Промышленный лизинг Промышленный лизинг  Методички 

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is that the Russians, as a CIA memorandum stated, wanted to challenge the US specifically and test the firmness of US resistance to Communist expansion. 15 Inasmuch as, during the existence of the Soviet Union, the same analysis was put forth by American political pundits for virtually every encounter between the United States and leftists anywhere in the world, before and after Korea, it would appear that the test was going on for an inordinately long period and one can only wonder why the Soviets never came to a conclusion.

The finishing touch, wrote T.F. Stone, was to make the United Nations forces subject to MacArthur without making MacArthur subject to the United Nations. This came on July 7 in a resolution introduced jointly by Britain and France. This is commonly supposed to have established a United Nations Command. Actually it did nothing of the sort. 16 The resolution recommended that all members providing military forces and other assistance ... make such forces and other assistance available to a unified command under the United States (emphasis added}. It further requested the United States to designate the commander of such forces. 17 This would be the redoubtable MacArthur.

It was to be an American show. Military personnel of some 16 other countries took part in one way or another but, with the exception of the South Koreans, there could be little doubt as to their true status or function. Eisenhower later wrote in his memoirs that when he was considering US military intervention in Vietnam in 1954, also as part of a coalition , he recognized that the burden of the operation would fall on the United States, but the token forces supplied by these other nations, as in Korea, would lend real moral standing to a venture that otherwise could be made to appear as a brutal example of imperialism (emphasis added).18

The war, and a brutal one it was indeed, was fought ostensibly in defense of the Syngman Rhee regime. Outside of books published by various South Korean governments, it is rather difficult to find a kind word for the man the United States brought back to Korea in 1945 after decades of exile in America during the Japanese occupation of his country. Flown into Korea in one of MacArthurs airplanes, Rhee was soon maneuvered into a position of prominence and authority by the US Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK). In the process, American officials had to suppress a provisional government, the Korean Peoples Republic, that was the outgrowth of a number of regional governing committees set up by prominent Koreans and which had already begun to carry out administrative tasks, such as food distribution and keeping order. The KPRs offer of its services to the arriving Americans was dismissed out of hand.

Despite its communist-sounding name, the KPR included a number of conservatives; indeed, Rhee himself had been given the leading position of chairman. Rhee and the other conservatives, most of whom were still abroad when chosen, perhaps did not welcome the honor because the KPR, on balance, was probably too leftist for their tastes, as it was for the higher echelons of the USAMGIK. But after 35 years under the Japanese, any group or government set up to undo the effects of colonialism had to have a revolutionary tinge to it. It was the conservatives in Korea who had collaborated with the Japanese; leftists and other nationalists who had struggled against them; the make-up of the KPR necessarily reflected this, and it was reportedly more popular than any other political grouping.19

Whatever the political leanings or intentions of the KPR, by denying it any authority, status or form ,20 the USAMGIK was regulating Korean political life as if the country were a defeated enemy and not a friendly state liberated from a common foe and with a right to independence and self-determination.



The significance of shunting aside the KPR went beyond this. John Gunther, hardly a radical, summed up the situation this way: So the first-and best-chance for building a united Korea was tossed away. 21 And Alfred Crofts, a member of the American military government at the time, has written that A potential unifying agency became thus one of the fifty-four splinter groups in South Korean political life. 22

Syngman Rhee would be Washingtons man: eminently pro-American, strongly anti-Communist, sufficiently controllable. His regime was one in which landlords, collaborators, the wealthy, and other conservative elements readily found a home. Crofts has pointed out that Before the American landings, a political Right, associated in popular thought with colonial rule, could not exist; but shortly afterward we were to foster at least three conservative factions. 23

Committed to establishing free enterprise, the USAMGIK sold off vast amounts of confiscated Japanese property, homes, businesses, industrial raw materials and other valuables. Those who could most afford to purchase these assets were collaborators who had grown rich under the Japanese, and other profiteers. With half the wealth of the nation up for grabs, demoralization was rapid. 24

While the Russians did a thorough house-cleaning of Koreans in the North who had collaborated with the Japanese, the American military government in the South allowed many collaborators, and at first even the Japanese themselves, to retain positions of administration and authority, much to the consternation of those Koreans who had fought against the Japanese occupation of their country. To some extent, these people may have been retained in office because they were the most experienced at keeping the country running. Another reason has been suggested: to prevent the Korean Peoples Republic from assuming a measure of power.25

And while the North soon implemented widespread and effective land reform and at least formal equality for women, the Rhee regime remained hostile to these ideals. Two years later, it enacted a land reform measure, but this applied only to former Japanese property. A 1949 law to covet other holdings was not enforced at all, and the abuse of land tenants continued in both old and new forms.26

Public resentment against the US/Rhee administration was aroused because of these policies as well as because of the suppression of the KPR and some very questionable elections. So reluctant was Rhee to allow an honest election, that by early 1950 he had become enough of an embarrassment to the United States for Washington officials to threaten to cut off aid if he failed to do so and also improve the state of civil liberties. Apparently because of this pressure, the elections held on May 30 were fair enough to allow moderate elements to participate, and, as mentioned earlier, the Rhee government was decisively repudiated.27

The resentment was manifested in the form of frequent rebellions, including some guerrilla warfare in the hills, from 1946 to the beginning of the war, and even during the war. The rebellions were dismissed by the government as communist-inspired and repressed accordingly, but, as John Gunther observed, It can be safely said that in the eyes of Hodge [the commander of US forces in Korea] and Rhee, particularly at the beginning, almost any Korean not an extreme rightist was a communist and potential traitor. 28

General Hodge evidently permitted US troops to take part in the repression. Mark Gayn, a correspondent in Korea for the Chicago Sun, wrote that American soldiers fired on crowds, conducted mass arrests, combed the hills for suspects, and organized posses of Korean rightists, constabulary and police for mass raids. 29 Gayn related that one of Hodges political advisers assured him (Gayn) that Rhee was not a fascist: He is two centuries before fascism-a pure Bourbon. 30



Describing the governments anti-guerrilla campaign in 1948, pro-Western political scientist John Kie-Chiang Oh of Marquette University has written: In these campaigns, the civil liberties of countless persons were often ignored. Frequently, hapless villagers, suspected of aiding the guerillas, were summarily executed. 31

A year later, when a committee of the National Assembly launched an investigation of collaborators, Rhee had his police raid the Assembly: 22 people were arrested, of whom 16 were later found to have suffered either broken ribs, skull injuries or broken eardrums.32

At the time of the outbreak of war in June 1950, there were an estimated 14,000 political prisoners in South Korean jails.33

Even during the height of the war, in February 1951, reported Professor Oh, there was the Kochang Incident , again involving suspicion of aiding guerrillas, in which about six hundred men and women, young and old, were herded into a narrow valley and mowed down with machine guns by a South Korean army unit. 34

Throughout the war, a continuous barrage of accusations was leveled by each side at the other, charging the enemy with engaging in all manner of barbarity and atrocity, against troops, prisoners of war, and civilians alike, in every part of the country (each side occupied the others territory at times), trying to outdo each other in a verbal war of superlatives almost as heated as the combat. In the United States this produced a body of popular myths, not unlike those emerging from other wars which are widely supported at home. (By contrast, during the Vietnam War the inclination of myths to flourish was regularly countered by numerous educated protestors who carefully researched the origins of the war, monitored its conduct, and publicized studies sharply at variance with the official version(s), eventually influencing the mass media to do the same.)

There was, for example, the consensus that the brutality of the war in Korea must be laid overwhelmingly on the doorstep of the North Koreans. The Kochang Incident mentioned above may be relevant to providing some counterbalance to this belief. Referring to the incident, the British Korea scholar Jon Halliday observed:

This account not only serves to indicate the level of political violence employed by the UN side, but also confers inherent plausibility on DPRK [North Korea] and Southern opposition accusations of atrocities and mass executions by the UN forces and Rhee officials during the occupation of the DPRK in late 1950. After all, if civilians could be mowed down in the South on suspicion of aiding (not even being) guerrillas-what about the North, where millions could reasonably be assumed to be Communists, or political militants?35 (Emphasis in original.)

Ohs account is but one of a number of reports of slaughter carried out by the South Koreans against their own people during the war. The New York Times reported a wave of [South Korean] Government executions in Seoul in December 1950.36 Rene Cutforth, a correspondent for the BBC in Korea, later wrote of the shooting without trial of civilians, designated by the police as communist. These executions were done, usually at dawn, on any patch of waste ground where you could dig a trench and line up a row of prisoners in front of it. 37 And Gregory Henderson, a US diplomat who served seven years in Korea in the 1940s and 50s, has stated that probably over 100,000 were killed without any trial whatsoever by Rhees forces in the South during the war.38 Following some of the massacres of civilians in the South, the Rhee government turned around and attributed them to Northern troops.

One way in which the United States contributed directly to the wars brutality was by introducing a weapon which, although used in the last stage of World War II,



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