On the U.S. Occupation of Korea

(Letter)

4 January 2014

Dear Editor,

“U.S./Japanese Imperialists: Hands Off China!” (WV No. 1036, 13 December) states: “Behind South Korea’s rulers stands a U.S. military presence that dates back to the 1950-53 Korean War.” This omits the American post-war occupation of South Korea. With the establishment of a U.S. military dictatorship during 1945-48, a countrywide insurrectionary proletariat and peasantry were suppressed below the 38th parallel and the modern South Korean police state was forged.

Straight from U.S. victory over the Japanese in Okinawa, Gen. John Reed Hodge dispatched 21 ships, including five destroyers, to establish a military government in South Korea. Landing at Inchon on September 8, 1945, five years before the better known Korean War landing, his forces established the “U.S. Military Government in Korea” or USAMGIK in Seoul. On 16 October 1945 Syngman Rhee was flown into the South Korean capital on Gen. MacArthur’s personal airplane to put a Korean face on American occupation.

Under American tutelage, Rhee reconstructed an anti-communist police state based on Korean quislings who had served in the Japanese colonial administration and armed forces to ruthlessly oppress their own people. Now serving American imperialism and with its military backing, the same forces proceeded to suppress militant labor struggle and peasant uprisings. Even when American troops were withdrawn in ’49, U.S. military advisers and equipment remained to aid the Rhee dictatorship in mopping up what had turned into a guerrilla war of resistance.

Cold War scholars often falsely portrayed the Korean War as having suddenly begun on 25 June 1950 when North Korean forces “invaded” the south. The most distinguished historian in the English language of post-WWII Korea, Bruce Cumings, devoted much of his academic career to combating this self-serving account, as exemplified in his two-volume The Origins of the Korean War, published by Princeton University Press in 1981 and 1990 respectively. As Cumings has pointed out in his writings, the American military occupation of South Korea was a harbinger of its murderous policies in Guatemala, Vietnam and Indonesia.

Comradely,
Reuben