Search Results

By Paul Liem | April 11, 2024 The following is based on a talk delivered by KPI Board Member, Paul Liem, at a demonstration called to protest the trilateral summit meeting between leaders of the U.S., Japan and the Philippines on April 11, 2024.  Organized by the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines-US (ICHRP-US), Bayan, Nikkei Resisters and Malaya Movement, rallies were held at the Philippine and Japanese Consulates in San Francisco. Thank you for organizing this protest and inviting the Korea Policy Institute to speak. Today when Biden, Kishida and Marcos Jr. are meeting, I cannot fail as a Korean American to acknowledge the sordid history of collaboration between U.S. imperialism and Imperial Japan at the turn of the 20th century in Asia. U.S imperialism made its debut in Asia in 1905, hand in hand with Imperial Japan. The U.S. colonized the Philippines after its war to subjugate Filipino nationalist forces led by Emilio Aguinaldo in 1902, and Japan defeated Czarist Russia in a contest for control over Joseon Korea in 1905. Imperialist collaboration between the U.S. and Japan was sealed by the Taft-Katsura memorandum of 1905 in which the U.S. recognized Japan’s interests in Korea, in exchange for Japan’s recognition of U.S. interests in the Philippines.  Ever since, the peace-loving people of Korea and the Philippines have stood in solidarity with each other in their struggles for sovereignty, and their desire for liberty guaranteed by popular governance, free of U.S. militarism. So, it is today that we stand together in opposition to designs by the U.S. and its junior partner in imperialism, Japan, to entrap the Republic of Korea (ROK) and the Philippines, and other countries in the region in a web of militaristic “minilaterals” (AUKUS, JAKUS, the Quad) to do their bidding. That is, to serve as shock troops fighting to preserve a moribund neoliberal world order in Asia, as is NATO in Europe, and Apartheid Israel in Palestine. Along the new cold war fault lines being carved out by the Biden administration, nowhere is the possibility for the outbreak of nuclear war greater than at the Korean demilitarized zone.  The U.S. and the now lame-duck Yoon Suk Yeol administration have declared that Korea shall be reunified under a “liberal” political system, a catchphrase calling for regime change in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), and for the privatization and accumulation of the public property of its people into the hands of a rapacious oligarchy of family run conglomerates in the ROK, known as Chaebol. Thus, under the guise of pushing back on the DPRK’s nuclear deterrent the U.S. and ROK militaries, under U.S. command, have just conducted the world’s largest military exercises to date in scale and scope, deploying U.S. nuclear capable bombers, fighter jets, aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, and mobilizing 300,000 ROK soldiers and 100,000 U.S. soldiers. What is a country, facing such brazen hostility to do?  How, in fact, is the DPRK responding? It has deployed its military to build housing on a massive scale and to develop a manufacturing infrastructure in its rural counties; it is turning airfields into green houses and implementing renewable energy in its grid.  To avert an accidental outbreak of fighting it is clarifying its national borders; it is developing its nuclear weapons in response to the U.S. “extended nuclear deterrent” over the ROK, and it has been candid with its people that reunification with a U.S. sponsored regime, intent upon overthrowing socialism in the DPRK is not possible.  In short, the DPRK is carving out a space for itself in which it can improve the livelihood of its people, secure from the threat of foreign invasion.  Under the most precarious of circumstances, it seeks to thrive. To ensure peace on the Korean peninsula what can the people of the ROK to do?  No ROK president can implement agreements with the DPRK without U.S. permission.  The ROK is not a sovereign state.  However, the people are sovereign. They can act in the interests of the nation.  They can call for a Peace Agreement with the DPRK.  United, they can hold their new electorate accountable for achieving a state of peaceful co-existence on the Korean peninsula, instead of allowing President Yoon Suk Yeol to plunge the peninsula into war. To end the forever U.S.-led Korean War, we call upon the world’s people to stand with us today as we demand that the U.S. sign a peace treaty and normalize relations with the DPRK. To ensure that Japan never goes to war again, what are the people of Japan to do?  The peace-loving people of Japan, can hold their government accountable to its Peace Constitution and never allow their troops, their land, or industrial might to be used as a “force-multiplier” for U.S. military adventures in the region, or beyond.  It is time, long past, for Japan to apologize and make amends for atrocities it committed against the people of the Philippines during WWll, to apologize and make amends for its its crimes against the Korean people and nation during its colonial rule of Korea, it is time for Japan to treat Zainichi Koreans and all other marginalized peoples in Japan with respect and dignity; and is long past time for Japan to establish diplomatic relations with the DPRK.  It is long past time for the Rising Sun to set. To ensure that U.S. adventurism does not start a world war, what can the American people do?  All peace-loving people of the U.S. and the Korean American diaspora must struggle ceaselessly for the U.S. to embrace the concept and practice of being one among the many global citizens of a multi-polar world; a country which embraces all countries big and small; wealthy and developing, as its equal; a country committed to the equitable distribution of wealth domestically and across the globe, rather than the accumulation of financial wealth resulting from the exploitation of the U.S. working class, the super-exploitation of marginalized people’s within the working-class, and chronic debt peonage of the Global South. Today, the people of the world are rising up against U.S. imperialism.  Only we in solidarity with the world’s people can decide if the exit of U.S. imperialism, Japanese militarism, Zionism, and NATO expansionism from the world stage ushers in a new era of human development, or more forever war. Long live international solidarity. Paul Liem is the Chair of the Korea Policy Institute Board of Directors.

Tomomi Kinukawa | March 29, 2024 | Originally published in Mondoweiss On the 148th day of Israel’s unfolding genocide and the 76th year of the ongoing Nakba, this Op-Ed, which is grounded in collaboration among Dr. Rabab Abdulhadi, Director of Arab Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas (AMED) Studies at San Francisco State University, and leaders of the transnational “Comfort Women” justice movement, calls on our transnational movements and communities to condemn the governments of Israel, the United States, Japan, and the Republic of Korea, and all other complicit states and actors whose hands are covered with Palestinian blood, including US-based Zionist organizations, mainstream media, and university administrations, for their collusion with and enabling of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people. The “Comfort Women” justice movement stands in solidarity with the Palestinian anti-colonial liberation movement against “imperialism, settler colonialism, racism and apartheid–a wholesale systematic design by the Israeli regime to erase Palestine from the map and eradicate the Palestinian people.” As Dr. Abdulhadi maintained, Both nonviolent resistance—for instance, the Great March of Return in 2018, BDS, strikes, and popular committees—and armed struggle—from the 1920s to the present—have been met with severe colonial violence, collective punishment and indiscriminate killings. Today, the cost of resistance is clear, and is felt deeply. But the Palestinian people are aware, as do all oppressed people, that only resistance in all its forms leads to freedom, liberation and return. The transnational movement against Japan’s imperialism, settler colonialism, fascism, and denialism categorically rejects the misuse of the movement by Zionist organizations, such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center, ADL, AJC, AIPAC, JCRC, and Hillel, who deliberately engage in legitimizing Israel’s genocide and settler colonialism and criminalizing Teaching Palestine. For example, at press conferences in Japan, Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, promoted their project against what they call “digital terrorism” and attacked the BDS movement, while alleging that they support the redress movement for victims of Japan’s colonial and war-time crimes. For another example, ADL and AJC requested the Japanese American Citizens League to support their racist campaign to repeal the UN resolution that condemned Zionism as racism, in exchange with their support for redress for Japanese American incarceration during WWII. There is no place in this movement for Zionist organizations or any actors that spread hate and cover up Israel’s genocide. The anti-colonial justice movement must protect itself from being tarnished by Zionism. Instead, this movement continues to fulfill the commitment to speak the truth while listening to and learning from Palestinian siblings in the spirit of what Dr. Abdulhadi called the indivisibility of justice. People’s truth speaks louder than settler colonialism and denialism for Palestine and “comfort women.” Women’s unions and grassroots movements inside historic Palestine and in exile called out the “anti-Palestinian colonial western establishment, in tandem with its deeply racist and dehumanizing media,” which rejected Palestinian and global calls for an immediate and permanent ceasefire and an end to Israel’s siege and genocide against the Palestinian people. The Western establishment, including its non-Western colluders, not only continues to finance and arm Israel, but also commits what the Kashmir Scholars Consultative and Action Network has called “epistemicide”—to punishing, targeting, and murdering Palestinian intellectuals, cultural workers, journalists, educators, and their families while demolishing schools, hospitals, theaters, libraries, places of worship, and sacred burial sites. Using the most extreme measures, Israel denies Palestinians what Professor Edward Said called “permission to narrate.” As part of their “epistemicide,” Israel and its apologists have also consistently used imagery of Gaza as a woman who should be violated by Israeli military commanders and political leaders, and have deployed pinkwashing and purplewashing to label Palestinians as exceptionally misogynist and homophobic. Feminist Solidarity Network For Palestine has documented how Israel and its partners in crime, including mainstream media, have manufactured “consent for genocide” by invoking “Orientalist cultural tropes” of “native savagery” that “depict the Arab/Muslim male as a terrorist-rapist in order to fuel racial fantasies.” In its incisive critique of the New York Times article “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7” (December 28, 2023), the Feminist Network showed that the article not only violated journalistic standards of evidence but reverberated with the colonial rapist myth of criminalizing resistance, while simultaneously normalizing and covering up Israel’s own colonial violence, including rampant sexual violence against Palestinian men, women, and queer and trans people. II. Colonial Roots of Japan’s Collusion with Israel In the same way that Namibia critiqued Germany for siding with Israel at the ICJ and failing to learn from its own genocide and colonial aggression against the Namibian people, the Japanese government’s ongoing collusion with Israel and the United States has deep colonial roots. The US-led imperial forces that have granted impunity to Japan’s imperialism, settler colonialism, and fascism since Japan’s defeat in 1945 are the very forces that are fueling Israel’s ongoing genocide. In fact, work by Japanese Christian Zionist imperialists, including Kanzo Uchiura and Tadao Yanaihara, who considered Zionism as an ideal model for their supposedly “scientific” legitimization of Japan’s brutal colonialism and racism, continued to influence Japanese international studies at elite institutions such as the University of Tokyo after the defeat. The US-led imperial establishment let Japan continue its settler colonialism against Okinawans, Ainus, Zainichi Koreans and Chinese, and Buraku communities in the context of US-led Cold War imperialism in Asia. Japan continues to act with impunity from almost all of its colonial and war-time crimes. Many war criminals accepted elite positions in postwar Japan, while corporations that profited from exploitation of and violence against colonized and enslaved laborers were allowed to maintain their monopolies. Since the end of World War II, the Japanese government and allied forces have colluded in their attempts to suppress and silence fierce anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-caste, liberation, redress, labor, and other justice movements led by Zainichi Koreans, Buraku, Okinawans, Ainu, and Japanese anti-imperialist far left, communists, and labor. Dehumanization of the colonized, criminalization of anti-colonial resistance, and the colonial rapist myth were also used to normalize and cover up the Japanese imperial military’s colonial violence, including gendered and sexualized violence. During the Kanto massacre, which took place after the great Kanto earthquake in 1923, for example, Japanese imperial government, police, military, and vigilantes slaughtered and raped Koreans, Chinese, socialists, and anyone mistaken for Koreans and Chinese. While demonizing anti-colonial resistance, the Japanese government, police, and media spread unfounded rumors of Koreans attacking, murdering, and raping Japanese, to legitimize their own heinous violence. In the following decades, the Japanese imperial military went on to commit the Nanjing massacre and other massacres in Asia and the Pacific, including in Okinawa. To this day, fear of another Kanto massacre is very real for Zainichi Koreans. Fabricated rumors of Zainichi Koreans or “foreigners” attacking Japanese circulate via the internet after every natural disaster. Those rumors reflect and escalate racism in Japan, which continues to criminalize Zainichi Koreans and punish their/our anti-colonial and anti-racist resistance, including ethnic Korean schools in Japan. A video that went viral in 2013 shows a Japanese high school student screaming for “Tsuruhashi massacre” in Tsuruhashi, a neighborhood where many Zainichi Koreans reside. Between 1932 and 1945, hundreds of thousands of women were sexually enslaved by Japan’s state-sanctioned and institutionalized so-called “Comfort Women” system. In 1991, survivors of the Japanese Military Sexual Slavery (“Comfort Women” system) courageously broke their silence and demanded a formal legally bound apology and redress from the Japanese government. Most victims from Asia and the Pacific were “missing and murdered,” because of Japan’s refusal to engage in a good faith formal investigation of the war crime. Hundreds of  “Comfort Women” survivors, including Indigenous and Muslim women, have come forward to describe the daily gang rapes, torture, and slaughter that these women endured. Those survivor-resisters, whom we fondly refer to as our “grandmothers,” have repeatedly refused to accept the terms set by Japan, which has never formally apologized but instead has continued to deny and distort memories, testimonies, and other evidence. Through its global publicity campaign, the government also sought to legitimize its denialism through educational institutions and research centers in Japan, the United States and beyond. The “Comfort Women” memorial that we built in San Francisco’s Chinatown played a critical role in countering the smear campaign and preserving grandmothers’ narratives in the Asian Diaspora. The memorial was successful only because of persistent activism and advocacy. That is why the justice movement for “Comfort Women” can’t be silent about Palestine. III. Against Collusion between Zionists and Japanese Denialists As a community that has championed justice-centered pedagogy against Japan’s historical denialism, we condemn the US-led imperial forces’ “epitemicide” and “consent for genocide” against Palestinians. We have critiqued Japan’s “organized, official distortion and denialism” in a “systematic attempt at permanent erasure of WWII-era atrocities … spearheaded by Japan’s highest levels of government and the Prime Minister himself.” The Japanese far-right government’s official denialism lies at the heart of the government’s direct and indirect support for Israel’s legitimization of genocide and its criminalization of Palestinian resistance. In defensive response against powerful third-world left solidarity with Palestine in the 1960s and 1970s, US-based Zionist organizations penetrated anticolonial and redress movements for the sole purpose of legitimizing Israel’s settler colonialism, Zionism, Islamophobia, and anti-Arab and anti-Palestine racism. This included Zionists’ “support” for movements against Japanese imperialism and denialism. During the administration of Shinzo Abe, the far-right denialist prime minister of Japan, however, Zionists stopped their critique of Japanese denialism in exchange for not only Japan’s increased armed trades with Israel, but also Abe’s buying into the Zionist weaponization of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust for legitimizing Israel’s settler colonialism. In 2015, for example, Abe visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. After his visits, the Times of Israel wrote, “Abe has been criticized for appearing to minimize Japan’s own atrocities during the war, particularly the forced sexual enslavement of up to 200,000 ‘comfort women’ from Korea and China… His visit to the Holocaust Memorial may help quell some of that criticism.” Zionists’ change of mind proves how hollow their gesture for solidarity with redress and justice movements against Japanese imperialism in the past is. Zionists and the Japanese government also colluded with each other in their attempt to legitimize their denialism and racist ideologies as allegedly academic research. For example, the Hudson Institute, a Zionist and a white-supremacist right-wing think tank, promotes Islamophobia and anti-Arab and anti-Palestine racism through its so-called research. The institute gave an award to Shinzo Abe. In turn, Abe funded the “Japan Chair” for the institute, which promotes denialist and racist research. Supporting the Chair reflected and reinforced Abe’s interest in expanding Japan’s collusion with Israel’s military industry, which has exported military, apartheid, and surveillance technologies used against Palestinians, to imperialist states all over the world for their repression of Indigenous, racialized, and colonized people. “Research” at the institute fuels both Zionism and “Asian hate” (especially targeting “North Korea” and China), which is promoted not only by Western white supremacy but also Japanese “white”  supremacy against “Asians,” whom Japanese imperialists and settlers have demonized and dehumanized as racialized others. It’s not coincidental that Shinzo Abe, who advocated for Japan’s far-right imperial ideology, denialism, re-militarization, and Japanese-supremacist racism, abandoned Japan’s so-called “balancing diplomacy in the Middle East,” and made a pro-Israel turn. Under Zionists’ pressure, which includes demands for Japan to defund UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East) and adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has continued Abe’s pro-Israel turn and follows the United States and others in labeling Hamas as a “terrorist” organization, for legitimization of Israel’s genocide. However, Japan refuses to apply the same definition of terrorism to Israel’s war crimes. Japan also co-sponsored the US resolution in the United Nations Security Council condemning the Yemen resistance movement, which did not result in any human casualties, for its opposition to the Israeli genocide and insistence to abide by the BDS movement. The United States and its allies, including the Republic of Korea, in turn used the resolution to join the US statement to justify military attacks on Yemen. Most recently, Japan took an even more direct part in the Israeli genocide in Gaza by becoming the tenth government to suspend funding to UNRWA, thus directly participating in the genocidal practice of starving an occupied population and denying it medication, water, and shelter-–a form of punishment banned by international conventions. The attack on UNRWA, that was erected for Palestinian refugees exiled in 1948 Nakba and later years, along with their descendants, is also a collective punishment denying their right of return. IV. People’s Truth against States’ Denialisms Through our own painful struggle against the Japanese far-right government and historical denialists, leaders of the “Comfort Women” justice movement know how oppressors/colonizers/denialists feign neutrality while sanctioning genocide and repression. The movement rejects the racist and colonial logic that alleges that there are always two sides to each story as a way to deny survivors’ truth and legitimize colonial and war-time crimes and violence. There is only one side to genocide and colonialism, as Feminist for Justice in/for Palestine states. Likewise, the movement condemns and rejects Western media’s attempts to erase Israel’s colonial history and ongoing war crimes. Mainstream media’s uncritical parroting of Orientalist tropes for legitimizing Israel’s massacres and terror have been cemented by Zionists’ repression against those who oppose Israeli settler colonialism and demand justice for Palestine, by conflating any criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. It reminds us of how the far-right Japanese government claimed that the “Comfort Women” memorial incites anti-Japan sentiments and would lead to the bullying of Japanese children, while far-right politicians publicized their desire to destroy our memorial with a bomb. Holding to the indivisibility of justice, the “Comfort Women” justice movement continues to strengthen de-national coalitions, which defy divide-and-conquer tactics and repression by nation states. It was critical that Japanese American communities in the SF Bay Area spoke up to support the “Comfort Women” memorial and critiqued the far-right Japanese government’s attempt to misuse their trauma. In the same way that Zionists conflate antisemitism with anti-Zionism, Japanese denialists intentionally conflate white-supremacist anti-Japanese racism with critique of Japanese imperialism. Leaders of CWJC (“Comfort Women” Justice Coalition) also appreciate AMED Director’s critical support for the movement and education for justice for “comfort women” against denialism, including raising awareness within Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim communities. Dr. Abdulhadi refused to remain silent but instead immediately responded to the CWJC’s call to paint over Japan’s imperial flag on the wall of a Palestinian-owned restaurant. She worked closely with the restaurant owner, who has since become a strong supporter of the movement for justice for “comfort women.” Leaders of the “Comfort Women” justice movement have likewise expressed our concerns over the Zionist collusion of the San Francisco State University administration and its attempts to dismantle AMED Studies and cancel AMED courses on Palestine while not only refusing to protect the AMED director from Zionist attacks, but reprimanding her for doing her job to offer AMED courses to students. Through listening to narratives of anti-colonial resistance crossing movements and collectively fighting against the forces that deny permission to narrate, it is we who hold the ultimate power to truth that the Zionist, white supremacist, and denialist governments, institutions of knowledge, and media attempt to deny and distort. We join the call by our California State University Ethnic Studies colleagues and community members: While the intensive Zionist smearing and bullying has produced a chilling effect that silenced many of our colleagues, we are presented with another opportunity today to once and for all come together in a unified voice to speak up and collectively reject oppression, colonial violence and racism against all our people. Dr. Tomomi Kinukawa is a queer scholar-activist with Zainichi Korean and Japanese ancestries and currently teaches in the Department of Women and Gender Studies at San Francisco State University.

By Tim Beal and Gregory Elich | May 3, 2023 | Originally published in Monthly Review For a book on contemporary events to have a new edition seventy years after the first is a rare achievement. Izzy Stone’s The Hidden History of the Korean War has a continuing relevance for three major reasons: it is a tour de force of investigative journalism; the Korean War was a pivotal event in post-1945 history; and the combination of the two—the method of investigation and what it revealed of machinations behind the official curtain of obfuscation—can be brought to bear on a wider scale in order to understand what has happened since then and what is happening around us now, and into the future.1 There is a certain constancy in human affairs. Deceit, deception, and manipulation are characteristics of power, perhaps especially of modern “democratic” political power—what country does not claim to be adhering to democracy? In addition, the international framework fixed in place by the Korean War, dubbed the “Cold War,” is still with us despite superficial detours into rapprochement. In 1952, when Hidden History was first published, the United States was in hot war with North Korea and China, and in cold war with the Soviet Union. In 2022, when this edition is being issued, the United States is in proxy war with the Russian Federation, successor to the Soviet Union, and in cold war, perilously close to turning hot, with North Korea and China. In the United States itself, the flailing president is struggling to stay afloat in a turmoil that his administration had a major role in producing, and the political climate is increasingly intolerant of dissent, redolent of McCarthyism.2 Stone would find the situation in 2022 sadly, depressingly familiar. Penetrating the Curtain of Deceit and Deception: Stone’s Investigative Journalism Decades after its initial publication, Hidden History remains as relevant as ever in its method of analysis of U.S. foreign policy and war-making modes, and the dissemination of the hidden history behind the official narrative. Stone believed that he could only be persuasive with a domestic audience if he “utilized material which could not be challenged by those who accept the official American government point of view.” Therefore, Stone limited his sources to official U.S. and UN documents and American and British newspapers. It is interesting to note in this context how much revealing information Stone uncovered through careful analysis coupled with an investigative frame of mind. He adopted an approach of comparing mainstream sources and noting discrepancies, omissions, emphases, and framing to reveal the complex reality behind official obfuscations. Stone’s analytical method remains an ever-relevant model for analyzing and interpreting official sources. The eruption of full-scale war on the Korean Peninsula presented an opportunity to advance U.S. geopolitical interests and those of key Asian clients. In the popular imagination, the start of the war is generally regarded in simple terms as a surprise North Korean attack for which no one had been prepared. However, by closely examining various sources, Stone points to ambiguities that muddy that picture. Most prominently, he finds considerable evidence suggesting U.S. and South Korean officials had probable foreknowledge of an offensive by North Korean forces, which they chose not to try to prevent. South Korean President Syngman Rhee had recently suffered a dramatic defeat in Assembly elections, and his political future looked shaky. Nor did he feel entirely confident in U.S. support. On the American side, General Douglas MacArthur and many in Washington were eager to launch a global anticommunist crusade, regardless of the cost in lives, and a war in Korea promised the potential for widening conflict. Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan also dreamed of a wider war, in which he hoped his forces would retake the Chinese mainland. There are indications, which Stone tantalizingly brings up but deliberately does not pursue, that the war was precipitated by Syngman Rhee, quite possibly in collusion with or foreknowledge by Chiang Kai-shek. Early reports, later overwhelmed by official propaganda, said that “The South Koreans have attacked North Korea.”3 Then there was the strange business of the soybean market. Before the war, relatives and associates of Chiang Kai-shek bought soybean futures, which yielded great profit after war broke out. Senator Joseph McCarthy had also made a felicitous foray into soybeans.4 The Korean conflict also boosted President Harry Truman’s “get tough” policy to escalate Cold War tensions. It provided the pretext for quadrupling the U.S. military budget, cemented the American base presence throughout the Asia-Pacific, and set the United States on a one-way road to a militarized economy and foreign policy that remain with us to this day. Stone situates the U.S. role in the Korean War in the context of the global Cold War, in which it can only be fully understood. A central theme is the tension between the Truman administration’s hostile containment policy of “political boycott and economic blockade” of the socialist countries and the anticommunist conservatives in Washington pushing for more aggressive action. The latter group’s hope for a global war against communism was fueled by MacArthur’s desire to steer the United States into a full-scale war with China and the Soviet Union. Stone details MacArthur’s machinations in eye-opening and disturbing detail. His is a memorable takedown of an American icon. MacArthur and Truman were in accord, however, in thwarting every opportunity to bring the war to an early end. Each had his motive to keep the conflict going: MacArthur with his hope of igniting the war into an international conflagration, and Truman shifting the basis of the U.S. economy into military Keynesianism to ensure there would be no turning back from a fervently anticommunist foreign policy. It is customary for U.S. journalists to focus on war’s impact on civilians only when it suits the country’s geopolitical objectives.5 Civilians in U.S. wars are typically rendered invisible in media reports. The Korean War was no different in that regard, but Stone was determined to expose the harsh reality that the bland verbiage in official reports was meant to obscure or erase. On this subject, he writes with evident compassion. Such empathy can seem startling in contrast to the near-total absence of such feelings in American journalism since the end of the Vietnam War. In one example, Stone examines U.S. Air Force communiques issued after a bombing campaign in September 1950, which complained of a paucity of targets because not much remained to destroy. “These communiques should be read by anyone who wants a complete history of the Korean War,” Stone suggests. “They are literally horrifying.”6 He quotes one document that reported large fires in villages that jets had attacked with rockets, napalm, and machine-gun fire. “Why was not explained,” Stone acidly observes, adding, “A complete indifference to noncombatants was reflected in the way villages were given ‘saturation treatment’ with napalm to dislodge a few soldiers.”7 Another operational summary described an attack on several villages as having achieved “excellent results” with bombs, rockets, and napalm. Stone lets the words sink in for the reader with his bitter comment, phrased to encourage a pause for reflection: “The results were…‘excellent.’”8 Stone found some U.S. Air Force reports deeply disturbing on another level, where in place of the customary indifference to human life, he found expressions of delight in death and destruction. “There were some passages about these raids on villages which reflected, not the pity which human feeling called for, but a kind of lighthearted moral imbecility, utterly devoid of imagination—as if the fliers were playing in a bowling alley, with villages for pins.” Among the examples Stone provides is one from a captain who led a flight attack group: “You can kiss that group of villages good-bye.”9 Then, as now, journalists generally acted as stenographers, parroting the official narrative and displaying a remarkable lack of curiosity about the complex reality on the ground. Frequently, in a mirror to our time, the media acted as cheerleaders for war or an escalation of violence. Lulls in combat worried General MacArthur, who wanted to keep the pressure on Washington to widen the war. By juxtaposing MacArthur’s hyperventilating reports against the situation on the ground, Stone exposes the general’s duplicity in damning detail. MacArthur’s communications may often have been fanciful, but he knew his image carried weight back home, and he could count on the media to disseminate the message he wanted to convey. In that expectation, he was rarely disappointed. U.S. newspapers tended to ignore the more sober-minded assessments that officials provided and ran with MacArthur’s wild fear-mongering claims in their headlines. Regardless of the military situation, what newspapers fed the American public was a steady diet of MacArthur’s fabrications. Once MacArthur was removed from his position, the United States nevertheless remained wary of peace. After the war entered a stalemate, the only reason Washington had to continue combat and drag out negotiations was to score political points. Quoting U.S. officials to illustrate their uneasiness at the prospect of peace, Stone concludes, “The peace talks were regarded by these leaders as a kind of diabolic plot against rearmament.”10 The media, not surprisingly, fell in line behind this narrative, and Stone cites saber-rattling editorials from the Washington Post and New York Times. Stone’s analysis of peace negotiations is a masterpiece of investigative journalism. He unveils the ugly reality of how the United States intentionally kept the war going long past the point where either side could make any significant gains on the ground. Indeed, when the book was initially published on September 1, 1952, it would take nearly another year before an armistice was reached. The main sticking point was the refusal of the United States, in collusion with Syngman Rhee and Chiang Kai-shek for whom the issue was of crucial importance, to return prisoners of war to their home countries, according to the Geneva Convention. Instead, the United States was intent on trying to score political propaganda points regarding Chinese and North Korean “legitimacy.” Prisoners held by the United States and South Korea were subjected to enormous pressure to reject a return to their homelands, thus according spurious legitimacy to the bankrupt regimes of Syngman Rhee and Chiang Kai-shek.11 The protracted wrangling over this issue ensured that combat would continue beyond any purely military rationale. As Stone thoroughly documents, each time it appeared that an agreement might soon be in the offing the United States acted to undermine the talks. Deferral of an end to hostilities was accomplished in a variety of ways. One of the many examples Stone offers occurred in August 1951, when North Korean General Nam II relented to American demands to adjust the truce line from the 38th Parallel to the current battle line. That concession produced a warmer atmosphere at the talks, and an agreement seemed to be close at hand. At that point, the U.S. military launched a heavy artillery barrage. Negotiations were held in Kaesong, which was agreed by all parties to be a neutral combat-free zone for the duration of the talks. South Korean guerillas entered the Kaesong neutral zone and attacked a North Korean police patrol. Other incidents ensued, including a U.S. warplane strafing a North Korean truce jeep on its way to the talks and a bombing attack on Kaesong. It would be hard to devise a set of provocations more likely to scupper negotiations, and these produced the desired effect as the North Koreans broke off talks. U.S. media dutifully ascribed responsibility for the abrupt halt to North Korean intransigence and “Red trickery.” Here and elsewhere, Stone skillfully exposes how U.S. civilian and military officials, with media complicity, shifted responsibility for their actions to the other side. It is an unsparing picture of official mendacity. With Stone’s attention to revelatory detail, he never loses sight of the broader picture. The Korean War set the United States on the path to militarism and endless war. Stone’s final words in this volume bear repeating: The dominant trend in American political, economic, and military thinking was fear of peace. General Van Fleet summed it all up in speaking to a visiting Filipino delegation in January 1952: “Korea has been a blessing. There had to be a Korea either here or some place in the world.” In this simple-minded confession lies the key to the hidden history of the Korean War.12 The Pivotal Role of the Korean War The Korean War is arguably the most consequential conflict since the Second World War. Less well known than the Vietnam War—even being dubbed the “Forgotten War”—its ramifications were immense. It put flesh on the skeleton of the incipient cold war, and it left behind both Korea and China as divided nations, sowing seeds for continuing conflict. It shifted “the business of America” from business to war, and embedded the permanent war economy at the core of U.S. society. Stone was close to the action, writing as the events were unfolding, so although his judgments were astute, they were necessarily limited. With the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to locate the war, and the U.S. domestic politics that molded it into the historical development of U.S. imperialism. There were important, sometimes crucial milestones in the process. Henry Luce’s coining of the phrase “American Century” in February 1941 helped establish the ideological appetite for global dominance that is still debated today.13 Franklin D. Roosevelt’s maneuvering of a recalcitrant United States into the unfolding Second World War was a crucial first step, but it was Truman who transformed what might have been a temporary participation into a permanent commitment to domination. The decision to use nuclear weapons against a defeated Japan was a signal to the Soviet Union, and the world, of America’s strategic military preeminence.14 The creation of NATO in 1949 gave the United States a Western European military alliance against the Soviet Union, and the Korean War became the other arm of the pincer in East Asia, locking South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan in a U.S.-led alliance against China and the Soviet Union. In addition, this convenient war also bonded fifteen other nations against the Red/Yellow Peril—the racist and political aspects being somewhat intertwined. Although some of those countries, such as Turkey, have distanced themselves from the United States and are unlikely to be dragooned into another war against China or North Korea, others such as Australia and far-off Britain have shown remarkable, if foolish, enthusiasm for a second round. Moreover, as Stone ably recounts, the United States was able by sleight of hand to drape itself in the flag of the United Nations and have its expeditionary force, over which the United Nations has no control, called the United Nations Command, a situation that still obtains today.15 Seven decades on, the major thrust of U.S. strategy is to integrate these two arms of the pincer even further, so that the Western Pacific alliance— primarily Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Australia—can be deployed seamlessly against Russia, and NATO arrayed against China.16 The counterpoint to the deepening role of U.S. imperialism in East Asia was the anticolonial movement. Resistance to European colonialism in Asia has, of course, deep roots but the injection of Japanese colonialism toward the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth made the anticolonial struggle the dominant theme of the region, not least in Korea. In general, the United States rejected the trappings of traditional colonialism—its flag flew over U.S. bases rather than governor’s palaces—but in essence the prevailing tendency was to supplant European and Japanese colonialism and replace it with U.S. dominance. However, since the United States could not admit, especially to itself, that it was an imperial power, anticolonialism had to be reconfigured as enemy expansionism. Sometimes this was expressed in national terms—Soviet or Chinese expansionism—at other times politically, as Communist expansionism. The latter was, as some recognized at the time, more properly seen as an aspect of the anticolonial movement; much of the attack on the State Department’s “Old China Hands” under McCarthyism revolved around this issue.17 As for Soviet/Chinese expansionism, it is appropriate to recall the quip attributed to Lord Ismay, the British soldier who was the first Secretary-General of NATO, that the organization was designed “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”18 The Americans are still there—over 100,000 in mid-2022.19 But what of the Russians and the Germans? How would Stone have dissected that? The Continuing Relevance of the Hidden History of the Korean War, Its Methods and Insights Stone read words carefully, comparing texts, noticing contradictions, always testing the rhetoric against reality. Thus, when MacArthur claimed that he was being beaten back by overwhelming Chinese forces—“hordes,” with its racist overtones, was the favorite term—Stone checked that against U.S. military reports. These indicated that Chinese forces were not large and that contrary to the claims of fighting a valiant rearguard action against huge odds, the Americans frequently lost contact with the enemy. He concluded, correctly, that MacArthur was constructing a pretext to take the war into China, which in turn might well have triggered Soviet intervention, bringing about the Third World War, with MacArthur as the hero of the hour. MacArthur claimed that such escalation was the only way to stop Chinese aggression. In reality, the aggression was a chimera. China was acting with caution and restraint to protect its border and was keen for peace negotiations. As Stone acerbically put it: Few stopped to consider what was really happening in Korea. The fact is that the Chinese Communists had again failed to “aggress” on the scale that some feared and others hoped for.20 If we stand back and attempt to look at “what was really happening,” this made good sense. For Koreans, North and South, the reunification of their country, divided without their permission by the United States in 1945, was a cause worth fighting for. China’s aims were necessarily different and more limited. A unified peninsula under a friendly allied regime would be desirable, but one under a U.S. client would be intolerably dangerous, so a compromise was necessary. Kim Il Sung, and his successors, seemed to have accepted that if the U.S. military was committed to staying in Korea, its huge technological superiority and comparatively inexhaustible resources (including “hordes” of troops from its large population) could not be dislodged. This meant an armistice in the short term and deterrence in the long term. Syngman Rhee wanted the Americans to keep fighting, boycotted the armistice negotiations, and attempted through the POW issue (which was only in its opening stage when Hidden History was written) to scuttle the talks. His successors have taken a different position on relations with the North (and China and Russia), but at the time of publication of this edition the present incumbent, Yoon Suk-yeol, may well become a latter-day Syngman Rhee. For the Truman administration, it all came back to Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. The Truman Doctrine was predicated on “containing Soviet expansion,” of which the Korean War was a key test. This was partly a matter of psychological projection, where the opponent was accused of what the United States was doing. The postwar decades saw a huge expansion of U.S. political and military power. The Truman Doctrine also served to reduce the complexities of the period, and in particular the anticolonial movement, to a simple binary morality tale, with America being the “city upon the hill,” guiding humankind to a better future. But within this Manichean framework, Truman wanted to keep Korea a “limited war” and avoid a showdown with the Soviet Union. If this sounds familiar, it is because the struggles of those times have since then been continually replicated. There have been huge changes in the world, of course, in the seventy years since the first edition, but if Stone came back, he would recognize the pattern. The United States is at war of some sort—cold, proxy, on the cusp of hot—with Russia, China, North Korea, and many other countries beside. The planet is littered with the victims of America’s wars in the intervening period, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya to mention just a few. MacArthur is gone but his spirit has been transmogrified into the military-industrial complex. This behemoth includes not merely the “immense military establishment and a large arms industry” of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s valedictory speech but the huge number of people in America and overseas who benefit from war or the promise of it.21 This includes much of Congress, the think tanks, and media outlets, and extends to individuals such as university professors on defense contracts—all part of the militarization of U.S. society and its reconfiguration as a national security state.22 A crucial, but overlooked, component of this broader concept of the military-industrial complex is NATO—the European arm complementing the Western Pacific alliance stretching from South Korea down to Australasia produced by the Korean War, encircling imperial America’s enemies. NATO was established purportedly to defend Western Europe against “Soviet expansionism,” but when the Soviet Union collapsed it promptly reinvented itself, including going “abroad, in search of monsters to destroy,” attacking Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Libya. Crucially, despite promises, it expanded eastward, threatening the Russian Federation and precipitating the Ukraine War.23 When Lord Ismay roundly rejected a proposal from the Soviet Union in 1954 that it join NATO he revealed that “keeping the Russians out” had a deeper meaning than resisting supposed aggression.24 Nearly a half-century later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was talk of Russia joining NATO. President Vladimir Putin said “Why not?” and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said, “We’re not talking about this right now.”25 A military alliance without an enemy might just wither on the vine, so when there has been a likelihood of peace breaking out—an acerbic comment that Stone needed to use frequently—there is always an intervention to exorcise that danger. The spirit of MacArthur lives on. America’s wars, and quasi-wars, are driven by a mix of geopolitical calculation, domestic politics, and the hunger for personal and corporate profit. There is a pervading tension between desire and fear: the desire to control the world—showing leadership is a favorite euphemism—and the fear of the consequences of war. The struggle between MacArthur and Truman exemplified that, but it constantly manifests itself today. Should the campaign against Russia in Ukraine be limited to a proxy war? Can a limited war over Taiwan stop the rise of China? Elbridge Colby, a war strategist in the Trump administration and author of The Strategy of Denial, apparently thinks so.26 He argues that U.S. allies can be bound by a constructed fear of China to provide active support, that China can be manipulated into “firing the first shot,” and that the resulting war would be limited to the Western Pacific, where the buffer states—Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Taiwan—would bear the costs in casualties and damage. China would suffer a bloody nose that would halt its challenge to U.S. hegemony.27 This is a dangerous fallacy argue others: because of local military superiority China is likely to win such a conflict, which would propel the United States to escalate. A limited war is a fantasy.28 Thus, the issues that Stone worked to decipher seventy years ago are still with us. Much has changed in the meantime, sometimes substantially—the Soviet Union downsizing to the Russian Federation and the rise of China—and sometimes superficially. Decipher is the operative word because today Stone would readily recognize the veil of deception that is used to mask the actions of states and the powerful. Few things are as they seem, or as they are presented. Governments lie to the enemy, but most of all to their own people. The Internet and social media have transformed the information environment in profound ways but the fundamental challenge of penetrating the veil of deception remains. Stone’s pioneering attempt to unearth the hidden history of the Korean War is both a guide to deciphering and an inspiration. Notes 1. Isidor Feinstein Stone called himself “Izzy,” and that’s how he was known to his friends. However, in 1937, when overt antisemitism had not become unfashionable, he published under the anodyne byline I. F. Stone. This is how he appears on the cover of this book, and how he is known to the world. But here we feel it appropriate to revert to Izzy. 2. Joe Lauria and Robert Scheer, “No Such Thing as Dissent in the Age of Big Tech,” Consortium News, May 6, 2022. 3. I. F. Stone, The Hidden History of the Korean War (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2023), 11. 4. I. F. Stone, “New Light on the Korean Mystery: Was the War No Surprise to Chiang Kai-shek?,” appendix to Stone, Hidden History. See also Bruce Cumings’s discussion in his introduction to Hidden History (New York: Little Brown & Co., 1988). 5. Stuart Rees, “The Human Catastrophe in Yemen: What a Contrast to Our Media Focus on Ukraine,” Pearls and Irritations, July 14, 2022, johnmenadue.com. 6. Hidden History, 272. 7. Hidden History, 273. 8. Hidden History, 274. 9. Hidden History, 274. 10. Hidden History, 296. 11. We follow the convention here, as does Stone, of using the Western name order for Rhee, and Asian name order for Chiang. Stone uses the Portuguese name for the island of Taiwan, Formosa, but because the Chinese name is standard we have used it. 12. Hidden History, 362. 13. Henry R. Luce, “American Century,” Life, February 17, 1941, personal.umich.edu/~mlassite; Daniel Bessner, “Empire Burlesque: What Comes after the American Century?,” Harper’s, July 2022. 14. Gar Alperovitz, “Hiroshima: Historians Reassess,” Foreign Policy, no. 99 (Summer 1995): 15–34; Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (New York: Vintage, 1996). 15. Jang-hie Lee, “In Name Only: The United Nations Command and U.S. Unilateralism in Korea,” Korea Policy Institute, July 1, 2020, org. 16. Jack Detsch and Robbie Gramer, “Biden Enlists Asian Partners for Unprecedented Russia Sanctions Plans,” Foreign Policy (blog), February 22, 2022; Axel de Vernou, “No Pivot: The U.S. Can’t Take on China Without Europe,” National Interest, July 18, 2022. 17. John Kifner, “John Service, a Purged ‘China Hand,’ Dies at 89,” New York Times, February 4, 1999. 18. See “Hastings Ismay, 1st Baron Ismay,” Wikipedia. 19. Christoph Bluth, “Ukraine: US Deploys More Troops in Eastern Europe—Here’s How It Compares with the Cold War,” The Conversation, July 1, 2022. 20. Hidden History, 233. 21. Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Farewell Address to the Nation,” National Archives, Washington, D.C., January, 17, 1961, gov. 22. Marcus G. Raskin, “Democracy versus the National Security State,” Law and Contemporary Problems 40, no. 3 (Summer 1976): 189–220; William Hartung and Mandy Smithberger, “How the National Security State Has Come to Dominate a ‘Civilian’ Government,” Common Dreams, January 28, 2021, org. 23. John J. Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin,” Foreign Affairs 93, no. 5 (2014): 77–84, 85–89; Jack F. Matlock Jr., “Ukraine Crisis Should Have Been Avoided,” Consortium News, February 17, 2022. 24. Lord Hastings Ismay, “Russian Admission to NATO,” April 1, 1954, nato.int. 25. George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin, “Press Conference by President Bush and Russian Federation President Putin,” White House, Washington, D.C., June 16, 2001, georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov. 26. Elbridge Colby, The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021). 27. Laurence H. Shoup, “Giving War a Chance,” Monthly Review 74, no. 1 (May 2022): 18–34; Clyde Prestowitz, “As the U.S. and China Continue to Posture, the Key Will Be Taiwan,” Washington Post, October 29, 2021. 28. Graham Allison and Jonah Glick-Unterman, “The Great Military Rivalry: China vs the U.S.,” Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School, December 16, 2021. Tim Beal is a retired New Zealand academic with a special interest in U.S. imperialism, mainly with respect to Asia. He is the author of North Korea: The Struggle Against American Power (Pluto Press, 2005), Crisis in Korea: America, China, and the Risk of War (Pluto Press, 2011) and numerous articles. He has traveled to North and South Korea and is chair of the NZ-DPRK Society. His website, Asian Geopolitics, has more information. Gregory Elich is a Korea Policy Institute board member. He is a contributor to the collection Sanctions as War: Anti-Imperialist Perspectives on American Geo-Economic Strategy (Haymarket Books, 2022), and his work frequently appears on Counterpunch. His website is gregoryelich.org and he can be followed on Twitter at @GregoryElich. This is a reprint of the introduction to the new edition of The Hidden History of the Korean War by I. F. Stone (Monthly Review Press, 2022).

By Tim Shorrock | June 30, 2017 Originally published in the Nation.com South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who swept to power in May elections after promising to defuse tensions with North Korea through diplomatic, economic, and cultural engagement, arrives in Washington on Wednesday, June 28, for his first meetings with Donald Trump and his hawkish national-security team. Many Koreans hope the summit will clear the way for Moon to move ahead with his efforts at peace-making, which he has modeled on the “Sunshine Policy” adopted by South Korea’s last two progressive presidents, Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun. According to a recent poll, nearly 80 percent of South Koreans support the renewal of dialogue with North Korea, which lies just 30 kilometers north of the capital, Seoul. “We expect Moon will be able to ease tensions between North Korea and the United States, which will also lead to improvement of the relationship between the two Koreas,” Gayoon Baek, the international coordinator of People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (PSPD), an influential peace-and-justice organization based in Seoul, told The Nation. Her coalition, she added, is hoping that Moon will “open an unconditional dialogue with North Korea which could lead to denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.” In a sign of what’s to come, President Moon last weekend welcomed a delegation of North Korean athletes to the World Taekwondo Championships in Muju, South Korea. He used the occasion to propose that North and South Korea form a unified team to compete in the 2018 Winter Olympic Games, which will take place in the South Korean city of Pyeongchang. “Sports are a powerful tool to demolish walls and separation,” Moon declared. But the new president, who spoke to The Nation in an exclusive interview two days before his election, is likely to face stiff resistance to some of his ideas in Washington at a particularly volatile time in US-Korean relations. Two weeks ago, Moon drew Trump’s ire when he ordered his government to delay US deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Air Defense system, known as THAAD, until it conducted a full environmental review. THAAD has been the subject of fierce protests from residents in the rural town of Soseong-ri, where the first batteries were set up with the blessing of former president Park Geun-hye, who was impeached in March and later arrested for corruption and abuse of power. On June 24, several thousand demonstrators chanting “No THAAD, No Trump” gathered in downtown Seoul and later circled the US Embassy to demand THAAD’s immediate withdrawal. Moon drew the line on THAAD after learning in late May that the Pentagon had secretly brought in four more launchers for the system into the country, and that his own defense chief—a holdover from the Park government—had failed to inform him of this. (When the system is finally deployed, it will include at least six rocket launchers, “with 48 rockets designed to intercept aerial threats flying over the peninsula,” The Korea Herald has reported.) “The failure to provide critical information regarding South Korea’s security rightly incensed Moon, and ensured he will clean house,” Scott Snyder, the director of the Program on US-Korea Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote after the incident. He added that the delay was inevitable given Moon’s “longstanding criticisms that the previous administration had failed to manage the THAAD decision and deployment in a transparent manner.” But the deep gap between Moon’s government and the United States on this issue was thrust into relief when Senator Dick Durbin, a liberal Democrat and the minority whip in the Senate, met with Moon in early June and defended the Pentagon. “It isn’t that we were sneaking in to put [THAAD] in place,” he told Korean reporters. “I don’t think there has been any effort by the U.S. in any way to mislead the Koreans about what we are proposing.” Meanwhile, on the eve of Moon’s visit, his foreign minister, Kang Kyung-wha, assured Washington that the THAAD review doesn’t mean the US deployment will be canceled altogether. “My government has no intention to basically reverse the commitments made in the spirit of the ROK-US alliance,” she said in a conciliatory address in Seoul. Moon and Trump, she added, “see eye to eye on North Korea nuclear and missile issues.” The discussions won’t be easy, however. Last week, US officials were seething over North Korea’s treatment of an American tourist, Otto Warmbier, the Virginia college student who was imprisoned for 17 months by the Kim Jong-un government and suddenly returned to the United States in mid-June in a coma. He died a few days later, sparking emotional denunciations from the Trump administration and Congress, which in response may soon pass an outright ban on US citizen visits to North Korea. “North Korea has to be held accountable,” Representative Rob Portman, the Ohio Republican, promised CNN after Warmbier’s funeral last Friday. “There will be more of that later.” Christopher Hill, a former high-ranking diplomat who led the US delegation to the six-party talks with North Korea from 2005 to 2009, took to The New York Times to oppose further visits by Americans. “Given the danger to United States citizens in the country, it is time to take the unusual step of imposing a ban,” he said. North Korea, according to the Associated Press, was aware of Warmbier’s condition a year ago and failed to relay the information to the US government during months of sporadic negotiations about him and three other Americans being held by the North. But while the student’s doctors dismissed North Korean claims that his coma was induced when he contracted botulism and then took a sleeping pill, they did not find any evidence of brutalization or torture. “When asked whether [the brain damage] could be the result of beating or other violence while in prison, [doctors] said that Warmbier did not show any obvious indications of trauma, nor evidence of either acute or healing fractures,” The Washington Post reported. The mystery of how Warmbier got his brain injury may not be easily solved. After his death, his family asked that no autopsy be performed. “No conclusions about the cause and manner of Mr. Warmbier’s death have been drawn at this time,” the Warmbier family’s medical examiner in Ohio said afterward. In an official statement on June 23, North Korea’s foreign ministry denied any mistreatment, saying that “we provided [Warmbier] with medical treatments and care with all sincerity on a humanitarian basis until his return to the U.S., considering that his health got worse.” Bill Richardson, the former New Mexico governor who has helped get several prisoners released from North Korea, told NPR that Warmbier was probably the victim of an interrogation that went wrong. “It affected his brain [and] he then went into a coma,” he said. “I don’t think they’re foolish enough to engage and torture a 21-year-old boy who just stole a political banner.” In any case, US activist groups seeking to end the standoff through dialogue and engagement expressed hope that Congress would not ban US citizens from visiting North Korea. “While we do not know the full account of what happened during his imprisonment in North Korea, we believe Otto should not have been detained—nor lost his life,” Women Cross DMZ, the women’s peace group that visited North and South Korea in 2015, declared. “Rather than use Otto’s case to continue a policy that further cuts off communication, we call for improved channels of dialogue between North Korea and the United States.” That idea has currency in Washington. On Monday, at the same Seoul forum where the foreign minister spoke, James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, proposed that the United States and North Korea establish interest sections in each other’s capitals to “help prevent miscalculations stemming from a lack of communication” and establish conditions for direct negotiations, according to The Korea Herald. Yet even as President Moon was expressing sorrow and anger over Warmbier’s death, Moon and his foreign-policy advisers were portrayed by the US media as undercutting American policy. The coverage was epitomized by a visit to Seoul by CBS reporter Norah O’Donnell, who spent two years of her youth living with her Army family at Yongsan, the sprawling headquarters of the US military command in South Korea. In a televised interview with Moon that received front-page coverage in South Korea, O’Donnell offended many Koreans by telling the former human-rights lawyer that it’s “not clear” whether President Trump “will agree to allow you to negotiate with the North Koreans without any preconditions.” Moon replied politely. “I have never mentioned a dialogue with no preconditions whatsoever,” he informed O’Donnell. “I believe that first we must vie for a freeze of North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. And then, as a second phase, try to achieve the complete dismantlement of North Korea’s nuclear program. And I believe there are voices supporting such a step-by-step approach even within the United States.” He was referring to recent statements from former officials such as William Perry, who negotiated directly with North Korea in the 1990s as President Clinton’s defense secretary. Two weeks ago, Perry made several appearances in Washington, where he said a North Korean freeze of its missile tests, combined with a reduction in US-South Korean military exercises, were ideas “worth considering” as a way to restart negotiations with the North. He also told a seminar on North Korea sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee and the Korea Peace Network that the United States should respect the Moon government’s wishes to remove THAAD, arguing that the system was of “little use” in defending against North Korean missile attacks. Even the RAND Corporation, long known for its hawkish stance on Korea, recently endorsed the idea of negotiating a peace treaty with North Korea to end the state of war. Clapper backs the idea as well. “At least engaging in discussions leading to a peace treaty would relieve [North Korea’s] fear of attack, and also deflate one of their major assertions they use to instill fear among their people to justify their grotesque commitment of resources to their military,” he said on Monday. Taking note of the shifting tone in Washington, The New York Times’s David Sanger reported on June 21 that the Trump administration “has come under growing pressure” to open negotiations on a temporary freeze of North Korean missile tests in exchange for reductions in US military exercises on the peninsula. But President Moon was clearly rattled by O’Donnell’s audacious assumption that he needed permission from President Trump to talk to the North. “Resumption of dialogue with North Korea may need to be pursued in close cooperation and consultation with the United States, but South Korea does not need to be allowed by the U.S. to do so,” Moon’s chief spokesman told Yonhap News, the country’s official news agency, within hours of his CBS interview. The public should expect similar fireworks during this week’s summit, predicted Christine Ahn, the founder and spokesperson for Women Cross DMZ. She recalled the disastrous 2001 meeting between the late Korean president Kim Dae-jung and former President George W. Bush, when she said Bush “humiliated” Kim by publicly rejecting his policies of engagement. “Like Emmanuel Macron [France’s new president], Moon should be prepared to push back,” she said. *Tim Shorrock is the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. He was raised in Japan and South Korea and has been covering the intersection of national security and capitalism since the late 1970s. A Korea Policy Institute advisor, his writings on Korea have appeared in the Daily Beast, The Progressive, The Nation, as well #KoreaPeace #THAAD #MoonJaein #TimShorrock #NorthKorea

By Haeyoung Kim | February 1, 2024 | Also published in Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus On August 25, 2023, Haeyoung Kim of the Korea Policy Institute (KPI) spoke with Bruce Cumings, Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he was the Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of History from 1987 until his retirement in 2022. During his long career as a historian, author, and teacher, Bruce Cumings has produced path-breaking studies on the Korean War, the Cold War, and US relations with East Asia. His award-winning, magisterial two-volume study, The Origins of the Korean War (1981 and 1990), challenges conventional narratives about the Korean War, and fundamentally transformed our understanding of the region’s complex and multifaceted history. Some of his other books include Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History, Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American-East Asian Relations, North Korea: Another Country, and The Korean War. His writings have also appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New Left Review, and the London Review of Books. Extending beyond the confines of the academe, his scholarship continues to resonate and brings historical insights to bear on contemporary dynamics in East Asia. With Kim, Cumings discussed the region’s current geopolitical landscape, prospects for U.S.-Korea relations, and reflected upon intellectual interventions made over the course of his career. Kim: Can you reflect upon the Camp David Summit that took place on August 18, 2023, where President Joe Biden hosted South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at the presidential retreat in Maryland? How can we make sense of this trilateral meeting in the context of, what some have characterized as, an emerging new Cold War? South Korea's President Yoon has actively joined the US and Japan in their Indo-Pacific strategy to contain China; North Korea recently invited Chinese and Russian delegations to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Armistice agreement. The Korean Peninsula, of course, is a place where the Cold War never ended. How do these new and renewed alignments relate to previous Cold War alignments? What are your thoughts about the current global order and its connection to a Cold War, whether previous or new? Cumings: If this realignment were fixed and even permanent, it would go back to the 1950s when South Korea, Japan, and United States were facing Russia, China and North Korea, which of course resulted in the Korean War. That’s not at all what I think is happening today. First of all, the South Korean and Japanese decisions to do this are really dependent on who is the incumbent in Seoul and Tokyo. President Yoon is distinguishing himself, I think, by becoming a kind of lacky of, first of all, Biden and secondly, Kishida. He is one of the more extreme right-wing presidents we've had in South Korea. Even though Korean public opinion now doesn't really support what he's doing, there isn’t anything important happening right now—no big issue at the moment, but if one comes up, I can see public opinion turning against Yoon pretty quickly. And, Kishida is a weak prime minister compared to his predecessor Abe Shinzo. But even Abe faced a lot of criticism for his Cold War-like moves with the United States, expanding defense spending, doing joint military exercises that could easily be related to a possible war over Taiwan. So, I think this is a realignment in a modest way. In the case of North Korea, they have every reason to cozy up to China and Russia because the US has the worst sanctions in the world slapped on them, and the US consistently threatens North Korea with nuclear weapons by flying B-1 bombers near their waters and also sending a nuclear-powered submarine to Busan last month. The other interest North Korea has, of course, is that China and Russia are not enforcing sanctions the way they used to. If you remember back around 2014 and 2015, China and North Korea were quite at odds. China was enforcing sanctions on North Korea and seemed to be aligned with American policy toward North Korea—without ever saying that, of course. So, this realignment actually serves North Korea's interests, at least in the short-term. I don't think it's going to last very long, because they know that Russia is not the wave of the future. People have been comparing the recent meeting at Camp David to the Camp David Accords that brought Israel and Egypt together under Jimmy Carter. That's a farce. All this gathering amounted to was a meeting and a commitment to consult. Anybody who works in government or diplomacy knows that that’s a euphemism for being able to back out of things if you don't like what's going on. They already consult anyway. The meeting did enhance the global position of South Korea and Japan. I saw a reference in the New York Times to the two “powers” coming to Camp David. Ten years ago, nobody would have called South Korea a power, but South Korea is doing very well. Its importance in the world is really growing, punching above its weight, so to speak. So, I'm sure the Camp David visit enhanced President Yoon’s standing in South Korea. But he barely beat a liberal in the last election and he will be out of office after the next election, because of term limits. Relations between South Korea and Japan are really tenuous. They look good now, but all you have to do is come up with some incident, for example, the Fukushima reactor water being dumped into the Pacific, and you can get really strong demonstrations against Japan. Some historical issue like sexual slavery is also going to deeply exacerbate relations between the two. I think it's somewhat illusory to think that there's some kind of really new relationship between Japan and South Korea, even though the US certainly wants that. The US has wanted that literally since World War II ended. Kim: What about relations between North and South Korea? What room do you see for inter-Korean dialogue? This past July 27 marked the 70th anniversary of the signing of the Korean War Armistice Agreement, and in a 2020 interview with KPI, commemorating the 70th year of the official start of the Korean War, you noted that, “there’s a hard core of career officials in Washington who don’t want summit meetings” with North Korea. At that time, your hopes for the U.S. and North Korea were not particularly high given that the diplomatic overtures in Hanoi between then President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un had fallen apart. Have your thoughts changed in the intervening three years? South Korea’s President Yoon has shown to be in lockstep with Washington. How do you see things unfolding with regard to North and South relations, and U.S.-Korea relations in the coming years? Cumings: I think things have gotten much worse. When President Moon was in office, he had a thorough engagement policy with North Korea and did as much as he could, like Roh Moo-hyun and Kim Dae-jung before him. President Trump seemed to go along with that after fulminating about how he was going to destroy North Korea in the early part of his presidency. As we all know, he then met with Kim Jong Un twice and that provided a kind of umbrella for President Moon to do what he could to engage North Korea. It all collapsed when Trump walked out of the second meeting in Hanoi. It took a lot for Kim Jong Un to come to these meetings. He is basically all powerful, but he still has to worry that he's going to engage in something like this and it's going to blow up in his face politically. And that's what happened in Hanoi when Trump and his entourage just decided they were leaving because North Korea was recalcitrant on giving up its nuclear weapons. They didn't even stay for lunch, which had been laid out I’m sure with great care, and they just walked out. It's a terrible insult in any culture, but especially in Korean culture. It's been downhill since then. As for the people in Washington who don't support engagement with North Korea, they've always been there, except for a few years in the 1990s. After Jimmy Carter intervened in June 1994 to avoid what might have been a nuclear war, meeting with Kim Il Sung and getting Clinton to back off from a plan for a preemptive strike on the plutonium facility in North Korea, within a couple of months the plutonium was frozen and it stayed frozen for eight years until 2002. That was a great victory. North Korea didn't have any uranium or plutonium with which to make a bomb during that period. By 1998, when Kim Dae-jung came in as president of South Korea, the momentum for engagement really doubled and tripled. Pretty soon you had the two Kims meeting, Kim Jong-il and Kim Dae-jung, in June 2000. Kim Dae-jung was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his “sunshine policy” towards North Korea. The US was at the time on the verge of buying out North Korea's missiles, too. This gets no attention: I wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times with Meredith Woo calling attention to it in 2006 and I got not one single email or anything about it. If you look at the New York Times on March 6th, 2001, Michael Gordon has a very detailed two-page analysis of the rupture of the missile deal by George W. Bush. I was at Stanford for a year at an institute and so I happened to have lunch that day with William Perry, who was a big part of the engagement with North Korea, especially in 1998 and 1999. I have great respect for Mr. Perry who has really done all he can to try and engage with North Korea and keep North Korea from having nuclear weapons—and from a nuclear war on the peninsula. He told me that everything in Michael Gordon’s article was true and that the Bush administration just destroyed that agreement, with John Bolton in the lead. That happened in 2003. Ever since, North Korea has been building up a very formidable nuclear and ICBM arsenal, and every US president, including liberals like Obama, has sent B-1 bombers to scare North Korea about dropping nuclear weapons on them. As I understand it, the American war plan has about 80 or 90 targets in North Korea to hit with nuclear weapons. If there's a war that's called genocide, it's a holocaust. Anybody sitting in Pyongyang knowing this will want the only deterrent that there is for nuclear weapons, which is your own nuclear weapons. Kurt Campbell, who is the leading Asia advisor to Biden, and Matthew Pottinger, who was in the Trump administration, are both hardliners, even though Kurt Campbell works for Democrats. It’s because the Democrats gave him his first job. If the Republicans had given him his first job, he'd be in a Republican administration. He came to the University of Chicago when he was out of office a number of years ago at the invitation of John Mearsheimer. There was a huge turnout, and I was sitting in the back as I got there late. In the course of his lecture, he said if there's a new war in Korea, there will be “a magnificent symphony of death in the valleys of North Korea.” I just sat there steaming. I was so angry that I couldn’t ask a question or counter him. Few Americans realize that we already had that in the Korean War. We had that magnificent symphony of death of maybe 3 million people in the North alone. Then, during the Trump administration, a friend of mine asked Matthew Pottinger at some meeting why the US wasn’t engaging North Korea. He said, you have to understand that in secret meetings among the top leadership, the North still talks about invading the South and taking it over. I thought to myself, here's what happens when a person with no experience comes into an important office in the State Department and says something that could have been said literally since 1946. General John R. Hodge during the American occupation in March 1946 warned about the possibility of a North Korean invasion. If you have the idea that all the North Koreans really want is to find a way to take over the South militarily, then of course engagement goes out the window. So, I don't think there's going to be any progress during the Biden administration. Maybe in a second Biden administration there could be some different people. Biden also won't have to run for office again. Maybe like Bill Clinton's second administration, we can look for some breakthroughs in our policy toward North Korea. I doubt it. Kim: Your critique of US policy toward the Korean peninsula has been charged with being too sympathetic to the North Korean regime. Your work has also been banned in South Korea. Volume 1 of your Korean War study was first translated and published in Korea in 1986, five years after it was released in the U.S., and then quickly banned by the Chun Doo-hwan military regime for being anti-American and anti-Korean. In regard to the Korean peninsula, why does critiquing the U.S. seem to be bound up with accusations of being a North Korean sympathizer? How can that be avoided? Your book North Korea: Another Country was quite critical of the regime, and yet it was still criticized for being anti-US and pro-North. What does that say about the state of US discourse about the two Koreas? Cumings: In the case of my first volume being translated in a pirated edition in South Korea, that was at a time when Chun Doo-hwan was the most unpopular president in Korean history, after Kwangju. It was a feather in my cap to be blacklisted, somewhat like Nixon's enemies list back in the early seventies. I was against the Chun dictatorship, but being blacklisted didn't affect me at all. I think it did, of course, affect Koreans who may have picked up the book and read it because it was forbidden. Maybe the authorities got hold of them. I don't know, but it certainly could have happened. At that time in the mid-eighties, I was called by Chun’s people ch’inbuk (pro-North Korean), panhan (anti-Korean), and panmi (anti-American)—which I always thought was kind of funny because I'm as American as apple pie. My family goes back to 1630. If you're living in America any much before that, you're a Native American. Being anti-Korean is ridiculous. They even put out the line in the mid-eighties that I said the South started the Korean War, and I never even wrote about the outbreak of the Korean War by the mid-eighties. My book that dealt with that didn't come out until 1990. What young people need to understand is that they will say anything about you just to warn people away from your work. What is so ironic about it is, particularly when you have a very unpopular figure like Chun, it just makes people want to read the book. Book banning just enhances the sales of books. When I was in college, D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned, yet we got hold of it and read it voraciously, then a few years later it was published in the US and not banned. It's just a losing proposition to ban books unless you do it across the board time and again, permanently, like North Korea or China under Xi Jinping. As for being pro-North, I have a very deep abiding belief that as an American, I am tangentially or indirectly responsible for the division of Korea, which was done solely by three Americans on August 10th and 11th 1945, 24 hours after Nagasaki was obliterated. I don't ever want to contribute to the division between North and South, so I’ve tried to be as objective as I can in using primary materials to look at the record of South Korea and North Korea and the US. Many of your readers may not know that we've had North Korean primary documents in a captured archive from the Korean War since 1977, when they were declassified. I just don't want to contribute anymore to the division and the killing in Korea. The second thing is that I learned not to read criticism of my work except for a handful of people whose views I respect. As for the others, I don't care what they think if they haven’t done the research and can't refute my arguments. Labeling people is a way to tell everyone that you can't refute the person's arguments, so you label. It's a way of not being able to deal with the truth. We used to dismiss this as an ad hominem argument, but American discourse is so debased these days that I haven’t seen that phrase in a long time, and most Americans probably don’t know what it means; we have a former president who spends most of his time engaging in ad hominem attacks. The other much more important thing I think is that this country still suffers from the shadow of McCarthyism. You had a three-year period, basically 1950 to 1953, when McCarthy was dominant in the way that Trump is dominant now. Hardly anybody would openly criticize McCarthy even though lots of people had contempt for him. Then in 1954, rather belatedly, the news media started criticizing him, leading to his downfall and his censure by the Senate. Then he drank himself to death and died in 1957. But, the shadow of McCarthyism comes down to the present. I remember when I was protesting the Vietnam War, one of my professors told me that if you people, you students, keep doing this, you're going to rouse up the right wing like in the early fifties. I can perfectly understand what he was saying, even though a completely different era had come to pass where radicals were debating with liberals and nobody was paying any attention to conservatives like, say, Barry Goldwater, in the late sixties. I never complained about my career because I've been very happy and very fortunate to teach at one of the great universities in the world, but I am constantly sniped at by people who ought to know better, accusing me of this, that and the other. It is just a form of McCarthyism. I don't ever get that at the University of Chicago, having taught there since 1987. Nobody ever asked me about my politics in Chicago. The first thing people wanted to talk about at the University of Washington, where I spent 10 years, was my politics or what they thought was my politics. Washington was the only university to have three faculty testify against Asia scholar Owen Lattimore in the McCarthy inquisition, insinuating that he was a communist; most faculty elsewhere who testified did so in support of Lattimore. The influence of those three people was still strong when I arrived at the University of Washington in 1977. It's a fascinating and daunting story. The point is that McCarthyism was still alive and well at this university. Kim: Speaking of the academe’s connection to Washington, you have written about the ways in which area studies programs in the US have been complicit with the National Security state. In your 1997 piece, “Boundary Displacement: Area Studies and International Studies During and After the Cold War” in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, you observe how Cold War dynamics shaped particular fields by determining what was important to study and how funding streams in the US were directed. If you could, how would you update this piece for the current moment? In what ways does the relationship between the government and academy persist to this day? Cumings: This particular issue is both important and very involved. That article came out, as you said, in 1997. After September 11th, I think the CIA branched out with enormous funding into academe in ways that might have surpassed the very cozy relations the CIA had with academe in the fifties and sixties. In another article, I made the point that anthropology and psychology as disciplines were particularly implicated by CIA involvement after 9/11. With anthropologists, you got a general condemnation of CIA money going into anthropology even though there was a tremendous official interest in understanding the myriad ethnic groups in the Middle East—Kurds, Yazidis, Iraqis, Iranians. The anthropologists fought back at their national meetings. Psychology was much worse. Two psychologists who were not at all prominent scholars were employed at Guantanamo to tutor American torturers on how to waterboard detainees—those who were gathered up in a war who have no rights under any international convention and are sitting in Guantanamo. One of the most notable cases, I think, was where a detainee was water boarded 160 times. There was just an article in the New York Times last week about another guy who was waterboarded many times. There were secret torture sites around the world, so-called black sites. Dick Cheney, then vice president, had said right after 9/11 that we need to go to the “dark side.” And there was a debate in this country about whether torture is worth anything. Now the US faces people who have been there for upwards of 20 years that they can't bring to trial even in a military court because whatever confessions they've made happened under torture of various kinds. They were even consulting Chinese Communist manuals from the Korean War on how to use sleeplessness to get people to talk. I've read a lot about this because my father and my aunt were in the CIA—my aunt, her whole career, my father, for one year in the fifties. From the time I was in third grade, when my father was at Langley, I was very interested in all of this and the same kinds of things that my father was involved with, which were so-called enhanced interrogation techniques back in 1950 and 1951. They were directed against Nazi spies who went over to the US after World War II and were being infiltrated into Eastern Europe and were being rolled up by the Soviets all the time. And they were trying to figure out who was a real agent of the United States among these Germans and who was a double agent. They subjected them to beatings and sleeplessness and various kinds of tortures. My father quit. He never told me why he quit until he was nearly on his deathbed, but the reason was he just couldn't stomach what was going on. He was a Germanics PhD from the University of Chicago and fluent in German, and he just couldn't countenance going to these safe houses around Maryland and Virginia to see these would-be spies tortured. After 9/11 there was a lot of turmoil in the psychology discipline about people doing intelligence work, especially these two guys. But they were paid something like $80 million, which is what most academics in the psychology discipline wouldn't make in their entire lifetimes. It wouldn't even come close. My impression is that also in political science, there were many, many people brought in to consult about how to deal with terrorism. I don't know of any at the University of Chicago. I've been fortunate to teach at a university where I think the vast majority of faculty would not secretly work for the CIA. I got my PhD at Columbia in the late sixties--early seventies, and I would say almost a dozen of the professors I knew there in various disciplines were going down to Langley and consulting with the CIA. So, it's always been an interest of mine. I haven't done any primary research on the question since 9/11, but I've read a lot in the New York Times and other journals and newspapers that have covered this very important and controversial issue. It's my impression that the CIA did the same thing they did during the Korean War. They just plowed a lot of money into academia. Kim: As a student at Columbia, you were an anti-war activist. You have also been a supporter of democratization in South Korea and of Korea peace. Most recently, you gave the keynote address at the Korea Peace Action events in DC, commemorating the 70th anniversary of the signing of the Korean War Armistice Agreement. Where do you see Korea peace and reunification efforts going? What do you think would be most effective and necessary for the movement to do? Cumings: I think organizations like Women Cross DMZ have been a major breakthrough in what citizens can do to try to promote a new Korea policy in the US. That was a very courageous and notable event when they actually did cross the DMZ from North Korea to South Korea. It's important that the North Koreans let them do this. It signaled an opening to engagement. As an anti-war protestor in a situation where nobody knew my name, let alone my views, I would just be going from Columbia down Broadway with a few thousand people marching to Times Square to oppose the war. I was very conscious of how things like that are only valued and only make a difference when they're really voluminous, when masses of people take part. That's what was happening then. That along with the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong basically defeating the US during the Tet Offensive in 1968. You can see from early 1968, the US was going to lose the war, but Nixon prolonged it for five bloody years. It led to protests not just on the elite campuses like Harvard or Chicago or Columbia, but also places like Kent State University, where four students were killed during a rally. This led to strikes on every campus, virtually every campus in the country. The problem with trying to change policy on Korea is that most Americans can't find North Korea on a map. There was a test of this during the Trump administration, and a majority of Americans couldn't locate North Korea. I actually have run into college-educated people who think that Korea is in Southeast Asia rather than Northeast Asia. The level of ignorance is terrible. Even worse is when people have a little bit of knowledge, which almost always means they are castigating North Korea in every possible way. Let’s consider our 78-year history with Korea. Just 78-years ago and a few weeks from now, 25,000 American combat troops marched into South Korea and set up a three-year occupation. They were trying to keep Kim Il Sung and his friends from taking over the whole peninsula. Here we are 78 years later, and Kim's grandson is in total power and he’s got A-bombs and ICBMs. I don't know of a more catastrophic policy failure in recent American history than that one. Just a disaster. I'm not too optimistic about how this is going to be turned around. It certainly won’t happen as long as the US continues to threaten North Korea with nuclear weapons. The point of my talk on the 70th anniversary in Washington, DC was about the Armistice under a nuclear shadow, that the US threatened North Korea with nuclear weapons all during and after the Korean War and installed tactical nuclear weapons in the South in 1958 and didn't take them out until 1991. If you're the leader of North Korea and there are hundreds of bombs just 100 to 200 miles south of Pyongyang—A-bombs—what are you going to do about it? Of course, they're foaming at the mouth to get their own deterrent. I'm sure people who defend American policy toward North Korea would say, well, we've deterred them for 70 years. But, we've deterred them while creating a situation that would have flabbergasted Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles and other leaders who made the armistice in 1953. It would have flabbergasted them that we have a small power that we couldn't defeat with conventional weapons in the fifties and now it's armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. Noam Chomsky says in a recent book that the world faces two world-historical crises right now. One is climate change and the other is nuclear war. What is so terrible about them both is that they both can bring about the extinction of the human race in the world. We've had fires all over the world this summer. Many people don't understand that if there were 80 or 90 nuclear weapons dropped on North Korea plus whatever they could potentially drop, you would have a cloud of debris, fire debris, all kinds of debris up in the atmosphere that would circle the globe and might lead to nuclear winter, blocking the sun so that for a couple of years few crops would be grown in the world. Noam, I think, sees this in terms of the relationship between the US, China and Russia. The same thing could happen with North Korea. So, one has to be very serious about the situation in Korea, which is just super, super dangerous. At the recent event in Washington, Siegfried Hecker participated from Stanford. He's a physicist who has been to North Korea many times. The North Koreans actually showed him their metalized plutonium around 2006 to demonstrate that they had a serious nuclear deterrent. He said at the meeting we're one bad decision away from a nuclear war in Korea, and bad decisions lead to wars all the time, like the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Was that a smart decision? I don't think so. Kim: Complete translations of your two-volume study on the origins of the Korean War have recently been published in Korea. Given that 33 years have passed since their initial publication, this re-release speaks to the tremendous impact your work continues to have and its enduring importance. You note in your work that asking who started the Korean War is not the right question as it undermines how the two Koreas, the US, the Soviet Union and China were all responsible for the war. What are the right questions to ask to move us closer to making progress towards peace on the peninsula? Cumings: Thank you for what you said about the translation, and I want to thank Kim Boem whom I just met last week when he was here with a group to interview me for the Historical Compilation Committee, kuksa p'yŏnch'an wiwŏnhoe. Mr. Kim is a wonderful person and he worked five years on that translation. My old friend, Chung Kyungmo, did the translation into Japanese years ago. I think he and his team worked about 20 years on both volumes. I can't actually think of a compliment that is higher than for these two folks to work so hard on that book. I never expected anything like this, and here it is in my retirement year, so it's a nice present. A lot of liberals, for example, in several articles over the years in the New York Review of Books, paid attention to one chapter of the 33 chapters I wrote in two volumes. They focused on the one called “Who Started the Korean War?” and proceeded to show that they didn't understand what I was talking about. I tried to deconstruct this whole utterly politicized question because if you ask it, the official story in this country is North Korea started the war at Stalin's behest. You can then wrap it up, put a ribbon on it, and that's the story you need to know. What happened in the previous five years while the US was supporting the South? Well, we had a military government for three years and then the US supported the Syngman Rhee government for two more years. Nobody knows that. I mean, even well-informed New York Times journalists that I've talked to over the years were unaware that there was an American occupation of Korea. They know all about the one for Japan and the one in West Germany, but they don't know there was an occupation, let alone what happened during that time. So, when you probe “who started it,” the best thing is to start probing back into the origins. If you take up Clausewitz’s definition of war as an act of violence intended to pursue political means, then the war started on little Jeju Island in April 1948, when the two sides—the two fundamental sides that fought this civil war—the people's committees and leftists, labor unions, women's groups in the south and north, were fighting against a regime that the US set up led by Japanese collaborators. The record is very clear in top secret documents that the US reemployed every pro-Japanese Korean that they thought would do a good job in the forces of order and in the bureaucracy and various other places, but especially in the national police and in the army, which was called a constabulary. It became the South Korean army. The US set up the Constabulary within three months after arriving in Korea, contrary to State Department policy. The anecdote that may perhaps express this best is that a year after the occupation began, in the fall of 1946, two Korean officers who had been in the Japanese military, Park Chung-hee and Kim Jae-gyu, both graduated together as good friends in the second class of the American Military Academy. Think about that, because a few decades later, Kim Jae-gyu, by then head of the KCIA, blew President Park’s brains out in October 1979. When you probe back to the origin of violence, you get Jeju, which opens up a chain of violence through the Yŏsu-Sunch'ŏn Rebellion in 1948, guerrilla war in the next two years, and border fighting, which was very serious all through the summer and fall of 1949. So, you have just an escalation of violence. I remember reading that General William Roberts, the American commander of the military advisory group that we had in Korea in the summer of 1949, informed Washington in a top-secret message that the South Koreans had started more than half of the fighting that whole summer. The first battle in May was also said to have been started by South Korean forces, as was the last in December 1949. I said to myself, anyone looking at this would call this a civil war and know that when North Korea gets ready, North Korea will deal with these people. North Korea had tens of thousands of its soldiers fighting in the Chinese Civil War on the communist side, but they came back in fall of 1949 and 1950 and formed the crack divisions of the Korean People’s Army. So, I consider it just pure politics when someone says this war has a single author, which is the communist side. It's purely political. After my books were published, so much more information came out from Suh Dae-sook and other scholars about the 1930s, and I realized that Kim Il Sung was a much more important guerrilla than I had thought. I always knew he was important, and I said so in my books, but Suh Dae-sook’s biography says something like Kim fought all through 1939 and 1940 with 40,000 Japanese forces trying to find him and bearing down on him. I think the Korean War is one of the most mystified foreign experiences that the US has been involved with. One reason is that it's called a forgotten war, so people don't pay attention. It was in fact a never-known war, and scholars and other authors have not gone into it even remotely like the Vietnam War. David Halberstam wrote a book that I didn't much like on the Korean War. When he interviewed me, he told me that he walked into a library in Florida and they had 80 books on the Korean War and over a thousand on the Vietnam War. Of those 80 books, I'm thinking, geez, I can't even count that high myself. Kim: Throughout your long career as a historian, author, and teacher, you have fundamentally changed the narrative about the Korean War, the Cold War, and US relations with East Asia. Your work has also been foundational to many subsequent studies in the field of Korean history, international history, and the political economy. Can you speak about the state of these fields when you started your career and their evolutions? Have political conditions in the US and East Asia influenced the direction of scholarship being produced? What are your thoughts about the future of these fields? Cumings: When I started out, there were about five major Korea programs, and not big ones, at Harvard, Columbia, Berkeley, Washington and Hawaii. UCLA had not gotten started, even though they have a very big Korea program now. The scholars involved in these programs were almost all army veterans from the 1950s. If you take the doyen of the field, as he saw himself—Edward Wagner at Harvard—studying Korea meant studying pre-20th century Korea, learning classical Chinese, and doing genealogies and the kinds of things he did. The problem with that is South Korean historians couldn't study the 20th century. Every decade was too controversial, so there was hardly any scholarship on the modern period. If you look at Han Woo-keun and other authors, historians who published their books that were translated into English, they have about 10 pages on the 20th century and it's all avoiding the most important problems. You would go to jail if you actually did serious primary research on the 20th century in South Korea under the dictators. You had a field that didn't exist, namely modern Korean history. I dimly recognized that. I studied classical Chinese at Columbia, but I didn’t need it to work on the 20th century and therefore forgot it about six months after I got out of that class. Focusing on pre-20th century Korea was, consciously or not, a way of avoiding the politics of divided Korea among other things. You didn't have to think about or write about divided Korea. An exception was Frank Baldwin, who was my advisor at Columbia, who was an historian of modern Korea. He knew Japanese and Korean and did an excellent dissertation on the March 1st independence movement. He and I became good friends, and we used to talk all the time about what was needed in the field. Also, this was a white man's field. There were a few Korean-Americans like Suh Dae-sook or Chong-Sik Lee. Lee was at Penn and Suh was at the University of Houston when I was getting to know him. And then he went to Hawaii to set up their Korea program in a big way. They were generally ignored. Lee collaborated with Robert Scalapino, who was probably the most right-wing East Asian political scientist in my experience. So, there just wasn't much there. When I think about people who came to understand the Korean War very quickly, the first one is I.F. Stone with his Hidden History of the Korean War, a very courageous book. It took him 33 publishers to find one that would put his book out in 1952. That was Monthly Review Press, which is an independent Marxist press in New York. The other is Reginald Thompson's Cry Korea, also I think a 1952 book. Thompson had been all over the world. He had been a war correspondent during World War I, and he was British, so he didn't function under censorship the way the American reporters did. Cry Korea is a book that will actually make you cry, because it's such a devastating account of the utter violence of that war on the ground. Napalm splashed everywhere. Villages totally obliterated all over the place and virulent racism on the part of American troops toward Koreans. I remember he quoted one soldier saying, “Today, I'm going to get me a gook.” And they shot grandfathers and little kids just to get a gook. It made my skin crawl when I read that book, and it was banned in South Korea for a long time. It was called an anti-Korea book, too. When you read accounts like this, you see this was a people's war, like Vietnam, that was completely shrouded and buried in a Cold War narrative that the US was able to maintain at the height of its global power. Then you have McCarthyism at home, so anybody who wanted seriously to learn about the war could quickly get into trouble and lose their job, which happened a lot. A professor at Yale, Samuel Moyn, was quoted recently as saying that the Korean War was the most brutal war of the 20th century, and I would say it certainly was one of the most brutal wars. When you look at what the US did in Vietnam, it's hard to say which was more brutal. But, we lost both of them. Korea was a stalemate, but let's face it—an army that defeated Germany and Japan with a lot of Soviet help in Europe could not defeat peasant armies from North Korea and China in the fifties. Then we out and lost the Vietnam War. We've had five major wars since 1945, and we only won one of them—the Persian Gulf War—and that was a pyrrhic victory because people like Cheney wanted to take that containment victory and extend it to rolling back the Saddam Hussein regime. Americans believe deeply in the efficacy of military force. You can see that in levels of gun ownership, which are higher by far than any place in the world, and yet military force doesn't usually work and hasn't worked with these five major wars. I became interested in political economy at Swarthmore College, which was my first job. James Kurth, one of my oldest friends, introduced me to Karl Polanyi's book called The Great Transformation. At the same time, Franz Schurmann brought out the Logic of World Power in 1974, which I read at Swarthmore in 1975. Immanuel Wallerstein's book on world-systems theory came out at about the same time. These were classic, brilliant works in political economy. Meanwhile, suddenly, South Korea was on everybody's lips as a wunderkind of economic development by the mid-seventies. So, in the eighties, I wrote a lot about Korean development. Polanyi and Wallerstein also informed the theoretical basis of both Volume One and Volume Two of my Origins. Wallerstein talked about core countries, peripheral countries, and semi-peripheral countries with the semi-periphery playing the role of a kind of middle class—an arena for upward and downward mobility. If you take Japan in the colonial period and Korea and Manchuria, there was a classic Wallersteinian tripartite situation where Manchuria was spewing out soybeans to the world market and the Japanese were exporting perhaps 30% of the Korean rice crop. Koreans substituted poor Manchurian grains, like millet, which is actually quite nutritious, for white rice. Then the textile industry got going in Korea with Kim Seong-su, as very wealthy landlords moved into industry using second-rate Japanese technology in Korea, which would be profitable because you have much lower labor costs in Korea than in Japan. In the mid-thirties, Japan was the leading textile manufacturer in the world. They had the highest technology in textiles, and the British were going crazy complaining about it in the thirties. All of this economic activity led to about 10% growth per year in Korea, Japan, and Manchuria in the late 1930s. Japan industrialized itself out of the depression. This led to tremendous social changes and population changes within Korea because jobs were open for Koreans in factories and mines in North Korea, Manchuria, and Japan. You end up with a million Koreans in Manchuria in 1945 and more than 2 million in Japan. They're all essentially peasants who were being turned into workers of one sort or another, and they're coming mostly out of South Korea because North Korea didn't have a lot of rice agriculture with a surplus of farmers. So, 11% of the population in Korea was outside the country in 1945 and 9% was in another province, which is very important because the provincial population had been very stable for centuries in Korea. So, you have 20% either in another province or out of the country, all mobilized directly or indirectly by the economic activity, the military, or other activities of the Japanese. We're talking about people from maybe the age of 16 to 60, so it’s an even bigger slice of the population. When it was over, they all came back. One of the things I was able to try and do in my first volume was to see where those returning populations led to rebellion, people's committees, left-wing activity, labor unions, or ousting of officials who had sent them to Manchuria. All of that is political economy. I have to say South Korea has really done so well in educating its population to a high level and in finding ways to expand into the world economy amidst very sharp competition, and to overcome backwardness over the period of about 60 years so that South Korea is a major industrial country. It's a highly educated country. Its culture is now spreading all around the world. We have roughly 2 million Korean Americans who are entering all walks of life and professions in the US and making a huge economic and cultural, and I think eventually political, impact. That's an answer to the previous question, which is that something like Women Cross DMZ is only possible by having a large number of college-educated Korean American women in this country who would form an organization like that. Korea had no constituency in the US at the time of the Korean War. There were about 10,000 Koreans in the US then, mostly originating in the first decade of the 20th century, coming as farm laborers mostly. They did well economically, but they were too small to be noticed. Apart from some liberal and leftist Koreans in the Los Angeles area, there was no constituency of Koreans who would take a different view than the US government on the Korean War. Now we have a major constituency of Korean Americans, and I think it's increasingly one that the government here has to pay attention to. I don't think they do, but they should. Kim: To close, can you speak about how the enduring legacies and impacts of the Korean War have shaped both the US and East Asia, complicating efforts to bring about a definitive end to the state of war on the Korean Peninsula? Can you also share with our readers how you imagine what lies ahead for the Korean Peninsula? Cumings: At the 70th anniversary of the Armistice, Korea stands as one of the best examples in world history, of how easy it is to get into a war, and how desperately hard it is to get out. Most Americans, including many in the government, don’t realize that they are trapped in matters of their own doing. In the years after World War II, the US bestrode the world like a colossus. Without giving it much thought, Americans divided Korea in 1945 and China in 1950. Most Americans are completely unaware that Taiwan exists apart from mainland China because Truman inserted the 7th fleet in the Taiwan strait right after the Korean war broke out. Yet every Chinese is aware of this, and the situation still could yield another war. John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state under Eisenhower, divided Vietnam in the mid 50s. How did that work out? To many people, history often seems like a muddle of kings and queens, dates that are hard to remember, and events that seem to occur randomly. But it has its recurrent tendencies with predictable results. American planners in the 1940s could not conceive of the power of aroused colonial peoples. At the most fundamental level, that was their mistake. It led to the Korean War, the victory of Mao’s forces in China, and the Vietnam War. After the Berlin wall fell and Soviet communism disappeared, there has been no break in Asian communism, in spite of endless speculation about China breaking apart or North Korea’s “collapse.” About the future of the Korean peninsula, if you had asked me this when the year 2000 came to an end, I would’ve been quite optimistic about peace in Korea and the coexistence of the South and North, with the latter being under some kind of provincial autonomy for a number of years, as Kim Dae-jung had outlined, pending eventual reunification. Those hopes were dashed by an ignorant former alcoholic with not one important credential in foreign affairs, when the Supreme Court put him into the Oval Office. George W. Bush was then led around by the nose by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, resulting in the catastrophic and illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. George F. Kennan wrote in his diary that this was one of the two worst foreign policy decisions since 1945: the other was the American invasion of North Korea in October 1950. American diplomacy with North Korea in the late 1990s fully demonstrated the virtues of engagement, and the North’s readiness to reconcile with the South and the US. But this careful effort was destroyed, and destroyed quite purposely and consciously, by the Bush administration. Ultimately, this may turn out to be an even worse outcome than the debacle in Iraq, because North Korea—whose plutonium was completely frozen and under UN observation when Bush came into power—now has the capability to wreak havoc on a world scale. The United States is fundamentally a provincial country, which had global leadership thrust upon it by the victory in World War II. The result is that foreign policy has been mostly an autonomous affair, divorced from the democratic principles of this country. Popular participation in foreign affairs did not really exist until the opposition to the Vietnam War. That was a courageous, patriotic movement—although I don’t think most Americans see it that way. As we have seen, even today most Americans are ready to fight North Korea at the drop of a hat, as soon as they can find it on a map. It would also be child’s play to whip up hysteria in the event of a military conflict with China. After 1945 the US had three fundamental goals. One was to reestablish the industrial powers, which was complete by about 1970 and, by fulfilling its stated goals, was a major success. The second goal was to contain the Soviet Union short of a war, until, to everyone’s surprise, it disappeared in 1991—not with a bang but a whimper. The third goal was to mold, contain, or defeat anticolonial nationalism. It was almost a perfect failure. The Vietnamese people put a definitive end to American intervention in 1975 after a 30 years’ war. But here we still are, 70 years later, with two unreconciled enemies—North Korea and China, both immeasurably stronger than they were in 1953.

By Hyun Lee |  May 8, 2017 Originally published in Zoom in Korea War threats before a major political election may have been effective in the past in swinging the South Korean electorate to the right, but not this year. The conservative camp is battered and split into two warring parties following the impeachment of former President Park Geun-hye. The general public—its collective consciousness heightened through the mass protests that successfully ousted Park—is no longer rallying behind hawkish candidates who fan public paranoia to garner votes. Barring a last-minute upset, liberal democrat Moon Jae-in will be the next president of South Korea. But does he truly represent the interests of the millions who took to the streets to unseat Park and demand systemic change? And what are the tasks facing the left vis-á-vis the new administration? These are the questions this article will discuss, but first, let’s quickly review the field of candidates. A Brief Run-down of the Candidates Moon Jae-in Front-runner Moon Jae-in, of the main opposition Minjoo Party, is the greatest beneficiary of the mass protests that led to Park Geun-hye’s impeachment. Widespread discontent against Park and the conservative Saenuri party have catapulted Moon to the front of the pack with a significant lead over the other candidates. Moon was Chief of Staff for the late former President Roh Moo-hyun, who served from 2003 to 2008 and continued his predecessor Kim Dae-jung’s “sunshine policy” of engagement and economic cooperation with North Korea. If elected, Moon is expected to reverse South Korea’s policy toward North Korea to one of engagement. He has pledged to reopen the Kaesong Industrial Complex—the joint inter-Korean economic project that was the last remaining hallmark of peaceful North-South engagement before it was shut down by the Park administration in 2016. The question is: if Moon is elected, will the United States be willing to recalibrate its North Korea strategy to allow Moon to lead? And if not, how much will Moon stand up to the United States to chart an independent path? Ahn Cheol-soo The runner-up, according to polls, is Ahn Cheol-soo, who defected from the Minjoo Party to establish the centrist People’s Party in the lead-up to the 2016 general election. His public branding as a successful entrepreneur and political outsider previously made him wildly popular among young people. But his attempt to court the conservative vote in the aftermath of Park’s impeachment has estranged him from his former fans. He promotes not just strengthening South Korea’s historic military alliance with the United States but also expanding it, under the banner of a “comprehensive strategic alliance,” to include closer cooperation in the areas of politics, economy, and culture. Hong Jun-pyo Neck and neck with Ahn is Hong Joon-pyo, the governor of South Gyeongsang Province and the candidate of the Liberty Korea Party, the right-wing faction of the conservative split. Hong has appealed to South Korea’s far right by doubling down on his conservative positions and slinging mud at his liberal opponents. He has said he wants to bring U.S. tactical nuclear weapons to South Korea and has blamed gay people for the spread of HIV/AIDS. Sim Sang-jung Support for Sim Sang-jung of the left-leaning Justice Party climbed to a record 11.4 percent in the week leading up to the election. Disaffected voters disappointed by Ahn Cheol-soo’s rightward shift are turning to Sim whose progressive and principled stance on issues such as LGBT rights appeals to young voters seeking change. After splitting in 2012 from the Unified Progressive Party, which was forcibly dissolved a few years later by Park, the Justice Party has embraced pragmatism over left ideology and rebranded itself as a reformist party to appeal to a broader public. The leaders of the party will likely take official positions in the new liberal democratic administration. Whether the party can consolidate forces on the left to build on the momentum of the mass movement that ousted Park and push for systemic change remains doubtful. Yoo Seong-min Trailing far behind the pack is Yoo Seong-min, who represents the moderate, anti-Park faction of the conservative camp. He once served as Park’s chief of staff when she was a lawmaker in the National Assembly. His open criticism of her policies resulted in their alienation and his exclusion from the Saenuri Party’s nomination process in the 2016 general election. During Park’s political scandal, Yoo left the Saenuri Party to help found the splinter Bareun Party. His strongest base is in the conservative stronghold of Daegu and North Gyeongsang province. The Mass Movement Cannot Rest Park Geun-hye’s historic impeachment, which created the opportunity for the upcoming election, cannot be credited to the political strength or deft maneuvering of the opposition parties. It was the organized power of millions of ordinary people, who rejected Park’s corrupt rule and took to the streets week after week, that pushed the wavering opposition parties into action. That mass movement has virtually handed the presidency to Moon Jae-in. As a liberal democrat, Moon is far better than Park whose authoritarian rule rolled back decades of gains made by the country’s pro-democracy forces. But his party has done little to challenge the previous administration’s labor market reform initiative or block the ongoing deployment of a controversial U.S. missile defense system in Seongju. South Korean progressives note with bitterness that negotiations on the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, which has led to the disastrous privatization of public services, such as healthcare, began when Moon was in the Blue House as the chief of staff for then-President Roh Moo-hyun. Clearly, the mass movement that ousted Park cannot rest after the May 9 snap election if it wants real change. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of this year’s historic election is that while people power created a historic opportunity for change, there is no political party that can consolidate that power and build on its momentum to fight for issues that are important to the broad majority of working people. A decade of conservative rule—from Lee Myung-bak to Park Geun-hye, who jailed many opposition leaders, including Han Sang-gyun, the president of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, and forced the dissolution of the opposition Unified Progressive Party—has battered and fragmented South Korea’s organized left. No matter what the outcome of the May 9 election, the left has a lot of ground to regain. The Rise and Fall of the Democratic Labor Party The South Korean left’s entry into the political arena has its roots in the mass uprisings of 1987, a pivotal year for the country. The decades-long South Korean struggle for democracy culminated in the June people’s uprising of 1987 and finally put an end to a succession of U.S.-backed military dictatorships. The following months of mass labor strikes in industrial manufacturing zones across South Korea laid the groundwork for the eventual formation of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions. And for the first time since the division of Korea in 1945, masses of South Koreans openly called for reconciliation towards peaceful reunification. The formation of the National Council of Student Representatives (Jeondaehyeop) led to South Korean participation in the 13th World Festival of Youth and Students in Pyongyang in 1989 and the historic, defiant crossing of the DMZ by the late Reverend Moon Ik-hwan and then-student activist Lim Su-kyung. That year, paradoxically, also marked the moment that South Korea’s economy, once tightly controlled by an autocratic state, began its transition to a neoliberal market economy modeled after Reagonomics. South Korean political terrain in the wake of 1987 was shaped by a political and economic ruling class that embraced neoliberalism and trampled on the rights of workers in the name of “globalization,” on the one hand, and a new democratic force borne out of militant resistance against the system of national division and capitalist exploitation, on the other. Despite major political differences on questions of strategy, the forces at the helm of the pro-democracy struggle, labor unions, and social movement organizations joined together in 1987 to form the People’s Victory 21, which became the foundation for the establishment of the Democratic Labor Party (DLP) in 2000. The DLP went on to garner 13% of the general vote and gain ten National Assembly seats to become the third largest political party in South Korea in 2004. Its success in 2004 was due in part to a change in election law, which, for the first time, allowed proportional representation. This would not have been possible, however, without disparate political forces reaching beyond their differences to come together in a united front. For a relatively small party, the DLP played a key role in South Korean politics from 2000 to 2008. Through direct democracy, the party kept itself firmly rooted in the struggles of workers, farmers, and the urban poor, who made up the majority of its membership. Its principled and persuasive positions on behalf of politically marginalized sectors forced the established parties to adopt progressive reforms and had the effect of pulling South Korea’s entire political spectrum to the left. Before its forced dissolution in 2014, the DLP’s heir, the Unified Progressive Party was the most vocal opponent of Park Geun-hye’s policies on a range of issues, from privatization of public services to hostility toward North Korea. In the last two decades, South Korea’s political and economic system has shown signs of faltering. The inter-Korean summits between Kim Dae-jung and Kim Jong-il in 2000 and Roh Moo-hyun and Kim Jong-il in 2007 shook the very foundation of South Korea’s decades-old political system based on national division. South Korea’s economy, which once grew rapidly through neoliberal policies that forced its workforce to tighten their belts and endure longer and harsher working conditions, faced persistent crises, and its core, festering with corrupt collusion between the country’s largest conglomerates and the government, has now been laid bare for the entire world to see. The mass candlelight protests of 2008—which brought out tens of thousands to protest the reversal of a U.S. beef import ban as part of South Korea’s free trade negotiations with the United States—and the recent protests to oust Park were the embittered expressions of a populace frustrated with the country’s outdated political and economic system and in search of an alternative. The words to their anthem, sung in unison at every candlelight protest, is article one of the Constitution: “The Republic of Korea is a democratic republic. All state authority shall emanate from the people.” More than mere expressions of discontent over rotten beef or the president’s secret shamanic advisor scandal, the protests raised a fundamental question: the meaning of true sovereignty. The left, unfortunately, has not provided an answer. Friction due to political differences on questions of strategy led to a split in the DLP in 2008 and created deep rifts within the South Korean left. The year 2008 also marked the beginning of a decade of conservative rule, which systematically eroded the gains made by the pro-democracy forces in the previous decades. The Park administration’s transgressions against the people—from its mishandling of the Sewol Tragedy to its backdoor deal with the Japanese government to silence the former “comfort women” who endured sexual slavery by the Japanese imperial army during WWII—are numerous to list. What cannot be disregarded is the incompetence of the existing opposition parties that have failed to stand up to these overt acts of authoritarianism. The undisguised degeneration of South Korean politics and the rightward shift of the opposition parties are a direct result of the marginalization and isolation of the organized left following the DLP’s break-up. Time to Regain Lost Ground The South Korean people, who declared “Basta ya!” and gave Park Geun-hye the boot, are still fighting—in the melon fields of Seongju, by the watery grave at Paengmok Harbor, and on picket lines across the country. Whoever wins the election on May 9, the mass movement that ousted Park needs to build on the momentum of its victory and keep the pressure on in a number of fronts. The most pressing task for the new administration will be to mediate the current crisis between the United States and North Korea. Despite Trump’s declared willingness to sit down with Kim Jong-un, no one—not even China—has proven to be up to the task of brokering such a meeting. That has to be the priority of the incoming South Korean leader. To achieve reconciliation with the North and permanent peace on the peninsula, the South Korean people will need to press the new administration to stand up to the Trump administration and chart an independent path. Demanding the United States end its provocative war exercises in exchange for a freeze of North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests in addition to withdrawing its dangerous missile defense system in Seongju is now more urgent than ever. The fight against the government’s labor market reform initiative—aimed at turning South Korea’s entire workforce into a disposable labor pool and undermining the power of unions—will intensify even with a liberal democrat in the Blue House. Unless the mass movement continues to press the next administration, the corrupt system exposed through Park’s Choi Soon-sil scandal—the cozy back-scratching relationship between South Korea’s largest conglomerates and its political leaders—will remain unchanged. Abolishing the National Security Law—mainly used to punish political opponents, dissolve social organizations and political parties, and suppress progressive voices—is a task that even Moon Jae-in failed to do as Roh Moo-hyun’s chief of staff. It will take an organized fight from the left to overturn the archaic law once and for all. What the movement to impeach Park laid bare is that South Korea’s current political and economic system is no longer sustainable. It also showed clearly that state power, which has been wielded to quash the democratic aspirations of the people, can also be pushed back by their organized power. The fissures in the political system exposed by their struggle are openings for the broader left. But people power does not emerge spontaneously. Only when the people are organized through social movements and have a political party that fights for their interests can they mount effective and sustained resistance to challenge the status quo. A left political party cannot exercise its power in the political arena without the organized social movement of the disenfranchised who make up the party’s base. Likewise, without a political party that can fight for their interests in the political arena, social movements can easily be defeated. A unified political party fighting in tandem with a social movement of the organized masses is essential for systemic change. After May 9, the movement that ousted Park cannot rest, as the South Korean majority seeks, as a matter of survival, a political force that will forge a new path. Creating that force—by building social movements and unifying the left to build political power—should be top on the agenda of everyone on the left. And supporting that effort should be a priority for all those outside Korea who were inspired by the awesome mass protests that toppled Park Geun-hye’s regime. Hyun Lee is a member of the US-Korea Solidarity Committee for Peace and Democracy and a fellow at the Korea Policy Institute. #elections #SouthKorea #NationalSecurityLaw #parkgeunhye #HyunLee

By Jae-Jung Suh | March 12, 2024 | Originally published in Hankyoreh As the Freedom Shield military exercises continue, the North has redirected efforts once used to respond to the drills to instead break ground on factories as part of a campaign to modernize the country and revitalize its economy. South Korea and the US initiated their “Freedom Shield” joint military exercises on March 4. The two sides plan to hold a total of 48 field maneuvers through March 14, which is twice as many as last year. The joint exercises will cover air strikes, tactical live fire, air combat and bombing runs. As part of a multiyear push to revitalize the UN Command, 12 UN member states (including Australia, Canada, France, the UK, Greece and Italy) are taking part in the exercises. But why do South Korea and the US hold large-scale military exercises in March, at the beginning of spring? Since the two countries launched their “Team Spirit” joint exercises in 1976, they’ve been holding large-scale military exercises nearly every March, notwithstanding some changes in nomenclature. Granting that the exercises have become a yearly occurrence, why do they have to be held in the spring? Why South Korea and the US hold military exercises in March North Korea has always reacted testily to these joint military exercises. It has mobilized its troops to carry out its own military exercises and also activated civil defense organizations such as the Worker-Peasant Red Guards, which are equivalent to South Korea’s reserve forces. In other words, North Korea has basically mobilized the entire country to counter the US military, which has the world’s most advanced technology, and the South Korean military, which is equipped with far superior equipment. When almost the entire country has to leave the workplace to spend 10 or more days in military exercises, that’s obviously going to present difficulties for economic activity. Factories can’t run, production is delayed. A shortage of workers in the busy spring planting season can ruin the year’s crop. That’s nowhere truer than in North Korea, a country where the year’s crop depends on assistance from soldiers and students who are given farm duties during the busy season. So it’s hard to even calculate the damage caused when not only soldiers and students, but the farm workers themselves, have to leave their fields and take part in military exercises. For North Korea, the South Korea-US military exercises are not only a challenge for its security, but a threat to its very survival. Perhaps that was the target of the South Korea-US exercises all along. But more recently, North Korea’s reaction to those exercises has been different from before. While the North continues to protest the exercises, it doesn’t always respond with military exercises of its own. For example, North Korea held a groundbreaking ceremony for a factory in Songchon County, South Pyongan Province, on Feb. 28, just a few days before this year’s Freedom Shield exercises were scheduled to begin in early March. The groundbreaking in Songchon marked the beginning of the “20x10 regional development policy,” a 10-year plan that seeks to revitalize the entire North Korean countryside. There were several odd things about the groundbreaking ceremony. For one, it was attended by Defense Minister Kang Sun-nam, KPA General Political Bureau Director Jong Kyong-thaek, military corps commanders, and soldiers mobilized for the construction work. That ceremony was also when North Korea revealed the existence of the KPA 124th Regiment, which has been newly organized to implement the 20x10 regional development policy. To sum up, North Korea created a new regiment of military engineers to build factories in its provinces right when South Korea and the US were planning to launch joint military exercises on twice as large a scale as last year. And then on Thursday, while the Freedom Shield exercises were still going strong, North Korea’s state-run newspaper the Rodong Sinmun reported that other groundbreaking ceremonies for factories in the 20x10 regional development policy had been held in the city of Kusong and the counties of Sukchon, Unpha, Kyongsong, Orang and Onchon. That’s quite different from before. North Korea is spurring on factory construction in areas around the country even as the South Korea-US joint military exercises are underway. On March 4, when Freedom Shield kicked off, large numbers of tractors were sent to the city of Samjiyon and the counties of Taehongdan and Paegam in Ryanggang Province to help with potato farming. Back on Feb. 23, ground was broken on the third stage of a homebuilding project in the Hwasong area of Pyongyang with the goal of quickly building 10,000 new homes over the next year. Troops are also being mobilized for that construction project, too. So while military exercises may be taking place south of the armistice line, North Korea is busy with farming and is stepping up construction work on homes and factories. A return to self-sufficiency in the COVID-19 lockdown The experience of Kimhwa County and the city of Samjiyon speaks volumes. After being nearly wiped out by flooding in August 2020, Kimhwa has not been merely restored to its original form, but completely transformed into a modern city. Considering that this was a meager, run-down county in the uplands of Kangwon Province, that shouldn’t be taken to mean the construction of some state-of-the-art industrial complex. However, factories have been built to produce garments, foodstuffs, everyday items and paper. What’s notable here is the timing of the rebuilding project in Kimhwa County. The year and six months between early 2021 and June 2022 were when North Korea had closed its borders because of COVID-19 and had absolutely no physical exchange with the outside world. Not only humanitarian aid but even material imports were completely cut off and all activities were curtailed because of COVID-19, but new factories were still set up in Kimhwa County, and the area was completely rebuilt. Modern automated factories were built, all the machinery and parts were sourced domestically, and the factories were designed such that the raw materials needed for production could be supplied locally. The inspiration for that may have come from the experience of Samjiyon. Numerous homes and public buildings were put up in the city in the two years between early 2020 and late 2021, the same period when the border was closed. Troops were also deployed to the construction project, which was overseen by the 216 Division. Since it wasn’t feasible to truck in construction materials to an upland city on the slopes of Mt. Paektu, many of the materials were sourced locally. To make the cement stretch out, the diatomaceous earth that is so common in Samjiyon was prepared as an admixture, and when making bricks, local mud was mixed with the soot produced as a byproduct of a potato processing facility. Agglomerate marble, planking and other lumber were also reportedly sourced on a local level. In July 2022, one year after the rebuilding project was completed in Kimhwa County, products from county factories displayed at an everyday goods fair in Wonsan, Kangwon Province, were positively reviewed by everyday consumers. As for Samjiyon, the city is being labeled a “socialist utopia.” North Korea seems to have found the mojo to modernize its economy and spread development to the whole country. North Korea is willing to wage an all-out war with economic sanctions without getting worked up about the South Korea-US military exercises. Recent days have seen subtle barometric shifts in the policies of Japan and the US toward North Korea. The cabinet of Fumio Kishida in Japan is playing hard to get, all while leaving the possibility of a summit-level meeting with the North on the table. For its part, the North has actively responded to these overtures, and suggested that it has no intention of fighting Japan. Even the Biden administration in the US recently said that “interim steps” were necessary on the path to North Korea’s denuclearization, signaling a shift to managing ties with North Korea. And then there’s the Yoon administration in South Korea, the lone holdout in hard-line tactics. In a speech delivered to mark the anniversary of the March 1 Independence Movement, the president referred to a “free, unified Korean Peninsula,” and intimated a desire for regime change in Pyongyang. Then, on March 7, Defense Minister Shin Won-sik gave orders that “if North Korea uses our defense drills as an excuse for provocations” to “go beyond the ‘act first, report later’ and instead ‘retaliate first, report later,’ in accordance with the principle of responding immediately, powerfully and definitely.” It may well be the case that North Korea’s quietly getting the last laugh here. Suh Jae-jung is professor of political science and international relations at the International Christian University in Tokyo.

By Jae-Jung Suh | February 12, 2024 | Originally published in Hankyoreh While bellicose rhetoric continues to be lobbed across the DMZ, North Korea appears focused on bolstering not just its weaponry, but its farms as well The mood on the Korean Peninsula has been fraught since the very start of 2024. Does North Korea really intend to start a war? Are we facing the prospect of a nuclear war in the region this year? First, there were the predictions of a “spring crisis” that floated around South Korea like specters. The speculation was that South Korea might create a crisis to be used for political ends. Lending weight to these predictions were the actions of the Yoon Suk-yeol administration, which was thrusting inter-Korean relations deeper into an emergency with strong shows of antagonism toward the North. Previously, the administration had included a passage in its first defense white paper in February 2023 stating that “the North Korean regime and military are our enemy.” The crisis predictions were bolstered further by its suspension of the comprehensive military agreement reached by the two sides on Sept. 19, 2018. To make matters worse, National Defense Minister Shin Won-sik’s threats of “swift, forceful and definitive” action if North Korea further provokes South Korea, and military leaders’ support of such claims, have heightened tensions even further. Fears that South Korea’s leadership in Yongsan will touch off a crisis have been adding to concern that spring winds may bring crisis to the Korean Peninsula. A fitting example of the construction of a new socialist countryside It was around this time that speculations about North Korea being ready to go to war began to emerge in the US. The hypothesis was spearheaded by Robert Carlin and Siegfried Hecker, two scholars affiliated with the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. Known as proponents of negotiation with North Korea, the scholars submitted to US-based North Korea news and analysis website 38 North that proved both shocking and provocative. “We believe that, like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong-un has made a strategic decision to go to war,” they wrote. Robert Gallucci, a former US State Department special representative and a key figure behind the negotiations made between North Korea and the US after the first North Korean nuclear crisis in the 1990s, also bolstered their claims, stating, “We should at least entertain the thought that nuclear war could break out in Northeast Asia in 2024.” This signified the shift in responsibility: instead of the crisis being instigated by South Korea, people began to think that North Korea might be the one to make the first move. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s statements also bolstered such claims. While conducting inspections of major munitions factories in early January, he declared that “the ROK clan is our principal enemy,” and that “we will have no hesitation in annihilating the ROK by mobilizing all means and forces in our hands.” At a speech made at a Supreme People’s Assembly meeting held on Jan. 15, Kim stressed that South Korea should be defined as North Korea’s “primary foe and invariable principal enemy” in its constitution. “We can specify in our constitution the issue of completely occupying, subjugating and reclaiming the ROK and annex[ing] it as a part of the territory of our Republic in case [. . .] a war breaks out on the Korean Peninsula,” he argued. The dismissal of age-old rhetoric that those from North and South Korea are fellow countrymen to instead adopt the stance stating that South Korea signifies hostile forces is only fueling anxieties over the possibility that North Korea may start a war. So, is North Korea really serious about war? While it may seem like a non sequitur, in order to find an answer to that question we should take a look at certain facilities the North has been enthusiastically building: greenhouse farms. In 2015, the Jangchon Vegetable Co-op Farm was built in Pyongyang. It is a massive greenhouse complex with 665 greenhouses on an area of about 684,000 square meters, where the North uses soil and hydroponic growing methods to cultivate tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and more. To support the application of scientific methods in vegetable farming, the farm is equipped with a complete greenhouse monitoring system that allows farmers to control the temperature and humidity of the greenhouses. Some greenhouses are also equipped with solar water heaters and nanomaterial decomposers. This is why the North is touting this facility as a fitting example of the construction of a new socialist countryside. While it is impossible to completely verify this claim, North Korea seems to be pleased with the achievements brought by the greenhouse. Since then, larger, more technologically advanced smart farm complexes have been built in areas outside of Pyongyang. The Jungphyong Vegetable Greenhouse Farm, which has 320 greenhouses, was built in North Hamgyong Province in 2019, and Ryonpho Greenhouse Farm, which boasts 852 greenhouses, was built in South Hamgyong Province in 2022. Ground was broken for a farm of an even bigger scale dubbed the Kangdong Greenhouse Farm, on the outskirts of Pyongyang in early 2023. Out of all of those co-op farms, Ryonpho Greenhouse Farm is said to have greenhouses that have been modernized, intensified, and industrialized on 280 hectares. One can use Google Earth to see the large greenhouse complex at coordinates 39°47’33.3”N latitude and 127°31’59.1”E. If we are to estimate the size of the complex by examining the Google Earth satellite images, we can say that it is approximately 2.64 square kilometers (1.43 km × 1.85 km, 264 hectares), which is close to the number that North Korea uses to describe the site: 280 hectares (278 acres). This demonstrates that the greenhouse complex is substantially large, at almost the size of Seoul’s Yeouido business district, putting it on a qualitatively different level from the past greenhouses built in North Korea, when South Korean support organizations provided all the materials needed for their construction, such as plastic sheeting. Behind Kim Jong-un’s threats At the ground-breaking ceremony for the construction of Ryonpho Greenhouse Farm in February 2022, Kim Jong-un emphasized the Workers’ Party of Korea Central Committee’s duty to “accelerate the overall rural development of the country more powerfully and confidently with it as a standard and torch.” On Oct. 10, 2022, Kim attended the Ryonpho Greenhouse Farm’s ribbon-cutting ceremony instead of staying in Pyongyang for the anniversary of the founding of the Workers’ Party of Korea, demonstrating the farm’s importance. More than a year later, in December 2023, the state-run Rodong Sinmun reported that the country had exceeded the 2023 plans for crop production. The outlet explained that the completion of a smart integrated production system, adoption of cylindrical farming machines, and multi-layered farming helped increase vegetable yield while also lowering costs. While it isn’t too hard to check the location and scale of these greenhouse farms with Google Earth, there are fewer external measures that we can utilize to verify how the greenhouse farms are being operated. Nonetheless, we would be making hasty generalizations if we were to dismiss these claims as mere propaganda. If these claims were being made for the sake of propaganda, building the Jangchon Vegetable Co-op Farm would have been more than sufficient. However, the country has built much larger greenhouse complexes in the provinces and plans to continue to add more, with the goal of having one in each province. Moreover, earlier this year, Kim Jong-un announced the “regional development 20 x 10 policy,” pledging to build manufacturing facilities in 20 cities and counties every year, substantially raising the standard of living in every city and county in the country within 10 years. It is also worth noting that the recently constructed greenhouse complexes used to be military airfields. If you utilize Google Earth’s historical imagery feature, you can see runways and airplanes waiting in the vicinity. Ryonpho Greenhouse Farm was built on the site of Ryonpho Airfield, which was still in use until 2022. The Jungphyong Vegetable Greenhouse Farm was also built in 2018 by pushing out a military airfield in the Junphyong area in Kyongsong County, North Hamgyong Province. The Kangdong Greenhouse Farm in the suburbs of Pyongyang, which began construction in 2023, is also being built on another ex-airfield site, as confirmed by Yonhap News. These economic activities provide a material basis for understanding Kim’s comments. If North Korea is seriously pursuing reunification through force by starting a war, it is highly contradictory for the country to build such a large greenhouse complex at this certain point in time. Furthermore, the fact that North Korea is demolishing its air force airfields one by one to make way for more greenhouse complexes can hardly be seen as preparation for reunification through war. Kim is making these threats so that South Korea won’t mess with North Korea. As of now, he wants to focus on making economic progress, but if the Yoon Suk-yeol administration dares to start provoking him, he will not hesitate to retaliate mercilessly. Korean relations are the relations “between two states hostile to each other,” and since the North no longer considers the South to be their countrymen, they will have no qualms resorting to use of nuclear weapons. Therefore, the view that North Korea will instigate war is the same as the view that South Korea will be the one to take the first step toward war. Suh Jae-jung is professor of political science and international relations at the International Christian University in Tokyo.

By Gregory Elich | February 8, 2024 | Originally published in Counterpunch In recent days, U.S. media have been proclaiming that North Korea plans to initiate military action against its neighbor to the south. An article by Robert L. Carlin and Siegfried S. Hecker, neither previously prone to making wild assertions, created quite a splash and set off a chain reaction of media fear-mongering. In Carlin’s and Hecker’s assessment, “[W]e believe that, like his grandfather in 1950, Kim Jong Un has made a strategic decision to go to war.” They add that if North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is convinced that engagement with the United States is not possible, then “his recent words and actions point toward the prospects of a military solution using [his nuclear] arsenal.” [1] U.S. officials have stated that while they do not see “an imminent risk of a full-scale war on the Korean Peninsula,” Kim Jong Un “could take some form of lethal military action against South Korea in the coming months after having shifted to a policy of open hostility.” [2] How do these sensationalist claims stack up against the evidence? It is no secret that lately, the stance of the United States and South Korea has hardened against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK – the formal name for North Korea). Since the centerpiece for suggesting that war may be on the horizon is Kim’s speech at the 14th Supreme People’s Assembly, its content is worth examining in some detail. [3] What strikes one when reading the text is that mainstream media have taken quotes out of context and ignored much of the content of Kim’s speech, creating an impression of unprovoked belligerence. Also generally absent from media reporting is the speech’s relationship to the backdrop of events since the far-right Yoon Suk Yeol became president of South Korea in May 2022. Yoon came into office determined to smash every vestige of the improved inter-Korean environment established during his predecessor’s term. Instead, Yoon prioritized making South Korea a subordinate partner in the Biden administration’s hyper-militarized Indo-Pacific Strategy. To fully understand Kim Jong Un’s speech, one must also consider the nature of the Biden administration’s rapid military escalation in the Asia-Pacific. The United States conducts a virtually nonstop series of military exercises at North Korea’s doorstep, practicing the bombing and invasion of that nation. One South Korean analyst has counted 42 joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises conducted in 2023 alone, along with ten more involving Japan. [4] Those totals do not include exercises that the U.S. and South Korea engaged in outside of Northeast Asia, such as Exercise Talisman Sabre in Australia and Exercise Cobra Gold in Thailand. Moreover, U.S. actions on the Korean Peninsula must also be situated within the broader geopolitical framework of its hostility towards China. Last year, in an act of overt intimidation, the United States conducted seven exercises with nuclear-capable bombers over the Korean Peninsula. [5] Additional flights involved the B-1 bomber, which the U.S. Air Force says “can rapidly deliver massive quantities of precision and non-precision weapons.” [6] Through its actions, the United States sends far more provocative messages than anything that could be honestly construed in Kim’s speech. But then, we are led to see nothing amiss in such aggressive behavior from the United States. Nevertheless, the threat is real and unmistakable from the targeted nation’s perspective. It also has not gone unnoticed in Pyongyang that U.S. and South Korean military forces regularly conduct training exercises to practice assassinating Kim Jong Un and other North Korean officials. [7] Just this month, U.S. Green Berets and soldiers from South Korea’s Special Warfare Command completed training focused on the targeted killing of North Korean individuals. [8] The Biden administration avers that it harbors no hostile intent toward the DPRK, but its actions say otherwise, loud and clear. North Korea, with a GDP that the United Nations ranks just behind that of Congo and Laos, is considered such a danger that the U.S. must confront it with substantial military might. An inconvenient question that is never asked is why the DPRK is singled out for punishment and threats when the other nuclear non-members of the Non-Proliferation Treaty – each armed with ballistic missiles — are not. What distinguishes North Korea from India, Pakistan, and Israel? How is it that North Korea is regarded as a threat to peace but not Israel, notwithstanding mounting evidence to the contrary? The essential distinction is that North Korea is the only one of the four that is not a U.S. ally; moreover, one which the U.S. wishes to retain the ability to bomb, whether or not it ever exercises the option to do so. It is a tribute to the persuasiveness of propaganda that the United States, with its record of multiple wars, bombings, and drone assassinations in recent decades, can convince so many that the DPRK, which has done none of these things during the same period, is a danger to international peace and stability. Yet, such towering hypocrisy goes largely unnoticed. It would appear that there is no principle involved in targeting only North Korea and not the other nuclear-armed non-members of the NPT — unless outrage over a small nation following an independent path being able to defend itself can be regarded as a principle. Predictably, Washington think tank analysts and media commentators are throwing more heat than light on the subject of Kim’s pronouncements, and they are always ready with a cliché at hand. Some, like Bruce W. Bennett of RAND Corporation, let their imagination run wild, conjuring bizarre absurdities. Bennett suggests that armed with more nuclear weapons in the years ahead, North Korea “could threaten one or more U.S. cities with nuclear attack if the United States does not repeal its sanctions against North Korea.” Or perhaps, he suggests, the DPRK could threaten the U.S. with a limited nuclear attack “unless it abandons its alliance with [South Korea]” or “disengage from Ukraine.” As for South Korea, Bennett warns that Kim might insist that it “pay him $100 billion per year and permanently discontinue producing K-pop…” [9] This is what passes as expert analysis in Washington. The military section of Kim’s speech was at root defensive, pointing out that North Korea’s “security environment has been steadily deteriorated” and that if it wants to take “the road of independent development,” it must be fully prepared to defend itself. Kim quotes specific threats made by U.S. and South Korean leaders to emphasize his awareness that his nation is in the crosshairs. At one point in his speech, Kim suggested that the constitution could specify “the issue of completely occupying, subjugating and reclaiming the ROK [Republic of Korea, the formal name for South Korea] and annex it…in case war breaks out…” He added, “There is no reason to opt for war, and therefore, there is no intention of unilaterally going to war, but once a war becomes a reality facing us, we will never try to avoid it.” Such a war, he warned, “will terribly destroy the entity called the Republic of Korea and put an end to its existence” and “inflict an unimaginably crushing calamity and defeat upon the U.S.” Kim continues, “If the enemies ignite a war, our Republic will resolutely punish the enemies by mobilizing all its military forces including nuclear weapons.” Harsh language, indeed, intended to remind the war hawks in Washington and Seoul not to imagine that their nations are invulnerable if they attack the DPRK. Note also the conditional phrasing, which tends to get downplayed in Western media. Even less attention is paid to more direct clarifying language, such as Kim’s statement that the DPRK’s military is for “legitimate self-defense” and “not a means of preemptive attack for realizing unilateral reunification by force of arms.” And: “Explicitly speaking, we will never unilaterally unleash a war if the enemies do not provoke us.” It was entirely predictable that Western media would put the worst spin on Kim’s blunt language that mirrored earlier South Korean pronouncements. The month before Kim’s speech, South Korean Defense Minister Shin Won-sik warned, “North Korea has only two choices – peace or destruction. If North Korea makes reckless actions that harm peace, only a hell of destruction awaits them.” [10] A few days later, Yoon ordered his military to launch an “immediate and overwhelming response” to any provocation by the DPRK. [11] Yoon and South Korean military officials use the term ‘provocation’ so loosely as to encompass almost any action the DPRK takes that they do not like, including what is normal behavior for other nations – or for South Korea itself, for that matter. South Korean and North Korean rhetoric identifying each other as enemies and destruction in the event of war differ in that the former preceded the latter. By ignoring the fact that North Korea is reacting to prior South Korean statements, mainstream media can portray Kim’s language as unprovoked. Last December, Yoon heightened the risk of conflict when he visited an infantry division near the border and gave them an order: “In case of provocations, I ask you to immediately retaliate in response and report it later.” [12] Vague in defining neither “provocation” nor the appropriate response level and delegating to lower-level commanders to decide those questions, this formula potentially can transform a minor clash of arms into a conflict of wider impact. Kim’s statements are presented in Western media as tantamount to a plan to start a war. Earlier statements of a similar nature by the Yoon administration that created an acrimonious atmosphere are rendered invisible or uncontroversial. It is fair to say that given North Korea’s longstanding practice of responding in kind, Kim may have adopted more restrained phrasing without South Korean officials setting the tone. Western media have raised concerns over Kim’s labeling of South Korea as a “principal enemy.” We are not reminded that nearly one year before, South Korea had re-designated the DPRK as “our enemy” in its Defense White Paper. [13]Under Yoon’s predecessor, Moon Jae-in, the defense paper dropped the reference to North Korea as an enemy. [14]The general pattern has been for liberal presidents to shun that tag in the interests of inter-Korean relations and for conservative presidents to embrace it as one element in their project to undo progress. Yoon himself frequently refers to North Korea as the enemy, and his administration’s National Security Strategy document describes the Kill Chain system, which is designed to launch preemptive strikes on North Korea. [15] In omitting such details, cause and effect are inverted, reinforcing the media-constructed Orientalist image of an irrational leader at the helm of the DPRK, prone to unpredictable statements and rash acts. Patience has run thin in Pyongyang, as Biden’s trilateral alliance with South Korea and Japan, “buoyed with war fever,” as Kim put it, sharply escalates military tensions in the region. In a sharp reversal, North Korea has abandoned its longstanding policy of seeking improved inter-Korean relations and working toward peaceful reunification. Any headway achieved in the past has quickly been undone in South Korea whenever the conservative party came to power. Still, Yoon has taken matters further than the norm, not only willfully dynamiting inter-Korean relations but also deliberately raising the risk of military conflict. Inter-Korean relations have reached such a nadir under Yoon that the DPRK sees no hope of progress in the current circumstances. The North Koreans are not wrong in that perception. Sadly, in a clear signal of its exasperation with Yoon, North Korea demolished the Arch of Reunification in Pyongyang, and all governmental bodies responsible for reunification planning and projects were shut down. The latter steps are not inherently irreversible, however. But as long as Yoon remains in power, there is no conceivable possibility of progress on reunification. Yoon has slammed the door shut on inter-Korean relations. One would never know it from Western reports, but more than two-thirds of Kim’s speech focused on economic development. “The supreme task,” Kim announced, “is to stabilize and improve the people’s living as early as possible.” Peace is an essential prerequisite for the realization of that goal. North Koreans are well aware of American and South Korean military capabilities, and a war would not only wipe out new economic projects but most of the existing infrastructure as well. Immense damage has been done to the DPRK’s economy by sanctions designed to target the entire population and inflict as much suffering as possible. [16] The period when North Korea closed its border with China in response to the COVID-19 pandemic added to economic challenges. Reversing direction is imperative. In his speech, Kim called for “a radical turn in the economic construction and improvement of the people’s living standard” and said that progress is being made “despite unprecedented trials.” Kim enumerated industrial, power, housing, and other ongoing projects. Kim admitted there have been internal challenges in economic development. “It is a reality that the Party and the government yet fail to meet even the simple demand of the people in life…” In particular, regional and urban-rural economic imbalances have plagued the North Korean economy for decades. “At present,” Kim continued, “there is a great disparity of living standards between the capital city and provinces and between towns and the countryside.” Kim acknowledged that these issues have not been adequately addressed in the past, but it “is an immediate task” to do so now. Kim took the occasion to officially unveil the launch of the Regional Development 20×10 Policy. This ambitious plan calls for substantially raising material and cultural standards in twenty counties over the next ten years, including constructing regional industrial factories and establishing advanced educational institutions. In particular, emphasis is to be given to scientific and technological development. The aim is to even out regional imbalances and to accelerate overall development. None of this can be achieved if the U.S. and South Korea are showering the DPRK with high explosives, and the Regional 20×10 Policy makes nonsense of Western scaremongering that Kim has decided to go to war. As usual, though, when it comes to reporting on North Korea, assertion substitutes for evidence, and we can expect Washington think tanks, U.S. media, military contractors, and the Biden administration to capitalize on the manufactured image of a war-mad Kim Jong Un to accelerate the military buildup in the Asia-Pacific, aimed against the DPRK and the People’s Republic of China. For his part, Yoon can be expected to amplify military tensions on the Korean Peninsula and sharpen his war on South Korean progressives. What is not in the cards is militarism abating in the foreseeable future. Notes. [1] Robert L. Carlin and Siegfried S. Hecker, “Is Kim Jong Un Preparing for War,” 38 North, January 11, 2024. [2] Edward Wong and Julian E. Barnes, “U.S. is Watching North Korea for Signs of Lethal Military Action,” New York Times, January 25, 2024. [3] “Respected Comrade Kim Jong Un Makes Policy Speech at 10th Session of the 14th SPA,” KCNA, January 16, 2024. [4] http://www.minplusnews.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=14494 [5] Chae Yun-hwan, “S. Korea, U.S. Stage Joint Air Drills with B-52H Bombers Over the Yellow Sea,” Yonhap, November 15, 2023. [6] https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/104500/b-1b-lancer/ [7] Jeongmin Kim, “Drills on Assassinating Kim Jong Un Remain an ‘Option,’ ROK Defense Chief Says,” NK News, December 19, 2023. [8] Lee Yu-jung and Esther Chung, “Kim Jong-un Instructs North Korea’s Navy to Prepare for War,” JoongAng Ilbo, February 2, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQJF7tbzwfY Donald Kirk, “U.S. to Enrage Kim Jong Un with Assassination Dry Run,” Daily Beast, August 19, 2022. [9] Bruce W. Bennett, “Is North Korea Really Getting Ready for a War Against America?” The National Interest, January 17, 2024. [10] Chae Yun-hwan, “Defense Chief Warns N. Korea of ‘Hell of Destruction’ in Event of Reckless Acts,” Yonhap, December 13, 2023. [11] “Yoon Orders Swift, Overwhelming Response to N. Korean Provocation,” KBS World, December 18, 2023. [12] Kim Han-joo, “Yoon Orders Military to Retaliate First, Report Later in Case of Enemy Attacks,” Yonhap, December 28, 2023. [13] Kwon Hyuk-chul, “S. Korea’s First Defense White Paper Under Yoon Defines N. Korea as ‘Enemy’”, Hankyoreh, February 17, 2023. [14] Yosuke Onchi, “South Korea No Longer Calls Pyongyang ‘Enemy’ in Defense Paper,” Nikkei Asia, January 16, 2019. [15] https://www.nknews.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Yoon-Suk-yeol-Administrations-National-Security-Strategy-June-2023.pdf Josh Smith, “South Korea Doubles Down on Risky ‘Kill Chain’ Plans to Counter North Korea Nuclear Threat,” Reuters, July 25, 2022. [16] https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/19/trumps-war-on-the-north-korean-people/ https://gregoryelich.org/2017/10/04/punishing-a-nation-how-the-trump-administration-is-waging-a-merciless-economic-war-on-north-korea/ Gregory Elich is a Korea Policy Institute board member. He is a contributor to the collection, Sanctions as War: Anti-Imperialist Perspectives on American Geo-Economic Strategy (Haymarket Books, 2023). His website is https://gregoryelich.org  Follow him on Twitter at @GregoryElich.

By Tim Shorrock | January 23, 2024 | Originally published in The Shorrock Files "Growing up in North Korea, you learn nothing of the outside world." - Director Madelaine Gavin, boasting with former high-ranking CIA operative Sue Mi Terry about their film Beyond Utopia, which was passed over for an Academy Award nomination today. Remember The Interview, the satirical Seth Rogen film depicting the assassination of North Korea's Kim Jong Un by two CIA operatives that was released by Sony Pictures on Christmas Day in 2014? You should: when North Korea allegedly hacked Sony in an apparent attempt to sabotage the film, President Obama, whose top national security aides had previewed the film, led an unprecedented campaign with Michael Moore and other Hollywood liberals urging Sony to release it. Then, after millions of gullible Americans followed their leaders into theaters across the country, Thor Halversson, a right-wing Venezuelan "human rights" activist based in New York, led a flamboyant campaign by North Korean defectors in South Korea to illegally air-drop DVDs of the film into the North using hot-air balloons launched from a spot just south of the DMZ. That, in turn, sparked a furious response from Kim's influential sister, Kim Yo Jong, and inflamed domestic politics in South Korea with repercussions lasting until today. Now, 10 years later at a time of intensifying tensions on the Korean Peninsula, Halversson has forged an alliance of Hollywood liberals, prominent North Korean defectors, and a former US intelligence official to produce another film to undermine Kim's North Korea and prime Americans for the regime change long sought by the South Korean right, the Pentagon, and elements of the US national security state. His partners are Sue Mi Terry, a former high-ranking CIA official with the Bush administration long affiliated with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the government-funded Public Broadcasting System. Two executive producers, Hannah Song and Blaine Vess, work with Liberty in North Korea (LINK), which claims to operate an "underground railroad" for North Korean defectors and frequently briefs the US government about the DPRK. Another producer, defector Hyeonseo Lee, works closely with Halvorssen's Human Rights Foundation. The result is Beyond Utopia, "the gripping story of families who risk everything escaping North Korea. The film, directed by Madeleine Gavin, is told from the perspective of a Seoul pastor who helps North Koreans stranded in China get to the South, and premiered January 9th on PBS's Independent Lens series. Gavin's January 14th interview on CNN was the first shot of an expensive media campaign that producers hoped would climax on March 10th with the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film. But they failed to convince Academy members who have viewed eligible films that it was worthy of an Oscar. Halversson's Human Rights Foundation, CSIS, and its other producers at Ideal Partners Film and LINK have been pushing the film relentlessly on Twitter and on their own websites as the must-see documentary of the awards season. Until the Oscar rejection, the campaign had been a smashing success: last year, the film captured the Sundance Film Festival Audience Award, and it has been rapturously reviewed by the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, and nearly all of the Hollywood press (for now, it can be viewed, in its entirety, at the PBS Independent Lens website here). The plight of North Koreans escaping from a country plagued by a forever war and ruled by a hereditary military dictatorship (pictured above in a still from the film) is worth learning about; last year, nearly 200 made it to the South. But their stories are not new to Americans. Thanks to the prominent defector Yeonmi Park, who serves on the board of Halversson's HRF, the US public has been fed a steady diet of frightening and often exaggerated tales depicting North Korea as a cruel, demonic state that despises its own people and uses extreme measures to control them. Park's stories, usually accompanied by well-timed tears and a quivering voice, have made her a media darling in a country where many people, liberals and conservatives alike, simply love to hate North Korea. In 2014, the New York Times  was one of the first publications to fall for Park's fantastic stories. As the North Korean celebrity du jour, Park's appearances on media outlets such as NBC News and the popular "Joe Rogan Experience" have drawn millions of viewers. But under scrutiny, many of her claims have been found to be false, as the Washington Post, another early champion of Park, discovered in this devastating takedown of her. Park’s unproven descriptions of North Korea has made her a subject of ridicule on social media, especially among Korean Americans. Recently, her embrace of the tenets of the MAGA movement, particularly its opposition to "DEI," or diversity, equity and inclusion, has made her a big Elon Musk fan. In December, she was a prominent speaker at a Turning Point USA conference with Ted Cruz, Dennis Prager, Charlie Kirk and other MAGA reactionaries. The producers of Beyond Utopia seem to have taken a lesson from Park's experience and her descent into a far-right ideologue. The film is designed to pull on liberal heartstrings by depicting the struggles of everyday North Koreans as they make their way through China and Southeast Asia to South Korea and beyond. According to Gavin, Beyond Utopia was put together with video from hidden cameras provided to her by the film's hero and star witness, Pastor Kim Seongeon of the Caleb Mission, a South Korean religious organization that helps North Koreans make the difficult journey from their home to South Korea. With Pastor Kim's footage, the director told Deadline, she "started to feel the pulse and heartbeat of these people" by "cracking open North Korea and what it's like." To gather information, she claimed to have scoured the internet and "read everything she could get her hands on" about North Korea "in every language [and] every country." Her research, she claimed to CNN, contrasts sharply with people in the DPRK, who grow up learning "nothing about the outside world." Judging from Gavin's historical account of Korea's division and the Korean War, however, North Koreans know far more about the American role in Korea and the "outside world" than Gavin herself will ever know about Korea. Her vaunted internet skills appear to be skewed to the far-right and hand-fed to her by Terry, the former CIA operative who produced the film. She doesn't investigate what happens to defectors when they get to the South, or why some of the 35,000 defectors in the ROK choose to return to the DPRK. And throughout the film, it's obvious she has missed the large volume of material available on the internet and any public library about the Korean War, the origins of North Korea's nuclear confrontation with the United States, and the economic conditions that have led many of its citizens to flee. That point was made forcefully in a January 7th "open letter" to Lois Vossen, Executive Producer at Independent Lens, from three prominent Asian American film makers, Deann Borshay Liem, Hye-Jung Park, and JT Takagi. "We are concerned that Beyond Utopia presents an unbalanced and inaccurate narrative about Korean history and North Korean society," they wrote in the letter, which they also posted on Medium. "While the film’s verité sequences of the Roh and Lee families’ plight are compelling, noticeably lacking is any mention of the ongoing impact of the Korean War and U.S. policies that have destabilized the livelihood and well-being of North Korea’s people — factors that cause families like the Rohs and Lees to leave the country." In their letter, Liem, Park, and Takagi explain how the film ignores the impact of the Korean War and the decades-long strategy by the U.S. government to undermine and weaken the North Korean state. "Beyond Utopia implies that identifying brutalities and helping North Koreans flee to freedom are the only solutions to North Korea’s human rights violations," they write. "To be sure, the North Korean government, as all countries which ascribe to the United Nations charter, should be held accountable for breaches in human rights. But U.S. policies that have destabilized the human security of the North Korean people for the past 70 years must also be held accountable. We believe that diplomacy, engagement, and building trust are more sustainable and effective ways to improve the lives of everyone on the Korean Peninsula." A transcript of the film's history section underscores how much Gavin and her CIA-bred producer stray from the truth about North Korea. In a sidebar that follows this article, I've posted a few excerpts from Gavin's narration, followed by my own analysis showing the extent of the director's deliberate obfuscation of Korean history and America's role in it. Most problematic, in the view of its critics, are the way North Korea's economic ills and current conditions are approached by Gavin and the producers. For example, the devastating impact of US and UN sanctions on the civilian population is not even addressed. As the authors of the open letter told PBS’s Independent Lens, "U.S.-led sanctions underpin the difficult economic conditions portrayed in the film. North Korea is one of the most heavily sanctioned countries in the world. Dr. Kee Park of the Harvard University Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, a neurosurgeon who has trained doctors and regularly performed surgeries in North Korea, calls these sanctions 'warfare without bullets.'" They also take issues with a sequence in the film about North Koreans "coveting human waste." This, the directors wrote, "is simply callous. Other countries also use human waste as a fertilizer and for the production of methane gas. In the case of North Korea, sanctions severely limit the country’s capacity to import oil, fertilizer, and even spare parts to run farm equipment. In the absence of this information, the sequence promotes derision rather than empathy for the plight of ordinary people struggling to get by with extremely scarce resources." I can personally attest that the use of human waste for fertilizer was very common in South Korea and Japan during the years I grew up there during and after the Korean War (the photo above was taken by my father in Seoul in 1959).  Anyone who lived in Korea at the time remembers the "honey bucket men" who would pick up the waste and deliver it to farms (once, walking in rural fields near my house in Seoul in 1960, one of my siblings had the awful experience of falling in a pool of human fertilizer, an experience engrained in our family's collective memory). To make its use a key point in ridiculing North Korea is simply racist. In her response to the open letter, Gavin, the director, stated that her film "Attempts to give voice to North Koreans, people who have been largely unseen and unheard by the outside world for more than 75 years. Our goal was to honor the families that trusted us with their stories and to provide audiences with a window into Pastor Kim's lifelong dedicated work. We have been humbled and gratified by the wonderful reception that the film has received."  She added: "Our film does not set out to present a comprehensive history of the Korean War, or the development of the North Korean state." But her factual misrepresentations, intentional or not, should raise serious questions for any documentary seeking Hollywood's highest prize for truth-telling. So, too, should the politics of the film. The Politics of Regime Change Like The Interview, Beyond Utopia is intended to build public support in the United States for outside, preferably American, intervention in Korea during another Korean War or in the unlikely scenario of a political collapse in the North. That theme was underscored last year by Pastor Kim himself in an interview with Politico. "I want the regime to collapse," Kim, a featured speaker at Halversson's Oslo Freedom Forum last year, told the publication. Asked what happens in those circumstances, Kim replied: "I'm afraid that it's going to be chaotic... They've been living under control, like brainwashing. They never really make their own choices." "So when this regime collapses, people won’t know what to do," Kim continued. "It will be all chaos. We need to be prepared for how to control the chaos" (my italics). "But my assumption if they collapse is the Chinese government is going to take over first. If they collapse right now, the Chinese will try to take over faster than anybody else. I think China would try to manipulate and use the North Korean situation to deal with the United States." That, of course, is a scenario often discussed by US national security officials. As I reported in 2020 in Responsible Statecraft, Avril Haines, President Biden's Director of National Intelligence, has publicly argued that any U.S. pressure campaign against North Korea must be accompanied by "intensive contingency planning" in preparation for a "collapse" of the Kim regime. Such planning, she emphasized in a talk at the Brookings Institution in 2017, "must be done not only with [South Korea], but also with China, and of course Japan." That theme of regime-change is personified in the film’s Executive Producer Thor Halvorssen. His record of political intervention and interference in South Korea on behalf of North Koreans he believes are craving for his support and American intervention is a story in itself. It's important to understand this man, who no doubt was craving to be one of those accepting the Oscar if his film had been nominated. Halvorssen is a member of the Venezuelan aristocracy. He is the first cousin of Leopoldo Lopez, a prominent right-wing politician in Venezuela, and a major supporter of Juan Guaido, the right-winger usurper once recognized by the US government as the de facto leader of Venezuela. Both Lopez and Guido have been major recipients of money from the US government's National Endowment for Democracy, which has also funded many North Korean defectors. HRF often speaks through its chairman, Garry Kasparov, the fanatically anticommunist opponent of Russian leader Vladimir Putin. Not surprisingly, Kasparov disapproves of any attempt to end the Korean War through dialogue, as South Korean President Moon Jae-in attempted in 2018, when he invited top officials from Kim Jong Un's government to the South for the Winter Olympics. Moon "claims to be using the games to foster goodwill, but the reality is that the Hermit Kingdom has taken this opportunity to stage one of history’s great whitewashing operations," he wrote in the Washington Post (he was wrong: the talks led to two years of relative peace and the suspension of North Korea's missile tests and US-South Korean military exercises). Halvorssen founded the Human Rights Foundation in 2005, to "unite people - regardless of their political, cultural, and ideological orientations - in the common cause of defending human rights and promoting liberal democracy globally," according to its Internal Revenue Service Form 990 tax statement. Those forms show that HRF received over $68.8 million in "public support" between 2017 and 2021, a princely sum for any non-profit. But the foundation hasn't disclosed the source of the money since journalist Max Blumenthal disclosed in The Electronic Intifada that it received nearly $800,000 from the extreme-right (and Islamaphobic) Donors Capital Fun and $325,000 from the conservative Sarah Scaife Foundation from 2007 to 2011. Since its founding, much of HRF's efforts have gone into "exposing" human rights violations in North Korea and smuggling information into the country ("Flash Drives for Freedom"). It's also a sworn enemy of China: through its "CCP Disruption Initiative," HRF "endeavors to increase awareness about the CCP’s ongoing attacks on civil liberties and inspire a change in public attitudes toward Xi Jinping’s authoritarian regime." As Blumenthal has rightly observed, HRF "functions as a de facto publicity shop for US-backed anti-government activists in countries targeted by Washington for regime change." Halversson and his extreme-right allies in South Korea Halvorseen and his organization claim to be non-partisan. But, like Gordon Chang, another fanatical critic of North Korea, Halversson has formed close relationships with the far-right in South Korea and directly intervened in that country's affairs by vehemently attacking progressives, both South Korean and American, who prefer diplomatic negotiations to war with North Korea (it's also important to note that Adrian Hong, one of the founders of LINK, which helped produce the film, was the leader in 2019 of a botched attempt by armed vigilantes to seize the North Korean Embassy in Madrid and kick off a rebellion against Kim Jong Un). Halvorssen's twisted politics of red-baiting were on full view in 2015, when the Korean peace activist Christine Ahn joined with Gloria Steinem, Ann Wright, Medea Benjamin, two winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, and over a dozen women from around the world to walk across the DMZ in an attempt to jump-start peace talks between North and South Korea. "The women became, willingly or unwillingly, shills for North Korea’s dictatorship," Halverrson wrote in a misogynistic attack in the liberal webzine Foreign Policy (Deann Borshay Liem, one of the signers of the PBS letter, directed Crossings, a film about the 2015 march, which I covered for Politico - below is one of my photos from the march.) Halvorssen and his sleuths scour the world for anyone who engages with North Koreans. One of his targets is the Uruek Symphony Orchestra in New York, which holds annual concerts where American and North Korean music is played - one of the only venues where Americans can mingle freely with North Korean diplomats at the UN. (He has also attacked me for criticizing US policy in South Korea over the issue of Gwangju and US military bases. In one post on Twitter, he claimed that I purposely ignore North Korea as the "cruelest dictatorship;" after I attempted to open a dialogue about the DPRK, he kept up the vitriol, so I blocked him). In his activities in South Korea, Halvorssen works closely with Park Sang Hak, a controversial "defector-activist" who uses funds from HRF and other US organizations to send his propaganda balloons across the border into North Korea. His actions with Halversson have attracted enormous attention in NK News and other media sites that sympathize with defectors as well as the foreign press, including Voice of America and The Hollywood Reporter. But the launches have deeply angered Koreans who live near the launch sites near the border as well as the government of Gyeonggi Province, which encompasses the area around the DMZ. The situation became untenable for local and national governments in 2017, when President Moon Jae-in was engaged in delicate negotiations with North Korea that led to a brief, two-year period of peace between South and North. “The brazen attempts by some defectors to disseminate propaganda leaflets in North Korea makes a mockery of South Korea’s laws and creates anxiety for people living on the border," Gyeonggi's vice governor said at the time. "Gyeonggi Province will fully cooperate with the police and with cities and counties on the border and will apply all provincial resources to fully block all illegal distribution of propaganda leaflets." In response to Park and Halversson's actions, the Moon government, backed by the National Assembly, passed a law restricting the actions. Moon's actions drew a swift response from Halvorssen and other US groups and individuals who support Park and his band of defectors. " The South Korean government's investigation of Park Sang-hak, head of the Coalition for a Free North Korea, over the distribution of anti-North Korea leaflets is a turning point in history," Halversson told the right-wing Chosun Ilbo, Seoul's largest daily, in 2020. "It's a scandalous act." The Venezuelan also launched a public attack on President Moon for pushing the legislation limiting the launch of his balloons (so did CSIS, the former ideological home of Beyond Utopia producer Sue Mi Terry). “This is a tragedy of catastrophic proportions for the North Korean people," Halvorssen declared in a press release. "Defectors are the only people capable of representing the voices of the 25 million North Koreans living without access to the Internet, without access to outside mail, or to any uncensored information." He called the bill "a shameful attempt by the Republic of Korea’s government to discriminate against [defectors'] fundamental rights and treat the refugee community like second class citizens.” As in so many of his diatribes, Halversson seems to forget he is not a Korean citizen. And ironically, the law he and CSIS denounced so strenuously has remained on the books under the right-wing government of Yoon Suk Yeol (Halversson met last October with Yoon's Unification Minister to discuss human rights in North Korea). Halvorssen's arrogance seems to have rubbed off on Park, his ally in the balloon launches and also a member of the HRF board. Park has come under scrutiny in Korea, including from NK News, which is usually quite friendly to the defector community in South Korea. "Numerous accounts from fellow defector-activists," NK News reported in 2020, "paint a picture of a provocateur whose sloganeering and brash methods have alienated even his partners. The interviews also offer a glimpse into a grassroots activism community mired by questionable incentives and misappropriation of finances – and a culture where winning foreign grants has become an end unto itself." "Park’s approach has also made him something of an enfant terrible in South Korea, even in the close-knit world of North Korea human rights activism," the article went on. " At his launch sites in villages near the North Korean border, he has scuffled with local residents, who oppose his work for fear that the balloons put a target above their heads... When faced with this sort of resistance, Park has been known to fly into a rage, accusing anyone who stands in his way of being a communist." The CIA Officer The producer getting the most attention in the media is Sue Mi Terry, who was Director of the Asia Program at the US government's Wilson Center in Washington from 2021 to 2023. Before she joined CSIS as a senior analyst, she spent seven years (2001 to 2008) at the Central Intelligence Agency, where she "produced hundreds of intelligence assessments--including a record number of contributions to the President’s Daily Brief, the Intelligence Community’s most prestigious product," according to the Wilson bio. From 2008 to 2009 she was a director for Korea and Japan at the National Security Council, and from 2008 to 2009 she was Deputy National Intelligence Officer for East Asia at the National Intelligence Council. Her experience as one of Bush's top intelligence advisers on North Korea is significant. It was during these years that North Korea exploded its first atomic bomb, sparking the "nuclear crisis" that continues today. That test occurred in 2006, five years after Bush rejected the idea of negotiating with the Kim government. Bush did that at the urging of the CIA in the wake of President Clinton's Agreed Framework with Kim Jong Il that halted North Korea's nuclear fission program for eight years and almost led to a broad agreement with Pyongyang to halt its missiles sales (see my detailed 2017 article on this agreement in The Nation). After leaving the CIA, Terry took her expertise - and opposition to engagement - to CSIS, where she honed a reputation as a hard-liner, becoming a favorite in the media. Her disdain for North Korea was on display in 2013, when tensions escalated between the Obama administration and Pyongyang just before The Interview fiasco. In an interview with Spencer Ackerman in the neocon-techie magazine Wired, Terry, described by Ackerman as "one of the CIA's former top Pyongyang analysts," predicted that "North Korea will launch an attack" that will be "something sneaky and creative," and warned that an "all-out war with South Korea would spell the end of the North Korean regime." Above, Kim Dae Jung and George Bush at the White House, 2001. No attack ever came, of course. (Ackerman is now the national security correspondent for The Nation; I hope his reporting on the next inevitable crisis with the DPRK is better than his work at Wired). But the actions of Bush and his advisers were catastrophic, Stephen Costello, a Washington-based consultant who has worked closely with progressive movements in South Korea, told me recently. "The Bush group's ideological fanaticism not only provoked and enabled the creation of the North's nuclear and missile capabilities, it also eliminated the leverage that could have improved human rights in North Korea," he said. That could be said of Terry as well. She has become a big supporter of the Biden administration's tough approach to North Korea, particularly its formation of a trilateral military alliance with South Korea and Japan that has drawn sharp criticism from the North and raised military tensions in Korea to their highest levels in years. Talking to the Washington Post with the fanatical neocon Max Boot, Terry heaped praise on South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol as a "profile in courage" and blasted Moon, his predecessor, for "scuttling" an earlier agreement with Japan that was repudiated by South Korea. Yoon, who has condemned Moon and his party for their engagement policies with North Korea, is now one of the most unpopular leaders in South Korea's history. Lately, Terry has turned her attention to more profitable opportunities than writing opinion pieces. Her LinkedIn profile lists her as "the founder of Peninsula Strategies Inc., an advisory firm specializing in Korean issues with both government and corporate clients, and a senior advisor to Macro Advisory Partners, a global advisory firm." The former does not appear to have a website, but Macro Advisory does. It looks like a typical intelligence contractor led by former high-ranking national security officials and think tank executives "who will help you interpret the geopolitical and economic forces impacting your business and develop strategies to navigate them." Terry is listed as a senior adviser who "advises clients on Korea." It's well-connected: from 2017 to 2020, Macro Advisory was the corporate home for Jake Sullivan, President Biden's National Security Adviser, and during his time there earned $37 million a year, according to The American Prospect. With producers like Halvorssen and Terry involved, it's impossible not to see Beyond Utopia as anything but a propaganda exercise. At the very least, the media and the Hollywood elite reviewing the film should be asking tough questions of its director and its producers about their intent. Moreover, a documentary should provide the full truth about its subject, not the distorted vision of its producers and funders. That, too, is the prime concern of Liem and the other Asian American directors. "We ask that you add a disclaimer on the film and on the website that indicates the film represents only one perspective of what is a highly controversial situation and its causes, and offer additional resources for your viewers," they asked Lois Vossen, the Executive Producer at PBS' Independent Lens. "We also request that Independent Lens pursue alternative, diverse programming for audiences seeking further information about the issues raised by this film." In particular, they said, alternative programming should include the voices of Asian Americans and Koreans in the diaspora “who have a critical understanding of this history and who have been researching, writing about, and grappling with issues of displacement, war, peace, and the impact of U.S. policies on the Korean peninsula." Responding to the letter, Vossen and the film's director wrote that "our goal was to provide only enough background information to ground the personal journeys of our participants, and this historical information was thoroughly vetted by numerous experts and scholars for accuracy and fairness; We are not aware of a single factual error.” But that claim does not stand up to scrutiny. A Point-by-point Refutation of the Film's Version of Korean History Beyond Utopia provides a history of North and South Korea that corresponds with the views of the South Korean right and military think tanks in Washington, and is cleverly designed to undermine the legitimacy of the North Korean state founded in 1948. As a result, Madeleine Gavin, the director who narrates parts of the film, comes off sounding much like the flamboyant defector Yeonmi Park, who often paints a picture of the North that is so fantastic that even the Washington Post has come to doubt her version of events. Here is Gavin, as summarized by Deadline: "North Korea. Your house is on fire. What do you try to rescue first? Your kids? Your pet? No, the first thing you reach for is the portrait of the Dear Leader, Kim Jong-un and his father and grandfather that is hanging on your wall, as mandated by the authoritarian government. Everything else can wait. Such is the bizarre and grim reality of North Korea that emerges in Beyond Utopia... Despite the North Korean regime’s attempts to brainwash the populace into believing they live in an earthly paradise, over a period of years hundreds of thousands of people have risked death to try to escape." But "brainwashing" can go two ways. As the popularity of Yeonmi Park attests, Americans are willing to believe almost anything about North Korea. That is the result of the nation being subjected to disinformation and propaganda from the American government and the guardians of empire about the country for years and years. Here is a point-by-point refutation of the false picture of North Korea's history promoted by Gavin in this film, which she claims to have found through reading "everything she could get her hands on" on the internet about North Korea "in every language [and] every country." Well, not everything, as we can see below. The Film: In 1910 the expanding Japanese empire colonized what was then a unified Korea. It was a very brutal colonization. Over the next 35 years the Korean culture and the Korean language were nearly eradicated. At the end of World War II when Japan surrendered, they lost the empire that they had been building. Part of the settlement deal was that Korea was split. Fact: In 1905, in the wake of a war over Korea between Japan and Russia, US President Theodore Roosevelt negotiated a peace treaty that included a secret protocol in which the United States approved Japanese control over Korea in return for Japanese recognition of America's colonization of the Philippines (this egregious act is even taught in South Korean schools). Five years later, with US approval, Japan formally colonized Korea (and yes, it was extremely brutal). Over the next 35 years, Japan created a colonial administration staffed in part by Korean collaborators with security provided by Koreans invited to join the Japanese military and constabulary. As Gavin carefully avoids mentioning, these collaborators - who helped the Japanese Army chase down Korean independence fighters in Manchuria and elsewhere - became the core of the South Korean military and police force created by the United States after 1945. Moreover, contrary to Gavin's claim, there was no "settlement deal" between Japan and the U.S. after World War II. Instead, Japan surrendered unconditionally in the wake of the Nagasaki bomb, and the United States decided unilaterally to divide Japan's colony at the 38th parallel and then directed Japan to surrender its military forces in Korea to the Soviet Red Army in the north and the US military in the south. Stalin, whose troops had entered Korea days before (as discussed with Truman at Potsdam), agreed to this arrangement after the fact. The Red Army, units of which had already crossed into the southern zone, then withdrew to positions north of the 38th parallel and to Pyongyang. The US military finally arrived in Seoul, Korea's traditional capital, on September 8, 1945. As Liem and her fellow directors wrote, "By inferring that the division of Korea was a term of Japan’s surrender, which it was not, [Gavin's] language erases the role of the U.S. in dividing Korea." The Film: The idea was that Korea would shortly come back together and then have control over their own country. In the meanwhile the south held a public election and US educated Syngman Rhee became the first president of what would become South Korea. Fact: The plan for Korea was spelled out by President Franklin Roosevelt and his British and Chinese allies at their famous conference in 1943 and ratified by Stalin and Truman at Potsdam in 1945. "The idea" was for the allied powers to occupy the Korean peninsula until "in due course" it could be granted independence (FDR "felt the trusteeship might last from 20 to 30 years," the State Department summary of Potsdam states, while "Marshal Stalin said the shorter the trusteeship period the better.") But this did not sit well with the people of Korea. In the days after Japan's surrender on August 15th, Koreans throughout the peninsula declared a People's Republic and established "People's Committees" in every province. These committees, north and south, included communists who had led the fierce resistance to Japanese colonialism as well as Christians and nationalists who wanted a united, independent Korea to emerge. In the initial stage of their occupation, the Soviets recognized these committees as legitimate, and they became the core of the North Korea government the Red Army set up in Pyongyang. But not the United States. Upon arriving in Korea, the US military set up a US Army Military Government (known as USAMGIK) and, believing the committees were communist fronts, outlawed the People's Republic. It then brought in Syngman Rhee, a Princeton-educated Christian who had been an advocate in the United States for Korean independence for decades, to run the new administrative state for USAMGIK. Rhee, who hated Japan but reviled communists even more, built a government of wealthy landlords, right-wing political figures, and former bureaucrats who had collaborated with Japanese colonial rule. Rhee's election by a right-wing National Assembly took place in 1948 during a time of severe repression in the South. By 1946, many South Koreans were in open revolt against USAMGIK's policies and Rhee's rightist policies. In response, the US and its Japanese-trained military forces launched a vicious counterinsurgency. This secret war fractured the country along ideological lines. According to a US diplomat in Seoul, over 100,000 South Korean dissidents were killed long before the North Korean invasion of June 1950, many of them at the hands of Japanese-trained, Korean military, police, and anticommunist death squads. The counterinsurgency culminated in a brutal, US-directed assault on the island of Jeju, the only province to vote against a US-designed plan to keep Korea divided. Film: In the north, Stalin decided to look for a Soviet sympathizer as a temporary leader in what would become North Korea. And this is where Kim Il Sung comes in... When he was just 8 years old his family moved to Manchuria. Kim Il Sung joined the communist party in China and he eventually fought with the Soviet Union throughout World War II. Stalin heard about Kim Il Sung because of his reputation as a leader of several anti Japanese guerilla groups. When Stalin brought him to Pyongyang, Kim Il Sung didn’t even speak good Korean...[He]  had the dream of reunifying the Koreas under communism. Expanding upon his guerilla contacts, he put together an army and eventually got the support of both Stalin and Mao. Fact: Stalin didn't have to "look for" Kim Il Sung. The guerrilla fighter was widely known as a leader of the anti-Japanese resistance in Manchuria by the Japanese, which (under the future LDP Prime Minister of Japan, Nobusuke Kishi) sent units to hunt him down. As Bruce Cumings, the eminent historian of the Korean War wrote in his famous two-volume history of the war's origins, "Kim Il Sung was by no means a handpicked Soviet puppet, but maneuvered politically first to establish his leadership, then to isolate and best the communists who had remained in Korea during the colonial period, then to ally with Soviet-aligned Koreans for a time, then to create a powerful army under his own leadership (in February 1948) that melded Koreans who had fought together in Manchuria and China proper with those who remained at home." As Cumings wrote in an incisive article on Kim's legacy in 2017, his legitimacy as a leader is well established. "The story of Kim Il-Sung's resistance against the Japanese is surrounded by legend and exaggeration in the North, and general denial in the South. But he was recognizably a hero: he fought for decades in the harshest winter environment imaginable...Koreans made up the vast majority of guerrillas in Manchukuo [the Japanese colony in Manchuria], even though many of them were commanded by Chinese officers...Other Korean guerrillas led detachments too...and when they returned to Pyongyang in 1945 they formed the core of the new regime." In other words, these were not just innocuous "guerrilla contacts," but the leaders of the resistance to Japan. And it was in that capacity as part of collective leadership that Kim got the support of Stalin and Mao to invade the South in June 1950 to dislodge the US-backed Rhee regime, which he claimed did not represent the interests of most Koreans at the time. The rest is history, and the terrible war ended in an uneasy armistice in 1953 that Syngman Rhee refused to sign. No peace treaty was ever signed, leaving the two Koreas in a technical state of war today. Tim Shorrock, a Korea Policy Institute Associate, is a Washington-based journalist who has been writing about the Korean Peninsula for over 40 years.

By Deann Borshay Liem, Hye-Jung Park and JT Takagi | January 7, 2024 | Originally published in Medium.com The following letter was sent to Lois Vossen, Executive Producer at Independent Lens, regarding the documentary Beyond Utopia, on January 7, 2024. Dear Lois, We are writing about the documentary Beyond Utopia, which is opening the new season of Independent Lens. As documentarians, we have traveled to North Korea many times. We have made films about the un-ended Korean War, the division of the Korean peninsula, and the effects of these devastating events on Koreans in the diaspora. Over the past two decades, our work has focused on combating stereotypes and historical erasure and bringing nuance and humanity to those living on both sides of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). We are concerned that Beyond Utopia presents an unbalanced and inaccurate narrative about Korean history and North Korean society. While the film’s verité sequences of the Roh and Lee families’ plight are compelling, noticeably lacking is any mention of the ongoing impact of the Korean War and U.S. policies that have destabilized the livelihood and well-being of North Korea’s people — factors that cause families like the Rohs and Lees to leave the country. While an armistice stopped the fighting in 1953, a peace treaty was never signed. North and South Korea, as well as North Korea and the United States, are still at war. Ongoing hostilities have resulted in the hyper-militarization of North and South Korea and the remilitarization of Japan, threatening to engulf the region in renewed fighting. These factors contribute to North Korea’s siege mentality, nuclear weapons development, and the economic hardships faced by the civilian population. U.S.-led sanctions underpin the difficult economic conditions portrayed in the film. North Korea is one of the most heavily sanctioned countries in the world. Dr. Kee Park of the Harvard University Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, a neurosurgeon who has trained doctors and regularly performed surgeries in North Korea, calls these sanctions “warfare without bullets.” In this context, the film’s sequence about North Koreans coveting human waste is simply callous. Other countries also use human waste as a fertilizer and for the production of methane gas. In the case of North Korea, sanctions severely limit the country’s capacity to import oil, fertilizer, and even spare parts to run farm equipment. In the absence of this information, the sequence promotes derision rather than empathy for the plight of ordinary people struggling to get by with extremely scarce resources. We are also concerned that the film’s factual imprecisions obscure events that are critical for understanding Korean history. For example, the film’s narrator explains that “At the end of World War II when Japan surrendered, they lost the empire that they had been building. Part of the settlement deal was that Korea was split.” By inferring that the division of Korea was a term of Japan’s surrender (which it was not), this language erases the role of the U.S. in dividing Korea. In an effort to prevent the USSR from occupying the entire peninsula, the U.S. proposed (and the Soviets agreed) to divide Korea at the 38th parallel to disarm Japanese forces. The division was solidified by the founding of two separate states in 1948. Similarly, the film portrays the Korean War as an international effort led by a “UN force containing soldiers from 21 different countries.” Lost is the fact that of these countries, the United States comprised 99.7 percent of the international force, totaling 5.7 million military and support personnel. The U.S. led the war effort and continues to be the only foreign presence with military bases on the Korean peninsula. We also have questions about the power dynamics in the filmmaking process between the filmmaker, the crew, the pastor, and the defectors. Unequal power relations undergird these rescue activities in which defectors are entirely reliant upon brokers, missionaries, smugglers, and others for food, shelter, and security. In what ways did the filmmakers take advantage of, benefit from, and contribute to these unequal power relations and vulnerabilities? This dynamic is alluded to in the film itself as Pastor Kim directs the Roh family as to how they should film their journey for the documentary during some of their most vulnerable moments. The power imbalance continues in South Korea, where defectors are reliant on NGO largesse and the South Korean government for their support and livelihood. Beyond Utopia implies that identifying brutalities and helping North Koreans flee to freedom are the only solutions to North Korea’s human rights violations. To be sure, the North Korean government, as all countries which ascribe to the United Nations charter, should be held accountable for breaches in human rights. But U.S. policies that have destabilized the human security of the North Korean people for the past 70 years must also be held accountable. We believe that diplomacy, engagement, and building trust are more sustainable and effective ways to improve the lives of everyone on the Korean Peninsula. We are taking this step of writing to you because this film is being presented on public television, an entity that we support and which has presented our own films. We would like to know the process by which this film was vetted and by what standards. We ask that you add a disclaimer on the film and on the website that indicates the film represents only one perspective of what is a highly controversial situation and its causes, and offer additional resources for your viewers. We also request that Independent Lens pursue alternative, diverse programming for audiences seeking further information about the issues raised by this film. We ask that you include voices of Asian American and Korean diasporic community members, scholars, and activists who have a critical understanding of this history, and who have been researching, writing about, and grappling with issues of displacement, war, peace, and the impact of U.S. policies on the Korean peninsula. Thank you in advance for your consideration. We look forward to your response. Sincerely, Deann Borshay Liem, Producer | Director, First Person Plural, In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee, Memory of Forgotten War, Geographies of Kinship, Crossings Hye-Jung Park, Producer | Director, The #7 Train, The Women Outside: Korean Women and the U.S. Military, North Korea: Beyond the DMZ JT Takagi, Producer | Director, Bittersweet Survival, The #7 Train, The Women Outside: Korean Women and the U.S. Military, Homes Apart: Korea, North Korea: Beyond the DMZ cc: Carrie Lozano, President and CEO, Independent Television Service Stephen Gong, Executive Director, Center for Asian American Media Don Young, Director of Programming, Center for Asian American Media Leslie Fields-Cruz, Executive Director, Black Public Media Denise Greene, Director of Program Initiatives, Black Public Media Francene Blythe-Lewis, Executive Director, Vision Maker Media Cheryl Hirasa, Executive Director, Pacific Islanders in Communications Amber McClure, Director of Programs, Pacific Islanders in Communications Sandie Viquez Pedlow, Executive Director, Latino Public Broadcasting Luis Ortiz, Program Manager, Latino Public Broadcasting S. Leo Chiang, Co-Director, Asian American Documentary Network Grace Lee, Co-Director, Asian American Documentary Network

By John Eperjesi | December 26, 2023 An earlier version of this article appeared as a guest essay in the Hankyoreh, December 15, 2023 One of the worst civilian massacres in 20th-century Asian history took place on Jeju Island at the dawn of the Cold War. On this “hauntingly beautiful island,” Bruce Cumings writes, “the postwar world first witnessed the American capacity for unrestrained violence against indigenous peoples fighting for self-determination and social justice.” Since October 7th, a civilian massacre on the other side of Asia, in Gaza, has been unfolding, one that many scholars, journalists, and activists are calling a genocide. This humanitarian crisis can be compared to the Jeju April 3 Incident because Palestinians in Gaza have also been fighting for self-determination and justice, and against an Israeli military occupation, since 1967. We can see Jeju’s past in the unrestrained violence raining down on Gaza now. The US military occupation of South Korea began in 1945 when the World War II defeat of Japan ended 35 years of colonial rule in Korea. Frustration and anger at the military occupation built up slowly at first, then accelerated and exploded three years later on Jeju Island. John Merrill points out that, “Violent opposition on this scale to a postwar American occupation occurred nowhere else in Asia or Europe.” Like Jeju Islanders at the inception of the Cold War, over the past fifty-six years, Palestinians in occupied Gaza have been routinely subjected to multiple forms of state violence designed to terrorize them into submission: beatings, torture, mass arrests, executions, interrogations, curfews, lockdowns, checkpoints, deportations, property destruction, financial sanctions, blockades, rations, quotas. In 2014, the Israeli Jewish “new historian” Ilan Pappé described life in Gaza as a form of “incremental genocide.” In 1987, the first Palestinian uprising, or “intifada,” began. This was a mostly nonviolent uprising, led mainly by women and inspired in part by Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Gene Sharp. Just as the entire population of Gaza is being punished for the October 7 attack by Hamas militants, the entire population of Jeju Island was subjected to state terror after an organized resistance of islanders rose up on April 3, 1948 in protest of police brutality and of pending United Nations sponsored elections to create a separate U.S.- backed state in the south.  In reprisal for what is today remembered as the April 3 Incident the US military government and the newly formed Republic of Korea (ROK) administered “collective punishment” on the entire island, a war crime prohibited by the Hague Regulations (1899) and Fourth Geneva Convention (1949), much as the U.S.-backed Israeli government is meting out to the general population of Gaza today. Since the Hamas attack, killing an estimated 1139 civilians and Israeli Defense Forces soldiers, over 20,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by the IDF of which 70% have been women or children under the age of 18.  In Jeju an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 islanders were killed, or one-tenth of the population, of which one-third were elderly, women, or children.  In Gaza almost “900,000 buildings have suffered severe destruction and damage from Israeli bombardments, including places of worship, hospitals, schools, and residential buildings,” resulting in displacement of 80 to 90% of the population of Gaza according to United Nations estimates. Those who have been forced out of their homes are now stuck in overcrowded shelters, makeshift tents, and open areas without enough food, clean water, proper sewage or sanitation. More people may end up dying from diseases – bloody diarrhea, jaundice, measles, meningitis, chickenpox, viral hepatitis – than from bombs and missiles, according to the UN Food Programme.  In Jeju, scorched earth campaigns destroyed ninety-five percent of mountain villages, and 80,000 to 90,000 villagers were forcibly relocated to internment camps along the coastline.  As in Gaza today virtually every family in Jeju was impacted by state violence. In addition to unrelenting bombing of the civilian population, the Israeli government is using starvation as a method of warfare, which is prohibited by international law, leaving the entire population of Gaza at risk of famine. As Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant stated, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.” Israel’s Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem Arieh King said, “They are not human beings and they are not animals, they are subhuman and that is how they should be treated.” Asian peoples from Palestine in the west to Korea in the east, have often been subjected to dehumanizing stereotypes and slurs. In the United States, derogatory terms like “yellow peril,” “gook,” “sand nigger,” “raghead,” “chink,” “Jap,” “Nip,” “slope,” and most recently “China virus,” have historically enabled acts of racist hate, both big and small, both foreign and domestic, ranging from the massacre of civilians in the Philippines, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, to the brutal attacks on Asian Americans during the pandemic which gave rise to the #StopAsianHate movement. Isaac Herzog, the President of Israel, views the massacre of civilians and destruction of Gaza as part of global clash of civilizations, “This is a war that is not only between Israel and Hamas. It’s a war that is really intended, really, truly, to save Western civilization.” The state of Israel, propped up with billions of dollars in military aid from the US, is proudly broadcasting the interrelated practices of racism, apartheid, settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide which helped build western civilization, and viewers from around the world are horrified by what they are seeing. Many people are turning to the late Palestinian-American cultural critic Edward Said to make sense of what is happening in Gaza. Like Said’s analysis of the intersection of racism and colonialism in Orientalism (1978), Discourse on Colonialism (1950) by the great Martinican poet, playwright, and politician Aimé Césaire, provides a historical context for understanding, and critiquing, the support for Israel by the governments of the Global North. When the United States was the only country to veto the UN Security Council resolution demanding an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza, I thought of Césaire’s words, “I make no secret of my opinion that at the present time the barbarism of Western Europe has reached an incredibly high level, being only surpassed–far surpassed, it is true – by the barbarism of the United States.” A barbaric form of American exceptionalism is thriving in the twenty-first century.  But I take heart that massive protests around the world are calling for an immediate ceasefire and for a free Palestine. In the US, many of these protests are being led by both Jewish and Palestinian groups and their allies In 1953, the Armistice Agreement stopped the senseless killing of the Korean War, but the ceasefire was never followed up by a formal peace treaty. Unending war has resulted in massive military buildup, divided families, authoritarian governments, travel restrictions, sanctions, famine, and mandatory military service. Everyone on the Korean Peninsula, and indeed in the Asia-Pacific region, lives under the threat of a return to total war. There are plenty of hawks in the United States who would love to do to North Korea, and China, what Israel is doing to Gaza. If the new cold war turns hot, the entire Korean Peninsula, both north and south, could be reduced to rubble while American bombers fly overhead, painted with the slogan, “Saving Western Civilization.” John Eperjesi is a Professor of Literature at Kyung Hee University in Seoul.