The War Against the Working Class

by Will Podmore

  Still no peace

  But at last the Armistice was signed in July 1953. Eisenhower accepted the deal that Truman had rejected: the US government, not the DPRK, changed its position. General Mark Clark became the first US general to agree to end a war with no official victor. The Chinese and Korean forces had ‘fought the world’s greatest power to a standstill’ and defeated its plans to occupy all Korea and invade China.30 The American people rejected the war and its author: Secretary of State Dean Acheson admitted that the war ‘demolished’ Truman’s administration.

  In the five years after the 1953 Armistice Agreement, the US government broke all the terms stopping it turning the ROK into a military and nuclear base. The Agreement banned the introduction of qualitatively new weapons, but the US government introduced nuclear weapons.31 The US government backed the military dictatorships which ran the ROK from 1960 to 1987, even when General Chun Doo-hwan’s regime killed 2,000 pro-democracy demonstrators in Kwangju in 1980. It also broke Article 15 of the Agreement by starting a blockade of the DPRK which it has maintained ever since.

  In the 1950s and the early 1960s, the DPRK grew by more than 20 per cent a year. As Cumings observed, “Industrialisation on the Soviet model made North Korea perhaps the fastest growing postcolonial country in the world in the 1950s and 1960s.”32 Machine-building and metal-working industries’ share of the economy rose from 1.6 per cent in 1944 to 31.4 per cent in 1967. Industrial output grew from 16.8 per cent of GNP in 1946 to 57.3 per cent in 1970. Between 1946 and 1987, the proportion of industrial workers in the population grew from 12.5 per cent to 57 per cent. A CIA study “acknowledged various achievements of this regime: compassionate care for children in general and war orphans in particular, ‘radical change’ in the position of women; genuinely free housing, free health care and preventive medicine; and infant mortality and life expectancy rates comparable to the most advanced countries until the recent famine.”33

  After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the DPRK faced huge problems. The US government maintained its punitive sanctions. The Russian government cut its oil supplies to the DPRK by 90 per cent. Nicholas Eberstadt, of the American Enterprise Institute, forecast ‘The coming collapse of North Korea’ in the Wall Street Journal as early as 25 June 1990.34 In 1992, Aidan Foster-Carter, Honorary Senior Research Fellow in Sociology and Modern Korea at Leeds University, forecast that the DPRK would collapse by 1995.35 Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz said in June 2003, “North Korea is teetering on the brink of collapse.”36

  In 1993, the DPRK withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, so it was no longer bound by its provisions. In 1994, the USA and the DPRK signed the Agreed Framework, the only agreement ever signed between the two countries.

  In 1995-96, the DPRK suffered catastrophic floods, hurricanes and drought. The 1995 floods wrecked 330,000 hectares of arable land just before harvest time, destroying nearly two million tonnes of grain (half the year’s harvest) and three million tonnes of emergency grain stores. The floods made five million people homeless. The damage cost the country $15 billion. In 1997, drought destroyed 70 per cent of the country’s corn. In 2000-01, the country suffered the worst drought in its history.

  Despite all these hardships, the DPRK honoured the 1994 Agreement. It carried out its one specific commitment, to suspend its plutonium production facilities (Provision I.3). It warned that if the US government did not supply the promised energy sources, it would have to restart its nuclear power programme.

  The US government, on the other hand, failed to install the promised 2,000 megawatts of nuclear-powered generating capacity to replace the DPRK’s plutonium-producing reactors. It did not normalise political and economic relations, as it had promised, and it did not give ‘formal assurances against the threat or use of nuclear weapons by the United States’ (Provision III).37

  In January 2002, President George W. Bush named the DPRK as part of the ‘Axis of Evil’ and named it as a target in the Nuclear Posture Review and again in September in the National Security Strategy. The DPRK declared that it had the right to develop nuclear weapons in response to these US threats. In October, the DPRK offered to shut down its nuclear programme if the US government committed itself again to normalise relations and not to attack the DPRK. The US government refused, and rejected any more negotiations. In December, the US government cancelled its promised oil shipments. The US government had torn up the treaty.

  In 2005, Bush wanted the UN to impose sanctions on the DPRK; China, Russia and the ROK refused. In 2007, the US government still had 37,000 troops illegally occupying the ROK and planned to spend an extra $11 billion tightening its grip there. The Defence Minister of Japan, the US government’s main ally in the region, sought a law allowing Japan to launch a pre-emptive strike on the DPRK.

  The DPRK had every right to defend itself against threats to its existence. Even ROK President Roh Moo-hyun pointed out, “North Korea professes that nuclear capabilities are a deterrent for defending itself from external aggression. In this particular case it is true and undeniable that there is a considerable element of rationality in North Korea’s claim.”

  NATO’s illegal attack on Libya showed that if a country gave up its nuclear programme, it would be more vulnerable to attack. Within days of the NATO attack, a senior North Korean official said that NATO’s 2003 deal, that Gaddafi gave up his nuclear programme in exchange for better relations with the West, had been ‘an invasion tactic to disarm the country’.38 The NATO powers would not bomb nuclear-armed North Korea the way they bombed Gaddafi’s denuclearised Libya.

  Chapter 10

  Vietnam and South-East Asia

  Colonial wars

  At the end of World War Two, across South-East Asia, the major colonial powers, Britain, France and the Netherlands, sought to restore their rule. But the peoples of all South-East Asia’s countries had no wish to be ruled in the old way. The French government sent armed forces into Vietnam and Laos, and the Dutch government sent troops into Indonesia. The British and US forces in the region did all they could to assist the French and Dutch governments.

  In late 1945, the Labour government sent troops to Indonesia. They rearmed Japanese troops, who had killed 3.7 million Indonesians during their occupation and who now killed another 7,000 Indonesians. The Royal Navy ferried in Dutch troops. The British forces killed more than 15,000 Indonesians.1

  The Labour government also sent forces to Malaya to restore Britain’s colonial rule. Malaya was the Empire’s biggest asset. Between 1949 and 1953, it sent £204 million in profits, interest and dividends to shareholders in Britain. The war lasted from 1948 to 1960. Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer, who was both High Commissioner and Director of Operations, admitted that the people of Malaya opposed British rule when he said, “If only I had the support of the Malayan people I could bring this war to a speedy ending.” The government called the war ‘the emergency’ because, as the Colonial Secretary admitted, “if we called this war we should presumably have to deal with our prisoners under international Conventions, which would not allow us to be as ruthless as we are now.”2

  The army forcibly resettled 1.2 million people, a seventh of the population, into barbed wire-enclosed ‘strategic hamlets’ that were no better than concentration camps.3 British forces used chemicals to destroy food crops. In 1955 alone, the RAF dropped 5,089 1000-pound bombs, 5,712 500-pound bombs, 2,660 20-pound fragmentation bombs and 3,096 rocket projectiles.4

  Templer said he used “special squads of jungle fighters … they will really be ‘killer squads’ (though I promise you I won’t call them that, with a view to the questions in the House.)”5 British forces sometimes massacred innocent civilians. A subaltern serving with 6th Malay Regiment wrote in 1953, “No Chinese rubber tapper is safe when we search an estate, my men are trigger-happy with Chinese, and several platoon commanders have had to plant grenades on tappers and call them bandits when their men have made
‘a small error in judgement’.”6 British forces effectively operated a shoot-to kill policy in Malaya.7 An estimated 4,000 civilians were killed.

  Historians have detailed the repression. Bruno Reis pointed out, “In the Malayan campaign manual there was a detailed section devoted to Emergency Regulations. However, the dominant tone was enabling not restrictive: it was oriented towards showing how this special legislation could be put to the best possible operational use. These regulations included: the right to shoot without warning in war areas; or in all areas after due warning; or in order to prevent captured insurgents from escaping, which amounted to a potential blank cheque for summary executions; as well as virtually unlimited powers of detention, deportation, resettlement and collective punishment.”8 The manual laid down a mandatory death penalty for carrying arms, and life imprisonment for providing food or other support to the rebels. As Calder Walton wrote, “during the Emergency, Malaya effectively became a police state.”9

  All this left a dreadful legacy: as Caroline Elkins stated, “repressive laws and undemocratic institutions, not peace and progress, were the primary bequest of the British to Malaya.”10 Christopher Hale summed up, “The Emergency War in Malaya was a nasty and brutal business that had unintended consequences which punish and divide the people of Southeast Asia to this day.”11

  But this war was all too typical of Britain’s wars to keep the empire. Between 1945 and 1968, the British state deployed its military forces overseas more often than either the USA or the Soviet Union, in more than 20 countries in nearly every region of the world. These were dirty wars. As military historian David French asserted, “British counter-insurgency doctrine, as it was practised in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus, deliberately targeted the civilian population. Coercion took various forms, ranging from cordon and search operations, collective punishments, detention without trial on a sometimes massive scale, right up to the creation of free fire zones. But in every case civilians were always in the front line.”12 As Hale noted, “Violence was integral to ‘the British way in counter insurgency’.”13

  Douglas Porch wrote of these wars, “most proved to be protracted, unlimited, murderous, expensive, total-war assaults on indigenous societies. … the true key to success was pitilessly to target anyone and anything that sustained the insurgency. In this way, colonial warfare simply boiled down to national displacement and ruining the countryside by making it unlivable. … imperial Britain’s small wars retained their dirty, violent, racist character ...”14 As he summed up, all these wars resulted in “the institutionalization of collective punishment, torture, resettlement, internment, special night squads/ferret forces/counter gangs, and RAF terror bombing for imperial policing. The key to success was to rebrand these kinetic methods as hearts and minds and prosecute it out of public view. … villages might be bombed from the air, shelled, burned, or simply knocked down, wells poisoned, crops fumigated or destroyed, livestock slaughtered, the wounded executed, and the population displaced.”15

  Vietnam’s victory

  Vietnam, like Korea, was until 1945 a single united country. In 1945, the people of Vietnam made their revolution and evicted the French, in the first overthrow of a colonial state, and President Ho Chi Minh declared the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), establishing state power in the north of the country.

  But in October, the Labour government authorised British troops ‘throughout Southern French IndoChina, to maintain order in support of the French government’. British forces assisted the French coup against the Viet Minh administration in Saigon and imposed martial law throughout South Vietnam. Their commander, General Douglas Gracey, boasted, “I was welcomed on arrival by the VietMinh … I promptly kicked them out.” The British and US governments divided Vietnam, supposedly temporarily.

  From 1946, French governments fought to reimpose their colonial rule over Vietnam. But the Vietnamese people gradually wore down the French forces. Finally, the French risked a set-piece battle at Dien Bien Phu in April 1954. Towards the end of the battle, the French government, desperate to avoid defeat, begged the Eisenhower government to launch a huge bombing raid on the Vietminh forces. Eisenhower said that he would only intervene if the Churchill government did too. To their credit, Churchill and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden refused. Eisenhower then tried to get the Australian government to intervene. It too refused. Its allies forced the US government not to intervene.

  This Vietnamese victory crowned their successful struggle. As American historian Fredrik Logevall summed up, “The Battle of Dien Bien Phu was over. The Viet Minh had won. Vo Nguyen Giap had overturned history, had accomplished the unprecedented, had beaten the West at its own game. For the first time in the annals of colonial warfare, Asian troops had defeated a European army in fixed battle.”16

  But in their eight-year war, French forces killed 175,000 Vietminh fighters and at least 300,000 civilians. The French wrecked much of the country. When they left, they dismantled hospitals and stripped factories of tools, machinery, even lightbulbs.17

  Vietnam’s 1953 Law on Farm Land Reforms confiscated the farms of colonial and feudal owners, landlords and capitalists, and gave the land to more than half of all families, under the slogan of ‘farms to the cultivators’. Ho Chi Minh tried to curb any excesses. When a people’s tribunal had a woman landlord executed, he said, “The French say that one should never hit a woman, even with a flower, and you, you allowed her to be shot!” On 8 February 1955, at a conference on land reform, he said, “Some cadres are using the same methods to crush the masses as the imperialists, capitalists, and feudalists did. These methods are barbaric. … It is absolutely forbidden to use physical punishment.”18

  At the 1954 Geneva Peace Conference, the British, French, Chinese and Soviet governments agreed, “In their relations with Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, each member of the Geneva Conference undertakes to respect the sovereignty, the independence, the unity and the territorial integrity of the above-mentioned states and to refrain from any interference in their internal affairs.”19 President Eisenhower pledged the USA not to violate the Accords. The four governments, and the USA, all promised to back ‘general elections which will bring about the unification of VietNam’.20 These ‘free general elections by secret ballot’ were to be held under UN supervision in July 1956. The Final Act of the Accords defined Vietnam as one state and nation. Part 6 stated, “the military demarcation line is provisional and should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary.”

  On 21 July 1954, a US government spokesman pledged that it ‘will refrain from the threat or use of force to disturb [the Accords] … [and] shall continue to seek to achieve unity through free elections’. But, as they all knew, Ho Chi Minh would have won about 80 per cent of the votes in an election. So the US and British governments backed the regime in the South, the Republic of Vietnam led by President Diem, when it attacked those calling for an election. As American historian George Herring commented later, “Violating the letter and spirit of the Geneva Accords, the United States backed Diem’s refusal to participate in the national elections.”21 The regime killed 76,000 people between 1954 and 1961. American historian Joseph Buttinger noted, “thousands of Communists as well as non-Communist sympathizers of the Vietminh were killed and many more thrown into prison and concentration camps … all of this happened more than two years before the Communists began to commit acts of terror against local government officials.”22 Douglas Valentine, the historian of the USA’s Phoenix programme, concluded, “Diem’s security forces terrorized the Vietnamese people more than the VCI [Vietcong infrastructure].”23

  The US government attacks Vietnam

  Successive US governments had no intention of honouring their pledges. Walt Rostow, President Kennedy’s deputy special assistant for national security affairs, said on 28 June 1961, “The sending of men across international boundaries … is aggression.”24 But the Geneva Accords ha
d explicitly stated that the demarcation line between the North and South of Vietnam was not an international boundary. So when the DRV sent men into the South, it was not aggression. But when the USA sent men into Vietnam, it was aggression.

  Walter Lippmann affirmed, “the easy way to avoid the truth is to persuade ourselves that this is not really a civil war but is in fact essentially an invasion of South VietNam by North VietNam. This has produced the argument that the way to stabilize South VietNam is wage war against North VietNam.”25 The claim that a country called Vietnam was ‘invading’ another country, also called Vietnam, surely raised questions in people’s minds.

  The US government violated the Accords’ neutrality provisions by giving huge support to Diem. It carried out covert military operations and psychological warfare against the North.26 Kennedy started the war when he sent 16,000 military ‘advisers’ to Vietnam, far more than allowed by the Accords.27 Some of these ‘advisers’ fought alongside Diem’s army units and a hundred of them were killed. US pilots flew combat and bombing missions.28

  Kennedy never wanted negotiations.29 As Logevall commented, “In 1963, the Kennedy administration opposed any move to bring about an early diplomatic settlement, as it had since it came into office and as its predecessor had done before that. From January 1961 to November 1963, the administration adhered firmly to the position that the insurgency in the South had to be defeated and that no diplomacy should be undertaken until that result was ensured. Negotiations should be entered into only when there was nothing to negotiate.”30

  Kennedy’s successor, President Johnson, also opposed negotiations. In the US election of November 1964, the American people voted for peace and got war. Logevall noted, “Goldwater’s general Vietnam policy before election day would become Johnson’s Vietnam policy thereafter. A Herblock cartoon some months later got it right – it showed LBJ looking into a mirror and seeing Goldwater’s face staring back at him.”31 Johnson promised ‘no wider war’ and then sent more than 500,000 US troops. The supposed rationale was the ‘domino’ theory. As Wyoming Democrat Senator Gale McGee told his colleagues, “If Vietnam goes, Cambodia goes, Thailand goes, Malaysia goes, Indonesia goes, the Philippines go …”32 Except that they didn’t go. Even the dominos did not believe in the domino theory.