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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.
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