From: orwell@reg.triumf.ca (BALDEN, RON)
Newsgroups: alt.activism.d
Subject: Korean War (Was: Re: A pacifist's call for conditional ...Somalia)
Date: 29 Dec 1992 20:34 PST
Organization: TRIUMF: Tri-University Meson Facility
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Douglas Foxvog (dfo@tko.vtt.fi), commenting on my reply to Bud Hovel's
comments on Doug's original posting (got that?) [my ** emphasis] : 
>>(e.g. as
>>a front for the U.S. invasion of South Korea) when it did not (e.g. was
                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>Misleading phrasing.  The US invaded the occupied South Korea in the
>**same way it invaded France** on D-Day in the refered to invasion [It also
>invaded Japanese-occupied Korea at the end of WW II.].  It was sheer
>Soviet stupidity to allow this to have the imprimitar of the UN by
>walking out of the Security Council, allowing the US with its allies
>(UK, Taiwan, and France) to have their way.

This comment relates to a point also raised by John McCarthy.

Security forces installed and directed by the U.S. killed about
100,000 people in South Korea before the beginning of the Korean
War (I believe a modern reference is "Korea: the Unknown War" by
Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings, 1988).  The U.S. intervened in
support of a murderous right-wing dictatorship, hardly analogous to D-Day.  
I haven't yet studied the history of the Korean War in sufficient
depth so as to be able to refute all the "standard lies" in detail (I
*have* done this for the U.S.-Vietnam War), but I know enough to
recognize them. The U.S. support for the feudal warlord Chiang
Kai-Shek in China is discussed in some detail in Gabriel Kolko's "The
Politics of War: U.S. Foreign Policy 1943-45"" (1968, reprinted 1990),
and it would be a startling anomaly if the situation was markedly
different in Korea during 1945-50. 

[When U.S. General Joseph Stillwell was asked to summarize Chiang's
political program/philosophy, he replied succinctly, "gangsterism". 
He was eventually relieved of his command in China because of his
honest appraisal of the situation.  It is noteworthy that for some 30
years -- roughly, 1942-72 -- the opposition of *American citizens* to
the U.S. support of a feudal Chinese warlord was considered
unpatriotic, even *treasonous*, by the American establishment.] 


>>whatever one
>>thinks of the state of U.S. domestic democracy.  (BTW, this is true generally
>>of *all* the Western industrial democracies.) 

>And all other nations as well, no need to single out "Western"
>"industrial" "democracies".  Negate any or all of those terms and the
>statement will apply.

True, but then the point I was trying to make is lost -- which is that
*even* in (approximate) domestic democracies, there is *no* democracy in
the conduct of foreign affairs.  This is generally assumed *a priori*
for countries which are not domestic democracies.  


To speak to another point raised by John McCarthy:
In article <JMC.92Dec23140843@SAIL.Stanford.EDU>, jmc@cs.Stanford.EDU writes...

> ...
>In the second place, it the U.N. voted to defend South Korea from
>the North Korean invasion, and many other countries took part in
>the operation.  Others I remember are Britain and Turkey.
> ...

This point brings us back to where we started, which was my assertion
that the U.N. has often served as an instrument of United States
foreign policy, and my example of the U.N. "sanction" of the Korean
War. It seems this particular debate is going nowhere.  A few comments
are in order, though.  The "U.N. army" was essentially the American
army; it was an American war. The military forces of other countries
(Britain, Turkey, Canada, etc.) were involved in the Korean War in order to
lend a patina of "internationalism" to the effort (in a similar vein,
I believe that the Soviet Union pressured other Warsaw Pact countries
to send a few token troops to "aid" in the 1968 occupation of
Czechoslovakia).  

As for the support of the British in this venture, this impresses me
no more than the fact that Prince Phillip in spring 1989 presented the
Winston Churchill award (this award is a creation of The Churchill
Foundation, a coalition of American businessman) to Ronald Reagan. To
be brief, the old global imperialists -- the British (government, that
is) -- have never objected *on grounds of principle* to actions of the
new global imperialists, and have often supported them, hoping to play
"Greece to America's Rome" (these themes are explored in Christopher
Hitchens' 1990 book, "Blood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American
Ironies" -- see, in this context, especially Chapter 10, "Imperial
Receivership").   Of course, there are cases where the interests of
the two were in direct conflict, as was the case in the 1956 `Suez Crisis'.

[BTW, I speak as one who by education and upbringing was influenced
to view the history of British imperialism through rose-colored 
glasses.]

Ron Balden