Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

by Chalmers Johnson

  Between Japan’s surrender on August 15, 1945, and the installation of Syngman Rhee (who claimed to be a former Princeton student of Woodrow Wilson’s) as president of the Republic of Korea in the southern half of that peninsula on August 15, 1948, the Koreans themselves tried desperately to create a postcolonial government of their own, just as the Czechs struggled to create a democratic government under President Edvard Benes up to February 25, 1948. They were ultimately undone by superpower rivalries. Fearing that the United States was setting up Japan as its chief client in postwar Asia, the Soviets held on to Korea above the 38th parallel as a bulwark against Japanese influence. There, they promoted and endorsed a Communist government made up of former guerrilla fighters against the Japanese.

  The Americans were more ambiguous about what they were doing. General John Hodge and his U.S. Army veterans of the Battle of Okinawa were the legal successors to the Japanese in South Korea. Only in 1948 did they hand over power to Rhee, and even then they retained operational authority over the South Korean armed forces and national police for another year. Preoccupied with the security of Japan and indifferent to Korea’s status, Hodge ended up thwarting the efforts of patriots such as Kim Ku to reconcile with the North Koreans. Instead, he moved to support Syngman Rhee, who himself was supported by and who staffed his new government with numerous former collaborators with the Japanese whose main credential was their firm and reliable anticommunism. The forces under Hodge’s command then trained and supervised Rhee’s armed forces in the suppression of any and all dissenters—invariably labeled “Communists”—and waited to see whether Rhee could consolidate his power.

  Following the departure of the Japanese, the people of Cheju, a remote island off the extreme southern coast of Korea, governed themselves through patriotic “people’s committees” that were socialist but not Communist in orientation, as even General Hodge acknowledged. On April 3, 1948, Rhee’s police fired on a demonstration commemorating the Korean struggle against Japanese rule. This incident led to a general insurrection on the island against the police and their attempt to integrate Cheju into the new South Korean regime. Rhee responded with a campaign similar to that of the Indonesian Army in East Timor or of the Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo. His police carried out a merciless assault on the people of Cheju, killing from thirty thousand to sixty thousand of them in the course of a few months and forcing another forty thousand to flee to Japan. On May 13, 1949, the American ambassador to the Republic of Korea, John Muccio, wired Washington that most rebels and sympathizers on Cheju had been “killed, captured, or converted.”2

  By far the most ruthless of Rhee’s agents was a paramilitary vigilante organization called the Northwest Youth League, composed of refugees from North Korea, whom the U.S. Army tolerated with full knowledge of their reputation for brutality. The American occupation authorities, in fact, directly funded and trained a similar organization, the Korean National Youth League, under its leader Yi Pom-sok (known to the Americans as “Bum Suk Lee”), as a right-wing paramilitary organization. The “youths” were aged eighteen to fifty. Northwest Youth League members, who were not funded by the U.S. Army, were, of course, rabidly anti-Communist but they also were interested in securing their own livelihoods by acquiring wealth and wives in South Korea. They were responsible for the widely documented sadistic treatment of Cheju’s women, including forcing female survivors of families they killed to marry them and cede their land to them. Some of these men still reside in Cheju today, having profited from the island’s contemporary status as a beach and golf resort. In April 1996, when President Kim Young-sam used the beachfront Cheju Shilla Hotel as the site of his summit meeting with President Clinton, no American journalist mentioned Cheju’s past, much less the similarity between Clinton’s mindless visit to Cheju and former President Reagan’s mindless visit to a cemetery for former SS soldiers in Bitburg, Germany, in 1985.3 At an August 1998 international conference on the fiftieth anniversary of the Cheju uprising held in Cheju City, many speakers noted that Clinton had played golf on the unmarked graves of Syngman Rhee’s victims.

  For at least forty-five years after the Cheju massacre, any Korean who so much as mentioned it was liable to arrest by the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) or its successors, followed by beatings, torture, and a long prison sentence administered under the terms of the National Security Law, enacted in December 1948 and still on the books in 1998. Only in that year did the director of the Agency for National Security Planning, the KCIA’s successor, promise that abuse of the law for political purposes would stop and Koreans would no longer be arrested for minor violations like praising Communist North Korea.4 Only in 1995, after the arrests of former presidents Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo for mutiny, corruption, and murder did the Cheju Provincial Assembly finally feel secure enough to create a committee to investigate the massacre, whose research produced the names of 14,504 victims. The committee’s best estimate of the total killed was thirty thousand, about 10 percent of the island’s population. Some 70 percent of the island’s 230 villages were burned to the ground and a staggering 39,000-plus homes destroyed.

  The consolidation of a pro-Soviet regime in North Korea and a pro-American one in South Korea led to a war that began in June 1950. The North Koreans have consistently claimed that this was a war of national liberation against American imperialism, while Americans have generally characterized it as an international conflict in which North Korea invaded South Korea. It was without question a civil war among Koreans, some of whom in the South had collaborated with the Japanese colonialists and some of whom in the North had fought against them. From my personal perspective as a veteran of the period immediately following the armistice of 1953, it was also clearly a war between the United States and China fought on Korean soil.

  Shortly after North Korea invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950, the United States intervened in force. In the autumn of that year, after American troops had invaded North Korea, China intervened in force. From June 1950 to early 1951 the war was primarily between U.S. troops and the North Korean army. Starting in March, it became a Sino-U.S. war, and its nature was transformed. The first phase of the war saw massive North Korean, American, and Chinese military movements combined with guerrilla struggles behind the lines. The later Sino-U.S. war bogged down in World War I–style trench warfare along what would later become the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Regardless of one’s view of the Korean War, the position of South Korea from the war down to the present has been that of a client of the United States.

  In June 1950, the United States took its intervention against the North Korean attack to the U.N. Security Council. The USSR was then boycotting the Security Council to protest an American refusal to allow the new People’s Republic of China to occupy the seat reserved for China. On July 7, 1950, under conditions never again repeated, the Security Council, free of the threat of a Soviet veto, authorized a “unified command under the United States” to defend South Korea. Fifteen nations other than the United States contributed forces to this “unified command.” The United States on its own initiative then created the “United Nations Command” as the operational unit through which it would fight the war. The Republic of Korea also placed its troops under this American-controlled command. Thus, from 1950 to the present, the U.N. commander in Korea was and remains a United States Army general.

  The United Nations itself was not, however, a party to the Korean War. There was no U.N. operational control over any aspect of the hostilities, and the United States, the designated occupant of the “unified command,” reported to the United Nations only after the fact. Cynics say that the first U.N. commander, General Douglas MacArthur, never sent the United Nations anything other than his press releases. Under international law the U.N. Command is an alliance of national armies commanded by the United States, even though there are today no other members left except for the United States and South Korea. The armistice agreement of July 27, 1953, was signed by General Mark W. Cla
rk, the U.N. commander; Marshal Kim Il-sung of the Korean People’s Army; and General Peng Dehuai, commander of the Chinese People’s Volunteers—but not by any representative of South Korea. This is one reason why today North Korea insists upon negotiating with the United States, not with South Korea.

  Another important result of these arrangements is that the South Korean armed forces—today, some 670,000 men, 461 combat aircraft, and a navy that includes 44 destroyers, frigates, and corvettes as well as 4 attack submarines, with a budget of around US$16 billion—is operationally part of a military command structure headed by an American general. No matter how hard the U.S. government tries to finesse the matter, the South Korean army, except for some elite paratroop and special forces units, is as much under American military control now as it was at the time of the Cheju massacre.

  When in 1961 and again in 1979 this South Korean army carried out military coups d’état and in 1980 massacred civilians protesting military rule in the city of Kwangju, ordinary Koreans inevitably saw the Americans as co-conspirators. On November 30, 1994, forty-one years after the armistice and seven years after the birth of Korean democracy, the United States finally transferred peacetime control over South Korean forces to the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff. In times of war, however, command reverts to a U.S.-dominated Combined Forces Command. China and Russia today have friendly diplomatic and economic relations with South as well as North Korea, whereas the United States still has 37,000 combat troops occupying 65,500 acres of South Korean territory at 96 bases and has no formal relations with North Korea.

  In the years since the Korean War, the United States has had to deal with many difficult situations in its South Korean satellite brought about by popular demands for democracy and independence from the United States, which in many ways resembled the 1956 Hungarian and 1968 Czechoslovak uprisings for democracy and independence from the Soviet Union. The major difference was that whereas the Soviet Union relied primarily on its own armed forces to suppress these popular movements, the United States entrusted repression to the Republic of Korea army, whose leaders ruled South Korea from 1961 to 1993. The most important of these situations was the suppression of the Kwangju uprising of 1980, which bore many similarities to the Hungarian uprising of 1956.

  The comparison is instructive. At the end of fascist rule in 1945, the Hungarians tried to establish a popularly supported government. In elections held late in that year, six political parties put up candidates. The Independent Smallholders Party emerged with 245 seats, the Communists with 70, the Social Democrats with 69, and the National Peasants with 23. These four major parties formed a coalition government, but power increasingly flowed to the Communists because of the presence in the country of the Red Army—exactly as happened in South Korea because of the presence of the U.S. Army. By 1948, most non-Communist leaders in Hungary had been silenced, sent into exile abroad, or arrested. In 1949, Hungary officially became a people’s democracy under Matyas Rakosi, a Communist trained in Moscow, who was secretary-general of the Hungarian Workers Party.

  Hungary was, of course, not divided into Soviet and American zones. The Allied powers had concluded a peace treaty with Hungary that came into force in September 1947. It called for the withdrawal of all Allied armies except for the USSR’s. Soviet troops were to be stationed in Hungary to maintain lines of communication to Red Army units in the Soviet zone of occupation in Austria. In April 1948, Hungary entered into a treaty of “friendship, cooperation, and mutual assistance” with the USSR in which both parties pledged military assistance to the other if they once again became victims of aggression from Germany or “any state associated with Germany.” The Hungarian army was expanded well beyond the limits authorized in the peace treaty.

  In July 1955, the occupation of Austria came to an end; the last Soviet units left Vienna on September 19, 1955. Immediately preceding the signing of the Austrian peace treaty, the USSR and its seven people’s democracies united in the Warsaw Pact, aimed at NATO and a “remilitarized Western Germany.” Under the terms of this alliance, the Soviet Union stationed its 2nd and 17th Mechanized Divisions, with a strength of about twenty thousand men and six hundred tanks, in Hungary.

  Rakosi and the Communists ruled Hungary with an iron hand, utilizing mainly the hated State Security Police (the AVH) to crush all dissent. In June 1949, in an interparty struggle, Rakosi arrested the foreign minister, Laszlo Rajk, charged him with an attempt to overthrow the “democratic” order, and had him hanged. Six years later, in March 1956, following the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, at which Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev revealed the extent of Stalin’s tyranny, Rakosi made a similar move to de-Stalinize his own country. He revealed that Rajk had been condemned on “fabricated charges.” No doubt Rakosi’s mistake was that he was still in political control and revealing his own, rather than someone else’s, criminality. Widespread protests followed, and the Russians ousted Rakosi in July 1956, replacing him with Erno Gero, a party hack who did not last out the year. In October 1956, Laszlo Rajk and other victims of the 1949 purge trials were ceremonially reburied, with large Hungarian crowds in attendance.

  The autumn of 1956, following the Soviet 20th Congress, saw the first “thaw” in the Communist world. China launched its campaign to “let a hundred flowers bloom” (that is, to invite criticism of the regime); Poland took its first tentative steps toward greater independence from the USSR; and in Hungary, starting with Rakosi’s fall, people looked forward to a softening of the regime. This mood lasted no more than a year anywhere in the Communist world, but at the time optimism was prevalent. Gero’s regime ordered an end to the compulsory teaching of Russian in Hungarian schools and some other cosmetic reforms. Students and intellectuals felt bold enough to meet and discuss such subjects as ending single-party rule and asking Soviet troops to go home. They called for the return to power of Imre Nagy, who had been premier from 1953 to 1955, following the death of Stalin, and was reputedly a moderate. An old Communist, a member of the party since 1918, Nagy had lived in Moscow for some fifteen years and returned to Hungary with the Red Army in 1944. His moderation consisted primarily of opposition to the secret police and their activities. Rakosi had attacked Nagy as a deviationist and had him expelled from the party.

  On October 23, 1956, in the new atmosphere of mild intellectual ferment and optimism, an incident occurred in downtown Budapest that led to a general insurrection and the mobilization of Russian forces in Hungary. The State Security Police, intensely unpopular and universally feared, opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators and killed a number of students. In the melee that ensued, ambulances with red crosses sped to the scene; when their doors opened, AVH reinforcements dressed in the white coats of doctors but armed with machine guns emerged from them.5 Outrage over the killings and deception led to the Budapest uprising.

  Over the succeeding five days fighting broke out between students and workers wielding Molotov cocktails and Soviet tanks trying to negotiate the narrow streets of Budapest. Not a single instance was recorded of Hungarian troops fighting on the Soviet side against their fellow countrymen. Even the Soviet troops themselves seemed reluctant to push forward with the attack. As the U.N. report noted, “Soviet forces normally stationed in Hungary or Romania had been affected by their surroundings. . . . The civilians whom they fought included women, children, and elderly people. [Soviet troops] could see that the people were unanimous in their fight against the AVH and foreign intervention; that the men whom the Soviet Army was fighting and the prisoners who were captured were not fascists, but workers and students, who demonstrably regarded Soviet soldiers not as liberators, but as oppressors.”6

  On the morning of October 24, Imre Nagy, having been readmitted to the party a week earlier, was elected to the Politburo and hastily appointed prime minister. It was a gesture designed to calm the crowds, which by then had broken the power of the AVH, while the Soviets were taking losses in the street fighting. The events of O
ctober 24 and 25 were extremely confused, and people did not know whether Nagy was actually in power or even whether he was fully on their side until later in the month. On October 25, Janos Kadar replaced Gero as first secretary of the party, and Gero fled to the USSR. Only on October 27 was Nagy finally able to form a government, into which he invited both Communists and non-Communists as ministers. The people of Hungary then accepted Nagy as their leader, having concluded that although he was a Communist he was also a good Hungarian. In the few days remaining to him, Imre Nagy ordered a cease-fire (which the insurgents honored), asked the Soviet Union to withdraw its forces from Hungary, ordered the AVH abolished, released all political prisoners, withdrew his country from the Warsaw Pact, and asked the international community to defend Hungary’s neutrality. This was obviously far more than Khrushchev and the other Soviet leaders had bargained for or were prepared to countenance.

  On November 4, 1956, at 5:20 in the morning, Nagy announced over Radio Budapest that Soviet forces in battle formation had invaded the city with the intent to overthrow the legal government of Hungary. This second Soviet attack, using troops from central Asia who had been led to believe that they were being sent to Egypt to fight against British and French “imperialists,” was swift and thorough.7 By eight A.M. that same morning, Soviet tanks were in control of the Danube bridges. Imre Nagy, Laszlo Rajk’s widow, and several other democrats and women and children sought refuge in the Yugoslav embassy. The Soviet Union promised them safe passage out of Hungary, but the bus taking them from Yugoslavia’s embassy delivered them not to the border but to the headquarters of the Soviet military command. They were never heard from again. In 1958, the Hungarian government announced that Nagy had been secretly tried and executed.