As Bush visited South Korea earlier this week, he was greated by mass protests around the issue of mad cow and beef imports being allowed into South Korea--an issue that even the new, conservative government fells necessary to raise in its talks with Bush and other administration officials. Lower profile for the moment, but of more enduring significance, are the findings of South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, regarding US military massacres of South Korean civilians.
I discussed the Korean War In my July 20 diary, Patriotism Smackdown: Barack Obama Vs. Hitler's Ghost?, which centered around a discussion of Kevin Baker's 2006 article for Harpers a couple of yearrs ago, "Stabbed in the back! The past and future of a right-wing myth". General Douglass MacArthur's reckless conduct as supreme commander during that war, and his subsequent demand for massive nuclear attacks on China, which President Truman over-ruled, were a key link in the decades-long story that Baker told.
But another side of that war was the commission of widespread, systemic war crimes, including mass murder of civilians. There were, of course, even more massive violations by South Korean allies, but we were hardly innocent bystanders. Nor were these simply the acts of "a few bad apples", the Lyndie Englands of their day. They were no more isolated from the command structure of their time than England was from hers.
Exposing this systemic and intentional pattern was, of course, the main purpose behind the Vietnam Veterans Against the War's Winter Soldier Hearings in Detroit Michigan, in early 1971, about which John Kerry later testified to Congress. The rightwing counter-narrative--i.e lie--is that (a) those who testified were not really the combat veterans they claimed to be and (b) they were smearing the honor and integrity of common soldiers in Vietnam. However, the expressed intent of the hearings--and of Kerry's reporting on them to Congress--was quite the opposite: it was to show that the My Lai Massacre, terrible as it had been, was not an aberration to be blamed solely on the soldiers in the field, but was the foreseeable result of high-level policy that was as indifferent to the moral and psychological welfare of American troops as it was to the very lives of Vietnamese civilians.
Because the Korean War happened so early in the Cold War, because it has been so forgotten, and because it contributed so mightily to subsequent atrocities and false narratives, a clear-eyed look at what actually happened then is an invaluable antidote to much of madness that we still struggle with today. A major chunk of this history was discussed on Democracy Now this past Thursday in an interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press reporter Charles Hanley, co-author of The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War. Transcript excerpts and discussion on the flip.
In Part 1, I took note of the reportage casting Fox News as "populist" highlighted by Kargo X, and wrote:
While the notion of Fox News as "populist" is a ludicrous rightwing perversion in one sense, it is quite accurate in another sense we dare not ignore--and that is, quite simply, that it reflects the truest test of elite power--the ability to define the essential contours of populist thought, and to cast someone else as the dreaded "elite".
In this diary, I want to dig back into history, and uncover some key turning points that brought us from the economic populist solidarity of the New Deal to the sorry state we find ourselves in today, where the Democratic Party is still virtually clueless about how to respond to such outrageous lies. A key figure in this story is the pivotal Republican President of the past 75 years--Richard Nixon.
While Barack Obama and legions of his supporters insist on seeing Reagan as his hagiographers have painted him--as a trascendental transformative figure--the simple reality is that he was nothing of the sort. He was the beneficiary of an enormous amount of high-power myth-making. But Nixon was the one who made it all possible.
I've argued elsewhere about why 1968 was a de-aligning election--ending the "New Deal" Fifth Party System, in which Democrats dominated Congress and the presidency as thoroughly as any party has ever dominated a party system, and ushering in the only party system in American history in which the dominant "party" is divided government. Now, in an excerpt from his new book, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, Rick Perlstein provides a striking snapshot of how that deeply split 1968 election sent down much deeper splits into the bedrock of American politics. The excerpt, "Then No One Would Be a Democrat Anymore" (at American Prospect Online) describes the progression of blue-collar anti-anti-war violence, rioting, and eventual mass marching that thrilled Nixon with the prospect of a vast political realignment:
Nixon had tried to talk to the student demonstrators. He concluded he preferred the hard hats. "Thinks now the college demonstrators have overplayed their hands," Haldeman wrote in his diary, "evidence is the blue collar group rising against them, and [president] can mobilize them."
New York construction workers now took every lunch hour for boisterous patriotic demonstrations. So did hard hats in San Diego, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh. Some of the rallies were not entirely spontaneous: "Obviously more of these will be occurring throughout the nation," White House staffer Stephen Bull wrote in a memo to Chuck Colson, "perhaps partially as a result of your clandestine activity." Peter Brennan, the combative head of the Building Trades Council of Greater New York, accused of organizing the "hard hat riot," defiantly denied it -- then showed what he could do as an organizer: one hundred thousand marchers on May 20, complete with a cement mixer draped with a LINDSAY FOR MAYOR OF HANOI banner. Signs read GOD BLESS THE ESTABLISHMENT and WE SUPPORT NIXON AND AGNEW. Time called it "a kind of workers' Woodstock."
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