“We know we can’t stand for peace on one foot and war on the other.”
—Eslanda Robeson1
“. . . we have killed, maimed and rendered homeless a million Koreans, all in the name of preserving western civilization. U.S. troops have acted like beasts, as do all aggressive, invading, imperialist armies. North and South of the 38th parallel, they have looked upon the Korean people with contempt, called them filthy names, raped their women, lorded it over old women and children, and shot prisoners in the back . . .”
—Paul Robeson2
Not long after his inauguration as the 45th president of the United States, Donald Trump wasted no time in racheting up tensions with the Democratic Republic of Korea (DPRK), known to many Americans as North Korea. The DPRK was accused by American media, military, and political officials of testing intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM) that possessed the capabilities of reaching American shores. Trump hurled insults at DPRK leader Kim-Jong Un, calling the head of state a “madman” and a “Rocket Man.” Kim Jong-Un lashed back by labeling Trump a “deranged” leader. The new administration’s war of words over the DPRK’s missile tests facilitated war provocations in the form of increased sanctions and military exercises directed at the “rogue regime.”
The DPRK and neighboring South Korea responded to Trump’s belligerence with manuevers toward peace. It started during the Winter Olympics when the leaders of the two countries agreed to form a joint women’s hockey team. Numerous talks between the heads of state of the DPRK, South Korea, and China ensued over the following months. The DPRK invited Donald Trump to meet with Kim Jong-Un in March of 2018. In a stunning reversal of policy, Trump accepted the invitation. When the summit finally occurred in June of that year, Trump agreed to halt joint military exercises between the U.S. and South Korea in exchange for the denuclearization of the DPRK. A step toward peace was made.
However, the corporate media and the entire ruling class saw the summit differently. Democrats and Republicans alike expressed distrust in the DPRK’s willingness to comply with the agreement. The corporate media slammed Trump for meeting with Kim Jong-Un, a sworn enemy of the American nation-state. Jong-Un was depicted as a crazed dictator that didn’t deserve a pass from an American president. Such coverage proved that the corporate media and the mainstream of both parties were just as hawkish toward the DPRK if not more so than Trump.
The American ruling establishment’s hostilities toward Kim Jong-Un are an extension of a long-standing trend in American folklore that has positioned American leaders and leaders of the DPRK on opposite ends of sanity. On one side sits the exceptional American nation-state responsible for promoting democracy around the world. On the other is the DPRK, the antithesis of American-style democracy. The DPRK is described as an impoverished and increasingly dangerous nuclear-armed “regime” with an abysmal human rights record while the United States and its South Korean ally are depicted as success stories that the DPRK must emulate, or else. Every American president since Harry Truman has upheld this narrative to some degree, whether it was George W. Bush including the DPRK in his “Axis of evil” or Barack Obama threatening the DPRK with “consequences” for its “reckless pursuit of nuclear weapons.”3
The role of American exceptionalism in the hostilities between the DPRK and the U.S. cannot be fully understood without remembering “the Forgotten War,” otherwise known as the Korean War of 1950–1953. This war really began in the aftermath of the Second World War. It was World War II that brought the defeat of Japan at the hands of American and Soviet forces. Japanese defeat led to a reconfiguration of the world order in East Asia. The decimated Japanese empire was forced to relinquish many of its colonial possessions, including Korea. The Second World War also precipitated the rapid expansion of arms production led by U.S. imperialism and its wartime allies. Incendiary and nuclear weapons were just some of the military advances made during the Second World War that would play a role in the American invasion of Korea. “In the case of “Korea”, writes Nayoung Aimee Kwon, “there was no time in its history in which actual domination did not come in the name of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘liberation’ promised either presently or ‘in due course’—often in the name of ‘freedom’ from a past hegemon from which it was supposedly being liberated by the new force.”4
As one colonial power was forced to leave Korea, another one came storming in with guns ablaze. And as one global war came to a close, another one opened. The Second World War’s finale gave way to the opening act of the “Cold War.” The Cold War was born from U.S. imperialism’s obsessive disdain for communism. The Soviet Union, then the only nation founded upon communist principles, was an impediment to the unfettered spread of American enterprise. However, the rulers of U.S. imperialism faced a major problem despite its new status as economic and military superpower in the world. That problem was the Soviet Union’s rapid economic and military development based on the collectivization of feudal agriculture, the elimination of unemployment, and the socialization of private production in service of human need. The Soviet “workers state” played a decisive role in the defeat of fascism during the Second World War and could not be ignored in the new world order that emerged after 1945. To compound the problem, one of the largest populations in the world—China—waged its own victorious revolution under the banner of communism in 1949.
Fear of losing East Asia to communism compelled the rulers of U.S. imperialism to wage war in the Korean Peninsula. Prior to the Chinese Revolution of 1949, the United States had negotiated a “trusteeship” in Korea with the Soviet Union to ensure that the Red Army would not march alongside Korean communists and nationalists to totally liberate the country from Japanese colonialism. Korea was divided along the 38th parallel in the summer of 1945, with communist committees in control of the north and Korean landlords, Japanese operatives, and American military advisors in control of the South. Independence was to be achieved within five years of the division along the 38th parallel despite the fact that the ROK, formed in 1948 as the South Korean government, restricted voting to landlords and large taxpayers. What transpired instead was an American-led war to prevent Korean independence.
The Korean War began officially on June 25th, 1950. American involvement was sanctioned by the United Nations (UN) as an American-led “police” operation to rescue South Korea from a communist takeover. Korean communists and nationalists both north and south of the 38th parallel (known commonly as the Demilitarized Zone or DMZ) had in fact marched on Seoul in 1950, precipitating the American invasion. However, narratives of American exceptionalism and innocence have played a dominant role in how the Korean War has been depicted from the very beginning. Those who know anything about the war have been led to believe that American military forces entered in response to an evil, communist uprising. The origins myth of the Korean war has been contradicted in recent years, with new research claiming that American-supported guerillas in the South invaded Northern villages as early as 1949.5 This evidence supports claims that the American-backed regime in the South was wildly unpopular and often resorted to repression in the face of popular insurgency. As Tim Beal notes in regard to the Cheju Island uprising against Republic of Korea (South Korean) forces in 1948, up to “20 percent of the population were killed or fled to Japan and more than half the villages on the island were destroyed. Even the army was not immune to the rebellion, and the 14th regiment . . . mutinied in the Port City of Yosu in October 1948.”6
Joint American-ROK atrocities would only intensify in the three years of armed conflict that ensued in Korea prior to the July 1953 armistice agreement. What was alleged by President Harry Truman to be a “limited conflict” turned into an all out American-led massacre as China’s entry into the war in the fall of 1950 raised the spectre of a fully independent, and communist, Korea. And the massacres of the war have been erased from American memory. As Bruce Cumings suggests,
The forgotten war—the Korean war of 1950–53—might better be called the unknown war. What was indelible about it was the extraordinary destructiveness of the United States’ air campaigns against North Korea, from the widespread and continuous use of firebombing (mainly with napalm), to threats to use nuclear and chemical weapons, and the destruction of huge North Korean dams in the final stages of the war.7
American exceptionalism and innocence have a large part to play in keeping the American invasion of Korea an unknown war. The relevance of these ideologies can be broken into two parts. The first is the erasure of U.S. imperialism’s ambitions and actions during the three year invasion. Second is the narrative that was devised by the American ruling class to dehumanize the Korean people. These components share equal importance as one cannot exist without the other.
The horrors imposed on the Korean people and the ambitions behind them are now a matter of public record even if most Americans are unaware of them. The United States’ combined air campaign and occupation killed three million Koreans, mostly from napalm bombs and indiscriminate killings. The damage was far-reaching, Cumings writes, drawing on his co-authored book (with Jon Halliday), Korea: The Unknown War, and the work of Conrad Crane:
Over the course of the war . . . the US air force “had wreaked terrible destruction all across North Korea. Bomb damage assessment at the armistice revealed that 18 of 22 major cities had been at least half obliterated.” A table [Crane] provided showed that the big industrial cities of Hamhung and Hungnam were 80–85% destroyed, Sariwon 95%, Sinanju 100%, the port of Chinnampo 80% and Pyongyang 75%. A British reporter described one of the thousands of obliterated villages as “a low, wide mound of violet ashes.” General William Dean, who was captured after the battle of Taejon in July 1950 and taken to the North, later said that most of the towns and villages he saw were just “rubble or snowy open spaces.” Just about every Korean he met, Dean wrote, had had a relative killed in a bombing raid. Even Winston Churchill, late in the war, was moved to tell Washington that when napalm was invented, no one contemplated that it would be “splashed” all over a civilian population.8
Air Force General Curtis Lemay reinforced this assessment in an interview decades later when he said “over a period of three years or so . . . we burned down every town in North Korea and South Korea, too.”9 The American air campaign dropped 635,000 tons of bombs on Korea and over 30,000 tons of napalm while threatening to use nuclear weapons on numerous occasions.10 On the ground, American military forces supervised South Korean forces responsible for their own kind of atrocities. Dong-Choon Kim writes that between the fall of 1950 to the spring of 1951, about 10,000 civilians were killed by ROK soldiers.11 ROK divisions often tortured and buried political prisoners in mass graves under the South’s national security law that labeled the North as a “non-state” entity with no rights the South was bound to respect.
Despite being literally forced to live underground, the Korean people waged a heroic resistance against the heavily armed American invasion and forced a stalemate in July of 1953. This brings us to the question of how the Korean War was forgotten amid the massive destruction it left in its wake. The answer has driven American foreign policy ever since and is rooted in the race-based logic of U.S. imperialism. For by 1950, the United States’ superiority on the world stage following the Second World War had already become deeply ingrained in the American psyche. This entailed the belief that the U.S. was synonymous with “good” while communism was an “evil” that must be eradicated from the world. Growing competition from the Soviet Union, China’s infant revolution in 1949, and massive upheaval in Korea threatened American hegemony and gave the ruling class plenty of targets in its anticommunist policy of containment both at home and abroad, popularly known as the “Red Scare.”
While radical labor organizers and Black freedom organizers were being labeled communists to justify racist and class-based repression from the FBI or the Ku Klux Klan, Koreans were subject to a similar anticommunist racism. Cumings explains that anti-Korean sentiment was pervasive in all spheres of American life, especially in the media and the military. Prominent publications such as the New York Times and Marshall Plan officials such as Edgar Johnson described Koreans as “fanatics,” “barbarians,” and “wild.”12 American military officials were trained to think of Koreans as “gooks,” giving fertile ground for the mass extermination campaigns that characterized American military policy during the war. Anticommunist racism followed an old formula in new clothes. It stemmed from the white supremacist and capitalist roots of the American nation-state that depended on the dehumanization of enslaved Africans and displaced Indigenous nations to develop the economic infrastructure capable of invading Korea.
The dehumanization of the Korean people rendered the true purpose of the war invisible. Anticommunist racism cloaked in American exceptionalist garb united Americans around the U.S. military and the corporate interests it served. The American ruling class wanted to stop the march of communism in East Asia so that the region would remain an “Open Door” to the profits of American monopolies and corporations. Japan was a key player in this arrangement. Its defeat in the Second World War led to the American occupation of the country, with U.S. officials guiding both its military and economic policy. In 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall pressed his successor, Dean Acheson, to have a “plan drafted of policy to organize a definite government of [South] Korea and connect . . . its economy with that of Japan.”13 The Korean War was thus a necessary precondition to securing Japan’s economic and military progress as a bulwark against the independent predations of communism spreading in the region like wildfire.
Korea remains in the crosshairs of American warfare nearly seven decades after the Republic of Korea and the DPRK agreed to an armistice. The DPRK has been economically strangled with American-imposed sanctions. Over 40,000 American military personnel conduct regular military exercises in South Korea along the demilitarized zone (DMZ).14 Japan, Guam, and Hawaii are also occupied with over 100,000 American troops stationed in military bases equipped with deadly war armaments such as B-52 bombers. Since a peace treaty has not been signed despite the progress made at the “Trump-Kim summit,” the Korean War continues on today as a “hot conflict.” The persistence of this particular war in the context of a generalized American-led project of endless warfare around the entire globe has meant that Korea continues to be mischaracterized and forgotten in the haze of the “Cold War,” decades after the fall of the socialist bloc in 1991.
And because U.S. imperialism possesses the same interests now as it did during the rise of the socialist bloc in the 20th century, the DPRK finds itself the target of an ideological war not unlike the one that existed during the Korean conflict. North Korean leadership and society has been described as a totalitarian police state. Racist tropes from the Korean war such as the term “gook” and the mockery of citizens of the DPRK as “brainwashed” and submissive are pervasive in American media and politics. Americans possess few channels in which to unmask the Korean war’s “unknown” character. This is readily seen in the difference between how the Korean War is memorialized in Korea as opposed to the American mainland. As Tessa Morris-Suzuki shows, while the Korean War National Museum in Illinois depicts American participation in the war as a triumph against communism and a victory for “democracy,” museums in the North and South of Korea tell a different story. Memorials in the DPRK portray the war as a great victory for Korean independence despite the hardship suffered, while the ROK’s status as a protectorate of America has meant that memorials in the South reinforce the largely false image of the ROK as a nation that bravely fought off the foreign threat to the North. For example, an image found in Seoul’s War Memorial “shows a large and muscular South Korean soldier embracing and looking down upon his smaller and frailer North Korean kinsman—thus simultaneously embodying messages of triumph and of reconciliation.”15 Such imagery reveals the deep influence of American power on the political system in South Korea.
The manipulation of memory is critical toward the normalization of American exceptionalism and innocence as the ideological bedrocks that justify the real-life consequences of U.S. imperialist plunder. Indeed, a close relationship exists between the inculcation of American superiority as the law of the land and the racist tropes that continue to fuel American war crimes in East Asia and the world at large. The depiction of the DPRK as a wild country ruled by insane children keen on developing nuclear weaponry in a vendetta against American democracy strips away the humanity from the Korean people both south and north of the DMZ. Without having to recognize the humanity of its “enemy,” the United States’ past war crimes against the Korean people are not only forgotten, but its current war crimes are also exonerated in the court of ruling class opinion.16 They’ve become reasonable responses to crazed dictatorships.
One of these “reasonable responses” involves threatening the DPRK with nuclear annihilation. After all, what scares so many Americans is the thought of a crazed and fanatical DPRK acquiring a nuclear bomb. As Shane Maddock notes in his book, Nuclear Apartheid: The Quest for American Atomic Supremacy From World War II to the Present, superpowers like the United States have “remained so convinced of the correctness of their respective privileged positions in the world system that they refused to make mutual concessions to achieve arms control.”17 Thus, ideologies of national superiority and exceptionalism are impossible to disentangle from popular discourses about nuclear proliferation. “Even U.S. leaders who sincerely desired to stem proliferation,” Maddock writes:
could not break free from the presumptions of national superiority that fostered nuclear discrimination. At its heart rested a variant of American exceptionalism that envisioned the United States as outside the normal constraints of a combative world system, therefore exempting Washington from most of the arguments used to dissuade other countries from acquiring nuclear arms.18
Rhetoric of an irrational enemy with whom the “rational” West cannot negotiate makes it hard for us to understand why North Korea seeks nuclear capabilities.19 And while media pundits assert that the DPRK cannot be trusted with a nuclear weapon or to uphold a joint agreement, rarely is the question ever asked: Why should the United States be trusted with a nuclear weapon, let alone 9,600 of them? Or, to take it one step further, why is the DPRK expected to “demilitarize” but the United States is not? As offensive as these questions might sound to many Americans, such sensitivity only exposes the historical amnesia and sense of moral superiority one must have to find these questions offensive in the first place.
The Korean war is but one of the first examples of how American exceptionalism creates a dialectical relationship between “national” superiority and the targeting of racialized “others” in the service of imperial aims. This phenomenon was not lost on early Black radical thinkers like Eslanda Robeson, her husband Paul, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Lorraine Hansberry who fiercely opposed the Korean War.20 “Big business wants war to keep your mind off social reform; it would rather spend your taxes for atom bombs than for schools because in this way it makes more money,” Du Bois famously remarked. “[It] would rather have your sons dying in Korea than studying in America and asking awkward questions. The system which it advocates depends on war and more war.”21 Later wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the remaining fifty foreign governments that the U.S. would overthrow followed a similar model, with American values extolled, corporate profits pursued, and the people of the targeted nations dehumanized as “terrorists,” “towel heads,” and “dinks.” Whatever public opposition to these wars existed would morph into forgetfulness or outright support, even though the American people would have as little say in their implementation as they do in domestic policies like mass incarceration or the rise of poverty. This is the real legacy of the Korean War, a legacy that the Korean people and the majority of people all over the world do not have the privilege of forgetting.