I posted this blog yesterday and I have had numerous responses... so many responses that I have been up all night responding to e-mails and phone calls from all over the world... from Korea to China and Canada to Venezuela and Finland; from Boston to Oakland from Sudbury to Miami Beach.
Responses ranged from "both sides" did terrible things to "these killings were in response to what the communists did;" to "Stalin created the problem" to "the Soviet delegate to the United Nations did not show up and Malik's (the Soviet Delegate) vote could have prevented the Korean War."
But, the overwhelming majority of those I heard from told me they appreciated the new perspective I am shedding on this most disgraceful act of barbarism. One has to ask: Why is it so difficult for the main stream media to call this what it was: POLITICAL REPRESSION. Murder. Barbarism.Let us set the record straight as far as why Malik was not at the U.N. Security Council meeting... he was boycotting the meeting to protest the fact that the anti-communist, pro-American, pro-imperialist delegation was seated representing China and the Chinese people who had just been victorious under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party in securing their homeland from imperialist domination and imperialist rule had successfully completed a socialist revolution putting China on the road to real freedom; freedom from exploitation and the rape of the country's resources which the United States and other imperialist powers had their greedy eyes on.
In short, the world was in turmoil as people everywhere were still celebrating their victories over Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo.
American workers were feeling their strength and their power and flexing their muscel at work and in politics under the leadership of the Communist Party USA... Truman had the leadership of the CPUSA shackled and chained... very literally.
In fact, all of these responses I received critical of what I wrote below about this article have absolutely nothing to do with the Korean War itself.
The United States brought a pro-imperialist, pro-capitalist government to power against the will of the overwhelming majority of the Korean people.
The Associated Press thinks we are all a bunch of dumb clucks to try and put a story over on us in this very well thought out deceitful manner.
The wholesale slaughter and butchering of human beings is nothing but the most atrocious form of political repression carried out for the single-minded purpose of smothering the democratic will of the overwhelming majority of the Korean people who wanted an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, socialist government.
What kind of fools does the main stream media take us for?
To round up this many people is not an act carried out with out considerable planning and forethought. Tremendous planning needs to take place. Informers have to provide names of people and tell these fascists who put together such a murderous plot against democracy and the people where people live and work... it is no small task rounding up so many people. Trenches have to be dug to bury the bodies.
This vicious, barbaric act of political repression could not have been carried out by the American puppets being brought into power... the United States had to be the master-mind and primary plotter of these sick and dirty murderous deeds.
Remember, only months before, these people who were murdered were OUR primary allies in the war with imperialist Japan. They are the ones who led the fight on the Korean Peninsula that routed the Japanese imperialists, only to face U.S. imperialist domination in the end.
These were not war crimes; these were crimes against humanity which were motivated by political repression against the patriotic people of Korea... their only crime was wanting to have the right to be full participants in a cooperatively run, democratic socialist society. This was these people's only "crime."
These human beings were murdered in cold blood only because they did not intend to allow the United States to take over their country in the exact same way the Japanese imperialists had done... the Japanese imposed a cruel regime of murder and repression on the Korean people; the United States intended to impose the exact same kind of government that the Korean people along with their Soviet and then American allies had driven from their country.
All throughout World War Two, General Douglas MacArthur, the United States government at the highest levels and the American people were fully aware that our greatest, best and most reliable allies in fighting the Japanese imperialist aggressors from among the Korean people were the Korean Communists... this was no secret. It was to the Korean Communists that arms and food was distributed through... it was the Communists who had the most reliable network to carry on the resistance struggle... everyone knew that at the conclusion of the War the Communist Party was going to be the strongest and most influential party in Korea.
It did not take the presence of Russian troops delivering Communist Manifestos to the Korean people... the revolutionary science of Marxism-Leninism had been well developed and promoted--- and accepted--- by the Korean people long before the Soviets arrived.
Socialism in Korea was on its way, World War Two or no war.
Socialist ideas were well established in the process of the Korean people resisting Japanese occupation of their country.
In fact, all over the world... the most reliable resistance to the fascist axis powers were the Communist parties... in Europe, in Asia.. and right inside the fascist powers themselves... the armed and political resistance was carried on primarily under the leadership of the Communist parties.
And it makes me sick to see the corporate controlled main stream media continue these to peddle their lies... what is just as sickening is to have those who call themselves liberals and progressives and even "Marxists" and "revolutionaries" not understand what took place as far as this political repression.
Whether or not the Soviet delegate was present for a U.N. Security Council meeting had nothing to do with this barbaric repression which was thought up, organized and carried out under the full and complete knowledge of the United States government and that worthless, cowardly piece of imperialist, fascist, crap--- General Douglas MacArthur.
In the name of democracy, such perverted and murderous campaigns have been orchestrated, planned and carried out by the United States government... the School of the Americas trains people to commit just such barbaric acts in the furtherance of U.S. imperialist domination.
From the Korean Peninsula to Spain and Greece to the streets of Chile to the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam from South Africa to Palestine... the world's peoples have endured this kind of "delivery of democracy" to their countries... the motives are the same, corporate greed and conquest, the methods may very; but, in the end as people are on the verge of casting off the unbearable yoke of fascist and imperialist domination the American military and CIA chose the "ten cent solution" as the last resort... the trenches are dug, the people are shot, the bodies are buried, everyone in Washington holds up their hands and exclaims in unison, "We had no idea this was going on; our hands are clean." The cover-up proceeds. And fifty years later the skeletons appear.
In fact, every single administration--- bar none--- since Roosevelt's, and many before, has blood stained hands from having put down the democratic aspirations of the people in some country on the face of this globe.
The crimes of U.S. imperialism like this that is now just coming to light, the last few months in Korea, is but one more example of why we need to make sure that Barack Obama has his hands securely tied and restrained by the people to prevent such atrocities in the future.
To wait until after the election, as some suggest, for the American people to rise up and resist the drive to war with Iran, is only asking for one more imperialist blood-bath.
I say shame on those who look everywhere else except to their own government right here in Washington for excuses for the barbaric crimes of U.S. imperialism.
This is made in the USA:
These are the faces of the imperialist monsters responsible for these dirty deeds of political repression:
These are the courageous leaders of the Communist Party USA who had the courage to stand up and organize resistance to U.S. imperialism:
And these are a few of the rank and file workers and Communist Party members who faced job loss and years of political persecution for having courage to try to organize resistance to U.S. imperialism:
The faces of U.S. imperialism have changed... but the aims of U.S. imperialism have not:
From Korea to Iraq... the blood continues to flow; the barbaric criminality of U.S. imperialism knows no bounds, nor limits, as corporate profits are the objective of big-capital--- no limits except that to which U.S. imperialism is restrained by people united for real change:
The American people and people on every continent of our planet have paid a terrible price for the twin evils of racism and anti-communism being the ideological underpinnings of U.S. state monopoly capitalism as big-business extends its greedy fingers in quest of profits.
These mass graves now being "discovered" in Korea are nothing new--- part of a long, long trail of injustices... from stealing the lands of First Nations Peoples to the oil fields of Iraq... we need to unite for real change to create a new society based upon human needs, compassion, empathy and cooperation--- respect for all peoples... that society is called socialism; a society where private for-profit corporations will once and for all be abolished, and the motivation for killing people and shoving them into mass graves as politicians who ordered the killings scurry to cover up their dirty deeds has got to come to an end... it is capitalism which must be buried.
Alan L. Maki
What this Associated Press article fails to mention is one very important point:
Had Korea remained one united country, the Korean people would have created a unified socialist Korea; and, it was to prevent Korea from going communist where all problems arose... just like most world problems from the beginning of the Second World War on... Hitler was the "preeminent anti-communist;" but Harry Truman and General Douglas MacArthur were not far behind Hitler in this respect.
Korean communists led the struggle against Japanese imperialism; therefore, at the conclusion of the Second World War, communists were the strongest and most influential political force in Korea.
General Douglas McArthur, who, first, ran like a coward from the Japanese in the Philippines, then "returned" after the Japanese imperialists had become entrenched... rolled up his pants and waded onto the beach after thousands of his men had been slaughtered, and posed for photographers.
This same gutless coward, General Douglas McArthur, who had mowed down American servicemen in the shadows of the White House demanding their "bonuses" from World War One; McArthur stood by, not only turned his back on the executions of the very courageous Korean communists who had only shortly before helped the U.S. military efforts in defeating Japan; but as everyone knows, he approved and sanctioned this barbaric, murderous repression of Korean Communists--- poor peasants and working people.
We are talking about the mass slaughter of human beings for their political ideas.
People who were heroes for their courageous fighting ability against the Japanese imperialists were somehow demonized and turned into "criminals" when they wanted to be masters of their own destiny and refused to submit to the exploitation and dictates of capitalists.
What is also not stated, is those whom the Russians executed, were war criminals in the full sense of the word, just like any Nazi war criminal... these traitors were responsible for aiding the Japanese imperialists in carrying out some of the most heinous and atrocious war crimes against humanity--- perpetrated against their fellow countrymen fighting to free their country from Japanese domination.
Dah... the Soviets were in Korea as American and British allies per the Allied agreement between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin to drive the Japanese from the Korea; not to occupy Korean Peninsula--- a "
little fact" missing from this Associated Press story.
A massive Korean people's movement of workers and peasants was in progress over who would govern Korea after the Japanese were defeated. Remember--- the Japanese occupied Korea through the Second World War.
The "great" Harry Truman made the decision that Korean peasants and workers who sacrificed to drive the Japanese out, didn't have the right to determine their own destiny after the war and he chose to murder these workers and peasants in cold blood just as Hitler had done to millions of Communists.
With this real history in mind, read this sickening story.
It has taken "democracy" over fifty years to come clean with the truth.
AP: U.S. Okayed Korean War Massacres Associated Press
Published: Saturday July 5, 2008
SEOUL The American colonel, troubled by what he was hearing, tried to stall at first. But the declassified record shows he finally told his South Korean counterpart it "would be permitted" to machine-gun 3,500 political prisoners, to keep them from joining approaching enemy forces.
In the early days of the Korean War, other American officers observed, photographed and confidentially reported on such wholesale executions by their South Korean ally, a secretive slaughter believed to have killed 100,000 or more leftists and supposed sympathizers, usually without charge or trial, in a few weeks in mid-1950.
Extensive archival research by The Associated Press has found no indication Far East commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur took action to stem the summary mass killing, knowledge of which reached top levels of the Pentagon and State Department in Washington, where it was classified "secret" and filed away.
Now, a half-century later, the South Korean government's Truth and Reconciliation Commission is investigating what happened in that summer of terror, a political bloodbath largely hidden from history, unlike the communist invaders' executions of southern rightists, which were widely publicized and denounced at the time.
In the now-declassified record at the U.S. National Archives and other repositories, the Korean investigators will find an ambivalent U.S. attitude in 1950 — at times hands-off, at times disapproving.
"The most important thing is that they did not stop the executions," historian Jung Byung-joon, a member of the 2-year-old commission, said of the Americans. "They were at the crime scene, and took pictures and wrote reports."
They took pictures in July 1950 at the slaughter of dozens of men at one huge killing field outside the central city of Daejeon. Between 3,000 and 7,000 South Koreans are believed to have been shot there by their own military and police, and dumped into mass graves, said Kim Dong-choon, the commission member overseeing the investigation of these government killings.
The bones of Koh Chung-ryol's father are there somewhere, and the 57-year-old woman believes South Koreans alone are not to blame.
"Although we can't present concrete evidence, we bereaved families believe the United States has some responsibility for this," she told the AP, as she visited one of the burial sites in the quiet Sannae valley.
Frank Winslow, a military adviser at Daejeon in those desperate days long ago, is one American who feels otherwise.
The Koreans were responsible for their own actions, said the retired Army lieutenant colonel, 81. "The Koreans were sovereign. To me, there was never any question that the Koreans were in charge," he said in a telephone interview from his home in Bellingham, Wash.
The brutal, hurried elimination of tens of thousands of their countrymen, subject of a May 19 AP report, was the climax to a years-long campaign by South Korea's right-wing leaders.
In 1947, two years after Washington and Moscow divided Korea into southern and northern halves, a U.S. military government declared the Korean Labor Party, the southern communists, to be illegal. President Syngman Rhee's southern regime, gaining sovereignty in 1948, suppressed all leftist political activity, put down a guerrilla uprising and held up to 30,000 political prisoners by the time communist North Korea invaded on June 25, 1950.
As war broke out, southern authorities also rounded up members of the 300,000-strong National Guidance Alliance, a "re-education" body to which they had assigned leftist sympathizers, and whose membership quotas also were filled by illiterate peasants lured by promises of jobs and other benefits.
Commission investigators, extrapolating from initial evidence and surveys of family survivors, believe most alliance members were killed in the wave of executions.
On June 29, 1950, as the southern army and its U.S. advisers retreated southward, reports from Seoul said the conquering northerners had emptied the southern capital's prisons, and ex-inmates were reinforcing the new occupation regime.
In a confidential narrative he later wrote for Army historians, Lt. Col. Rollins S. Emmerich, a senior U.S. adviser, described what then happened in the southern port city of Busan, formerly known as Pusan.
Emmerich was told by a subordinate that a South Korean regimental commander, determined to keep Busan's political prisoners from joining the enemy, planned "to execute some 3500 suspected peace time Communists, locked up in the local prison," according to the declassified 78-page narrative, first uncovered by the newspaper Busan Ilbo at the U.S. National Archives.
Emmerich wrote that he summoned the Korean, Col. Kim Chong-won, and told him the enemy would not reach Busan in a few days as Kim feared, and that "atrocities could not be condoned."
But the American then indicated conditional acceptance of the plan.
"Colonel Kim promised not to execute the prisoners until the situation became more critical," wrote Emmerich, who died in 1986. "Colonel Kim was told that if the enemy did arrive to the outskirts of (Busan) he would be permitted to open the gates of the prison and shoot the prisoners with machine guns."
This passage, omitted from the published Army history, is the first documentation unearthed showing advance sanction by the U.S. military for such killings.
"I think his (Emmerich's) word is so significant," said Park Myung-lim, a South Korean historian of the war and adviser to the investigative commission.
As that summer wore on, and the invaders pressed their attack on the southern zone, Busan-area prisoners were shot by the hundreds, Korean and foreign witnesses later said.
Emmerich wrote that soon after his session with Kim, he met with South Korean officials in Daegu, 55 miles (88 kilometers) north of Busan, and persuaded them "at that time" not to execute 4,500 prisoners immediately, as planned. Within weeks, hundreds were being executed in the Daegu area.
The bloody anticommunist purge, begun immediately after the invasion, is believed by the fall of 1950 to have filled some 150 mass graves in secluded spots stretching to the peninsula's southernmost counties. Commissioner Kim said the commission's estimate of 100,000 dead is "very conservative." The commission later this month will resume excavating massacre sites, after having recovered remains of more than 400 people at four sites last year.
The AP has extensively researched U.S. military and diplomatic archives from the Korean War in recent years, at times relying on once-secret documents it obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests and declassification reviews. The declassified U.S. record and other sources offer further glimpses of the mass killings.
A North Korean newspaper said 1,000 prisoners were slain in Incheon, just west of Seoul, in late June 1950 — a report partly corroborated by a declassified U.S. Eighth Army document of July 1950 saying "400 Communists" had been killed in Incheon. The North Korean report claimed a U.S. military adviser had given the order.
As the front moved south, in July's first days, Air Force intelligence officer Donald Nichols witnessed and photographed the shooting of an estimated 1,800 prisoners in Suwon, 20 miles south of Seoul, Nichols reported in a little-noted memoir in 1981, a decade before his death.
Around the same time, farther south, the Daejeon killings began.
Winslow recalled he declined an invitation to what a senior officer called the "turkey shoot" outside the city, but other U.S. officers did attend, taking grisly photos of the human slaughter that would be kept classified for a half-century.
Journalist Alan Winnington, of the British communist Daily Worker newspaper, entered Daejeon with North Korean troops after July 20 and reported that the killings were carried out for three days in early July and two or three days in mid-July.
He wrote that his witnesses claimed jeeploads of American officers "supervised the butchery." Secret CIA and Army intelligence communications reported on the Daejeon and Suwon killings as early as July 3, but said nothing about the U.S. presence or about any U.S. oversight.
In mid-August, MacArthur, in Tokyo, learned of the mass shooting of 200 to 300 people near Daegu, including women and a 12- or 13-year-old girl. A top-secret Army report from Korea, uncovered by AP research, told of the "extreme cruelty" of the South Korean military policemen. The bodies fell into a ravine, where hours later some "were still alive and moaning," wrote a U.S. military policeman who happened on the scene.
Although MacArthur had command of South Korean forces from early in the war, he took no action on this report, other than to refer it to John J. Muccio, U.S. ambassador in South Korea. Muccio later wrote that he urged South Korean officials to stage executions humanely and only after due process of law.
The AP found that during this same period, on Aug. 15, Brig. Gen. Francis W. Farrell, chief U.S. military adviser to the South Koreans, recommended the U.S. command investigate the executions. There was no sign such an inquiry was conducted. A month later, the Daejeon execution photos were sent to the Pentagon in Washington, with a U.S. colonel's report that the South Koreans had killed "thousands" of political prisoners.
The declassified record shows an equivocal U.S. attitude continuing into the fall, when Seoul was retaken and South Korean forces began shooting residents who collaborated with the northern occupiers.
When Washington's British allies protested, Dean Rusk, assistant secretary of state, told them U.S. commanders were doing "everything they can to curb such atrocities," according to a Rusk memo of Oct. 28, 1950.
But on Dec. 19, W.J. Sebald, State Department liaison to MacArthur, cabled Secretary of State Dean Acheson to say MacArthur's command viewed the killings as a South Korean "internal matter" and had "refrained from taking any action."
It was the British who took action, according to news reports at the time. On Dec. 7, in occupied North Korea, British officers saved 21 civilians lined up to be shot, by threatening to shoot the South Korean officer responsible. Later that month, British troops seized "Execution Hill," outside Seoul, to block further mass killings there.
To quiet the protests, the South Koreans barred journalists from execution sites and the State Department told diplomats to avoid commenting on atrocity reports. Earlier, the U.S. Embassy in London had denounced as "fabrication" Winnington's Daily Worker reporting on the Daejeon slaughter. The Army eventually blamed all the thousands of Daejeon deaths on the North Koreans, who in fact had carried out executions of rightists there and elsewhere.
An American historian of the Korean War, the University of Chicago's Bruce Cumings, sees a share of U.S. guilt in what happened in 1950.
"After the fact — with thousands murdered — the U.S. not only did nothing, but covered up the Daejeon massacres," he said.
Another Korean War scholar, Allan R. Millett, an emeritus Ohio State professor, is doubtful. "I'm not sure there's enough evidence to pin culpability on these guys," he said, referring to the advisers and other Americans.
The swiftness and nationwide nature of the 1950 roundups and mass killings point to orders from the top, President Rhee and his security chiefs, Korean historians say. Those officials are long dead, and Korean documentary evidence is scarce.
To piece together a fuller story, investigators of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission will sift through tens of thousands of pages of declassified U.S. documents.
The commission's mandate extends to at least 2010, and its president, historian Ahn Byung-ook, expects to turn then to Washington for help in finding the truth.
"Our plan is that when we complete our investigation of cases involving the U.S. Army, we'll make an overall recommendation, a request to the U.S. government to conduct an overall investigation," he said. Charles J. Hanley and Jae-Soon Chang, The Associated Press
