Author Topic: Misremembering the Korean War  (Read 137 times)

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Offline Kamaji

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Misremembering the Korean War
« on: December 01, 2022, 04:03:29 pm »
Misremembering the Korean War

The profound difference in quality of life on opposing sides of the 38th parallel today offers a rebuke to those who portray the US-led intervention in Korea as immoral or futile.

Niranjan Shankar
29 Nov 2022

The Korean War was among the deadliest of the Cold War’s battlegrounds. Yet despite yielding millions of civilian deaths, over 40,000 US casualties, and destruction that left scars which persist on the peninsula today, the conflict has never received the attention (aside from being featured in the sitcom M*A*S*H) devoted to World War II, Vietnam, and other 20th-century clashes.

But like other neglected Cold War front-lines, the “Forgotten War” has fallen victim to several politicized and one-sided “anti-imperialist” narratives that focus almost exclusively on the atrocities of the United States and its allies. The most recent example of this tendency was a Jacobin column by James Greig, who omits the brutal conduct of North Korean and Chinese forces, misrepresents the underlying cause of the war, justifies North Korea’s belligerence as an “anti-colonial” enterprise, and even praises the regime’s “revolutionary” initiatives. Greig’s article was preceded by several others, which also framed the war as an instance of US imperialism and North Korea’s anti-Americanism as a rational response to Washington’s prosecution of the war. Left-wing foreign-policy thinker Daniel Bessner also alluded to the Korean War as one of many “American-led fiascos” in his essay for Harper’s magazine earlier this summer. Even (somewhat) more balanced assessments of the war, such as those by Owen Miller, tend to overemphasize American and South Korean transgressions, and don’t do justice to the long-term consequences of Washington’s decision to send troops to the peninsula in the summer of 1950. By giving short shrift to—or simply failing to mention—the communist powers’ leading role in instigating the conflict, and the violence and suffering they unleashed throughout it, these depictions of the Korean tragedy distort its legacy and do a disservice to the millions who suffered, and continue to suffer, under the North Korean regime.

Determining “who started” a military confrontation, especially an “internal” conflict that became entangled in great-power politics, can be a herculean task. Nevertheless, post-revisionist scholarship (such as John Lewis Gaddis’s The Cold War: A New History) that draws upon Soviet archives declassified in 1991 has made it clear that the communist leaders, principally Joseph Stalin and North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung, were primarily to blame for the outbreak of the war.

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America’s reluctance to “provoke” its rivals and get dragged into confrontation inadvertently set the stage for the very scenario it had been so desperate to avoid (a lesson with important implications for the current debate about “strategic ambiguity” over Taiwan and the role of NATO in the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war). Despite the failure to discourage a North Korean attack, Truman and his advisers correctly concluded that deploying US troops was the only way to repel the KPA’s onslaught. General Douglas MacArthur’s successful establishment of a defensive perimeter at Pusan and amphibious landing at Inchon in September 1950 are key examples of the US military’s vital role in preventing the ROK from being wiped off the map. President Truman’s ability to put together an international coalition to resist the attack, and the subsequent transformation of NATO from an abstract and disorganized framework into a robust military alliance, reinforced the strategy of containment that would deter future acts of unprovoked aggression.

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Source:  https://quillette.com/2022/11/29/misremembering-the-korean-war/