refugees who ran away from it, which is about like getting one's facts about London from Berlin during the war. They assured me that I myself would get no real facts in the Soviet zone, but would be watched and handicapped at every turn.

It is therefore necessary to state first how I got my facts in North Korea. When I reached the airport in Pyongyang, the capital, a courteous Russian major of the army's press department offered me his services in getting about. He arranged a room for me in a hotel with western style beds and food and was useful for first routine contacts. Then I told him that too much guidance would invalidate my observations, and that I wanted to go around alone among Koreans. He got the point; thereafter I made my own plans.

I travelled from coast to coast across the country, visiting villages, industrial plants, rest homes of the social insurance system. I picked up interpreters where I found them; some had learned English in American missionary schools. I talked freely to farmers, workers, factory managers, women, writers, officials. I got my facts entirely from Koreans, all of whom seemed glad to talk and unconstrained. If and when I met Russians they usually declined to comment on Korean affairs, saying: "It is the Koreans' country; ask them." I had freer and closer contact with Korean people in the Russian zone than any correspondent has reported., from the American zone.

My strongest impression was that the Koreans seemed to think that they were running things. They were even naive about it. Again and again I was told that the "democratic government," the universal suffrage, the land reform, the expanding agriculture, industry and education was the work, as one farmer put it, "of our own hands." The Russians, they insisted, were just there because of a treaty with the Americans, and only to give advice.

"The Russians liberated us from the Japanese," said one, "but we Koreans did all the rest."

If I remarked that the Russians still handled their foreign contacts and supplied their defense - for North Korea had, in autumn of 1947, no army of its own(1) - they would brush this aside as if foreign relations and army didn't matter. "In all the running of the country," they would say, "in elections, in police, in courts, in acts o£ government, we Koreans are the boss." The only concentration of Russians was in the capital, Pyongyang, and they were not very conspicuous even there. The only time I saw Russians much in evidence was at the anniversary celebration of the date of liberation, August 15, 1947. Russian generals stood beside the President Kim Il Sung in the tribune in Pyongyang to review the floats of factories and organizations and receive the plaudits of the marching crowd. In the banquet that followed, Russians and Koreans mingled on equal terms, drank alternate toasts, sang in turn the folk songs of their people - I was struck by the fact that the Russians responded with old Ukrainian love songs rather than with Bolshevik propaganda - and danced with each other's womenfolk. It was a natural, joyous celebration of a joint victory. But it was hard for me to imagine an American occupying army mingling in such easy equality with an Asiatic race. That is one of Russia's strong points in Asia.

RUSSIANS AND KOREANS
As far as I could see, the Russians were popular. What was more important, their popularity had grown. There had been some complaint against them at first, in 1945, for the first troops that came in fighting were tough babies from the German front; liberating armies, even when they are of one's own people are not easy for a civilian population to take. But these shock troops were quickly replaced by small numbers of selected experts in farming, industry, engineering and government, who were dotted around the country, and whose functions were quite clearly circumscribed.

A Korean farm inspector on the east coast told me that there were only ten or twelve Russians in his provincial capital and three or four in his county seat, and that their job was "just to give advice."

"For instance I got the job of farm inspector because I know farming. But I don't know inspecting for no Korean had such jobs before. So I go and ask one of the Russians how to make out reports for the government. They have specialists in all lines. They are good-hearted, simple people who have more experience of government than we."

This almost amusingly naive attitude towards the Russian occupation is partly the brag of a newly liberated people but it must also be credited to the shrewd technique of the Russians. Unlike the Americans in the south, who were always discussing which candidate to support and who, as their own chosen chairman of the Legislature, Kimm Kiu-sek, himself stated, "were always interfering in every little thing," the Russians never appointed or even discussed a single governing official in North Korea nor have they ever discussed the merits of any proposed Korean laws. They took very firmly the position that these things were the Koreans' own affair. The Russians have their own technique of influence - we shall see as we proceed further - but it is always in terms of influence, not of domination. I could not find a Korean who felt that the Russians were "over him" in any sense at all.

I found in fact an almost mystical belief in the "power of the Korean people." One farmer actually told me that the landlords submitted without resistance to the confiscation of their lands, not because of the Red Army but because "it was a just law and the will of the Korean people." A factory worker told me that the "pro-Japanese traitors ran away to the south," not because of the Russians but because "they feared the wrath of the people." The North Koreans seem hopeful adolescents in politics who still have to learn some international facts of life. But their attitude showed an awakened sense of their own political power.

This North Korean atmosphere is not due to Russian control of the news reaching the Koreans. Every village has plenty of radios that can listen to American army broadcasts from Tokyo. They are ex-Japanese radios especially geared to Tokyo propaganda; they can't get Moscow programs at all. There are also twenty-four newspapers of three political parties, including one privately owned paper run merely for profit. There is - if one can believe the unanimous assurance given me by reporters, writers and editors at a banquet they threw in my honor - no censorship in North Korea at all!

"It is not needed in the north, for everyone here is progressive and patriotic," was the incredible claim they made!

The idyllic, and rather unrealistic self-assurance that one finds among the North Koreans is due, in my judgment, to the ease with which farmers got land and workers got jobs and the people got the Japanese industries, houses and summer villas without any class struggle. And this in turn is due to the events of the last month of the war.

When the Red Army entered Korea in early August, 1945, heavy battles took place in the north, but the Japanese rule remained tranquil in the south, for the Russians stopped by the Yalta agreement at the 38th parallel, while the Americans came several weeks after the surrender of Japan, and ruled at first through the Japanese and then through the Japanese-appointed Korean officials and police. So naturally all of the pro-Japanese Koreans - former police and officials, landlords and stockholders in Japanese companies - fled south to the American zone.

The flight of all these right-wing elements amazingly simplified North Korean politics. The Russians did not have to set up any left-wing government, assuming that they wanted one. They merely set free some ten thousand political prisoners and said, by implication; "Go home, boys, you're free to organize."

Under Japanese rule all natural political leaders either served Japan or went to jail. With the pro-Japanese gone, the ex-jailbirds became the vindicated heroes of their home towns. They were all radicals of sorts, including many Communists. Anyone who knows what a tremendous reception was given to Tom Mooney when he was released to come home to the workers of San Francisco, may imagine the effect on the small towns and villages when ten thousand of these political martyrs came home. North Korea, just naturally took a great swing leftwards, and the Russians had only to recognize "the choice of the Korean people."

People's Committees sprang up in villages, counties, and provinces and coalesced into a provisional government under the almost legendary guerrilla leader Kim Il Sung. Farmers organized, demanded the land from the landlords and got it in twentyone days by a government decree. (Compared to the land reforms of other corintries, this sounds like a tale of Aladdin's lamp!) Ninety per cent of all big industry - it had belonged to Japanese concerns - was handed over by the Russians "to the Korean people" and nationalized by one more decree. Trade unions organized, demanded a modern labor code, and got it without any trouble frorrl their new government, with the eight-hour day, abolition of child labor, and social insurance all complete. Another decree made women equal with men in all spheres of activity and another expanded schools. Then general elections were held and a "democratic front" of three parties swept unopposed to power. The natural opposition had all gone south, to be sheltered - and put in power - by the Americans.

This is the, reason, I think, for the almost exaggerated sense of "people's power" that the North Koreans express. Their real class struggle is coming; it hasn't fully hit them yet. The reactionaries all fled, south, where they are bloodily suppressing strikes. In North Korea the farmers are building new houses and buying radios because they no longer pay land rent, while the workers are taking vacations in former Japanese villas.

The North Koreans assume that this is just what naturally happens when once you are a "liberated land." "They aren't yet liberated down south," they told me. "The Americans let those pro-Japanese traitors stay in power."

The American Military Government of South Korea will consider this charge fantastic. They have been hunting for rulers who were not compromised by association with the Japanese. But the Americans are thinking of a few figureheads at the top, whom they call the government. The Koreans think of the whole civil service and police apparatus that served Japan and that remained to serve America with the same brutal technique.

All this apparatus was thrown out in the north by what they call the "people's rule." And since it was thrown out, all North Koreans that I met insisted that they were "free."

1. Since my visit the North Koreans have organized their own army, stating that this was necessary because of the large force of "right reactionary terrorists," armed by Americans in South Korea. The Americans were justifying their action by claiming that the North Koreans had an army of 250,000, but there was no army at all in the north at the time - late 1947.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/arch ... a/ch03.htm
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Re: Korea

Post by blindpig » Wed Jun 19, 2019 10:57 am

Russia, China block US bid to halt North Korea fuel deliveries
Wed Jun 19, 2019 05:49AM [Updated: Wed Jun 19, 2019 06:20AM ]

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In photo taken on November 20, 2017, a man takes photos of coal and ships docked in Rajin port, near North Korea's border city of Rason, adjacent to Russia and China. (By AFP)

Russia and China have blocked a US initiative at the United Nations aimed at halting deliveries of refined oil to North Korea as Washington attempts to keep up economic pressure on Pyongyang, a policy that is blamed for a halt in the diplomatic process between the two sides.

Diplomatic sources said Tuesday that Moscow and Beijing put a hold on the initiative, which had urged a UN sanctions committee to rule that the North had exceeded its annual cap of 500,000 barrels of fuel imports, and that all countries should stop fuel deliveries to the country, AFP reported.

Those limits are part of a UN sanctions resolution adopted last year, under which crude oil supplies to North Korea were limited to 4 million barrels per year, with a ceiling of 500,000 barrels put on refined oil products.

Washington’s request was backed by 25 UN members, including its close allies Japan, France and Germany, according to the report.

Russia and China, however, said they needed more time to examine the allegations against, the sources said.

“Russia is closely examining this request and is seeking additional information on every single case of ‘illegal’ transfer of petroleum to the DPRK claimed by the US,” Russia’s UN mission said in an e-mail to council members, using an acronym for the official name of North Korea, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

In turn, the Chinese mission said, “We also request the US side to provide additional factual information to facilitate all states to study and make judgment.”

In a report sent to the UN committee, Washington had said, “The United States and its partners remain gravely concerned about the degree of UN Security Council resolution violations that are occurring in relation to North Korea’s import of refined petroleum products.”

The US and Japan have documented at least eight alleged illegal ship-to-ship transfers of fuel involving North Korea-flagged tankers, the report said. An additional 70 instances of fuel deliveries on the high seas were detected by the United States between January and April, it added.

In a similar development last year, the United States accused North Korea of exceeding the annual quota on fuel imports through illegal ship transfers, but Russia and China raised questions about the data and no action was taken.

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PressTV-N Korea calls US seizure of ship 'robbery,' demands return
North Korea says the seizure of one of its cargo ships by the US violates the spirit of a summit deal between the leaders of the two countries in June 2018.

North Korea has been under a raft of harsh UN sanctions since 2006 over its nuclear tests as well as multiple rocket and missile launches.

Over the past year US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong- un have held two summits, but the second meeting, held in Vietnam, ended abruptly when the two failed to agree on what the North would be willing to give up in exchange for sanctions relief.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in called last week for Trump and Kim to meet again soon, saying a prolonged impasse could weaken their willingness to pursue dialog on the Korean peninsula.

Pyongyang has taken several steps toward the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula by suspending missile and nuclear testing, demolishing at least one nuclear test site, and agreeing to allow international inspectors into a missile engine test facility.

The US, however, has insisted that all sanctions on the North must remain in place until it completely and irreversibly dismantles its nuclear program.

https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2019/06/ ... -import-UN
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Re: Korea

Post by blindpig » Thu Jan 30, 2020 2:29 pm

In South Korea, discovered the remains of the participants in the uprising in Gwangju
01/29/2020

“This is not a human rights issue. This is a matter of national interest ... "

The site of construction work in the South Korean city of Gwangju, famous for the bloody events of 1980, found the remains of dozens of people. The construction site used to house a prison where the participants in the uprising were imprisoned. Found remains most likely belong to prisoners executed or deceased in prison.

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Forensic scientists determine the number of victims detected in 250 people. In all, according to various estimates , 4,000 were injured during the confrontation , of which about half were killed in battle, the rest were injured or missing. South Korean official propaganda called the Gwangju uprising an attempt at a communist coup, the brutal suppression of which was supported by the United States. The Washington Post dated June 1, 1980 announced a statement by a prominent American official:

This is not a human rights issue. This is a matter of national interest for the United States to create and maintain stability in northeast Asia.

But the events in Gwangju were not an isolated case, but in addition, they were provoked by the internal policy of Korea in relation to the working people. Since 1960, the urban population has grown in Korea, and the number of industrial workers has increased. Thus, the number of urban residents rose from 28 % in 1960 to 55 % in 1980. And if in 1963 there were 600 thousand industrial workers in the country , in 1973 - 1.4 million, and in 1980 - more than 3 million. At the same time, the workers were subjected to extreme exploitation: in 1980, the salary costs of a Korean worker amounted to one tenth of the salary costs of a German worker, 50% of a Mexican worker and 60%working Brazil. All these years, a powerful protest movement has developed in the country, in which, despite repressive measures, both workers and students participated. In 1979, mass demonstrations led Korea to a political crisis, during which President Park Jeong-hee was killed .

Power was captured by General Jung Doo-hwan. But the establishment of a military dictatorship only added fuel to the fire. On May 18, numerous student performances began in Gwangju. There were clashes between demonstrators and the military and police directed against them. Resistance in a few days swept the whole city. After bloody battles of the townspeople with the landing troops, the city was captured by the military. Mass arrests began. And now, forty years later, on the territory of the former Gwangju prison, the remains of dead prisoners were found.

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Demonstrators and police. Gwangju, 1980

As we can see, the performances of the Koreans were due to objective reasons. The rebels had nothing to lose: Korean and American capital had a fine-tuned machine for exploiting local workers. Hiding behind national interests and horror stories about the “phantom of communism”, General Chung Doo-hwan threw up armed forces against workers and students, allowing fire to be defeated. And later it was called the "turn to democracy." However, in South Korea even today, there is persecution of union leaders: in 2012, the South Korean government arrested the leaders of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), and in 2016 , leader of the labor movement Han Sang-gun was sentenced to 5 years . Meanwhile, in 2014, the country occupiedone of the last places in the world on the rights of workers. The list of violations included: the refusal of the South Korean authorities to register the union of state workers, the decision to deprive the Korean union of teachers of the legal status, the mass dismissals of Korean railroad union members for participating in the strike, as well as the legal processes of lawsuits against the unions.

And we can confidently assert that in the event of new mass protests, the local authorities will not hesitate to repeat the Gwangju scenario, using armed force to suppress the workers. Indeed, only gentlemen have human rights in a society of class inequality. And the rest has only one right: to work without spinning.

https://www.rotfront.su/v-yuzhnoj-koree ... nki-uchas/

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Re: Korea

Post by blindpig » Tue Apr 07, 2020 11:25 am

DPRK (North Korea) has the most hospital beds per 1000 people
6 APRIL, 2020 ~ LEAVE A COMMENT
The following table gives an indication of how many hospital beds exist across a range of countries per 1000 people. The top spot goes to the DPRK (North Korea)!

Further, note that the top two groups (above 5 per 1000) include most of the countries in the former Soviet Union, along with most that were part of the ‘Eastern Bloc’. It also has some notably high ratios in East Asian countries. By contrast, most Western European countries fall into the 3-5 range.

A caveat or two: some countries prefer a widespread system of doctors operating outside the hospital system, with people sent to hospital only when they really need to go. You may compare with this interactive world map at the WHO website (here).

If you look at the map, you will find that Scandinavia has the highest density of doctors, but they also have quite low ratios of hospital beds. Obviously, they focus most of their medical care outside hospitals. All very well in ‘normal’ times, but not good in an epidemic.

By comparison, Russia is in the top 5 countries for density of doctors, with a little over 4 doctors per 1000 of population. It is only slightly behind Scandinavia on this count, and comparable to Germany.

But there is a significant difference: Russia also has 8.2 hospital beds per 1000 people, so it does very well indeed on both counts. This is also true for most countries in the former Eastern Bloc, although the numbers are not as good as Russia’s. In a country that straddles eastern and western Europe, Germany, the situation is also quite good: 4.2 doctors per 1000, and 8.3 hospital beds per 1000.

But the country with the best combination of both hospital beds and doctors is the DPRK: not only does it have 14.3 hospital beds per 1000, but it also has 3.7 doctors per 1000. Of all countries in the world, it is best equipped to deal with COVID-19.

You can see for yourself how other countries in which you may interested fare.

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Re: Korea

Post by blindpig » Wed Apr 22, 2020 1:41 pm

U.S. Media Fall For Kim Jong Un Rumor From U.S. Government Financed Propaganda Outlet
U.S. media went crazy today over a rumor from South Korea which said that the North Korean leader Kim Jong Un was near to death:

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CNN Breaking News @cnnbrk - 1:49 UTC · Apr 21, 2020
US is monitoring intelligence that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is in grave danger after surgery, according to a US official https://cnn.it/2KkCVph

The New York Times @nytimes - 4:00 UTC · Apr 21, 2020
North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, is receiving treatment after undergoing a cardiovascular procedure earlier this month, a South Korean media report said, amid speculation over Kim’s health following his absence from a key anniversary event https://nyti.ms/2RW1GMN

What the CNN, NBC News and the NY Times did not say is that the 'South Korean media report' over grave illness of Kim Jong Un, on which their reporting was based, came from the Daily NK website and was itself based on a single anonymous source allegedly from North Korea.

The South Korean and the Chinese government have both rejected the reports:

Two South Korean government officials rejected an earlier CNN report citing an unnamed U.S. official saying Washington was “monitoring intelligence” that Kim was in grave danger after surgery, but they did not elaborate on whether Kim had undergone surgery. The presidential Blue House said there were no unusual signs coming from North Korea.
...
An official at the Chinese Communist Party’s International Liaison Department, which deals with North Korea, told Reuters the source did not believe Kim was critically ill. China is North Korea’s only major ally.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said Beijing was aware of reports about the health of Kim, but said it does not know their source, without commenting on whether it has any information about the situation.

The report was bad for the South Korean markets:

South Korean shares exposed to North Korea tumbled and the Korean won fell on the reports. The won traded down more than 1% against the dollar even as South Korean government sources said Kim was not gravely ill.
The DailyNK has since published a correction. It now says that Kim might have had a heart problem but is recovering well. The NBC News correspondent Katy Tur deleted her tweet out of a laughable 'abundance of caution'.

When they published the sensational claims none of the western reports mentioned that the DailyNK is not a regular news outlet. It is a website in Seoul which is run by defectors from North Korea. It has for years been financed by the U.S. government through the National Endowment for Democracy which is a CIA offshot. From the NED's 2018 grant report:

The Daily NK - $270,000
To raise awareness and understanding of the conditions in North Korea by disseminating accurate, timely, and relevant news and information about the country. The project will produce an online newspaper serving readers in South Korea and the international community, and will provide journalism training to North Koreans working as citizen journalists as well as ongoing professional development for its regionally-based correspondents and stringer reporters.

The DailyNK is a run of the mill U.S. propaganda organization which prepares for a U.S. 'regime change' operation in North Korea.

Earlier records show that the DailyNK has received NED money since at least 2006. Between 2016 and 2019 it received a total of $1,120,000.

When U.S. officials claimed they were 'monitoring intelligence' about Kim Jong Un's health they meant that they were reading the fake news the people at the desk next to them just had produced.

Having been caught falling for a CIA rumor mill report the New York Times engaged in a Trump like move and blamed North Korea for its false reporting: Speculation Over Kim Jong-un’s Health Is Fueled by North Korea’s Own Secrecy.

There might be malicious intent behind the initiation of today's rumor. South Korean President Moon Jae-in is not well liked by U.S. North Korea hawks. Last week Moon's ruling party won an absolute majority in the parliamentary elections. The landslide win came after much success during the recent efforts to contain the novel coronavirus in South Korea.

There is a silent war between the Trump administration, represented by the hawkish U.S. ambassador in Seoul Harry Harris, and the Moon government.

Trump is demanding that South Korea pay $5 billion per year for the stationing of U.S. occupation troops in the country. That is five times more than South Korea currently pays. South Korea has rejected such a hefty increase and the U.S. furloughed 5,000 South Korean workers who were employed on its bases. The negotiations have since stalled.

Ambassador Harris has engaged in sabotage of South Korean policies. Here is just one example. The country recently acquired a Global Hawk reconnaissance drone but wanted to keep that a secret. Despite urgent requests for secrecy from the Moon government Harris tweeted about the arrival of the drone:

US Ambassador Harry Harris disclosed the delivery of the Global Hawk (RQ-4), a US surveillance asset, to the South Korean military and shared a photograph of it despite efforts by South Korean military officials to dissuade him, it has been learned. Observers criticized his unilateral decision to disclose information about his host country’s military in defiance of its wishes as overstepping his authority as a diplomatic representative.
...
Many in and around the military viewed Harris’s tweet as “irregular.”
“The Global Hawk is being introduced to South Korea through Foreign Military Sales (FMS) procedures supervised by the US government, but it is unquestionably a surveillance asset of the South Korean Air Force, not the US military,” said one military official.

“As a former commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command, Ambassador Harris may be quite interested in military issues, but it crosses a line for him to unilaterally disclose South Korean military information,” the official continued.

It would not be beyond Harris to launch rumors about North Korea's leader if only to throw the South Korean government off balance.

Posted by b on April 21, 2020 at 17:03 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/04/u ... .html#more
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Re: Korea

Post by blindpig » Sat Apr 25, 2020 12:47 pm

How is the DPRK (North Korea) handling COVID-19?
25 APRIL, 2020 ~ STALINSMOUSTACHE

An insight from the Pyongyang Times (here). At the beginning of January, 2020, the DPRK shut its borders immediately and undertook extensive measures to ensure that COVID-29 did not enter and spread in the country. A distinct advantage is that the DPRK is largely self-sufficient in such situations – a result of many decades of getting along largely on its own. As I mentioned earlier (here), the DPRK has the most number of hospital beds per capita in the world, and – as appears from this article – a very large number of doctors:

The meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea held on Apr 11 discussed as the first item on the agenda the matter of taking more thoroughgoing state measures to protect the life and safety of the people from the world-sweeping pandemic and, accordingly, the Central Committee of the WPK and the State Affairs Commission and Cabinet of the DPRK adopted a joint resolution.

The resolution specified the need to steadily strengthen national emergency anti-epidemic work, detailed targets for this year in boosting economic construction and defence capabilities and stabilizing the people’s livelihood and tasks and ways to be adopted by Party and government organs, working people’s organizations, military organs and all other sectors and units.

Both the enlarged meeting and the meeting of the Political Bureau of the WPK Central Committee held this year dealt with the prevention of COVID-19 as the most important agenda item and took strong and drastic measures to this end.

The devastating epidemic found its way to 210 countries as of Apr 16, bringing the death toll to more than 145 000.

Fortunately, however, no infected case has been reported in the DPRK.

This provides clear testimony to the timeliness of its anti-epidemic measures and the proper maintenance of them at a due level.

The DPRK was the first to declare a national hygienic and anti-epidemic system and take emergency steps in the world after COVID-19 broke out in China in December last year.

An immediate and strict emergency anti-epidemic system was set up from the central down to the lowest local levels, and thorough inspections were made and strict quarantine was enforced at all points of passage including borders, harbours and airports under the unified command of the central emergency anti-epidemic headquarters. Foreigners, returnees from overseas trips, contacts and other local people were put under strict medical observation and check-ups.

Careful preparations were made to detect and quarantine those who would be suspected of contracting the epidemic, while efforts were made to secure reagents for examination and diagnosis and disinfectants as well and a hygienic information campaign was conducted on a large scale.

The anti-epidemic measures were ratcheted up a level higher on Feb 29 and no exception was allowed under the national emergency anti-epidemic system.

All the people turned out as one in the fight against COVID-19.

Everyone regarded it obligatory to wear a mask, took temperature three times a day and disinfected hands, public places and dwelling houses.

Vacation was declared for all students and the mothers with infants who had no one to turn to for childcare were given temporary leave.

Hygienic and anti-epidemic institutions at all levels examined water quality in rivers and lakes as well as in residential areas, institutions and enterprises and stepped up inspection of wild animals and birds, and the work to maintain sanitary environment throughout society in spring was conducted scrupulously in close combination with anti-epidemic work.

The household doctor system whereby all families are under the care of doctors in charge proved very effective.

The household doctors made the rounds in the areas under their charge on a regular basis to disseminate hygienic information about the danger of COVID-19, the route of its spread, its clinical symptoms, preventive and curative measures and antisepsis and made sure that everyone took their temperature more than three times a day.

A series of state measures were taken to look after people including those in quarantine.

Officials of Party and government organs and working people’s organizations at all levels took immediate steps to solve problems arising in people’s living by prioritizing the work to ensure that isolated patients, residents and employees suffered no inconvenience in life.

The fine trait of helping one another forward was displayed innumerably to constitute a social feature.

All the foreign visitors in the country have been released from lockdown and normal activities have been allowed for those who have gone through 30 days of medical observation.

https://stalinsmoustache.org/2020/04/25 ... -covid-19/
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Re: Korea

Post by blindpig » Sat Jun 13, 2020 11:00 am

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via twitter
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Re: Korea

Post by blindpig » Mon Apr 05, 2021 1:59 pm

A Quintessential Eastern Marxist State: A Review of A.B. Abrams’ Immovable Object: North Korea’s 70 Years at War with American Power
By Stephen Gowans

April 3, 2021

On the eve of the First World War, and for a good many years thereafter, the bulk of humanity was in the thrall of a handful of great powers: Britain, France, Russia, and the rising powers of the United States, Japan, and Germany. These self-declared chosen nations and soi-disant models for humanity, enjoyed unexampled prosperity as the product of their ruthless despoliation of nine-tenths of humanity, made possible by their military and industrial supremacy.

In East Asia, the French raped Indochina; the British plundered Borneo, Malaya, Siam, and Hong Kong; Japan held Taiwan, Korea, and Manchuria in colonial subjection; the United States colonized the Philippines and Guam; the Netherlands looted Indonesia; the Portuguese enslaved Macau and East Timor; and China, as Sun Yat-sen remarked, was exploited by everyone.

The First World War—the Weltkrieg, or World War, as the Germans called it—marked the beginning of the end of the Columbian period, that era marked by the plunder of the world by Europe and its offshoots beginning with the voyages of Columbus to the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century and continuing through today. The 500-year-plus domination of Asia, Africa, and Latin America by the West has been aptly called “The 500 Year Reich,” an allusion to the identity of the practices used by the Nazis with those of their predecessors and contemporaries, not only by Germany, but also by the other ‘model nations’ as well. These practices comprised the methodology of colonialism. Deployed by Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, the United States, Italy, and Japan outside Europe, they became the paradigm for the Nazis, whose great crime in the eyes of their rivals was that, as Sven Lindqvist put it, they did in the heart of Europe what had theretofore only been done in the hearts of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Racism, genocide, dispossession, and colonial subjugation outside of the metropole were acceptable in the capitals of Western Europe and North America, deemed necessary and inevitable, even extolled, but became great iniquities only when the Nazis inflicted them upon Europe.

Today, nearly half of the world’s wealth is controlled by the 10 percent the population that makes up the G7 countries, while the other half is shared by the remaining nine-tenths. The chasm dividing the East from the West has considerably narrowed with the Communist Party-orchestrated rise of China, a phenomenon ultimately traceable to what Domenico Losurdo argued was the signal event of the Weltkrieg.


The World War of 1914-1918 was many things, but among these it was “a war between two groups of the imperialist bourgeoisie for the division of the world, for the division of the booty, and for the plunder and strangulation of small and weak nations,” as Lenin put it. Lenin called for unity among the workers of the “model” nations, to emancipate, not only their labor from its exploitation by the bourgeoisie, but also to liberate their bodies from the war of industrial extermination the bourgeoisie had visited upon them. At the same time, the Bolshevik leader called for unity between the workers of the West and the oppressed peoples of India, China, Korea, Indochina, and elsewhere, against their common oppressor, the metropolitan bourgeoisie. Broadening the compass of Marxism, the Bolsheviks extended Marx’s and Engel’s 1848 battle cry “Workers of the world unite!” to “Workers of the world and oppressed peoples, unite!”

This widening orientation, along with the Bolsheviks’ success in using the state and patriotism to mobilize the Russian population against the intervention of the “model nations” in Russia’s Civil War of 1919–21, inspired revolutionary nationalists like Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Kim Il Sung, inaugurating a movement to end the 500-year Reich.

The World War, and the Bolshevik Revolution that sprang from its womb, had generally positive effects in the East. The toll of the war weakened the grip of the exploiting nations upon the peoples they exploited, while the Bolshevik example precipitated the anti-colonial revolution in the East. An Eastern Marxism developed, responsive to the needs of colonial peoples to overcome their dependency and achieve political and economic sovereignty. Revolutionary nationalists would make good use of patriotism, the state, and industry to achieve political sovereignty and economic independence, as well as to protect dearly bought gains from the unceasing efforts of the imperialist Leviathans to reverse them.

By contrast, the Weltkrieg was a catastrophe in the West, and Western Marxism developed to reflect the experience of the war in Europe. Whereas the revolutionary nationalists of the East harnessed patriotism to the project of national liberation, Marxists in the West eschewed national devotion as a bourgeois subterfuge used to divide the proletariat along national lines. In the East, Marxists saw violence as a means of liberation and the military as an instrument for defending national revolutionary gains. In the West, the horrors of the war envenomed Marxists to violence and the military. Marxists of the Orient viewed the state as the means to organize economic development and as an instrument of repression to be ruthlessly deployed in the defense of revolutionary nationalist gains. Marxists of the Occident viewed the state with suspicion, an engine of class oppression, that had been used against them.

Each form of Marxism represented a set of proposed solutions to the problems of emancipation present at a specific time and place. In the East, the germane question concerned how people under colonial and semi-colonial domination could achieve political and economic sovereignty and safeguard their achievements once gained. In the West, the relevant question revolved around how to win political power to liberate industry from the control of shareholders and financiers and vest it in the hands of the proletariat.

Whether intentional or not, A.B. Abrams’ Immovable Object: North Korea’s 70 Years at War with American Power, examines the relationship between North Korea and the West from an Eastern Marxist perspective. Without using the idiom, Abrams presents the DPRK as a quintessential Eastern Marxist state. Korean patriotism, strong central authority, military preparedness, self-reliance, and the development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles are identified as sources of North Korea’s resilience in the face of Washington’s 73-year project to bring about “the end of North Korea”, as John Bolton once described Washington’s policy aim. These practices are presented as the bases for the DPRK’s success in achieving the revolutionary nationalist goals that lie at the center of the Eastern Marxist project.

Abrams’ history of the DPRK-US relationship begins with the arrival of US forces in Korea in 1945, after Koreans had declared a Korean People’s Republic, with which the US military government immediately went to war. Abrams devotes considerable attention to the Korean War, known as the Great Fatherland Liberation War in North Korea (memorializing the success of the combined Korean and Chinese forces in evicting the US invaders from territory administered by the DPRK), and the War to Resist America and Aid Korea, in China. Nearly half of the tome, weighing in at 675 pages, covers events since 1990, and a substantial part deals with recent events.

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Abrams’ history is not archival; he uncovers no new facts. Instead, it is perspectival, offering a fresh take on what the archives have already revealed—or, what seems like a fresh take to those, like myself, who are familiar with an historiography that is congenial to the Western Marxist perspective. To illustrate, Abrams makes an observation and poses a question that, at best, are quickly passed over in Western accounts, if broached at all, but within the framework of Eastern Marxism, are critical. The observation is this: Of small countries that have liberated themselves from the iron-grip of colonialism, only North Korea, a country of a mere 24 million, has survived the aggressions of US imperialism, stood unbowed before relentless military pressure, withstood the burdens of sanctions, and developed its military strength to a high degree sufficient to take a US war on the East Asian state off the table. To be sure, in the realm of post-colonial resistance to US imperialism, Cuban resilience also stands out, but unlike the DPRK, Havana cannot stay the hand of US military aggression with a retaliatory strike capability.

Indeed, there is a lengthy list of states that have succumbed to US efforts to reverse the tide of national liberation. Egypt betrayed the Arab nationalist cause; the Soviet Union surrendered; Ba’athist Iraq was outmaneuvered; Gaddafi fell prey to the West’s blandishments and left his country defenseless; Ba’athist Syria has been partitioned among the United States, the Turks, the Israelis, Al Qaeda, and Kurd separatists; Iran’s economy is squeezed by a US blockade; and Venezuela is bedeviled by the twin demons of low oil prices and US sanctions. “Yugoslavia, Haiti, Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Syria and others were all much softer targets,” writes Abrams.

“The KPA [Korean People’s Army] boasted the most sophisticated defense industry, densest air defense network, best trained soldiers, hardest fortifications, and largest submarine force and special forces of these states. Of America’s potential targets, Korean air, artillery, tank and ballistic missile forces were second only to those of China.”
North Korea’s borders are secure; it has a manufacturing economy that produces many of its own goods; it makes its own tanks, artillery, and submarines (including those capable of launching ballistic missiles), manufacturers MiG-29s domestically under license, and produces some of the world’s most advanced missiles. Pyongyang exports military gear to Cuba, Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah, and has provided special forces training to its allies. Its pilots flew missions on behalf of Arab nationalist forces in the 1967 Six Day War, the 1973 October War, and against US forces in the Vietnam War. Far from being a failed state and the impoverished, bizarre, laughing-stock of US propaganda, North Korea, in point of fact, is the most accomplished of the small post-colonial states. This gives rise to the central question that lies at the heart of Abrams’ book. How has Pyongyang managed to pull off this extraordinary feat?

“The successes of North Korea’s defense sector in developing high end missile technologies, and having done so in such a short time, with a very limited budget, totally contradicted predominant Western perceptions of the state as corrupt, inept, and backward. …[How] could the failed ‘Kim Regime’ have developed such technologies?”
In 1950, the DPRK fielded an army of soldiers equipped with rifles against a nuclear-armed military whose brutality knew few limits. In a footnote, Abrams observes: “It is estimated that the number of civilians killed by the IDF [Israeli military] in more than 70 years of frequent wars [is] less than the US-led coalition killed in an average week of war in Korea.”

Since the US war of mass extermination against the DPRK—at a minimum, 20 percent of the country’s population was killed by US and allied marauders from 1950 to 1953—the United States has continued to do everything in its power to enfeeble North Korea. It has deployed battlefield nuclear weapons to the peninsula; threatened the DPRK repeatedly with nuclear annihilation; and imposed the world’s longest lasting, and by now, most comprehensive, sanctions regime. Despite facing Himalayan obstacles, North Korea has advanced both economically and militarily. Its economy is stronger than ever, and it has replaced rifles with nuclear-tipped ICBMs as its principal means of self-defense. This represents a radical break from the Columbian era, when Europe and its offshoots felt free to wage war on the peoples it sought to conquer, knowing their victims were incapable of retaliating. No more will the DPRK face a nuclear-armed United States with rifles alone.

In Abrams’ view, the DPRK’s successful test launch in 2017 of an ICBM capable of striking the US mainland…

“represented the first time a medium or small state was able to effectively deter a superpower at such a peer level without need for support from a nuclear umbrella of a superpower sponsor of its own. In this respect North Korea’s achievement in 2017 was historically unprecedented, and was referred to by Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former Commander of the US Strategic Command John Kyten as having ‘changed the entire structure of the world.’”
This radical change, construed as ominous by Kyten, is assessed as a welcome development by Abrams—one which heralds peace and stability in East Asia.

“Considering the rationales widely expressed for American military action against the DPRK [and] the apparent willingness [of the United States] to bring death and destruction to supposedly allied Northeastern Asian states [in pursuit of the US foreign policy goal of bringing about the debellation of the DPRK] there is a strong argument that North Korea’s development of a viable nuclear deterrent with an intercontinental range is strongly in the interests not just of its own population—but of peace and stability in the entire region. Had the US and its Western allies been free to initiate a war, South Korea and Japan would have been devastated alongside North Korea and very likely parts of China and Russia, as well. By constraining America’s ability to start a war in East Asia through introduction of mutual vulnerability, North Korea’s deterrence program has ensured that extra-regional actors cannot initiate a regional war by ensuring that they too could be targeted should hostilities break out.”
What accounts for North Korea’s success? Abrams traces the DPRK’s achievements to:

“The Korean nationalist state’s rooting in both Korean history and culture, its ‘culture of resistance’ built on the potent historical memory of subjugation, and its firm commitment to the centrally organized party system…These often overlooked factors do much to explain its unique ability to sustain a conflict under immense pressure for so long.”
Immovable Object argues that Washington’s hostility to North Korea originates, not in the East Asian state’s proliferation activities, alleged human rights abuses, or mislabelled ‘provocations’ (North Korea doesn’t initiate provocations, but it does respond to them), but in Pyongyang’s embodiment of the fundamental values of the UN Charter—values which contradict Washington’s arrogation of world “leadership” (read dictatorship).

“North Korea’s existence is considered unacceptable [to Washington] because it refuses to submit to the imposition of Western leadership and become part of the Western-led order. For Pyongyang, the Western position is considered unacceptable because it is contrary to states’ right to self-defense as contravening international law and the UN Charter. The Western Bloc are so often referred to as ‘the imperialists’ in Korean rhetoric because they seek to impose their values, their ideologies, their economic and political systems and above all their soldiers and governance—whether direct or indirect—on the Korean people.”
In Abrams’ view, the mutual hostility of the United States and DPRK springs from a conflict between their antithetical Weltanschauungs. This isn’t…

“…a clash of capitalist and socialist ideologies, but rather of nations’ perceptions of the nature of international relations, world order and states’ rights to self-determination. The DPRK, like other East Asian states which won their independence in the aftermath of the Second World War, expressed a strong belief in global and regional orders comprised of nation states equal in their rights to their sovereignty, including self-defense and self-determination and prohibiting forced external interference into their domestic affairs. This is the same order enshrined in the United Nations Charter.”
While I agree to a point, I would argue that Washington is not opposed to Pyongyang’s embodying the UN Charter simply because it doesn’t like the UN Charter, but that it dislikes the UN Charter for legitimizing the right of countries to pursue their own economic development outside of a system that privileges Wall Street’s interests. This view is summarized in the words of Norman Bethune, a Canadian whose life anticipated that of Che Guevara: physician, communist, internationalist, martyr. Bethune died while serving with the Eight Route Army in China. He wrote: “Money, like an insatiable Moloch, demands its interest, its return, and will stop at nothing, not even the murder of millions, to satisfy its greed. Behind the army stands the militarists. Behind the militarists stands finance capital.” To which can be added: Behind finance capital stands a contempt for the UN Charter and any country that, exercising its Charter-defined right to independent economic development, denies the insatiable Wall Street Moloch its interest.

Abrams’ compares South Korea’s Westernized society, with its strong US cultural influences, to North Korea’s non-Westernized society, with its strong indigenous influences.

“[South] Korean society [values] US education ties more than any others—with the majority of professors at leading universities holding degrees from the US … Similar trends can be observed among the country’s political elite. From 1948-1968 much of the [South] Korean leadership boasted higher education in Japan, which, as the previous imperial power occupying Korea, had heavily influenced the Korean elite through education. This Japanese influence would gradually recede to be replaced by an American one, and from 1968 to 2001 71% of ministers in the ROK held degrees from the United States. This fosters not only positive views towards and close ties with the new hegemon, as it was intended to do towards Japan beforehand, but also ensures American thought will continue to have a major influence over scholarship and political discourse in the country.”
The contrast with North Korea is sharp.

“North Korea lacks the colonial-era foundations for Western soft influence and an idealization of the West common to many countries formerly under American or European rule. North Koreans were never second class citizens in their own country, which combined with a lack of Western soft influence and strongly nationalist ‘Korea-first’ identity, perpetuated through media and education, means its population are not moved to remake themselves in the image of or to idolize the West—esthetically or otherwise. The extent of Western influence in South Korea and other Asian client states, and the depths to which it has permeated, shows the alternative fate for the Korean population to that of resistance under the DPRK—namely life under a system which attributes the greatest value not to one’s own nation, culture and thought, but instead under one which is heavily influenced by and idolizes the Western hegemon.”
One important aspect of Abrams’ book is its delineation of North Korea’s foreign relations and the vital support it provides to other small- and medium-sized states that are on a congeneric path of development independent of US domination and control. This is a neglected area. In Western propaganda, North Korea is portrayed as a ‘hermit kingdom’, hermetically sealed and separated by choice from the family of nations. While it is undoubtedly a US aim to isolate North Korea, and block its commerce with other countries, the aim is not reality. Readers might be surprised to discover that the DPRK has long been engaged in aiding the struggles of other peoples to free themselves from the 500-year Reich. I will highlight two: Syria and Hezbollah, though Abrams also covers DPRK engagements with Vietnam, Iran, Libya, and southern Africa.

“Of all America’s adversaries,” notes Abrams, “it is the Syrian Arab Republic which has relied most heavily on North Korean support in the face of Western and allied military and economic pressure.” From 1980 to 2010 the KPA “bolstered Syria’s defenses with a permanent stationing of forces including pilots, tank operators, missile technicians, and officers who trained much of the country’s military.” North Korean engineers “developed a specialized class of missile specifically for Syria’s defense needs, known as the Scud-ER,” and the East Asian state furnished Damascus with nuclear technologies to construct a reactor based on the DPRK’s Yongbyon plutonium reactor. The Syrian reactor was destroyed by Israel in 2007.

“Without continued Korean assistance Syria’s deterrent capabilities likely would have eroded into obsolescence in the post-Soviet era,” writes Abrams, “leaving the state highly vulnerable. Korean actions thus served to severely constrain Western and allied freedom of military action against a leading regional adversary.”

The resurgence of the Islamist war on the secular Arab nationalist state in 2011 led to stepped up North Korean aid.

“Notably, in 2015, the Korean People’s Army reportedly set up a command and control logistic assistance center to support the Syrian war effort, with Korean officers deployed to multiple fronts, including the frontlines of engagement against jihadist forces in Aleppo. A number of Western sources have meanwhile claimed regarding the KPA role on a second front in 2013: ‘Arab-speaking North Korean military advisors were integral to the operational planning of the surprise attack and artillery campaign during the battle for Qusair. According [to one report] KPA pilots were operating Syrian aircraft against jihadist forces. Considering the significant shortages of trained pilots Syria has endured since the mid-1990s, this report has some plausibility. Other reports … indicate that North Korea dispatched two special forces units … to Syria to engage jihadist forces, and that these units proved ‘fatally’ dangerous on the battlefield.”
Notably, Syria established a park in 2015 to honor the founder of the North Korean state, Kim Il Sung. The park is adjacent to a street in Damascus named after the Korean leader.

The DPRK’s military aid to Hezbollah has also been extensive. Abrams notes that “much of Hezbollah’s central leadership, including current Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, Security and Intelligence chief Ibrahim Akil and head of counter-espionage operations Mustapha Badreddine, were trained” in North Korea.

Hezbollah’s military wing is “effectively a smaller reproduction of the Korean People’s Army.”

“Some indications of the extent of defense cooperation between the two parties were highlighted in the aftermath of the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah War—a conflict in which the militia’s means of waging war indicated strong Korean influence. Israeli experts described Hezbollah’s war effort as ‘a defensive guerilla force organized along North Korean lines,’ concluding ‘all the underground facilities [Hezbollah’s], including arms dumps, food stocks, dispensaries for the wounded, were put in place primarily in 2003-2004 under the supervision of North Korean instructors.’ Other intelligence sources indicated that the Korean People’s Army had a military presence on the ground, concluding that Hezbollah was ‘believed to be benefiting from assistance provided by North Korean advisors.’ A further decisive factor was Hezbollah’s high degree of discipline and effective command and control…These factors were reportedly strongly focused on by the KPA when training Hezbollah’s special forces and officer corps.”
Abrams’ attributes Hezbollah’s success in defeating the Israeli military in 2006—the first time Israel had been vanquished in war—to the assistance it received from Pyongyang.

“Had Hezbollah lacked the tunnel networks, intelligence network, high level training, or missile assets provided by the DPRK, it is highly likely that it would have faced a swift and outright defeat in the summer of 2006 as the Israeli government had initially predicted. The tunnel and bunker network in particular, alongside the communications network and fortified armouries, were all reportedly built by Korean Mining Development Trading Corporation.”
Abrams’ chapter on North Korean ideology is particularly valuable for Westerners, for whom North Korean thinking may seem to be opaque, and may to Marxists appear to be un-Marxist. The renowned Korean scholar Bruce Cumings was once asked: “How many liberal democrats are there in North Korea?” He replied: “As many as there are followers of Confucius in the United States.” Many Westerners fail to understand the DPRK because they view it from the lens of Western culture and fail to grasp the unique set of circumstances that created the Korean experience.

Abrams’ writes:

“From its formation North Korea’s ideology has been influenced by and has assimilated parts of the country’s traditional culture, Confucianism in particular, in a way that few if any other ideologies have in communist states. Premier Kim Il Sung’s reformism Juche speech in December 28, 1955, which outlined the country’s future ideological position … notably stressed the need to draw inspiration from national culture, history and traditions... While no mention was made of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao or even Stalin, the Korean leader warned against the ‘negation of Korean’ history with ‘foreign ideas,’ emphasizing above all else the importance of a Korean national identity. While the Stalinist economic model, which had rapidly industrialized the Soviet Union, would be largely adopted, this would be interpreted and applied in a way that was compatible with Korea’s own culture. As the Korean leader envisioned, the ‘essence’ and ‘principles’ of communist ideology would be ‘creatively applied’ in line with the needs of the Korean nation—the former would bend to the latter rather than vice-versa. He thus strongly criticized ‘dogmatism and formalism’ in ideological work and advised: ‘There can be no set principle that we must follow the Soviet fashion. Some advocate the Soviet way and others the Chinese but is it not high time to work out our own?’”
The coincidence of North Korea’s ‘Stalinist’ economic model with the ability of the country’s economy to weather the fierce storms of US hostility, raises two questions: Can the same model be exported to other countries to produce the same success? What could North Korea achieve without the unceasing efforts of the United States to bring about its destruction? While Abrams doesn’t address these questions, elsewhere he has written:

"If the country were free to trade and export its goods, capitalizing on advantages including a weak currency and a highly educated and skilled workforce and established technological and industrial bases, annual growth rates several times higher and likely significantly over 10% would be expected.”
Syria’s ambassador to North Korea in 2017, Tammam Sulaiman, intoned, “I visited many other countries. I look at this country I see that … they do miracles here, really. This country, after the sanctions and with the skills that they have, they are making miracles.” Pausing he asked, “What if they were not under sanctions? They would do even more.”

According to one view, communism is the politics of liberation. Indeed, communists have always been involved in, if not in the van of, the world’s greatest emancipatory struggles. “The socialist revolution is by no means a single battle,” Lenin wrote in his essay “The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination.” Instead, it is “a whole series of battles around all problems of economic and democratic reforms” including “equal rights for women” and—importantly from the perspective of people trying to free themselves from colonial subjugation— “self-determination.” Socialism “would remain an idle phrase,” Lenin insisted, “if it were not linked up with a revolutionary approach to all the questions of democracy, including the national question,” by which he meant the right of peoples, including Koreans, to exercise sovereignty over their own affairs, rather than being dominated by imperialist masters. Lenin envisaged what he termed “a truly democratic, truly internationalist” order, in which each nation is free to set its own course, and freely join with other states in relationships of mutual benefit. That, significantly, is the vision of the DPRK.

If Eastern Marxism is the use of patriotism, the military, and state-directed economic development to achieve and defend emancipatory goals, then the DPRK is, in practice, a quintessentially Eastern Marxist state. It is, moreover, a successful one, whose emulation by similar states in similar circumstances inspired by similar goals could significantly advance the world’s struggle to achieve a complete victory over the 500-year-plus Reich.

Immovable Object is published by Clarity Press.

Stephen Gowans is the author of Patriots, Traitors, and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom, and Washington’s Long War on Syria, both published by Baraka Books.

https://gowans.blog/author/gowans/
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Re: Korea

Post by blindpig » Sat Jun 26, 2021 1:05 pm

A Brief History of Two Koreas
How an American Korea and a Korean Korea came to blows over the same territory on this day 71 years ago

June 25, 2021

By Stephen Gowans

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Korea, as a nation, has existed within the same space for over a thousand years, but it is only since 1948 that it has been divided into two states, and the division is the consequence of a US decision taken in pursuit of US geopolitical aims, without the slightest regard for the wishes or aspirations of Koreans, who didn’t want their country divided politically.

Had the United States not intervened in Korea at the end of the Second World War, historians agree that the nation would have emerged from the war, and from its years of colonization by the Japanese, with a politics that favored communism, or at the very least, favored a very robust leftist agenda, because that’s what Koreans, in the majority, wanted.

Koreans were, in the main, peasants, who were exploited by a tiny landlord class. And they lived in a country that was oppressed by the Japanese. They would naturally be inclined toward communist politics, since communist politics aimed at overcoming exploitation at all levels, including the levels of class and nation.

Today there are two states on the Korean peninsula, the Republic of Korea, or South Korea, the creation of the United States, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, or North Korea, the creation of Koreans, and the successor to the People’s Republic of Korea, the state Koreans proclaimed for themselves at the end of WWII, before the United States arrived on the peninsula, and refused to recognize it.

These two states—one an American Korea, the other a Korean Korea—each claim to be the sole legitimate state in the country.

Kim Il Sung, who was the first leader of North Korea, worried that the division of Korea into US and Soviet occupation zones, which was done at the end of the Second World War to accept the Japanese surrender, would inevitably lead to the division of Korea into two states—one of patriots, and one of traitors.

The patriots, in Kim’s view, would be the Koreans who fought the Japanese colonization of Korea, and aspired to an independent Korea. The traitors would be the Koreans who collaborated with the Japanese, who, Kim believed (correctly it turns out), would also collaborate with the Americans. Kim recognized that the United States was an imperialist power that would seek to dominate Korea, as Japan had done, and would recruit collaborators to assist it, also as Japan had done.

Coveted by Great Powers

Koreans have had the great misfortune of inhabiting territory that has been either coveted by powerful states or dominated by them. China (which Korea borders), Russia (which Korea borders), Japan (which lies nearby across the Sea of Japan), and the United States (which regards itself as an Asia-Pacific power) have all, at one time or another, sought to make Korea, if not their own, then at least subservient.

Korea was long a tributary of its neighbor China.

After Japan modernized, and fell under a compulsion of its capitalist economy to seek markets for its industrial products, sources of raw materials, investment opportunities, and territory to settle its surplus population, its rapacious gaze fell upon Korea. The Sino-Japanese war was fought over the question of who would control the country: China or Japan. The Japanese won the war and therefore won Korea.

Russia was also interested in Korea. Japan and Russia fought the Russo-Japanese War over control of Korea (and Manchuria), a war the Russians lost, to the great consternation of the West, for this was the first time a Western power had been defeated by an Eastern one.

Finally, the United States fought Japan over control of all of East Asia, and when it defeated Japan in 1945 with the help of Britain and the Soviet Union, its intention was to supersede Japan as the hegemonic power in the region. Its goal was to make all of East Asia an American neo-colony.

Japanese Colony

Japan formally colonized Korea in 1910 and remained the colonial power for the next thirty-five years.

These were very harsh years for Koreans.

Korean culture was outlawed. All Korean political organizations were disbanded. Korean newspapers and public gatherings were prohibited. The education system was Japanized. Koreans were forced to speak Japanese, take Japanese names, and worship at Shinto shrines, even though Shintoism, the traditional religion of Japan, was foreign to Korea.

Koreans were coerced into service as conscripted laborers, sent to every corner of the empire to satisfy the requirements of Japan’s military and economic expansion. At the close of World War II, one third of industrial workers in Japan were Koreans.

At the same time, Korea was transformed into a Japanese granary. Agriculture was steered away from Korean needs to Japanese needs. The Japanese ate more Korean rice per capita than the Koreans did.

Korea, thus, became a means to Japanese ends, a country that existed to serve Japan, not itself.

Inspired by the Soviet Union and Communism

Koreans found themselves in a dual debased condition. Most were peasants, exploited by landlords. And they lived in a country oppressed by a foreign power. Such a people couldn’t help but be inspired by a Soviet Union that called for an end to the exploitation of man by man, and an end to the division of the world into oppressor and oppressed nations.

Moreover, the Soviet Union was not only calling for an end to these debased conditions, it was showing how they could be overcome. For example, the Bolsheviks had given land to the peasants and ended the rule of the landlords, something that would certainly appeal to Korean peasants who toiled under the oppression of Korean landlords. They also successfully repelled a dozen capitalist powers that tried to bring Russia under their control in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Later, the USSR emerged victorious from the greatest colonial war ever waged, that of Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union, impelled by the German imperialist aim of enslaving the peoples of Eastern Europe. Germany said its war for lebensraum would create its own American West or its own East Indies in Eastern Europe. The Soviet victory in repelling the attempted colonization of Eastern Europe was an inspiration to colonized people everywhere, Koreans included.

What’s more, communists were at the forefront of the struggle against Japanese colonialism. Kim Il Sung and Mao Tse Tung were major figures in the resistance.

Finally, the Soviet economy offered oppressed people a model of how to modernize and industrialize.

Washington’s Interest in Korea

The United States had the same interests in East Asia as Japan had—to exploit the region as a market, source of raw materials, and sphere for investment.

Koreans hated the United States because they saw the country quite correctly as another imperialist power, no different from Japan. Washington had blessed Japan’s colonization of Korea in return for Tokyo blessing the United States’ colonization of the Philippines.

Thus, in the view of Koreans, these two countries were robbers, seeking to divide up East Asia between themselves.

Kim Il Sung made fun of Syngman Rhee, the anti-communist Washington picked as the first president of South Korea, because Rhee had spent over four decades in the United States lobbying Washington to free Korea from Japanese rule. Kim said this was like asking a robber who waits outside your house to help you evict the robber already inside your house.

Koreans, with the exception of people like Rhee, had no illusions about what the United States was, namely, a predator, waiting outside their door to rob them once the Japanese were evicted.

The US-Orchestrated Political Division of Korea

The United States created the Republic of Korea in 1948, over the objection of most Koreans, who saw the American project of establishing a state in the US occupation zone as an attempt to create a permanent political division of their country. Few Koreans wanted this. What they wanted was a unified, independent, communist Korea.

But the only way Washington could prevent Korea from becoming a communist state, or at the very least, a country with a robust leftist agenda and preference for political independence, was to artificially implant an anti-communist Gestapo-like police state in the US occupation zone to crush the political aspirations of Koreans who favored a unified communist country.

As mentioned, to accept the Japanese surrender, the peninsula had been divided at the end of WWII into two occupation zones, an American one, and a Soviet one. By agreement, the occupations and division were to last no longer than five years. Before the end of this period, elections were to be held for a pan-Korean government and the occupying armies were to leave. (The Soviets departed at the end of 1948. The Americans stayed and have never left.)

It was clear to Washington, that the election would be won by anti-imperialist, pro-communist forces, who would oppose a continued US presence on the Korean peninsula. Washington, then, had a choice. Lose all of the peninsula or keep the half it controlled. It chose to keep the half it controlled. To retain its influence in Korea, the United States created a puppet state in its own occupation zone. And then it boldly claimed that the state it created was the sole legitimate state in Korea, representing all Koreans.

The only possible response to this attempt to preempt the creation of an independent, unified Korea, was for Koreans who held out the hope of a Korean Korea to create their own state, as the sole legitimate state in the country.

That was why the DPRK was founded. It was also how the division of Korea between an American Korea and a Korean Korea came about.

The Patriot

Bruce Cumings, the leading US historian of Korea, recounted in his book, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History, that when “the leading scholar of Korean communism, Dae-sook Suh, was finally allowed to explain the real story to a large audience of young people in Seoul in 1989, upon hearing that Kim Il-sung was in fact a hero of the resistance, they all burst into applause.”

That, in short, is who Kim Il Sung was – a hero of the anti-Japanese resistance. Kim was so important as a guerilla leader that the Japanese established a special Kim unit to hunt him down, and they staffed it with Korean traitors who would later be recruited by the Americans to play leading roles in the South Korean military.

Kim spent 13 years in top positions in the armed struggle against the Japanese, and on the eve of his return to Korea after the Japanese surrender, the major Korean leaders of the resistance agreed that, owing to Kim’s reputation, his charisma, and his abilities, that he should become the principal political leader of a Korean Korea.

He wasn’t selected by the Soviets, but was chosen by his peers in the resistance. Indeed, the Soviets never fully trusted Kim, but within their occupation zone, they allowed Koreans to administer their own affairs independently, and to promote Kim as the leader of a Korean Korea.

The Korean War

There are many views of what the Korean War was, or is.

One view is that the Korean War began in the early 1930s when Kim Il Sung created his first guerilla unit, and began to fight Korean traitors who collaborated with the Japanese, traitors who would then form the core of the US-created Republic of Korea, while Kim and his colleagues formed the core of the DPRK. According to this view, the Korean War is a war between the traitors of the American Korea and their descendants and the patriots of the Korean Korea and their descendants, and that, so long as these two states independently exist, the war between patriots and traitors, between those who oppose imperialism and those who collaborate with it, between American Korea and Korean Korea, never ends.

Another view is that the Korean War began in 1945, when the United States arrived on the peninsula and went to war with the People’s Republic of Korea, and five years later, with its successor, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

A third view is that the war began in 1948, when the United States created a permanent political division in the nation by setting up an American Korea in the form of an anti-communist, Gestapo-like police state, staffed at the highest level of its military with pro-Japanese traitors, over the objections of the majority of Koreans. This presented Koreans with no choice, if they were to have a Korea that met their preferences, but to go to war to liberate their country.

This view, as the preceding one, sees the Korean War as a war of the United States on Koreans, whereas the first view sees the Korean War as a civil war, between those who fought against imperialism and those who collaborated with it.

The conventional view of the war is that it began on June 25, 1950 when North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel, and immediately drove the South Korean army deep into the south. The United States soon after intervened, driving the North Korean forces out of the south, and deep into the north, up to the Yalu River, which divides Korea and China. At that point, China intervened, and China and North Korea drove US forces back across the 38th parallel where the war bogged down for the next two years. The war ended in an armistice in 1953 and a peace treaty has never been signed.

What most Americans don’t know about the war is that there was no moral or legal basis for US intervention.

There was no moral basis because American Korea was unacceptable to most Koreans. Because the collaborator government had little popular support, its army immediately collapsed. North Korea would have quickly won the war, millions of lives would have been saved, Koreans would have achieved the communism they desired, and an independent, unified, Korea would have been born, had the United States not intervened.

Fundamentally, the war was a civil war between Korean Koreans and American Koreans, a quarrel over how to organize the social, political and economic life of the nation. At the heart of the quarrel was the question of equality. Are nations equal, or are some nations destined to lead others, and to have rights and privileges senior to others? Should exploitation be prohibited or welcomed? Should the country be integrated into the US Empire, or independent? And who should form the governing elite—collaborators with the Japanese Empire, or those who waged war against it? These questions were at the heart of the conflict.

Also, there was no legal basis for the US intervention, because there was no aggression across an international border. When North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel on June 25, 1950 they crossed an imaginary line drawn in 1945 by two US colonels to separate US and Soviet occupation armies. This was not an international border separating two countries. It was simply a dividing line that came to separate two Korean armies. Koreans cannot invade Korea. What’s more, North Korea’s military action against territory occupied by a foreign power and its Korean collaborators was not an invasion; it was an attempt at liberation.

The War’s Aftermath

Open hostilities came to an end because the United States threatened a nuclear strike unless the North Koreans and their Chinese allies came to terms with Washington. Because the United States wielded a nuclear sword, it was able to drive a hard bargain, and the North Koreans and Chinese had little choice but to accept many US demands.

The United States left behind tens of thousands of troops and brought tactical nuclear weapons onto the peninsula which weren’t withdrawn until 1991. North Korea believes those weapons remain. At about the same time, the United States retargeted some of its strategic nuclear missiles away from the Soviet Union, which had dissolved at this point, to North Korea. Thus, for decades, the United States has cast a nuclear shadow over the Korean peninsula.

That’s a key point in any talks about denuclearizing the peninsula. To North Korea, denuclearization means that the nuclear shadow Washington casts over Korea must be lifted. To Washington, denuclearization means North Korea must abandon its nuclear weapons but that the US nuclear shadow can remain.

Thesis and Antithesis

From 1961 until 1979, South Korea was ruled by Park Chung-hee, a military dictator who had served in the Imperial Japanese Army, and who had hunted down Korean guerillas liked Kim Il Sung. During this period, Park served as the largely figurehead ruler of an American Korea and Kim Il-Sung ruled in Korean Korea—the traitor versus the patriot.

From 2013 to 2017 Park’s daughter was president of South Korea and Kim Jong Un, Kim Il Sung’s grandson, was leader of North Korea. As Bruce Cumings has pointed out, the conflict between traitors and patriots carried on in their descendants.

Park nurtured a capital-centered economy, in which South Koreans “had the right to work the longest hours in the industrial world at wages barely able to sustain one’s family,” as Cumings wrote. Kim preferred a people-centered economy, and had introduced an eight-hour work day and social security within months of coming to power.

Park was greatly hemmed in by the influence exercised behind the scenes by the US military commander, US ambassador, and CIA station chief—the decision-makers with ultimate authority in American Korea. Tens of thousands of US troops occupied the domain over which the southern leader’s state ruled. And his military reported, not to him, but to a US general. In the north, there were no foreign troops, and Kim preached a doctrine of self-reliance, which eschewed dependency on foreign powers.

In the south, the top political leader was a traitor to the Korean project of national liberation; in the north, the top political leader was a patriot who had devoted his life to Korea’s liberation.

In the south, the state was part of an empire. In the north, the state rejected empire.

The state of the south was founded by a foreign hegemon. The state of the north was founded by guerrilla leaders who had fought against foreign hegemony.

US Propaganda

US propaganda paints a false picture, not only of the DPRK, but also of the Republic of Korea.

It doesn’t tell you that South Korea is not an organically created Korean state, but a state created by Washington to serve US aims: an American Korea.

It doesn’t tell you that for decades, until the 1990s, South Korea was ruled by a series of vicious anti-communist military dictators, who ran a Gestapo-like police state that locked up communists and leftists, for infractions as mild as having something good to say about the DPRK or reading Marx and Engels.

It doesn’t tell you that there was a massive guerilla war in the south from 1945 to 1950 against the United States and its South Korean puppet, and that American Korea built concentration camps to hold the tens of thousands of Koreans who opposed the US presence in their country.

It doesn’t tell you that the military of American Korea has always been under the command of US generals.

It doesn’t tell you that 300,000 troops of American Korea fought on the American side in Vietnam in return for injections of economic aid from the United States, making the American Korea a mercenary state, on top of a traitor state.

It doesn’t tell you that the South Korean military has been trained and equipped by the United States to kill communists. It killed communists in the south from 1945 to 1950, communists in the north from 1950 to 1953, and communists in Vietnam during the 1960s and 1970s. It is being trained by Americans today to kill the communists of a country Washington deems its enemy: China.

And it certainly doesn’t tell you that while Washington has done all it can to ensure that American Korea succeeds economically, it has also done all it can to immiserate Korean Korea.

The Future

North Korea’s manufacture of nuclear arms and ballistic missiles capable of striking US targets effectively forecloses the possibility of a US invasion of North Korea and a US nuclear strike. By using nuclear weapons to substantially enhance its means of self-defense, the DPRK is able to re-allocate resources from its military to its civilian economy, to mitigate the effects of the world’s longest and most comprehensive sanctions regime. No country has been the target of as long and comprehensive a campaign of economic warfare as the DPRK.

Concerning the prospects for a unified Korea, the key question is: Will it be a Korean Korea or an American Korea?

Washington’s favored unification scenario is one in which North Korea follows the East German path of annexation by its neighbor and absorption into the US empire. Since the early 1990s, US officials have expected this scenario to play out. Three decades later, their expectation has proved to be wide of the mark.

A Korean Korea, on the other hand, cannot be born unless the American Koreans evict US troops from the peninsula. Since the collaborators of the South Korean government evince no strong predilection for parting company with their American master—and since the possibility of North Korea unifying the peninsula by force is beyond the DPRK’s capabilities—the possibility of a unified Korean Korea is remote. But it’s the nature of anti-colonial struggles that they’re often long-term projects.

Kim Il Sung recognized that Korea’s fight for freedom might last hundreds of years. He wrote, “India won its independence from England after 200 years of colonial enslavement. The Philippines and Indonesia won their independence after 300 years. Algeria after 130 years. Sri Lanka after 150 years and Vietnam after nearly 100 years.”

It may take 200 years, maybe longer, for Korea to win its struggle, but one day all of Korea will be Korean.

https://gowans.blog/2021/06/25/a-brief- ... wo-koreas/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Korea

Post by blindpig » Wed Jan 12, 2022 2:53 pm

Obits for a South Korean Dictator Gloss Over US’s Anti-Democratic Role
JOSHUA CHO


When former South Korean dictator Chun Doo-hwan passed away on November 23, Western media were forthcoming about his brutality, including his direction of the 1980 Gwangju Massacre, in which at least several hundred opponents of his regime were slaughtered. But the US role in supporting successive dictatorships in South Korea and its involvement in the 1980 massacre to preserve South Korea’s status as an American vassal state were either erased entirely, or whitewashed to distance Washington’s efforts to suppress democratic uprisings in Korea.

Praising a ‘pre-democratic era’
The death of Chun Doo-hwan closes a chapter in South Korean history
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The Economist (11/24/21) said that Chun’s death “revived a debate about the legacy of military rule”—maybe “rapid economic growth” makes dictatorship worthwhile?
The Economist’s brief obituary (11/24/21) acknowledged that Chun’s dictatorship was “better remembered” for the “violent suppression of political dissent” than for the “rapid economic growth” he presided over, and even reported Chun’s unrepentant denialism of his role in Gwangju. Yet the Economist joined right-wing South Korean media outlets in expressing subtle praise for “the achievements of the pre-democratic era,” and made it seem as if there is a legitimate debate to be had about Chun’s legacy:

Left-wing outlets denied Mr. Chun his presidential title in their obituaries, but right-wing media made allowance for his successful economic policy and his eventual voluntary retreat from power. Mr. Chun may be dead, but the debate over the generals’ legacy will live on for a while yet.

Even though the Wall Street Journal (11/23/21) described how Chun “dispatched the military around the country and banned all political activities,” in addition to closing schools and forcing media outlets to “shut down or merge into government-controlled TV stations,” it engaged in similar praise for Chun’s rule:

Despite the political repression, Mr. Chun’s rule from the presidential Blue House was marked by economic prosperity. He successfully hosted the 1986 Asian Games and won the rights to host the 1988 Seoul Olympics, which is widely considered to be one of the most important international events in South Korean history, because it boosted the economy and the country’s morale.
Chun Doo-hwan, Brutal Former South Korean Dictator, Dies at 90
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Wall Street Journal (11/23/21): “Despite the political repression, Mr. Chun’s rule from the presidential Blue House was marked by economic prosperity.”
Like the Economist and the Journal, Reuters’ obituary (11/23/21) managed to discuss Chun Doo-Hwan’s dictatorship without once mentioning Washington’s support for Chun or its role in the Gwangju Massacre, reporting on events in South Korea as if it were a country independent of the US.

For instance, when writing on Chun’s military career before seizing power in a coup, Reuters merely wrote: “He joined the military straight out of high school, working his way up the ranks until he was appointed a commander in 1979.” This glosses over Chun’s involvement in what Vietnamese people call the Resistance War Against America, commonly known as the Vietnam War in the US. South Korea’s collaboration in the US invasion of Vietnam has largely been forgotten in the US, although South Korea sent more troops there than any other country besides the US.

South Korean troops, notorious for their brutality, committed numerous massacres and mass rape of Vietnamese women. Journalist K.J. Noh (CounterPunch, 12/3/21) pointed out that Chun and his handpicked successor, Roh Tae-woo, both fought in Vietnam, and were members of Hanahoe, an elite praetorian guard for their predecessor, Park Chung-hee, a US-backed dictator who collaborated with Korea’s Japanese colonizers (Hankyoreh, 11/23/21; Jacobin, 5/16/21). And the US Defense Intelligence Agency suggested a few weeks after the Gwangju Massacre that the savagery of the special forces involved could partially be attributed to their “Vietnam experience,” citing an anonymous American eyewitness who likened Gwangju to the My Lai Massacre (Jacobin, 6/25/20).

Whitewashing Washington’s role
Chun Doo-hwan, Ex-Military Dictator in South Korea, Dies at 90
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The New York Times (11/22/21) quoted a former US diplomat as saying Chun “manipulated not only the Korean public, but also the United States.”
While other obituaries in Western media outlets were more transparent about Chun’s history, they also whitewashed the US role in backing Chun during the Gwangju Massacre and throughout his dictatorship.

The New York Times (11/22/21) noted that Chun took part in Park’s 1961 coup after Koreans in the south had overthrown the widely despised US-backed dictator Syngman Rhee in a democratic uprising in 1960:

As an army captain, he took part in Maj. Gen. Park Chung-hee’s coup in 1961, a move that secured his place in Mr. Park’s military elite. When Mr. Park’s 18-year dictatorship abruptly ended with his assassination in 1979, Mr. Chun, by then a major general himself, staged his own coup to usurp control.

The Times also reported on some of Chun’s atrocities while he was in charge:

Dissidents, student activists and journalists were hauled into torture chambers. Under Mr. Chun’s “social purification” program, the government rounded up tens of thousands of gangsters, homeless people, political dissidents and others deemed to be unhealthy elements of the society, and trucked them to military barracks for brutal re-education. Hundreds were reported to have died under the program.

The Gwangju Massacre occurred after Koreans in the southwestern city of Gwangju erupted in protest of Chun’s military dictatorship and his declaration of South Korean martial law. Chun sent in special forces troops on the night of May 17, 1980, that would later go on to kill hundreds of people over the course of several days to quash a citizen’s army that had seized weapons from local armories to throw out his martial law forces (The Nation, 6/5/15).
The Gwangju Uprising and American Hypocrisy: One Reporter’s Quest for Truth and Justice in Korea
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Tim Shorrock (The Nation, 6/5/15): “The Carter administration had essentially given the green light to South Korea’s generals to use military force against the huge student and worker demonstrations that rocked the country in the spring of 1980.”
Journalist and Korea expert Tim Shorrock noted that during the brief days where Koreans in Gwangju had resisted Chun’s dictatorship, they had formed a self-governing community that many Koreans liken to the Paris Commune of 1871. The date of the massacre is commemorated every year in South Korea to honor those who took up arms to defend democracy from US-backed dictators.

Even though the US retained operational control (OPCON) of the South Korean military, the Times uncritically cited Washington’s claims about its helplessness to prevent Chun from carrying out the massacre, without mentioning internal documents which contradict that narrative. None of the troops deployed there were under the control of US authorities at the time, the Times reported, implying that the US was “manipulated” by Chun:

To young Koreans, Washington’s perceived failure to stop the Gwangju Massacre, even though their country had placed its military under the operational control of American generals, was evidence of betrayal. Later, President Ronald Reagan’s “quiet diplomacy” toward Mr. Chun’s human rights abuses hardened their belief that Washington had ignored Koreans’ suffering under Mr. Chun….

Washington said that it had been caught off-guard by Mr. Chun’s coup, and that none of the forces deployed at Gwangju were under the control of any American authorities at the time. It criticized Mr. Chun’s martial law and called for restraint in Gwangju, but the government-controlled South Korean news media reported that the United States had approved Mr. Chun’s dispatch of troops there.


Noh argues that it’s absurd to portray South Korea as a fully sovereign nation when the US retained operational control of the South Korean military during the Gwangju Massacre, and officially retains operational control of the South Korean military during wartime, when Korean soldiers are placed under the command of a US general. Former US Ambassador Donald Gregg also openly acknowledged before Congress in 1989 that the US’s relationship with South Korea has historically been a patron/client relationship (though he claimed it had “evolved” into a “relationship between…equal partners”). Thus Noh argues that South Korean soldiers don’t get to commit massacres on their own without explicit or tacit US approval.

One recent blatant example of South Korea’s lack of full sovereignty due to OPCON was when South Korea’s Ministry of National Defense secretly had four additional launchers for the US’s Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense System (THAAD) delivered, without informing South Korea’s own supposed commander-in-chief Moon Jae-in (Korea Times, 5/31/17). The South Korean military cited a confidentiality agreement with the US military for not informing Moon.

Ambassadorial apologetics
Chun Doo-hwan, brutal South Korean dictator, dies at 90
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The Washington Post (11/23/21) wrote that “US Ambassador William H. Gleysteen Jr. came to distrust Mr. Chun”—while the fact that US President Ronald Reagan invited Chun to a White House summit two weeks after his own inauguration was not worth mentioning.
The Washington Post (11/23/21) engaged in similar apologetics for the US when it implied Chun was operating outside US control and approval during the Gwangju Massacre, as it described Chun’s 1979 coup:

On the night of December 12—a night that quickly became known as 12/12—Mr. Chun launched the first stage in a two-part coup. The first involved capturing control of the military. Mr. Chun had his superior, a four-star general, arrested on charges of being involved in Park’s assassination. Generals loyal to Mr. Chun arrested key military figures and took over military headquarters, key roads and bridges, and media outlets.

Mr. Chun and his allies refused direct contact with the Americans until they had established effective control, former Washington Post correspondent Don Oberdorfer wrote in his book The Two Koreas. US Ambassador William H. Gleysteen Jr. came to distrust Mr. Chun, Oberdorfer wrote, and eventually consider him “almost the definition of unreliability…unscrupulous…ruthless…a liar.”


The Post’s citation of Gleysteen’s characterization of Chun, and self-serving depictions of himself as an unwitting official who was merely deceived by Chun and not complicit in some of Chun’s crimes, is especially ridiculous. Although the US didn’t facilitate Chun’s coup, they certainly accepted the outcome afterwards, as Gleysteen met with Chun two days after his coup on December 12 at his embassy residence. Gleysteen was also the one who made assurances to Chun that the US wouldn’t oppose contingency plans to use military force on May 8, days before the massacre began on May 18, 1980. Gleysteen also cabled the State Department to retract his earlier “careless” depiction of Chun’s takeover as a “coup in all but name,” and advised State Department officials to publicly refrain from using that term, as Kap Seol noted for Jacobin (6/25/20):

“Whatever the precise pattern of events, they did not amount to a classical coup because the existing government structure was technically left in place.” Gleysteen believed that the United States had to approve the general’s contingency plan to use military force in order to prevent South Korea from slipping into “total chaos.”

Approving Gwangju force
Chun Doo-hwan’s bloody Gwangju legacy is America’s problem too
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Responsible Statecraft (12/14/21): “The US government knowingly supported Chun’s military crackdown on a pro-democracy uprising.”
Shorrock and Korean journalist In Jeong Kim (Responsible Statecraft, 12/14/21) were the first to document the Carter administration’s approval of Chun’s plans to crush pro-democracy demonstrations in several Korean cities in the spring of 1980 with military force, before the subsequent Gwangju uprising. This contradicts a later 1989 white paper by the Bush administration claiming that the Carter administration was alarmed by Chun’s threats to use military force against nationwide demonstrations in 1980, and did not know in advance that special forces were sent to Gwangju. Shorrock and Kim also reported how the US was aware of key details about the Gwangju Massacre by May 21, yet approved further use of military force to retake Gwangju on May 22, as all of this is documented in the declassified “Cherokee Files.”

Before Chun sent his army’s 20th Division to destroy the Gwangju uprising, he had to first notify US Gen. John Wickham that he was removing them from Wickham’s control, and Wickham’s acknowledgment that he was notified is taken by many South Koreans to have constituted approval of Chun’s use of military force (LA Times, 8/29/96). In November 1987, in a recently uncovered top-secret report, the CIA confirmed that Washington knowingly supported Chun’s crackdown on a pro-democracy uprising, as the agency reported:

Most citizens remain bitter towards the government and the military, as well as the United States, because Chun used troops from the 20th Division, which is under the Combined Forces Command.

US opposition to democracy in South Korea can’t be limited to Washington’s support for brutal crackdowns and military dictators against pro-democracy forces. The South China Morning Post (7/20/19), reporting on CIA documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, noted that the establishment political faction supporting Chun’s handpicked successor, Roh Tae-woo, planned to use “dirty tricks” to ensure that he would win the 1987 election that Chun agreed to after fierce protests against his dictatorship. Although it is unclear to what extent Roh’s ruling political faction followed through on its plans to cheat in the election, Shorrock argued that the documents suggest the US intelligence establishment saw Roh as their preferred candidate at the time, since they indicate no intention to use the information to protect the elections against anti-democratic tactics.

The US’s installation of former collaborators with Japanese colonizers as the initial leadership of South Korea, its continued support for South Korean dictators like Chun Doo-hwan, its tolerance (at least) of brutal crackdowns like the Gwangju Massacre, its favoritism toward far-right electoral candidates: all contradict the US’s white savior propaganda of invading and occupying Korea under the pretext of defending democracy.

US complicity in the Gwangju Massacre is a major factor behind South Korea’s anti-imperialist sentiment against the US (crudely caricatured as “anti-American” sentiment in US media). Yet the Western media’s whitewashing of the legacy of people like Chun Doo-hwan betray that, to whatever extent South Korea can be considered a sovereign democracy, it is despite US meddling in the peninsula, not because of it.

https://fair.org/home/obits-for-a-south ... atic-role/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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