Introduction: Ancient Historical Origins of Korean Culture
Though this introductory section ostensibly has little to do with the contemporary situation in Korea, in fact it is very important for understanding the rich history and unity of the Korean culture. For as we are beginning to realize more and more, the presence of the past is always here. Everything is related to everything. We can only ignore this principle at our own peril, which in turn robs us of the incredibly profound input of a vast sea of indispensable wisdom. It helps explain how deep is the passion for the reunification of a people who share a long, evolved history with one another. There are no regions in the Western world that possess a million-plus year history of human activity as does the Korean Peninsula. And the Korean culture possesses a 5,000 year distinct, unified homogenous history devoid of ethnic minorities. Never was Korea divided until the 17th Parallel was cruelly imposed upon it in 1945 by the United States. Korea has never been an aggressor nation. Instead, it has suffered a long history of being aggressed upon by other outside nations, both Asian and Western.
In contrast, the earliest record of human activity in the Western Hemisphere according to carbon dating is no more than 45,000 years, but most evidence makes a more comfortable estimate of 30,000 years or less. And since there were no Eurocentric or New World societies until after the Conquest of the original Indigenous societies that occurred from the late 1400s through the 1700s, the longest period of organized society we in the West possess is no more than 500 years old. The Republic of the United States of America, and its Europeon antecedent communities, only go back 400 years. There is evidence that some of the Indigenous stock in the Western hemisphere originated in portions of Asia, including the Korean Peninsula.
Chinese and Japanese influences have been strong throughout Korean history but the Koreans descended as a distinct racial and cultural group from Tungusic (Siberian ethnic groups) tribal peoples from central Asia and Manchuria. It is important to understand Korea's strategic geographic position. A peninsula 600 miles long, north-south, with an average width of 150 miles, it is separated from China by as little as 130 miles on the west by the Yellow Sea (and Korean Bay, a northern section of the Yellow Sea) while sharing a 500 mile northern boundary with China marked by the great Yalu River. It also shares an 11 mile northeast boundary with Russia marked by the Tumen River. It is separated from Japan on the east by the Sea of Japan. On the south it is bounded by the Korean Strait (connecting the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan) which separates Korea and Japan by only 120 miles. The large volcanic Cheju Island, a part of Korea 70 miles south of the mainland, lies between the Korean Strait to its north and the East China Sea to its south. Korea has some 3,000 islands and islets, mostly in the south and west. The total area of the Peninsula is about 85,000 square miles, about equal in size to Great Britain or New York State. This geography helps explain why Japan historically considered the Korean Peninsula as its "natural bridge" to the heart of the Asian continent.
Traces of the earliest ancestors of modern humans have been discovered in tropical eastern sub-Sahara Africa as early as 5 million years ago. By 1.8 millions years ago early hominids (walking bipedal) began spreading out from these original homelands, migrating into temperate regions as distant as East Asia. Homo Erectus grade hominids were present in the Peninsula of Korea, eastern portions of China, southern Asia, and central India more than one million years ago. During the Neolithic (New Stone) Age period beginning about 10,000 B.C.-8,000 B.C., paleo (ancient)-Asiatics scattered throughout Siberia began migrating to the Korean Peninsula through northeast provinces of China and Russian areas around Vladivostock. There is evidence of occupation through hunter-gatherer and burial sites from this period, such as at Tongsamdong (in southeastern Korea near present day Pusan), along with pottery, stone agricultural tools, and cereal cultivation of millet.
Around 4,000 B.C.-3,000 B.C. there is evidence of the first permanent farming settlements, such as at Hunamni (in central Korea not far from present day Seoul). Some scholars identify this period as the beginning of a continuous evolution of a distinct culture, meaning that by 2,000 A.D., Korea has been developing as a distinct people for 5,000-6,000 years. The spread of rice farming reached northern areas of the Peninsula by 1500 B.C., southern areas by 1000 B.C. By 1,000 B.C., during the Bronze Age (ores of copper, tin, and zinc), new immigrants had assimilated Indigenous neolithic peoples in small hamlets on foothills near rivers. Distinct Korean style tools first began appearing in "Wae" (Japan), when Korean weapons (Dagger culture) emerged. Iron Age culture became widespread in southern Korea by the second century B.C. as did glass production. Chariot fittings have been found near Pyongyang and the Taedong River basin (that flows from northeast to southeast through Pyongyang).
Confucianism, a learning and social philosophy rooted in a series of particular relationships among and between family, friends, and rulers, became prominent from the third century B.C. to the first century A.D. through much of China, the Korean Peninsula, and southern Japan. After the schism in the Buddhist religion in northeast India in the first century A.D., the Mahayana Buddhism that offered universal salvation (versus the more conservative Theravada Buddhism) arrived in China and Korea where it began to be shared with Confucianism and Daoism.
The majority of historians document Korea's history to the 12th century B.C. when a Chinese scholar (Kija) founded a colony at Pyongyang. By about the fourth century B.C., the Korean tribal kingdom of Ancient Choson had emerged in the area between the Taedong River in present day western North Korea and the Liao River in Manchuria 250 miles to the northwest. Ancient Choson ("land of the morning calm") possessed relatively advanced iron technology for tools and weapons. From c.109 B.C. to 6 B.C., Korea (except in the southeast area around present day Pusan) came under the domination of the Chinese Han empire. After 100 B.C. the Chinese colony of Lolang was established near Pyongyang. The Kingdom of Koguryo established the first native Korean state near the Yalu River (separating present day China from northern Korea) in the north in 37 B.C. by the Maek Tribe, even while still in the Han empire. In 313 A.D. Koguryo conquered Lolang. By 427 A.D. the capital city was established at Pyongyang. Koguryo expanded its territory well into eastern Manchuria (present day northeast China) in the north, as far south near the Han River (flows through present day Seoul) in proximity of where the other two major kingdoms emerged, Paekche (c. 250 A.D.) in the in the southwestern portion of the Peninsula, and the more powerful Silla (c. 350 A.D.) in the southeastern portion in and around the Naktong River valley. Many sites have been found of lavishly furnished tombs for the elite in Koguryo society, adorned with exquisite paintings. Among the grave offerings were elaborate gold crowns and other jewelry of gold and wire. A fourth kingdom of Kaya in the far southeast (west of the Naktong River and present day Pusan) exported fine stoneware pottery to Japan. Iron was exported from the lower Naktong River in southeastern Korea to Wae (Japan) and Lolang. Kaya tribes were soon incorporated into Silla. Cultural elements from China, northern nomadic tribes, Lolang, and the Buddhist religion were incorporated during this period of Koguryo dominance. Iron technology in this period became stronger and sharper as it was incorporated into weapons and agricultural tools. Korean literary tradition adopted the Chinese language and its ideograph (written system representing an idea or object directly rather than a particular word) system.
With Chinese support the Silla dynasty conquered Koguryo and Paekche in 668 A.D., and a feudal society emerged which began the modern unification of the Korean Peninsula along Confucian lines. Korea prospered as each king was surrounded by a warrior aristocracy and a skillful bureaucracy that ruled over a peasantry class which provided the manpower for military, agricultural, and technical industry. The arts flourished and Buddhism became the dominant religion. In 935 the Silla dynasty was overthrown relatively peacefully by the Koryo dynasty at which time literature was cultivated and Confucianism (from China) controlled the pattern of government even though Buddhism remained the state religion. Pottery manufacure flourished. The first Korean histories were published, using movable type, which led to the world's first casting of metal type in 1403. In 1231 Mongol forces invaded from China and eventually the Koryo kings accepted Mongol rule. In 1392, Yi Songgye, with the aid of the Ming dynasty (which had replaced the Mongols in China), seized power. The Yi dynasty created a new capital at Seoul, established Confucianism as the official religion, and developed a Korean phoenetical alphabet.
Japanese warrior Toyotomi Hideyoshi won control of most of geographically close-by Japan in 1590, and two years later invaded Korea with 160,000 men seeking to conquer China after subduing Korea. His forces were thwarted after the Korean admiral Yi Sun-sin cut their nautical supply lines. Further Japanese incursions into Korea were confronted by counterattacks by combined Ming Chinese and Korean forces, and Hideyoshi was killed in 1597 while attacking Korea. Later, Korea attempted to protect itself from outside threats by closing its borders and thereby became known as the Hermit Kingdom. Japan was becoming ever more powerful, and with secret U.S. help (see below, "Early Western and U.S. Intervention") was able to effectively conquer and occupy the Korean Peninsula in 1905. The Yi dynasty lasted 519 years from 1392 until its formal annexation by Japan on August 22, 1910.
The Phenomenon of "Haan" Being Released in Korea
In May 2000, while visiting several villages in South Korea about 80 miles southeast of the Yongdong/Nogun Ri area, I listened to dozens of horror stories of emotionally and physically wounded survivors of civilian massacres committed in 1950 by U.S. ground and air forces, as well as by South Korean forces under U.S. command. Then in August 2000, as a representative of the newly formed Korea Truth Commission (KTC), our delegation visited the Kumjung Cave massacre site in Ilsan, Kyonggi Province north of Seoul, and the massacre at twin bridges viaduct near infamous Nogun Ri, 100 miles south of Seoul near Yongdong in North Chungchong Province. I heard even more of similar horror stories about what happened during the summer of 1950. After having kept silent for all these fifty years, their tales were intensely emotional. I came to understand that until two years or so ago, there remained so much fear among the people that they kept their stories inner dark secrets. If they were publicly identified in any way with those who had been shot or bombed, they, too, would be suspected of being "red," or "pro-north," i.e., "communist." Even today, since some of the then Korean police who were working under orders of their U.S. military commanders still live in the same communities as these survivors, there remains fear of reprisals. Until very recently South Korea has maintained a repressive, right-wing police state, conveniently suppressing most dissent by citing their National Security Law. This draconian instrument, instituted by U.S. puppet Syngman Rhee in 1948, in effect prohibited any discussion of the north, especially about reconciliation. It was routinely enforced by quick arrest, intense "interrogation," long prison terms, and even imposition of a death sentence with little due process.
Koreans have a word, "haan," that helps explain this phenomenon of delayed emotional "coming out" that is now happening for people throughout South Korea. "Haan" means deep, unresolved, suppressed grief and rage. I can personally relate, because for twelve years after witnessing horrors of the bombing of villages in Vietnam, my own grief and rage remained deeply submerged in my soul. I was not able to talk about my experiences, not because I feared state persecution, but because I didn't think anyone would understand that the U.S. had deliberately committed war crimes, and further, I feared no one would care. I found myself weeping as the South Koreans told their stories about what happened to them and their families fifty years ago, and how this pain has remained deeply within them.
I searched for the source of this deep, mostly unexpressed rage, and one must understand both the ancient and more recent history of the Korean people. The Koreans have never been an aggressor against other lands, yet they have continually been aggressed against by outside forces. It is ironic then that they are the only Asian nation that was involuntarily divided and remains so to the present day. That this is a deep and historic egregious crime against the Korean people is an extraordinary understatement.
Early Western and U.S. Intervention
Beginning in the nineteenth century, Western powers began to show interest in the Korean Peninsula. Seeking access to Korean markets and raw materials, the British sent warships in 1832 and 1845, the French in 1846, the Russians in 1854, the U.S. and Germans in 1866, and the U.S. again in 1871. All non-Chinese influences were excluded in an attempt to secure protection until 1876, when Japan coerced a commercial treaty with Korea. Korea had been known even prior to the nineteenth century as a country that distrusted foreigners, even from the East, but especially those from the West. For this policy it came to be known as the "Hermit Kingdom."
Japan had begun to emerge as a restive power in the 1800s. Japan had been forced by the United States to sign a commercial treaty on March, 31, 1854, a year after U.S. Admiral Mathew C. Perry had arrived in 1853 with four warships in Tokyo Bay pursuing U.S. President Millard Fillmore's orders to penetrate the perceived isolationist Japan. The Japanese emperor acceded to U.S. requests and opened the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate to trade. Perry was awarded $20,000 by Congress for his bold expedition. Sentiment in Japan wisely became concerned that it was dangerously vulnerable to becoming a colony of western powers. The Japanese elite responded with the Meiji Restoration of 1868 which restored power to its emperor formerly held by the Tokugawa military house. The new Meiji government moved quickly to discard the old feudal system and succeeded in transforming Japan into a regionally aggressive industrializing nation.
The history of U.S. nineteenth century military intervention in Korea included the first American Korean War in 1871, a war noted by its belligerance. Five years earlier, in July 1866, a U.S. Merchant Marine ship, the General Sherman, a heavily armed ship with a mixed crew of U.S., British, and Chinese/Malay, including a U.S. Protestant missionary, Robert Thomas, attempted to penetrate Korean waterways in pursuit of trade discussions and Christian evangelization. Denied permission to sail up the Taedong River leading to Pyongyang, the ship defied Korean authorities. Consequently, after four days of fighting, the ship was burned, and the twenty persons aboard killed.
In retaliation, the U.S. Navy and Marines invaded Korea in June 1871 with the warships Monocacy and Palos, three steam launchers, and about twenty support boats, with total crew of more than 1,000 mostly Civil War veterans. The U.S. Minister to China, Frederick Low, was on board. The expedition, commanded by Admiral John Rodgers who had previous Far Eastern experience, landed nearly 700 men at the Kanghwa beaches (25 miles north of present day Inchon in west central Korea), partly to resume attempts at trade talks with the "last outstanding scoffer at western civilization," but also to "avenge the insult to the American flag," and the earlier loss of the General Sherman and her passengers. [William Elliot Griffis, "American Relations With the Far East," The New England Magazine, November 1894, pp. 269, 270]. The Koreans again resisted. But the U.S. forces insisted on vengeance and, in two days of heavy fighting, destroyed five forts and inflicted as many as 650 casualties on the defending Koreans, while suffering only three casualties of their own. The U.S. forces then quickly departed, obviously not having succeeded in establishing any trade with Korea. In all of the Nineteenth Century, this was the largest U.S. military force to land on foreign soil outside of Mexico and Canada until the "Spanish American" War in 1898. This intervention created heightened anxieties among the Japanese about aggressive U.S. intentions in Asia.
After Japan "opened" Korea by coercing the 1876 commercial treaty with her, the latter attempted to ameliorate this heavy Japanese influence by finally establishing trade relations with the U.S. in 1882. The Korean-U.S. Treaty of Commerce, resulting in official U.S. recognition of and promise to protect Korea's independence, created a small "diplomatic" legation to represent U.S. interests there. The U.S. Marines were first dispatched in 1888 "to protect American interests" from threats by local residents not happy with the U.S. presence there. Competition for Korea's strategic land area and potential resources heated up between nearby powers of Japan and Russia.
The First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95) saw conflict between China and Japan for control of Korea. This war marked Japan's clear emergence as an imperial power. Japan acquired Formosa and the Pescadores (64 small islands) off the west coast of Formosa, and initially the Liaotung peninsula (just west of northern Korea) in Manchuria, China's most resource-rich province with its valuable farmlands, timber, coal, and future industrial potential. During this war Japanese troops had begun a quasi-regular presence in Korea. The pressure of this war again brought in a contingent of U.S. Marines to "protect American interests" who remained there for a number of months.
The rival designs of Russia and Japan for Manchuria and Korea led to the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05). Russian failure to withdraw from Manchuria and its associated penetration into northern Korea was met by Japanese attempts to negotiate a division of the area into respective spheres of influence and control. The Russians resisted. On January 27, 1904, Japanese destroyers torpedoed three Russian battleships in Port Arthur at the tip of the Liaotung (Kwangtung) Peninsula. Japan broke off diplomatic relations on February 6, 1904, and two days later attacked Port Arthur and for awhile contained the Russian fleet there. Japanese troops in large numbers had moved through Korea when they attacked Manchuria. These war pressures again created conditions that led to another intervention by U.S. Marines to, you guessed it, "protect American interests" in Korea. However, during these series of interventions by U.S. Marines the longest they remained in Korea at any one time was twenty-two months.
Japan's prestige peaked after a series of spectacular Japanese military victories over humiliated Russian naval forces at its great base at Port Arthur (January 1905); over smashed Russian armies at the inland city of Mukden, 220 miles northeast of Port Arthur (February-March); and in the Tsushima Island Port, 50 miles south of Pusan, Korea, in the Tsushima Strait (May 27, 1905) where virtually the entire Russian Baltic fleet of thirty-seven ships was destroyed and nearly 5,000 men drowned. This was the first time a major European power had been defeated in a major battle by a nonwhite nation. Western mystique took a hit. Though the Japanese had lost only three small boats and suffered a mere 110 men killed, she was reaching the limit of her strength. On May 31, only four days after their spectacular naval victory over the Russian fleet, Japan asked U.S. President and Harvard educated Theodore Roosevelt to mediate a formal end to the war. Both England and the U.S., the only two countries powerful enough to block Japan's advances in Korea, favored Japanese colonization of Korea in order to selfishly protect their own respective regional imperialistic designs from threatened Japanese competition.
What Koreans did not know at the time of Roosevelt's willing "diplomatic" intervention to end the war over who would control Korea, however, was the fact that U.S. Secretary of War, lawyer and Yale educated William H. Taft, on instructions from Roosevelt, had since February been secretly discussing with Japan for its absorption of Korea. This led to a concluded secret agreement with Japan's Prime Minister Taro Katsura on July 31, 1905. Known as the Taft-Katsura Agreement, the U.S. recognized Japanese rights in Korea, in exchange for Japanese recognition of the recent U.S. military conquering and subsequent possession of the Philippines (after U.S. military intervention in the 1898 Philippine revolution against Spain, termed in the U.S. as the "Spanish American" War) and Hawaii (after the U.S. Marines landed in 1893 to "protect American life and property," more specifically protection of sugar interests). The Taft-Katsura Agreement directly, and shamelessly, violated the earlier 1882 treaty in which the U.S. promised to protect Korea's independence, despite the legal and Ivy League education of its U.S. authors.
To comprehend just what Roosevelt thought of the Koreans it is instructive to examine his own words as written in his autobiography when he describes a rationale for the violations of the 1882 Treaty perpetrated by the 1905 Taft-Katsura Agreement: "To be sure, by treaty it was solemnly covenanted that Korea should remain independent. But Korea itself was helpless to enforce the treaty, and it was out of the question to suppose that any other nation, with no interests of its own at stake, would do for the Koreans what they were utterly unable to do for themselves...Korea has shown its utter inability to stand by itself."
Less than two years earlier, Roosevelt had uttered similar comments about Colombia, justifying his "taking" of a section from that country called Panama. It is important to understand the depth of arrogance that manifested at that time, and has only grown more intense since. In his December 7, 1903 remarks to Congress, Roosevelt stated: "The experience of over half a century has shown Colombia to be utterly incapable of keeping order on the Isthmus. Only the active interference of the United States has enabled her to preserve so much as a semblance of sovereignty. Had it not been for the exercise by the United States of the police power in her interest, her connection with the Isthmus would have been severed long ago...In 1856, in 1860, in 1873, in 1885, in 1901, and again in 1902, sailors and marines from United States warships were forced to land in order to patrol the Isthmus, to protect life and property, and to see that the transit across the Isthmus was kept open...Every effort has been made by the government of the United States to persuade Columbia to follow a course which was essentially not only to our interests and to the interests of the world, but to the interests of Colombia itself. These efforts have failed; and Colombia by her persistence in replacing the advances that have been made, has forced us, for the sake of our own honor, and of the interests and well-being, not merely of our own people, but of the people of the Isthmus of Panama and the people of the civilized countries of the world, to take decisive steps to bring to an end a condition of affairs which has become intolerable. The New Republic of Panama immediately offered to negotiate a treaty with us. This treaty I herewith submit."
The United States had articulated an open-door concept seeking commercial success in Asia as early as President John Tyler's Presidency when the first American-Chinese treaty was signed in 1844 that included most-favored-nation language. But the U.S. was interested in the Caribbean, Central and South America, and Africa, as well as Asia. Market expansion grew ever more aggressive after the U.S. Indian wars of 1880-1890 had assured the final conquering of the Continent to its westward limits at the Pacific Ocean. Overseas market areas were looming ever more important for the U.S. economy. Political-commercial interventions had recently occurred: in Samoa in the southern Pacific (1878) under Harvard educated President Rutherford B. Hayes; in African Morocco in association with other European nations (1880), also under Hayes; through the opening of Korea in 1882 under lawyer President Chester A. Arthur with the signing of the Commerce Treaty mentioned above; by accessing free markets in the African Congo (1883-84), also under Arthur, as the U.S. was the first country to recognize King Leopold's exploitative claim there; by claiming rights to Pearl Harbor (1887), then completing seizure of Hawaii (1893) under lawyer President Grover Cleveland; interventions in Venezuela (1893) and Brazil (1894-96), also under Cleveland; formal annexation of Hawaii in 1898 under lawyer President William McKinley; and assuring control over Cuba and the Philippines after preempting their revolutions for independence (1898-99), also under McKinley. The U.S. was on a roll!
The Treaty of Portsmouth ending the Russo-Japanese War was signed formally at the U.S. Naval base at Portsmouth, New Hampshire on September 5, 1905, acknowledging Japan as a world power, more than a month after the secret agreement between the U.S. and Japan relating to Korea. However, the peace discussions had been conducted all summer long at President Roosevelt's private summer home at Oyster Bay, Long Island, New York, prior to the formal signing in Portsmouth, and during and after the secret negotiations leading to the signing of the Taft-Katsura Agreement.. The Treaty recognized Japan's paramount interest in Korea and ceded to her the leasehold of the Liaotung Peninsula in Manchuria (the site of the strategic Russian port on the Chinese coast), and the southern half of Sakhalin Island (just north of Japan and separated from Russia by the Gulf of Tartary). Russia took a hit for which it would not forget easily.
In addition, Roosevelt demanded that Japan follow the Open Door policy in Manchuria and return the region to Chinese administration. The "Open Door" policy had been formalized and presented to the world in a series of Open Door Notes (1898 - 1901) by U.S. Secretary of State John Hay, under President William McKinley, to assure "perfect equality of treatment for commerce" in the Chinese marketplace, including spheres of influence claimed by other Western nations and Japan. The U.S. was experiencing the integration of two important themes which were in effect formalized in the Open Door Notes: (1) export of "civilization, order, and security" as representing the American Way Of Life (AWOL) seriously believed as being good for the advancement of everybody in the world, and (2) export of products such as cotton, canned fruit, milk, and beef, good for prosperity and profits of commercial interests in the United States.
At the end of the Nineteenth Century, it had become clear to the business and political powers of the United States that expansion was indispensable in order to acquire necessary markets for the increasing surplus of manufactured goods, agricultural products, and venture capital. In addition, acquiring reliable access to cheap raw materials was becoming important in order to continue the profitable growth of the U.S. American industrial production system. It was becoming clear that U.S. prosperity and preservation of the American Way Of Life (AWOL), and its myths, were dependent upon, in fact demanding, an expansionist, increasingly imperial foreign policy.
Extensive Chinese unrest against foreigners exploded in June 1900, known as The Boxer Rebellion, provoked a deepening of concern in the U.S. (and other nations') over the ability to begin exploitive designs there. From May 24 - September 28, about five thousand U.S. troops joined soldiers from Great Britain, France, Russia, Germany, and Japan, dispatched to quell 140,000 "Boxers" who had occupied Beijing and were seriously "harassing" Westerners as well as Chinese Christians. "Boxers" was the English name given to an antiforeign secret society in China called "I Ho Ch'uan," which in Chinese literally means "righteous, harmonious fists," i.e., boxers. This scare produced a strengthening of the U.S. Open Door language on July 3, 1900, promising "uttermost accountability" for anyone causing "wrong" to be committed against U.S. citizens, while intending to guarantee a free and open marketplace for all interested U.S. Americans in "all parts of the Chinese Empire," on an equal basis with competing nations of Germany, Russia, England, and Japan. Of course, the "Open Door" was intended to be a diplomatic cover for the ability of the U.S. to protect its "welfare" by pushing and holding doors open throughout the world using strategies ranging from polite to impolite coercion, and the use of military means as necessary. It was a cute term for U.S. imperialism.
In Korea, the Japanese since 1905 had assumed police responsibility in Seoul, had placed their own police inspectors in all Korean provinces, and placed a resident general in the country. Japanese troops were never withdrawn, and only ten weeks after the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War, Japan forced Korea to formally sign the Protectorate Treaty. Japan exercised broad control over both Korea's domestic and international affairs. Japan renamed Korea Chosen, and the wealthy Korean aristocracy began changing their names to Japanese. Later, after the formal Annexation in 1910, all Koreans had to speak Japanese, not Korean, take Japanese names, and conform to Japanese dress and religious customs.
Ironically, Teddy Roosevelt received the Nobel Peace Prize for his "mediation," having been credited with bringing peace between Russia and Japan. Little did anyone understand at the time that the secret agreement made prior to the Treaty at Portsmouth had aimed an early fatal dagger cutting the heart out of an independent, sovereign Korean Peninsula which to this day it has not recovered.
The Treaty of Portsmouth marked the corresponding temporary decline of Russian power in the Far East. The expensive railway lines constructed by Russia in southern Manchuria were ceded to Japan without payment. All Russian troops were removed. This humiliating defeat of Russian efforts to control the eastern corner of the dying Chinese empire was a shock to the Tsar. It must be remembered that the Tsar was already in trouble. Disgruntled Russians had secretly formed the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party at Minsk in 1898 based on principles of Marxism. At the second party congress held at Brussels and London in 1903, Lenin's faction gained a majority, calling themselves Bolsheviks (meaning "majority").
When the Russo-Japanese war first broke out in February 1904, historic Russian racism that despised the "inferior" Japanese, augmented with cocky patriotic fervor, seemed to bolster the Tsar's power. But continued Russian defeats disillusioned moderate Russians and spurred the unsuccessful first Russian revolution that erupted in January 1905. Though it failed, it came to be understood as a great rehearsal for the two subsequent revolutions that erupted twelve years later in 1917. The second revolution occurred in February 1917 as a result of the costly, vastly unpopular First World War. The Tsar was toppled by moderate Mensheviks (meaning "minority") and the Socialist Revolutionaries, leading to establishment of a Provisional government. As chaos spread throughout the disintegrating Russian empire, self-elected councils (soviets) of workers' and soldiers' groups sprang up all over the country just as they had done during the first revolution in 1905. Lenin and the Bolsheviks established rule in Petrograd on October 1917, the third revolution, which is the date generally attributed to the Russian Revolution. Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in 1924 but later recovered its original name of Saint Petersburg as it is known today.
The Russian Bolshevik Revolution was not acceptable to the Allied and Japanese world. The U.S. and other Allied nation's belligerent response to the Bolsheviks has had dramatic implications for the world, and Korea, as will be discussed in the section below, "U.S. Cultural Context, U.S. Occupation and the Cold War."
After 1905, Japan's assertion of power was accomplished substantially at Korea's (and after 1931, at China's) expense. Nonetheless, popular Korean resistance to Japanese colonialism grew strong. The Japanese estimated that there were almost 70,000 Korean guerrillas in 1908 engaging Japanese forces in nearly 1,500 separate confrontations. Between 1905 and 1910, Korean people's resistance to Japanese occupation led to the killings of at least 18,000 protesting Koreans, 12,000 of them from 1908 to 1910 alone.
Nonetheless, on August 22, 1910, after more than a thousand years as an independent and distinct geographic unit, Korea formally capitulated to Japan, when the Yi Dynasty was forced to sign the Annexation Treaty. Korea thus became annexed as a province of Japan with the full support of the United States. This capitulation was due primarily to the Korean ruling class's fears of losing their privilege to organized, aggrieved peasants, more than fears of being ruled by foreign powers. After formal annexation, many of the guerrillas regrouped in Manchuria or in Russian maritime territory as they continued to wage war against the Japanese.
The Yi Dynasty had ruled since 1392 but was unable to defend itself from the formidable Japanese imperial colonization supported secretly by the United States. Though Korea had formally been an independent nation, it had long survived under a kind of Chinese suzerainty (overlord) which had provided it military protection. However, the Chinese had become significantly weakened due to aggressive Japanese diplomatic and military maneuverings following its Meiji Restoration in 1868, as noted above.
Nogun Ri: Tip of the Iceberg
Nogun Ri, the July 1950 massacre committed by U.S. forces, was revealed in the fall of 1999 thanks to a rare tenacity exhibited by a few members of the U.S. press. As shocking as the Nogun Ri story was, it is only the "tip of the iceberg." The telling of that story has triggered many more. Now, many villages are creating their own local massacre investigation commissions, with formation of a national commission imminent. There is already a Korea Truth Commission (KTC) On U.S. Military Massacres of Civilians, created in 2000 at a meeting in Beijing, China. Hearings are planned for locations in both South and North Korea, as well as in the United States. The KTC has set up its international office in Washington, D.C. and has already conducted preliminary hearings in the United States on the commission of U.S. war crimes in Korea. Furthermore, now that Kim Dae Jung, the President of South Korea, and Kim Jong Il, his counterpart in the North, successfully completed their historic first meeting in June 2000, domestic political changes in Korea are likely to escalate dramatically toward reunification of their historically undivided nation. A unity of remarkably unique culture, ethnicity, and linguistics is held so deeply in the hearts and minds of most Koreans, that its power transcends the relatively recent Cold War ideological schism that was involuntarily imposed upon them by the United States.
U.S. Intentions and Actions Dividing Korea, 1943-1945
Within months of Pearl Harbor, in early 1942, U.S. State Department planners began to express concern in the event there was to be Soviet involvement in the war against the Japanese in Manchuria and Korea. They feared that the Russians would bring with them the fearless Korean guerrillas who had been passionately fighting the Japanese in Manchura in their efforts to recover their homeland. The first formal international statement supporting Korean independence was proclaimed in November 1943 when the U.S. (Franklin D. Roosevelt)., Great Britain (Winston Churchill), and China (Chiang Kai-shek) issued the Cairo (Egypt) Declaration, in which Korea was to receive independence "in due course" following the expected ultimate unconditional surrender of the Japanese. This arrogance over Korea's future existed despite the fact that Korea was the oldest victim of Japanese expansion. Fearing a Russian puppet regime in Korea once the Japanese were defeated, something confidentially presumed, this "conclusion" became the critical factor in planning for Korea. In March 1944, the U.S. State Department recommended "the employment of technically qualified Japanese in Korean economic life ... during the period of military government." (emphasis added) Given the extent of nearly forty years of Japanese domination and the humiliating subservient role forced on the Koreans, this secretly planned postwar U.S. military government in Korea amounted to preservation of Japanese imperialism and an unlawful, cruel violation of Korean sovereignty.
At the February 4-11, 1945 Yalta "Big Three" Conference, held at Yalta, a city in southern Ukraine on the Black Sea, President Roosevelt, without consulting the Koreans, suggested to Stalin and Churchill that Korea be placed under joint trusteeship prior to being granted its independence at the conclusion of World War II, once Japan surrendered. However, the most important agreement achieved at Yalta was the Soviet's promise to enter the Pacific war theatre three months after the anticipated surrender of Germany, thereby relieving the U.S. of further casualties in defeating the Japanese in Manchuria, China, Korea, and Japan itself. This secret agreement by the USSR to enter the war against Japan was promised in return for possession of S. Sakhalin (island off the east coast of USSR just north of the Japanese island of Hokkaido), the Kurile Islands (extending northeast from the Japanese island of Hokkaido to the USSR peninsula of Kamchatka between the Sea of Okhotsk and the Pacific Ocean), and an occupation zone in Korea if the U.S. insisted on joint trusteeship.
Harry Truman had only succeeded to the Presidency on April 12, 1945, upon the death of President Roosevelt, only 2 months after the Yalta conference. Germany surrendered on May 7, starting the 3 month clock to the promised entrance of the Soviet Army to hopefully finish off the Japanese in Asia. The strategic decision to wait for resolution of the Manhattan Project (development of the top secret Atomic bomb) came to dominate much of secret U.S. policy making beginning in mid-May. Truman, only having been briefed of the existence of the new weapon project once taking the Presidency in April, and as a newcomer to international diplomacy, was believed to have dreaded his upcoming meeting with Stalin and Churchill at Potsdam, near Berlin, in northeastern Germany. The advance agenda of Potsdam was to discuss challenges arising out of the collapse of Nazi Germany and the disposition of eastern Europe vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. Not surprisingly he delayed the conference. However, it is significant to note that Truman finally scheduled the confernece to immediately follow the critical test of the secret Bomb, to occur July 16 at Alamogordo, 120 miles southeast of Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The test's success exceeded expectations and immediately provided the U.S. with unprecedented confidence in all of its post-test negotiations. Potsdam began on July 17 and concluded on August 2. Previoiusly, the U.S. had virtually accepted the fact that once the Japanese were defeated with Soviet assistance, the Soviets would occupy and control the future of the Korean Peninsula. However, with the success of the new, most powerful, weapon ever developed, U.S. diplomacy was radically altered, and U.S. arrogance could prevail with minimal need to compromise.
On August 8, exactly three months after the German surrender, Russian troops entered Manchuria, as they had earlier promised, overwhelming Japanese forces there. On August 12 they entered northern Korea, further ousting Japanese forces, thereby assuring no more U.S. casualties. This significant Soviet involvement now made it impossible for the U.S. to exclude the USSR in a post-war Korean settlement. On August 11 (three days after the entrance of the Soviet troops in the Japanese arena and, as it turned out, only four days before the imminent surrender of Japan), President Truman ordered two colonels in his Department of War to hurriedly identify a supposedly temporary line dividing Korea into two zones. The 37th and 38th parallels were discussed in a quick 30-minute meeting by two young colonels, one being Oxford-educated Dean Rusk (later to be Secretary of State under President's Kennedy and Johnson during the early Vietnam War years), at the newly constructed headquarters of the then U.S. War Department, the 34 acre Pentagon building in Arlington, VA. The decision on the 38th parallel, no surprise, created a division that placed approximately 21 million rural people, sixty-five percent of the country's population, and the historic capital city of Seoul in the United States zone. Nine million people and the more industrial sectors, with fifty-five percent of the land base, were to be in the Soviet zone. The question was whether Stalin would accept the 38th parallel rather than the 37th, the latter of which would have included the historic capital of Seoul in the anticipated Soviet zone.
This decision establishing the 38th parallel, publicly proclaimed on August 15 as "General Order No. One," occurred without prior consultation with other countries, including the Soviet Union. This public proclamation occurred on the same day that Japan announced its intentions to surrender. No one was sure how Stalin would respond to this limit on the August Soviet military advances in Korea. To everyone's surprise, Stalin accepted the division without comment or challenge. The division of Korea had begun, even before Japan announced its surrender. Later, Dean G. Acheson, Secretary of State (1949-53), a lawyer trained at both Yale and Harvard, described the 38th Parallel as no more than "a surveyor's line." But to the koreans it was the equivalent of an egregious assault on their historic soul and aspirations for genuine independence. Order Number One determined that the Japanese were to transfer power immediately from their authority to specified occupation forces, and to prevent local "Left" populations from taking control.
The U.S. was to take the southern zone; the already present Soviet troops were to remain temporarily in the northern one, with the aim of repatriating all Japanese in their respective sectors. The U.S. immediately created the United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK), which was the sole legal authority south of the 38th Parallel, and it remained so until the Republic of Korea was formally established on August 15, 1948, exactly three years later. Tragically, Western plans for a post-war division of Korea were proceeding without the prior knowledge or consent of the Korean people.
Ironically, on the very same day of the Japanese surrender and U.S proclamation of General Order Number One, August 15, 1945, the Korean people, the majority seriously impoverished, openly celebrated their liberation after forty years of miserable Japanese occupation. The Koreans immediately formed The Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence (CKPI). By August 28, all Korean provinces on the entire Peninsula had established local peoples' democratic committees and, on September 6, delegates from throughout Korea, north and south, gathered in Seoul to create the Korean People's Republic (KPR). The people of Korea were confident they would now be able to build their own society, resuming control over their sovereignty which had been effectively suspended since the Japanese had taken over their foreign and military affairs in 1905 prior to formal full annexation in 1910. At that exciting moment in their lives on September 6, 1945, the Korean people could not have imagined that they were about to become victims of an even more tragic and cruel injustice, this time inflicted upon them by a Western nation, the United States of America, rather than by one of their historic Asian nemesises.
Japan presented its formal surrender on September 2 to five-star (a newly established rank at the time) General Douglas MacArthur aboard the U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay. MacArthur was named commander of the Allied powers in Japan and directed the subsequent occupation that included Korea as well.
On September 7, the very next day after the excited creation of the KPR, General Douglas MacArthur, as commander of the victorious Allied powers in the Pacific, formally issued a proclamation addressed "To the People of Korea," announcing that forces under his command "will today occupy the territory of Korea south of 38 degrees north latitude." The very first advance party of U.S. units, the 17th Regiment of the 7th Infantry Division, actually began arriving at Inchon on September 5th, two days before MacArthur's occupation declaration. The bulk of the U.S. occupation forces began unloading from twenty-one Navy ships (including five destroyers) on September 8 through the port at Inchon under the command of Lieutenant General John Reed Hodge. Hundreds of black-coated armed Japanese police on horseback, still under the direction of Japanese Governor-General Abe Nobuyuki, kept Korean crowds away from the disembarking U.S. soldiers. On the morning of September 9, the U.S. troops marched into Seoul, again protected by Japanese troops lining the streets, ushering the high-ranking officers into their new quarters at the Choson Hotel. And on September 9, General Hodge announced that Abe, the Japanese Governor-General would continue to function with all his Japanese and Korean personnel.
Hodge had become known for his aggressive warfare in battles at Guadalcanal, Leyte, Bougainville, and the "last battle" at Okinawa, earning him the reputation as "the Patton of the Pacific." Patton had been nicknamed "old blood and guts" for his tank actions in World War I, and his later exploits during War II in Italy, North Africa, and France and Germany.
Within a few weeks there were 25,000 troops and members of "civil service teams" in country. Ultimately the number of U.S. troops in southern Korea reached 72,000. Though the Koreans were officially characterized as a "semi-friendly, liberated" people, General Hodge, nonetheless, regrettably instructed his own officers that Korea "was an enemy of the United States...subject to the provisions and the terms of the surrender." Quickly, tragically, and ironically, the Korean people, citizens of the victim-nation, had become enemies, while the defeated Japanese, who had been the illegal aggressors, served as occupiers with and friends of the United States. Korea was inflicted with the very occupation originally intended for Japan. Japan was subsequently built up by the U.S. in the post-war period, while Korea was subjected to brutal occupation. Japan remains to this day the U.S. forward military base affording protection and intelligence for its "interests" in the Asia-Pacific region.
This was due to strategic evaluations made by the U.S. of projected post-war plans of its wartime Soviet ally but who in fact were held with fear and mistrust by the West since the Bolshevik revolution first articulated its socialist philosophies in 1917. The provisions of such occupation, including ordinances issued by the Military Governor of Korea, were to be enforced by a "Military Occupation Court." On September 12, West Point Graduate and artillery expert Major General Archibald V. Arnold, was named U.S. Military Governor to replace Japanese Governor-General Abe, though most of the existing administrative and police personnel were retained.
Arnold was later replaced as U.S. Military Governor by Major General William F. Dean, a highly decorated World War II veteran of battles in France, Germany and Austria. Interestingly, when the 'hot' war started in June 1950, Dean became the commander of the U.S. 24th Division and was captured on August 25 in Taejon, being the highest ranking U.S.officer ever captured by the North Koreans and imprisoned as a POW for 37 and-a-half months
From that fateful day on September 8, 1945, to the present, a period of now 56 years -- a long, painful 660 months -- U.S. military forces (currently numbering 37,000 positioned at 100 installations), have maintained a continuous occupation in the south, supporting de facto U.S. domination of the political, rhetorical, economic and military life of a needlessly divided Korea. This overwhelming U.S. role, often brutal in nature and, until recently, supporting repressive policies of dictatorial puppets, continues to be the single greatest obstacle to peace, because of its interference with inevitable reunification of the Korean Peninsula. Until 1994, all of the hundreds of thousands of South Korean defense forces operated legally under direct U.S. command. Even today, although integrated into the Combined Forces Command (CFC), when the U.S. military commander in Korea deems there is a war situation, these forces automatically revert to direct U.S. control.
U.S. Cultural Context, U.S. Occupation and the Cold War
The well documented but little publicly known historical record of the United States in Korea is nothing short of demonic and shameless: from the brutal U.S. formal occupation (1945-48); to steadfast support of the tyrannical rule of U.S. puppet, Syngman Rhee, before, during, and after the hot Korean War (1948-1960), under the rhetorical propaganda of a Korean "democracy"; to U.S. dominance in Korea from 1960 to the present, most of the time during which the Korean people have been forced to labor under iron fist military dictators while the U.S. State Department often reported to the U.S. population the existence of "democratic reforms" there.
As one observes the chronic historic pattern of U.S. interventions all over the world, its consistent imperial behavior can only be properly understood by examining the interplay of five deeply ingrained features of its culture in addition to two factors relating to its geographical position.
Cultural features:
The fifth cultural factor, i.e., our imperial reach, has led to incomprehensibly violent behaviors during the history of our Republic that have maimed and murdered countless millions through more than 400 overt and anywheres from 6,000 to 10,000 covert interventions in more than 100 nations, primarily directed against the poor as they have struggled, and continue to struggle, for justice and genuine local sovereignty. The United States and the Western nations combined, comprising about twenty-five percent of the world's population, to this day have not tolerated genuine self-determination (democracy) processes, because if they did so it would seriously undermine their ability to continue to consume eighty-five percent of the world's resources. In other words, it is essential to our way of life to be able to continue to rob and pillage at will the global pool of labor and natural resources, no matter how much hurt and misery it causes, and whether people like it or not.
This pattern of U.S. behavior pre-dates the Cold War interventions that used the pretext of fighting the "evils" posed by post-World War I Bolshevism/Communism. In fact, the 1917 Russian Bolshevik revolution was a threat because its proclamation of socialism represented a radical, indigenous nationalism responsive to popular local pressures that required independence from Western capitalism, a definite no-no. However, the U.S. intervention pattern originated in the late 1700s with the westward expansion on the North American continent of "deserving," god-fearing European settlers, and the establishment of a strong national U.S. government that could use force to assure success of that expansion into "hostile" territory inhabited by "undeserving savages." The U.S. has relied on terror, massacres, and genocide throughout its history to assure continued hegemonic success. During the Revolutionary War, in 1779, George Washington, General of the Continental Army, ordered General John Sullivan, along with General James Clinton and Colonel Daniel Brodhead, and their nearly 5,000 troops, to instill "terror" in the Iroquois and "to lay waste all their settlements" in New York State, that their country "may not be merely overrun but destroyed." The Iroquois Confederacy with their sophisticated cooperative agriculture was considered the most advanced Indigenous federation in the New World. Sullivan's troops with their 120 boats, 1,200 pack horses, and 700 cattle, loyally carried out the instructions from Washington and employed a scorched earth policy no less ruthless than General Sherman's march to the sea during the American Civil War, General Curtis LeMay's incendiary wasteland bombings of North Korea, 1950-53, or search and destroy missions of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. In little more than a month (September 1779) the Iroquois were wiped out. This early "manifest destiny" behavior was psychically facilitated by the combination of a "white" ethnocentrism (ethnic superiority) accompanied by a deep racism (fear manifested as hatred) held toward people of "color," or those who otherwise looked "different" from white Europeans.
To be fair, this kind of brutality emanating from minds that can so easily rationalize such superiority and the consequent bestiality directed toward others is not unique to Europeans. But nonetheless, it was applied with such a ruthlessness in North America (and in the remainder of the Americas, as well) as to be on the order of our own first holocaust. Let us examine the context. It is now believed that there were as many as 125 million Indigenous living in thousands of communities speaking numerous native languages throughout the Western Hemisphere at the time of the Columbus' invasion in 1492. In 400 years of Conquest this native population was reduced by numbers exceeding 95 percent! The Europeans, my own genetic ancestors, knew know limits in their marauding of the people they found living in the Americas: they hacked Indigenous to death, burned them alive, hunted them as game, fed them to dogs, trampled them under horses, scalped them for bounty, stabbed and threw them over the sides of ships, worked them to death as slaves, intentionally starved or froze them to death during forced marches and internments, and intentionally infected them with epidemic diseases leading to massive numbers of deaths. This is the truthful history, the legacy of "development" of our Western and, yes, U.S. American civilization.
Of the 125 million Indigenous, it is now believed that 10 to 15 million lived north of the Rio Grande, the river that is today's legal boundary separating the United States from Mexico. By the end of the Nineteenth Century, the U.S. Census Bureau counted less than 238,000 Indigenous, a 400 year population decline of 98 percent. The dispossession of Native Americans, along with the second holocaust committed against African people, are the defining and enabling experiences of the Republic of the United States. And the U.S. experience with its Indigenous "problem" became an example partially motivating the Twentieth Centuries most infamous holocaust. Historian John Toland, in his biography of Adolph Hitler, describes how the concept of the Third Reich's concentration camps and the practicality of genocide derived from its study of Boer camps in South Africa and the methods used to exterminate American Indians by the U.S. government. Hitler often praised to his inner circle about the "efficiency of America's extermination - by starvation and uneven combat - of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity."
Let us look at slavery, the second holocaust enabling development of "America." There were some 50,000 separate voyages of slave ships that took the six to ten week passage to the Americas from the 16th to the 19th Century. They transported as many as 15 million slaves, the majority young males, from western African countries to a number of European colonies in the Caribbean, West Indies, and in North, Central and South America. The 4,000 mile long slave coast of West Africa lay betwen the Senegal River in the north that separates today's Mauritania from Senegal, to the Cunene River in the south that separates today's Angola from Namibia. It is roughly estimated that Africa lost 50 million human beings to death and slavery in the centuries when Western civilization was being constructed. Of those 50 million identified for capture, probably less than a third, 10 to15 million, survived apprehension and the barbaric conditions of the "Middle Passage" to be sold as slaves somewhere in the Western Hemisphere. Slavery was a huge business for the investors, brokers, shippers, smugglers, auctioneers, and the planters, miners, and other commercial interests that could profit from this abundant supply of "free" labor.
The incredibly difficult labor required to prepare land for profitable large farms and plantations from tangled thickets of mangroves and palmettos could be done only under duress. Freemen with any options whatever would not agree to suffer the brutalities of such labor. Only chattel slaves, under involuntary physical duress could be made to perform this miserable work. And agriculture, once the land was prepared, was only profitable when it became a slave plantation, requiring the work of varying numbers of slaves. This enabled the plantation owner to afford the various buildings and equipment, including lavish living quarters, that made for a successful, profitable life. Somewheres between one and two million of those slaves came to the colonies that became the United States of America. The United States developed "fair and square" on the land stolen from the Indigenous and the labor stolen from the Africans.
This, too, is part of an honest history of "development" of the U.S. American civilization. And from the beginning, U.S. policymakers, civic and religious leaders, historians and other academicians have systematically perpetuated a grotesque distortion of history which presents U.S. intentions and behavior as noble triumphs over ever-lurking evil forces. It is as if we have been taught, and proudly learned, a fabrication of history to the extent of it being sheer fantasy. Honest confrontation of this distortion is virtually always greeted with severe criticism and contempt, virtually assuring that the critic is quickly marginalized and not taken seriously.
Now, just for a moment, let us look at the broad historical context of what happened between about 1500 and 1900. The six primary imperialist powers of Europe at the time (France, Spain, Italy, British Isles, Portugal, and Netherlands) comprising about 40 million people combined, possessed less than 10 percent, probably less than 8 percent, of the world's population in 1500. These powers in their pursuit of riches proceeded to (1) decimate African society by enslaving the millions of people who survived their apprehension and transportation process, and (2) eliminate American Indigenous cultures in the Western Hemisphere who refused to be enslaved by or assimilated into European values. These two aggrieved populations combined totalled about 200 million at the time, or between 30 and 40 percent of the world's population. Thus, European societies with probably one-twelth the world's people, virtually eliminated societies comprising a third or more of the global population. To accomplish that, to perpetuate and rationalize that kind of superiority and carelessness over others, requires an arrogance that clearly knows no limits. It is this legacy that we in the West must address, because its character is still with us, still determining contemporary policies that grow from historic values of greed and power that in turn emanate from a consciousness of superiority, rather than one that recognizes respect, justice, and a sacred interconnectedness with all life. It is instructive to remember that the presence of the past is always here!, always operating just below the surface.
The casualties inflicted upon Europe by the Black Death begining in the mid-1300s and extending into the Fifteenth Century were exceeded by those caused by the plague brought to the Western hemisphere by Europeans that devastated its Indigenous cultures.
The American Revolutionary War was not initiated by the poor, but by an upper class of successful business people and plantation owners who wanted to be free of irritating British rules and taxation. In effect, it was a revolt of Brits against Brits. Only 56 selected White men signed the 1776 Declaration of Independence, 48 men the 1778 Articles of Confederation. Of the original 65 White men selected (but not elected) as state delegates to convene on May 14,1787 for the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia, only 55 attended, and of those, only 39 signed the final document on September 17, many with reservations. None of these men, virtually all learned and/or wealthy, were typical representatives of the colonial population.
James Madison, the framer usually acknowledged as the "Father" of the Constitution, a Princeton educated lawyer from an established landed Virginia family, who at one time possessed more than 100 slaves, greatly feared that the majority of people with little or no property would threaten to take away the property of the few. The constitutional system in the new United states of America would, according to Madison (The Federalist No. 10), prevent "an equal division of property or any other improper or wicked object." The new government would have the capacity to conrtrol class conflict which arises from "the various and unequal distribution of property."
The creation of the republic, the United States of America, was conducted in secrecy, primarily by the educated and wealthy elite of white European land-owning males (the plutocrats), comprising but a tiny percentage of the colonial population. The people were not privy to the proceedings at the founding Constitutional convention, nor to the ratification process in the various state legislatures. If the people, i.e., the ninety-five percent of the population not part of the well-to-do commercial and agricultural elite, had been given a voting franchise, many historians believe the Constitution and its creation of a strong central government would have been soundly defeated.
Shortly after the new central government was inaugurated in April 1789, there were reminders of the need for strong action to ward off any threats to its designs for an expanded economy and territory. The July-August 1789 popular revolt in France (the French Revolution) created anxiety among the new ruling class in "America." Shays Rebellion in 1786-87 of debt-ridden Massachusetts farmers just prior to the Constitutional Convention had suggested a lack of popular support for the emerging principles of centralization of the "American" Republic. The Founding Fathers were fearful a genuine popular revolt might emanate from disgruntled citizens living in the separate states if not united under a strong national government. The successful August 1791 rebellion of African slaves in the nearby French colony of Haiti, prompted by promises growing out of the French Revolution, was a frightening reminder to the new governing Fathers that their slave-based economy was precariously based on continued submission of its "free" labor force. There had been a number of earlier slave revolts in the colonies and the new elite knew the importance of keeping the lid on this potentially explosive population that could devastate the new economy once its members revolted.
During its first few years the new government was busy signing treaties with various Indigenous nations in New York State, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, rapidly expanding its land base for a growing restive, White population. Early on, Indigenous became suspicious that the U.S. government was using deceit in preparing the treaty language, then noting the consistent pattern of refusing to keep its promises. The Shawnee Nation rejected "peace" offers made by the national government and continued to battle U.S. forces throughout the Ohio Valley. Thus, the importance of the new national army was critical from the beginning. Internally expressed opposition, especially by editors and printers, to issues such as continued slavery, violence against Native Americans, and the emerging militaristic foreign policy considered belligerent by some critics (e.g., the dangerous undeclared naval war with France, see below; and the growing tensions with the Arab states of Morocco, Tunis, Algeria, and Tripoli in northern Africa over their interference through the Barbary pirates of U.S. maritime operations in the Mediterranean Sea), was of growing concern to the new government. The latter adopted the very anti-democratic 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts under its second President, John Adams (1797-1801), which were aimed at repressing unwanted popular dissent, especially as expressed by the press.
The first of what were to be hundreds of subsequent foreign military interventions was initiated during the term of President John Adams over a crisis in relations with France. On July 11, 1798, Congress established the Marine Corps. Almost immediately, the U.S. Marines committed their first foreign intervention when they landed at the city of Puerta Plata on the northern coast of the Dominican Republic and captured a French privateer, one of 85 French vessels captured by the new U.S. Navy and marines. This occurred during the undeclared Naval War with France (1798-1801) in the Caribbean, which resulted partially from the continuation of anti-French sentiment in the U.S. that had been inflamed by the provocative 1789 French Revolution. Thus, the new strong central government designed to assert empire as a way of life was rapidly validating itself.
Once the "American" Republic was established, its political, economic, and military resources were violently and ruthlessly utilized for a solid century to eliminate self-determination capacities within and among all the various Indigenous nations. Most Indigenous, not exterminated through murder, European disease and military repression, were forced to assimilate into the "white" culture as a price for continuing to exist. Tragically, this existence was conditioned on obliteration of their language, customs, and collective way of land stewardship and political decision-making. Indigenous culture was essentially deraced. The U.S. government breached each one of the more than 400 treaties made with the various Indigenous nations. It was by consistently employing overwhelming violence and vicious deceit that the Europeans were able to "safely" expand their initial territory from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. When Indigenous have described the "White Man" as having "forked tongue," they know from tragic experiences what they are talking about.
A major expansion of the United States occurred under President James Knox Polk (1845-1849), who provoked a "war" in May 1846 with Mexico, a large country which at the time included the territory that is now all or part of ten U.S. states - Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Nevada, and California. The illegally negotiated Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed in February 1848 in which Mexico ceded nearly half of its existing territory (i.e., the above identified land now comprising much of the west and southwestern U.S.) to the United States. But it was the period in the 1890s that saw the actual beginnings of the U.S. as an imperial power, formulating a formal "open door" policy as a diplomatic cover for hegemonic designs. Domestic agricultural and industrial production was then consistently exceeding capacity for domestic consumption. This meant that domestic U.S. prosperity increasingly became dependent upon a global reach beyond the already greatly expanded original boundaries of the the United States. The anti-imperialists were opposed to outright colonization, but they did agree on empire based on expansion of markets, versus expansion of territory. There was an overwhelming consensus, even among radicals, of the need for commercial expansion.
Nonetheless, the debate raged as to how this expansion could be accomplished while furthering "American" values of "freedom." Would it be through costly outright imperialism followed by "altruistic, civilizing reeducation" of the "savage" Indigenous who inhabited the new territory in the world, or through control of markets and resources without formal annexation of land and the consequent requirements of political administration? Access to and control of the Hawaiian Islands began to define the tricky process of unraveling Democratic-Republican differences over the manner of commercial expansion. The early missionary families who had been busy bringing Christianity to the Island's natives soon branched out to be prosperous sugar and pineapple plantation owners. In 1875 the U.S. signed a commercial treaty with Hawaii, enabling sugar and pineapple to enter the U.S. without duty. This developing prosperity led to creation in 1887 of a naval base at Pearl Harbor that served our expanding Pacific fleet as a coaling and docking station. The 1890 McKinley Tariff wiped out the earlier advantage for Hawaiian sugar growers, and Hawaiian Queen Liliuokalani was resisting the increasing U.S. interest in and control over Indigenous life. Thus, by January 1893 the U.S. sugar and pineapple planters (e.g., Sanford B. Dole) were anxious for formal annexation by the United States. In January they staged a successful revolt and applied to the U.S. for legal annexation. From January 16 to April 1, U.S. Marines were dispatched to "protect American lives and property." Under Democratic President Grover Cleveland, however, whose administration took office March 4, 1893, this effort was disfavored, the Marines were soon recalled, and annexation was for the moment dropped, only to be revived under Republican President William Mckinley. In 1898 Hawaii was finally annexed.
The same year, at the conclusion of the "Spanish-American" War of 1898, the United States assumed control over Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Phillipines and Guam. This "victory" was a prelude to the U.S.'s striving in the Twentieth Century to triumph in the contest for world dominance. The outcome of the War gave the U.S. much added capability to control sea lanes in the Caribbean and the Atlantic, enabling more secure access to Latin America and the building of the Isthmus Canal, as well as in the Pacific, enabling freer access to Asian markets. Hesitant to possess outright new colonies, the U.S., nonetheless, concluded that it did require physical occupation and administration of a second secure base, the Philippines, in the Pacific Ocean for access to east Asia, especially China.
During U.S. President Woodrow Wilson's administrations (1913-1921) the U.S. intervened in Latin America more frequently than at any other time in its history. This despite Wison's reputation as a progressive, and for his famous Fourteen Points speech of January 8, 1918, in which he promised the adjustment of colonial claims with concern for the wishes and interests of the inhabitants, a representation that encouraged the colonized that they might finally be freed. Ho Chi Minh was one who had taken Wilson's words very seriously in his efforts to achieve Vietnamese independence from all outside nations, especially France, China, and the United States. Wilson militarily intervened into Mexico in 1913, 1914, again in1916, and several times in 1918-19; Haiti in 1915 and where U.S. Marines remained until 1934; the Dominican Republic in 1916; Cuba in 1917; and Panama in 1918. Throughout his two administrations he maintained effective military and political control over Nicaragua with the stationing of thousands of Marines. So it must be understood that when a U.S. President is thought to be "progressive" while rhetorically speaking of self-determination for colonized peoples, it must be taken with a grain of salt. Everything that the U.S. policy makers believe and rhetorically proclaim must be understood from the racist and arrogant ethnocentric mind set that has permeated the ethos of its civilization from its very origins. It comprises the "American" character. Beware!
Korea, like so many other countries around the world, has been a victim of this historic matrix of U.S. cultural forces, but it was the first one where the intervention was couched in the language and ideology of the Cold War. The U.S. chose to eliminate the passionate Korean self-determination forces that rightfully sought an end to its repressive colonial legacies. Instead, the U.S. intervened on behalf of the smallest group in Korea (private, elite capitalists) and helped to perpetuate their privilege at the expense of the well-being of the vast majority of Korean citizens. This is the plight of so many peoples around the world and yet the people of the U.S. find it difficult to understand because they have not yet had their own socio-economic revolution. I pray that this important void is increasingly understood, i.e., that the U.S. civilization has yet to endure an ideological revolution addressing its historical injustices based on oligarchy and class.
These identifiable culturally defining factors of U.S. civilization provide a broader context in which to understand development of U.S. "containment" policies following World War II in the earliest stages of the Cold War. On March 12, 1947, President Truman addressed a joint session of Congress to request authorization for a program of economic and military aid to Greece and Turkey because "the free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms" from "attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures." This containment speech, expressing fear of the international "communist threat," officially launched the first of thousands of U.S. covert and overt interventions around the world.
A military mission was quickly created on May 20 in Turkey as a bulwark against foreign aggression. Then, on May 23, only three days later, the U.S. intervened in the bloody Greek Civil War (1946-49) on the side of the neo-fascists against the Greek left who had fought so courageously against the Nazis. U.S. advisors headed by General James Van Fleet were immediately dispatched to Athens and by 1949 the Joint U.S. Military Advisory Group, with a contingent of 450 men, was virtually directing the war for the Greek army. In the last five months of 1947 alone, the U.S. sent 74,000 tons of military equipment to the right-wing government in Athens, including artillery, bombers, and napalm. The fascist Greek army finally won, but not before there were an estimated 100,000 casualties and 700,000 refugees.
Initially called the Truman Doctrine, Truman's March 12, 1947 speech is often described as the formal declaration of the Cold War between the "Free World" and the forces of communism. The doctrine had its effects domestically as well. On March 25, Truman issued Executive Order #9835, initiating a domestic search for any "infiltration of disloyal persons" working in the U.S. government. This EO became a repressive and sinister destructive force in postwar U.S. America, poisoning broad areas of its work, educational, and cultural life.
The United States direct involvement in Korea beginning in August 1945 provides us the earliest example of U.S. Cold War behavior. When examined carefully, it reveals a great deal about the nature of her national psyche as it is expressed in corresponding misguided political and vicious military policies, as well as the kind of unrestrained terror that was to be in store for its victims. Fear of communism -- a national, and Western, mental illness of paranoia -- caused a ferocious fury of violence to be directed at undeserving "Third World" peoples, as the monolithic spread of communism, itself grossly exaggerated, was regularly confused with genuine national self-determination (democratic) movements striving for independence from Western, colonial forces.
The proof of chronic distortions relating to allegations of Soviet-led "monolithic communism" is found in an honest perusal of the record, not in a blind belief in the constant rhetoric of U.S. public relations campaigns.
The Soviet Union had fought with the Allies in World War I, having suffered 20 percent of all the casualties in that War. The October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution was not acceptable to the Allied and Japanese world. Even before the terrible First World War ended, the U.S. and other Western countries, along with Japan, had invaded the Soviet Union threatening her new sovereignty in order "to strangle [the Bolshevik Revolution] at its birth" (Churchill). This resulted in millions more horrible Russian deaths, some from the alleged first use ever of gas bombs from warplanes -- as many as had died in World War I.
After the November 1918 Armistice ending World War I, the new but weakened Soviets made persistent efforts to make peace with the threatening Allies, on amost any terms. From November 1918 to February 1919, alone, the Soviet, Bolshevik government presented seven peace proposals to the Entente powers of France and Great Britain and the United States. Blatantly ignoring these proposals for peace, the military intervention of fourteen outside nations proceeded: [Canada; France (140,000 troops); Great Britain (140,000); Germany; Italy (40,000); Greece (200,000); Serbia (140,000); Romania (190,000); newly created nations of Czechoslovakia and Poland, Finland, Latvia, Japan, and the United States]. From May 1918-April 1920 a combined total of more than 900,000 troops supported the "White" side of the Russian civil war in efforts to overthrow the Revolution. This decision was to have extraordinary implications for the world during the rest of the Twentiety Century and this still little known "hot war" some argue was the actual beginning of the Cold War.
Launching a series of campaigns in (1) the north along borders with Baltic nations and Finland, with landings at Murmansk (May 1918) and Archangel (August 1918); (2) various regions of Siberia, and on the Pacific Coast, with a major landing at Vladivostock (July 1918), and (3) the Ukraine and other southern regions around the Black and Caspian Seas (April 1919), the Allied forces intended to surround, contain, then defeat the Bolsheviks while at the same time arming and equipping the "White" Russian forces. The Allied Supreme War Council maintained a hostile naval blockade of the new Soviet nation until January 16, 1920. In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson, consistent with his intervention philosophy in Latin America, had begun sending secret money to aid the White Russians, then in 1918 authorized support of the naval blockade while sending U.S. expeditionary military units comprising collectively 14,500 soldiers, first with 5,500 troops to Murmansk (May) and Archangel (August) in northern Russia on the White Sea, then 9,000 troops to Vladivostock (August) in eastern Russia on the Sea of Japan for penetration into Siberia as far as Lake Baikal. In March 1919 he sent additional forces to Murmansk in northern Russia near its border with Finland on the Barents Sea. U.S. casualties in the northern occupation approached 2,900. The U.S. forces in Vladivostock were joined by Japanese military (in violation of their earlier pledges to the U.S.) and moved westward nearly 2,000 miles to the Lake Baikal region to support Czech and White Russian forces which had declared an anti-Bolshevik government at Omsk more than a thousand miles further west. All U.S. troops had been removed by April 1, 1920 but Japanese forces remained until 1922.
Though the Bolsheviks were ultimately successful by mid-1920 in fending off the major Allied campaigns that attempted to destroy them, the intervention had severe effects. The Russians had already withstood the invasion of their lands in 1914 by Germany and the Hapsburg empire, experiencing enormous devastation and 7 million casualties throughout World War I. They experienced a serious invasion from Poland in 1920 near the end of their Civil War. The Allied interventions from 1918-1920 tragically prolonged a bloody Civil War costing thousands of additional lives. Some say that 25 million died from combat, terror and assassinations on both sides, and war-related deaths due to famine and disease, mostly typhus, smallpox, and exposure. This weakened an already devastated nation that extended from Poland to the Pacific, from the Arctic to the Caucasus. The long-range implications fueled the Cold war. The Bolshevik leaders had clear proof that Western powers intended to destroy their new Soviet government and such awareness entrenched a Soviet regime, contributing to more totalitarian methods for survival and ruling. The U.S. suffered nearly 3,000 total military causalties, dead and wounded, during its 18 months of intervention activities in the Russian territory.
In 1939 the Soviets were forced into signing the Soviet-Nazi nonaggression pact due to the incessant refusal, especially of the U.S. and Great Britain, to unite with the Soviets to stand firmly against Hitler's advances. When Nazi Germany nonetheless invaded Russia in June 1941, neither this threat nor the increasing plight of the European Jews provoked the U.S. to join in the fight against Germany. And the major factor in the Nazis' defeat wasn't Normandy (June 6, 1944) or other scenes of U.S. battles, but the Eastern Front. Most historians date the war's turning point eighteen months before D-Day when, at Stalingrad (September 13, 1942-February 2, 1943), the Soviet military trounced 50 Axis divisions, and in July 1943 when, at Kursk, it destroyed 3,000 German tanks, the bulk of its tank force. And it was the Soviet army that liberated Auschwitz in January 1945. Furthermore, Soviet losses during World War II were staggering! She suffered more than half of all the aggregate dead from that gruesome war, losing as many as 28 million citizens, or over 17 percent of her entire population. The Nazis had demolished 15 large Soviet cities, over 1,700 villages, and enough factories, railroads, bridges, power stations and farms to cut the nation's material output in half. By comparison, the U.S. suffered the loss of about 400,000 battle and other deaths, or only .3 percent of its population, and none of its infrastructure, with the exception of the Pearl Harbor facility on its illegally acquired Hawaiian colony.
Despite the critical role the Soviet Union played in defeating the Nazis, and the staggering losses she suffered in manpower and infrastructure as a result, the U.S., nonetheless, insisted on all out "economic, political, and psychological warfare" to bring about the "collapse" of the Soviet Union. The U.S. Marshall Plan (adopted in 1948) gave $13 billion to 18 western European nations for various investment projects toward recovery from the devastating war, though most of that money was required to be spent on U.S. made goods. Japan also became dependent upon the U.S. for reconstruction. The Soviet Union received only sabotage designed to cause her more suffering.
In light of this tragic historic reality, the Soviet people experience scars burned deeply into their soul, never to be forgotten. Insecurities and fears inevitably effected the Soviet character. They had every reason to fear further threats to their security, especially from other Western forces. By 1945, the Soviets were eager, not for additional military confrontation, but to achieve some accommodation with the Western powers, and to initiate a process of world disarmament that would allow them to rebuild their shattered society. They were exhausted! This contributed critically to the Soviet's policy of pragmatic, defensive security, not an ideology of domination. Despite popular myth to the contrary, the intellectual architects of U.S. Cold War policy clearly understood this Soviet reality. The U.S. Secretary of War at the time, Henry Stimson, in April 1945, told a conference of U.S. leaders that the Soviet Union's demands in Eastern Europe were motivated by concerns for Russia's security, not by goals of world conquest. A January 1946 U.S. Naval Intelligence report acknowledged this exhaustion factor and concluded that USSR's policies were defensive in nature and that she was not expected to initiate "hostilities with Anglo-Americans" for the foreseeable future. Even hawkish John Foster Dulles, later to become Secretary of State, had agreed that security and survival, not ieology, dictated Soviet policy.
Nonetheless, in Korea, as in dozens of other nations, the U.S. insisted on rationalizing draconian measures to destroy "monolithic communism" in robot fashion wherever and whenever our leaders claimed it appeared, refusing any credence to genuine peoples' aspirations for justice, security and independence. The U.S. helped create, then support repressive measures, rather than nourish democratic, popular movements. Circumstances elsewhere in Asia fed the frenzy of anti-communism. The successful communist revolution in neighboring China in 1949 was extremely troubling to the West, even though China, like Vietnam, had greatly aided the Allies in the fight against the Japanese. The people's triumph in China greatly contributed to Truman's decision to not only continue his support of the tyrannical Rhee in Korea, but significantly escalate aid to the French military forces in their colonial war against Vietnamese self-determination efforts (considered part of monolithic "communism") further south. The advancement of "communism" had to be stopped!
The United States' ability to crush the popular movement (of "communists" as they were incorrectly labeled by U.S./Rhee political and military leaders) in Korea was an important test of the success or failure of the "containment" policy articulated in 1948 by George Kennan, director of the U.S. State Department's Policy Planning Staff (PPS). Publishing a then top-secret document (PPS 23, February 24, 1948), Kennan laid out an honest assessment of the need for a successful U.S. imperial policy:
"...we have about 50 percent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population...In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task...is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security...We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction...We should cease to talk about vague and -- for the Far East -- unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better."
Three-and-a-half months after Truman's 1947 "containment" speech, the July 26, 1947 National Security Act established the National Security Council (NSC) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the latter which was to operate under the NSC. The CIA mandate to manage much of the Cold War was initiated at the very first meeting of the NSC on December 19, 1947, directing the CIA in National Security Council Document 4/A (NSC 4/A) to undertake covert psychological and other operations to prevent a feared popular (democratic) Communist victory in the scheduled 1948 Italian elections. The U.S. through the OSS (CIA's predecessor) had already established operational connections with the Mafia in Italy in 1943 in order to aid Allied invasion strategies in Sicily and Italy proper. It is believed that a number of these connections continued to serve as "assets" in Italy. On December 22, 1947, a Special Procedures Group (SPG) was created to direct that effort. The stakes were considered high. George Kennan cabled U.S. diplomatic representatives in Europe: "As far as Europe is concerned, Italy is obviously key...If Communists were to win election there our whole position in Mediterranean, and possibly in Europe as well, would probably be undermined." Kennan was so alarmed that he advocated outright U.S. military intervention in the event that the Communists win through the election process.
Truman ordered "Leftists" ousted from the Italian cabinet while he was providing weapons, supplies, and technical advice to the Italian military. And the CIA had organized a secret paramilitary army, with hidden stockpiles of weapons and explosives at various locations. Called Operation Gladio, 15,000 guerrillas were trained to be ready to overthrow the Italian government should it go "Communist." The SPG provided secret funds to the centrist Italian political parties in efforts to guarantee a Communist Party defeat. The CIA by its own declaration gave $1 million to Italian "center" parties, though other reports place the amount at $10 million. Using fear rhetoric, the SPG officers on the ground in Italy waged an intense propaganda campaign using posters, pamphlets, planted newspaper stories, etc. More sordid disinformation devices were used such as the forging of documents and letters misrepresented as being written by the Communist Party.
In fact, the Communists were defeated in the April 1948 elections. No military coup was necessary. A propaganda coup had been executed with successful plausible deniability. This U.S. "victory" produced a surge of enthusiasm for covert operations as the device of choice in the behind-the-scenes struggles of the Cold War. The next month, Kennan recommended creation of a permanent organization to carry out in the world what the SPG under authority of NSC 4/A had done in Italy. NSC 10/2 superseded NSC 4/A on June 18, 1948, establishing the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) as the covert action arm of the CIA, and broadly chartered it to conduct an endless list of secret activities, including sabotage and overthrow of governments, in response to the "vicious covert activities of the USSR, its satellite countries and Communist groups." NSC 10/2 stipulated that OPC covert actions be "so planned and conducted that any U.S. government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if uncovered the U.S.Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them." And NSC 10/2 defined covert actions as any activity related to "propaganda; economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world." The whole world was now open to U.S. intervention. The device of being able to use plausible deniability (lying) has enabled, only in the arrogance of imperial fiction, of course, the U.S. to avoid taking responsibility for millions of murders and maimings of innocent human beings, destruction of civilian infrastructure such as schools, health clinics, and entire villages, and destroying the sovereignty and autonomy of entire Indigenous groups and nations.
In Korea's neighbor China, the OSS during the War had established a base for its Asian activities. The U.S. signed a secret agreement with the tenuous Nationalist Chinese government that set up a joint secret service known as the Sino-American Cooperative Organization (SACO). SACO was to provide training for guerrillas, conduct sabotage and espionage, and intercept Japanese communications. Following defeat of the Japanese, any cooperation between the Nationalists and Communists broke down. Truman aligned himself with Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist forces in the Civil War that raged after 1945. This despite the fact that the Nationalist Party under Chiang, and its army and government which was forced to flee the mainland, had taken over Taiwan upon the defeat of Japan and were known for their corruption and extraordinarily repressive measures. A reign of terror on Taiwan began on February 28, 1947, called the 1947 Massacre, lasting for many months, in which tens of thousands of Taiwan's best and brightest were disappeared, tortured, and murdered by Chiang's security forces. To the present day survivors and descendants of victims often do not know when their relatives were kidnapped nor where their bodies were dumped. This terror was similar to what the Koreans were experiencing at the same time under the U.S./Rhee forces. It is not surprising that Rhee and Chiang were friends sharing a similar philosophy of dictatorial rule while being supported by the United States under pretexts of being "democratic."
A private airline, Civil Air Transport (CAT), created in 1946 by Chiang Kai-shek's friend, General Claire Chenault, conducted paramilitary operations for the Nationalist forces, flying troops, supplies and dignitaries in the Civil War. After victory of the Communists over the Nationalists in late 1949, the United States became terrified. The CIA adopted the CAT, moved its base facilities to the Nationalist stronghold on Taiwan, and began officially covert flight operations on October 10, 1949. The Far East Division of the CIA's Office of Policy Coordination (OPC) masterminded the operations against Communist China. A CIA paramilitary training base was created in November 1949 at Ft. Benning, Georgia, and front organizations with training and operational bases were set up in southern Taiwan. Raids against the mainland began in early 1950. The Nationalists claimed to have more than a million guerrillas active on the mainland but U.S. intelligence indicated about half that number. The Peoples's Liberation Army (PLA) of Chinese Premier Chou En-lai claimed to have mobilized more than a million men for operations in central and southern China where the Nationalist's wielded their major threat.
The Korean War was the first time the CIA, created in 1947, operated in a hot war. The NSC 10/2 provided the "authority" for carrying out destabilizing, plausibly deniable, clandestine operations against China and Korea. By April 1950, President Truman approved the massive National Security Council study known as NSC 68, which became the most fundamental U.S. Cold War document. It was being implemented as the Korean hot war was to begin. NSC 68 concluded that "the assault on free institutions is world-wide" and "imposes on us, in our own interests, the responsibility of world leadership" such that we must seek "to foster a world environment in which the American system can survive and flourish."
Office of Strategic Services (OSS) veterans John "Jack" Singlaub and Danish-American Hans Tofte headed up CIA operations in Korea. OSS had operated during WWII and was CIA's precedent organization. When Tofte first arrived in Tokyo to begin planning for his Korea mission in 1950, there were only six CIA operatives present. Creating a secure fifty-acre compound serving as a headquarters at Atsugi Air Force Base, forty-seven miles south of Tokyo, Tofte quickly worked to recruit more than 1,000 operatives. He created six other training stations in Japan and Korea, including a large guerrilla training base on Yong-do, a small island in the Bay of Pusan on Korea's southern tip. Two islands off the east and west coasts, respectively, above the 38th parallel, manned by CIA agents and communications personnel, served as locations for retrieving downed flyers. There were two CIA-controlled indigenous "fishing fleets" patrolling the coasts while actively involved in black market operations. More than 1,200 guerrillas were trained on Yong-do for covert actions in the North to rescue downed pilots, commit acts of sabotage, and incite insurrectionary activities among hoped-for disgruntled North Koreans. From April to December 1951 alone, the CIA sent forty-four teams into North Korea to operate near the Yalu River. Their mission was to gather intelligence, ambush truck convoys and disrupt supply lines. Tofte inherited the forty strong aircraft of the nearly bankrupt Civil Air Transport (CAT) that had earlier fought on behalf of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists in their long guerrilla war against the Chinese Communists. The beefed up CIA office was responsible for covert actions over a wide swath of Asia far beyond Korea: eastern Siberia as far inland as Lake Baikal; all of Mongolia and North China to include Manchuria, and the Kurile Islands northeast of Japan and the Ryukyu Islands southwest of Japan.
When the Korean hot war began in June 1950, the Far East Division of the CIA's OPC rapidly expanded. Demand for covert operations against North Korea and China became a major focus. Both CIA and Military covert operations utilizing thousands of Koreans and hundreds of Chinese were constant throughout the war, but with limited success. A secret advanced training base was created on the Mid-Pacific Island of Saipan, part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, technically a United Nations dependency. By the U.S. using this island for a secret military base it was breaking international law, but this violation was unfortunately part of a long pattern of lawless behavior carried out with total impunity. The CIA kept a large weapons depot on Okinawa. During the Korean War, the U.S. constantly trained and armed Nationalist Chinese troops hiding illegally in Burma and Thailand for their launching of regular invasions into the Yunnan region of China, hoping to distract Communist Chinese troops away from their military support of the North Koreans. In order to facilitate regular arms flow to the Nationalists in Burma, Thailand and Taiwan, the CIA became complicit in Chiang's forces selling of large amounts of drugs (opium) to finance their operations.
The Korean War was the experience that catavaulted the CIA into a large operation. In 1949, the agency's OPC had 302 personnel, operating on a $4.7 million budget located at seven foreign stations. By 1952, during the Korean War, the OPC had grown to 2,812 direct employees with an additional 3,142 "overseas contract personnel," with a budget of $82 million operating out of forty-seven stations.
It is instructive to note, however, that the U.S. security and intelligence infrastructure that was to become so entrenched and ubiquitous during the Cold War was actually created at the beginning of World War II under President Roosevelt. After the Nazis had taken Czechoslovakia in March 1939, Roosevelt created the Interdepartmental Intelligence Conference (IIC) comprised of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Army's Military Intelligence Division (MID/G-2), and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). On September 1, 1939, the ante was heightened when Germany invaded Poland, marking the formal begining of WW II. There was still plenty of resistance in the United States to entering the war which created a political dilemma for Roosevelt. In July 1940, then from December 6, 1940 to March 18, 1941, Roosevelt quietly dispatched private citizen, Wall Street lawyer, and World War I hero, William J. Donovan, to England, then to Portugal, Gibraltar, Madrid, Malta, Cairo and Alexandria, the Libyan desert, Athens, Sofia in Bulgaria, Belgrade, Albania, Turkey, Cyprus, Palestine, Baghdad, Ireland, and Jerusalem to size up the effectiveness of the German "Fifth Column" and the extent of counter-sentiments thereto.
As a result of Donovan's secret intelligence mission, Roosevelt created on July 11, 1941, the Office of Coordinator of (War) Information (COI), the first U.S. agency ever whose function was to gather and interpret intelligence. Donovan was named director. The amount of work being generated led to dividing the functions of the COI into two new organizations on June 13, 1942: the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), headed by Donovan, but technically under the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Office of War Information (OWI), headed by Elmer Davis. The OSS became the first genuine foreign intelligence agency in U.S. history, and had trained agents, both military and civilian, located throughout the world conducting numerous clandestine activities. In April 1945, one month before defeat of the Germans, Allen Dulles, the OSS's Chief of Mission in Berne, Switzerland, asked Eastern European OSS officer Frank Wisner to begin secret talks with General Reinhard Gehlen, Hitler's notorious eastern front espionage chief. The U.S. was concerned about its post-War relations with its temporary ally, but long-term enemy, the USSR. Gehlen possessed voluminous files on Soviet activities, agents, suspected agents, government officials, and military capacity. Gehlen had microfilmed his intelligence files and buried this information throughout the Austrian Alps. Two weeks after the German army surrendered, Gehlen turned himself in on May 22, 1945, and was later flown to Washington, D.C. to meet with OSS founder Donovan and chief European OSS contact Allen Dulles. Before the end of 1945, Gehlen and much of his command structure with their entire network of thousands of spies and double agents were freed from POW camps with annonymity and impunity, then provided with several million dollars to continue to develop Russian and Eastern European intelligence information for the United States. This became known as the "Gehlen Org" and it began working immediately to destroy the existing anti-fascist, popular resistance movements, restoring oligarchic traditions of power, in effect destroying any possibility of a genuine democratic process.
After Roosevelt's death in April of 1945, new President Truman indicated a dislike for Donovan and was distrustful of the OSS. Less than two months after Japan surrendered, on October 1, 1945, Truman summarily disbanded the OSS and temporarily replaced some aspects of it with the Strategic Services Unit (SSU) in the Department of War. On January 22, 1946, Truman created something called the Central Intelligence Group (CIG), which immediately started gathering intelligence in Latin America while the Gehlen Org was busy doing the same in Eastern Europe, and while under deep cover in the Soviet Union. By August 1946, the anxious U.S. government renamed the SSU the Office of Special Operations (OSO). Note that the word "Special" generally is a code word for "secret." The OSO initially had a staff of a thousand, including six hundred dispatched to seven field stations around the world. Its Foreign Division (FDM) Chief was Richard Helms, responsible for intelligence in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, in which he worked closely with Gehlen's organization. Helms who had been voted most likely to succeed in his 1935 graduating class at prestigous Williams College in Massachusetts, would later become the director of the CIA during the Vietnam War years.
In September 1946 President Truman secretly authorized "Project Paperclip" circulated as State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC) 257/22, that authorized ultimately thousands of German scientists, doctors, as well as intelligence operators to emigrate to the United States with complete immunity from prosecution for war crimes. Much of the U.S. rocket and space program, much of its secret warfare against "Communists" in the U.S., in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and much of U.S. Special Warfare doctrine, drew considerably from this supply of German talent and philosophy. Much of the counterinsurgency literature of the U.S. military is based on an analysis of Nazi experience in Europe, especially as to which techniques worked for controlling resistance, particularly the use of mass terror.
On December 11, 1946, the Secretary of War created a special subcommittee of SWNCC to creat guidelines for covert action operations. After the subcommittee began planning for specific operations in April 1947, it soon took even another name in June, the Special Studies and Evaluations Subcommittee. But on July 24, the infamous National Security Act mentionned above became law, creating the National Security Council, an independent Army, Navy, and Air Force with a Joint Chief of Staff under a new Department of Defense (rather than the War Department), and a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). That is the structure that remains today, and has orchestrated countless crimes in blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution, the United Nations Charter, many other international laws, while threatening the sovereignty of more than 100 nations, killing and maiming millions in the process. The U.S. has waged (and continues to wage) various covert campaigns, perhaps as many as 10,000, in these countries, in its efforts to prevent any kind of serious alternative economic and political discussion and system from competing with the immense private profits of Western style capitalism. Increasingly we know that such obsession possesses the emotional passion of a religion that knows no limits in its tyrannical, often forcefully imposed tentacles to be spread wherever U.S.-driven selfish economic interests dictate. Their U.S. oligarchic political representatives systematically respond to assure promotion and necessary protection for such exploits, whether of the covert or overt variety, no matter the costs.
All of this activity has been rationalized, and made "lawful" by the imperial legal system of the United States. The most illuminating and coherent Cold War statement came out of the 1949-50 study by the National Security Council, with issuance of NSC-68, mentionned above, "United States Objectives for National Security." An ultimate declaration of U.S. "Manifest Destiny," NSC-68 formulated a worldview of polarization between two opposing ideologies where the leaders of the United States asserted the unique right and responsibility to impose their chosen "order among nations" so that "our free society can flourish." NSC-68 declared that U.S. policy and action must "foster a fundamental change in the nature of the Soviet system." A global imperial policy was seen as indispensable to protect "our belief in ourselves and our way of life." Ideologically speaking, this document articulates well our historical addiction to an imperial psychology that continues to this day. It became clear that following World War II, the United States considered all political and economic sectors or regions of influence that it did not control as being a threat to its global objectives of an integrated political-economic capitalism, i.e., promotion of the grotesquely consumptive American Way Of Life (AWOL).
In early 1951, the policy directives NSC-101 and NSC-118 established further "authority" for a variety of covert operations in North Korea and China. Of course, the U.S. had already been previously conducting operations in Korea and China, as well as elsewhere, but as the Korean War gave great impetus to the CIA, U.S. hegemony through clandestine activities merely intensified.
The U.S./Puppet Rhee Repression Machinery Created
The U.S. understood that if it was to assert Western-style, capitalist control in Korea it had to defeat, then eliminate, the broad-based popular, democratic KPR. Instead of repatriating Japanese as mandated, the U.S. military government (USAMGIK), manned by nearly 2,000 U.S. officers, most of whom were unable to speak or understand the Korean language, quickly recruited them and their Korean collaborators to continue administrative functions. More important, and egregiously, the U.S. military government revived the feared Japanese colonial police force, the Korean National Police (KNP). About 85 percent of the Koreans who had served in the Japanese colonial police force were quickly employed by the U.S. to man the KNP. Other collaborators were recruited into the Korean Constabulary created in December 1945 by the commander of the U.S. forces in Korea, General John R. Hodge. Secret protocols, later revealed, gave the U.S. operational control of the South Korean police and all of its armed forces from August 15, 1945 to June 30, 1949. Additionally, many Japanese and Korean collaborators who had been correspondingly purged, often brutally as well, by Russian forces and the new popular Korean committees in the north, became core members of powerful paramilitary groups like the Korean National Youth (KNY) and the Northwest Youth League (NWY) in the south which would work in concert with the "official" U.S./Rhee security forces.
This was happening despite the fact that the U.S. government knew full well of Korean desires in 1945 for independence. General John Reed Hodge, commander of the XXIV Corps of the United States Tenth Army, became Commanding General of the US Armed Forces in Korea because his forces could be moved quickly to Korea after Japan's August 15 surrender. While in Okinawa, Japan, the XXIV Corps possessed a thorough study entitled, "Joint Army-Navy Intelligence Study of Korea." This report described the strong desires of the Koreans for their independence, and that they preferred a cumbersome autonomous transition to the danger and dread of continued control by "some successor to Japan." The study described the extent of the 40 year Japanese rule and its collusion with an aristocratic Korean minority, reiterating that the majority of tenant-farmers were terribly oppressed. Nonetheless, the U.S. had no intention to grant the Koreans their historical legal and cultural rights to independence. And a subsequent U.S. survey of Korean attitudes disclosed that nearly three quarters of the population clearly wanted a socialist, rather than a capitalist, system. Furthermore, early reports revealed that their socialist leanings were quite independent of any directives from the Soviet Union, and were cooperative with but not under the thumb of northern Korea communists.
The U.S. hurriedly organized wealthy conservative Koreans representing the traditional land-owning elite and, on September 16, convened the Korean Democratic Party (KDP). According to XXIV Corps intelligence, the U.S. had quickly identified "several hundered conservatives" among the older and more educated Koreans who had served the Japanese who could serve as the nucleus for the rapidly convened KDP. These were the Koreans who had grown wealthy as a result of years of collaboration with their Japanese colonizers. Preston Goodfellow, former Deputy Director of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) who had a background in U.S. Army intelligence and clandestine warfare, was an acquaintance with Syngman Rhee living in the United States, and quickly made arrangements to import the seventy-year-old expatriate politician to Korea. Apparently Rhee had in some way cooperated with OSS in Washington, D.C. during World War II. On October 16, 1945, Rhee was flown to Korea from the U.S. on General Douglas MacArthur's personal plane.
At the conclusion of World War II, Goodfellow was director of a mysterious "Overseas Reconstruction Corporation" which probably served as an intelligence front. In that capacity he became involved in Asian tungsten deals with the World Commerce Corporation, a postwar company established by heads of Allied intelligence operations, including William J. ("Wild Bill") Donovan, the founding director of the OSS and Goodfellow's immediate boss when he was gathering intelligence during the war. Tungsten was and is one of the most treasured strategic metals used in making hardened tank armor and anti-tank shells tipped with tungsten carbide. Only the more recent discovery of depleted uranium (DU 238) as an even more effective, but extraordinarily dangerous, armor plating and piercing shell has tungsten been replaced in this function. By early 1949 Goodfellow had become Syngman Rhee's principal U.S. advisor and was a key agent for Korean-American business deals, and likely intelligence operations, involving both the U.S. and Nationalist China prior to the success of the Communists over the Nationalists. In 1954 Goodfellow was working with the former head of propaganda operations for the OSS in importing tungsten for the U.S. which at the time was desperate to maintain its military stockpile.
Rhee had been born in 1876 in Hwanghae Province, south of Pyonyang, into a struggling, though upper class family in the Yi dynasty. While attending a Methodist middle school in Seoul he repudiated Buddhism and Confucianism in favor of Christianity. However, he was vigorously opposed to the Japanese presence in Korea. He was arrested by Japanese police authorities and was sent to prison for several years. After release he had left for the United States in 1905, and was apparently able to arrange a meeting with outgoing Secretary of State John Hay in urging Theodore Roosevelt to protect Korean independence as the President was mediating an end to the Russo-Japanese War. He apparently was also able to meet with Roosevelt at his summer home at Oyster Bay, Long Island, at the very same time that Roosevelt's Secretary of War Taft was meeting with Japan's Katsura to consummate an agreement to Japan's control over Korea if Japan honored the U.S. control over the Philippines. Rhee was rudely rebuffed. Rhee remained in the United States and received degrees from George Washington University (1907), an M.A. from Harvard (1908), and an alleged Ph.D. from Princeton (1910) where he claimed to have studied under Professor Woodrow Wilson. He is credited to being the first Korean to receive a doctorate from a U.S. university, even though it is not at all certain that he received such degree. He returned briefly to Korea in 1910 to work for the Seoul YMCA as a teacher and evangelist, but returned to the U.S. in 1912 where he remained, part of the time in Hawaii, other times in Washington and New York, until Goodfellow brought him back to Korea on MacArthur's plane thirty-three years later with his wealthy Austrian wife whom he had met on a 1932 trip to Europe. To his credit an anti-Japanese colonialist, he had at one point been the leader of a Korean Provisional Government in exile, but was expelled in 1925 for embezzlement. Now Rhee, a Methodist, would quickly become the U.S. puppet leader in Buddhist and Confucianist Korea, just as Diem, a Catholic who had been temporarily living in New Jersey, was to be in Buddhist Vietnam nearly ten years later in the continuation of a tragic Asian policy in which the U.S. continued to confuse national movements for self-determination with monolithic communism. When he returned to Korea in 1945 few Koreans or U.S. Americans knew much about him since he had been in exile in the U.S. for a total of nearly forty years.
Now, with its Korean police state forces beefed up and a Korean political puppet it could herald as the new democratic leader of a South Korea, the U.S. Military Government could begin its systematic purge of all opposition forces. On October 20, at the Welcoming Ceremony for the Occupation, Rhee made it clear he was not intending to unify the country. Rhee denounced Russia and the North and refused to work with the KPR that had been democratically created on September 6. Rhee quickly embraced the pro-Japanese Koreans already working with the U.S. military government, while denouncing the more numerous anti-Japanese advocates on the Left. On December 12, 1945, the USAMGIK, working closely with Syngman Rhee, outlawed the KPR and all its related local, provincial and national democratic peoples' organizations and activities. The various unions had joined forces in November under the National Council of Korean Labor Unions (NCKLU), affiliated with the KPR, but their activities were soon prohibited. All labor strikes were forbidden; most union activities were considered traitorous. Women's organizations, youth groups, and other elements of the popular movement were targeted as well. In September 1946, disgruntled workers declared a daring strike that by October spread throughout South Korea. The USAMGIK declared martial law. By December, the combination of KNP forces, the Constabulary (called the National Defence Forces by Koreans, later to become the Republic of Korea Army or ROKA), and right-wing paramilitary units, supplemented by U.S. military forces and intelligence as needed, had forcefully contained the insurrection in all provinces. More than 1,000 Koreans had been killed with more than 30,000 jailed. Regional and local leaders of the popular movement were either dead, in prison, or had gone underground.
Cheju Uprising in Response to Rhee's Plans for Separate Elections Leads to Cheju Massacre
Rhee, with total U.S. support, was busily preparing for a political division of Korea involuntarily imposed on the vast majority of the Korean people. Following suppression of the October-December 1946 insurrection, in 1947 Koreans began to form small guerrilla units that conducted sporadic activities for a year or so. On March 1, 1948, a large nonviolent demonstration on Korea's Cheju Island took place to celebrate the anniversary of the Korean people's 1919 mass demonstrations against Japanese occupation. Using the occasion to protest Rhee's planned separate elections scheduled for May 1948, the crowd was fired upon by the KNP. The police arrested 2,500, a number were injured, and several Koreans were tortured, then killed. Cheju, Korea's largest island located 70 miles south of the mainland, had been governed by popular local peoples' committees since August 1945, and had been left relatively alone up to that point. The vast majority of its inhabitants were poor farmers and fisherpeople living a marginal existence. General Hodge even acknowledged that Cheju was a "truly communal area that is peacefully controlled by the people's committee without much Comintern influence." But Cheju's democratic period was brutally terminated. The March 1 incident provoked a larger people's rebellion that erupted on the island on April 3.
As matters seemed to be getting out of hand, a number of leaders from throughout Korea attempted one last effort at peaceful reunification. An emergency national conference was convened on April 19-23, 1948, in Pyongyang, attended by most political leaders on the right as well as the left, except for Rhee. Conferees opposed Rhee's scheduled plans for separate elections in the south on May 10, about to be sanctioned by the U.S./U.N. However, the convention was unable to dislodge the U.S./Rhee position, and the elections proceeded as scheduled. This was a further depressing development for most Koreans, closing any space for democratic participation that might lead to a reunified Korea. This was the last time representatives from organizations both south and north of the 38th Parallel were to meet in Korea to discuss reunification until the historic summit between the two respective leaders nearly fifty-two years later, June 13-15, 2000. But dramatic escalation of armed resistance to the US/Rhee regime was about to begin.
The U.S. military commander in Cheju, Colonel Rothwell Brown, ordered an indiscriminate scorched earth campaign as the Cheju uprising escalated. The U.S. Navy blockaded the island with eighteen warships, while bombarding it with 37mm cannons. U.S. planes conducted regular reconnaissance missions and dropped grenades and small bombs. U.S. mortars, machine guns, rockets, and M-1 rifles were provided to the NKP, the Constabulary/military, and right-wing paramilitary units. U.S. advisers conducted daily counterinsurgency briefings, interrogated and tortured prisoners, brought Japanese officers and soldiers to aid in the suppression efforts, and contributed U.S. combat troops at critical moments. All this suppression effort was applied despite the fact that officials of the USAMGIK had acknowledged prior to the uprising that the Cheju islanders had been treated cruelly by the NKP and Rhee's right-wing units.
While the Cheju insurgency and the responding U.S./Rhee "suppression" campaign were raging, on October 19, 1948, elements of the 14th and 16th Regiments of the ROK Army in the southern port city of Yosu refused orders to head for Cheju to suppress the guerrillas there. This mutinous rebellion quickly spread to other areas in the southern part of the mainland. The cities of Yosu and Sunchon, among others, were taken over by the guerrillas, and local peoples' committees were immediately restored in a number of other villages, including on some of the smaller islands off Korea's southern coast. However, within two weeks this mutiny wa