By Moe Taylor | September 3, 2026 President Houari Boumédiène with Kim Il-sung during his visit to North Korea in the 1970s. Abstract In the early-mid 1970s the DPRK leadership presented a new analysis of the international situation and the political tasks required of it. This new narrative was summarized by Kim Il Sung’s concept of the “era of chajusŏng,” a historical conjuncture in which the “primary tendency” was a universal yearning for national self-determination clashing with the declining forces of imperialism. The struggle implied in this conception was one in which nation-states, rather than subaltern classes, were the primary protagonists, and of which the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was the most important political expression. This understanding of the historical moment rationalized a set of objectives, strategies, and partnerships quite different from those pursued by its socialist allies, but which made possible a level of international engagement previously foreclosed to Pyongyang. In the process, the DPRK leadership at times openly downplayed the contemporary relevance of Marxism-Leninism, particularly in the Global South. Read the paper here:

By Brad Wolf | August 5, 2026 | Originally published in CounterPunch Second International Hiroshima Forum. On the right corner of my desk, next to my laptop and always in eyeshot, sits a metal model of an atom bomb I assembled from a kit, a model of “Little Boy,” the bomb the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima. The model is made from aluminum alloy parts and is a 1/12th scale of the original atom bomb, about nine inches long. The ad for the bomb contained a video with dramatic music showing the model spinning through the air as it falls toward its imagined target. “Perfect for collectors,” the ad boasted. “A must-have for history enthusiasts. Very enjoyable assembly process.” Toward the bottom of the ad, perhaps as an afterthought, perhaps recognizing the implications of marketing such a murderous model, was the following: “By assembling this model, you can understand the history and moral issues of nuclear weapons and trigger thoughts about the future of the world.” The kit came with a tiny screwdriver, two dozen tiny screws, a sanding rod, glue, and decals. The aluminum alloy parts were in molded plates. The model even had a metal cart to assemble that the bomb sits on so it can be pulled around your desk, pretending you’re getting ready to load it onto the Enola Gay, extinguish a city in a flash. On the morning of August 6, 1945, the real “Little Boy” exploded with a flash 2,000 feet above the city of Hiroshima, which sits on the Ota River delta on Hiroshima Bay. The Ota River has six channels splitting Hiroshima into islets. Bomb victims staggered toward these channels to throw themselves into the water hoping to extinguish their burning bodies. The channels became so clogged with bodies that others couldn’t squeeze in. Some people, closer to the hypocenter, were vaporized, reduced to shadows seared into stone. Temperatures on the ground reached 4,000 degrees. As we once again approach that fateful day of August 6th, it is important to recognize that not just the U.S. and Japan are intertwined in a nuclear nightmare that has lasted over eighty years, but also 70,000 Koreans who were exposed to the two atomic bombs incinerating Hiroshima and Nagasaki, people forcibly removed from their homeland by the Japanese and sent to work in these cities. Japan colonized Korea in 1910 and for decades used Koreans as they saw fit, from Comfort Women to slave labor. The Koreans then became atomic bomb victims, despite their country not being at war with the United States. They are among the unintended victims, the forgotten victims. This November in Seoul, South Korea, the surviving Korean bomb victims will testify at a People’s Tribunal holding the U.S. accountable for war crimes. Lawyers from around the world have been preparing legal briefs and will argue the case. The U.S. government is invited to appear as the defendant at the Tribunal. The Republic of South Korea has also been asked to appear as a witness. Once let loose, an atomic bomb keeps on killing, generation after generation, the cancers passed down to those not even born when the bombs first exploded. The Korean atomic bomb victims, as well as the Japanese, have horrific stories testifying to this. Children of the bomb. Atomic maladies. The bomb wages war against the future. The second atomic bomb that was dropped on August 9th incinerating another Japanese city had a different nickname. That bomb had an even bigger belly and used plutonium rather than uranium. They called it “Fat Man.” The same ad for the model of the “Little Boy” atom bomb had a second ad inducing you to buy “Fat Man.” It is another 1/12th scale model of the original, this one weighing 6.2 pounds when completed. I declined the offer to buy and build it. One was repellent enough. The U.S. currently has 5,277 nuclear warheads. Russia has 5,4490. China, approximately 600. France and the U.K have about 250 each and Israel has about 90. India, Pakistan, and North Korea bring up the rear with a few nukes each. In total there are over 12,300 nuclear warheads spanning the globe. The Korean atomic bomb victims stand as ready reminders of what happens when these things are unleashed. Brad Wolf edited the recent book on the writings of Philip Berrigan entitled A Ministry of Risk which was published in April by Fordham University Press. He co-coordinated the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal and is currently chair of the organizing committee of the International People’s Tribunal on the Korean Victims of the 1945 Atomic Bombings. He is executive director of Peace Action Network of Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

By Paul Liem, KPI Board Chairperson | August 15, 2026 Photo: Nodutdol for Korean Community Development On behalf of the Korea Policy Institute I want to congratulate Nodutdol and BAYAN, and all who organized today’s remembrance and celebration of Korea’s liberation from 45 years of Japanese colonial rule. We remember this as Kwangbok, meaning “return of the light.” But today, darkness still pervades our path. As the United States (U.S.) exhausts it weapons in Ukraine, in Iran and the gulf region faster than its deindustrialized economy is able to replace them, it is transforming its allies in Asia, namely the Republic of Korea (R.O.K), Philippines, and Japan into self-financing forward-deployed proxies of aggression targeting China and the D.P.R.K. Extremely concerning is the encroachment of the Japanese military on its previously occupied countries. The U.S.-Philippines Balikatan 2026 war games included, for the first time since WWll, Japanese combat forces numbering 1400, conducting live-fire exercises on Philippine soil. Japan and the R.O.K. already conduct joint naval exercises. Will the U.S.-Korea Ulchi Freedom war games someday call for Japan to plant its “rising sun” flag on Korean soil? The danger of nuclear war is ever more threatening. To its nuclear umbrella over the R.O.K. and Japan, the U.S. is recklessly flaunting the idea of adding so-called “tactical nuclear weapons,” considered more usable, because smaller. But for that reason, they vastly increase the danger of nuclear holocaust. The government of Sanae Takaichi has opened the pandora’s box of nuclear escalation by questioning Japan’s 70 year old policy which prohibits the possession, production, and introduction of nuclear weapons. The administration of Lee Jae Myung is pursuing production of a nuclear submarine in partnership with the U.S. and is also lobbying for the right to pursue nuclear enrichment, a path that can lead to the weaponization of nuclear material. In 2025 the U.S. bombed the nuclear enrichment facilities of Iran, a non-nuclear country. This year it assassinated the supreme leader of Iran, Ali Kamenei, and members of his family, and threatened to “end all of Iranian civilization” if Iran did not bend the knee to the U.S.-Israeli cabal. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (D.P.R.K.) has carved into its constitution measures to defend itself from such victimization, principally by defining itself a nuclear power. The D.P.R.K. has the right to self-defense. U.S., hands off the D.P.R.K. Under the present circumstance, in which the U.S. and R.O.K. continue to call for the denuclearization of “North Korea,” the D.P.R.K. has concluded that reunification with the R.O.K., is not possible, and that diplomacy with the U.S. is no longer a priority. It will rather go its separate way as a socialist country, strengthening its alliances with Russia and China. What then can lead us to peace on the Korean peninsula, and hopefully reunification - someday? The R.O.K. and D.P.R.K. appear to be divided as much by their differing social systems as they are by the Korean demilitarized zone (DMZ). But there is no imperative, carved in stone, for either to seek to impose its system upon the other. The D.P.R.K. is eager to trade with capitalist countries, which are not hostile to it. It was ready to partner on development projects with the former Moon Jae-in administration, and it needs access to the international banking system. The will to engage with capitalist countries for mutual benefit is there, but it is blocked by U.S.-led economic sanctions and diplomatic hostility. For the R.O.K to re-engage with the D.P.RK. requires foremost that the Lee Jae Myung administration be willing to test the proposition that a multi-lateral foreign policy that is also inclusive of the D.P.R.K., Russia and China, may be a better guarantor of the security of the republic, the economic well-being of the people, and the personal freedoms they enjoy, than a bilateral cold war U.S.-R.O.K. military alliance, and a Japan-Korea-U.S. (J.A.K.U.S.) trilateral alliance. And it means letting go of the insistence, codified in the R.O.K constitution, that the territory of the R.O.K. encompasses the entire peninsula (including the D.P.R.K.). Such developments will go much further toward re-establishing inter-Korea dialog toward peaceful reconciliation than calling for the D.P.R.K. to denuclearize while conducting war games that envision the decapitation of the D.P.R.K. state leadership. They will also serve notice to the U.S. that the R.O.K. has no intentions of becoming cannon fodder in any U.S. military adventurism in Asia, or that of any foreign power. To eliminate the threat of nuclear war, “denuclearization,” is, of course, necessary. But as Korean A-Bomb victim, Mr. Lee Tae-jae, told students at San Francisco State University in April, the U.S. must apologize and denuclearize FIRST. Mr. Lee and other Korean Hibakusha are convening a People’s International Tribunal in Seoul, this November, to demand redress and an apology from the U.S. for its 1945 atomic bombing. Apologize! To imagine that the R.O.K. may someday let go of its staunch anti-North, anti-communist outlook, may seem far-fetched. However, the number one anti-communist society in the world today is, and always has been, the United States. And even here, especially since the 2008 Wall Street meltdown, and now the U.S. kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, its blockade of Cuba, U.S.-Israeli genocide in Palestine, and aggression against Iran, the ideas that economic planning should be left to a billionaire elite and foreign policy left to war mongers, have given way to a new generation of political leaders, socialist-minded leaders, who are addressing, responsibly, the two issues that unite us all, here, in Korea, and everywhere – affordability and forever wars! The Korean people, after liberation, did not demand land reform without compensation to landlords for ideological reasons. They did so because paying for land previously hoarded by a parasitic class and used to exploit them was irrational. Likewise, we and the world’s people today are not beginning to address social problems, such as lack of housing, food security and health insurance, with public solutions for high-minded theoretical reasons, but because privatization and financialization are destroying the fabric of U.S. society, depressing the earnings of the working class, fueling racist attacks against immigrants and marginalized communities, while driving us to debt peonage and fascism. The light of Kwangbok was never ethereal. It was political. It was the casting out of the colonial master and the people struggling to build a new society based on an equitable distribution of wealth. Kwangbok will come again. But as our forbearers, we must struggle to make it happen. We will make it happen! Toojeng!

By Tim Shorrock | August 3, 2026 | Originally published in Empire Blues by Tim Shorrock This is the last of three introductions written by investigative journalist, and KPI Associate, Tim Shorrock, to the three volume book, The Korean War you never Saw, released on July 27, the 73rd anniversary of the Korean War Armistice, by Newstapa/Korea Center for Investigative Journalism. Volume 1 is Scorched Earth Bombing; Volume 2 is Leaflet Psychological Warfare; Volume 3 is Prisoners and Panmunjom. Shorrock has written the introduction to each volume and has given KPI permission to reprint them. For additional investigative reporting on Korea and U.S.-Korea policies subscribe to Shorrock’s, Empire Blues, a reader supported publication. The Bridge of No Return in Panmunjom, as photographed by my father Hallam Shorrock in 1960. (Tim Shorrock collection) On July 27th, 2026, the 73rd anniversary of the 1953 Armistice in Korea, Newstapa/The Korea Center for Investigative Journalism published three new books on Amazon Kindle about the Korean War, translated into English for an American audience. I was honored to write the introductions to all three volumes. Here is my essay for Volume 3, Prisoners and Panmunjom, slightly expanded for my Substack readers. I first visited Panmunjom and the DMZ in October 1960, while my father was working as the director of Korea Church World Service, the largest private U.S. relief agency operating in South Korea. The black-and-white photographs he took that day never left my memory. One shows the “Bridge of No Return,” which battle-weary POWs slowly crossed on their way home from battle. Another shot is of a building where post-armistice negotiations took place, depicting two North Koreans grimly facing an American and two South Koreans across the table. These scenes are the subject of the third book in the Newstaps series, The Korean War You Never Saw. It documents the extraordinary story of the tens of thousands of prisoners seized by the U.S.-controlled UN forces, the Korean People’s Army, and the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army and subjected to political indoctrination before they crossed the border at Panmunjom or returned via other routes. The cover is a photo of young women fighters captured by the U.S. and South Korean armies in the southern front of the counterinsurgency war - images that most Americans have never seen or even imagined. It was taken on August 6, 1953 — ten days after the armistice was signed — by a U.S. military photographer in the U.S. 1st Marine Division. The Newstapa authors write: Young women in military caps are shouting something at the top of their lungs. No sound reaches us, yet the silent cry pouring out of the photograph seems to ring in the ears. Fierce emotion is etched into their young faces. A banner hung outside the train window carries a grim resolve. At a glance the writing is hard to read — it has been flipped by the wind. Reading it right to left, upside down, it says: “Long live the Korean People’s Army.” Looking at the strokes, you can tell the letters were not written with a brush-like implement. Something like bloodstains marks the area around the characters, so it appears to be written in blood. An image frozen at one moment of our modern history. Who are the subjects of this soundless clamor? How did they come to be aboard this train? Women fighters being returned to North Korea after their imprisonment by the U.S. military (Newstapa/US National Archives) The original U.S. Army caption reads: “Operation Big Switch frees North Korean communist women: this photograph shows women awaiting repatriation to the North, seen from south of the Freedom Bridge. From the moment they boarded the train in Incheon these women began shouting communist slogans and singing, and hours later, upon arriving here, they were still shouting slogans.” These weren’t images that the U.S. government wanted the American public to see. Instead, during and after the Korean War, the U.S. media seized on a narrative that U.S. POWs in Korea were exposed to ominous “brainwashing” techniques that transformed them into virtual slaves of their communist masters. The Manchurian Candidate The fear was encapsulated in the famous 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate, in which a U.S. soldier captured in Korea is imprisoned in China and programmed by his evil captors to assassinate a presidential candidate and trigger the overthrow of the U.S. government. The film created for Americans a lasting memory of the Korean War as a frightening battle for hearts and minds that justified the extreme violence unleashed by the U.S. military in Korea. Yet we learn from this book that the “brainwashing” was one-sided, primarily directed by the U.S. military against soldiers and partisans fighting with North Korea and China. “When the Korean War broke out, the United States drew up plans to use prisoners of war as a resource for psychological-warfare strategy, beyond merely detaining them,” the authors write. The “core aim” of the program was to turn captured soldiers and partisans (who were called “bandits”) into anti-communists.“It focused in particular on persuading prisoners who wished to be repatriated north to remain in the South. It also orchestrated, behind the scenes, a kind of coup in which anti-communist prisoner forces within the camp overthrew enclosures controlled by ‘pro-communist prisoner leadership’ — provoking conflict, murder, and violence among prisoners to that end.” The photos of the U.S.-run POW camps are also a reminder that the U.S. military put down - sometimes with brutal violence - outbreaks of rebellion among its thousands of prisoners from Korea and China. The POW camp at Koje-do was the scene of one of the largest uprisings by North Korean POWs. It was put down with the use of gas grenades. The bottom two photos show US soldiers displaying flags and other items seized from the prisoners. (Newstapa/US National Archives) During the war, the POW issue became “a major stumbling block during the ceasefire talks in Korea, each side accusing the other of atrocities, presenting lists and counter-lists of prisoners and trying to score propaganda points,” according to the Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett. In his book Koje Unscreened, Burchett “set out to investigate the veracity of each side’s claims,” according to an anthology of his writings edited by his son George Burchett, who lives in Hanoi. He “contrasted the generally good conditions he had observed in North Korean and Chinese-run POW camps with the reportedly appalling conditions and brutality in Allied prisoner of war camps, though in writing about this he indulged in some hyperbolic language he would later regret using.” The elder Burchett was the first foreign journalist to report from Hiroshima after the atomic bombing and later became known around the world for his coverage of Vietnam from behind enemy lines. American missionaries were part of the pychological warfarfe campaign Prisoners and Panmunjom reveals that among those participating in the U.S. re-education programs were psychological-warfare officers, psychologists, and sociologists, whose “curriculum centered on anti-communism, the superiority of the U.S.-style liberal-democratic system, and the emphasis on individual freedom.” In my own research into the U.S. policies on POWs, I was appalled to discover that American missionaries were employed by the U.S. military to convert communist prisoners to U.S.-style Christianity. The Presbyterian missionary and Army Chaplain Rev. Harold Voelkel preaching American-style Christianity to North Korean POWs at the prison camp where he worked. Photo from the Presbyterian Historical Society archives in Philadelphia. The best known of these chaplains was the Rev. Harold Voelkel, who had been a Presbyterian missionary to Andong in North Gyeongsang Province in the 1930s. He was deployed to the camps from 1950 to 1953, and claimed in his book Behind Barbed Wire in Korea (with an introduction by the famous evangelist Billy Graham) to have “converted” hundreds of North Korean POWs to Christianity. Voelkel’s work can only be described as a religious crusade carried out by the most powerful state in the world. It is ironic that the much of the U.S. civilian participation in the POW camps was managed by the Civil Information and Education Section (CI&E) of the U.S. occupation forces based in Japan. CI&E was initially established to dismantle state-sponsored Shinto in Japan; instead, America used CI&E to impose its own state religion of Christianity on Korea and China. Readers unfamiliar with this history should read The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War by the Korean-American historian Monica Kim. Through the “prism” of the U.S. interrogation rooms, Kim demonstrates “how the Korean War evolved from a fight over territory to one over human interiority and the individual human subject, forging the template for the US wars of intervention that would predominate during the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond.” During the armistice negotiations at Panmunjom, Kim explained, “the United States and their allies proposed a new kind of interrogation room: one in which POWs could exercise their ‘free will’ and choose which country they would go to after the ceasefire.” The complex web of interrogators and prisoners—Japanese-American interrogators, Indian military personnel, Korean POWs and interrogators, and American POWs—that Kim uncovers contradicts the simple story in U.S. popular memory of “brainwashing” during the Korean War. The third Newstapa volume helps us understand that convergence in the most vivid way possible. 🌺 This was the "enemy." On the left, "During Operation Mongoose — a joint ROK Army and KMAG operation to suppress the Korean People's Guerrillas — a Korean People's Army nurse-officer captured on Mount Jiri is interrogated by a military police officer of the ROK Capital Defense Division. With a face full of worry, she holds a POW registration tag reading "PRISONER OF WAR." On the right, "U.S. troops capture and body-search boy-soldier prisoners; a "Do Not Release" stamp is on the image. The sight of stripping and searching boy-soldiers lays bare the barbarity of war." (Newstapa/US National Archives) Order and download The Korean War You Never Saw: Prisoners and Panmunjom here. Tim Shorrock is a journalist and writer who grew up in Japan and South Korea in the aftermath of World War II and the Korean War. His 3-volume collection of declassified U.S. government documents revealing the complicity of the United States in the South Korean Army’s suppression of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising was published in Korean translation in 2024. He lives in Washington, D.C.

By Tim Shorrock | July 29, 2026 | Originally published in Empire Blues by Tim Shorrock This is the first of three introductions written by investigative journalist, and KPI Associate, Tim Shorrock, to the three volume book, The Korean War you never Saw, released on July 27, the 73rd anniversary of the Korean War Armistice, by Newstapa/Korea Center for Investigative Journalism. Volume 1 is Scorched Earth Bombing; Volume 2 is Leaflet Psychological Warfare; Volume 3 is Prisoners and Panmunjom. Shorrock has written the introduction to each volume and has given KPI permission to reprint them. For additional investigative reporting on Korea and U.S.-Korea policies subscribe to Shorrock’s, Empire Blues, a reader supported publication. The caption reads: “TEARS AMID THE RUINS: A frightened little South Korean boy cries in the midst of the ruins of his home in Seoul. The child was found by American soldiers at the end of a bitter battle.” In the original document, the last sentence is crossed out, suggesting that the archivist did not want American Christian donors to know that the little boy’s home was destroyed by lethal U.S. firepower. (Credit: Presbyterian Historical Society) On July 27th, 2026, the 73rd anniversary of the 1953 Armistice in Korea, Newstapa/The Korea Center for Investigative Journalism published three new books on Amazon Kindle about the Korean War, translated into English for an American audience. I was honored to write the introductions to all three volumes. Here is my opening essay for Scorched Earth Bombing. I first heard about the Korean War when my father was a missionary in postwar Japan and South Korea with Church World Service, then America’s largest private relief organization. In 1957, after his post-World War II relief work in Tokyo was ending, he began traveling regularly to South Korea to help it recover from the Korean War. When he arrived, the country was still a mess, with the terminal at Gimpo Airport marked with bullet and shell holes from the battles with North Korean troops entrenched in Seoul. Shacks filled with refugees crowded onto hillsides along the Han River. “These bombs and the shell and bullet damage came during the Korean War when the communist soldiers were trying to win control of South Korea,” my father explained in a letter to his children. “With the help of American, English, French, and Canadian soldiers, however, the South Korea Army pushed the communists back to North Korea.” The Christian aid to Korea, he added, “gives the Korean people hope and courage even though their country is so badly destroyed.” In 1959, he moved us to Seoul, where we lived until May 1961. As a child who had seen the aftermath of the terrible U.S. fire-bombing of Tokyo, I understood a little of what Koreans had lived through in the war. At the same time, the nature of the war was clear to me from the work my father did for Church World Service: running homes for orphans and widows, operating hospitals for people with missing limbs, and distributing powdered milk, grain, and used clothing to destitute survivors all over the country. This had obviously been one hell of a war. These are still photographs from a slide show called “Traveling Man” that was distributed in America by Church World Service to show the virtuous contributions made by U.S. Christians to South Korea after the war. Note the identifying words “Pusan Korea” in the photo on the left. (Credit: Presbyterian Historical Society) In fact, these relief programs were made necessary by the terrible damage inflicted on the Korean people by U.S. policies that maximized bombs and fire power. Between 1950 and 1953, over 3 million Koreans were killed, probably half of them civilians, in fighting and bombing runs that raged all over the peninsula. Nearly 40,000 Americans, about 4,000 foreign troops in the US-run UN Command, and over 100,000 Chinese died. Millions of Koreans were left homeless, their lives forever scarred by the fratricidal and imperial violence. Their shacks were among those we could see from our house in Seoul during our time in Korea. As I learned more about America’s conduct in the war as an adult, I became appalled at its “scorched earth” tactics described in their full, horrific detail in this volume. For three years and one month between 1950 and 1953, U.S. aircraft flew 710,886 sorties over the Korean peninsula — about 630 every single day. They dropped 386,037 tons of bombs and 32,357 tons of napalm, more than twice the napalm the United States used in all of World War II. Entire cities were, in the U.S. military’s own words, “erased from the map.” The Korean War, I concluded, was a vicious war fought for spurious reasons that undermined the very notion of “freedom” that American leaders promised the Korean people. These three books published by Newstapa underscore the genocidal nature of the Korean War and explains the enormous propaganda and psychological warfare methods undertaken by the United States to win over the Korean population and convince Americans it was a righteous war. Volume One describes the U.S. strategy of carpet bombing that began during World War II and was perfected in Korea. After MacArthur’s landing at Incheon and the US counter-invasion of North Korea two months later, the U.S. military spent three years bombing, strafing, and splashing napalm - “the devil’s weapon” - everywhere it could find the “communist” enemy. Left: A formation of B-29 heavy bombers carpet-bombs the skies of North Korea. Between July and August 1950, B-29s dropped a staggering 24 million pounds of destruction bombs. Right: 24 August 1950. U.S. Air Force carpet bombing of the Wonsan area in North Korea sends up countless mushroom clouds. (Newstapa/US National Archives) In November, 1950, as China’s intervention loomed, MacArthur pronounced a virtual death sentence on millions of Koreans. “Every installation, facility, and village in North Korea now becomes a military and tactical target,” he ordered. His directive was carried out by General Curtis LeMay, the Air Force Chief of Staff who had masterminded the firebombing of Japan just five years before. “Over a period of three years or so, we burned down every town in North Korea and South Korea too,” LeMay would later boast. “We even burned down Pusan. That was an accident, but we burned it down anyway.” As we learn in this volume, the U.S. Air Force began bombing runs south of the 38th parallel immediately after the North Korean invasion. That July, a phalanx of B-29s attacked the Yongsan area of Seoul; over 1,300 civilians died and were buried in mass graves. Even MacArthur’s much-celebrated Incheon invasion was tainted when U.S. planes firebombed the island of Wolmi, massacring hundreds of civilians living there. The consequences for people caught in these free-fire combat zones were horrific, as these gruesome photos carefully preserved in the U.S. National Archives demonstrate. Top: In Incheon, reduced to rubble after the landing operation, a child hauls scrap metal. A mother and child who had set out as refugees froze to death in a snowfield. Bottom: Refugees killed by gunfire while passing through a combat zone as their village burns. (Newstapa/US National Archives) Sadly, many Americans didn’t learn of the U.S. atrocities in Korea until 1999, when the Associated Press broke the story of the U.S. Army’s deliberate shelling of Korean civilians hiding under a bridge near the South Korean hamlet known as Nogunri. The late Los Angeles Times editorial cartoonist Paul Conrad compared Nogunri to the mass slaughter of Vietnamese peasants at My Lai in Vietnam. Paul Conrad compared Nogunri to My Lai. The U.S. orders to its soldiers in both Korea and Vietnam were aptly described by war reporter Nick Turse: “kill anything that moves.” (Los Angeles Times) Yet amidst this horror, many Americans still refer to Korea as “the forgotten war.” Its origins and denouement are shrouded in a miasma of myths and double-speak about America’s manifest destiny propagated by the Pentagon, the CIA and the national security establishment in Washington. With these three books, it will be forgotten no more. Click here to order The Korean War You Never Saw: Scorched Earth Bombing. Tim Shorrock is a journalist and writer who grew up in Japan and South Korea in the aftermath of World War II and the Korean War. His 3-volume collection of declassified U.S. government documents revealing the complicity of the United States in the South Korean Army’s suppression of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising was published in Korean translation in 2024. He lives in Washington, D.C.

By Tim Shorrock | July 31, 2026 | Originally published in Empire Blues by Tim Shorrock This is the second of three introductions written by investigative journalist, and KPI Associate, Tim Shorrock, to the three volume book, The Korean War you never Saw, released on July 27, the 73rd anniversary of the Korean War Armistice, by Newstapa/Korea Center for Investigative Journalism. Volume 1 is Scorched Earth Bombing; Volume 2 is Leaflet Psychological Warfare; Volume 3 is Prisoners and Panmunjom. Shorrock has written the introduction to each volume and has given KPI permission to reprint them. For additional investigative reporting on Korea and U.S.-Korea policies subscribe to Shorrock’s, Empire Blues, a reader supported publication. A North Korean leaflet criticizing America’s policy of a separate peace with Japan, 1951. The figure at the upper right is John Foster Dulles, President Truman’s fanatically anticommunist, pro-Japanese “special adviser” on Korea. Credit: Newstapa and U.S. National Archives. On July 27th, 2026, the 73rd anniversary of the 1953 Armistice in Korea, Newstapa/The Korea Center for Investigative Journalism published three new books on Amazon Kindle about the Korean War, translated into English for an American audience. I was honored to write the introductions to all three volumes. Here is my essay for Leaflet Psychological Warfare. Volume Two of The Korean War You Never Saw shows the importance of propaganda and psychological warfare to both sides in the Korean War, when the United States “scattered more than 2.5 billion leaflets and North Korea more than 300 million” in their attempts to demonize each other and convince enemy soldiers to abandon their posts. The book’s authors explain: Psychological warfare is said to be propaganda and other information activity that a state or military plans so as to influence the thoughts, beliefs, and behavior of a “target” in order to achieve some objective. The U.S. Department of Defense’s 1950 propaganda documentary “Psychological Warfare: A Combat Weapon in Korea” defines it this way: Psychological warfare is as old as the history of war. Today it has taken a new form as an essential element of combat. Its means are varied — printed type, the spoken word — but the aim is one: to defeat the enemy. Its target is not the enemy’s body but the enemy’s mind; by influencing the mind, it weakens the enemy. In the film, Brigadier General Robert McClure, then the U.S. Army’s chief of psychological warfare, argued that “psychological warfare is a war of ideology — a more total, global war than anything we knew before. The enemy waged propaganda, subversion, and infiltration in the Cold War, and does the same in Korea where the hot war rages,” declaring that “we too wage this ideological struggle on the front lines of the Korean Peninsula.” As he said, psychological warfare — especially leaflet warfare — promoting ideological, doctrinal, and systemic superiority was waged very fiercely during the war. Near an airfield outside Tokyo, Japan, U.S. Far East Command psy-war troops load leaflets into shells to be mounted on B-29 bombers bound for the Korean Peninsula. A single 500-pound bomb casing held 22,500 leaflets.(Newstapa) On the U.S./South Korean side, the book displays U.S. leaflets that described the war as “started by Soviet imperialism” in which even children know they must “fight the communist enemy.” One leaflet smeared Kim Il Sung’s land distribution policies that it knew would spark calls for similar efforts in the South. Another was elaborately drawn from a revolutionary scene in Tapgol Park in Seoul and suggested that the nationwide March 1st 1919 movement against Japanese colonization was in reality a symbol of anticommunism. U.S. Eighth Army propagandists inadvertently described the Korean “conflict” as a civil war with their “Mount Jiri Bulletin,” which targeted the many partisans fighting in the mountains for a unified Korea. A US/UN “Safe-Conduct Certificate” leaflet printed in English, Korean, and Chinese and signed by US General Douglas MacArthur. (Newstapa/US National Archives) Many of the leaflets from the North Korean/Chinese side sought to convince South Koreans that the ROK government of Syngman Rhee was illegitimate because of its roots in the colonial period and its collusion with the U.S. occupiers of Japan hoping to revive Japanese militarism. One leaflet distributed by North Korean and Chinese forces ridicules the “post-liberation record” of ROK Army Chief of Staff Paik Sun-yup, who led the U.S.-ROK counterinsurgency campaign against partisan rebels fighting behind the lines in the Jiri Mountains. As many Koreans knew, Paik was a collaborator with the Japanese Army’s “Gando Special Force” that fought Korean independence fighters in Manchuria. This U.S. report transcribed into English the Korean and Japanese names of the three ROK Army leaders - Lee Jong-chan, Paik Sun-yup, Kim Seok-won - carried on a North Korean leaflet and reproduced it. The upside-down drawings show the ROK generals’ Japanese names during World War II (Newstapa/US National Archives) Some leaflets had more than the ring of truth to them. Take the cartoon at the top on John Foster Dulles.. On June 19, 1950, this Christian statesman had stood sternly at the 38th parallel and told the Rhee government that the U.S. would gladly assist the South in the battle against communism. He then flew to Tokyo to meet with the U.S. Secretary of Defense and senior Japanese security and industrial officials to discuss the upcoming peace treaty that would guarantee U.S. bases in Japan for perpetuity. While Dulles was in Tokyo, North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel and nearly overran the entire peninsula. In turn, the Korean War and U.S.. military procurements fueled Japan’s postwar rise as an industrial power, selling vehicles and weapons, including napalm, to U.S. forces. The New York Times headline on Dulles’ visit to South Korea six days before North Korean forces crossed the 38th Parallel and overran the South. Click here for the full story. Korean War Comic Books As I read through the U.S. and North Korean leaflets, I was struck by the similarities between U.S. propaganda dropped on Korea and U.S. comic books about the Korean War. They portrayed all communists as treacherous and cruel scoundrels who turned into “seething, screaming mobs” in U.S. prison camps and sneakily attacked U.S. and South Korean negotiators during the truce talks in Panmunjom. Others glorified killing in racist terms. One story in “Fighting Air Force” in 1953 shows U.S. planes strafing a North Korean anti-aircraft battery. “First the bullets, gooks, then the rockets - and then you get the dessert: NAPALM!” “Ugh, we burn!” the “reds” cry out. “Why do our planes never come?” One of the most absurd American comic stories was secretly funded by the U.S. State Department, according to cartoonist Leonard Rifas, the author of Korean War Comic Books and the Militarization of US Masculinity. These incredible strips depicted injured U.S. soldiers in South Korea finding refuge with an “English plantation owner” in South Korea who sends his “native boy” for help. When “Red Korean Soldiers” show up, the Englishman bravely stands up to them and is cruelly machine-gunned to death. This strip was a blatant attempt to hide the fact that most farmland in the South after Korea’s liberation was owned by Japanese absentee landlords and Korean collaborators. That, of course, was one of the key reasons for the rural uprisings that took place in the ROK from 1946 on and marked the true beginning of the Korean War. This comic story funded by the State Department was a blatant attempt by the US government to hide the fact that most farmland in the South after Korea’s liberation was owned by Japanese absentee landlords and Korean collaborators with Japan. That, of course, was one of the key reasons for the rural uprisings that took place in the ROK from 1946 on and marked the true beginning of the Korean War. Hint: there were no “English plantation owners” in Korea! (Credit: Leonard Rifas, author of Korean War Comic Books and the Militarization of US Masculinity). The images of North Korean leaders as “beasts” still persists today Finally, it’s also clear how much the U.S. depiction of North Korea as a beastly creation of Stalin’s USSR has persisted in the United States “long after the war stopped,” as the authors state, and “even into the 1980s.” This cover of Newsweek, printed just after the death of Kim Il Sung in 1994, calls North Korea “the headless beast,” just like the U.S. leaflets from the Korean War. Even today, the U.S. media, both conservative and liberal, depict Kim Jong Un the same way. No wonder the Korean War has never ended. Order and download The Korean War You Never Saw: Leaflet Psychological Warfare on Amazon Kindle here. Tim Shorrock is a journalist and writer who grew up in Japan and South Korea in the aftermath of World War II and the Korean War. His 3-volume collection of declassified U.S. government documents revealing the complicity of the United States in the South Korean Army’s suppression of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising was published in Korean translation in 2024. He lives in Washington, D.C.

By Choi Sang-won | April 20, 2026 | This article was produced by Hankyoreh A delegation of victims and advocates will head to the US next week to alert the international community about the toll that America’s atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had on Koreans who were forced there during Japanese rule Han Jeong-soon, the president of the Korean Society for the Second Generation Patients Atomic Bombs, pays her respects at a memorial space featuring plaques with the names of Koreans who died while suffering the aftereffects of the US atomic bombings of Japan, located at a welfare center for Korean A-bomb victims in Hapcheon, South Gyeongsang Province. (Choi Sang-won/Hankyoreh) “I see this as my last chance to speak,” said Sim Jin-tae, 83. “So I’m going to give it everything I have to get the message out to the international community about how Koreans were affected by the atomic bombs.” Sim, who serves as president of the Hapcheon chapter of the Korea Atomic Bombs Victims Association, is scheduled to fly to the US on Monday to testify about the Korean toll of the US’ atomic bombings at the once-in-five-year review conference for parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. “Japan started a war against the US and was hit with atomic bombs while engaging in combat. That goes to show that Japan was never an innocent victim,” Sim told the Hankyoreh on Thursday. “The true victims of those bombings are the Koreans who were dragged to Japan against their will and became exposed to radiation,” he said. “But how are people from other countries expected to know this when even Koreans remain clueless?”  Sim himself is an atomic bomb survivor, having been in Japan during the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Originally from Hapcheon, a county in South Gyeongsang Province, his parents went to Hiroshima in 1940. Sim’s father, who was fluent in Japanese, worked as a civilian military worker, while his mother made ammunition cartridges at a munitions factory. Sim was born in Hiroshima on Jan. 9, 1943. The US forced Japan to surrender in WWII by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and Nagasaki on Aug. 9. Approximately 230,000 people lost their lives in those bombings — at least 40,000 of whom were Korean. The total number of Koreans exposed to the bombings is estimated at around 70,000.  Sim Jin-tae (left), the president of the Hapcheon chapter of the Korea Atomic Bombs Victim Association, and Han Jeong-soon (right), the president of the Korean Society for the Second Generation Patients Atomic Bombs, will be leaving for the US on April 20, 2026, to testify about the effects of America’s bombings on Koreans. (courtesy of the Korean Society for the Second Generation Patients Atomic Bombs) Following Korea’s emancipation from Japan on Aug. 15, 1945, 23,000 atomic bomb survivors returned to Korea. Having narrowly escaped death, Sim’s parents went back to their home in Hapcheon with their young son in tow.   “Has America ever apologized or paid us reparations? When has Japan demonstrated any sort of remorse? What has our government done? It’s done nothing more than try to stay on the good side of both the US and Japan — how can we call ourselves a sovereign state?” Sim said, the anger apparent in his voice. Accompanying Sim to the US is Han Jeong-soon, 67, the head of the Korean Society for the Second Generation Patients Atomic Bomb Survivors. Han, whose parents were exposed to radiation in Hiroshima, is part of the second generation of Koreans affected by the atomic bombings.  “While they made it out alive, both my parents suffered with lasting aftereffects. My mother had been pregnant with my eldest brother at the time of the bombing, but he died in infancy for reasons that weren’t clear to them at the time,” Han said.  “My parents gave birth to two boys and four girls after returning to Korea, and all of us have suffered from cerebral infarction, heart conditions, osteonecrosis of the hip, and dizziness from a young age,” she said.  “The third generation, which includes my son, nieces and nephews, also suffers from cerebral infarction,” said Han. “My mother was riddled with guilt, thinking that this was all her fault, and never permitted us to talk about the bombing.” Han said that hereditary illnesses and generational poverty prevented her from getting a proper education. “I’ve barely eked out a living for myself,” she said. “With this trip, I’m ready to put everything on the line to tell the world what we’ve gone through.” Out of the 23,000 atomic bomb victims who returned to Korea after it gained its independence in 1945, only 1,510 remain — 577 men and 933 women. The average age of survivors is now 85.6.  Surviving an atomic bombing does not spare one from its consequences. Radiation can cause genetic mutations, meaning the effects of the bombing may be passed down to children and grandchildren even without direct exposure. Kim Hyeong-ryul, a peace and anti-nuclear activist, was the first to break the silence on the inter-generational effects of the bombings on March 22, 2002, when he went public with his story of being a child of atomic bomb survivors who had inherited aftereffects from radiation exposure with a statement from the Daegu office of the Korean Youth Corps. Kim died three years later on May 29, 2005, at the age of 35 due to illnesses stemming from his parents’ exposure to the bomb. There are currently 1,350 members of the Korean Society for the Second Generation Patients Atomic Bomb Survivors, an organization that Kim established. The Special Act on Support for Korean Atomic Bomb Victims was enacted on May 19, 2016, 11 years after Kim’s death. However, the act restricts the scope of victims only to include those who were present when atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, including those who were in utero.  The rationale behind that decision is based on the fact that the hereditary transmission of effects from atomic bomb exposure has yet to be scientifically proven. This makes it impossible to track how many descendants of atomic bomb victims are living with such aftereffects.  Most of the Koreans affected by the atomic bombs hail from Hapcheon, South Gyeongsang Province, as people from that region who had been forcibly mobilized as laborers lived in Hiroshima. This is why Hapcheon is known as the “Hiroshima of Korea.” Sim, Han, and the late Kim all had roots in Hapcheon. The lives of Korean atomic bomb victims were defined by brutal injustice, starting with Japanese colonial rule and forced mobilization, then the US’ atomic bombings, and finally the indifference and cold treatment from Korean society following independence. But for too long, their plight has been ignored by the international community.  Hiroshima, Japan, after the US dropped an atomic bomb on the city on Aug. 6, 1945. (courtesy Korea Atomic Bombs Victim Association) Sim and Han are scheduled to tour six cities in the US, including Seattle, San Francisco, Sacramento, Los Angeles, New York and Washington, with the peace and anti-nuclear organization Solidarity for Peace and Reunification of Korea, or SPARK, from April 20 to May 4. During the tour, they will speak to the experiences of Korean atomic bomb survivors, marked by universal victimhood and the absence of accountability, and urge the US to issue an official apology and reparations for dropping the atomic bombs.   The delegation will meet with various Korean American organizations and hold meetings with students from San Francisco State University, California State University, Sacramento, University of California, Los Angeles, and the City University of New York.  A peace and anti-nuclear rally and march will be held near the United Nations on April 26, where Han will give a speech on the importance of creating a world without nuclear weapons.  They are also to attend one of the events happening on the sidelines of the UN’s Review Conference on the NPT, scheduled for April 30 and May 1. The NPT Review Conference is an international conference that takes place every five years to review the implementation of the NPT, which went into effect in 1970, and to discuss how the international community should approach nuclear weapons.  The 2026 conference will take place from April 27 to May 22 at the UN headquarters in New York. Sim will give a speech to diplomats from the parties to the NPT at the UN General Assembly Hall on May 1, where he plans to highlight the people’s tribunal for holding the US accountable for the 1945 atomic bombings and ask for the active support and participation from the international civil community. The tribunal is slated to run Nov. 13-15 at Hanshin University’s campus in Seoul, and 12 Korean atomic bomb victims will attend as plaintiffs.  “During our talks at the review conference and other events, we aim to underscore that the Korean Peninsula is emerging as a flash point of global nuclear confrontation. Achieving denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula could become the starting point to pursue denuclearization worldwide,” said Lee Gi-eun, an activist for the Solidarity for Peace and Reunification of Korea, who will also go to the US as part of the delegation. “We hope this US trip will bring the voices of Korean atomic bomb victims to the wider international community and help build global sympathy and support to prevent another nuclear catastrophe from playing out on the Korean Peninsula, where nuclear confrontation is intensifying,” said Lee. By Choi Sang-won, Hankyoreh, South Gyeongsang correspondent

By Dae-Han Song | February 7, 2025 | This article was produced by Globetrotter South Korean officials meet with Trump at the White House on July 31, 2025, to agree to a USD 350 billion investment in the US. Photo: White House In a flagrant disregard for international law and national sovereignty, the Trump administration invaded and kidnapped Venezuela’s President Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores. Rather than being an isolated event, the increasing bravado of and  remarks  from President Donald Trump open the terrifying possibility that, if not opposed, Trump’s war machine will proliferate its aggressions, with next possible targets being  Cuba, Mexico, and Colombia  or  Greenland . US  hyperimperialism  is dividing and unraveling the world at a time when we should be coming together to address our most existential crises.  Key in this strategy  for military domination are ‘AI, quantum computing, and autonomous systems, plus the energy necessary to fuel’ them. South Korea’s pledge of $350 billion dollars in factories, manufacturing know-how, and technology in these sectors will strengthen Trump’s war machine. Opposing this memorandum of understanding is one front in resisting the Trump administration’s hyper-imperialism.  Robbing the Mouse Since his ““Liberation Day,”” Trump’s tariff war has extorted pledges for trillions of dollars from the rest of the world, accusing it of taking advantage of the US and creating the US trade deficit. This narrative conveniently ignores the ultra-rich in the US whose trillion dollar companies were built on these global supply chains. More specifically, over 70 percent of the US S&P 500 companies rely on global supply chains ( as noted  by COVID 19’s impact on them). Most spectacularly, Apple grew into a  $3.8 trillion  company by selling products manufactured by the rest of the world. If it were a country, Apple would be the  7th largest . Amazon grew into a  $2.6 trillion  company (greater than Italy’s GDP, the 8th globally) by trading mostly ( 71 percent ) goods manufactured in China. If countries, nonetheless, developed and industrialized by producing US goods, they did so despite earning pennies on the dollar. For instance, China earned  2 pennies  for every dollar from the sale of an iPhone; Apple earned over  50 cents . The bulk of the US trade balance went not into the coffers of countries around the world but into those of the ultra-rich in the US, who took the lion’s share of the wealth. Now, Trump is gunning for the mouse’s share. Much has been made of the fact that the EU’s $600 billion investment pledge  lacks enforceability , with most investment happening on its own through the markets. Yet, the enforcement mechanism for Japan and South Korea’s investment pledges of $550 billion ( 42 percent  of Japan’s foreign reserves) and $350 billion ( 83 percent  of South Korea’s foreign reserves) is far more direct and brutal. Both countries must invest in Trump’s projects or risk reciprocal tariffs. More specifically, the Trump administration will propose investments in strategic sectors. If they refuse, Trump can simply impose the reciprocal tariffs and, despite South Korea’s bragging that it has gotten a better deal than Japan (through assurances that the US would  consider  the destabilizing effects of investments and would limit investments to $20 billion a year), it still has the  same unequal  profit sharing scheme: South Korean and Japanese investors would bring all their capital and manufacturing know-how into a project, but contrary to the principles of the market, they would still  hand over  50 percent and, once the investment is recovered, 90 percent of the project’s profits to the US. In effect, the US gets 50 percent and then 90 percent of profits without putting a penny of its own money. Furthermore, it’s not yet clear what impact the funneling out of such massive investments from South Korea and Japan will have on their people. By building factories for and training future competitors, it’s hard not to rule out a hollowing out of each country’s industrial base and a dulling of their competitive advantages.  Upgrading the War Machine Worst of all, these investments do not build a world centered on the needs and interests of people in the United States or of the world nor make the world safer or more sustainable. On the contrary, they help Trump preserve and advance  ‘cutting-edge military use technology and dual-use technology’  to intimidate, bully, and invade other countries. More specifically, South Korea will be investing $150 billion to expand the US capacity (which is suffering from  backlogged  orders) to build  warships  and  potentially  nuclear powered submarines. Additionally, South Korea will invest up to $20 billion a year for 10 years on sectors Trump’s National Security Strategy has identified as deciding  ‘the future of military power.’  Semiconductor factories would create the chips for the data centers that will allow the US to dominate AI, which is becoming  central to waging war . To  power  these electricity-hungry data centers, South Korea will  provide  the nuclear power plants. Finally, South Korea will be providing smelting technology and know-how for refining  critical minerals  for defense. Not Set in Stone While Trump has managed to extract many concessions through his tariff war, the memorandum of understandings (MOUs) that are reached are not set in stone. Not only are the legality of Trump’s tariffs (the extortion mechanism) being deliberated upon by the Supreme Court, the MOUs are  not legally binding . In other words, their enforceability will be determined by a struggle between Trump’s tariff pressure and a government—and more importantly, its people’s—willingness to resist Trump’s extortion and war machine.  South Korean progressive political parties and civil society created the  Organizing Committee of the International People’s Action Against Trump’s 1st Year Anniversary  to resist Trump’s aggressions. Jeong-eun Hwang of the  Organizing Committee  explains, ‘The US doesn’t need more submarines, warships, and AI to get better at intimidating, bullying, and destroying the world. Opposing South Korea’s $350 billion investment offers one specific way to resist Trump.’  Dae-Han Song is a part of the International Strategy Center  and the No Cold War  collective and is an associate at the Korea Policy Institute .

Interview by Ramsey Liem | January 30, 2026 | Interview conducted in 2002 Helen Kim with renown Korean peace activist Kang Jeong Koo at “Peace and Reunification in Korea,”a program commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Korean War -- Berkeley 2000. In Memory of Helen Kim   Helen Sunhee Kim, Korean American peace activist, labor rights organizer and performance artist in traditional Korean dance, song and drumming (pung’mul), passed away on January 12, 2026 from chronic health conditions.  A member of what is known as the 1.5 generation of Korean Americans, those born in Korea but raised in the US, Helen with her many talents, her unrivaled fluency in the Korean and English languages and her uncanny ability to guide diverse organizational stakeholders towards consensus, to say the least, helped create cultural spaces in which multi-generational Korean America activists and activists from many other communities could learn from each other and thrive.  What follows is an interview of Helen by Dr. Ramsay Liem, circa 2002, for the Korean American Memories of the Korean War Oral History Project , directed by Dr. Liem.  Helen’s interview now resides on Legacies of the Korean War  along with several others.  Not included in the published interview, is an excerpt featured on the Still Present Pasts Exhibit  site: “My hope for the future is to realize peace – within and among ourselves, in our community, on the Korean peninsula, and in the world.” Helen Kim Generation: 1.5 Generation Location: Oakland, CA (at time of interview) Interviewer: Ramsay Liem Immigration to the United States So our family, um, there’re four children in our family.  I was twelve when we immigrated.  So we immigrated in ’76 at the height of all this immigration influx.  In Chicago.  We actually have my mom’s side of the family; a few of them were living in Chicago so we had extended family on my mom’s side. Yeah, we were all born in Korea.  So I was twelve, the oldest, and then my brother, who is the youngest, was six at that time.  So we went through some, yeah, all of us went through some traumatic times but we were the only, like, streaks of color at school and all of that. On my mom’s side, I’m the oldest of my generation.  On my dad’s side, I’m oldest of North American cousins.  I’m the only bilingual one.  And then, I’m a history major and you know.  And then I got to learn more about my parents when I went back to Korea, from their friends….  Now as of this year, all of my grandparents have passed away.  So when my parents’ generation passes away, I feel like all of these cousins are, we don’t have enough connecting points and nobody else to really, to tell stories about our family.  So that’s why I feel like dragging my butt up.  You know, wanting to sort of document something as well. Postwar Period I grew up in Korea until I was twelve.  So during grammar school, we actually had a special class called [unintelligible].  It means like, ethical living or something.  But it was mostly propaganda about North Koreans and we would actually have textbooks that depicted North Koreans as subhuman, as something, um, animal basically.  They were always red, and they were always nasty.  I mean, I grew up reading that kind of you know, stuff, and we were never allowed to forget that Seoul is what, some how many miles away from the DMZ?  There’s always another war.  Around the time of the war, June 25 th , we would be always singing this special song about the war, and how we should never forget and all of that. I remember one night when I was sleeping and there was some loud knock on the, not on our door, but some neighbor’s door.  It was this really loud banging and probably some guy coming home drunk or something but that kind of loud banging in the middle of the night; immediately I thought the North Koreans are here.  And I remember running downstairs to my parent’s room because I was too scared to sleep in my room with the rest of my siblings.  But it’s that level that you lived with…that kind of propaganda was always there. War Legacies (Grandfather) Religious Life If my grandfather’s story wasn’t so closely linked with the war, maybe in our daily conversation, our family, we wouldn’t really have any reason to talk about the war all the time….  This is sort of the pride of the family that our grandfather was kidnapped during the war and he was martyred as a Christian because he held on to his beliefs….  My parents and my, you know, all my uncles—so, when they were living in Korea—still went to that church in the middle of Seoul….  This was the church that our grandfather [attended] when he had died because of his beliefs….  So because of our grandfather…and because it happened during the war, the war was always a constant presence in that way. So I mean, that’s always been a part of our family.  That’s why I think the war has always been sort of hanging over our heads….  My father, my father was um, I think he was maybe about thirteen or fourteen when his father was taken.  So sometimes I forget that my dad grew up without a father after that, and that the war has always been, um, a really significant point because that was the beginning of a really, really hard life for my grandmother raising five sons. But uh, never really in specifics.  Anything they mentioned about our grandfather was, nobody really spoke in specifics of what exactly happened.  It was sort of this…mystical figure in our family and, and in that way, I think a lot of times, we didn’t ask questions because it felt like almost unapproachable topic.  It was like too painful a topic, especially for my grandmother.  So we didn’t really ask questions that much until much later, and it didn’t really dawn on me that until I realized that, you know, my gosh, my father actually grew up without a father, starting age like thirteen on, and I started wondering what kind of impact that would’ve had on him.  But it’s not until much later you realize all these things, and try to, you know, ask your parents what that meant. Korean War Memories (Mother) Because her older brother and the father had to go into hiding because they were afraid that they were going to get drafted into the North Korean army, while they were in Seoul, she [mother] was the one who had to sell fruits or whatever to bring money back home so they could actually eat.  And I think she’s always been a tomboy, and I think this was just like, totally, her calling.  She never really talks about it in terms of really a lot of hardship.  I mean she talks about, you know, I had to walk miles and miles with all this fruit you know on my head, basically carrying it over my head.  She would talk about that, but the things that she remembers are more fond memories, more probably like independence.  She was sort of on her own. This woman very much had a sense of, you know, all the opportunities.  And she became the person that she would not have become in terms of her confidence and her ability to deal with things and to sort of stand up on her feet if she needed to and so forth.  And she thinks, maybe she would not have if she had never been shown into that light. I mean, my grandmother was also, how should I say, she had very clear ideas about gender roles and I think she really reinforced it in her sons.  And her sons, of course, would say their wives would never live up to their mother.  So I think that my dad and his brothers turned out to be really sexist.  None of their wives could ever live up to their mother.  So, I think that my mom and my aunts are just, you know, fighting this impossible battle.  And, yeah, I mean I wish I knew my grandmother a little better but I do know, as much as I think she’s an incredible person, I have a feeling, if I had gotten to know her better, we would’ve gotten into such huge arguments. War Legacies Family Separation Because the county’s divided, you know, I think there’s definitely a legacy of what happened during the civil war.  It’s where so much of my political understanding also comes from.  I think a lot of the beginnings of my questioning comes from discovering that what I learned about North and South Korea may not be exactly the way it is.  You know, when I started questioning that, then you start questioning a lot other things….  Although, you know, I wasn’t living at that time, it’s like everything I hear is secondhand, hearsay, but I am a product of the kind of brainwashing that went on in Korea and you know abroad, as well. When I talked to labor activists and women’s activists when I go to Korea, their political view, their worldview, has a lot to do with the division of the country and the U.S. militarism in the country, as well.  And for a deeper level of finding connection to Korea, as a people, as one country, I think that it’s extremely tragic for you know, a country to divide, for families to be divided, and a whole country just completely messed up by something like this. Anyway, so I think, the Korean War, you just can’t underestimate the kind of impact it has….  During one of the North Korean-South Korean symposiums that we had here, they were playing some old Korean songs at the basement of that chapel [1]  and I was sitting next to [inaudible]; we’re singing the same song.  I was like really, I was just really moved.  It’s like, we’re singing the same song that was sung before the war.  And people both in South and North are still singing this song.  And how tragic it is that you know, we can’t seem to do that, to figure out how to do it together.   [1]  University Lutheran Chapel, Berkeley, CA where Korean students at UC Berkeley met to plan a series of Korea Reunification Symposia inviting speakers from the ROK and DPRK in the early 1990s.

By Simone Chun | January 17, 2026 | Originally published in Counterpunch “President Yoon Suk-yeol has declared a state of emergency—martial law. Please come to the National Assembly.” “ People of this nation, please come to the National Assembly now. Protect the final bastion of our democracy !” —Lee Jae Myung, 3 December 2024 This urgent plea was livestreamed  at 10:40 p.m. on 3 December 2024 by National Assemblyman Lee Jae Myung , barely ten minutes after martial law had been declared by the now-impeached President Yoon Suk-yeol. Hundreds of citizens  heeded the call, converging on the National Assembly building to block troops from entering parliament and prevent the country from sliding into authoritarian rule. One year later, Lee, now President of Korea, commemorated one of the most dramatic nights in the nation’s history. He described it as a moment when the Korean people peacefully overcame an “ unprecedented democratic crisis in world history ,” in what is now remembered as the Revolution of Light . Lee went on to designate December 3 as National Sovereignty Day , pledging to build a Korea in which no one could even contemplate extinguishing the light of popular sovereignty. Lee’s renewed focus on sovereignty underscores the urgent need to examine not only the causal factors behind Yoon’s failed insurrection, but also to confront deeper factors that continue to undermine the foundations of Korea’s sovereignty, namely, Washington’s encroachment on Korean independence.  Despite the great strides made by South Korean democracy, the country remains the world’s only state to have ceded wartime operational control to a foreign power, an arrangement that violates international law and contradicts the principles of the UN Charter  by effectively positioning Korea not as a fully sovereign state but as a U.S. forward military base. For 74 years, Washington has maintained wartime Operational Control (OPCON) over Korea’s military, commanding 600,000 frontline troops, 3.5 million reservists , and the entirety of Korea’s military infrastructure. Under the 1953 U.S.–ROK Mutual Defense Treaty , U.S. forces have unrestricted freedom of operation on Korean soil.  As a result, Korea remains bound to a security framework that prioritizes Washington’s strategic objectives over its own sovereign decision-making. This unprecedented system has long constrained Korea’s military and political sovereignty and continues to shape every major security decision the country faces. It is within this broader structure of dependency–and the ongoing limitations on Korea’s sovereignty–that the events of December 2024 must be understood. Exposing the U.S. Role in Yoon’s Insurrection  A six-month investigation into Yoon’s declaration of martial law resulted in his indictment, along with 18 co-conspirators, of attempting to create justification for declaring martial law provoking North Korea to “ mount an armed aggression ”; a gambit that failed only because Pyongyang “ did not respond militarily .” The Special Prosecutor investigation  revealed that the Yoon administration carried out a series of calculated provocations , including repeatedly launching droves of massive balloons and military drones into North Korean airspace just two months before the December 3 insurrection. South Korean military sources confirmed that these were not defensive measures but deliberate provocations. A memo from the Defense Counterintelligence Command warned of potential North Korean reprisal scenarios ranging “from a minimum security crisis to a maximum Noah’s flood ,” reflecting the high stakes of Yoon’s planning. While Yoon stands trial for deliberately heightening inter-Korean tensions and risking a devastating war in furtherance of his own ambitions, the U.S. role in his brinkmanship has remained largely unexamined. In fact, Yoon’s declaration of martial law , far from being an isolated act of authoritarian overreach, was the culmination of years of U.S. pressure  under the Biden administration, which strategically positioned Korea as a frontline military hub in Washington’s global strategy. Washington’s geopolitical ambitions were directly manifested through Yoon’s pursuit of regime change in the North, his advocacy for the deployment of U.S. nuclear assets in South Korea, and his full embrace of a U.S.-brokered trilateral military alliance that inducts Korea and Japan into Washington’s aggressively anti-China regional strategy. It strains credibility to suggest that given the extensive intelligence sharing  between the U.S.–ROK Combined Forces and the advanced reconnaissance and surveillance capabilities of U.S. Forces Korea (USFK), which monitors the Korean Peninsula 24/7 with advanced equipment like satellites and reconnaissance aircraft, Washington somehow failed to notice Yoon’s sustained provocations against Pyongyang. Noh Sang-won , a Yoon associate and former intelligence operative, was found in possession of notes pointing to a plan to notify the US in advance before martial law declaration, including several references to "US advance notice," "cooperation from the U.S.," and "prior notice to the U.S." While Noh Sang‑won’s notes contain references to “U.S. advance notice” and “cooperation from the U.S.,” suggesting that elements of Yoon’s plan may have considered informing Washington, U.S. officials  have publicly denied any prior knowledge or involvement in the attempted martial law declaration. The special prosecutor’s most striking claim is that Yoon sought to justify martial law by repeatedly trying to “provoke” North Korea into responding militarily and coordinating covert moves to spark a security crisis. Yet the most serious provocations toward the North remain in place even after Yoon’s impeachment, namely, the decades-long campaign of military brinkmanship led by Washington.  Under the Yoon administration, U.S.–ROK combined military exercises  surged to nearly 340 per year, nearly triple the number conducted in 2017, locking the Korean peninsula in a cycle of militarization and provocation that perpetually thwarts any prospect for peace. These maneuvers mobilize tens of thousands of troops and U.S. strategic assets for live-fire field maneuvers simulating preemptive strikes, decapitation of leadership, territorial occupation, and post-war stabilization. ROK–U.S. and ROK–U.S.–Japan military exercises  expanded exponentially, signaling near-continuous training and a sharp escalation from 2023. This trajectory reflects the consolidation of a trilateral  nuclear war alliance, formalized in 2022–2023 and now actively operationalized. The exercises have also undergone a qualitative shift, encompassing nuclear war simulations against North Korea, China-focused drills, U.S. homeland defense training, and Conventional–Nuclear Integration (CNI). Through CNI—evident in bomber escort missions and carrier-based operations—South Korea’s conventional forces are increasingly embedded in U.S. nuclear war planning. At the same time, the U.S. has been rapidly expanding its airborne footprint in South Korea, signaling a significant strategic shift. Gunsan Air Base , located on Korea’s southwest coast in North Jeolla Province, provides the U.S. with rapid access to key theaters such as the Chinese mainland, the Taiwan Strait, and the West Sea maritime zone, making it a critical platform for US power projection  into Northeast Asia. It now hosts the first U.S. F-16 “super squadrons ,” with 31 aircraft deployed last year and additional squadrons joining this year. Infrastructure upgrades, including 20 reinforced hangars built in 2020 and another 18 more nearing completion, have prepared the base to accommodate F-35A strategic bombers as well. While portrayed as “defensive”, the U.S. military posture in the Korean peninsula is unmistakably offensive , integrating nuclear and conventional capabilities, and rehearsing multi-domain operations spanning land, sea, air, space, cyber, and electromagnetic domains and extending across the Indo-Pacific to explicitly target China. The increased cadence of Multinational drills  such as Talisman Sabre , Pacific Vanguard , and Freedom Edge  deepen South Korea’s entanglement in U.S. strategic priorities at the expense of its own national interest. Properly understood, the offensive character of these U.S.-led military exercises is not incidental but foundational, providing a structural context that enabled and emboldened Yoon’s insurrection. Although the exercises are justified as “reinforced deterrence,” in practice they implement a permanent near‑war posture. The battlefield is being structured not around risk reduction and normalization of relations, but around the maintenance and even increase of heightened tensions. Gravest Threat to South Korea: Servility Toward Washington In contrast to Yoon, the Lee administration has taken modest but meaningful steps to de-escalate tensions, including suspending anti–North Korea leaflet  launches and halting loudspeaker broadcasts along the heavily militarized border. Yet even these small gestures merely serve to expose the limits of South Korea’s sovereignty under the alliance structure. Washington has taken no parallel steps, as U.S.-led joint military exercises continue unabated, hamstringing any measures independently taken by Seoul and effectively constraining South Korea’s capacity to pursue an independent de-escalatory policy. In fact, the precedent of provocation set under the Yoon administration has not only persisted but expanded, undermining South Korea’s efforts toward genuine de-escalation. Just two weeks after Lee’s inauguration, on June 18, 2025, the U.S., Japan, and South Korea  conducted their first-ever joint military exercise near Jeju Island, while South Korean artillery drills near Hwacheon, situated only a few miles from the North Korean border, violated the September 19 Inter-Korean Military Agreement, underscoring the persistence of provocative military posturing. Moreover, General Xavier Brunson , Commander of the ROK–U.S. Combined Forces Command (CFC), has explicitly described South Korea as a forward platform for U.S. power projection and offensive operations against China and Russia, thus abandoning any pretense of pursuing deterrence or regional stability. Brunson has prioritized “cost imposition” against China and Russia by operationalizing the Korea–Japan–Philippines strategic triad, placing Seoul in the front line of potential conflict and highlighting the enduring challenge to South Korea’s sovereignty. In doing so, he has openly positioned South Korea as the central hub of U.S. forward military operations in Northeast Asia aimed at China and Russia. By enabling the USFK to impose military costs not only on North Korea but also on Russia’s Northern Fleet and China’s Northern Theater Command, South Korea itself becomes a primary target .  Occupied and Overcharged: Korea’s National Sovereignty Crisis Under the Trump Administration Since Yoon’s removal from power, the Trump administration has imposed even harsher and more coercive encroachments on Korea’s national sovereignty, deepening the subordination of Korean decision-making to U.S. strategic imperatives . Trump's newly released National Security Strategy (NSS) 2025 explicitly states that “allies” must bear the costs of the Indo-Pacific strategy “with a focus on the capabilities—including new capabilities—necessary to deter adversaries and protect the First Island Chain”,  a U.S.-led strategic concept describing the line of western Pacific islands stretching from Japan and Okinawa through Taiwan and the northern Philippines. These nations are intended to serve as the U.S. front line of military containment against China. This represents Washington’s renewed emphasis on systematically shifting the financial costs, operational burdens, and strategic risks of its Indo-Pacific and global defense commitments onto subordinate allies who are incapable of rejecting this structure. South Korea, deeply bound to the United States economically, militarily, and ideologically, has become a prime example of this subordination. Not only does the country shoulder the major financial responsibility for the U.S. forces it “hosts”—troops whose unrestricted operations on Korean soil have been guaranteed since the 1953 U.S.–ROK Mutual Defense Treaty–it is increasingly being entangled in a program of intensified regional militarization driven by Washington.  Coupled with military pressure, economic coercion has also been systematically applied to undermine Seoul’s sovereignty. Through the imposition of a new trade arrangement that replaced the zero-tariff framework of the original KORUS FTA with a 15% tariff rate , Washington has compelled Seoul to commit to an estimated $350 billion investment (which amounts to nearly 19% of the country’s total GDP in 2024), including roughly $200 billion in cash commitments and $150 billion tied to U.S.-controlled assets, including shipbuilding and other strategic sectors. According to Trump’s Social post , South Korea has agreed to pay the U.S. $350 billion and additionally purchase large quantities of oil and gas, with investments by South Korean companies exceeding $600 billion. Trump’s tariff-driven trade deal has had a profoundly destabilizing effect on South Korea’s economy, exemplified by the current won‑weakening crisis .  By pressuring South Korea to put U.S. investment first—at the expense of its own economic stability—the deal shifted real financial risk onto Seoul. The result is not merely economic realignment but effective dispossession : Korea has ceded control over critical segments of its own economy and entrenched itself in a structurally subordinate position within a U.S.-led economic order. Furthermore, South Korea’s 2026 defense budget  has risen by 8.2 percent, representing the largest year-on-year increase since 2019 and driven largely by expanded procurement of U.S.-made arms. Seoul now finds itself compelled to purchase an estimated $25 billion  in additional U.S. weapons systems, underscoring how Seoul’s defense policy is being reshaped under coercion and locking Korea into a U.S.-dominated military-industrial framework. Moreover, South Korea has committed an additional $33 billion  to support USFK, on top of the expenses it already bears for hosting roughly 28,500 U.S. troops on its soil. Notably, South Korea covered 90% of the $10.8 billion  cost of constructing Camp Humphreys, the largest U.S. overseas base in the world. Under the Trump administration, Seoul, as a key “burden-bearing” state within a  U.S.-centered framework  spanning defense, energy, and infrastructure, is being compelled to finance the construction of U.S. military installations, absorb strategic and frontline costs, fund U.S. security operations, increase defense spending to support U.S. forces, and purchase billions in American weapons. Recognizing these exactions, U.S. Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby praised South Korea as the first non-NATO treaty ally to make such commitments, calling it a “model ally” for “stepping up” its defense spending. Taken together, these measures reveal not a commitment to peace or regional stability but the deep entrenchment of a war-making posture: Korea’s sovereignty  has been subordinated to Washington’s strategic agenda, forcing the country to finance the occupation of its own territory while bearing the material, political, and front-line risks of U.S. militarism in the Indo-Pacific. Inter-Korean Reconciliation Blocked by Washington Amid mounting economic and military pressure, Washington not only continues to veto even modest Korean efforts to foster inter-Korean rapprochement but also preempts any attempt to formulate independent policies based on the principle of self-determination. On December 3, for the first time since his inauguration, President Lee  publicly mentioned the possibility of suspending  or reducing U.S.-ROK joint military exercises. To bolster his argument, Lee recalled President Trump ’s 2018 statement: “ I think it’s very provocative…  We will be stopping the war games… which will save us a tremendous amount of money .” Indeed, a U.S. Army budget analysis later confirmed that canceling certain exercises in 2018 had saved the U.S. an estimated $14 million . Lee then argued for dialogue and rapprochement as a means of reducing or postponing the exercises once  “a peace regime between the North and the South is firmly established ” However, USFK Command promptly rejected the prospect of suspending or reducing the exercises, asserting de facto control over Korea’s military decisions. General Brunson  retorted: “ Whenever someone talks about—I don’t care who it is—talks about exercising less or exercising differently, they need to understand that there are two times in a year where we absolutely need some support .” Brunson also made clear Washington’s rejection  of another central pillar of President Lee’s agenda: the transfer of wartime operational control (OPCON) to South Korea within Lee’s presidential term. Veteran American journalist Tim Shorrock , who has covered Korea for more than two decades, summed up the implications succinctly: “ Sovereignty much? … South Korea’s de facto leader is a U.S. four-star general, Xavier Brunson, Commander of U.S. Forces Korea .” In spite of an approval rating above 60 percent, based largely on public pledges to safeguard Korea’s national sovereignty, Lee remains unable to fully exercise Korea’s sovereignty on the most important national security matters. War, peace, and sovereignty on the Korean Peninsula is being decided by Washington, while the Korean ambition for sovereignty has been pushed aside and Korea itself reduced to a sidekick in the U.S. Indo Pacific strategy, forced to pay for the U.S. military assets stationed on its soil. Asserting Sovereignty in a World Shaped by Washington’s Militarism While the broader pitfalls of the U.S.–ROK alliance remain largely unchallenged, grassroots movements within Korea, together with the Korean diaspora  in the U.S., continue to assert the right to self-determination and demand an end to Korea’s structural dependence on U.S. forces. In the U.S., Korean American activists , scholars, and peace advocates , along with independent research and educational organizations such as the Korea Policy Institute  have been at the forefront of the struggle for Korea to reclaim its sovereignty. At the same time, domestic pro-democracy organizations within Korea such as the weekly Korean Citizens’ Candlelight Rally and Korean Confederation of Trade Unions  (KCTU), whose protests were instrumental to removing Yoon from power, have remained active, renewing their focus on social reform, national sovereignty, and liberation. The Revolution of Light and Korea’s Sovereignty Crisis Viewed through the lens of U.S. militarism and Korea’s eroded sovereignty, the following takeaways highlight both the significance of the Revolution of Light and the paradox of Korea’s sovereignty crisis under Washington’s persistent pressure. First, Korea’s revolution of light exposed the enduring imperial dynamics shaping Korean politics and the geopolitical constraints imposed by Washington’s revived Cold War posture. In this context, the movement underscored the profound moral contradictions at the heart of a U.S. foreign policy that claims to defend democracy while simultaneously enabling authoritarianism in its client states. It also illuminated the deep contradictions at the core of Washington’s hegemonic ambitions that continue to erode Korea’s sovereignty . Second, the revolution of light effectively united millions of Koreans around a shared demand to reclaim democracy not only from domestic authoritarians but also from imperial domination. It revealed a truth rarely acknowledged by mainstream analysts: the fragility of U.S. unipolar power when confronted with a morally grounded and highly organized popular resistance. Standing as a testament to the resilience of Korea’s grassroots democracy, it demonstrated that any U.S. policy in Korea that dismisses or sidelines the democratic will of the Korean people is ultimately unsustainable. Conclusion A year ago, Koreans rose not only against illegal martial law and an attempted insurrection but also implicitly against a hegemonic U.S. framework that empowered an autocratic president whose ambitions nearly sparked war. To challenge Yoon and martial law was to resist U.S. hegemonic power  within a deeply militarized client state under occupation, a reality that most mainstream analysts and media either ignore or deliberately obscure. Korea has already proven it can resist authoritarianism peacefully. The question now is whether it can assert genuine sovereignty in a world order dominated by U.S. militarism. Simone Chun is a researcher and activist focusing on inter-Korean relations and U.S. foreign policy in the Korean Peninsula. She currently serves on the Korea Policy Institute Board of Directors and the advisory board for CODEPINK. She has over 20 years of teaching and research experience in the United States and has been a central contributor to the creation of a number of interdisciplinary Asian and Korean Studies degree programs. She has served as an assistant professor at Suffolk University, an associate-in-research at Harvard University’s Korea Institute, and a lecturer at Northeastern University. Follow her on Twitter at @simonechun .

By Bon-young Lee | November 19, 2025 | Originally published in Hankyoreh US President Donald Trump shakes hands with President Lee Jae Myung of South Korea at a welcome ceremony held at the Gyeongju National Museum on Oct. 29, 2025, ahead of their bilateral summit. (courtesy of the presidential office) This past Monday, Nov. 17, marked the 120th anniversary of the signing of what’s known in Korea as the Eulsa Treaty, which made Korea a protectorate of Japan and set the stage for its colonization. On that day in 1905, the nobles of the Korean Empire who had vowed to protect their country tucked their tails between their legs, one by one, under coercion and in the face of obstinance and placation from Hirobumi Ito.  Thus, the most notorious treaty in all of Korean history was drawn up and signed, marking the beginning of the fall of Korea. Four months earlier, the Japanese received tacit approval to govern Korea in the confidential Taft-Katsura agreement.  In the sexagenary cycle used by many cultures in East Asia, 2025 is an “Eulsa Year” — the Year of the Wood Snake, in zodiac terms — just as 1905 was. On Nov. 14, after a rocky negotiation cycle, the South Korean administration signed a memorandum of understanding on its tariff negotiations with the US. The National Assembly is still in a heated debate over whether the MOU about South Korea investing US$350 billion in the US requires the National Assembly’s ratification.  The People Power Party and the rest of the opposition argue that since the treaty “will burden the state or people with an important financial obligation,” it requires the National Assembly’s ratification, as stipulated in the Constitution.  The Lee Jae Myung administration and the ruling Democratic Party argue that MOUs are not legally binding and therefore do not require the legislature’s ratification. The administration also argues that ratifying the MOU would make it an official treaty, thereby shackling the administration to terms that would prevent it from renegotiating and maneuvering.  If the agreement does evolve into an official treaty, either in name or form, it’s liable to be belittled as the “New Eulsa Treaty.”  This is another reason for the government to avoid the term “treaty” at all costs. In the first phase of tariff negotiations, the US demanded the authority to decide when and where the US$350 billion went. Some within the administration reportedly reacted to it by calling it a second Eulsa Treaty. The original Eulsa Treaty, sometimes referred to in English as the Japan-Korea Treaty of 1905, made the Korean Empire a protectorate under Imperial Japan, so the trade MOU is indeed different in nature.  Japan, 120 years ago, was in the midst of swallowing up its neighboring countries. Korean Empire nobles beat their chests in the morning about protecting their country, and in the evening stuck their tails between their legs. This time around, the Lee administration worked around the clock to ensure that Korea would not have to cave to the absurd demands of the US. Many assess the deal as one in which the Lee administration put up a good defense and at least avoided the worst-case scenario.  But no matter how you spin it, Korea got the short end of the stick. Our economic sovereignty has been damaged. It’s difficult to think of any modern case of one country plundering another country this way. The methods used boggle the mind. Whatever happened to “give and take” being the basic principle of negotiations and deals? US President Donald Trump refers to himself as a dealmaker, but what he’s offering us is not fair compensation.  With a big stick in one hand and a small stick in the other, he says he’ll only hit us with the small stick if we offer something in return. Now that he’s secured a deal, he’s taking a finger instead of the arm and leg that he threatened to cut off. After imposing 25% tariffs for the first time, he secured a massive payment in exchange for the kindness of lowering the tariff rate to 15%. Mobsters running protection rackets and robbers are no doubt taking notes.  South Korea’s civil code refers to acts that defy common sense and are contrary to good morals or sound ethical appraisals — in other words, acts that contradict social norms — as “juristic acts contrary to social order,” and thereby declares them null and void. The code also refers to any unjust acts of exploiting someone’s economically deprived status as “unfair juristic behavior.”  Referring to the domestic civil code in response to a situation in international relations is pointless. However, considering the severity of the circumstances, it’s not enough to simply console ourselves by saying, “We did the best we could.” We must face the facts.  The Lee administration claims that it secured a more favorable agreement than Japan. Yet within the global tariff war that Trump started, the only countries that the US has arm-twisted into pledging direct cash investments from the government are South Korea and Japan. If Japan’s terms are more unfavorable than South Korea’s, Japan is in last place and South Korea is next to last. In a disaster, you cannot console yourself by saying someone else has it worse than you; it doesn’t change the fact that you’re miserable.  Looking back, the Eulsa Year of 1965, the one that fell between 1905 and 2025, was another year of trials and tribulations for Korea. The process of the Park Chung-hee regime normalizing relations with Japan put South Korean society through the wringer. That’s the year when South Korea began sending troops to fight in the Vietnam War. Only after thousands of young men were killed were we able to escape from the jungle.  1905, 1965, 2025 — all three years have been messy and involved the US and Japan. South Korea has always been the victim.  While we need to be realistic, we cannot simply resign ourselves to a c’est la vie attitude. That clouds our understanding of the real problem.  “In negotiations that we did not ask for, our sole strength is the ability to endure.” These words from President Lee Jae Myung in the press conference about the MOU sounded more like a sigh than a statement. We must harness our rage now so that our posterity does not suffer a bitter fate in the next Eulsa Year.  Bon-young Lee is a senior economics writer at The Hankyoreh.

By Léopold Lambert  | November 9, 2025 | Originally published in The Funambulist Korea after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. / Map by Léopold Lambert (2025). The 1945 defeat of Japan was meant to signify Korean liberation. In Manchuria, anticolonial and communist Korean guerillas were joined by the Soviet Union and Mongolian armies in August 1945, and proceeded to oust the Japanese from Korea. The US, however, imposed a partition of the peninsula following the 38th parallel, which was crystallized by the “bombing holocaust” of the Korean War starting 1950. In this conversation, Christine Hong provides useful historical context to understand the significance for Korea of the few weeks/years that followed the US nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. LÉOPOLD LAMBERT : When I visited the Nagasaki memorial in 2024, I was struck by the sole presence of the Republic of Korea flag, a state that “represents” only the southern half of the country, and that did not exist in 1945 for the colonized Korean laborers in Japan killed by the nuclear bombings. How were the weeks that followed crucial for the way Japan-occupied Korea gave birth to the two militarized regimes we know today? CHRISTINE HONG : The historian Gar Alperovitz once stated that the atomic bombings of Japan represented not just World War II’s last act, but also the Cold War’s opening salvo. Few people would dispute that the US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the closing punctuation point to World War II, but Alperovitz’s revisionist account compels us to consider their proleptic Cold War significance. By use of the atomic bomb, the United States sought to secure for itself a position of regional domination, if not global supremacy. Even though there was a two-front, US-Soviet Allied strategy for Japan’s defeat, the atomic bombings were a unilateral act, a spectacular showcase of US annihilatory power. The goal was to gain the upper hand in shaping the postwar world order. And let’s be clear: contrary to the retroactive propaganda tale spun by Truman’s secretary of state Henry Stimson that were it not for the bomb, over a million US soldiers would have been killed in the Pacific Theater, Japan had been negotiating surrender for about a year. Stimson’s postwar insistence on the bomb’s military necessity thus obscures the political implications of the US decision to use the bomb. By putting the Soviet Union, its wartime ally, on notice, the United States launched the Cold War. Yet the nuclear bombings granted broad geostrategic latitude to the United States in ways that go unrecognized. Over the years, I’ve thought about how Alperovitz’s insight might be understood relative to Korea. If the atomic bombs birthed the Cold War, the division of and ensuing hot war in Korea were seized to consolidate a nuclearized Cold War world order. On August 10, 1945, a day after the US bombing of Nagasaki and five days before Emperor Hirohito went on the radio to formally announce Japan’s surrender, Korea’s fate was sealed behind closed doors. Armed with a National Geographic map of Korea, two US military officers, Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel, adjourned to a side room and divided the Korean peninsula. In so doing, they created a Cold War blueprint for hot wars to come in Asia where the United States created or backed politically partitioned geographies, such as Taiwan and South Vietnam, and repeatedly intervened in peoples’ decolonizing struggles for national liberation and self-determination. By dividing the peninsula, the United States imposed on Korea, a colony of Imperial Japan, the fate visited on Germany, an enemy nation, after its defeat. Yet why was Korea—not Japan—severed in two? Korea, after all, was a victim of Japan’s imperialist aggression and settler colonial expansion. As Rusk recounted, he and Bonesteel chose the 38th parallel in order to keep Seoul in the US occupation zone. To achieve this goal, they heedlessly bisected Kaesong and other Korean towns and villages, devastating numerous communities and families. Did they consult with any Korean? Not remotely. Did they consider the anti-colonial struggle Koreans had been waging? Not at all. Neither gave a damn about the Korean situation in its material particulars. What this meant was that Korea’s liberation occurred in the same historic window as its tragic division. Both were consequent to the US atomic bombings in Japan. In Dictée (1982), Korean American artist and writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha describes Korea’s division in language that captures the equivocal nature of US intervention: Korea was severed in two by an enemy clad in liberator’s garb. With foreseeable tragic consequences, the act of partition triggered a brutal war of national reunification in which the United States aggressively intervened, ruling the skies, contemplating using atomic bombs to create a “zone of cobalt” between Korea and China where no life could be sustained for a hundred years, and perpetrating what historian Bruce Cumings calls a “bombing holocaust.” Especially ruinous for the north, which the United States indiscriminately targeted as a “red region,” US bombing also devastated the south. Across the peninsula, an estimated 4 million Koreans were killed. This death toll is inexact because Korean lives, and therefore deaths, did not matter. Some Chinese statistics indicate that North Korea, which has never disclosed numbers, lost upwards of 30% of its population. Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay, head of the US Strategic Air Command, casually later remarked that the air force killed off 20% of the total Korean population. He conceded that had the United States lost—to be clear, it did not win—he would have been tried as a war criminal. LL : The five years following the two nuclear bombings led to another particularly devastating war—usually called the “Korean War.” Could you talk to us about it? CH : Many people in the United States think the Korean War was just one of many small wars the United States has waged in far-off places around the world. They don’t grasp the seismic transformation of the world order it facilitated. The official US line on the war, as expressed on the plaque at the Korean Veterans Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, DC, is that the United States sacrificed its own sons and daughters to save Koreans—the implication is from global communism. Yet this message contradicts Secretary of State Acheson’s statement in 1954: “Korea came along and saved us.” So which of these claims is true? Did the United States altruistically enter the war to save a benighted people in a distant country, or did the Korean War somehow save the United States? And why would the United States, recently victorious in World War II, need saving? Only if we take stock of the fact that the United States was transformed into a total war state during World War II can we understand that the Korean War was a godsend, rehabilitating a US economy geared toward total war. By authorizing a sweeping infrastructure of violence, the war’s implications exceed Korea itself. The war consolidated the US national security state. It legitimated the expansion of the US empire of bases and fortified the military-industrial complex. It placed the United States on permanent war footing, giving rise to a post-World War II pattern of US forever wars. The Korean War also hardened the division of the Korean peninsula by supplanting the 38th parallel with the demilitarized zone. Yet what actually is the nature of the US-South Korea alliance, its touted bonds forged in blood? We understand this to be a “strategic partnership” between unequal parties, with South Korea, in the first instance an anticommunist US creation, serving as a host site for a US garrison state that encircles the globe. What is less evident, given this rhetoric of friendship, is how South Korea figures as collateral damage in US war plans. Geography is key. The US division of Korea at the 38th parallel means North and South Korea’s capitals are in theory a relatively short car ride away from each other. There is therefore no nuclear targeting of North Korea that would leave the south unscathed. US apocalyptic designs toward Pyongyang cannot but encode the deaths of millions of South Koreans who are not formally US enemies. This returns us to what it means that the United States liberated Koreans, first from Imperial Japan and shortly thereafter from the forces of global communism. What does it mean that Koreans were “liberated” by means of the atomic bomb in 1945 and through a bombing holocaust less than half a decade later? For Koreans, an estimated 5.4 million of whom had been conscripted into Japan’s war effort as forced labor, the US atomic bombings meant freedom from the fetters of colonial rule. But there was a dark side to the day of freedom people in South Korea celebrate as Gwangbokjeol, or the day that light returned: namely, the deaths of tens of thousands of enslaved Korean laborers at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Korean mass death was thus built into Korea’s liberation in ways that blur the distinction between friend and enemy and that inform US policy toward the divided peninsula to this day. LL : The Republic of Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea were created in a context of nuclear imperialism, the United States having demonstrated the mass murderous effects of their bombs, and the Soviet Union using their first warheads in Kazakh Indigenous lands in August 1949. Eight decades later, is nuclearism still a productive framework to think of Korea’s current political conditions? CH : Although not welcomed into the nuclear club, North Korea unquestionably is and has been a nuclear power for over a dozen years. By acknowledging North Korea as such on his return to office, Trump rhetorically marked a stark departure from his predecessors. Crafted with the goal of preventing North Korea from advancing down the nuclear road, post-Cold War US policy has aimed at “complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization.” This objective notwithstanding, US policy toward North Korea over the last three decades has been anything but consistent. In contrast to North Korea, the US side of things has been characterized by regime shifts—first Clinton, then Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden, and now Trump again. Each US leader has gained political mileage by initially getting tough on North Korea and seeking to reverse their predecessors’ negotiating gains. Only late in the game—perhaps eyeing the Nobel Peace Prize, with the exception of Obama who was prematurely awarded it—have these presidents gotten vision by moving toward engagement. In practice, this has meant a remarkable succession of US nuclear threats against North Korea. In the early 1990s, Colin Powell, formerly Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George H.W. Bush, threatened to turn North Korea into a charcoal briquette. Less than a decade later, George W. Bush yoked North Korea into a tripartite “axis of evil,” and Donald Rumsfeld argued the viability of a two-front war strategy in the Middle East and North Korea. Obama wielded a nuclear-armed North Korea as a bogeyman for remilitarizing Asia and the Pacific and announced the use of stealth bombers in the annual war exercises the United States conducts in and around Korea. And during his first term, Trump threatened “fire and fury” against North Korea, placing “all options on the table.” For North Korea, such threats do not come in a vacuum. More than virtually any other country, it intimately knows what it means to be in the US war machine’s crosshairs. In sheer tonnage, the United States dropped more bombs on North Korea, a country the size of Kentucky, than in the entire Pacific theater during World War II. It dropped over 420,000 bombs on Pyongyang, which had 400,000 residents in 1950. This is the definition of overkill. As early as 1951, international delegations to North Korea remarked there was nothing left to bomb. Tellingly, North Koreans learned during this time to live underground. Schools, factories, dwellings, everything moved underground. Farmers ventured above ground at night to till their fields. For North Koreans as targeted life, night became day, day became night, and underground became home. Let’s also recall that until the early 1990s, the United States, in blatant violation of the armistice agreement, deployed nuclear weapons systems to South Korea. It continues to deploy nuclear aircraft carriers—essentially mobile military bases and launchpads—as part of its trilateral war exercises with South Korea and Japan that simulate North Korea’s nuclear decimation. This is to underscore that North Korea not only experienced apocalypse at the hands of the United States, but thereafter, has faced the prospect of total annihilation. This is critical context for North Korea taking to the nuclear path. The 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) imposes a twofold obligation: non-nuclear states must not nuclearize, and nuclear powers must reduce and eventually eliminate their stockpiles. Yet the NPT has been wielded principally to crush the defense strategies of states that view the nuclear path as critical to their survival. While demanding that North Korea denuclearize, the United States has never taken measures to reduce its own nuclear stockpile. We should remember that during the “axis of evil” era, North Korea was urged by the United States to follow the “Libyan model” of nuclear dismantlement in order to have normalized relations with the West. North Korea watched US-engineered regime change in Libya with an eagle eye, understanding it to be an object lesson of what happens when countries consent to the eradication of their nuclear programs. Yet North Korea’s commitment to the nuclear path has tragically meant that it has transformed itself into a target to ensure its own defense. In contrast to the United States, which tested “the gadget” in Indigenous lands in New Mexico, and the Soviet Union, which conducted nuclear tests on Kazakh lands, North Korea has tested its devices underground in its own northeast. Aerial views of US Army Garrison Humphreys, the largest US military base outside of the United States. It is located near the Korean city of Pyeongtaek. / Photos by USAG- Humphreys (October 2015). LL : We were put in touch by Lisa Yoneyama, who mentioned the documentary, Village of Widows , about Korean hibakusha in Hiroshima in her contribution. I think that you teach this film in your class called “The Nuclear Pacific,” right? CH: Yes, that’s correct. There’s a scene from that documentary, the same one Lisa describes in her essay, that lingers with me. The film follows a delegation of Sahtu Dene elders and tribal members as they travel in 1998 to Hiroshima where they visit Korean hibakusha hospitalized with radiation sickness. Addressing the Koreans, a tribal elder movingly states, “We share your suffering. I am part of you.” How do we explain this encounter between peoples who are differently situated and ambivalently implicated within a nuclearized kill-chain? Mobilized by the Canadian settler state to extract uranium from their tribal lands for the Manhattan Project, Sahtu Dene miners and their families have suffered the mutagenic effects of radiation exposure across generations. Like Korean hibakusha, they have long campaigned for redress and justice. What does it mean when colonized peoples who belong to what Lou Cornum calls the “irradiated International” claim each other as relation? When the perpetrator nation refuses accountability, why do Indigenous people from Port Radium, themselves victims of nuclear imperialism, atone for the devastating effects of the US atomic bombing on Korean hibakusha in Hiroshima? By exceeding the limits of the perpetrator-victim binary, this criss-crossing of the nodes of the nuclear Pacific allows something unexpected yet powerful to emerge. Here, I am reminded of the fact that many of the enslaved Korean workers who were mobilized by the Japanese Imperial Army to labor in coal mines, factories, and other militarized industries came from Jeju Island. Seized as a launching pad for Japan’s invasion of the Chinese mainland, Jeju was a stopover in the Imperial Army’s infamous march to Nanjing in 1937. In the 1930s, Jeju people were conscripted to build Altteureu Airfield, a key refueling site for Japanese forces. Some died in the process. Yet even as they too were victims, Jeju islanders have repeatedly apologized to the people of Nanjing for their role in facilitating Imperial Japan’s atrocities. LL : Any vision of Korean reunification that would repair the effects of 35 years of Japanese colonialism and subsequent decades of militarism, clearly could not involve the absorption of one regime by another, but rather the inventive creation of new political conditions. Are there people working towards this vision? CH : Many people note that reunification is a moribund discourse that casts back to the time of US-backed military dictatorships in the south when “Tong-il” (통일) was the left’s rallying cry in South Korea and the Korean diaspora. Following the inauguration of the hardline South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol, who more recently was impeached after stunningly attempting to declare martial law, North Korea abandoned peaceful reunification and identified South Korea as a hostile state. In a 2023 constitutional amendment, it affirmed its nuclear status, clarifying that given continued US provocations, including combined-force war exercises that rehearse its invasion, regime collapse, and occupation, nuclearization ensures its right to existence. Yet if “Tong-il” is a dated term in the south, it’s also crucial to acknowledge that South Korea remains militarily occupied by the United States but generally speaking has an impoverished vocabulary for grappling with US imperialism. For Koreans, whether north or south, “Ilje-sidae” (일제시대) serves a common term of reference for the era of Japanese colonial rule. Yet if you mention “Mije-sidae” (미제시대), or the era of US imperial rule, to South Koreans whose sons are conscripted into mandatory military service, whose territory is occupied by the US military, and whose separation from family in the north is a consequence of the Korean War’s irresolution, you’ll likely draw a blank stare. There is little critical education, certainly not in formal spaces of learning, that enables people to grasp their own material conditions under US imperialism and to understand the Korean War not as an event, but as a durable structure that persists to this day. It is within a landscape conditioned by a fog of war that normalizes Korea’s division that groups like the South Korean civil-society organization, Solidarity for Peace and Reunification in Korea (SPARK) do urgent work. Emerging from the anti-imperialist wing of the democracy movement, SPARK formed during the first early 1990s’ North Korean nuclear crisis and thereafter organized delegations to NPT review conferences. In recent years, it has focused on overdue recognition of and justice for Korean A-bomb victims whose suffering has been minimized in even progressive, US-Japan no-nukes organizing efforts. The challenge remains not only US disavowal of its war crimes accountability but also the illegibility of Korean victims as colonized hibakusha. Since 2019, Korean hibakusha, supported by SPARK and an alliance of organizations, researchers, and activists in South Korea, the United States, and Japan, have taken part in many events, including three fora in Seoul, Hapcheon, and Hiroshima, in preparation for a major international people’s tribunal, focused on Korean A-bomb victims that will take place in New York next year. This past March, Korean hibakusha testified in Chicago about the world-shattering aftermath of the bomb, including its mutagenic effects. In calling for a nuclear-free world, they have focused on the United States, their supposed liberator from imperial rule, describing the 1945 US atomic bombings as “the original sin.” Although not foremost in their vocabulary, is “reunification” still a structuring freedom dream? I would say, Yes.  Christine Hong is a professor of ethnic studies and literature at UC Santa Cruz where she directs the Center for Racial Justice. She serves on the board of directors of the Korea Policy Institute, an independent research and educational organization, and is a core member of the Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective and the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. Her book, A Violent Peace: Race, Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific , was published in 2020.