Remembering those who fell and appreciating the Winter Olympics
I went to Korea for a tour of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) and then onto Busan to pay my respects to the 516 young Canadians who died, according to the United Nations Memorial, fighting ‘Communist aggression.’ I wanted to get a feel for what took place during the 1950-1953 Korean War. I wanted to see what a new outbreak of hostilities might look like were the United States to resume bombing North Korea. I figured it was safe to travel because the Americans would wait at least until after the Winter Olympics had ended if they were planning to launch a second Korean War.
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The first observation I made upon entering the DMZ and adjoining Joint Security Area (JSA) was the eerie, Disney-like approach that the Americans employ as they scuttle around this very popular tourist attraction. Instead of Donald Duck and Daffy Duck being the tour guides, however, there are GIs with real guns, who ask the public not to take pictures of sensitive areas or to think of defecting to the other side.I was invited to descend down a 265 meter underground portal leading to where the South uncovered a two-kilometre tunnel dug by the North through solid rock using just picks and shovels. At the Dora Observatory, for a buck, I peered out over Kim Jong-un’s barren North while nearby loudspeakers blasted endless South Korean pop songs in his direction — as punishment, an effective weapon of propaganda.
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Korea remains a divided 5,000-year-old civilization. The Japanese annexed the peninsula in 1910 and after 1945 it was taken over by the Americans. Northern forces under nationalist Kim II-sung battled this new imperial power whose singular focus was to contain regional Communist Chinese influence. Syngman Rhee, a cruel and murderous tyrant loathed by his own people, was quietly installed by Washington to legitimize a deliberate policy of provoking the North.According to William Blum’s book, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions since World War II, the U.S. objective from the start relied on hundreds of illicit cross-border raids and then used northern reaction as an excuse to go to war. This madness, as the Pentagon Papers helped to reveal, emanated from a fanatical, anti-communist, proto-capitalist, McCarthyist ideology that Washington appropriated throughout Southeast Asia. The thought of the U.S. setting up dictators while young men died fighting for freedom and democracy is a disturbing, unpleasant, and often unspoken legacy of the war.
The Korean War was a crippling ground war that killed over 2.5 million people. Regardless of superior U.S. air power, the Nationalist Communists were never defeated and it took 40,000 dead U.S. Marines to bring about the current stalemate, so beware Mr. Trump. Great powers can end up losing big time if a war goes badly. Nowadays, a single nuclear tipped land-based missile, fired comfortably from hundreds of kilometers away, will send the best protected aircraft carrier battle group to the bottom. Seoul with its 25 million won’t be a Mosul, Raqqa, or even downtown Baghdad; it could take years to clear it of determined, well-armed North Koreans. Remember: new, untested military technology entirely changes the parameters of how the last war was fought. The danger is sending so many to die in a protracted, nuclear war scenario.
Not forgotten are the 40,896 young men who died the last time, with appreciation, their names inscribed forever into a grey marble “Wall of Remembrance” found at the United Nations Memorial Cemetery in Busan. The North lost 520,000 soldiers and the South a further 415,000 while fighting each other and destroying themselves — and for what? Was it about ‘containing’ Chinese Communism by American elites — an utter failure — or was it more about killing hope in people fighting colonialism and seeking an alternative, socialist way?
In the heart of the DMZ stands a statue very near the Bridge of No Return, next to where ribbons from separated family members flutter in the wind.
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It depicts a large, bronze, globe-like Korea, cut in half through the center, both ends held up firmly and being pressed back together by the peoples of both Koreas. Why? Because, from what I’ve observed, in every Korean there is a deep longing for reunification, to see their loved ones again, to be united as one country. The magic of the Winter Olympics presented an opportunity for doing so, proudly marching together as a nation under one flag, in open defiance of America’s self-interest. There is hope in such action, a promise of a united future, and a blessing for world peace.
Photo by Kornelis Klevering