Gaza happened because we forgot Korea
History didn’t start on October 7th. True that. To get a deeper sense of why the shocking destruction in Gaza is happening we have to revive the memory of the war that the US waged against North Korea in the 1950s. In many ways, it was the template for all that followed.
Gaza is tiny: 365 km². The American-Israeli onslaught has destroyed something like 150,000 buildings, killed tens of thousands of civilians and maimed countless others. North Korea is 120,538 km² - about the same size as England or Greece. And yet the scale of destruction was proportionally identical. Nearly every city, town and village in that country of 11 million people was totally destroyed. Even US General Douglas MacArthur couldn’t believe what they were doing:
More civilians were killed than in the Vietnam War.
“If you go on indefinitely, you are perpetuating a slaughter such as I have never heard of in the history of mankind,” he said after his dismissal in 1951. The Americans were already preparing to do far worse.
To understand the wider story, I would highly recommend “Korea - Where the American Century Began” by former Australian Supreme Court Judge Michael Pembroke.
Trading under the nom de guerre The United Nations Command, the Americans killed millions of civilians in a revenge war for getting trounced by the Chinese in 1950. The US, assisted by New Zealand, Australia and others, killed more men, women and children than were killed in the Vietnam War - and yet, the Western media and the other adjuncts to Western power have cast a spell of amnesia, revisionism and indifference over the Western mind. By doing so, they helped ensure the lessons of history would never be learned, the war criminals would never be held to account, and it could be done again and again, all the way through to Gaza.
In 1945 US planners with the stroke of a pencil invented North and South Korea, drawing a line at the 38th parallel. In 1950 the North struck and drove the South Korean army and its allies to the foot of the peninsula. General MacArthur’s brilliant Incheon offensive undid their plans for reunification and drove the commies back behind the 38th. It would have been wise to leave it at that but President Truman and General MacArthur decided to launch a war on communism and gathered a 130,000 strong army to head all the way to the Yalu River on the Chinese border. Sensing that this was part of a broader campaign, the new Chinese government led by Mao Tse Tung made it clear a US move towards the Yalu would necessitate China coming into the war. They were ignored.
In a glorious advance northwards, some elements making it all the way to the Yalu River, taking Pyongyang on the way, the Americans and their allies walked into a trap. 400,000 Chinese, many battle-hardened veterans from recent wars against the Japanese and Kuomintang, routed the UN army who almost immediately broke and fled in sometimes disorganised retreat back across the 38th parallel.
“First our boys softened them up with napaIm,” John Wayne says in the hagiographic war movie “This is Korea!” … Then he says, “Burn ‘em out! Cook ‘em! Fry ‘em!”
So far, that’s the story of war. Ebb and flow, win some, lose some. What happened next is what we need to retrieve to consciousness.
Having been devastated in a clash of arms, the Americans now conducted terror bombing, or what New York Times journalist James Reston later memorably called “war by tantrum” in describing the US air campaign against Hanoi. Sounds familiar? We saw it after 9/11 and now in the US-Israeli war on Gaza.
The scale of the ensuing bombing of North Korea was greater than Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the firebombing of Tokyo and every bomb dropped in the Pacific theatre in WWII. Nothing was spared, all civilian infrastructure - as in Gaza - was destroyed. Crops were deliberately destroyed to trigger famine - which it did. The freshly-minted Geneva Convention made clear that the “wanton destruction of cities, towns and villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity” constituted war crimes.
The weapon that particularly scared the Koreans and Chinese was napalm.
“First our boys softened them up with napaIm,” John Wayne says in the hagiographic war movie “This is Korea!” … Then he says, “Burn ‘em out! Cook ‘em! Fry ‘em!” And they did: women, children, babies. As in Gaza, most of the fighters were underground.
The American and Australian bombers even hit their own side. A Brit was given a last cigarette in a MASH hospital. When the cigarette was removed, his lips came with it. That is napalm.
If you think all that is a shameful war crime (and what is wrong with you if you don’t?) far worse nearly happened. In Korea we came closer to nuclear armageddon than the Cuban missile crisis. Yet few people know this today.
MacArthur, who would have been wise to rest on his laurels after the triumph of Incheon, demanded the right to hit North Korea with nuclear bombs! “Between 30 and 50 atomic bombs would have more than done the job,” he told reporters Jim Lucas and Bob Considine. He separately wanted, he said, to create “a belt of radioactive cobalt” from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea.
In a late-night fit of rage, President Truman scribbled a note that has been preserved. He prepared a hit list of cities in China and Russia that would be destroyed by US nukes, writing “Moscow, St Petersburg, Vladivostok, Peking, Shanghai … and every manufacturing plant in China and the Soviet Union.”
Zhou Enlai's warnings to the Americans were ignored.
My argument is simple: because the Americans got away with murder in Korea, they carried on killing millions and preaching from high pulpits. With their servile deference, Australia, New Zealand and Europe have enabled this all the way from Korea to Gaza.
A friend movingly spoke to me recently of the Dutch Hunger Winter of 1944-1945. As in Korea and as in Gaza, food was denied to the population as a matter of policy. In the Dutch case about 20,000 died. In Gaza, according to the World Bank “96 percent of the entire population of Gaza – around 2.15 million people – face high levels of acute food insecurity.” In Korea, over a million of the more than three million deaths were from US-induced famine.
Michael Pembroke quotes Justice Robert Jackson, Chief Prosecutor for the United States at the Nuremberg Tribunal on this very point.
“If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes, whether the United States does them or Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others, which we would not be willing to have invoked against us. We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow.”
If only that were true. For his part, Reichkommissar of the Netherlands Arthur Seyss-Inquart was hanged following his conviction at the Nuremberg trials of major war criminals. If the world Judge Jackson romantically described was the real world, we need hardly guess what fate Harry Truman, Douglas MacArthur, Benjamin Netanyahu, Yoav Gallant, Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, Lloyd Austin, Rishi Sunak, Ursula Von der Leyen and Olaf Scholz would face if they had appeared before Justice Robert Jackson or his successors. In our world, under Pax Americana, do you think Justice Jackson would send them all to do the hangman’s jig or would they, as Americans and their allies have done for generations, waltz free?
Eugene Doyle
