It was to be expected that the Soviet occupation in the North would favor working class organizations over the land owners and business enterprisers who had prospered collaborating with Japanese rule.
After the lighting success of the North Korea army, in five weeks reuniting the peninsula, the US and its allies invaded under the flag of the UN Security Council they controlled.[3] Americans over three years bombed to the ground every Korea city and town of any size, with the exception of US garrisoned Pusan.
(Divide three thousand (Americans dead at 9/11) into two million (Koreans dead) to estimate how many 9/11s were put on the Korean people.
Obviously a flattened Korea could not have gotten back at the superpower even if it would have wanted to, though a hell of a lot of Koreans wanted to, and one can be sure a lot of Koreans still would have liked to have bombed the US back. )
in an Australian produced documentary, The Forgotten War - still- shots of young South Korean young men roped together after capture for running away from induction into the army of the Sigmund Rhee government; newsreels of substantial amounts of Koreans lining the streets welcoming the troops from the North. Lee would remember as well what we read in dozens of articles throughout the Korean War that bewailed, what the New York Times referred to as, 'the lack of will to fight' of much of the South's forces during the war, as the U.S. continually bore the brunt of the fighting.
"... archival documents during a US retreat later emerged showing U.S. commanders ordering the shooting of refugees during this period, declassified documents found but not disclosed by the Pentagon investigators. Among them was a report by the U.S. ambassador in South Korea in July 1950 that the U.S. military had adopted a theater-wide policy of firing on approaching refugee groups. Despite demands, the U.S. investigation was not reopened.
Prompted by the exposure of No Gun Ri, survivors of similar alleged incidents in 1950--1951 filed reports with the Seoul government. In 2008 an investigative commission said more than 200 cases of alleged large-scale civilian killings by the U.S. military had been registered, mostly air attacks.
Veterans of the 7th Cavalry remembered similar scenes. "I shot, too. Shot at people. I don't know if they were soldiers or what. Kids, there was kids out there, it didn't matter what it was, 8 to 80, blind, crippled or crazy, they shot 'em all," Joseph Jackman, a G Company rifleman, told the British Broadcasting Corp.[11] Norman L. Tinkler, an H Company machine gunner, remembered white-clad people coming down the railroad tracks toward the bridge, including "a lot of women and children. ... I was the one who pulled the trigger." He fired about 1,000 rounds and assumed "there weren't no survivors."[12][13] Said ex-rifleman Herman Patterson, "It was assumed there were enemy in these people."[14] Thomas H. Hacha, dug in nearby with the sister 1st Battalion, witnessed the slaughter: "I could see the tracers (bullets) spinning around inside the tunnel ... and they were dying down there. I could hear the people screaming."[15]
On July 29, 1950, three days after the killings began, the 7th Cavalry Regiment was withdrawn from those positions as the U.S. retreat continued.
Chun Wook, a journalist with the North Korean 3rd Division troops who advanced to No Gun Ri, reported finding the area covered with layers of bodies. He said about 400 people had been killed." [No Gun Ri Massacre , Wikipedia ] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Gun_Ri_Massacre]
In 2005 the South Korean National Assembly established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in keeping with its maturation as a constitutional democracy. The Commission sought to "reveal the truth behind civilian massacres during the Korean War and human rights abuses during the [South Korean] authoritarian period and the anti-Japanese independence movement and to learn about the struggle to write truth into Korea's modern history and recent evidence of U.S. and South Korean responsibility for the
massacre of civilians before and during the Korean War."
A panel discussion headed up by its standing commissioner was recently heard in heart gripping documentation reports at the International Affairs Building of Columbia University, New York, as part of a short tour of universities in the United States. The speaker was Kim Dong-choon, Standing Commissioner, South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Human ights and Peace Center, Sungkonghoe University
It should be sobering for Americans to contemplate Picasso's Korean Massacre painting of American troops shooting down women and children at Sinchon, in the North of Korea. see Picasso Korean Massacre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Picasso_Massacre_in_Korea.jpg
President Lee could not possibly be unaware of all the well documented events and suffering described above, and he surely must remember his little brother's and sister's violent deaths. But in a world of maximized universal deceit and disinformation one cannot expect Lee to act differently than all the rest of the politicians in most countries that are beholden to the amoral international private investment community that rules the world.
The fact that for years the U.S. has had enormous trade and peaceful and friendly relations with the communist governments of China and Vietnam is making a goodly number of Americans, not only Koreans, wonder why millions of Korean and Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, Latin American and African lives were sacrificed in murderously violent actions to prevent communist leadership.
Martin Luther King Jr., in his sermon 'Beyond Vietnam - a Time to Break Silence railed that all these atrocity wars and covert overthrows are to maintain unjust predatory investments, but these US wars and violent covert attacks on vulnerable nations go forward unabated in no small measure for corporate media having buried King's words along with his assassinated body. [see King Condemned US Wars http://kingcondemneduswars.blogspot.com/]
Though King's words have been discounted, we have the wisdom of forerunners of King's awaking insight in Helen Keller, Eugene Debs and Albert Einstein. And the pathetic war criminal investors, and their beholden sickly corrupted media personnel, arrogant military, horrific CIA and self-incriminating elected and appointed politicians both past and present will eventually be brought to justice in the information age. [see educational web site: Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity - http://kingcondemneduswars.blogspot.com/]
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