WHY NORTH KOREANS HATE US

[Deleted]

Why Do North Koreans Hate Us? One Reason — They Remember the Korean War

theintercept.com/2017/05/03/why-do-north-koreans-hate-us-one-reason-they-remember-the-korean-war/



May 3, 2017


“WHY DO they hate us?”

It’s a question that has bewildered Americans again and again in the wake of 9/11, in reference to the Arab and Muslim worlds. These days, however, it’s a question increasingly asked about the reclusive North Koreans.

Let’s be clear: there is no doubt that the citizens of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) both fear and loathe the United States. Paranoia, resentment and a crude anti-Americanism have been nurtured inside the Hermit Kingdom for decades. Children are taught to hate Americans in school while adults mark a “Struggle Against U.S. Imperialism Month” every year (it’s in June, in case you were wondering).

North Korean officials make wild threats against the United States while the regime, led by the brutal and sadistic Kim Jong-un, pumps out fake news in the form of self-serving propaganda, on an industrial scale. In the DPRK, anti-American hatred is a commodity never in short supply.

“The hate, though,” as long-time North Korea watcher Blaine Harden observed in the Washington Post, “ is not all manufactured.” Some of it, he wrote, “is rooted in a fact-based narrative, one that North Korea obsessively remembers and the United States blithely forgets.”

Forgets as in the “forgotten war.” Yes, the Korean War. Remember that? The one wedged between World War II and the Vietnam War? The first “hot” war of the Cold War, which took place between 1950 and 1953, and which has since been conveniently airbrushed from most discussions and debates about the “crazy” and “insane” regime in Pyongyang? Forgotten despite the fact that this particular war isn’t even over — it was halted by an armistice agreement, not a peace treaty — and despite the fact that the conflict saw the United States engage in numerous war crimes which, perhaps unsurprisingly, continue to shape the way North Koreans view the United States, even if the residents of the United States remain blissfully ignorant of their country’s belligerent past.

For the record, it was the North Koreans, and not the Americans or their South Korean allies, who started the war in June 1950, when they crossed the 38th Parallel and invaded the south. Nevertheless, “What hardly any Americans know or remember,” University of Chicago historian Bruce Cumings writes in his book “The Korean War: A History,” “is that we carpet-bombed the north for three years with next to no concern for civilian casualties.”

How many Americans, for example, are aware of the fact that U.S. planes dropped on the Korean peninsula more bombs — 635,000 tons — and napalm — 32,557 tons — than during the entire Pacific campaign against the Japanese during World War II?

How many Americans know that “over a period of three years or so,” to quote Air Force General Curtis LeMay, head of the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, “we killed off … 20 percent of the population”?

Twenty. Percent. For a point of comparison, the Nazis exterminated 20 percent of Poland’s pre-World War II population. According to LeMay, “We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea.”

Every. Town. More than three million civilians are believed to have been killed in the fighting, the vast majority of them in the north.


1950: An elderly woman and her grandchild wander among the debris of their wrecked home in the aftermath of an air raid by U.S. planes over Pyongyang, the Communist capital of North Korea. (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)

An elderly woman and her grandchild wander among the debris of their wrecked home in the aftermath of an air raid by U.S. planes over Pyongyang, the Communist capital of North Korea, circa 1950.

Photo: Keystone/Getty Images

How many Americans are familiar with the statements of Secretary of State Dean Rusk or Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas? Rusk, who was a State Department official in charge of Far Eastern affairs during the Korean War, would later admit that the United States bombed “every brick that was standing on top of another, everything that moved.” American pilots, he noted, “were just bombing the heck out of North Korea.”

Douglas visited Korea in the summer of 1952 and was stunned by the “misery, disease, pain and suffering, starvation” that had been “compounded” by air strikes. U.S. warplanes, having run out of military targets, had bombed farms, dams, factories and hospitals. “I had seen the war-battered cities of Europe,” the Supreme Court justice confessed, “but I had not seen devastation until I had seen Korea.”

How many Americans have ever come across General Douglas MacArthur’s unhinged plan to win the war against North Korea in just 10 days? MacArthur, who led the United Nations Command during the conflict, wanted to drop “between 30 and 50 atomic bombs … strung across the neck of Manchuria” that would have “spread behind us … a belt of radioactive cobalt.”

How many Americans have heard of the No Gun Ri massacre, in July 1950, in which hundreds of Koreans were killed by U.S. warplanes and members of the 7th U.S. Cavalry regiment as they huddled under a bridge? Details of the massacre emerged in 1999, when the Associated Press interviewed dozens of retired U.S. military personnel. “The hell with all those people,” one American veteran recalled his captain as saying. “Let’s get rid of all of them.”

How many Americans are taught in school about the Bodo League massacre of tens of thousands of suspected communists on the orders of the U.S.-backed South Korean strongman, President Syngman Rhee, in the summer of 1950? Eyewitness accounts suggest “jeeploads” of U.S. military officers were present and “supervised the butchery.”

Millions of ordinary Americans may suffer from a toxic combination of ignorance and amnesia, but the victims of U.S. coups, invasions and bombing campaigns across the globe tend not to. Ask the Iraqis or the Iranians, ask the Cubans or the Chileans. And, yes, ask the North Koreans.

For the residents of the DPRK, writes Columbia University historian Charles Armstrong in his book “Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950–1992,” “the American air war left a deep and lasting impression” and “more than any other single factor, gave North Koreans a collective sense of anxiety and fear of outside threats, that would continue long after the war’s end.”

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not pretending that Kim’s violent and totalitarian regime would be any less violent or totalitarian today had the U.S. not carpet-bombed North Korea almost 70 years ago. Nor am I expecting Donald Trump, of all presidents, to offer a formal apology to Pyongyang on behalf of the U.S. government for the U.S. war crimes of 1950 through 1953.

But the fact is that inside North Korea, according to leading Korea scholar Kathryn Weathersby, “it is still the 1950s … and the conflict with South Korea and the United States is still going on. People in the North feel backed into a corner and threatened.”

If another Korean war, a potentially nuclear war, is to be avoided and if, as the Czech-born novelist Milan Kundera famously wrote, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” then ordinary Americans can no longer afford to forget the death, destruction and debilitating legacy of the original Korean War.

[AlaCowboy]

All North Korean POWs held in South Korea were repatriated after the armistice. Some 60,000 South Korean POWs were never returned by North Korea and China. About 100 South Koreans have escaped from POW labor camps in North Korea and said there were more still there as of 2010.
Over 900 American soldiers were known to be alive and POWs in North Korea at the time of the armistice. They have never been freed, and North Korea has always refused to comment on their status.
If we nuked North Korea from existence, no tears would be shed by me.

[Deleted]

May 3, 2017 20:42:34 GMT -5 AlaCowboy said:

All North Korean POWs held in South Korea were repatriated after the armistice. Some 60,000 South Korean POWs were never returned by North Korea and China. About 100 South Koreans have escaped from POW labor camps in North Korea and said there were more still there as of 2010.
Over 900 American soldiers were known to be alive and POWs in North Korea at the time of the armistice. They have never been freed, and North Korea has always refused to comment on their status.
If we nuked North Korea from existence, no tears would be shed by me.

Capt. Ra mey,

      I utterly despise North Korea's communist government, but I also understand why they hate the U.S.A.

     Have you ever seen photos of Pyongyang in 1953?

     (BTW, this is what General Curtis LeMay wanted to do to Cuba in 1962.)

[AlaCowboy]

So you don't care that the North Korean heathens refused to release POWs after the armistice was signed and all North Korean POWs were released?

[Deleted]

May 4, 2017 0:03:19 GMT -5 AlaCowboy said:

So you don't care that the North Korean heathens refused to release POWs after the armistice was signed and all North Korean POWs were released?

Yes, I care.  They suck badly-- just like their Bolshevik mentors.

[frmthegrav]

stalin never returned many US soldiers that were trapped in the soviet union or were liberated from german POW camps. many were executed by him. the allies knew this. a fuss wasnt made over it to keep him happy.

i saw this in a documentary-- i cant recall how many soldiers, but any number, IMO, is significant, especially from returning from a so called 'ally'.

[Deleted]

May 4, 2017 21:08:17 GMT -5 frmthegrav said:

stalin never returned many US soldiers that were trapped in the soviet union or were liberated from german POW camps. many were executed by him. the allies knew this. a fuss wasnt made over it to keep him happy.

i saw this in a documentary-- i cant recall how many soldiers, but any number, IMO, is significant, especially from returning from a so called 'ally'.

Graver,

     Check out the Peter Weir film, The Way Back (2010) on Netflix.

     It's based on the true story of some guys (including one American) who escaped from the Soviet gulag during WWII.

[frmthegrav]

never knew about this film. is it accurate? if yes, ill watch it. if they pull a "the revanent" on it, forget it.

whats that bitch doing in the movie about POWs?

[vindex]

May 4, 2017 22:07:44 GMT -5 frmthegrav said:

never knew about this film. is it accurate? if yes, ill watch it. if they pull a "the revanent" on it, forget it.

whats that bitch doing in the movie about POWs?

Now, now. Language, Matthew. Although I myself am not a fan, I am sure that you do not mean to offend any of the board's movie-goers who have taken enjoyment in Stallone's ridiculous right-wing Rambo movies.
As for the subject at hand:


The premise of 'Murican POWs in Commie Russia is far more ridiculous the a Revenant, Matt, although not completely manufactured out of while cloth as so much Republican mendacity about history often is. First off, this movie is not even about American POWS in Stalin's Soviet Union. It is about Polish POWs, captured when the USSR invaded Poland from the east in September 1939, who were imprisoned and the majority of them suffered a tragic fate. The officers were separated from their men, and eventually were murdered en masse in Katyn Forest, 1940. The Poles have made a decent movie about that, IF you are so inclined. The enlisted men were split up into various places, some in hopes of brainwashing them in order to create a cadre for a future Polish Communist Party - because Stalin himself had exterminated the previous Polish Communist Party in his purges of the latter 1930s. But time was working against him. In June 1941, Hitler's Germany and its satellites invaded the USSR on a huge front, from the Baltic to the Black Seas. Stalin's purges in 1937 had also beheaded virtually the entire top military leadership of the Red Army and left it in a parlous state to resist invasion from Europe's pre-eminent military power. Churchill and Stalin formed alliance within a month, but the Poles also had a government in exile, in London, which the British had formally recognized as the occupied country's legitimate government. These Poles requested that the British make the Soviet Union release their Polish POWS to take part in the war. Churchill did indeed make this request. Stalin didn't like it, but in latter 1941 was not in the best position to resist. Some of the Polish POWs were released and evacuated to the West via Iran, some simply escaped, such as Menachem Begin, the future PM of Israel, and some finally gave in to a combination of Soviet bribes & blandishments and became the basis for the so-called Lublin Government which was the eventual Polish Communist satellite government that Stalin simply installed onto Poland as the Red Army conquered and occupied it in 1944-1945.

The basis for an American prisoner (Ed Harris) comes from the fact that a number of idealistic but EXTREMELY misguided Americans had actually emigrated TO the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. These poor deluded souls felt that American capitalism had reached its final dead end in the Republican Party's incompetence in handling the vast human suffering and despair unloaded upon the American people by the Great Depression from 1930 onward. They felt that the entire system had gone over the cliff beyond any hope of salvation. At the same time, Stalin's government was, believe it or not, actually soliciting immigration from foreign "industrial experts" to assist in the frantic 24/7 industrialization process which he was beginning to inflict upon the Soviet peoples. This was an extremely vicious and brutal process, among other things it involved starving the Ukrainian peasantry till at least 4 million of them perished, in order to force them under the government's control either in factories or on collective farms. His government trusted that they could suppress news of this from seeping into the media outside the country. This was not successful, but the left-wing of the day, much like today's right wing, created its own "alt" media, attacking the so-called MSM of the day and claiming that (1) the USSR represented the wave of the future, and (2) it was also the only political force which could resist the Fascist right wing in Germany , Italy, or elsewhere. Several thousand Americans actually succumbed to this line of BS, some of them jobless as well; and emigrated to the USSR in 1932-24, took jobs in the humongous industrial enterprises which were being created in Stalin's "utopia." However, Stalin's purges of 1936 -39 also included a huge dose of xenophobia. Foreigners who had been invited to the Socialist paradise were suddenly denounced as subversive elements, having been infiltrated into the USSR in order to destroy it. A lot of them were sent off to Siberian "labor camps", i.e. concentration camps. Since they had forsworn their American citizenship upon emigrating to the Soviet Union, I'm not sure what could have been done for them especially when the Cold War started.

The "American POW aspect is as follows, and I had occasion to discuss it with my own beloved father, who as I've told you before was shot down over northern Germany on 6/21/1944 and subsequently imprisoned in a StalagLuft, or German Air Force POW camp, in Silesia, an eastern province of Germany which is now a part of western Poland. He was there from the summer of 1944 till early 1945. In the first week of February 1945, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill met with Stalin to try and reach various agreements as to post WW2 Europe as Nazi rule collapsed. Among those issues was that of POWs that fell into the custody of the Anglo-Americans in the west and the Red Army in the east. The Americans and British had captured a huge number of Soviet people: Russians, Ukrainians, Baltic peoples, from the Caucasus etc, probably close to 5 million. Many were POWs (and Stalin had made surrendering to the enemy a capital offense in 1941), any others had been kidnapped and forced basically to serve as slaves in all aspects of German life. American and British POWs were far fewer but there were tens of thousands of then located in military POW camps in then then eastern part of Germany. Although they lived under very Spartan conditions, they were treated far better than were Soviet POWs in neighboring camps, who are (1) considered to be of inferior race by the Germans and (2) also considered to be indoctrinated into Communist Ideology to a far greater extent than the Nazis were interested in "in-brainwashing" them especially since they were considered inferior to begin with. Plus, it was never officially stated, but I find it hard to believe that Stalin would ever have given up such a vast pool of potential slave labor as the millions of German POWs especially in view of the huge destruction which the Germans had deliberately wreaked in Russia. Anyway, the agreement was for the Soviets to turn over all British and Americans that they captured into our custody. American and British forces were obligated in turn to intern and then transfer to the Soviet military any Soviet peoples that came into our hands.

My father complained ever after about the Luftwaffe guards evacuating him and fellow prisoners from their POW camp and marching them west and then south, all the way down into Bavaria where they were eventually freed by Gen. Patton's Third Army. Said that he had hurt his back during the parachute fall, from his plane when he was shot down and that the long walk of several hundred kilos had made it worse. In the meantime, about 15 years ago, I came across some discussion online as to whether ALL the British or American POWs that fell into the Red Army's hands hand actually been repatriated. I suggested somewhat dryly to him that if this was true, then perhaps it was just as well that he had walked all the way down from Silesia to Bavaria, as otherwise he and my mother might not have met, since they got married on Christmas Day of 1945. He replied that the marriage was so unlikely that he figured it would have had to have happened sooner or later, so we had a good laugh over that. But I think that the post WW2 rumors actually got conflated at some point with rumors about Korean War airman in Soviet hands, which turned out to be true. A long story to be sure, but we are all part of history.
Vindex I
Georgia Bulldogs

[frmthegrav]

May 5, 2017 19:25:02 GMT -5 vindex said:

May 4, 2017 22:07:44 GMT -5 frmthegrav said:

never knew about this film. is it accurate? if yes, ill watch it. if they pull a "the revanent" on it, forget it.

whats that bitch doing in the movie about POWs?

Now, now. Language, Matthew. Although I myself am not a fan, I am sure that you do not mean to offend any of the board's movie-goers who have taken enjoyment in Stallone's ridiculous right-wing Rambo movies.
As for the subject at hand:


The premise of 'Murican POWs in Commie Russia is far more ridiculous the a Revenant, Matt, although not completely manufactured out of while cloth as so much Republican mendacity about history often is. First off, this movie is not even about American POWS in Stalin's Soviet Union. It is about Polish POWs, captured when the USSR invaded Poland from the east in September 1939, who were imprisoned and the majority of them suffered a tragic fate. The officers were separated from their men, and eventually were murdered en masse in Katyn Forest, 1940. The Poles have made a decent movie about that, IF you are so inclined. The enlisted men were split up into various places, some in hopes of brainwashing them in order to create a cadre for a future Polish Communist Party - because Stalin himself had exterminated the previous Polish Communist Party in his purges of the latter 1930s. But time was working against him. In June 1941, Hitler's Germany and its satellites invaded the USSR on a huge front, from the Baltic to the Black Seas. Stalin's purges in 1937 had also beheaded virtually the entire top military leadership of the Red Army and left it in a parlous state to resist invasion from Europe's pre-eminent military power. Churchill and Stalin formed alliance within a month, but the Poles also had a government in exile, in London, which the British had formally recognized as the occupied country's legitimate government. These Poles requested that the British make the Soviet Union release their Polish POWS to take part in the war. Churchill did indeed make this request. Stalin didn't like it, but in latter 1941 was not in the best position to resist. Some of the Polish POWs were released and evacuated to the West via Iran, some simply escaped, such as Menachem Begin, the future PM of Israel, and some finally gave in to a combination of Soviet bribes & blandishments and became the basis for the so-called Lublin Government which was the eventual Polish Communist satellite government that Stalin simply installed onto Poland as the Red Army conquered and occupied it in 1944-1945.

The basis for an American prisoner (Ed Harris) comes from the fact that a number of idealistic but EXTREMELY misguided Americans had actually emigrated TO the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. These poor deluded souls felt that American capitalism had reached its final dead end in the Republican Party's incompetence in handling the vast human suffering and despair unloaded upon the American people by the Great Depression from 1930 onward. They felt that the entire system had gone over the cliff beyond any hope of salvation. At the same time, Stalin's government was, believe it or not, actually soliciting immigration from foreign "industrial experts" to assist in the frantic 24/7 industrialization process which he was beginning to inflict upon the Soviet peoples. This was an extremely vicious and brutal process, among other things it involved starving the Ukrainian peasantry till at least 4 million of them perished, in order to force them under the government's control either in factories or on collective farms. His government trusted that they could suppress news of this from seeping into the media outside the country. This was not successful, but the left-wing of the day, much like today's right wing, created its own "alt" media, attacking the so-called MSM of the day and claiming that (1) the USSR represented the wave of the future, and (2) it was also the only political force which could resist the Fascist right wing in Germany , Italy, or elsewhere. Several thousand Americans actually succumbed to this line of BS, some of them jobless as well; and emigrated to the USSR in 1932-24, took jobs in the humongous industrial enterprises which were being created in Stalin's "utopia." However, Stalin's purges of 1936 -39 also included a huge dose of xenophobia. Foreigners who had been invited to the Socialist paradise were suddenly denounced as subversive elements, having been infiltrated into the USSR in order to destroy it. A lot of them were sent off to Siberian "labor camps", i.e. concentration camps. Since they had forsworn their American citizenship upon emigrating to the Soviet Union, I'm not sure what could have been done for them especially when the Cold War started.

The "American POW aspect is as follows, and I had occasion to discuss it with my own beloved father, who as I've told you before was shot down over northern Germany on 6/21/1944 and subsequently imprisoned in a StalagLuft, or German Air Force POW camp, in Silesia, an eastern province of Germany which is now a part of western Poland. He was there from the summer of 1944 till early 1945. In the first week of February 1945, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill met with Stalin to try and reach various agreements as to post WW2 Europe as Nazi rule collapsed. Among those issues was that of POWs that fell into the custody of the Anglo-Americans in the west and the Red Army in the east. The Americans and British had captured a huge number of Soviet people: Russians, Ukrainians, Baltic peoples, from the Caucasus etc, probably close to 5 million. Many were POWs (and Stalin had made surrendering to the enemy a capital offense in 1941), any others had been kidnapped and forced basically to serve as slaves in all aspects of German life. American and British POWs were far fewer but there were tens of thousands of then located in military POW camps in then then eastern part of Germany. Although they lived under very Spartan conditions, they were treated far better than were Soviet POWs in neighboring camps, who are (1) considered to be of inferior race by the Germans and (2) also considered to be indoctrinated into Communist Ideology to a far greater extent than the Nazis were interested in "in-brainwashing" them especially since they were considered inferior to begin with. Plus, it was never officially stated, but I find it hard to believe that Stalin would ever have given up such a vast pool of potential slave labor as the millions of German POWs especially in view of the huge destruction which the Germans had deliberately wreaked in Russia. Anyway, the agreement was for the Soviets to turn over all British and Americans that they captured into our custody. American and British forces were obligated in turn to intern and then transfer to the Soviet military any Soviet peoples that came into our hands.

My father complained ever after about the Luftwaffe guards evacuating him and fellow prisoners from their POW camp and marching them west and then south, all the way down into Bavaria where they were eventually freed by Gen. Patton's Third Army. Said that he had hurt his back during the parachute fall, from his plane when he was shot down and that the long walk of several hundred kilos had made it worse. In the meantime, about 15 years ago, I came across some discussion online as to whether ALL the British or American POWs that fell into the Red Army's hands hand actually been repatriated. I suggested somewhat dryly to him that if this was true, then perhaps it was just as well that he had walked all the way down from Silesia to Bavaria, as otherwise he and my mother might not have met, since they got married on Christmas Day of 1945. He replied that the marriage was so unlikely that he figured it would have had to have happened sooner or later, so we had a good laugh over that. But I think that the post WW2 rumors actually got conflated at some point with rumors about Korean War airman in Soviet hands, which turned out to be true. A long story to be sure, but we are all part of history.
Vindex I
Georgia Bulldogs

   hi vindex.
  
    to the first point:  i am a bit tired of films being bent and twisted only for the sake of being inclusive to different people.   i simply want accuracy and not a politically correct slant or a film that has something in it for the female audience.  just give me the truth-- which is what we did NOT get with leonardo decaprios film 2 years ago.  i was revolted and hugh glass turned in his grave.  im sure you read the book by wil blevins so you know what i mean.

    i read man is wolf to man, written by a polish officer, sent to kolyma (even though there is doubt that his story is true).  as for everything else you have typed, i dont see anything i would disagree with from what ive read and learned. 

   

[Deleted]

Fellas,

     The Way Back is, supposedly, based on a true story, as written by the Polish POW who is the main character.  As Vindex described, the Pole was a native of Soviet occupied eastern Poland, shipped off to Siberia after being falsely denounced as some sort of spy.

     In the Siberian prison camp, he befriends other POWs-- including a Latvian artist, the American businessman, and a Yugoslav who had been arrested while visiting Moscow, as I recall.

     Another escapee from the camp (played by Colin Farrell) is a hardcore Soviet criminal with a tattoo of Lenin and Stalin on his chest.

     They eventually encounter a Polish girl who has also escaped from the Gulag, but I won't spoil the plot any further.

     The film is worth watching for the cinematography alone.  (Has Peter Weir ever made a bad film?)

[frmthegrav]

doc, did they really encounter a female there? from what ive read, the men were segregated from the women. i dont see how they couldve came into contact with one.

[Deleted]

May 5, 2017 22:55:44 GMT -5 frmthegrav said:

doc, did they really encounter a female there? from what ive read, the men were segregated from the women. i dont see how they couldve came into contact with one.

The young lady was by herself, and was following them (from a distance) to Lake Baikal.  She had escaped from a women's camp in the Gulag.

[Deleted]

     Now that Kim Jung Un is threatening to detonate a hydrogen bomb in the mainland U.S., I'm revisiting this North Korean history thread.

    The North Koreans must, surely, harbor a deep-rooted hatred for the U.S.-- promoted by 65 years of communist propaganda.

[Deleted]

While contemplating Mutt's favorite U.S. bombers from the Korean War, it would behoove us to also contemplate the U.S. bombings.

Recall that U.S. bombers killed an estimated 4 million Koreans (and Chinese) in that terrible conflict.

Our bombers then killed an estimated 4 million Southeast Asians in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia during the Vietnam War -- in addition to dropping thousands of tons of toxic chemicals and defoliants on those countries -- Agent Orange, white phosphorus, napalm, etc.