The United States of Genocide

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Putting the US on trial for genocide against the peoples of Korea, Laos, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Iraq and elsewhere.

The United States of America was built on a foundation of genocide against the indigenous peoples of North America. In fact, all successful settler colonial societies are founded in genocide. The process is one of dispossession – the erasure of one group identity and the imposition of another on the people and/or on the land. But genocide is not merely the foundation of the US nation state, it is also the foundation of the US empire. The US habit of genocide has not died, but has transformed. The US has become a serial perpetrator of genocide with the blood of many millions of innocents spilled in pursuit of imperial hegemony.

There is a fight going on for the very meaning of the term “genocide”. Western powers assert their right to accuse enemies of committing genocide using the broadest possible definitions whilst also touting a twisted undefined sense of “genocide” which can never, ever be applied to their own actions. New Zealand Prime Minister John Key, apparently taking his cue from the US, is currently pushing for reform of the UN Security Council such that the veto power would be unavailable in cases of “genocide”. The UNSC is a political body and “genocide” will simply become a political term cited by powerful states to rationalise aggression against the weak.

Key notoriously said that his country was “missing in action” because it did not invade Iraq in 2003, reminding Kiwis that “blood is thicker than water”. If his desired reforms existed now, the US would probably have a UN Security Council resolution authorising the use of force against Syria on the grounds of “genocide”.

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John Key – Prime Minister of Aotearoa (NZ); former Merill-Lynch Currency Trader

All of those who oppose Western aggression justified as humanitarian intervention under the “responsibility to protect” must stop burying their heads in the sand over this matter. This is a very real fight for the future of humanity. We can either learn and propagate the understanding that US imperial interventions are, by nature, genocidal. Or we can just pretend the word has no meaning; indulge our childish moral impulses and the lazy fatuousness of our scholars and pundits; and let Western mass-murderers use this Orwellian buzzword (for that is what “genocide” currently is) to commit heinous acts of horrific violence which ensure the continued domination of the world’s masses by a tiny imperial elite.

(An aside: apparently people like a pragmatic focus to accompany a call to action. So, am I making the most obvious appeal – that US officials be tried for committing genocide? No I am not. They can be tried for war crimes if people really think that “holding people accountable” is more important than preventing suffering and protecting the vulnerable. But it has been a terrible mistake to construct genocide as being an aggravated crime against humanity committed by individuals, as if it were simply a vicious felony writ large. This has played completely into the hands of those propagandists for whom every new enemy of the West is the new Hitler. The means by which genocides are perpetrated are the crimes of individuals – war crimes, for example – but genocide itself is the crime of a state or para-state regime. That is the proper target of inquisition and censure. Though the attempt was tragically abortive, the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal recently began hearing charges of genocide against Israel. We need this sort of process to hear charges of genocide against the US. I fully support such efforts, but my real call to action is a call for thought, for clarity and for self-discipline. People are drawn to using woolly thinking over genocide, wishing to use it as the ultimate condemnation of mass violence without reference to any actual meaning of the term. We must not tolerate it in ourselves or others. We are a hair’s breadth away from the point where “genocide prevention” will be used by major Western powers to justify genocidal mass violence)

US “Wars” are Actually Genocides

Every major military action by the US since World War II has first and foremost been an act of genocide. I do not state this as a moral condemnation. If I were seeking to condemn I would try to convey the enormous scale of suffering, death, loss and misery caused by US mass violence. My purpose instead is to correct a terrible misconception of US actions – their nature, their meaning and their strategic utility. This understanding which I am trying to convey is a very dangerous notion with an inescapable moral dimension because the US has always maintained that the suffering, death and destruction it causes are incidental to military purposes – they are instances of “collateral damage”. But, with all due respect to the fact that US personnel may face real dangers, these are not real wars. These are genocides and it is the military aspect that is incidental. In fact, it is straining credulity to continue believing in a string of military defeats being sustained by the most powerful military in the history of the world at the hands of impoverished 3rd World combatants. The US hasn’t really been defeated in any real sense. They committed genocide in Indochina, increasing the level of killing as much as possible right through to the clearly foreseen inevitable conclusion which was a cessation of direct mass violence, not a defeat. The US signed a peace agreement which they completely ignored. The Vietnamese did not occupy US territory and force the US to disarm and pay crippling reparations.

There is no question that the US has committed actions which fit the description of genocide. Genocide does not mean the successful extermination of a defined group (there is no such thing as “attempted genocide”). It was never conceived that way, but rather as any systematic attack on “a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Those who deny US genocides usually only deny that there is any intent to commit genocide. The UN definition of genocide (recognised by 142 states) is:

“…any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

The US has committed these acts many times over and in many different countries. Some people object that this is some watered down version of genocide that risks diluting the significance of this “ultimate crime”. However, bear in mind that the victims of US armed violence are not usually combatants and even if they are they are not engaged in some sort of contested combat that gives them some ability to defend themselves or to kill or be killed. They are helpless as they die of incineration, asphyxiation, dismemberment, cancer, starvation, disease. People of all ages die in terror unable to protect themselves from the machinery of death. Make no mistake, that is what it is: a large complex co-ordinated machinery of mass killing. There is nothing watered down about the horrors of the genocides committed by the US, and their victims number many millions. The violence is mostly impersonal, implacable, arbitrary and industrial.

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There are at least three specific times at which US mass violence has taken lives in the millions through direct killing: the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the wars and sanctions against Iraq in combination with the occupation of Iraq. I refer to them as the Korea Genocide (which was against both South and North Koreans), the Indochina Genocide (against Laotians, Cambodians, and Vietnamese), and the Iraq Genocide (which took place over at least a 20 year period).

There are many ways to show that the US committed genocides in these cases. On one level the case is straightforward. For example, if the US commits acts of “strategic bombing” which systematically kill civilians by the hundreds of thousands, and it turns out that not only is there no rational proportionate military reason, but that US military and intelligence analysis is clear that these are in fact militarily counter-productive acts of gratuitous mass-murder, then by any reasonable definition these must be acts of genocide. The logic is simple and inescapable. I have written lengthy pieces showing in detail that these were large scale systematic and intentional genocides which you can read here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here.

For a long time I have tried to think of ways in which I condense this in a readable form. The problem in many respects lies with the necessity of overcoming misapprehensions. Genocide is an emotive topic, whilst people are very reluctant to read that those who rule in their name (with whom they sometimes actively identify) are in the moral vicinity of the Nazi leaders of Germany. Permeating every level of the discourse is the constant position (whether as the unspoken assumption or as the active assertion) that the US has never acted with genocidal intent. Intentionality is a topic in its own right, but to be brief I will point out that intent does not require that “genocide” be its own motive. If I kill someone because I want their watch, I can’t turn around and say it isn’t murder because I didn’t intend to kill them because I was really just intending to take their watch. It may seem a ridiculous example, but the discourse of genocide is so twisted that it is the norm even amongst genocide scholars. We keep looking for the people, the bloodthirsty psychopathic monsters, who kill people just for the fun of it and grab their watch afterwards as an afterthought. Unsurprisingly, we find those people among the leaders of those countries who oppose Western political power. Now that includes Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.

The best way of demonstrating US intentionality is to demonstrate the consistency of their approach in different times and places. However, this is a necessarily exhaustive approach, so I have decided to take a different tack here. I wish to sketch a fragment of autobiography here – an outline of the process by which I came to my current understanding of the topic. I want readers to understand that I didn’t seek these conclusions out. I have had it made clear to me, by rather comfortably embedded scholars, that they think that I am being provocative out of ambition. It is a testament to the self-satisfaction of such people that they somehow think that being provocative is some advantage. Academia thrives on the journal-filling peer-reviewed “controversies” of rival schools and scholars, but they aren’t really keen on anything that might actually be of any interest to anyone else. The fact is that I didn’t seek this out and it certainly has not endeared me to anyone that I can think of. On the other, hand I have had people act as if I had smeared my own faeces all over myself for using the g-word with respect to Iraq, and I have had many metaphorical doors slammed in my face. As I hope the following will indicate, at least partially, I cannot but characterise US genocides as such and I cannot but view the subject of absolute urgent fundamental importance.

Coming to Understand

The Vietnam War loomed large in my childhood. I was five when it ended. I watched the critical documentary series  Vietnam: The 10,000 Day War when I was ten or eleven years old. During the 1980s Vietnam War movie craze I was sucked into that powerful quagmire of pathos and adrenaline – not to mention the evocative music. But even then, as a teen, I could not abide the apologism and the way in which American lives and American suffering were privileged. The US personnel were portrayed as the victims, even in films which showed US atrocities. I knew far too much about things such as the nature of the atrocities carried out by the Contras to find that sort of propaganda palatable. For one thing, I had read William Blum’s The CIA: A Forgotten History. This book (now titled Killing Hope and still available) doesn’t leave the reader much room for illusions about the US role in international politics. Perhaps if I had been a little older I might have been “educated” enough to be blind to the obvious, but I wasn’t. While most people managed to avoid facing the facts, I knew from this book and others like it that although the atrocities of the Soviet Bloc were substantial, they were dwarfed by those of the US and its closest clients. If Cuba, for example, has been repressive, then what words remain to describe the US installed regimes in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, El Salvador, or Chile?

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How could one characterise a state that backed and created death squad regimes that massacred entire villages, that tortured children to death in front of parents? How does one describe a militarised country whose meticulously planned and executed bombing raids systematically visited untold death and suffering on innocents as an intended purpose. Any informed person who had an objective proportionate viewpoint could only conclude, as Martin Luther King Jr. had already concluded, that the US government and the wider US corporate state were “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” Fred Branfman, who saw the results of US bombing first-hand in Laos, has more recently concluded that the executive branch of the US government is “the world’s most evil and lawless institution”.

So that is where I was coming from. On moral terms I could not have been more condemnatory of the US government. I considered the US government and military-corporate-intelligence complex to be the worst thing in the world since the demise of the Third Reich. I believed this on the basis that they had demonstrably brought about more suffering, death and destruction than anyone else. If someone had tried to claim that it was for “freedom” I would have laughed bitterly, thinking of the brutally crushed democracies and popular movements that were victims of the US. But if someone had said to me that the US had committed genocide in Korea and Indochina I would have most likely dismissed the claim as emotive overstatement. I didn’t actually know what the word genocide meant precisely, but I would still have seen its use as being a form of exaggeration. Implicitly that means that I took the word “genocide” to be a form of subjective moral condemnation as if it were an inchoate scream rather than a word that might have a consistent meaning. (You can’t exaggerate by calling something “arson”, for example. It is either a lie or it is the truth. Genocide is the same). However, “genocide”, as a word, has been subjected to the ideological processes (described so well by Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four) which destroy the meaning of words. Here is how I put it in an academic piece:

Certain words are so highly politicised in their usage that, in Orwellian fashion, they are stripped of all meaning and become merely signals designed to provoke in impassioned unreasoning involuntary response. In this fashion ‘democracy’ means ‘double-plus good’ and the Party members1 respond with cheers and tears of joy. Equally, ‘terrorism’ means ‘double-plus bad’ provoking among Party members, ‘[a] hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer….’2 Genocide plays a starring role in an entire discourse shaped in such a way as to not only excuse but to facilitate the perpetration of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Stripped of any actual meaning but given the significance of being the ‘ultimate crime’ it becomes a tool by which powerful Western states are able to threaten or carry out attacks against weaker states – attacks which are in themselves criminal and which in some instances are actually genocidal. The emotive misuse of the term genocide has become a powerful political tool. As Jeremy Scahill reveals after accusations of genocide by Arabs against black Africans, “even at antiwar rallies, scores of protesters held signs reading, ‘Out of Iraq, into Darfur.’” Scahill adds that, ‘[a] quick survey of Sudan’s vast natural resources dispels any notion that U.S./corporate desires to move into Sudan derive from purely humanitarian motives.’3

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What brought me around to using the term genocide was realising that there was no other word to describe what the US did in South Viet Nam. I had been aware that the vast majority of victims of the US military were civilians. It was commonplace to say that 90% of casualties were civilian. (Tellingly Western commentators, including those in the peace movement, would vouch that the figure of 90% civilian casualties was proof of how cruel and deadly “modern war” had become – as if US practices were some sort of universal standard and as if the fact that other belligerents did not produce such high rates of civilian death was not of any interest whatsoever.)

So, US violence mostly caused civilian deaths and the vast majority of those civilians were, in fact, subjects of the US installed puppet [sic] regime in Saigon. They were killing their own supposed allies. I have read all of the rationalisations for why the US thought it was a good idea to kill the civilians of their own client state, and they are all completely insane. I don’t even believe that killing the civilian populations of enemy countries is militarily effective and in that belief I am supported by the strategic analyses of the US itself going back to 1944. Killing the civilian population of an allied state makes no military sense whatsoever. Often killing civilians was rationalised in terms of counterinsurgency (usually crudely reversing Maoist doctrine about the relationship between the guerrilla and the rural population) despite the fact that it was recognised from very early on that the civilian deaths were recruiting and strengthening the enemy.

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That was the other striking thing about US activities in Indochina – they were systematically killing civilians without apparent purpose, but they were also undermining their own political and military efforts. This happened at all levels. As I was reading and coming to grips with this aspect of history, it seemed that exactly the same thing was playing out in Iraq. In 2003, as invasion loomed, I had initially expected that the US would conduct a fast vicious campaign particularly aimed at inflicting maximum damage to economic infrastructure. They would then leave, crowing about their surgical use of force and minuscule US fatalities. The US would continue to enhance the perceived legitimacy of its acts of aggression and would be able to use economic blackmail to exert neocolonial control. However, I was woefully naïve for believing that. In contrast, Paul Wolfowitz was  absolutely clear on this point – you cannot use normal neocolonial power on Iraq: “…[W]e just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil.” Instead, the US invaded, occupied and then acted repeatedly and systematically in ways which would very predictably cause armed resistance, just as they had in Indochina. But without that resistance they could not have justified a major military presence and the proconsular rule of the occupation imposed on Iraq.

In 2006 I was able to devote quite a lot of time to the subject of genocide in Indochina as it was the topic of my Honours research paper. My initial understanding of genocide was pretty thin and one-dimensional, but it was sound in the given context. The most important aspect for me was that genocide matched means with ends. War is always a matter of uncertain outcome. To wage war is to wager (the words are cognates). Indeed that is why we use such terms as “wage” and “adventure” for military action. If memory serves, Carl von Clausewitz himself even wrote that a belligerent will never be able to attain their intended war aims because the war they pursue will itself change matters and impose its own realities. In that sense war is a gamble which will always be lost. Genocide is not a gamble.

I saw genocide as being an attack on the peoples of Indochina which avoided the uncertainties of waging military war. The maximal aim of the genocide was the eventual neocolonial domination of Indochina. It worked. In Viet Nam the war and subsequent US economic sanctions were devastating. By 1990 the per capita GDP was only $114.4 Under doi moi liberalisation, Viet Nam has achieved much greater formal economic activity (GDP), but only by submitting to the “Washington Consensus”, which means no price supports for staples such as rice, which in turn means that the real income of the poorest urban dwellers has dropped 5 Former US military commander in Vietnam Gen. Westmoreland characterised doi moi as proof of US victory.6 The point is, though, that genocide doesn’t need an end goal such as such as submitting to neoliberal WTO regulations and IMF conditions. Chomsky called Vietnamese poverty “a vivid refutation of the claim that the US lost,”7 Similar stories could be related with regard to Laos and Cambodia. Whether these nation states are considered enemies or vanquished vassals or friends is of no relevance, the weakness of their populations is a gain in relative power for the US empire, and empires intrinsically function on relative gains.

This is what I wrote in 2006:

…[A]clever strategist, where possible, matches means and ends, thus making results more predictable. In a situation where there is a stated end and a given means are employed and continue to be employed despite continued demonstrable “failure” and are then employed elsewhere under the same rationale with the same results – in such a situation it is possibly worth considering that the “means” are themselves the end. In the case of the Second Indochina War, I will argue the means were widespread general destruction, employed on as many of the people and as much of the societal fabric or infrastructure as was physically and politically feasible. If those were the means, I will suggest, they were also the end. The results are predictable. The dead stay dead.

As I would later discover, when he first coined the word “genocide”, Raphaël Lemkin wrote that “genocide is a new technique of occupation aimed at winning the peace even though the war itself is lost.” He also wrote: “Genocide is the antithesis of the … doctrine [which] holds that war is directed against sovereigns and armies, not against subjects and civilians. In its modern application in civilized society, the doctrine means that war is conducted against states and armed forces and not against populations. … [T]he Germans prepared, waged, and continued a war not merely against states and their armies but against peoples. For the German occupying authorities war thus appears to offer the most appropriate occasion for carrying out their policy of genocide.”

(At this point I would like to urge people to read what Lemkin actually wrote when trying to describe genocide. It is not a time consuming task. You can find the chapter here.)

What I had found was that the US was maintaining the “war”. It helped to recruit its enemies, to arm them, finance them, and to supply them. Just as I was researching this, a book by David Keen was published about the “War on Terror” which claimed that it was a self-perpetuating endless “war system”. It focussed on clearly “counterproductive” actions undertaken by the US, belying its stated aims:

When it comes to war in other words, winning is not everything; it may be the taking part that counts. Indeed, as Orwell saw in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, certain kinds of regimes may thrive off energies and perpetual war. The irrationality of counterproductive tactics, in short, may be more apparent than real, and even an endless war may not be endless in the sense of lacking aims or functions.8

Keen never mentioned Indochina. The precedents he cited of were civil wars in Africa. However it was as if the idea of a war system was, in a sense, on the tip of people’s tongues towards the end of the US involevment in Indochina, as if they knew deep-down that the US was not trying to win the war. It seems almost the implicit subtext of Magnum photographer Philip Jones Griffiths’ book Vietnam Inc. which by its title alone suggests an enterprise quite differently conceived than war. Even the orthodox political discourse (with talk of quagmires and a “stab in the back” story of brave soldiers hamstrung by politicians) hints at a war system. What the US did in Indochina was an absolute textbook example of what Keen was describing.

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As I found this way of understanding the past, I was also viewing events in Iraq with the same apprehension. What was occurring on a daily basis was very clearly indicating a parallel process. Captured weapons were dumped unsecured in the countryside. Efforts to secure borders (to at least impede the flow of weapons, resistance fighters and money) were systematically undermined. Just as in Viet Nam, diverted cash sloshed through networks of corruption and was available to resistance groups. People were driven into the arms of the resistance by the random brutality of US personnel, the murderous use of indiscriminate ordnance, and the systematic degradation of the civilian economic sphere. On top of this, the US fomented a civil war.

It is a pity that Keen did not know of the Indochina precedent, because what we know of it goes much deeper and reaches much higher than the what we know of the “War on Terror” (which Keen takes to include Iraq and Afghanistan interventions). Keen discusses various tactics and policies which are counterproductive. But it is not just the counterproductive things which sustain US enemies, it is the ways in which US leaders ensure that they cannot ever achieve a victory. This is what I wrote:

Numerous people, including Jeffrey Record9 and Harry Summers,10 have in effect suggested that the US lacked any winning strategy. In fact, what they had were three no-win strategies – strategies which did not, even in theory, have an end point at which a military victory would be obtained. These were the fire-power/attrition, the graduated response and the enclave strategies. The only strategy by which the US could have attained its stated objective was the pacification strategy, but this too was no threat because the pacification strategy was only weakly implemented while being misapplied, subverted, sabotaged and contravened – not least by the more vigorous application of the fire-power/attrition and graduated response strategies.

You can read all about thatstuffin detail if you want, otherwise you’ll just have to take my word for it. The US systematically ensured that it could never achieve “victory” in Indochina. Perhaps the most blatant example was the brutal genocide unleashed on Cambodia from 1970 until 1975. Not the “genocide” or “autogenocide” of the Khmer Rouge, but the genocide before that, without which there would never have been a Khmer Rouge takeover. Here’s a long excerpt from my Honours piece:

When the the US generated a war in Cambodia they had already had a great deal of experience in Viet Nam and Laos, and what occurred in Cambodia is, in many ways, a naked exposure of the logic behind the genocidal war system, less obfuscated because, ironically, Cambodia was a “sideshow” where it was not the details but the whole war which was kept obscure from the public.

Within a year of Lon Nol’s coup, as mentioned, the economy of Cambodia was virtually destroyed, not only by bombing, but also by US aid. Aid was channelled to the import of commodities and surplus US agricultural goods. It also underwrote the Cambodian government and armed forces: “By the end of 1970, the government was spending five times its revenue and earning nothing abroad.”11 Most of the population became reliant on US aid to eat, and rice supplies were kept at the minimum level needed to prevent food riots. By 1975, malnutrition was widespread and many children starved to death.12

Less than two months after the coup that brought Lon Nol to power, the US invaded Cambodia, along with ARVN forces. They did not bother to forewarn Lon Nol who found out after Richard Nixon had announced the invasion publicly.13 This invasion along US and RVN bombing and the civil war made refugees of around half of the Cambodian population.14 Lon Nol was outraged by the invasion and when later briefed by Alexander Haig (then military assistant to Kissinger) about US intentions he wept with frustration. According to Shawcross, “He wished that the Americans had blocked the communists’ escape route before attacking, instead of spreading them across Cambodia. … The Cambodian leader told Haig that there was no way his small force could stop them. … [Haig] informed Lon Nol that President Nixon intended to limit the involvement of American forces…. They would be withdrawn at the end of June. The the President hoped to introduce a program of restricted military and economic aid. As the implications of Haig’s words for the future of Cambodia became clear to Lon Nol, he began to weep. Cambodia, he said, could never defend itself.”15

As has been detailed, US actions, particularly in bombing, were directly responsible for creating the communist enemy which overthrew Lon Nol. The bombing between 1969 and 1973 took up to 150,000 lives.16 If averaged out, over 33 tons of ordnance were used to kill each Khmer Rouge insurgent.17 Despite the fact that Vietnamese pilots bombed any Cambodian they could, which aided only the Khmer Rouge, Lon Nol acceded to a US demand that he request an increase in VNAF bombing in 1971.18

By May 1972, the Lon Nol regime had control of perhaps 10 per cent of the country and continued to lose territory which was thereafter fragmented into ever smaller enclaves.19 The result was by that stage foregone, and yet the war dragged on for three years with the greater part of the 1 million casualties occurring after that point.

In 1970, when Henry Kissinger briefed Jonathan “Fred” Ladd, who was slated to conduct the war in Cambodia, he told him: “Don’t even think of victory; just keep it alive.”20

When the US Congress finally blocked aid to Cambodia and South Viet Nam, it was with the belated realisation that such aid would not give any hope of victory or improve a bargaining position. Senator Mike Mansfield spoke out, “Ultimately Cambodia cannot survive…. Additional aid means more killing, more fighting. This has got to stop sometime.”21

It was pretty clear that the US was maintaining the situation of armed conflict in order to commit genocide. This was a comprehensive act of genocide which did not merely involve the systematic killing of the target populations, it also involved every other “technique of genocide” described by Lemkin. There was systematic economic, social, cultural, political, and religious destruction. There was the systematic and deliberate ecocidal poisoning of the land and people with defoliants. There was very raw brutality. People were slaughtered by bombs, but there was also murder, rape and torture on a scale beyond imagining. In one book co-written by Nick Turse he finds that when he sets out to find the site of a massacre in Vietnam it becomes like trying to find a needle in a haystack of massacre sites.22 In his next book Kill Anything that Moves Turse tries to show that haystack for what it is. The results would be hard to believe if they were not so well documented. I cannot reduce its contents here, I can only recommend that people acquire and read the book. It is a litany of slaughter that seems almost endless and through it all the command structure and the political structure provide the framework for the personnel to commit atrocities.

MERE GOOKS

This is not just about the choice of tactics – it is also about “grand tactics”, strategy, doctrine, and indoctrination. Psychiatrist and author Robert Jay Lifton famously discussed “atrocity producing situations” as a driving factor behind US war crimes, and I believe we can now conclude these situations were deliberately created, not just because we have other evidence that atrocities were tacitly encouraged, but because the US went to great lengths to replicate these these “atrocity producing situations” in Iraq.

Why Genocide and Not War?

By the end of my honours thesis I was convinced that both the 2nd Indochina War and the “Iraq War” were “genocidal war systems”. Since then I have learnt a great deal more, and my thinking has developed a great deal more. I won’t bore you with the detail, but I came to realise the the “war system” appellation was largely redundant. Genocides are “war systems” by nature. Almost every perpetrator of genocide explains their violence as fighting war.

Genocide was a key means by which the US secured global hegemony in the post-WWII era. I learnt that Korea was also a case of US genocide. US actions there were as shocking, as deadly and as militarily nonsensical as they were in Indochina. Hundreds of thousands were massacred and hundreds of thousands incinerated. 25% of the entire population of North Korea was killed and we should not forget that many hundreds of thousands of the ostensibly allied South Koreans died at US hands or those of US commanded troops. The whole war became widely recognised as a pointless killing machine (described as “the meatgrinder”) while the US needlessly sabotaged and prolonged armistice negotiations.

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I can’t explain in this space why Korea, Vietnam and Iraq posed such great threats to US imperial hegemony, but they did and the US successfully dealt with those dangers by committing genocide. These are successful uses of genocide to establish, deepen and maintain imperial hegemony, but we have wilfully blinded ourselves to their nature. Critics of US interventions have evidently been scared to entertain the notion that there was some successfully applied rationale to US behaviour. They have joined with the lovers of war, the nationalists, the racists and the fanatics in declaring over and over and over again the wrong-headedness and failures of US military endeavours. The victims of US genocide quite understandably prefer to see themselves as the plucky Davids that beat the Pentagon Goliath. These are all lies.

US forces storm into one house after another, claiming to be trying to kill flies with sledgehammers. Given that they have entirely demolished several houses and severely damaged many others; and given that they have been caught red-handed releasing flies into targeted houses; and given that they forcibly try to make people buy very expensive fly “insurance”; maybe it is time we consider that neither they, nor their sledgehammers, are concerned in any way with flies (except as a pretext).

Where people might once have been terrified that to suggest any cogent purpose to US actions for fear of giving credit to warmongers, we need not be so worried now. It is very clear that the US does not exert imperial hegemony for the sake of peace and stability, or even for the sake of the enrichment of the US and its people. They never protected us from the nefarious threat of communism and they don’t protect us from the nefarious threat of Islam. A very narrow group of imperialists who share a cohesive long-term hegemonic programme have successfully concentrated power and wealth levels of disparity akin to those in slavery-based economies. They have also created a neofeudal framework of privatised regnal rights. No doubt many of these people have noble intentions, believing that only by such ruthless action can they exert enough control to save humanity from its self-destructive impulses. Many elitists will openly express such opinions and we can certainly understand having concern over the future of the planet. But such people are, in fact, completely insane and they should be taken out of circulation and treated exactly like any other dangerous megalomaniac who believes that they are the new Napoleon. It is not the masses that are threatening the planet. It is not the masses who bring about wars. And though communal violence seems almost the epitome of the mob in action, I know of no genocide that did not result from the actions of a narrow elite.

The reason that we must view US genocides as being genocides and not wars is that we cannot ever understand the logic of their actions in any other way. People shy away from the term genocide and people react violently to what they perceive as its misuse. That indicates just how important it is. I mentioned Nick Turse’s Kill Anything that Moves which is an entire book devoted primarily to the systematic killing of non-combatants. He never uses the term “genocide”. In a work based on veteran testimony, Chris Hedges and Laila al-Arian explain that the very nature of the Iraq occupation is that of an atrocity producing situation and that US personnel have gone “from killing – the shooting of someone who [can] harm you – to murder. The war in Iraq is primarily about murder. There is very little killing.”23 They are talking about the systematic murder of civilians in small increments multiplied many times over, but they never use the term “genocide”. This despite the fact that US actions in Indochina have widely been adjudged genocidal and despite the fact that it was very strongly argued that the US and UK controlled sanctions against Iraq were genocidal. Ask yourself this: if someone was documenting the same thing being perpetrated by Sudan, or by Zimbabwe do you think the word “genocide” would be left out of such works?

Above all we must end the continuing fatuous nonsense spouted by security geeks (including high ranking military and civilian personnel) who seem to believe every exaggerated claim about threats from the Cubans, the Iranians, the Soviets, Al Qaeda in the Falklands (AQIF) or whomever. The morons with their clichés about “fighting the last war” will never ever tire of telling us how the US just doesn’t know how to do counterinsurgency. Really? The question must be, then how did they manage to remain so bad at counterinsurgency when they have spent more person hours on counterinsurgency and counter-guerilla warfare that all other states throughout the entirety of humanity added together? (I could list a few examples here starting with the Indian Wars, mentioning 200 years of interventions in the Western hemisphere, Cuba, Philippines, Pacific War, Korea and Indochina. Then there is also the institutional knowledge built and disseminated by “security co-operation”. Moreover, the US is trains many of the rest of the world’s military leaders to conduct counterinsurgency at Fort Benning).

The point is that you can’t understand what the US does through the lens of war. It is very satisfying, no doubt, for young liberal reporters to outsmart generals (who clearly have no idea how to fight wars because they are just stupid Republicans), but it is seriously delusional. There is an instant exculpation given when these genocides are misrepresented as wars. It is very, very important for perpetrators of aggression or genocide (or both) to conceal their intentionality. The UK government and Tony Blair, in particular, showed far more concern with convincing people that they themselves believed in their fictitious casus belli, than with convincing people that Iraq really did have pose a threat. All of the British media seemed to echo the mantra that you might not agree with Blair but, “no one can doubt his sincerity”. So for moral reasons, in order to end the impunity of the worlds worst war criminals, as well as for intellectual reasons we must grasp the nettle and begin using the term genocide.

Textbook Cases

There are many problematic areas in the subject of genocide. Sometimes it is hard to tell when war ends and genocide begins. It can be hard to tell where state repression becomes persecution and when persecution becomes genocide. Were not the Nuremburg Laws an epitome of what we now call apartheid? Is apartheid a form of slow genocide? Is there structural genocide? Should something only be called genocide if there are mass fatalities?

These are all important considerations and questions, but none of them are relevant here. The genocides I have referenced are absolute textbook cases of genocide. It is impossible to create a coherent and rational definition of the term “genocide” which does not include these genocides.

These genocides were more demonstrably genocidal in nature than the Armenian Holocaust. We should always remember that for the Turkish government, and for most Turks, there was no such thing as a genocide of Armenians. In their own eyes they were fighting a war against Armenian insurgents. Sound familiar?

1In Orwell’s allegory the ‘Party’ represented the ‘educated’ sector of society – people such as the central character Winston Smith, who worked as a journalist.

2George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin, 1983.

3Jeremy Scahill, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, London: Serpent’s Tail, 2007, p 350.

4Hy V. Luong, ‘Postwar Vietnamese Society: An Overview of Transformational Dynamic’ in Hy V. Luong (ed.), Postwar Vietnam: Dynamics of a Transforming Society. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003, pp 12, 14.

5Nicholas Minot; Francesco Goletti, ‘Export Liberalization and Household Welfare: The Case of Rice in Vietnam’ in American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Vol. 80, No. 4. (Nov., 1998), p 743. Minot and Goletti actually (to their own evident surprise) projected a slight overall drop in poverty, but they do so on the basis of changes in real income which do not take into account that rural persons are better able to acquire food without income expenditure. They also slightly underestimate the level of urbanisation – they use the 1990 figure of 20 per cent, when by the time of their writing the figure was over 23 per cent (Michael DiGregorio, A. Terry Rambo, Masayuki Yanagisawa, ‘Clean, Green, and Beautiful: Environment and Development under the Renovation Economy’ in Hy V. Luong (ed.), Postwar Vietnam: Dynamics of a Transforming Society. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003, p 189.) and do not account for future urbanisation. Michel Chossudovsky suggests that the Vietnamese did, in the actual event, become considerably poorer (Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalisation of Poverty and the New World Order. Shanty Bay, Ontario: Global Outlook, 2003, p 168).

6Marc Jason Gilbert, “Introduction”, in Marc Jason Gilbert (ed), Why the North Won the Vietnam War. New York: Palgrave, 2002, p 26.

7Rethinking Camelot: JFK, the Vietnam War, and US Political Culture. Boston: South End Press, 1993, p 30.

8David Keen, Endless War? Hidden functions of the ‘War on Terror’. London, Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2006, p 51.

9Record, “How America’s Military Performance…”, in Gilbert (ed.), Why the North Won the Vietnam War, p 117.

10Harry G. Summers Jr., On Strategy: A critical analysis of the Vietnam War. New York: Presidio Press, 1995 (1982), p 103.

11William Shawcross, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia. London: Fontana, 1980 (1979), p 220.

12Ibid, pp 317-9.

13Ibid, p 149.

14Sorpong Peou, Intervention & Change in Cambodia: Towards Democracy? Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2000, p 127.

15Shawcross, Sideshow, p 163.

16Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996, p 24.

17Ibid, p 19.

18Shawcross, Sideshow, p 186.

19Ibid, pp 254-5.

20Ibid, p 169.

21Nigel Cawthorne, Vietnam: A War Lost and Won. London: Arcturus Publishing, 2003, p 213; Westmoreland, ‘A Look Back’.

22Deborah Nelson, The War Behind Me: Vietnam Veterans Confront the Truth about U.S. War Crimes, New York: Basic Books, 2008, p 127.

23Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian, Collateral Damage: America’s War against Iraqi Civilians, New York: Nation Books, 2008, p xiii.

The Korean Genocide Part 4: War or Genocide?

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The Korean Genocide Part 4: War or Genocide?

(In Part 3 I presented matters relating to the opening of “major hostilities” in late June of 1950. I eschewed conclusions because of the unanswered questions around events. However I believe that it would be possible to present the case that the US was the instigator of these events due to the circumstance which surround the events (even if those events are themselves are difficult to discern). There is no smoking gun, as such, but there is a very strong case. The US desired this “war”, they had foreknowledge of the timing of its outbreak, and the window of time in which the US could benefit (by forestalling the impending conquest of Taiwan and the looming collapse of the Rhee regime) was very, very, narrow by this point. The US was actively deceptive in claiming to be unprepared to intervene, yet the rapidity of the deployment of the US Navy to the Taiwan Straits, and the instantaneous commitment of troops to Korea showed that planning and decision-making had taken place already. There is also a clear flurry of secretive activity by US officials and personnel leading up to the outbreak of hostilities as well as inter-client activity between the Guomindang and the Rhee régime. Lastly, though the unpreparedness of the ROK Army can be explained as a deliberate softening in order to draw forces into the equivalent of the “centre”, nothing on Earth can explain the depth of DPRK unpreparedness. And, as Sherlock Holmes tells us, when faced with choosing between the unlikely and the impossible, the unlikely must be true. )

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The period which begins on 25 June 1950 and ends 27 July 1953 is conventionally termed “The Korean War”. A war of three years, as with wars in general, is almost inevitably going to be described in narrative terms and there are good reasons for this. Peoples’ lives were utterly dominated by major discreet events with distinct chronological placements – significant military actions; a front which swept south then north then south in the initial stage and then a completely different stage with virtually no such movement; notable political events; notable massacres; notable bombing raids. The Korean people were living through the “interesting times” referred to in the apocryphal Chinese curse – times when the narrative of “major” historical events is actually the most important factor in shaping the lives of the masses.

A narrative has a beginning, a middle and an end. The beginning describes a status quo. The middle is a series of transformative events which follow an initiation event which disturbs the status quo. The end is the establishment of a new status quo. This is all convention, of course, and it is understood that the beginning and end points are static only in terms relative to the defined boundaries of the middle – boundaries of both chronology and of type when including or excluding transformative events. What then should one expect from a narrative of war? More to the point, what would one expect the end to look like? Innumerable examples of war narratives end (by any reckoning) in a manner which accords with Clausewitz’s description of the nature of war. From the Punic Wars to the World Wars, they end with one side imposing its political will on the other, at least to some extent. Before World War II, stalemates were broken when one side gained the advantage. Only very small wars would actually end with a stalemate in place. The Korean War simply does not fit that aspect of the war narrative. The very simple trick of looking at the end of the narrative, one can already discern that the events of 25/06/1950 to 27/07/1953 are more likely to conform to a narrative wherein the “middle” is characterised by genocide rather than war.

In politico-military-strategic terms the end results of the Korean War are insignificant in terms of the scale of military action. There was no regime change. There wasn’t even a change in the balance of power on the peninsula except a growth of deterrence. If anything the war acted to stop change at this level, to halt transformative events and reimpose a more stable form of the status quo ante as if to defy the rules of narrative. However, on another level the transformation was profound and shocking. Around 10 percent of Koreans, or slightly more, were dead. In the DPRK about 2 million civilians and 500,000 military had died according to Halliday and Cumings.i That is more than one of every four human beings exterminated in a three year span. Others give lower figures, but still produce shocking mortality rates such as 1 in 5, though there is the ever-present confusion of specifying only “casualties” without distinguishing killed and wounded. One estimate is that one ninth of North Korean civilians (1,000,000 people) were killed in air raids alone.ii Additionally, according to Stueck,[i]n property, North Korea put its losses at $1.7 billion, South Korea at $2 billion, the equivalent of its gross national product for 1949. North Korea lost some 8,700 industrial plants, South Korea twice that number. Each area saw 600,000 homes destroyed.”iii The urban destruction in the DPRK was unparalleled before or since,at least 50 percent of eighteen out of the Norths twenty-two major cities were obliterated. A partial table looks this:

Pyongyang, 75%

Chongjin, 65%

Hamhung, 80%

Hungnam, 85%

Sariwon, 95%

Sinanju, 100%

Wonsan, 80%.”iv

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Pyongyang

Within months the US had run out of military targets and in less than a year they were running out of significant civilian targets and began bombing the countryside.v

The US also bombed south of the 38th parallel, when the KPA occupied areas or when there was guerilla activity. Hundreds of thousands were also massacred, almost exclusively by US and right-wing formations. Millett observes that[i]t is no accident that Koreans often compare themselves to Jews, Poles, and Irish.”vi In the ROK there is even a word, han, which specifically denotes the repressed and accumulated grief and rage that was produced in those who loved ones were killed by the regime but who avoided even mentioning the departed, let alone grieving their loss, for fear of being killed themselves.vii If this level of trauma is present in the ROK, one can only imagine the level of psychic devastation in the DPRK.

From the point of view of narrative, then, it would seem from the end point of the narrative arc that the middle, the crucial transformational events which are the stuff of traditional history, would be more likely to take the form of genocide than that of war. It’s not quite that simple though. It cannot be denied that there was a war going on. Baudrillard could not claim that “the Korean War did not happen”, although one might observe in events embryonic forms of the sort of “simulation” that led him to claim “the Gulf War did not happen”. What one can say is that in the narrative of war US actions often seem to be difficult to explicate, especially if its role in peace negotiations is incorporated. Claims of US naivety, idealism, stupidity and arrogance are all deployed to explain US actions, along with analyses of domestic political matters and inter-élite conflict. This sort of approach is no different from that used with respect to Indochina, Iraq, Afghanistan, and many sites of lesser US involvement which would include most of the very long list of US interventions. In contrast a narrative of genocide requires no such explications. Indeed, it is almost eerie that events unfold as if smoothly following a predetermined plan of genocide, notwithstanding that prosecuting genocide does not require the precision of prosecuting war and is thus not subject to uncertainty and reversal in the same manner.

Before narrating the events of the front line, it is worth describing the genocidal character of US actions in rear areas, which is ultimately a more fundamental defining characteristic of what occurred than the battles at the front. As Cho writes:

Targeting a civilian population would be a strategy that the U.S. militaryperfectedduring the Korean War, leaving three million people, or 10 percent of the population, dead. The horrors that began to unravel on the Korean peninsula on June 25, 1950, were already reminiscent of a future of U.S. military domination in Asia, flashing forward to images of napalmed children running through the streets….viii

It is worth contextualising US and ROK atrocities by making a comparison with Communist atrocities. Firstly, it is worth noting that the Chinese are not linked to massacres. Their treatment of POWs was far from what one would hope, and yet far better than that meted out by other belligerents. During 1951 the Chinese even took over custody of nearly all Western prisoners due to concerns over their treatment at Korean hands and were mostly at pains to treat them reasonably (in fairly grim circumstances) and protect them from the vengeance of Korean citizens.ix The Chinese example alone should be enough to belie completely any apologistic discourse which seeks to suggest that the sort of atrocities committed by the US were some innate by-product of the type of war fought.

North Korean atrocities differed form those of the US and ROK in three ways. Firstly there is the matter of scale. Cumings estimates that KPA atrocities were about one sixth compared to around 100,000 dying at the hands of ROK security forces and right-wing paramilitaries.x It may be that Cumings is being conservative with both numbers here, but if we assume from this a figure of 17,000 victims of Communist atrocities then it becomes more like one tenth or twentieth if one accounts in addition for US massacres and ROK massacres in captured or recaptured territories. If one factors in the civilians who died under US aerial bombardment the figure becomes less than 2%.xi

Secondly, there is the matter of authorisation. As Dong Choon Kim writes:North Korea’s Kim Il Sung strongly emphasized the prohibition against civilian killings, which seemed quite natural because the [KPA], as a revolutionary army, had to win the hearts and minds of the South Korean people.”xii Kim Il Sung also condemned revenge killingsxiii which were rife at the village level with reciprocal atrocities occurring as territory changed hands.xiv Furthermore, though the killing of POWs on or soon after capture was common, KPA officers at all levels strove constantly to end these murders.xv The authorised atrocities were restricted to the murder of political prisoners after a show of formal legal proceedings. On an individual level this is no less an atrocity than the same act carried out without the pretence of a trial, perhaps more so especially if confessions are produced through torture. It does, however, greatly restrict the scale of murder to a more individual rather than mass event. It also restricts the nature of the victims. Children, for example, would not be subject to this violence, nor generally would the apolitical, nor those without some significant form of political power.

This brings us to the third factor, the matter of discrimination. Communist atrocities particularly targetted specific individuals.xvi This was true of both authorised and unauthorised atrocities. Even surrendering soldiers and POWs are specifically “enemy combatants” who, by their nature, are or have been involved in conflict. The agency of, say, an infantryman may be virtually non-existent (outside of the fantasies promoted by recruiters), but that makes them pawns, not bystanders. There is no inherent moral difference between murdering a soldier and murdering a civilian, but there is a distinct difference. It is almost inevitable that military personnel are viewed as enemies, but enmity towards civilians, if defined innational, ethnical, racial or religious”xvii terms, is at the very least a prerequisite for genocide. Arguably it might be said that any mass killings and/or major destruction under this condition is definable as genocide in line with Lemkin’s definition of genocide as being “against populations”.xviii

Leaving aside the POW issue, given the conditions under which the Communists committed atrocities, it seems reasonable to accept Cumings’ implicit figure of roughly 17,000 civilians killed. This means that the US and ROK forces under US command killed more than 50 times as many civilians as the Communists.xix That is a substantive difference, not only in moral terms. Behind this massive disparity is a mountain of corpses. Explanations are given which rely on the atomisation of various forms of massacre, an artificial separation of methods and circumstances of mass slaughterpanic at the advance of the KPA; fanatical anticommunism; racism; superior firepower; and the USairpower fetish”. The disparity, however, gives lie to this because at every turn the Communists opposed the mass killing of civilians while, as will be shown; each instance of US/ROK mass murder was the result of policy. The disparate levels of atrocity mean exactly what they should suggest at first glanceone side was fighting a war, the other was committing a genocide.

To begin with the UN side of the frontline, the most well known massacre carried out by US personnel was that of No Gun Ri. This occurred from 26 July to 29 July 1950, that is to say over the space of about 3 days. The massacre began when refugees fleeing across a bridge were strafed and mortared. This much is not disputed.xx Controversy arose over the circumstances soon after the massacre rose to prominence in 1999. A narrative was promulgated throughout most of the US media thatthe incident took place because the military was ill-trained and ill-equipped during the early stages of the war”xxi with the result thatthe No Gun Ri story became sanitized as just another anecdotal war story that asks to be forgotten.”xxii In fact it is well documented that the US had on numerous occasions been directly ordered to open fire on refugees.xxiii According to the BBC: “Declassified military documents recently found in the US National Archives show clearly how US commanders repeatedly, and without ambiguity, ordered forces under their control to target and kill Korean refugees caught on the battlefield.”xxiv On 26 July, the day the massacre began, a letter from the US Ambassador to the ROK detailed to the State Department the US Army’s plan to open fire on refugees if they did not heed warning shots.xxv However, warning shots do not seem to have played a role in these events. According to the ROK Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRCK) in 2007:

On July 25th, 1950, Korean villagers were forced by U.S. soldiers to evacuate their homes and move south. The next day, July 26, the villagers continued south along the road. When the villagers reached the vicinity of No Gun Ri, the soldiers stopped them at a roadblock and ordered the group onto the railroad tracks, where the soldiers searched them and their personal belongings. Although the soldiers found no prohibited items (such as weapons or other military contraband), the soldiers ordered an air attack upon the villagers via radio communications with U.S. aircraft. Shortly afterwards, planes flew over and dropped bombs and fired machine guns, killing approximately one hundred villagers on the railroad tracks.xxvi

That is the context, which became a centre of controversy (albeit specious controversy) which in turn managed to leave most people with the impression of some sort of panicked response by US personnel who were not coping. The reader may well be wondering how this could possibly address all of the issues involved in a 3 day long massacre, a period longer than panic or unpreparedness could possibly account for.

After the initial attack, the refugees fled into a culvert and a tunnel beneath the bridge. US forces set up machine guns at either end of the culvert and tunnel. For over three entire days the machine gunners killed those who tried to leave, killing, according to the TRCK, an additional 300:xxvii‘There was a lieutenant screaming like a madman, fire on everything, kill ’em all,’ recalls 7th Cavalry veteran Joe Jackman. ‘I didn’t know if they were soldiers or what. Kids, there was kids out there, it didn’t matter what it was, eight to 80, blind, crippled or crazy, they shot ’em all.’xxviii Soldiers with small arms would, as time passed, approach the culvert to pick off any survivors. A survivor, 12 at the time, said:The American soldiers played with our lives like boys playing with flies.”xxix Bruce Cumings believes that there was a concerted effort to ensure that there were no surviving witnesses.xxx

We know these events occurred because of eye-witness statements, both those of survivors and those of 35 veterans who corroborate these events.xxxi Further corroboration exists in the bullet holes that remain to be seen, though plastered over, in the culvert and the tunnel to this day.xxxii Eye-witness testimony is the central evidence of these occurrences. Even the journal Archival Science is forced to concede that documents are supplementary, corroborating details rather than constituting an account.xxxiii This is true for all the massacres that occurred south of the 38th parallel. The orders that set the machinery of death in motion may be documented, but the events were not. The substance of eye-witness testimony, however, has been borne out by the mass graves to which witnesses were often able to lead investigators.xxxiv

No Gun Ri was not isolated. Over 60 further such massacres at US hands have been reported:

For example, on 11 July 1950, the US Air Force bombed the peaceful Iri railway station located far south of the combat line and killed about 300 civilians, including South Korean government officials. US warplanes also bombed and strafed gathered inhabitants or refugees in Masan, Haman, Sachon, Pohang, Andong, Yechon, Gumi, Danyang and other regions. Roughly 50 to 400 civilians were killed at each site and several times of that number were severely wounded. In dozens of villages across southern South Korea, US planes engaged in repeated low-level strafing runs of the ‘people in white,’ In the southeast seaside city of Pohang in August of 1950, US naval artillery bombarded the calm villages and killed more than 400 civilians. In addition, another fifty-four separate cases of attacks equivalent to No Gun Ri are logged with South Korean authorities but have not yet been investigated.xxxv

The one salient point that is repeated most often by veteran pilots is that they were told to target thepeople in white”. White clothing was the normal and traditional Korean attire, the most common form of dress among the rural majority.xxxvi But No Gun Ri is symptomatic of more than just the systematic targeting of refugees, it also shows the gratuitous violence of individual soldiers fuelled by racism. Hungarian reporter Tibor Meray described US personnel shooting Koreans for sport at the time and stated that neither the KPA nor the ROKA could compare to US forces in brutality.xxxvii In Viet Nam years later, a veteran of the Korean War told Philip Caputo:I saw men sight their rifles in by shooting at Korean farmers. Before you leave here, sir, youre going to learn that one of the most brutal things in the world is your average nineteen-year-old American boy.”xxxviii

The racist violence of US personnel had begun during the occupation. Here it is worth contrasting again. Soviet troops had entered Korea as conquerors, war weary, barefoot, and brutalised. They stole, they raped and they killed. After dark they had to travel in groups of no less than three to avoid reprisals from enraged Koreans.xxxix But the official reaction was swift. Their superiors stamped out such behaviour in a matter of weeks and the damage in relations began to heal.xl In contrast, Koreans greeted the US occupation warmly,xli but after 3 months of occupation Hodge reported that hatred of US was increasing,the word ‘pro-American’ is being added to ‘pro-Jap’, ‘national traitor’ and ‘Jap collaborator’.xlii This wasn’t just the result of US policies, but also of the behaviour of the occupation forces:

By December 1945 most of the specific acts with which the US command contended as the occupation proceededopen expressions of disrespect toward Koreans, lack of care in avoiding Korean pedestrians while driving American military vehicles, offensive advances toward Korean women, looting and larcenywere common.xliii

When thereplacements” arrived, conscripts taking over from Pacific War veterans, things got worse – “they lacked the training and discipline of their predecessors in the Army while possessing all the provincialism and sense of superiority of their older comrades, if not their dehumanizing experience in fighting the Japanese.”xliv Western reporters at the time found that racist contempt was the norm and that insurmountable alienation was more or less universal.xlv I cannot provide a full analysis of Hodge’s response, but it was inadequatelong on rhetoric (such as letters of exhortation to the troops), short on efficacious measures (such as widespread curfews and bans of off-duty personnel or rigorous prosecution of the more common offences, which were not necessarily minor). The fact that a commander with an entire machinery of military discipline at his disposal chose what amounted to begging his personnel to be nice shows that he was (as many have pointed out) a battlefield commander unsuited to the task of running an occupation. The fact that neither subordinates nor superiors did anything about his inefficacy, however, shows a fundamental disinterest in improving the behaviour of US personnel, a lack of will which supersedes in relevance any lack in capability on Hodge’s part.

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Racist violence was fully unleashed once the War was under way. Just as the Germans had conflated Jewishness and Bolshevism, the US in propaganda and military indoctrination conflatedAsiatic”-ness and Communism.xlvi Instead of reserving animus for combatant enemies animus was directed atgooks”, which meant all Koreans regardless of combatant status, political orientation, or gender. It is true that risks vastly differed for different locales and statuses, but it is also true the every single Korean faced at least some risk of being killed by US forces and local allies were not an exception (a circumstance also seen in South Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and any other place where US forces are directly deployed). A US correspondent wrote that it wasnot a good time to be a Korean, for the Yankees are shooting them all”, while a British war correspondent recorded that GIsnever spoke of the enemy as though they were people…. …[E]very man’s dearest wish was to kill a Korean. ‘Today… I’ll get me a gook.’xlvii

When US forces went north of the 38th parallel massacres also occurred. Details are, of course, sketchier, with DPRK officialdom being an unreliable source. However, as Dong Choon Kim points out:While it must be acknowledged that the North has politically exploited such claims, the facts on the ground force us to not discount their veracity.”xlviii In one instance an estimated 35,380 people in Sinchon were massacred but whereas the DPRK leaders claim that US personnel committed the massacre, it was in fact ROK paramilitary police and militias who were sent north (by the US) in the tens of thousands.xlix

Although subject to commands from the Rhee regime, ROK security forces were ultimately under US command.l The US military may have been involved in formulating the “special decree” which initiated widespread massacres south of the 38th parallel, but there is no doubt that it was the US which initiated the massacres by ROK security forces north of the 38th. An order was issued toliquidate the North Korean Workers’ Party”, a mass movement which had 14% of the DPRK population as members. Mass arrests were to be followed by the production by the US ofblack lists”, the unstated purpose of which is easy enough to guess.li A partial list of occasions when the US has provided clients with lists of persons who the US wishes dead due to their political beliefs or activism includes: Guatemala, 1953;lii Iraq 1963,liii 2002-3,liv 2005-7;lv Indonesia 1965;lvi Indochina 1950-75;lvii Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Peru, and Ecuador mid-1970s (Operation Condor);lviii Latin America 1982-91lix (note that in the latter two instances most targets were not directly chosen by the US, but under guidelines created by the US). It is pretty easy to establish that these murders are eliticidal in nature by looking at the nature of the victims. They target leading intelligentsia and students, unionists, and peasant organisers. In Viet Nam, for instance, the US even invented the termViet Cong Infrastructure”. PradosdefinesthemasashadowynetworkofVietCongvillageauthorities,informers,taxcollectors,propagandateams,officialsofcommunitygroups,andthelike,whocollectivelycametobecalledtheVietCongInfrastructure(VCI).”Sympathizers”werealsocounted.lx The victims are very clearly non-combatants. For example, in William Blum’s survey of US interventions (Killing Hope) there is no index entry given forunionists”,subversives” ordissidents”; however, quite tellingly, one can get a fair idea of the approach to such individuals through looking up the entries ontorture, US connection to.” Out of 14 entries there are three relating to interrogation;lxi three where armed activists/guerillas/insurgents were tortured alongside unarmed political activists;lxii and 7 entries where only political dissidents are mentioned as victims.lxiii

We don’t know how many died in massacres north of the 38th parallel, but we do have some idea (very roughly) of how many died in mass executions in the south. Of 30,000 political prisoners at the outbreak of war almost all were disposed of (except for 7000 fortunate enough to be imprisoned in Seoul).lxiv This was the tip of the iceberg. An estimated 350,000 people were enrolled in the Bodoyeonmang (National Guidance League, NGL). It was putatively an organisation for monitoring and rehabilitating left-wing activists, but up to 70% of its members were simply apolitical peasants.lxv In a series of enormous mass executions (evidenced by mass graves which, again, provide grim proof of eyewitness testimony) somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people were slaughtered (some estimates go as high as 300,000).lxvi In Taejon, for instance, 4000-7000 were executed, and when the town was recaptured the mass graves were used as propaganda under the false claim that it was in fact the Communists who had committed the atrocity.lxvii Probably those US personnel and Western reporters who saw the bodies believed it to be true (after all the Communists were the savages) but the massacre had in fact been attended by US officials.lxviii

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Victims at Taejon. Note, I found this picture at a site which replicates the lie that communists committed this massacre. Of 48 photos in this 2010 retrospective 4 are depicting communist atrocities (or claim to be) while only 1 depicts an ROK/UN atrocity (below).

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In recaptured territory, as in the North, many deemed politically suspect due to their activities during the DPRK occupation were liquidated. In the Seoul area, for instance, 50,000 were killed by one estimate.lxix In addition, civilians in areas where guerillas operated were at risk of being murdered throughout the war. Counterinsurgency often meant slaughtering civilian men, women and children deemed by geographical criteria to be supportive of the guerrillas. In Guchang, for instance,several thousand civilians, including babies, women, and elderly, were killed during the operations named ‘Keeping the Position by Cleansing the Fields….’lxx The US was also using airpower against parts of the countryside deemed inimical. From 5 January 1951 the US began the wholesale use of napalm against villages deemed to be willingly or unwillingly providing some form of support for guerrillas. As Suh Hee-Kyung writes:The objects of the bombings now included not only military targets but also civilian homes and towns suspected of harboring communist guerrillas and/or North Korean soldiers. Especially in areas that the North Korean Army and the Chinese Army had invaded, the U.S. Army applied a ‘scorched earth policy’ even if the targeted area was residential.”lxxi On 25 January 1951 Lt. General Edward Almond (commander of X Corps) defended the bombing in terms paraphrased by Cumings as,the local population was being killed, true, but the meager population remaining appears sympathetic to and harbors the enemy.”lxxii

The US also began its bombing campaign in the North. Most of the 1 million tons of US ordinance dropped from the air in the War were used instrategic” bombing in the North.lxxiii It is fair to say that in this small and highly urbanised half-country, this tonnage caused a greater degree of destruction than in any other time and place in human history (not counting single cities).By 1952 just about everything in northern and central Korea was completely levelled. What was left of the population survived in caves, the North Koreans creating an entire life underground, in complexes of dwellings, schools, hospitals, and factories.”lxxiv The rough consensus figure is that 1 million civilians died from the US bombing campaign. As Cumings notes:

The United Nation’s Genocide Convention defined the term as acts committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” This would include “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” It was approved in 1948 and entered into force in 1951 – just as the USAF was inflicting genocide, under this definition and under the aegis of the United Nations Command, on the citizens of North Korea. Others note that area bombing of enemy cities was not illegal in World War II, but became so only after the Red Cross Convention on the Protection of Civilians in Wartime, signed in Stockholm in August 1948.

Kim Dong Choon is cautious about the subject of genocide, despite writing in the Journal Of Genocide Studies:As we usually label genocide when the shooting and strafing were aimed at a certain race or community with clear cut boundaries and characteristics, America’s military actions towards Korean civilians may not be regarded as a genocidal incident. ([Interjects in endnote]However, as Bertrand Russell and Jean Paul Sartre argued when they established a ‘War Crimes Tribunal’… the ‘genocidal intent’ of war may be identified even when official military policies may deny such an ambition.)lxxv Of critical importance, however, is the fact that the US soldiers killed civilian refugees lacking even a modicum of self-defense, including women and children, even when no North Korean soldiers or grass-root guerilla forces threatened them.lxxvi This needless caution on Kim’s part is saddening. The US (and the ROK forces under US command) systematically killed civilians in various completely different circumstances, and they did so under orders from the very top of the chain of command. One need only to glimpse through the various levels of mortality produced bystrategic bombing”, “counterinsurgency”, and mass executions to see that, taken as a whole, this was a staggering amount of death and (perhaps more importantly) a staggering amount of co-ordinated labour employed in causing mass civilian deaths. The level of proof required here is, in fact, far lower than that required to label the mass killings in Rwanda or Cambodia as genocides. Likewise, the economic and social destruction wrought in the North was so comprehensive that it can only be matched by the most widely acknowledged genocides.

There is more. By deliberately drawing out the negotiations for an armistice while instituting a strategy ofattrition” the war, although a very real war, was made primarily an engine of genocide by the US. In this it became a progenitor of later genocidal war systems. To illustrate this evolution it is necessary to trace the progress of the war. The narrative produced is, like that of the origins of the war, distinctly anomalous at points. In the framework of war, as it is generally understood, such actions were difficult to explain and caused alarm among allies, US personnel themselves, and even US political leaders. The US public, on the other hand, simply hated the war and it destroyed the Truman presidencyTruman holding the record for least popular President on record (with 77% disapproval) until the advent of George W. Bush.lxxvii But while from a military perspective many US actions seemed counterproductive or at least completely pointless it should be remembered that the narrative ends with the US having won for itself every single advantage that it could have won, at least from an imperial perspective. The previously fragile division of Korea was now stable and consolidated as was the US client regime in the ROK. Each half of the peninsula was tied more firmly in dependency to its superpower patron. Taiwan was saved from unification with China, while the infant PRC was greatly retarded in its development. The US was now in a state of enduring militarisation, armed with both the weaponry and the ideology which would allow the US to exert coercive imperial power over most of the globe. From this perspective an outright military victory would have been considerably less attractive, not least because US interventions would rely on the (false) implication that the Communist Bloc posed a military threat to the US.

Korea is not particularly suited to blitzkrieg, it is narrow and hilly with poor roading generally at the bottom of valleys, and a climate which makes operations of any sort difficult. Carter Malkasian describes it as suited forstrong in-depth defense”, by which he means using elevated positions of the sort which would be so bloodily contested later in the war. Inexplicably, however, the ROKA commanderwanted to contain any North Korean attack at the 38th Parallel and rejected a planned withdrawal to stronger positions, such as behind the Han river. The 38th Parallel was on comparatively flat ground, lacking ridges or river-lines on which to form a defensive.lxxviii That is to say, such a stance is inexplicable unless it is explained, like so much else must be, as a deliberate softening of ROKA defences.

After capturing Seoul, the KPA waited about a week, apparently awaiting artillery and other supplies, before the next concentrated offensive.lxxixLacking detailed plans for operations south of Seoul, North Korean forces had been slow to proceed beyond the Han River.” On July 5 the KPA fought their first engagement with US forces, who did have anti-tank weapons but were nevertheless defeated. “American combatants had inadequate firepower to resist Soviet-built tanks, and North Korean soldiers were not intimidated by opponents simply because their skin was white….”lxxx On the contrary, the KPA continued to push, over-running an entire US division when Taejon was captured a week later. It took only until August 1 for the KPA to reach a point less than 50 km west of Pusan.lxxxi By this stage the KPA faced superior numbers 92,000 (47,000 of them US) to the 70,000 it could bring to the front known as the Pusan perimeter.lxxxii Only a tiny chunk of the peninsula was unconquered, but more critical for the KPA than being outnumbered was the fact that they had never prepared for this. They could not replace casualties, communications were still far from desirable efficacy, and their stretched supply lines combined with US air and naval power to make resupply difficult.lxxxiii As Malkasian explains the chance to end the war quickly was slipping away: “Better American bazookas and heavy M-26 Pershing tanks had arrived that could counter the T-34s. The North Koreans waited until 3 September to make their major assault in the Second Battle of the Naktong Bulge. However, by then North Korean strength was ebbing. With only 98,000 men, they faced 180,000 UNC soldiers.”lxxxiv

On September 15 the US X Corps made a bold and extremely well executed amphibious landing at Incheon, the port adjacent to Seoul. The DPRK expected this move but had little choice but to throw everything they could at the Pusan perimeter (in the abovementioned Second Battle of the Naktong Bulge).lxxxv It seems apparent, however, that the DPRK had prepared for withdrawal, and for troops who were cut-off to become guerillas in the hills.lxxxvi Nevertheless, this was a terrible defeat for the KPA who were more or less routed from the South, sustaining heavy casualties and equipment losses. UN forces broke out of the Pusan perimeter on September 23. Seoul fell on the 27th after bitter fighting which caused many civilian deaths.lxxxvii Only around 25,000 KPA reached the 38th parallel before UN forces.lxxxviii

The KPA continued retreating and X Corps pressed northwards. The 38th parallel, crossing which had been condemned as an act of aggression by the UNSC was, little over 2 months later, of no significance. An “imaginary line” as MacArthur put it,lxxxix the same phrase being used soon after by the US ambassador to the UN.xc (Malkasian claims that UNGAR 376, passed on October 7, authorised UN forces to proceed north of the 38th.xci The two major problems with such a contention are that a) by October the 7th UN forces were in places already more than 100 km north of the 38th and b) the resolution says no such thing.xcii)

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The US rationalised crossing the 38th as a measure to prevent further aggression, but then changed to the annunciated aim of military unification.xciii The Chinese openly avowed that they would respond militarily to a march on the Yalu with PLA Chief of Staff (on Sept 26) and Chou En Lai both telling the Indian ambassador for conveyance to the US. US intelligence agencies claimed, however, to have believed otherwise.xciv When China entered the war, the US reacted at first as if nothing significant had happened then, after suffering defeats in October and November, as if a large portion of the PLA had crossed the border en masse:

As American forces rushed pell-mell back down the peninsula, observers at the time wondered why they were moving so fast, often breaking contact with an enemy not necessarily pursuing them. On December 15 a British military attaché wrote, ‘The withdrawal continues without any major enemy pressure. There were no signs of defense lines being used to halt the enemy march; it looked like a phony war, or a great hoax.’ British military attachés said in early December that the numbers of Chinese were quite exaggerated, with very few confirmed contacts with the Chinese ; furthermore, it was often impossible to judge the nationality of enemy units. The number of Chinese POWs being taken did not indicate huge numbers of troops.xcv

So yet again US led forces were inexplicably retreating rather than using the defensibility of the hilly terrain, this time back to the 38th parallel in what was known as the “Big Bug-Out”.xcvi Hyperbole exploded in Washington. This was the longest retreat in US military history, but it became transformed into the greatest defeat in US history leading to panic in the corridors of power and many very serious moves towards the use of atomic weapons.xcvii This even went as far as the transfer of necessary bomb components to Japan and Guam.xcviii The “Big Bug-Out” didn’t merely facilitate a vastly heightened level of threats from the US, it also gave a boost to the racist propaganda deployed on Western peoples, particularly those of the US. Hollywood films (more likely to be about the Pacific War than the unpopular Korean “police action”) featured scenes “of marauding Oriental troops; of bearded, unkempt American fighters inhabiting alien hovels in alien lands and dauntlessly improvising devices and designs as they go.”xcix Public affairs programming on television was unabashedly infected by official propaganda. One NBC programme was produced out of the White House by a presidential aide, who used it to declare that[t]he barbarous aggression of the Chinese hoards [sic] in Korea is not only an attack upon the forces of the United Nationsit is an attack upon civilization itselfit is an effort to destroy all the rights and privileges for which mankind has fought and bled since the dawn of time.”c

In coming months China really did commit massive numbers of personnel (officiallyvolunteers”) to a series of offensives, perhaps 400,000 by mid-January.ci The KPA and the Chinese People’s Volunteers (CPV) managed to advance about 100km south of the 38thby the end of January, but by February UN counteroffensives had pushed them back across the Han and Seoul was evacuated after massive casualties on 14 March.cii The KPA and CPV continued to mount offensives, but shortages and heavy casualties inflicted by UN forces brought them inevitably to a stop.ciii

Seoul had by this stage changed hands 4 times. As UN forces retreated in January they more or less destroyed the port at Inchon and burnt down large parts of Seoul, just as they had on retreating from northern cities.civ As the UN was preparing to re-enter the city, US air and ground artilleryblasted” the city.cv Indeed, one neglected aspect of the war was that during the mobile phase (which, as has been shown, seemed a little artificial at times) all but some small pockets of the countryside were swept over at least once by the battlefront. In addition to the 1 million tons or ordnance dropped by US aircraft, US guns fired a total of 2.1 million tons of ordnanceon a peninsula less than four-fifths the size of New Zealand the US used 43% as much explosive power as it did in the entirety of World War II.cvi Massive amounts of Korean property were destroyed by UN scorched earth policies and by the profligate use of artillery in addition to the massive bombing campaign.

https://ongenocide.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/koreanwarartillerycasings.jpg

In late December 1950, General Matthew Ridgway took over command of the 8th Army which faced the KPA/CPF offensives. In April he was made Supreme Commander of UN forces.cvii From the first he created an offensive spirit and tactics to match. An infantryman put it thus:We were there to kill Chinese. That’s what they told us. The army was done with retreating. General Ridgway was in charge now, and he wasn’t a retreating general. We heard it every day from the officers. ‘Fix ’em, find ’em, kill ’em.’ We went out every day and we attacked. Seems like that’s all we did was attack. We hardly ate. We hardly slept. We just attacked.”cviii

The doctrine under which this occurred was referred to asattrition”. On the surface it seemed to have a military logic, at least in the time from January to March of 1951 in which the Communists were conducting major offensives and the UN conducting counteroffensives. In Malkasian’s words Ridgwaysought to wear down their manpower. To do so, superior UNC firepower was to be exploited to the maximum effect. The hallmark of Ridgway’s doctrine of attrition was his directive to his subordinates to maximize enemy casualties while minimizing those of the Eighth Army. Given the daunting Communist numerical superiority, conserving casualties was absolutely crucial.”cix

Implicit in the logic of this “attrition” were three concepts which as yet had no terminology, but would become central in later genocides – “body count”, “kill ratio”, and “force protection”. To understand let us contrast this “attrition” with attrition as it was understood previously by theorists such as Clausewitz. When Clausewitz wrote of a “war of attrition” he referred to the gradual wearing down of strength through the requirement of movement which fatigued personnel and caused supply problems.cx Attrition is primarily a function of ‘war of manouevre’ with the center of gravity here being lines of communication.cxi In the World Wars attrition was notably aimed at and achieved by the deprivation of strategic resources – the single most successful way of reducing the military strength of an adversary which was based so firmly in productive capacities. In Korea this sort of attrition was achieved by stretching supply lines, and this certainly provides one explanation for the two major retreats by ROK/US/UN forces. Interdiction was also a way open to the US to cause attrition. The US interdiction campaign during the Korean War was only very modestly successful. The main challenge to it was the fact that Communist forces used a far smaller tonnage of supplies than UN, or more acutely, US forces. They ran, as it were, on the smell of an oily rag.cxii Bear in mind, however, that the CPV were poorly equipped and the Communists lacked the ability to supply sustained offensives of more than about 14 days,cxiii but as the war progressed their diversified logistical operations supplied ever greater amounts of materièl to the front.cxiv (Communist logistics may have been robust and decentralised, but there was no Ho Chi Minh Trail, and one gets the inevitable impression from the partial success of the interdiction campaign that the Communists would have been highly vulnerable to a programme of interdiction which was as profligately supported as the “strategic” bombing and the “meatgrinder” version of attrition described below.)

https://i0.wp.com/www1.korea-np.co.jp/pk/101st_issue/Triumph_return.jpg

My point, and I will return to and illustrate the point, is that the Communist forces had to be more vulnerable in their materièl inferiority than in their numerical superiority. This is true notwithstanding the early Chinese belief that “deception, stealth, and night fighting would enable their poorly armed soldiers to overcome Western technological and materiel superiority.cxv With offensives severely limited by logistical concerns the Communists could only hope to chip away slowly at UN positions, but there was nothing to stop the UN from using its superior firepower to regain ground as proved to be the case in early 1951. Malkasian writes:

Ridgway’s first use of attrition was successful. [CPV commander] Peng [Dehuai] launched the Third Phase Offensive in sub-zero conditions on 31 December 1950. Although Ridgway was forced to abandon Seoul, his withdrawal stretched the Communist supply lines to breaking point, forcing Peng to call off the offensive. Ridgway was anxious to seize the initiative. On 15 January 1951, he mounted a reconnaissance in force, Operation Wolfhound, followed by a full-blown counteroffensive.cxvi

Others agree that it was the logistical difficulties that ended Chinese offensive actions.cxvii After the failure of the Third Phase Offensive, Peng returned to Beijing to inform Mao that the Communists could not win the war because supply lines had reached their maximum length.cxviii

Apart from the withdrawal during the Third Phase Offensive, however, Ridgway’s “attrition” had little to do with exploiting and exacerbating logistical weakness. It was about killing. After the capture of Seoul Ridgway ordered a limited offensive north of the 38th to establish the “Kansas Line” on high ground, but his whole doctrine was more generally to avoid taking territory or holding positions at the expense of casualties, while at the same time inflicting as many casualties as possible through the offensive “attrition” that became known to soldiers as the “meat grinder”. This involved staging attacks purely aimed at inflicting as many casualties as possible.cxix This was “limited war”. In fact, near the start of the “Big Bug-Out”, only 12 days after the Chinese entry into the war, and only 8 days after threatening the use of atomic weapons, Truman publicly abandoned the goal of military unification.cxxLimited war” meant, therefore, killing as many people as possible while maintaining a military stalemate, bearing in mind that bombing and massacres were ongoing.

Mao, however, was not to reach the same conclusion as Peng regarding the impossibility of significant military gain until the failure of the Fifth Phase Offensive which came to a halt because of a lack of food and ammunition. The hungry and ill-armed CPV troops were panicked by the inevitable counteroffensive and the UN advanced somewhat north of the Kansas Line, and then stopped.cxxi Neither side was trying to win the war now, and the Chinese also began using “attrition” in the sense of trying to inflict disproportionate casualties in terms relative to total numbers available.cxxii Perhaps it made slightly more sense for the numerically superior force to engage in this behaviour, but in the broader picture it was really just playing into the US hands, allowing them to maintain deadly conflict when there was really no military purpose in the killing.

Whether one dates it to the end of the Fifth Phase Offensive or the end of the subsequent UN counteroffensive, the stalemate phase lasted more than twice as long as the mobile phase of the war, and cost more lives. The stalemate was characterised by “see-saw” battles, wherein the same ground was taken and retaken many times overcxxiii in a manner akin to the mindless butchery of World War I. But this time, off centre stage, civilians were dying in numbers much greater than the battlefield deaths and a bitter guerilla war was fought with napalm and atrocities.

Cease-fire negotiations began on 10 July 1951 and continued for just over two years. One writer characterises them thus: “Throughout the duration of the negotiations U.S. leaders produced harsh ultimatums rather than workable bargaining positions, thereby presumably obviating any form of enemy flexibility.cxxiv The Communists tried to maximise the propaganda value of the talks, setting things up originally to give an impression of the UN being there to sue for peace,cxxv and they were able to capitalise on US dishonesty by the use of dissident Western journalists.cxxvi Early on armed Chinese troops paraded bymistake” through the demilitarized area. They had mortars and machine guns, but the Chinese claimed that they were military police (MPs).cxxvii The US, however, made even more drasticmistakes”. On August 22 the conference site was bombed and strafed by aplane of unknown origin but flying from the south”.cxxviii In September the UN apologised for twoaccidental” attacks the second of which took the life of a 12 year old.cxxix According to Halliday and Cumings, the Communistsclaimed that these were deliberate attempts by sectors of the US military to sabotage the talks at key momentsand possibly to assassinate communist delegates. At the time the USA denied most of the charges. The official US military history later acknowledged that the USA carried out a large number of violations, including strafing and bombing the neutral zone and bombing the communist negotiators’ convoy en route to the site.”cxxx

If I were to characterise, very roughly, the nature of the negotiations it would be something like this: Often the Communists didn’t take the negotiations that seriously because the US positions were themselves so extreme as to render seriousness difficult. Nevertheless, on a number of issues the Communists would make major concessions, although with minor face-saving conditions. US officials would then vastly exaggerate the significance of such conditions and a compliant Western news media would follow the official line that it was in fact the Communists who were demonstrating a lack of good faith. The US was the only UN party at the talks and their British allies were frustrated and blamed the US rather than the Communists for the lack of progress in talks. They also believed that US military actions, publicly rationalised as being designed to force the Communists to negotiate in earnest, actually caused the Communists to harden their line.cxxxi When talks stalled over the issue of POW repatriation, the UK Foreign Office again held US intransigence to be the cause. From their Korea desk J. M. Addis minuted with words such asrapid and unexplained changes of front on the main question and a policy of stepping up demands after concessions have been madehas not contributed to removing the suspicion that undoubtably exists on the Communist side that the Americans do not sincerely want an armistice.”cxxxii

A compromise proposed by the PRC wherein POW’s who did not wish to be repatriated could be interviewed by a neutral country was scuppered by the US bombing of 5 power stations on Yalu undertaken without consulting the British. Omar Bradley claimed it was apurely military operation” designed to apply pressure for negotiations.cxxxiii The proposal had been a major concession by the PRC because the 1949 Geneva Convention Article 118 made repatriation compulsory without exception. At the outbreak of war the US (a ratified signatory) and the DPRK (a non-signatory) announced adherence to extant Geneva Conventions (the PRC, a non-signatory, made such an announcement in 1952).cxxxiv Additionally, while within in the camps their were many who wished to defect, others were coerced by right-wing elements by threatened starvation and torture sessions.cxxxv

On the 13th of May the US began a series of bombing raids against DPRK dams. Timed just after the laborious work of rice transplantation, before plants had taken root, the resultant floods cause utter devastation. The bombing of the Toksan dam, for example,scooped clean 27 miles of valley” with floodwaters reaching and inundating large parts of Pyongyang. Many thousands must have drowned.cxxxvi Both stores and people were made more vulnerable by having been driven underground. But the direct mortality may be less significant than that which was to follow due to the destruction of the rice crop. As a US intelligence report puts it:The Westerner can little conceive the awesome meaning which the loss of this staple food commodity has for the Asianstarvation and slow death.”cxxxvii

An armistice was finally signed on 27 July 1953, but Korean suffering was far from over. Today one is accustomed, for very good reasons, to contrasting the impoverished and repressive DPRK with the wealthy and democratic ROK. One might think that the massive destruction and proportionately far greater death in the DPRK would leave them much worse off than those to the South. On the contrary, however, the people of the ROK were in fact worst off. The US was determined that the ROK should be a Third World state producing primary goods only.cxxxviiiIn 1961, eight years after the end of its fratricidal war with North Korea, South Koreas yearly income stood at $82 per person. The average Korean earned less than half the average Ghanaian citizen ($179).”cxxxix They were ruled by a US client who allowed the US to dictate economic policy and then blamed him for the policies they themselves forced on the ROK.cxl The US pursued a policy of keeping de-industrialisation,cxli it destabilised the ROK economy even during the war,cxlii it caused destructive inflation,cxliii used coercion to get the ROK to effectively abdicate economic sovereignty in 1952,cxliv and when people were starving to death due to these policies, the US repressed reports of this and created false statistics claiming that ROK citizens ate more food than they had before the war.cxlv As Tony Mitchell observes, the poverty and dependency thus created acted to increase US power, US control.cxlvi

In 1961 the new military dictatorship forced the US to accept a programme of economic nationalism in the ROK, something which was probably only possible because of the existence of the DPRK. Nevertheless it is a testament to the destructiveness of the antidevelopmentalist economic regime forced on poorer states by the US that it was not until at least the mid-1970s that ROK living standards caught up with those of the DPRK, reaching an average $1000 per capita per annum income in 1977.cxlvii

In terms of repression, the torture and killings under military rule have been discussed, and it was only with great sacrifice and bravery that the South Korean people seized democracy from below in 1987. North Korea also remained a dependencyso much so that the collapse of the Soviet Union destabilised the heavily industrialised and petrochemical dependent agriculture required in a state which is sorely lacking in fertile land. This led within a few years to devastating famines precipitated by flooding.cxlviii

For US imperialists the Korean War must be counted as a resounding success. Koreans were weakened and divided into two dependencies, China weakened and tied more firmly to the USSR, Japan and Taiwan were both strengthened economically but yet made increasingly dependent on the US. The US inaugurated an interventionist imperial military system, complemented by economic, ideological and political power, which allowed it almost free rein to intervene in any state outside of the Soviet Bloc up to and including full-scale military interventions where such a thing was practicable.

What had happened to Korea can be understood in those terms used by Lemkin to subdivide elements of genocide. They had suffered genocide in the physical, social, economic, political, cultural and moral senses, leaving out only the religious and biological elements which complete Lemkin’s enumeration. The trauma lasts even to this day, even south of the “demilitarized zone” (DMZ). The suffering, the loss and grief, the crushing of the national hopes of an oppressed people, the social disintegration, the loss of heritage, the millions of dead – these were not unfortunate by-products, these were not “collateral damage”, they were the means. The US had conducted a successful functional genocide, and its very success was to bring about repetition.

iHalliday and Cumings, Korea, p 200.

iiChristopher Coker, Humane Warfare, London: Routledge, 2001, p 2.

iiiStueck, The Korean War, p 361.

ivCumings, The Korean War, p 160.

vCoker, Humane Warfare, p 80.

viMillett, The War for Korea, p 4.

viiGrace M. Cho, HauntingtheKoreanDiaspora:Shame,Secrecy,andtheForgottenWar,Minneapolis:UniversityofMinnesotaPress,2008, p 82

viiiCho, Haunting the Diaspora, p 75.

ixHalliday and Cumings, Korea, p 180.

xCumings, The Korean War, p 202.

xiThe figures on which this is based are discussed below.

xiiKim,Forgottenwar,forgottenmassacres…,p537.

xiiiCumings, The Korean War, p 186.

xivKim,Forgottenwar,forgottenmassacres…,p529.

xvCumings, The Korean War, p 187.

xviCumings, The Korean War, p 202.

xviiSee Appendix 1.

xviiiLemkin, Axis Rule, p 80.

xixFigures for civilian deaths at US and ROK hands are given below. I have not encountered any suggestion that other United Nations forces committed atrocities on a scale which would change the proportions by inclusion or exclusion from the total.

xxJudith Greer, “What Really Happened at No Gun Ri?”, Salon, 4 June 2002. Retrieved 17 November 2010 from http://www.salon.com/2002/06/03/nogunri_2/.

xxiSuhi Choi, “Silencing SurvivorsNarratives: Why Are We Again Forgetting the No Gun Ri Story?, Rhetoric & Public Affairs, 11:3, 2008, p 373.

xxiiIbid, p 367.

xxiiiCharles J. Hanley and Martha Mendoza, “US Policy was to Shoot Korean Refugees”, Associated Press, 29 May 2006. Retrieved 17 November 2010 from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/29/AR2006052900485.html.

xxivJeremy Williams,Kill ’em All’: The American Military in Korea, BBC, updated 17 February 2011. Retrieved 15 November 2011 from http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/coldwar/korea_usa_01.shtml.

xxvCharles J. Hanley, “No Gun Ri: Official Narrative and Inconvenient Truths”, Critical Asian Studies, 42:4, 2010, p 589.

xxviIbid, p 590.

xxviiIbid.

xxviiiWilliams, “Kill ’em All….”

xxixCumings, The Korean War, p 167.

xxxIbid, p 168.

xxxiWilliams, “Kill ’em All….”

xxxiiValerie Perry, LookingforNoGunRi,KyotoJournal,49,2001.Retrieved15November2011fromhttp://www.kyotojournal.org/kjencounters/NoGunRi.html.

xxxiiiDonghee Sinn, “Room for archives? Use of archival materials in No Gun Ri research, Archival Science, 10, 2010, pp 117-40.

xxxivKim, “Forgotten War…’, p 534.

xxxvIbid, p 523.

xxxviStueck and Yi, “An Alliance Forged in Blood…”, p 192.

xxxviiCumings, The Korean War, p 158.

xxxviiiPhilip Caputo, A Rumour of War, London: Arrow, 1978, p 137.

xxxixStueck, The Korean War, p 20.

xlAndrei Lankov, From Stalin to Kim Il Song: the formation of North Korea, 1945-1960, London: C. Hurst, 2002, p 6.

xliStueck and Yi, “An Alliance Forged in Blood…”, p 185.

xliiCumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, p 198.

xliiiStueck and Yi, “An Alliance Forged in Blood…”, p 190.

xlivIbid, p 194.

xlvIbid, pp 195-6.

xlviBrewer, Why America Fights?…, p 142.

xlviiKorea, p 88.

xlviiiKim, “Forgotten War…”, p 531.

xlixIbid, p 536.

lIbid, p 532.

liCumings, The Korean War, p 195.

liiIbarra, “The Culture of Terror…”, p 198.

liiiTariq Ali, Bush in Babylon: The Recolonisation of Iraq, London: Verso, 2003, pp 87-8.

livMax Fuller, “Crying Wolf: Media Disinformation and Death Squads in Occupied Iraq, GlobalResearch, 10 November 2005. Retrieved 16 April 2006 from http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=FUL20051110&articleId=1230.

lvMichael Moss, “How Iraq Police Reform Became Casualty of War”, New York Times, 22 May 2006; Max Fuller, “Silence of the Lambs? Proof of US orchestration of Death Squads Killings in Iraq”, GlobalResearch, 14 March 2007. Retrieved 16 April 2007 from http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=5081.

lviPeter Dale Scott, “The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967”, Pacific Affairs, Summer 1985, pp 239-264.

lviiFrankL.Jones,‘Blowtorch:RobertKomerandtheMakingofViet NamPacificationPolicy’,Parameters, Vol.35,No.3 (Autumn2005),p104;Prados,The Hidden History of the Viet Nam War,pp204-5.

lviiiRoger Morris, “Donald Rumsfeld’s Long March”.

lixStokes, “Why the End of the Cold War…”, pp 583-4.

lxPrados, The Hidden History of the Viet Nam War, pp 204-5, 210.

lxiBlum, Killing Hope, pp 38, 226, 279.

lxiiIbid, pp 128-9, 200-5, 239.

lxiiiIbid, pp 72, 116, 171, 219-21, 232, 359-61, 375.

lxivKim, “Forgotten War…”, p 533.

lxvIbid, p 534.

lxviIbid, p 535.

lxviiCumings, The Korean War, p 173.

lxviiiIbid, p 175.

lxixKim, “Forgotten War…”, p 536.

lxxIbid, p 532.

lxxiSuh Hee-Kyung, “Atrocities Before and During the Korean War”, Critical Asian Studies, 42:4, p 579.

lxxiiCumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, p 295.

lxxiiiKolko, Century of War, p 404.

lxxivCumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, pp 295-6.

lxxvKim, “Forgotten War…”, p 542, n 31.

lxxviIbid, p 532.

lxxviiCumings, The Korean War, p 149.

lxxviiiMalkasian, The Korean War, p 20.

lxxixHalliday and Cumings, Korea, p 82.

lxxxStueck, The Korean War, p 47.

lxxxiMalkasian, The Korean War, p 24.

lxxxiiHalliday and Cumings, Korea, p 82.

lxxxiiiStueck, The Korean War, p 48.

lxxxivMalkasian, The Korean War, p 24.

lxxxvIbid, p 26.

lxxxviHalliday and Cumings, Korea, p 97.

lxxxviiMalkasian, The Korean War, p 29.

lxxxviiiStueck, The Korean War, p 86

lxxxixMichael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (4th ed.), New York: Basic Books, 2006, p 118.

xcCumings, The Korean War, p 23.

xciMalkasian, The Korean War, p 29.

xciiUNGAR 376, The Problem of the Independence of Korea, 7 October 1950. Retrieved 24 November 2011 from http://daccess-dds-ny.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/059/74/IMG/NR005974.pdf?OpenElement.

xciiiWalzer, Just and Unjust Wars, p 118.

xcivCumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, pp 283-4.

xcvIbid, p 287.

xcviMalkasian, The Korean War, p 36.

xcviiCumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, pp 289-91.

xcviiiIbid, pp 292-3.

xcixMarilyn Young, “Hard Sell: The Korean War” quoted in Steven Casey, Selling the Korean War: Propaganda, Politics, and Public Opinion in the United States, 1950-1953, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, 19501953, p 221.

cBrewer, Why America Fights, p 159.

ciHalliday and Cumings, Korea, p 144.

ciiIbid.

ciiiMalkasian, The Korean War, p 45.

civHalliday and Cumings, Korea, p 141.

cvIbid, p 144.

cviKolko, Century of War, p 404.

cviiI am not going to delve into the ‘controversy’ of MacArthur’s dismissal, except to point out that one possible interpretation was that MacArthur would have been very unlikely to have supported the stalemated ‘attrition’ strategy – the ‘meatgrinder’ – that was to be employed for the rest of the war.

cviiiMalkasian, The Korean War, p 38.

cixIbid, pp 38-9.

cxClausewitz, On War, 8.1, p 264.

cxiSee for example discussion of those times when a belligerent does not seek a decisive (or any) engagement, 7.16.

cxiiBilly C. Mossman, The Effectiveness of Air Interdiction During the Korean War, Arlington: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1966. Historical Manuscripts Collection, file number 2-3.7 AD.H.

cxiiiIbid, p 5.

cxivIbid, pp 16-7.

cxvMalkasian, The Korean War, p 30.

cxviIbid, p 39.

cxviiHalliday and Cumings, Korea, p 144; Stueck, The Korean War, p 232.

cxviiiHalliday and Cumings, Korea, p 144.

cxixMalkasian, The Korean War, p 40.

cxxStueck, The Korean War, p 138.

cxxiMalkasian, The Korean War, p 45.

cxxiiIbid, p 46.

cxxiiiIbid, p 48.

cxxivRon Robin,Behavioral Codes and Truce Talks: Images of the Enemy and Expert Knowledge in the Korean Armistice Negotiations, Diplomatic History, 25:4 (Fall, 2001), p 625.

cxxvStueck, Rethinking the Korean War, p 151.

cxxviHalliday and Cumings, Korea, p 162.

cxxviiIbid, p 160.

cxxviiiStueck, Rethinking the Korean War, p 153.

cxxixIbid, p 156.

cxxxHalliday and Cumings, Korea, p 161.

cxxxiDockrill,The Foreign Office, Anglo-American Relations…, pp 101-2.

cxxxiiIbid, p 105.

cxxxiiiIbid, p 107.

cxxxivCallum A. MacDonald, “’Heroes Behind Barbed Wire’: The US, Britain and the POW issue in the Korean War”, in James Cotton and Ian Neary (eds), The Korean War in History, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989, p 135.

cxxxvIbid, pp 136-7.

cxxxviHalliday and Cumings, Korea, p 195.

cxxxviiIbid, p 196.

cxxxviiiTony Mitchell,Control of the Economy During the Korean War: The 1952 Co-ordination Treaty and its Consequences, in James Cotton and Ian Neary (eds), The Korean War in History, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989, p 152.

cxxxixHa Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism, London: Bloomsbury, 2008, p ix.

cxlMitchell, “Control of the Economy…”, p 154.

cxliIbid, pp 152-3.

cxliiIbid, p 156.

cxliiiIbid, pp 156-7.

cxlivIbid, p 159.

cxlvIbid, pp 159-60.

cxlviIbid, p 160.

cxlviiChang, Bad Samaritans, xiii.

cxlviiiMarcus Noland, “Famine and Reform in North Korea”, Asian Economic Papers, 3:2, pp 1-40.

The Korean Genocide – Part 1, Before the US Occupation.

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(Author’s note: I was intending to be writing a long overdue piece about why the one should never refer to “The Iraq War” but rather “The Iraq Genocide”. It is daunting. You cannot simply make such a case in 1000 words, at least not in any way that convince or even empower anyone who was not already firmly of that opinion.  In these circumstances I feel it is worth going back to another enormous brutal US genocide which is never, ever discussed as such – the Korean Genocide. A Korean had commented on my facebook page that my cover photo, Picasso’s Massacre in Korea depicted the “genocide of antiimperialists”.
It is no coincidence that I chose that painting. Korea saw the development of a style of genocide which was later to be repeated by the US in Laos, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Afghanistan and Iraq. In a four part series (adapted from an even longer work) I will detail 1) Korea before US Occupation, 2) US Occupation Period and the US Imperial Context, 3) June 1950: Who Started It?, and (by far the longest part) 4) Korean War or Korean Genocide?)

PicassoMassakervonKorea1951
The premise of this blog is that the most significant post-World War II US military actions are acts of genocide. Genocide can be said to mean “war” undertaken against a whole population, not against its military nor, in any immediate sense, its military capacity (see my previous post about the nature and meaning of genocide). Further, the manner in which the US commits genocide is under the guise of fighting wars. In fact, these are best viewed as “war systems” in that, far from seeking military victory, the US sought to avoid decisions (even victorious decisions) in favour of extending the period of violence for as long as was feasible. The prototypical example was the Korean War, wherein attempts to achieve a military decision were abandoned in favour of an “attrition” strategy. This was putatively aimed at forcing a negotiated settlement, but the US itself was clearly the greatest impediment to reaching a settlement.
Korea, like Viet Nam and Iraq, was targeted because of two crucial circumstances. Firstly, it was potentially strong independent nation state and, secondly, it was vulnerable. The Korean Genocide served the ends of both the US and the USSR. The origins of the military advance south by DPRK forces on June 25, 1950 that initiated the “Korean War” are still surrounded by impenetrable mysteries and unanswered questions, and there is legitimate space for the intriguing possibility of tacit or conspiratorial collusion between the US and USSR.
The reader may well object already to my misuse of the term genocide, but allow me to anticipate some objections and make some observations. Genocide does not mean extermination or even intended extermination. The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UNCG) specifically uses the phrase “in whole or in part”, and for good reason.
Consider what is generally held as the ultimate exemplar of genocide, the Judeocide committed by Germany in Europe. The Germans never intended to exterminate all of the world’s Jews. Even confining the matter to European Jewry, there was a huge problem simply in defining who was and was not a Jew. They had to rely ultimately on confessional identification to define an alleged ‘race’.
As Yehuda Bauer wrote: “One can see how confused Nazi racism was when Jewish grandparents were defined by religion rather than so-called racial criteria.”1 As well as the fact that many with Jewish heritage would inevitably successfully evade detection, in the Nuremburg Laws (and later when deciding who to kill at Wannsee), exemptions were made on various criteria, such as being a decorated war hero. In fact, when it comes to the killing aspect of genocide, inconsistency, hypocrisy and schizophrenic dissonances are the norm.
Equally, genocide is not the exclusive domain of irrational and evil perpetrators. The very point of coining the term genocide, as will be explained, was to indicate a strategic paradigm with a functional logic. Irrationality is therefore a moot point and I prefer to distinguish between “functional” and “dysfunctional” genocides. Equally, “evil” is in the eye of the beholder. The hateful and racist rhetoric of the Nazis is an unavoidable feature of their existence, but in most instances of genocide there is a predilection for highlighting the evidence of fanaticism and hatred for the official villains (those at odds with Western interests)2 while ignoring identical statements made by Western personnel or their allies. In the case of the US there are plenty of instances of significant officials using fanatical, hateful or exterminationist language regarding communists, Asians, Arabs or Muslims.
Racism is a consciously inculcated trait used by the US, as by others, to harness not just hateful and violent tendency, but also infantilisation and a elevated sense of self which conveys both the right and duty of intervention and the wielding of imperial power (the “White Man’s Burden”). Racism also has its own logic, which may cause dysfunction when applied by the overzealous. On the whole, however, US genocides are highly functional strategically oriented imperial genocides. A point I neglected to make in my previous post about the meaning of genocide, and one well worth remembering, is that genocide is employed in order to achieve goals that cannot be achieved by military means. Lemkin related this back to the “imposition of [the genocidal power’s] national pattern” on the victim group, or on the land which they inhabit (after they have been cleansed therefrom). That is, however, to impose a predetermined end to genocide, whereas in empires which are not based around contiguous land formations it is not exceptional for genocide to be used simply as a way of weakening and immiserating a local population to facilitate the imposition of imperial power (which is itself often defined as the replication of power structure not dissimilar to Lemkin’s description but without reference to “nation”). In King Leopold’s Congo, for example, of an estimated 30 million there was a population decline of ten to thirteen million people from 1885 to 1908 from “murder, starvation, exhaustion and exposure, disease, and plummeting birth rates.”
There was little effort, at that stage, to impose a national pattern on the people or the land (although that did come later when Belgium took over). In fact, further to what has already been mentioned with regard to genocide being used for ends which cannot be achieved with military means, it may be obvious to some readers that in fact there is more strategic incentive to commit genocide in instances of informal imperialism or neocolonialism. Formal imperialism can be imposed by military means, taking over the reins of power from above. It only runs into trouble when it is imposed on a genos with enough consciousness to expect self-determination. This is what occurred in Iraq under the British (which I will discuss at some future time) and Korea poses similar challenges to imperial power.

Korea has a long stable history of political unity dating from 668 CE until it was divided in 1945.3
As impressive as that is, the Koreans go further, tracing the origins of their nation to the 3rd millennium BCE,4 and their written history (albeit initially written by Chinese) precedes political unity by a millennium.5 Relations with neighbours Japan and China have varied considerably over the centuries, but it is fair to say that, as with many other Asian polities a national identity cohered sharply in reaction to the inescapable presence of China. Before there even was a Korea, there was an established tradition of heroic resistance to foreign incursion,6 and another, seen by some as portentous, of drawing foreign powers into internecine conflict.7 The 16th and 17th centuries saw Korea fight off major Japanese and Manchu invasions.8 By the time Western interests turned their eyes towards Korea, there was a general hostility towards all foreigners, which probably had its first inklings in the Mongol invasions of the 13th century.9 The attitude of what is referred to as the “Hermit Kingdom” is summarised by Cumings as: “We have nothing. We need nothing. Please go away.”10

Council_of_War_USS_Colorado_June_1871
Western liberal imperialists did not, and do not, recognise anyone’s right to be left alone. Kanghwa Island, near Inchon, became a magnet for foreign gunboats. The French landed in 1866 and were pushed back. A heavily armed US schooner in that same year sailed up the Taedong river towards Pyongyang, opening fire on the angry crowd which gathered on the banks only to be grounded by the tide, the crew massacred. Five years later this provided the pretext for a US attack on Kanghwa.
650 Koreans were killed in what was referred as the “Little War with the Heathen”.11 Japan, like the Western powers, also sent gunboats to Kanghwa.12 In the end it was the US that succeeded first in “opening” the Hermit Kingdom. Britain, France and the US imposed conditions, such as extraterritoriality for their citizens (meaning they weren’t subject to Korean law when in Korea), which violated Korean sovereignty. In Cumings’s words: “Korea was now fully hooked into the system of unequal treaties….”13
Cumings makes the following comparison between liberal imperialism and the long-standing tributary relationship between Korea and China, a summary which works equally well for contemporary neocolonialism:

“The Sino-Korean tributary system was one of inconsequential hierarchy and real independence, if not equality. The Western system that Korea encountered, however, was one of fictive equality and real subordination. It was the British who did the most to propel the doctrine of sovereign equality around the world, confounding and undermining their imperial practice with an abstract, idealist theory that transferred notions about the free market to international politics…. [A]s Karl Polanyi put it, ‘in the liberal theory, Great Britain was merely another atom in the universe… and ranked precisely on the same footing as Denmark and Guatemala.'”14

It was Japan, however, that came to dominate, albeit in a very Western mode of domination, based on “unequal treaties” and economic “advisers”.15 Japan felt that to even keep pace with the West, it had to dominate Korea.16 Its initial inroads were made in pursuing the same policy as the British in exploiting late 19th century droughts to subvert Korean sovereignty, establishing the ability to force Korea to export food during subsequent droughts, causing devastating suffering.17 From the 1880s onwards Japan aspired to complete domination of Korea.18 This led to war with China in 1894-5,19 and Japan’s acquisition of Taiwan.20 Russia was the next obstacle, rebuffing a Japanese offer of accommodation over Manchuria and Korea due to what is generally held to be racist arrogance.21
The 1904-5 Russo-Japanese war, fought mostly over Manchuria,22 ended in Japanese victory. The door was open to complete Japanese domination, and in 1910 Korea was annexed.23 Western powers extended their blessing in exchange for Japanese recognition of their own colonial privileges.24
The Japanese occupation of Korea was brutal and it was hated. Gavan McCormack poses the question of whether it could be considered genocide:

In the Korean context, Japanese colonialist policy was undoubtedly designed to destroy “Korea” as a “national group” by assimilating it within Japan. However, such measures by other twentieth-century colonialist regimes have not elsewhere been held genocidal. There has been, so to speak, a colonialist exemption, and if that exemption is to be now closed, both logic and morality demand that it be closed against all colonialist powers, not just Japan. In the overall context of the century, the use of the term “genocide” carrying as it does extreme legal and moral oppobrium, to describe acts committed by imperial Japan but not to describe any acts committed by the Western powers must be problematic. If Japan was genocidal in China or elsewhere in Asia, what then shall we say of the French in Algeria or Indochina, the Americans in Korea and Indochina and the Gulf, the Russians in Chechyna?25

For obvious reasons I do not believe that there should be or is a “colonialist exemption”. People do not exempt Germany for colonialist genocide in Southern Africa nor in Eastern Europe which was an equally colonial enterprise. What they exempt is the acts of the Western powers who were victors in WWII which and thus have to be circumspect when (accurately) accusing Italy and Japan of genocides which bear such a close resemblance to these unmentionable instances. McCormack is suggesting that the norm of a politicised discourse is a definitional norm because one simply cannot apply “extreme legal and moral opprobrium” to the actions of Western imperialists, notwithstanding the immense death and suffering brought about. Once again “genocide” loses all meaning and becomes simply another term for “evil” reserved for those who are official enemies.
Prior to annexation the Japanese faced considerable guerilla resistance, but this was all but wiped out by 1910.26 When the annexation did take place:

At least half a million Koreans took part in demonstrations in March and April, with disturbances in more than six hundred different places. In one of the most notorious episodes, Japanese gendarmes locked protesters inside a church and burned it to the ground. In the end Japanese officials counted 553 killed and over 12,000 arrested, but Korean nationalist sources put the totals at 7,500 killed and 45,000 arrested.27

Once annexation had taken place there was a decade of particularly oppressive rule:

…[T]he Government General had grown into a powerful machine of centralized bureaucratic control that undertook the wholesale transformation of Korea’s political, educational, and social structures. It also created the institutions of a modern economy by building a transportation and communications network linking the entire country and creating new monetary and financial systems. In the process of these modernizing efforts, the Koreans were effectively deprived of freedom of assembly, association, press, and speech, and initial efforts were made to liquidate the very concept of a Korean identity. Under the draconian administration of Governor General Terauchi, Korea now entered that dark epoch of developmental shock known to its chroniclers as the “period of military rule,” a term that in English hardly conveys the crushing impact of the Japanese army and police on every aspect of Korean life.28

March_1st_movement

The memorial tablet for March 1st Movement in Pagoda park, Seoul.

The military rule period culminated in a mass mobilisation of protest in 1919 and a particularly bloody repression, but one which provoked international outrage and a backlash in Japan itself.29
After this period the level of oppression gradually and unevenly diminished – “if neither the depth nor the tempo of colonial reform went far in meeting the Koreans’ legitimate demands, the more overtly arbitrary and oppressive aspects of Japanese administration were at least muted throughout the empire during this decade, and the effort to construct modern economic facilities and institutions in the colonies continued apace.”30 The Koreans were not to be “assimilated” as McCormack suggests, but rather incorporated, as Koreans, under Japanese hegemony (another indication that the “national pattern” imposed by genocide does not need to be that of the nation of those who commit genocide). In light of this, Japan was now viewed as a “respectable colonial power”31 which tells us something about the standards of the time. If anything the promise of assimilation into a “Greater Japanese Race” was a false one akin to British promises to coloured people that they too could essentially become British though they would never be accepted as such.
Even now “Koreans” who have lived in Japan for multiple generations are denied citizenship and “Japanese families still pore over genealogies to make sure their daughters’ fiancés have no ‘Korean blood.’”32 There were however, significant efforts to degrade Korean culture (and emplace aspects of Japanese culture) which amply fulfil Lemkin’s cultural criteria for genocide.33
The Japanese brought considerable economic infrastructure, industrial development and education.
They acted in the developmentalist manner often falsely attributed to Western imperialists more inclined to extraction of raw materials and the destruction of local economies. Even this, however, was of little or no immediate benefit to the mass of Koreans whose national economy was enslaved to the needs of Japan. Indeed, it seems inevitable that this colonial developmentalism had nothing to do with paternalistic ideologies of empire (although the Japanese did have their own equivalent of the White Man’s Burden) and everything to do with strategic considerations. One of two strategic approaches in Japanese thought was the “northern advance” strategy which held sway in the Army.
This would see the Japanese project power into North East Asia, ostensibly as a defence against Russian/Soviet threats.34 The obvious role for the Korean peninsula in such a scenario was as a form of beachhead with a developed industrial and transport infrastructure along with a native population capable of operating such.

Groundbreaking_ceremony_of_Gyeongbu_Line_at_Busan,_1901
Groundbreaking ceremony of Gyeongbu Line at Busan, 1901.
World War II saw an elevation of some loyal Koreans by the manpower hungry Japan to positions of bureaucratic power and to commissions within the military.35 Simultaneously there was a surge of active resistance with Koreans making up the largest single ethnic group among the guerillas resisting the Japanese in Manchuria.36 Anti-Japanese activity was to become the key source of legitimacy in the post-war era based on perceived dedication, sacrifice and efficacy. As Keith Pratt puts it the Koreans populated their world with heroes and villains and up until June 1950 (and to a large extent thereafter) the only significant factor in terms of leadership (notwithstanding differences in ideology) was whether one had been a resistor (hero) or a collaborator (villain).37 This greatly favoured Kim Il Sung, who was particularly effective as an anti-Japanese guerilla leader and whom the Japanese had inadvertently boosted by media features pitting him against Korean quislings such Kim Sok-won [later an important General in the Army of the Republic of Korea (ROKA)] who was part of the “Special Kim Detachment” of the Japanese Army (specifically formed to combat Kim Il Sung).38
The communists were aware of Kim’s standing and “just before the Manchurian guerrillas returned to Korea, the top leaders such as Kim Il Sung, Kim Chaek, Choe Hyon, Kim Il, and Choe Yong-gon agreed among themselves to promote Kim Il Sung as the maximum figure, for reasons that included his wider reputation and his personal force. By some indexes the others outranked him; Kim Chaek and Choe Hyon stood higher than Kim in Chinese communist hierarchy.”39 Kim wasn’t in the same completely unrivalled position that Ho Chi Minh was consolidating in Vietnam, but he was a clear front runner and was both charismatic and politically able. Years of bitter violent struggle alongside disparate inchoate guerillas “left Kim Il Sung with a conviction: unity above all else, and by whatever means necessary….”40 That is to say, Korean unity, not proletarian and/or peasant unity.

Undated-KimIlSungwithAntiJapaneseGuerillaArmy
Something of the significance of Kim’s success as a guerilla can be gleaned from the fact that the ROK insisted that the DPRK leader was an imposter, a criminal who had taken the famous guerilla’s name. This lie was adhered to and believed by South Koreans until 1989.41 Indeed, it was not only Kim who sported such nationalist credentials in the DPRK regime. The DPRK would become what Cumings refers to as a “guerilla state” with positions of authority occupied by those who had fought the Japanese and had “impeccable credentials” of suffering and loss.42
The DPRK regime came about due to the Soviet occupation of North Korea. The day after the bombing of Nagasaki, the US unilaterally declared a division of Korea along the 38th parallel and an intention to occupy the southern part.43 From the Soviet perspective this meant ceding control of Seoul to the US. It meant that the greatest concentration of communists, in the South, would be under US occupation while the greatest concentration of Christians would be under Soviet occupation. It meant dividing the agricultural South from a North which was not, and is still not, able to even securely feed its population. Yet the Soviets acceded with great willingness. To understand why this occurred in such a manner and to understand subsequent US/USSR actions is quite straightforward. All of these events make perfect sense if one abandons notions of the relevance not only of ideology, but of culture and, for that matter, of leader’s personalities. If it helps, one might abandon the baggage that is attached when discussing state acts by envisaging instead competing criminal syndicates engaged in a constant dialectic of conflict, accommodation and co-operation in various areas of interest.
The Soviets stood to gain access to ice free ports. This was more tangible than anything the US might want, but fundamentally less important. Hence Stalin was quite prepared to cede the entire peninsula to the US rather than risk the consequences of a US defeat after the Chinese entered the war in force.44 The USSR was faced with a problem in that they stood to gain precisely nothing, in all likelihood, from a unified Korea under Kim Il Sung. Though Kim’s faction of communist guerillas had been based in the Soviet Union for a time, he was fiercely nationalistic and, for good reasons, had no great love or trust for Stalin’s regime (even though Stalin was officially the “Great Leader” to all Korean and Chinese Communists).45 Further, all Korean Communist factions had, to a greater or lesser extent, very strong bonds with the CCP and PLA in China, whose potentially dangerous independence was soon to loom much larger in Soviet calculations than access to Korean ports. Thus the Soviets stood to gain far more from a constrained and dependent Communist regime ruling a fragile half-state than it would gain with an officially ideologically aligned, but fully independent, Communist regime ruling over a potentially strong state of unified Korea. As William Stueck comments, “…for the present a divided peninsula served Soviet interests better than a unified one….”46 Where I would differ from Stueck is in his clear implication that a unified Korea would ever be likely to serve “Soviet interests” in the Cold War paradigm of imperialism.

1 Yehuda Bauer, “The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, 1933-1938,” excerpt from A History of the Holocaust, New
York: Franklin Watts, 1982. Reprinted in Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide:
Analyses and Case Studies, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990, p 345.
2  I will use the notion of “the West” which has connotations of Eurocentric culture (and cultural
imperialism), whiteness, liberalism/”capitalism” and material/economic hegemony; as well being redolent of a
hegemonic/imperial history. For consistency I do not use the alternative terminology of “the North” even in instances
where it might be more relevant.
3 Peter Lowe, The Origins of the Korean War (2nd ed.), London and New York: Longman, 1997, p 2.
4 Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History, New York: W. W. Norton, 1997, p 23.
5 Ibid, p 25.
6 Ibid, p 33.
7 Ibid, p 34.
8 Ibid, pp 76-9.
9 Ibid, p 89.
10 Ibid, p 87.
11 Ibid, pp 96-7.
12 Ibid, p 99.
13 Ibid, p 107.
14 Ibid, p 95-6.
15 Mark R. Peattie, “The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945” Peter Duus (ed.), The Cambridge History of Japan:
Volume 6, The Twentieth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p 225.
16 Akira Iriye, “Japan’s Drive to Great Power Status” in Marius B. Jansen (ed.), The Cambridge History of Japan:
Volume V, The Nineteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p 758.
17 Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. London, New York: Verso, 2001 , p 92.
18 Peattie, “The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945”, p 224.
19 Iriye, “Japan’s Drive to Great Power Status”, p 759.
20 Ibid, p 767.
21 Peattie, “The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945”, p 226.
22 William C. Fuller Jr., “The Imperial Army” in Dominic Lieven (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russia: Volume II,
Imperial Russia, 1689-1917. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p 542.
23 Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, p 145.
24 Hata, “Continental expansion, 1905-1941”, p 278.
25 McCormack, “Reflections on Modern Japanese History in the Context of the Concept of Genocide”, p 270.
26 Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, p 146.
27 Ibid, p 145.
28 Peattie, “The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895-1945”, pp 230-1.
29 Ibid, p 234.
30 Ibid, p 235.
31 Ibid.
32 Bruce Cumings, “Why Memory Lingers in East Asia”, Current History, September 2007, p 259.
33 Keith Pratt, Everlasting Flower: A History of Korea, London: Reaktion Books, 2006, p 225 et passim.
34 ‘Northern advance and southern advance were somewhat more ambiguous terms. The first was generally understood
to mean a policy of continental expansion from the Korean peninsula through Manchuria into China proper; the
second was understood to mean expansion from Taiwan into south China and Southeast Asia. Army-first meant that
the army would carry the main burden of expansion, whereas navy-first implied that the navy would. There was a
tendency for greater Japanism [which sought to make Japan a Great Power] to go hand in hand with northern
advance, which in turn implied continental expansion and an army-first policy. Little Japanism tended to be
associated with the southern advance and navy-first positions.’ Hata, “Continental expansion, 1905-1941”, p 271.
35 Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, p 176.
36 Ibid, p 160.
37 Pratt, Everlasting Flower, pp 235-40.
38 Bruce Cumings, The Korean War, New York: The Modern Library, 2010, pp 53-4.
39 Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, p 195.
40 Cumings, The Korean War, p 55.
41 Ibid, p 46.
42 Ibid, p 56.
43 Ibid, p 104.
44 Ibid, p 30.
45 Ibid, p 57.
46 William Stueck, Rethinking the Korean War: A New Diplomatic and Strategic History, Princeton and Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2002, p 33.