@JTT,
Part B
And for the south of Korea, the folks the USA was supposedly saving from oppression.
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Interviewed in two one-hour installments by Lawrence Velvel, Dean of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover, producers of Comcast’s “Books of Our Time” with the first installment being shown on Sunday, March 20th, Cumings said U.S. coverage of the war was badly slanted. Hanson Baldwin, the military correspondent for The New York Times, described “North Koreans as locusts, like Nazis, like vermin, who come shrieking on. I mean, this is really hard stuff to read in an era when you don’t get away with that kind of thinking anymore.” Cumings adds, “Rapes were extremely common. Koreans in the South will still say that that was one of the worst things of the war (was how)many American soldiers were raping Korean women.”
Cumings said he was able to draw upon a lot of South Korean research that has come out since the nation democratized in the 1990s about the massacres of Korean civilians. This has been the subject of painstaking research by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Seoul and Cumings describes the results as “horrific.” Atrocities by “our side, the South Koreans (ran) six to one ahead of the North Koreans in terms of killing civilians, whereas most Americans would think North Koreans would just as soon kill a civilian to look at him.” The numbers of civilians killed in South Korea by the government, Cumings said, even dwarfed Spaniards murdered by dictator Francisco Franco, the general who overthrew the Madrid government in the 1936-1939 civil war. Cumings said about 100,000 South Koreans were killed in political violence between 1945 and 1950 and perhaps as many as 200,000 more were killed during the early months of the war. This compares to about 200,000 civilians put to death in Spain in Franco’s political massacres. In all, Korea suffered 3 million civilian dead during the 1950-53 war, more killed than the 2.7 million Japan suffered during all of World War II.
One of the worst atrocities was perpetrated by the South Korean police at the small city of Tae Jun. They executed 7,000 political prisoners while Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. military officials looked on, Cumings said. To compound the crime, the Pentagon blamed the atrocity on the Communists, Cumings said. “The Joint Chiefs of Staff classified the photographs of it because they make it clear who’s doing it, and they don’t let the photographs out until 1999 when a Korean finally got them declassified.” To top that off, the historian says, “the Pentagon did a video movie called ‘Crime of Korea’ where you see shots of pits that go on for like a football field, pit after pit of dead people, and (actor) Humphrey Bogart in a voice-over says, ‘someday the Communists will pay for this, someday we’ll get the full totals and believe me we’ll get the exact, accurate totals of the people murdered here and we will make these war criminals pay.’ Now this is a complete reversal of black and white, done as a matter of policy.” Cumings adds that these events represent “a very deep American responsibility for the regime that we promoted, really more than any other in East Asia (and that) was our creation in the late Forties.” Other atrocities, such as the one at No Gun village, Cumings terms “an American massacre of women and children,” which he lays at the feet of the U.S. military.
Initially, reporters from U.S. magazines’ “Look,” “Saturday Evening Post,” “Collier’s,” and “Life,” could report on anything they saw, the historian said. They reported that “the troops are shooting civilians, the South Korean police are awful, they’re opening up pits and putting hundreds of people in them. This is all true.” Within six months, though, U.S. reporters were muzzled by censors, meaning, “you can’t say anything bad about our South Korean ally. Even if you see them blowing an old lady’s head apart, you can’t say that.” Even though his writings on Korea years after the war ended were not censored, New York Times reporter David Halberstam wrote a book on the Korean War (The Coldest Winter”) in which “he doesn’t mention the bombing of the North (and) mentions the three-year U.S. occupation of South Korea in one sentence, without giving it any significance,” Cumings said. Besides rape, the Pentagon was firebombing North Korean cities more intensively than any of those it firebombed during World War II. Where it was typical for U.S. bombing to destroy between 40 and 50 percent of a city in that war, the destruction rate in North Korea was much higher: Shin Eui Ju, on the Chinese border, 95 percent destroyed; Pyongyang, 85 percent; and Hamhung, an industrial city, 80 percent.”By the end of 1951, there weren’t many bombing targets left in North Korea.”
READ ON AT,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-korean-war-the-unknown-war-the-coverup-of-us-war-crimes/23742
I recently saw a photo that had been taken of Gen. Pinochet soon after he had violently overthrown the government of Chile (with the assistance of the U.S.). He was having a meeting with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and several other U.S. government officials or representatives. They were all smiles. Pinochet was prancing around and strutting like a rooster. Sickening! 
(Why I continue to post here, I don't know. Force of habit, I suppose.)
I was a teenager during most of the Vietnam War. (No, I was never subjected to the draft.) You're right about LBJ lying to get us into war. (The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution comes to mind, of course.) I was not exonerating him on that account. A terrible slaughter, indeed! It also had the eventual result of creating the conditions that enabled the mass murderer Pol Pot to come to power in Cambodia. I don't know enough of the history of the war to say how it should have been conducted differently or if it should have been prosecuted at all -- except to say that Ho Chi Minh was a Communist dictator, a client of the Soviet Union. (Of course, on the other hand, he had previously appealed to the West for support in the struggle of the Vietnamese people against the colonialism of the French, but received none.) All I know is that it was a great tragedy that had a horrible impact upon the lives of millions.
