John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PETER LEE IN CHECKPOINT ASIA
“80 Years of Injustice: The Joint, Serial, and Ongoing Betrayal of Korea by the United States and Japan”
Good summary with many tidbits people might not be aware of.
I suggest America's different treatment of Japan and Korea came down to what we see America doing still today in other parts of the world.
The President of Syria is completely unacceptable to Washington while the creepy prince running Saudi Arabia is just fine, as is the brutal Generalissimo running Egypt.
And, of course, the war criminal running Israel, a man whose brutality we've all witnessed for years, is also just fine.
Syria's Assad, while not democratically elected, remains fairly popular despite years of imposed war and hardship. And by most standards, he is a reasonable ruler, showing, for example, a great deal of tolerance for religious differences, of which there are many in Syria.
How the United States chooses to treat any two given nations clearly has little to do with principles like democracy, human rights, or even decency.
It has only to do with how important the state is in America's geo-political calculations and plans, and it has to do with how independent-minded the countries' leaders are. Do they put good old American interests first or not?
Oh, there is one way that America treated Japan and Korea almost the same.
In its bombing.
During the time each of them was an opponent, they were ruthlessly bombed.
While Japan suffered the two atomic attacks (twelve were planned until Japan offered unconditional surrender), setting a terrible precedent for future wars, the fire-bombing of Japan was actually on a still grander scale.
They not only ran out of "primary targets," there weren't any "secondary" ones left towards the end. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not important targets.
North Korea suffered 3 solid years of carpet bombing. By the Pentagon's own estimates, twenty percent of the country's entire population was killed.
This is not a widely known fact, but it sure explains why North Korea would want some nukes.
The effort in North Korea served as a model for Vietnam. Keep it non-nuclear – although nuclear weapons were considered in both wars – but bomb the crap out of them.
The United States killed about 3 million people in Vietnam by various horrible methods - carpet bombing, napalm, and cluster bombs, apart from all the landmines and Agent Orange. "Hero" pilot John McCain, for example, was bombing civilians on the day he was shot down.
