By Paul Liem | August 17, 2024
On August 17, 2024, hundreds of activists participated in rallies in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco to protest the Ulchi Freedom Shield war games, and to call for the U.S. to get out of Korea. The rallies were organized by the U.S. Out of Korea Campaign which was launched by Nodutdol for Community Development on July 27, 2024. The following is a talk delivered by KPI board member, Paul Liem, at the San Francisco rally.
There is a narrative in vogue in certain elite circles of academics and politicians in the Republic of Korea (ROK), particularly in the administration of President Yoon Suk Yeol, that Imperial Japan was the benefactor of Korea’s modernization and those who commemorate Korean independence fighters as patriots are badly mistaken. According to this view it is rather those who prospered from collaboration with Imperial Japan who propelled Korea’s modernization under Japanese rule, and who paved the way for the advancement of the Korean economy after liberation.
This is not a new take. It is the view of the Korean elite at the time of Korea’s liberation from Japan 79 years ago. It benefited opportunistically from Japan’s rape of Korea’s natural resources and the dispossession of its people. And it was the ascent of this elite to state power under the auspices of an American Military Government in Korea (1945 – 1948) that assured the continuation of this narrative, after liberation. Such is the sordid advent of the founding of the Republic of Korea in 1948 as a separate state south of the 38th parallel. Such is the beginning of a US-led world order in Asia premised upon the “rehabilitation” of Japan after WWII, the division of Korea, and secured with bi-lateral military alliances with the ROK and Japan.
Under the US-ROK alliance, which is as much an ideological embrace of neoliberalism as it is a military alliance, the regime of private property and the anti-communist laws instituted by Japan, prior to liberation, live on. However, no amount of repression to date has dampened the indignation of the Korean public at any show of disrespect for those who struggled against Japan for Korea’s Independence.
Yet today a pro-Japanese faction under the leadership of President Yoon Suk-Yeol has reared its ugly head. Because it believes that its entitlement to wealth depends upon the continuation of US patronage it has forsaken legitimate claims to redress for crimes committed against the Korean people by colonial Japan at the behest of Washington, which seeks to harmonize the ROK and Japan into a frontline fighting force to contain China and isolate the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). Among these are apologies and redress due from Japan for the sexual slavery of Korean women, known as “comfort women,” for compensation to Koreans forced to labor for the Japanese war machine, and most recently the failed demand that Japan truthfully describe Korean workers of the Sado mine as “forced.”
Moreover, as if to ingratiate himself to Washington even more, in his Liberation Day speech, just as the US-ROK Ulchi Freedom war games were about to launch, Yoon practically declared war on the DPRK, by calling for regime change. “The freedom we enjoy must be extended to the frozen kingdom of the North,” as he put it.
Not since Syngman Rhee has any South Korean president called for reunification by absorption of the north, as Yoon did this week. That is because the people of south Korea, who by and large embrace democracy as it is understood to be practiced in the west, nevertheless do not want war and have emphatically supported joint north-south efforts at peaceful reconciliation, instead.
Not since Park Chung Hee, a lieutenant in the Japanese imperial army (Lt Okamoto Minoru), tasked with counterinsurgency against Korean anti-Japanese guerillas in Manchuria, and who came to power through a military coup in 1961, has any ROK president proactively conceded the right to claim reparations from Japan. I am referring to the ROK-Japan Agreement of 1965 in which Park relinquished claims for one half a century of colonial rule for the sum of three hundred million dollars. That other presidential administrations have sought to gain redress for the enslavement of Koreans by Imperial Japan, is only because the people of south Korea honor those who suffered and died toiling for the Japanese war machine and demand that Japan be held accountable for their sacrifices.
President Yoon came to power in 2022 by a negligible margin of less than one percent. This was at a time when household debt was at an all-time high and housing prices, stagnant economic growth, and gender inequality were the top issues of the day. His solution, though, has been to prioritize wealth extraction by the conglomerates, including those of its military industrial complex, by cracking down on labor unions and by going “all in” on a trilateral military alliance with the U.S. and Japan. Known by its acronym, JAKUS, it is posturing for war with China, and possibly the DPRK and Russia, and possibly for war with all of these nuclear armed states at once.
The Korea Policy Institute is supporting the “US Out of Korea Campaign” because we know that the path of self-destruction that south Korea is treading is a direct consequence of 79 years of US foreign policy.
It was the American Military Government in Korea that disbanded the indigenous People’s Republic of Korea and grassroots governing structures, the People’s Committees, in 1945, and directed counterinsurgency warfare massacring progressive forces that continued to struggle for democracy and Korea’s sovereignty.
We recall that just as the US was the first to recognize the Zionist state of Israel in 1948, it called for separate elections in the south to install the remnants of Korea’s feudal aristocracy as the ruling class of the Republic of Korea, with Syngman Rhee as president, also in 1948. It subsequently went to war against the DPRK and the People’s Republic of China to protect the Rhee dictatorship and expand its rule over the whole of Korea, bombing and napalming the north into oblivion and killing millions of civilians in the process.
We know that the repression of workers’ rights, soaring household debt, rising inequality and the ascent of right-wing extremism in the ROK is a consequence of the state’s embrace of a US-led neoliberal world order in which the financial wealth of its ruling class is premised on unrestrained privatization of the economy and the impoverishment of its working class.
We know that the acquiescence of the Yoon administration to the view promoted by the right-wing in Japan that Japanese rule “civilized” Korea is a consequence of US policy to create a NATO-like military formation, with the ROK and Japan at its core, to defend the neoliberal order in Asia.
And we know that if we as members of the Korean diaspora in the U.S., and as American citizens, fail to demand and achieve “US out of Korea” the fate of Korea can be seen in the ongoing death and destruction in Ukraine, to achieve US-led NATO ambitions for expansion over Eurasia, and in the genocide of the Palestinian people by the US-backed Zionist state of Israel.
Although our demand today is “US Out of Korea,” we know that the US, clinging desperately to its mantle of global hegemon, is suppressing liberation movements and plotting regime change adventures on a global scale. To succeed we must join forces with all of the movements that have gathered here today, and with the American working-class that is struggling to assert its economic interests while carrying the weight of a 35 trillion-dollar sovereign debt from which only the financial elites, the military industrial, and educational complex, and the war mongers in Washington benefit. Together, in solidarity with our brothers and sisters across the Global South, we will defeat US Imperialism everywhere, and in Korea too.
Long live international solidarity!
Down with US Imperialism!
Toojeng!
Paul Liem is the Chair of the Korea Policy Institute Board of Directors.
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