The Korean War at 70: imperialism’s legacy of bloodshed and division | Korea | Asia

“in order to establish a buffer against the US” ⤴️
“Japan’s hold over the Korean Peninsula was rapidly collapsing” ⤴️
“In this vacuum, the Korean peasants and workers took it upon themselves to take power into their own hands locally and run their affairs for themselves.” ⤴️
“This effort was known as the People’s Committees (인민위원회), as village peasants and workers throughout Korea organised themselves into councils.” ⤴️
“many of them attempted to conduct their own land and social reforms that smashed against not only the old Japanese authorities, but also traditional Korean landlords.” ⤴️
“These local committees linked up in turn into larger, regional bodies. The villagers and workers would elect their own committees as the new authorities for their local governments” ⤴️
“Within them, there were various political tendencies that reflected the balance of class and ideological forces in any given region. This phenomenon is, from a Marxist perspective, extremely significant. The People’s Committees, especially those made up of urban workers, could have become the basis of working-class rule” ⤴️
“the People’s Committee’s were eventually captured or crushed by forces operating in the North and the South.” ⤴️
“In the East, Stalin quickly declared war on Japan in 1945. The Red Army then swept through Mongolia, northeastern China, and eventually the north of Korea, with little resistance from the local Japanese forces, halting at the 38th parallel on the Korean peninsula in order for the US to land in the south of Korea and take hold there.” ⤴️
“the use of the 38th parallel as the dividing line between Soviet and American occupation zones in Korea was a hasty decision on the part of the US. Two young American colonels were given thirty minutes to draw this line. Stalin agreed to this decision, and at no point was any Korean given a say in the matter.” ⤴️
“Had the Red Army continued its advance into the whole of Korea and encouraged the masses there to take power and prevent the US from even landing, the tide of world revolution would have been enormously strengthened.” ⤴️
“The US, seeking to curb the Soviet Union, quickly gathered the support of the most reactionary bourgeois and landlord elements in the south.” ⤴️
“new, brutal police force, the Korean National Police (KNP).” ⤴️
“This new, reactionary armed body of men would be the basis of the future state known as the Republic of Korea, to be headed by the most corrupt and autocratic bourgeois elements like Syngman Rhee.” ⤴️
“only interested in creating a satellite regime under the USSR’s direction.” ⤴️
“Stalin’s preference, as in many countries in Eastern Europe, would have been to simply lean on a well-established local Communist Party” ⤴️
“No such thing existed in Korea by the end of WWII.” ⤴️
“The Armistice is not a peace agreement” ⤴️
“It showed that the system of a nationalised planned economy could withstand the assault of US imperialism.” ⤴️
“Yet the fact was that the working class did not emerge as an independent force, with a clear programme, capable of seizing the lead” ⤴️
“It contained flashpoints of workers’ power – the first instances in East Asia.” ⤴️
“it turned into a bloody conventional war, and US imperialism was able to remain on the Peninsula” ⤴️
“tearing apart a nation that had hitherto been unified for over 500 years.” ⤴️
“Tens and thousands of innocent lives were extinguished in Japan by American weapons of mass destruction, including at least 10,000 Korean forced labourers living there at the time. This act was perpetrated even though the Japanese state was clearly leaning towards surrender.” ⤴️
“the fundamentally nationalist calculations of the bureaucracies of both the USSR and China, and also the Korean Stalinists of various stripes, ended with a complex compromise aimed at forming a state that would fit the interest of both the USSR and China.” ⤴️
“In the North, the USSR directed the merger of some of these forces into a Workers’ Party of North Korea and quickly intervened in and bureaucratised the People’s Committees in the north under this party’s leadership. It was also at this time that Kim Il-Sung, a guerrilla partisan leader, was agreed upon as a suitable compromise leader to balance between the pro-Moscow and pro-CCP tendencies.” ⤴️
“A new government modelled after the bureaucratic, one-party, totalitarian regime in the Soviet Union, and based on a nationalised planned economy, came into being, but under the leadership of Kim Il-sung.” ⤴️
“Kim developed a certain independence with his own base, by appealing to nationalist and anti-imperialist sentiment. As an individual, his personal determination to unite the peninsula would play an important role in how the war unfolded.” ⤴️
“For a time, the northern regime, and the Russians, allowed the People’s Committees to carry out land expropriations on their own accord. The People’s Committees in the south, on the other hand, were attacked by the southern police force and reactionary right-wing gangs.” ⤴️
“For them, it was clear that the process in the north represented genuine progress. Unable to carry the same tasks through to fruition, the masses became increasingly frustrated, which in turn led to even more explosive armed uprisings against the US-backed authorities in the south.” ⤴️
“Witnessing this process from the north, Kim Il-Sung decided that the time was right to expand the deformed workers’ state under his leadership across the whole of Korea. At the same time, Syngman Rhee in the south held the same ambition, in wishing to destroy the new social system in the north and unify Korea as a capitalist dictatorship with himself at its head.” ⤴️
“On Sunday, 25 June 1950, the Korean People’s Army (KPA) of the north marched into the south, captured Seoul, and drove further southward without meeting meaningful resistance.” ⤴️
“The Seoul People’s Committee expropriated all Japanese property and those belonging to the South Korean capitalists.” ⤴️
“existing US and Southern forces faltered against this powerful, revolutionary advance, until they were able to hold off KPA advances around Busan with the aid of a hastily deployed Task Force Smith from Japan.” ⤴️
“On the basis of sheer military might and aerial bombardment, the US’s direct intervention militarily pushed back the KPA and even threatened to take over all of the north.” ⤴️
“This threatened the newly-founded state of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).” ⤴️
“In the bloody process, Seoul changed hands four times, and the conflict ultimately centred above and below the 38th parallel.” ⤴️
“At one point, Truman and MacArthur both considered using nuclear weapons against North Korea and China.” ⤴️
“the two sides finally agreed to a ceasefire in 1953, with the 38th parallel as the de facto border between the North and the South. A so-called ‘Demilitarized Zone (DMZ)’ was set up in the strip of land between the north and south, which to this day remains the most militarised area in the world.” ⤴️
“Internationally, it showed for the first time that US imperialism, with all its superior military might, could not easily defeat the forces conjured by a new social system based on a nationalised planned economy.” ⤴️
“Upwards of four million lives were lost, and at least half of them were civilians.” ⤴️
“over 82 percent of massacres of civilians were conducted by South Korean forces under the command of the US. The American airforce also dropped over 635,000 tons of bombs on North Korea” ⤴️
“300,000 members of the National Defence Corps were lost through death or desertion. 90,000 deaths were directly attributed to starvation or disease on the ‘death march’ and in training camps.” ⤴️
“Ted Grant summarised the significance of the war thusly:” ⤴️
““Korea divided into Russian and American spheres of influence, reveals the weakness of imperialism in the whole of the Far East.” ⤴️
“This is the measure of the decay of the old relations of capitalism and imperialism of the past. Capitalism rots at its weakest point.”” ⤴️
“the tragic division of the Korean nation was crystallised at the end of the war.” ⤴️
“The north under Kim Il-sung consolidated into the so-called ‘Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’, where any element of workers’ and peasants’ power was snuffed out. Instead, an autocratic, bureaucratic state came into being, one that bastardised the ideas of socialism so much that they even justified the rule of a hereditary dynasty. The Kim bureaucracy also seals off the country rather than seeing itself as a motivator for further international revolution.” ⤴️
“Prior to the 1990s, the South Korean masses were ruled over by no-less brutal military dictators backed by the US. US imperialism continues to be responsible for heinous crimes against the masses in the South” ⤴️