Our masters fight to have you, lovely creature
They race to seize you in their headlong course.
Each feels most fit to bleed you white in the future
Most justified in taking you by force.
—Bertolt Brecht1
“[In] Korea, Japanese gendarmes and officers are in charge,
shooting and hanging anybody who dares so much as think of freedom.”
—Congress of the Peoples of the East, Baku, September 1920
Japan’s empire builders “first trained their guns on Korea,”2 wrote Louise Young, a US historian of modern Japan. The decision to build an empire was multifactorial, driven by a network of mutually reinforcing causes that led Japanese leaders to set their sights on the Korean peninsula, the gateway to the Asian continent, with its abundant raw materials, alluring markets, cheap labor, and potential enemies, a short distance, just one thousand kilometers (600 miles) from Japan across the body of water the Japanese call the Sea of Japan and the Koreans call the East Sea.
As an emerging industrial power, Japan required access to vital raw materials necessary for its industrial development. Unlike the United States and Russia, whose expansive continental empires contained almost all the raw materials a modern industrial economy needed, or France and Britain, whose vast overseas empires teemed with vital natural resources, Japan lacked almost every input the country’s industrialists required, with the exception of coal.3 With Korea under its control, Japan could offer its manufacturers a guaranteed source of raw materials, as well as cheap labor. What’s more, Korea could furnish Japan with a secure supply of agricultural goods. The need for an alternative source of foodstuffs had become increasingly pressing. By the early twentieth century, Japan’s food production was no longer self-sufficient,4 owing to the tensions between its growing population and its mountainous topography, which left little room for farming.5 Japan was also deficient in oil, which would become important later on, as warships converted from coal to oil, and industrial economies increasingly depended on secure sources of petroleum. Securing supplies of oil was not a factor in Japan’s integration of Korea into its empire, but it was significant in the subsequent expansion of the empire and its conflict with the United States. Industrial expansion, moreover, exacerbated Japan’s dependency on foreign markets and raw materials, creating growing pressures to acquire foreign territory. The more Japan industrialized, the more dependent it became on foreign markets and sources of raw materials, and the more dependent it became, the more it was driven to expand its empire.6
Japan wasn’t the only empire that had set its sights on Korea, and Japanese leaders, recognizing this, moved to pre-empt rival claims to the peninsula. The United States was aggressively expanding. Between 1776 and 1890, a period of 114 years, US territory grew by 3,357,000 square miles, an average of 29,535 square miles per year, or 81 square miles per day. Washington’s acquisition of colonies in the Pacific—Hawaii in 1893, Cuba and the Philippines in 1898, and Samoa in 1899—enkindled fears in Tokyo that US statesmen and industrialists harbored ambitions to acquire Korea as a colony, and might even turn their imperial ambitions on Japan itself.7
Russia was another looming threat. According to the late US author, lawyer and historian David Fromkin, “Until the end of the decade before the First World War, the Russian Empire had been expanding at the expense of its neighbors at a prodigious rate and for a long time. It has been calculated that, at the time, the Russian Empire had been conquering the territory of its neighbors at an average rate of 50 square miles a day for 400 years.”8 The Romanov Empire was building the Trans-Siberia Railway, which, once completed, would provide the Tsar a route to infiltrate Russian troops into Northeast Asia, where they could embark upon the project of enlarging the Tsar’s domains.9 Russia coveted the Korean peninsula for its warm-water ports, of which it was in short supply. And if Russia expanded its imperial demesne over Korea, how long would it be before the Tsar’s imperial ambitions turned to Japan?
Japan’s empire builders had seen how the great powers had humiliated China, making it into a colony, not of one great power, but of all of them, as Sun Yat-sen, the founder of modern China, had lamented.10 Japan resolved that it would not fall prey to the same fate. “In an international order where the ‘strong devour the weak,’ the Japanese concluded they could either join the West as a ‘guest at the table’ or be served up with China and Korea as part of the feast,”11 wrote Louise Young. They would, then, emulate the great powers. Japan would build its own empire by devouring as much of its surrounding territory as it could, before the great powers arrived on the scene. “Just as U.S. president James Monroe had informed the great powers that they better stay clear of Latin America,” observed Sarah Paine, a professor of strategy and policy at the US Naval College, “likewise increasing numbers of Japanese favored making East Asia their exclusive preserve.” Marshal of the Imperial Japanese Army, Terauchi Hisaichi believed that eventually all of Asia would fall under Japanese control.12
The first step in building Japan’s empire would be to wrest Korea from China’s orbit. On July 25, 1894, Japan went to war with China over the question of who would control Korea. The Japanese government resolved to unilaterally impose reforms on Korea, which Tokyo promised would benefit Koreans by lifting them out of poverty through expanded trade. Using language that anticipated the rhetoric Washington would employ more than a century later to justify its leadership of a new global economic order, Japan promised to create a win-win solution for both countries by opening Korea to the global economy.13
Unsurprisingly, Koreans rejected Japan’s self-proclaimed leadership14 and greeted the First Sino-Japanese War, not as the beginning of a period of Korean efflorescence, but as the commencement of a painful period of imperial Japanese rule15 marked by, among other things, a foreign military base in the middle of Seoul, which would become a seat for ongoing foreign domination of the peninsula that would last through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The war incubated an intense animus among Koreans toward the Japanese. To counter Tokyo’s imperial ambitions, the Korean monarchy sought out the protection of other great powers. Queen Min, the royal consort, looked to St. Petersburg as a counterpoise to Japan and purged the government of ministers whose sympathies lay with the Japanese. The Japanese government responded by arranging to have her eliminated. She was murdered on October 8, 1895, “to the enduring outrage of the Korean people.”16
Less than a decade later, Japan fought Russia over the question of which empire would control Korea and the contiguous Chinese province of Manchuria. The war was preceded by a series of negotiations in which the two countries proposed to divide the two territories. In 1896, Tokyo offered to bisect Korea along the 38th parallel, anticipating the United States’ partition of the peninsula along the same parallel 49 years later. Japan proposed to establish a sphere of influence south of the parallel, while Russia’s sphere would lie to the north. The Russians declined, their ambitions set on the warm-water ports of the south, and insisted that all of Korea fall within Russia’s ambit.17 The Japanese tried again in 1903, this time proposing to let Russia have Manchuria in exchange for Japan taking all of Korea. Again, the Tsar balked, demanding an exclusive sphere of influence in Manchuria and a shared sphere in Korea.18 Soon, negotiations between the two empires collapsed, and by 1904 the rivalry escalated into war. Japan launched a surprise attack on the Russian fleet, stationed at what was then called Port Arthur (now Lushunkou District), causing incalculable damage and Russia’s defeat. Japan’s vanquishing Russia stirred all of Asia and horrified Europe. For the first time ever, a non-white nation had defeated a great power in battle.19 A seismic event which shook the Western world, the war touched off the 1905 revolution in Russia, but inaugurated Korea’s enslavement by Japan.
With Japan now in control of Korea, the United States sought to consolidate its own imperial assets in the Far East. In 1905, US Secretary of War William Howard Taft and Japanese prime minister Count Katsura Taro signed a memorandum in which the United States would recognize Japanese domination of Korea in return for Japan recognizing US control of the Philippines.20 The agreement rankled Kim Il-sung, who would point out years later how the United States had connived with Japan to sell Korea into colonial slavery, in return for Japan recognizing Washington’s own imperial ambitions, a hard truth lost on his Korean compatriots who placed their hope in the United States winning Korea’s manumission from Japanese rule at the Paris Peace Conference following World War I. The widely held but erroneous belief that US President Woodrow Wilson had promised a post-war world of self-determination, and the hostility of the great powers to the colonial peoples’ demands for it, confirmed Kim in the belief, which would play no small role in North Korea’s official philosophy of self-reliance, or Juche, that it “is a tragic lesson that Korea should not count on other nations for independence, because they [do] not care.”21 Instead, Koreans would have to emancipate themselves, in accordance with the communist theory to which Kim subscribed. That theory held that any group that is oppressed can count on none but itself to bring about its liberation. Other people wouldn’t free Koreans; Koreans would have to free themselves.
The result of Japan’s victory over Russia was that Tokyo established a protectorate over Korea in 1905. Japan would now run Korea’s foreign affairs, its police, and its communications systems, and station Japanese troops on Korean soil.22 The US-supported affront to Korean sovereignty touched off a major insurgency, of such large scope that as many as 15,000 insurgents were killed and up to 10,000 jailed in uprisings between 1905 and 1907, the first martyrs in Korea’s long and enduring war for freedom.23 On August 1, 1907, the Japanese resident general ordered the Korean army disbanded, touching off a new round of riots and intensifying an anti-Japanese insurgency. Between July 1907 and October 1908, 14,000 Koreans were killed fighting to liberate Korea from the Japanese yoke.24 From 1907 through 1910, guerrilla bands numbering nearly 10,000 came close to evicting the Japanese colonizers from Seoul. By Japanese accounts, in 1908, nearly 70,000 Korean guerillas had engaged Japanese troops in almost 1,500 confrontations. This was hardly a war of minor skirmishes, but a determined military effort to expel the Japanese invaders. The Japanese occupation forces, however, proved formidable, and gradually overcame the insurgency. The number of guerrillas dropped to about 25,000 in 1909 and then plummeted to below 2,000, as insurgents fled to the safety of neighboring Manchuria.25 Kim Il-sung would later take up the insurgent cause in the frozen mountains of the Chinese region, forming the core of the future Korean People’s Army (KPA), North Korea’s military force.
Korea was formally absorbed into the Japanese empire on August 22, 1910, ceasing to exist as a country, and re-named Chosen by the Japanese. That day would become “the darkest day of any subsequent year in Korean history,” observed Bruce Cumings26 and would mark the beginning of what historian Frank Baldwin termed a 35-year period of “particularly intense colonial control compared to other colonial areas, like India and Indochina, which were far from their metropolitan centers.”27
During the Japanese colonial period, Korean culture was outlawed. All Korean political organizations were disbanded.28 Korean newspapers and public gatherings were prohibited. The education system was Japanized.29 Koreans were forced to speak Japanese, take Japanese names, and worship at Shinto shrines, even though Shintoism, the traditional religion of Japan, was foreign to Korea.30
The Empire of the Rising Sun built up Korea economically, developing mines, industry, railways, and electric power plants. But the development was geared to the needs of Japan’s empire and its financiers, industrialists, and militarists. Koreans became Japan’s peripatetic, super-exploited workforce, the coerced labor on which the wealth of the empire would be built. In pursuit of Japan’s imperial project, Koreans were reduced to the status of subhumans, dehumanized as machines and beasts of burden, denied the dignity of self-determination, and alienated from their language and culture.
At the same time, Korea was transformed from a territory whose agricultural activity sustained a Korean population into a Japanese granary. Huge blocks of land were transferred into Japanese hands, and agriculture was steered away from Korean to Japanese needs.31 In 1938, 60 percent of Korea’s harvested rice was exported to Japan. According to the American journalist Anna Louise Strong, “The Japanese ate seven times as much rice per capita as the Koreans, condemning the latter to eat rice huskings and cheaper grains.”32 What land did remain in Korean hands was owned by local landlords whose oppressive rents made the Korean peasantry among the world’s lowliest and most oppressed.33 Korea’s landed families would, after decades of collaboration with the Japanese, become the nucleus of a new post-Japanese South Korean state, and founders of the chaebols—literally “wealth clans”—the hydra-like family-owned conglomerates that dominate South Korea’s economy, including Samsung, Hyundai, and LG.
Manufacturing and mining, like agriculture, were subordinated to Japan’s needs. Almost all major industry north of the 38th parallel belonged to the Japanese,34 and was engaged in producing semi-finished products which were shipped to Japan. Not a single plant produced finished goods for the Korean market.35 Korean needs were simply not a consideration. On top of this, Korean workers were discriminated against in pay. According to Bruce Cumings, “Japanese workers in Korea got over 2 yen per day in 1937, a Formosan [Taiwanese] worker 1 yen, and a Korean worker .66 yen.”36 The pay was intolerably low, and working conditions were insufferably harsh. In the mines, Koreans were forced to work punishingly long hours, the women bare-breasted.37
As Japan took steps to expand its empire through military conquest, Koreans were impressed into service as conscripted laborers, sent to every corner of the empire to satisfy the requirements of Japan’s military and economic expansion.38 In 1941, about one of every 17 Koreans was in Japan, half working in Japanese industry. By 1944, one in eight had been relocated outside Korea, to other parts of the empire, where they were needed as laborers. Twenty percent were uprooted, either shipped beyond Korea’s borders or living in Korea outside of areas in which they were born.39 At the close of World War II, one third of the industrial labor force in Japan was made up of Koreans. 40 At least ten thousand Koreans were employed as conscripted laborers in Japanese war plants in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They perished in the US atom bombing of the two cities.41
* * *
Echoes of past oppressions can be heard in the present. Those who descend from dominant groups which benefitted from race-, class-, or sex-based discriminations of the past enjoy advantages which have carried forward across generations to the present. Likewise, the disadvantages imposed on groups which suffered under past discriminations continue to be visited upon their descendants, even when the discriminations have formally come to an end.
Aso Taro, Japan’s prime minister from September 2008 to September 2009, and later deputy prime minister and minister of finance in the government of Abe Shinzo (Abe is known as Shinzo Abe in the West), is an example of historical oppressions profiting contemporary figures through descent. Aso is the scion of a wealthy mining family whose wealth was built on the forced labor of Koreans.42 His considerable advantages, in education, position, wealth, and connections, derive less from his personal qualities (however admirable they may be) than from the conscripted labor of the thousands of Koreans his forbears exploited in their mines. It is from the womb of coerced Korean labor that Aso’s wealth—and all the advantages it confers—was born.
Aso is the grandson of another former Japanese prime minister, Yoshida Shigeru, who is related by marriage to two other former Japanese prime ministers, Sato Eisaku and Kishi Nobosuke. Kishi was the commerce and industry minister in Japan’s puppet Manchurian state, and later the munitions ministry supremo. He oversaw the coerced labor of hundreds of thousands of Koreans and Chinese in Manchurian-based mines and factories.43 Tojo Hideki, who would lead Japan’s cabinet during the Pacific War, was Manchukuo’s head of military police. Both Kishi and Tojo, as members of the wartime Japanese cabinet, co-signed the declaration of war against the United States in 1941. After the war, Kishi was jailed on war crimes charges.44
Despite his war criminal status, geopolitical events conspired to transform Kishi into a US asset and esteemed politician. The end of the war brought opportunity to the United States, but also danger. The danger was that the people of the world, the bulk of whom were victims of colonialism and the failures of capitalism, would be inspired by the example of the Soviet Union and the communists who identified with it. Lenin had urged the colonial oppressed to rebel against their imperial masters, and Moscow had furnished national liberation movements with assistance. This inspired the colonial downtrodden, gave them hope, and persuaded them to look favorably on the communists. Moreover, while the rest of the world went backward during the capitalist crisis of the Great Depression, the Soviets forged ahead, building a great industrial economy with full employment. Hadn’t the Soviets, in the space of a decade, turned an underdeveloped country into an industrial behemoth, a model that other underdeveloped countries could emulate? Additionally, the USSR had emerged victorious from the greatest colonial war ever waged, that of Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union, impelled by the German imperialist aim of winning lebensraum (living space) and enslaving the peoples of Eastern Europe. Almost all of the heavy lifting in the fight to crush Nazism was done by the Soviets. What’s more, the Red Army had played a lead role in toppling the Empire of the Rising Sun, while communists led the resistance to Axis occupation forces throughout Europe and Asia. Communists worldwide were held in high esteem after World War II; they had been in the vanguard of every fight against all that was rotten, reactionary, and exploitative.
In China, in the years immediately following the Pacific War, communist forces, led by Mao Tse Tung, were advancing toward victory in a great anti-colonial and anti-feudal struggle, offering inspiration to other peoples of East Asia seeking liberation. At the same time, Europe and Japan were reeling from economic breakdown caused by the war. Washington worried that local communist forces would come to power in Germany and Japan, pushed by widespread hardship and pulled by the prestige the communists had won as the most dedicated of the anti-fascist forces. Top US State Department and Pentagon officials feared that if communists came to power in Berlin and Tokyo, German and Japanese industrial potential would be brought under local popular control, tilting the balance of world power away from US hegemony. Real security against the popular revolt against empire-building and the failures of capitalism required the restoration of faltering economies and a crackdown on communists. The solution, in the view of the US power elite, was a stimulus program to put Japan and Germany back to work and the recruitment of anti-communists to take up major posts in the new US-allied post-war states. Kishi—the war criminal who oversaw the use of coerced labor in Manchurian munitions factories—was identified as a promising candidate to lead a new post-war anti-communist Japan.45 Kishi’s reputation was instantly rehabilitated. He was exonerated for wartime opposition to the US empire, and served two terms as Japan’s prime minister, becoming known in some circles as “America’s favorite war criminal.” Under the tutelage of Washington, the new Japan would not be much different from the old one. It would remain implacably opposed to forces of national liberation and hostile to a world of equality and democracy, its leaders chosen from among former enemies for their anti-communist credentials.
Kishi is held in the highest esteem by yet another Japanese prime minister, Abe Shinzo, Kishi’s maternal grandson. While Kishi was in Manchuria organizing the conscripted labor of Koreans and Chinese, Kim Il-sung, the grandfather of Kim Jong-un, the current leader of North Korea, was in Manchuria leading a guerrilla war against Kishi and other Japanese empire-builders, war criminals and freebooters. Eight decades later, Kim Il-sung and Kishi would meet “again through their grandsons,” observed Bruce Cumings,46 as vectors of contending social forces: revolutionary nationalism vs. imperialism, labor vs. parasitism, emancipation vs. reaction.
* * *
The Japanese dragooned Koreans into another form of coerced labor—enslavement to satisfy the lust of Japanese soldiers. Possibly as many as 200,000 women were impressed into a system of sexual slavery. By the time the system was fully established, the vast majority of sexual slaves were Koreans.47
As Bruce Cumings relates, “Japanese historians had written about the sexual slavery system for decades, but were told time and again by the authorities that no archival documents existed on it.” Then, in 1992, Japanese “historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi walked into a military library and found such documents just sitting on the shelf. His 1995 book, Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II, is now a standard source.”48
The first documented comfort station, the anodyne term used to sanitize the description of what were de facto rape stations, was established in Japanese controlled Manchuria in 1932, the year Kim Il-sung launched his insurgency against the empire-builders under whose supervision this miserable institution flourished. By 1938 there were already approximately 30,000 to 40,000 women, mainly Koreans, subjected to regular sexual violence by Japanese soldiers.49
Sexual slavery carried on even after the fall of the Empire of the Rising Sun, resurrected by the South Korean army during the Korean War.50 It is perhaps of some significance that the ROK Army was, at the time, dominated at its highest levels by Koreans who had served in the Japanese Imperial Army, some of whom had even served in army units tasked with hunting down Kim Il-sung. Is it any surprise, then, that this very same army, with its historical connections to the Japanese through its officer corps, should set up a Japanese-style system of sexual bondage? It’s also of significance that at the time, the South Korean army was, as it has been throughout its history, under the operational control of a US commander. Hence, the United States was complicit in the sexual slavery practiced by the ROK Army.
The terms “comfort women” and “comfort station” evince a patriarchal bias. Whose comfort was involved? Certainly not that of the women who were kidnapped or otherwise coerced into sexual slavery. “Comfort” is presumably what the institution offered its male beneficiaries—either “comfort” in sexual release, or the “comfort” of domination. But importantly, the institution, and the women who were dragooned into it, are described in terms of what they offered men, as if the interests of men are primary, and those of the female victims, of little moment. The women coerced into sexual slavery weren’t “comfort” women who worked at “comfort stations” but enslaved rape victims impressed into service in rape stations for the satisfaction of soldiers who were raping, both literally and figuratively, an entire nation.
* * *
While Japanese counter-insurgency efforts managed to quell the Korean struggle for freedom by 1910, resistance continued, and was never fully expunged at any point during Japan’s colonial rule. In 1912, the insurgency was strong enough that the Japanese had arrested 50,000 Korean rebels. By 1918, 140,000 patriots were arrested by Japanese colonial security forces.51 Koreans had no intention of capitulating to their Japanese conquerors.
In 1919, mass movements against colonialism swept across the colonial world, and on March 1, Korea erupted in anger. Over the next two months, at least 500,000 Koreans took part in street demonstrations in 600 different locations.52 The police were unable to cope with the disturbances, and the Japanese garrison army was called in to crush the uprising. Clashes between protestors and the army led to hundreds, if not thousands, of deaths,53 adding to the Golgotha of some 30,000 Koreans who had already been martyred in efforts to liberate their country dating from 1905.
“All the pent up angers and sorrows of living under the Japanese imperialists for ten long years exploded,” wrote Kim Il-sung, many years later.
Ten years after the annexation, Korea had become a gigantic dungeon, no better than those of the Middle Ages. The Japanese colonists used naked military power to suppress the Korean people’s aspiration to become free again. The Japanese took away our freedom of press, freedom to hold meetings, freedom to form organizations, and freedom to march. They took away our human rights and properties. The Korean people formed secret organizations, independence fights, mass enlightenment activities, and had built up considerable potential energy against the decade of plunder and exploitation by the Japanese.54
Kim complained that some of the leaders of the movement against Japanese colonization “believed that Korea could be freed by sending petitions to other nations. They took and swallowed US President Woodrow Wilson’s ‘Doctrine of Self-Determination’ and expected the United States and other Western powers to pressure Japan into freeing Korea,” Kim recalled. “They wrote petition after petition, becoming laughing stocks of the imperialists.”55
Syngman Rhee, whom Washington would recruit to lead South Korea, spent his days in Washington lobbying diplomats and State Department officials. A “gentleman” who spoke impeccable English, Rhee “begged and pleaded with representatives of the imperialist nations,” wrote Kim Il-sung, but the imperialist countries “were more keen on grabbing more colonies for themselves than freeing any colony.”56
“The end of World War I brought false and rapidly dashed hopes to those on the receiving end of imperialism,” wrote Sarah Paine. US “president Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points nowhere promised (though many interpreted them to promise) national self-determination. The Versailles Peace Treaty did not make good on the promise that was never made and this failure deeply disappointed the colonized worldwide.”57
Wilson did promise self-determination, though not universally, and only to the peoples of the defeated Hapsburg and Ottoman empires. Wilson’s point 10 of his 14-point plan for the post-WWI order expressed the view that “the people of Austria-Hungary should be accorded the freest opportunity to autonomous development,” while his point 12 recommended that “other nationalities under Turkish rule” be accorded the same opportunities. But Wilson failed to deliver a sweeping, universal call for the manumission of all colonial peoples.
To be sure, Wilson did dilate on the importance of self-determination, which he defined as the right of all people “to choose the sovereignty under which they shall live,”58 but he implicitly invoked an exclusionary clause that proponents of liberalism have traditionally used to differentially assign rights and privileges within their ostensible system of equality. Wilson implicitly defined “people” as subjects of defeated rival empires, denying the charter of humanity to the subjects of allied empires, such as that of Great Britain, which held hundreds of millions of Indians in thrall, among others, and who would not be subsumed under Wilson’s definition of those worthy of self-determination. Indians, Koreans, Africans—the subject peoples of the allied powers—were tacitly defined as non-people, or sub-humans—intellectually and culturally inferior beings for whom self-governance was impossible.
The same kind of exclusionary liberalism applied at home. Wilson believed in the supremacy of the white race. As Stephen Kinzer has pointed out, Wilson “removed African-Americans from government jobs, segregated the transit system in Washington, D.C., and had ‘Birth of a Nation’ screened in the White House—saying afterward that its portrayal of noble Klansmen repressing ape-like black thugs was ‘a splendid production.’”59
In international affairs, Wilsonian liberalism meant equality for whites and the denial of a charter of humanity for non-whites. Self-determination would be the exclusive preserve of Europeans, denied to Koreans, Chinese, Indians, Egyptians, and Palestinians. The falsely labelled paladin of the equality of peoples favored a Jewish Palestine (i.e., a Palestine settled by white Europeans), or, to put it another way, the negation of the rights of (non-white Arab) Palestinians. Neither had Wilson any intention of conferring self-determination upon the people of Central America into whose countries he kept dispatching US Marines to install governments congenial to US business interests. In office, Wilson intervened militarily in Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Russia, unwilling to grant the people of these countries the right of self-determination.60
“In 1916,” recounts Kinzer, “Wilson drafted a speech to Congress declaring, ‘It shall not lie with American people to dictate to another people what their government shall be.’ He sent it to his secretary of state for review. It came back with this notation in the margin: ‘Haiti, S. Domingo, Nicaragua, Panama.’ Confronted with this inconvenient reminder, Wilson decided not to deliver the speech.”61
Looking back on the March First movement, Kim Il-sung was scathing in his assessment of Koreans who believed that the United States would sincerely offer relief from Japanese imperialism. He recalled that it was the United States that had brokered the peace treaty between Russia and Japan in 1905 that handed Korea to the Japanese. And it was Washington, through the mechanism of the Taft-Katsura Treaty, that colluded with Tokyo to divide Korea and the Philippines between the two of them.
Kim thought Korean leaders equally naïve in assuming that demonstrations would move the Japanese to abandon their project of colonialism, a project in which they had invested significantly in time, resources, and manpower. “Many Koreans mistakenly assumed that the Japanese would get out if they marched for several months shouting slogans,” wrote Kim. “They were sadly mistaken; the Japanese were not about to leave Korea on account of mere marches. Japan had fought three wars over Korea. … In the nineteenth century, after the Meiji Reform, the Japanese formulated a plan to take Korea by force. It was asserted that Korea was essential for the Empire to expand. … Japan fought wars with Russia and China over Korea. America and Great Britain supported Japan in these two wars.”62 Japan was not going to abandon its imperial project simply because Koreans expressed their objection in marches and slogans.
Kim likened Japan and the United States to armed robbers. “An armed robber in your house will not spare your life, just because you plead for your life. Other armed robbers standing outside will not rush inside to help you no matter how loud you scream. If you want to live, you must fight off the armed robber yourself. Armed robbers must be fought with arms.”63
Instead of taking up arms, and freeing Korea by their own efforts, Koreans who resisted Japanese colonization “died shouting freedom and justice, appealing to the conscience of humanity and human rights advocates of the world, in vain,”64 Kim wrote. It “is a tragic lesson,” he lamented, but true nonetheless, “that Korea [could] not count on other nations for independence, because they did not care.”65 What the “failed March First Movement taught us,” Kim concluded, was that we must “build up our strength on our own.” Koreans “must unite and achieve independence on their own.”66
As a model, Kim looked not to Wilson and his doctrine of self-determination limited to the subjects of defeated rival empires, nor to the United States, with its agreement to recognize Japanese imperial aims in Korea in exchange for Japan recognizing US imperial aims in the Philippines. Wilson’s “so-called doctrine,” scoffed Kim, “was nothing but an American ruse to counter the October Revolution in Russia.”67 Kim, instead, would look for inspiration to Russia and the Bolsheviks.
Lenin had called in March 1917 for “the liberation of all colonies and of all oppressed nations,”68 (emphasis added) not just those of enemy countries. It would take a superhuman effort to fight the Japanese, Kim had concluded. “We must learn from the Russian revolution and arm the people of Korea, in order to free our nation and build a new Korea of equality, freedom, and justice for all.”69
Ho Chi Minh, the revolutionary nationalist leader of Vietnam, had himself been seduced and betrayed by Wilson’s faux-liberal rhetoric about self-determination. In fact, Ho had appealed directly to Wilson at the Paris Peace Conference, and to other delegates, to no avail.70 But, Ho, like Kim Il-sung, discovered that the program of the Bolsheviks had the substance that Wilson’s (exclusionary) doctrine of self-determination lacked.
Ho recalled, after World I, living in Paris, that he “would distribute leaflets denouncing the crimes committed by the French colonialists in Viet Nam.” He was a member of the French Socialist Party, and while he attended meetings regularly, he struggled to follow the discussions, especially those concerning the split within the socialist movement, between the reformists and the communists. “What I wanted to know,” he recalled, was which of the branches of socialism sided “with the peoples of colonial countries.”71
Today, the split between reformists and communists is remembered to have originated in a disagreement over whether to achieve socialism gradually, through piecemeal reforms within the existing capitalist system, or all at once, through revolution. But there was another point of contention: colonialism. Eduard Bernstein, a leading figure in the reformist movement saw “the colonial enterprise” as desirable, and necessary to the attainment of socialist goals in Europe. Without “the colonial expansion of our economy,” he wrote, “the poverty that still exists in Europe today, which we are trying to eradicate, would be much worse and we would have much less hope of eliminating it. Even when counterbalanced by the crimes of colonialism, the benefits from colonies always weigh more heavily on the scale.”72
The communists, led by Lenin, had a different point of view. They were advocates of genuine, inclusive, self-determination—self-determination for all peoples, not just for white Europeans.
The future leader of the Indochinese struggle for independence was given a tract by Lenin, which had been published in l’Humanité, the newspaper of the French Communist Party. It was titled “Thesis on the National and Colonial Questions.”
Lenin presented the following argument. The formal or legal equality between person A, who sells his labor, and person B, who buys it, conceals a profound inequality. Person B exploits and person A is exploited. Without redressing the inequality between persons A and B, no true equality exists. “The real meaning of the demand for equality,” wrote Lenin, “consists in its being a demand for the abolition” of exploitation, or the abolition of what we might call “parasitism”—living off the labor of others. This, by itself, however, did not directly answer Ho’s question. Ho insisted on knowing whether Lenin was on the side of the colonial peoples.
A narrow reading of Lenin would suggest that his concern was with the inequality between workers and capitalists, the principal focus of much of the socialist movement to that point. But Lenin argued that exploitation wasn’t limited to the relationship between classes within countries. It also existed between countries. There exists, Lenin wrote, a “colonial and financial enslavement of the vast majority of the world’s population by an insignificant minority of the richest advanced capitalist countries.” In other words, the unequal relationship that exists between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat also exists between a minority of wealthy capitalist nations and the rest of humanity (much of which those in the wealthy capitalist nations regarded as either subhuman or intellectually, culturally, and morally inferior, incapable of self-government, and suitable only for lives of exploitation as beasts of burden.)
Democracy among nations, if it is to have any substantial meaning, cannot, Lenin wrote “be restricted to the bare, formal, purely declaratory and actually non-committal recognition of the equality of nations”; it must entail the abolition of the exploitation of one nation by another. To achieve the abolition of exploitation, both within the metropolitan countries and between nations, Lenin called for the exploited of the metropolitan countries to pursue with the exploited of the colonies a joint revolutionary struggle to overthrow the economic elites of the metropole.73 In terms of France’s domination of Vietnam, this meant that the Vietnamese as a people and French workers should pursue a joint revolutionary struggle to overthrow their common enemy, namely, the French shoguns of finance, industry and commerce who exploited both groups. The success of this strategy, of course, would depend on French workers recognizing that the affinity between themselves and the peoples of the French colonies was more significant than the linguistic and cultural affinity they had with the French elite. Nevertheless, in Lenin’s words were found not only a sincere recognition of the colonial peoples’ right to liberation, but a concrete program by which to achieve it.
Ho was ecstatic. “What emotion, enthusiasm, clear-sightedness and confidence it instilled into me!” he exclaimed. “I was overjoyed to tears. Though sitting alone in my room, I shouted out aloud as if addressing large crowds: ‘Dear compatriots! This is what we need; this is the path to our liberation!”74
Earlier, Lenin had expanded the definition of socialist revolution beyond what socialist leaders such as Bernstein understood socialism to mean. “The socialist revolution is by no means a single battle,” Lenin wrote in his essay “The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination.” Instead, it is “a whole series of battles around all problems of economic and democratic reforms” including “equal rights for women” and—importantly, from the perspective of people trying to free themselves from colonial subjugation— “self-determination.” Socialism “would remain an idle phrase,” Lenin insisted, “if it were not linked up with a revolutionary approach to all the questions of democracy, including the national question,” by which he meant the right of peoples, including Koreans, to exercise sovereignty over their own affairs, rather than being enslaved by imperialist masters. Lenin envisaged what he termed “a truly democratic, truly internationalist” order, in which each nation is free to set its own course and freely join with other states in relationships of mutual benefit.
The prescriptive stress in Lenin’s writings on what was called the national question was on mutual benefit contra relationships in which benefits are monopolized by a stronger nation at the expense of a weaker one, as they are, for example, in the free trade agreements that dominant economic powers have always insisted upon. The United States, which until the end of WWII had the highest tariff barriers in the world, and had relied on protectionist policies for economic development, from the days of Alexander Hamilton to 1945, now insists on a level playing field. When it was the dominant economic power, Britain, too, insisted on free trade, and the United States, then a developing country, balked. But today, poor, post-colonial countries, whose economic development has been historically stifled, distorted, and yoked to the requirements of their former colonial masters, are not supposed to emulate the development practices of the United States. They cannot possibly compete on a level playing field with empires that have amassed enormous wealth, and have done so not only through their own past protectionist measures, but also through their long histories of plundering the colonies and semi-colonies of their resources, land, and labor.
A direct line runs from Lenin’s view that the international order ought to be based on the voluntary association of equal partners for mutual (and not coerced and unequal) benefit, to the official view espoused by such countries as the DPRK and the Republic of Cuba. This view, needless to say, runs completely counter to the US view. The US view unabashedly declares the intention of the United States to coerce states, by one means or another, into relationships of subordination to Washington.
Kim Il-sung’s continuity with Lenin was evident in a speech he made to the 85th Inter-Parliamentary Conference in April 1991, just a few years before his death.
In order to build the new world aspired to by mankind, it is necessary to abolish the unequal old international order in all fields of politics, the economy and culture and establish an equitable new international order. There are large and small countries in the world, but there cannot be major and minor countries; there are developed nations and less developed nations, but there cannot be nations destined to dominate other nations or those destined to be dominated. All countries and nations are equal members of the international community and as such have the right to independence and equality. No privilege and no arbitrariness should be tolerated in international relations; friendship and cooperation among countries must be fully developed on the principles of mutual respect, non-interference in the affairs of other countries, equality and mutual benefit.75
Seven months prior to Kim’s statement, US president George H.W. Bush had proclaimed a New World Order, in which all countries would be subordinate to the United States. Washington would exercise “world leadership.”76 The implication of Bush’s New World Order was that the planet would be divided between nations destined to be dominated and one nation, the United States, which would dominate. Only the United States would have the right to independence, and the Pentagon, CIA, and US state and treasury departments would exercise leadership over the affairs of other countries. The expression of Bush’s declaration of US world leadership can be seen in the words of a Pentagon spokesman, Rear Admiral John Kirby, who, in 2015, declared that the United States retains the “right,” the “responsibility,” and “the resources” to intervene in any country unilaterally to achieve US foreign policy goals.77
Lenin made one other point in his essay which portended what the oppressed peoples of the world would construe as Wilson’s betrayal of their aspirations for freedom. People struggling for manumission from colonial enslavement would find no allies among governments dominated by the proprietary classes of the great powers, the Bolshevik leader warned. The business class “always betrays the interest of the people and of democracy,” and “is always ready for annexations and for oppressing other nations.”
When the Bolsheviks formed the Communist International in 1919, an organization of communist parties from around the world, they established twenty-one conditions of membership. Condition number eight had enormous appeal to colonial peoples, who had been reduced to the status of untermenschen (subhumans) to be ruled by a Herrenvolk (master race.)
A particularly marked and clear attitude on the question of the colonies and oppressed nations is necessary on the part of the communist parties of those countries whose bourgeoisies are in possession of colonies and oppresses other nations. Every party that wishes to belong to the Communist International has an obligation of exposing the dodges of its ‘own’ imperialists in the colonies, of supporting every liberation movement in the colonies not only in words but in deeds, of demanding that their imperialist compatriots should be thrown out of the colonies, of cultivating in the hearts of the workers in their own country a truly fraternal relationship to the working population in the colonies and to the oppressed nations, and of carrying out systematic propaganda among their own country’s troops against oppression of colonial peoples.78
Communist ideology would resonate “globally among colonized and downtrodden peoples,” noted the US Naval College’s Sarah Paine79, and the reason why—because it offered the world’s oppressed people the charter of humanity they sought, to use a phrase Jean-Paul Sartre once eloquently crafted80—is evident in the yawning chasm that emerged between the new society of equality the Bolsheviks created and the societies of white supremacy the wealthy capitalist powers maintained.
In contrast to the Herrenvolk powers, in 1935, three years after Kim Il-sung embarked on his campaign of guerrilla insurgency against the Japanese, the British intellectuals Beatrice and Sidney Webb described the Soviet Union—Kim Il-sung’s and Ho Chi Minh’s model in contrast to Wilson’s race-based pro-colonial liberalism—as the very antithesis of the imperialist countries’ Herrenvolk polities. In their voluminous Soviet Communism: A New Civilization, the Webbs contrasted the racial policies of the great powers with those of the USSR, under the heading “The [USSR’s] Insistence on Racial Equality.” Beginning their survey with the British Empire, the couple noted that within this vast area, containing five hundred million inhabitants, only seventy million, or 14 percent, were accorded political rights. The “self-governing Dominions”—South Africa, Canada, Australia and New Zealand—were white supremacist settler states. South Africa differentially accorded rights, privileges, and duties on the basis of race, “while Canada and Australia ignored the native tribes (when they did not exterminate them) as possible citizens of the newly formed state.” And 400 million Indians were denied any political rights at all, their country governed, not by themselves, but by the British civil service.
But the British Empire was hardly unique, the Webbs observed. In the United States, citizens of African origin, “though assumed to be entitled to vote and to represent voters, [were] by the electoral law and administrative practice of particular states excluded from fully-fledged citizenship with the right to vote and to become representatives.” (In the 1930s, the United States was an anti-Jewish white supremacist country every bit as repressive, persecutory, harassing, menacing, and violent toward its citizens of African origin as was the contemporaneous, white supremacist, anti-Jewish Nazi state toward its Jewish citizens.)
In contrast, observed the Webbs, an outstanding feature of the Soviet Union was its “absolute refusal to regard racial characteristics” as a legitimate basis on which to assign rights, privileges and duties. Indeed, one “of the reasons for the Anti-Comintern Axis, uniting Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Shintoist Japan in hostility to the Soviet Union, was this insistence by the Bolshevist government on racial equality throughout the USSR. These three Great Powers were all alike intent on extending by force of arms, the dominance of their own race over new territories inhabited by so-called inferior races, who [had] no right to self-determination and were to accept the social order imposed by the conqueror, or to risk extermination.”81
Parenthetically, a comment made by Lenin in the statement of his thesis on the equality of nations reminds us of how, in some respects, little has changed since the Bolshevik leader wrote his tract in 1920. South Korea, a state established by Washington for reasons of US political, economic, and strategic aims, can without hyperbole be called a puppet state in the way Manchukuo, the state established by the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s, is often described. To most Americans and Europeans, South Korea is an independent, sovereign state, and at worse, a semi-sovereign state, but not a puppet. Yet a state which was conceived, midwifed, and suckled by Washington; which oversees an economy built by massive injections of financial and other aid from the United States and significant economic concessions accorded to it in order for it to develop economically to showcase the merits of the capitalist way of life in the Cold War competition with North Korea; which hosts “the largest overseas American military base in the world,” described by the US Army as the largest US power projection platform in the Pacific82; whose military remains under the command of the Pentagon and has been deployed to suppress Koreans who have taken up arms to overthrow the uninvited US presence in their country; which has contributed troops to US wars of aggression in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq: such a state is hardly independent. Lenin thought it was necessary “constantly to explain and expose … the deception systematically practiced by the imperialist powers, which, under the guise of politically independent states, set up states that are wholly dependent on them economically, financially and militarily.” South Korea is a paradigmatic expression of the kind of dependent state Lenin had in mind.
1 Bertolt Brech,. War Primer. (New York: Verso, 2017), 44.
2 Young, p. 23.
3 James Macdonald, When Globalization Fails: The Rise and Fall of Pax Americana. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 124.
4 Macdonald, 124; S.C.M. Paine. The Japanese Empire: Grand Strategy from the Meiji Restoration to the Pacific War. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 96.
5 Paine, The Japanese Empire, 2.
6 Macdonald, 124.
7 Paine, 2017, 54.
8 David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East. (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 1989), 475.
9 Paine, The Japanese Empire, 10.
2 Israel Eptsein, The Unfinished Revolution in China. (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1947), 28.
10 Young, 23.
11Paine, The Japanese Empire, 82.
12 Ibid., 22.
13 Ibid., 22.
14 Ibid., 45.
15 Ibid., 46.
16 Ibid., 51.
17 Ibid., 51.
18 Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), 141.
19 Paine, The Japanese Empire, 79-80.
20 Kim Il Sung, With the Century. (Korean Friendship Association, 2003).
21 Cumings, Korea’s Place, 143.
22 Anna Louise Strong, In North Korea: First Eye-Witness Report. (Soviet Russia Today, 1949), 27-28.
23 Paine, The Japanese Empire, 80.
24 Cumings, Korea’s Place, 146.
25 Ibid., 145.
26 Frank Baldwin, ed., Without Parallel: The American-Korean Relationship Since 1945. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), 5.
27 Kim, With the Century.
28 Paine, The Japanese Empire, 82.
29 Cumings, Korea’s Place, 182.
30 Young, 28.
21 Strong, 27.
32 Henry Heller, The Cold War and the New Imperialism: A Global History, 1945-2005. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006), 68.
33 Strong, 37.
34 Ibid.
35 Cumings, Korea’s Place, 169.
36 Ibid., 178.
37 Ibid., 176.
38 Ibid., 175.
39 Ibid., 177.
40 Ibid., 183.
41 Cumings, The Korean War, 39.
42 Michael Schaller, “America’s Favorite War Criminal: Kishi Nobusuke and the Transformation of U.S.-Japan Relations,” Japan Policy Research Institute, JPRI Working Paper No. 11. (July 1995).
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid.
45 Bruce Cumings, “A Murderous History of Korea,” London Review of Books, Vol. 39, No. 10, (May 18, 2017).
46 Cumings, The Korean War, 41.
47 Ibid., 41.
48 Ibid., 42.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid., 147.
51 Ibid., 154-155.
52 Paine, The Japanese Empire, 92.
53 Kim, With the Century.
54 Ibid.
55 Ibid.
2 Paine, The Japanese Empire, 92.
56 Stephen Kinzer, “Wilson perfectly embodies U.S. hypocrisy. That’s why we should remember him.” Politico Magazine, December 6, 2015. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/12/woodrow-wilson-center-princeton-foreign-policy-213419#ixzz3tb4S5BjY
57 Ibid.
58 Fromkin, 295; Kinzer.
59 Kinzer.
60 Kim, With the Century.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid.
66 V.I. Lenin, “The Tasks of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party in the Russian Revolution.” Lenin Collected Works. (Progress Publishers, Vol. 23, 1964), 355-361.
67 Kim, With the Century.
68 David A. Andelman, A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today. (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2008), 126.
69 Ho Chi Minh, “The path which led me to Leninism,” Selected Works of Ho Chi Minh Vol. 4, (Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960).
70 Domenico Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History. (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), 139.
71 V.I. Lenin, “National and colonial questions,” Lenin’s Collected Works, 2nd English Edition. (Progress Publishers, Moscow, Vol. 32, 1965), 144-151.
72 Ho.
73 Kim Il Sung, “For a free and peaceful new world,” (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, April 29, 1991).
74 Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the Persian Gulf Crisis and the Federal Budget Deficit by George H. W. Bush, September 11, 1990.
75 Damian Paletta and Julian E. Barnes, “Yemen unrest spells setback for U.S.,” The Wall Street Journal, January 23, 2017.
76 Minutes of the Second Congress of the Communist International, Seventh Session, July 30, https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/2nd-congress/ch07.htm
77 Paine, The Japanese Empire, 111.
2 Jean-Paul Sartre, Preface to The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Franon. (New York: Grove Press, 1963.), 21.
78 Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Soviet Communism: A New Civilization. 3rd ed. (London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1944), xxi – xxiii.
79 Jon Letman, “USAG Humphreys: The Story Behind America’s Biggest Overseas Base,” The Diplomat, November 6, 2017. https://thediplomat.com/2017/11/camp-humphreys-the-story-behind-americas-biggest-overseas-base/