As with My Lai in Vietnam, the slaughter of helpless civilian people at No Gun Ri, Korea was not an isolated incident. Before, during and after the war, the United States military and its fascist puppet regime in South Korea engaged in systematic genocide against both North and South Korean people — any and all people merely suspected of being Communist sympathizers.
“When U.S. forces entered Korea in 1945, they dispersed the local popular government, consisting primarily of antifascists who resisted the Japanese, and inaugurated a brutal repression, using Japanese fascist police and Koreans who had collaborated with them during the Japanese occupation.”
— Noam Chomsky
What Uncle Sam Really Wants
Between 1945 and 1948 alone, under the direction of the U.S. military, the Sygman Rhee regime and the South Korean military murdered over 300,000 people suspected of being Communists or Socialists — even though many of the victims had valiantly fought the Japanese during WWII.
This obscene injustice could not go on forever, and war finally broke out between the Communist forces of the north which had fought the Japanese, and the U.S. which allied itself with Japanese collaborators in the South. This is exactly the same pattern of betrayal the United States followed in Vietnam.
Between 1950 and 1953 the greatest devastation was of course inflicted upon the civilian people of North Korea. The United States Corporate Mafia Government and military were terribly frustrated by the heroic determination of the Korean people and their Chinese allies to be free of American domination. To teach them the “virtues” of the American way, the Pentagon began a deliberate campaign of bloody genocide from the air and on the ground beginning in June 1950, using 20 times more napalm against the Korean people than it used in World War II. The U.S. military also used biological warfare against both the Korean and Chinese peoples.
It was during the Korean Genocide that American military personnel first started using the term “gook.” Many subhuman Americans felt it was okay to slaughter Korean children and rape Korean women because they were all just “gooks.” This sort of bestial racism is a tradition in the bloodthirsty United States military. War criminals always attempt to justify their own evil inhumanity by imagining their victims as being less than human.
Speaking at a May 19, 2001 news conference in the Koryo Hotel in Pyongyang, world-renowned human rights activist Ramsey Clark said:
“The crimes committed by the U.S. against the Korean people included mass executions of political prisoners in South Korea between September 8, 1945, and the start of the Korean War on June 25, 1950.”
“The Korean people, like the Vietnamese people, also suffered from countless massacres between 1950 and 1953 by U.S. occupying troops.”
Never ones to be outdone by mere grunts on the ground, the United States Air Force leveled all of North Korea with three years of carpet bombing. By mid-1953 not a building or structure above one story remained standing north of the 38th parallel on the Korean Peninsula. The devastation was so total that American pilots routinely complained that there were no more targets left to pulverize as they were sent out on their endless bombing missions.
And yet still they couldn’t break the will of the Korean people. In spite of the overwhelming superiority of firepower possessed by the United States, the war bogged down to a stalemate on the ground. Enraged and humiliated at being fought to a standstill by mere peasant armies, American politicians and military leaders were, like any mafia, desperate to maintain their ruthless, all-conquering reputation. In defense of nothing but their psychopathic egos, American leaders actually planned to use nuclear weapons extensively against the people of North Korea.
Perhaps getting wind of this, Chinese leaders saved millions of lives by suddenly agreeing to a large prisoner exchange. This led to a reduction in tensions, and a few months later an armistice agreement was signed.
But by the end of America’s genocidal assault nearly 3 million civilian people in North Korea had died horribly, either directly from American bombing and massacres or from war-related causes such as starvation and disease.
The events in Sinchon County are a typical example of American war crimes in Korea. Sinchon was considered a Communist stronghold when American troops occupied the town in September 1950. By the time a North Korean and Chinese counter-offensive was able to drive them out in early December 1950, racist American troops had already managed to mass-murder 35,383 people — one out of every four of the county’s 140,000 inhabitants.
To this day a local museum carefully chronicles the extent of U.S. war crimes in Sinchon: Americans burned 5,484 dwellings and destroyed 618 factories, public buildings and irrigation facilities, committing the cold-blooded murder of tens of thousands of people in the process.
Then, when American troops were forced to retreat, they took revenge on women and children. In order to make the world safe for democracy, American troops murdered 900 helpless civilian people in an air-raid shelter by pouring gasoline into the shelter’s ventilation hole and setting it on fire.
In Wonam-ri, North Korea, American troops locked 502 women and their children in two storehouses and then burned them all alive too. This was done in December 1950, while American politicians and military leaders preached from every pulpit about the terrible threat of “Godless Communism.”
Unknown hundreds of thousands were ruthlessly slaughtered in South Korea as well, in many places like No Gun Ri. Predictably, the evil U.S. Army brass are trying to cover it all up and smear those few soldiers who have been honest enough to admit to these American crimes against humanity.
But even its own bloody records indict the United States Army:
“No refugees to cross the front line. Fire everyone trying to cross lines.”
8th Cavalry Regiment communications log
two days before the No Gun Ri massacre
“American soldiers played with our lives like boys playing with flies.”
— Chun Choon-ja
a 12-year-old Korean girl in 1950
survivor of the No Gun Ri massacre
“The hell with all those people! Let’s get rid of all of ’em!”
— U.S. Army Capt. Melbourne C. Chandler
heavy-weapons company commander
after speaking by radio with superior officers
“We just annihilated them.”
— Norman Tinkler
U.S. Army machine-gunner at No Gun Ri
Related pages
U.S. Biological Warfare Against the Korean People
Weapons of American Terrorism: Chemical & Biological Weapons
Neighborhood Bully: American Militarism
interview with Ramsey Clark
Related sites
Korea Truth Commission
http://www.koreatruthcommission.org/english/english.html
“If you’ve found your way to this site, you’re probably someone who believes in justice. You may already be aware of the terrible massacres of unarmed and innocent Korean villagers at the hands of U.S. troops during the 1950/53 Korean War. But if you weren’t aware of it, it’s not your fault. For fifty years it has remained one of the best concealed chapters of U.S. military history.”
A NEW LOOK AT THE KOREAN WAR
by John H. Kim
http://www.usa-outofkorea.org/jkim.html
“The U.S. Army, Air Force and Navy were directly involved in the killing of about several million Korean civilians — both South Koreans and North Koreans — at many locations throughout Korea, including Masan, Sachon, Tanyang, Iksan, Changyong, Wegwan, Ducksung, Sinchun, Wonsan, Pyongyang, etc. Several hundreds of civilian refugees were blown apart when the U.S. Army blew up Wegwan and Ducksung bridges in S. Korea.”
KOREA
http://www.iacenter.org/korea_top.htm
Index page for a collection of articles and reports about American war crimes during the Korean genocide, as well as current events in Korea.
KOREA TRUTH COMMISSION / INTERNATIONAL ACTION CENTER
http://www.iacenter.org/korea_tc.htm
“Since September of 1999, evidences of more than 160 instances of US-led military attacks on more than 2.5 million Korean non-combatants (Washington Post, June 13, 2000 ) during the Korean War have surfaced. Hundreds of thousands of children, women, and elderly people are believed to have been massacred as a result of orders from the top U.S. military leadership.”
The People’s Korea
http://www.korea-np.co.jp/pk/
This North Korean website has important information on American war crimes during the Korean Genocide. In particular, see:
The Korean War http://www.korea-np.co.jp/pk/military/category36.htm This is an index page for many articles and documents. An example:
DPRK Foreign Ministry memorandum on GI mass killings http://www.korea-np.co.jp/pk/135th_issue/2000032902.htm
This page has a great deal of information, including the amount and type of bombings, the civilian targets and the many massacres carried out by American troops.
“The fact-finding group of the Women’s International Democratic Federation, in its report on the investigation made into the [American] GIs’ atrocities in the North Korea during the war, said: ‘Every fact proves that this was a war of mass destruction, in which much more houses and food rather than military targets and war supplies were destroyed and more women and aged men than combatants killed. This war was against life itself.’”
Bibliography
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A Nonconformist History of Our Times
by I. F. Stone
Monthly Review Press, 1952; ASIN 0-316-81770-8
Rogue State:
A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower
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U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since WWII
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Princeton University Press, 1990
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Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
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The Destruction of Dresden
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What Uncle Sam Really Wants
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The Beast Reawakens
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Bloody Hell:
The Price Soldiers Pay
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The Fire This Time:
U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf
by Ramsey Clark
Desert Slaughter:
The Imperialist War Against Iraq
by the Workers League
Against Empire
by Michael Parenti
The Sword and the Dollar:
Imperialism, Revolution and the Arms Race
by Michael Parenti
Lies My Teacher Told Me:
Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
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Deadly Deceits:
My 25 years in the CIA
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1492 — Present
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Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda
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International Terrorism in the Real World
by Noam Chomsky
Western State Terrorism
Alexander George, editor; essays by Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman, Gerry O’Sullivan and others
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American Foreign Policy in the Post-Cold War Era
by Noam Chomsky
Pressure Drop Press, 1991
The Culture of Terrorism
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The Politics of News Media
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The Hidden Persuaders:
What makes us buy, believe – and even vote – the way we do?
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War, Lies & Videotape:
How media monopoly stifles truth
edited by Lenora Foerstel; multiple authors