Blowback - S3 Episode 1 - “Stop Me Before I Kill Again”

Episode Date: July 25, 2022

A new season, a new story: The Korean War. To listen to the rest of season 3 right now, visit www.blowback.showAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

And coming up here, And coming up here, we expect a briefing by defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. It should happen in just a couple of minutes. This is live coverage on C-SPAN. But I mean, the three countries in the axis of evil are each different. Each represents a danger to the world. And they're quite different in their circumstance. Yes.

Is there a military option on the table for preventing North Korea from manufacturing nuclear weapons? Well, let me just put it this way. The task of the department, one of the assignments of the department, is to prepare for a whole host of contingency. Is our rhetoric in any way responsible for pushing them to the point where they feel like they have, the only option that they have is to pull these restrictions off and start going down the road again of building nuclear weapons? That's an interesting question. One of those like, stop me before I kill again, that type of thing. I mean, really, their actions are a result of decisions by the leadership of the country.

The leadership of the country is currently repressing its people, starving its people, has large numbers of its people in concentration camps, driving people to try to leave the country through China and other methods, starving these people. Their economy is in the tank. People at all levels are unhappy with that leadership. It is a government that has made a whole host of decisions that had been, nothing to do with us. I don't know why they decided they wanted to have those concentration

camps. I have no idea why they decided that they wanted to end up after a relatively few years with an economy that's 136th the size of South Korea's. Think of that. Here are the same people on different sides of a line and the GDP in South Korea is 36 times or something like that, that of North Korea. Why would they do anything they do? Welcome to this last night about this last sign? Welcome to blowback. I'm Brendan James. And I'm Noah Colwin.

And welcome to season three, episode one. We are back against all odds. Thank you to everyone who listened to seasons one and two of the show. As usual, without you listening, we would not be able to come back for another season. And for those who are new, who are just coming to the show here for the first time, you can listen to both of those previous seasons, the first one on the Iraq War, the second season on Cuba. You can listen to those for free wherever you get your podcasts. But right here, right now, we of course have a new season, a new story.

And that is the story of the Korean War. Do you know anybody can help me cook? Cook? No, I don't know any cooks. I don't know anything about cooking. What's the matter with him? My dad was a cook during the Korean War. Something very bad happened.

Ever since, you can't get him near a kitchen. Shell shocked. Oh, yeah. But that has nothing to do with him. Right off the bat, before we get into it, we should probably mention that in addition to our new season and our new story, we also have a new setup, a new system for putting out the show. Yes, if you are hearing this, this episode is a free episode.

But if you want to hear the rest of the season, all you got to do is go to our website, www.blowback.show, and click the big old button that says subscribe. You just put in your payment information and bam, you get the whole season all at once, fully ready to binge if you want. And that is not all. There will also be for subscribers a whole host of goodies from outtakes and music and discount codes for upcoming things we're going to be putting out. We'll list all of that at the end of this episode, but the point is you get all of it in one shebang. So head over to blowback.com. If you haven't already, subscribe and join us for our third season. So without further ado, let's go.

All right, are you ready for my intro? Yes. So in the famous words of Billy Joel, Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television, North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe. Now, we could simply leave the story there. But I say let's try and dig a little deeper this season. Let's begin with the simple question. Why Korea? Thank you.

Inspired. Wonderful. It is so important to alert our audience, really, who we're dealing with here. NBC News has confirmed that North Korea, North Korea has fired a ballistic missile. A ballistic missile test sure to get America's attention. Jeffrey, chilling to say the least, but what does today's news tell us about North Korea's capability? We have just confirmed with a senior U.S. defense official that, in fact, North Korea has launched a ballistic missile. They say it demonstrated the North's ability to strike the U.S. West Coast.

You said recently it could possibly hit New York. North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. I am skeptical of North Korea. I don't think that that makes me an unusual individual in this country. I'm skeptical of North Korea. Anything that might cause the collapse of that weird, isolated, repressed, poor place. They will be met with fire and fury. They started pledging the third.

they would denuclearize the Korean Peninsula in the early 90s. Atrocities being committed throughout North Korea, including, quote, extermination, murder, enslavement. They have dropped out of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. Torture, imprisonment, rape. They've mastered and completed multiple nuclear fuel cycles. And persecution on political, religious, racial, and gender grounds. That's a lot.

As a way to discriminate, the regime groups people into a class system. This is really important stuff. Please pay attention. Our next guest couldn't agree more. She's a North Korean defector. North Korean defector. And the North Korean's indoctrination in anti-Americanism starts extremely young as one defect to remember.

And they would eat the rats and then they would get sick and some of them would die. Yeah. And then the rats would eat them. Yeah. This is Kim Jong-un, ruler of North Korea. He commands the world's fourth largest military. He has nuclear weapons.

and his family has ruled over their people using violence and terror for over 70 years. Scared about North Korea? You aren't scared enough. In America, the Korean War is usually referred to these days as the forgotten war. You have, for example, the title of a thick military history book, America in Korea, a Forgotten War. There's an article here on Korea from the New York Times in 2018, Forgotten Conflict. And here's, of course, a blurb for the popular history book, The Coldest Winter by David Halberstam. The Korean War, Forgotten No More, you get the idea. But this widespread attempt to officially relabel the Korean War as forgotten,

to supposedly recover the war's significance in history, or to honor American troops who fought in it, it has another effect. If something is forgotten, then it can't have really been too important in the first place, right? Something happened there, we now acknowledge. The first hot war of the Cold War, essentially the prequel to the war in Vietnam is how it's presented. In fact, by far the most popular depiction of Korea in American culture, the TV show MASH, I would think, was in fact using Korea, the Korean War, to comment on the contemporary war. war at the time, the Vietnam War. Even the most popular piece of culture about the Korean War isn't really about the Korean War. And the North Koreans have suffered because the United States

has done everything we possibly could to destroy the economy of North Korea. We've done everything we possibly could to boost the economy of South Korea. And then we condemn them because they are backward and because their people are starving. So as we rattled off there with some of those articles and blurbs, we have remembered now that once upon a time there was a war in Korea. Great. But in collectively treating it as a quote-unquote forgotten war, in tipping our hats and moving on once again, it makes you wonder, is this new official, unofficial designation of the forgotten war just another way of averting our eyes from what actually happened there? Maybe that's why Bruce Cummings, the preeminent historian, he writes of this as less of a

forgotten war and more of an unknown war. That's because the forgotten war allows the U.S. and people remembering the war in the U.S. to obscure why things are the way they are today. We could obviously destroy North Korea with our arsenals. We're told that North Korea is both the ultimate evil and a ridiculous punchline, an existential threat and a pathetic basket case. All this, even as we hear, from South Korea about dictatorships, permanent military bases, and soul-crushing hyper-capitalism. In the popular coverage of the Korean Peninsula, there is still no real explanation for these things. No sense of the origin of why there even is a North Korea and South Korea, and no

reckoning at all of America's role. If you look at a picture from the sky of the Korean Peninsula at night, South Korea is filled with lights and energy and vitality and a booming economy. North Korea is dark. It is a tragedy what's being done in that country. In her book, Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, scholar and friend of the show, Susie Kim, who you'll hear from this season, she remarks on this statement you just heard from our old friend Donald Rumsfeld. Quote, North Korea has serious problems, but what is the precise nature of the tragedy. A closer look at the process of creating the image that image of light

Rumsfeld spoke of reveals a more complicated picture. A product of modern technology, it is a composite of multiple images from repeated orbits around the Earth with sophisticated algorithms to adjust for anomalies such as fires and lightning. In other words, it is not an image the naked eye could see from the sky, nor an image that speaks for itself as Rumsfeld would have believe. It is a constructed image made possible only through sophisticated engineering. It is worth pondering to what extent other images of North Korea are deployed to fit certain premises. Rumsfeld's conclusion linking light and energy with a booming economy, Kim writes, implies that economic growth is an inherent good, and that without economic growth,

there is only tragedy. However, as unrestrained consumption of energy comes, undergrowing scrutiny, it is no longer clear how desirable it is for so much light to flood such uneven patches of the globe. North Korea is not the only place in the world without as much light as South Korea or Japan. Vast inhabited stretches of Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and China do not come close to the amount of electricity consumed per capita in the United States and Europe. Kim concludes, North Korea is seldom thought to have a history worth examining. Through the lens of the Cold War, it is consigned to the dustbin of history as an anachronistic relic of a Stalinist state. Taking a closer look, she writes, may produce inconvenient truth, perhaps better left ignored,

for fear that North Korea's problems may not be its problems alone. I'm thankful for being able to believe, in spite of everything, that somehow, some way, the unity we've got here in the Johnson family will someday spread to men and nations throughout the world. So, what is the history, the conventional history, of the Korean War? The story goes that the United States, actually, the United Nations, came to the defense of the newborn nation of South Korea in the summer of 1950, after communist hordes rushed over the 38th parallel. These North Koreans, under the command of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin,

were intent on turning the entire peninsula communistic. In other words, the typical story paints the Korean War as a case of aggressive communist expansion and how the U.S. would contain it. You can find this story, both boldly and more subtly stated, in plenty of popular accounts of the war. But there is another way to understand the war, one that has perhaps the benefit of more recent study and evidence. Unlike the idea of a Cold War setpiece, a sneak attack by the Soviets on the democratic startup nation in South Korea,

we can see this as an escalation of what was originally a truly Korean war, an inter-Korean conflict fought between Koreans, because before a couple of American military bureaucrats split Korea in two, there had long existed a conflict between nationalists, communists, Japanese collaborators, a whole host of political forces. And it's acknowledged that that conflict would have been resolved within the Korean peninsula, were it not for the United States' arrival after June 1950, which, considering that the war dragged on for three more years and claimed millions of lives, gives the American involvement quite a different meaning and quite a different legacy. In this regard, it's also useful to look at the case of Korea, particularly in the

North, as a story of decolonization, not only in the way that they cleaned house after the Japanese occupation, but also how they sought to prevent it happening again under the United States of America. Both North and South Korea, in journeys that were extremely difficult and at times brutal, sought in very different ways to build self-reliant, independent, and strong economies and societies. Charlie says that he met you during the Korean War. Yeah. I was a conscientious objective.

But he didn't agree with that. But we got to be a long ago, all right? As a matter of fact, we got to be very good friends. The outbreak of the Korean War is remembered as a surprise, as a one-size. act of aggression, that the North Korean's summer 1950 pushed southward was a violation of South Korean national sovereignty. But as we'll come to see, things aren't quite so simple. The 38th parallel wasn't an international boundary, like that between, say, Germany and Poland or Iraq and Kuwait. It was a line on a map that American officials came up with, meant to be

temporary. And no one, not either Korean leadership. Nor the masses of North and South Korea saw it as truly legitimate. Like Kim Il-sung to his north, South Korea's leader, Singman-Ree, also sought to reunify the country, knowing full well that a war against communist forces would be the only way that would happen. From a certain perspective, chiefly the American perspective, it is useful and convenient to decide that all this history starts in June of 1950. But if you begin to look for context, you have to start grappling with some very uncomfortable facts. Like, say, the fact that before June 1950, the regime in the South, with the aid of the Americans,

was massacring and disappearing people by the tens of thousands. Or the fact that the South Korean government was rife with former collaborators with Imperial Japan, which had occupied and exploited Korea for decades. Or the fact that in the North, in the DPRK, the communist leadership had not, made it to the top of the political pile because they were respected guerrilla fighters against those same Japanese imperialists. And the fact that the North, unlike the South, was undergoing a long-desired social revolution that changed everything from the distribution of land to women's rights, the labor rights, to setting up modern social services and a modern state. How many men have you killed? No way to murder it.

Your Honor, a man's war record, in Lieutenant Mannion's case, a great record certainly shouldn't be used against him. Your Honor, I'm as patriotic as the next man. But the simple truth is, war can condition a man to killing other men. I simply want to determine how conditioned the lieutenant may be to the use of firearms on other human beings. I don't quite like the question, Mr. Bigger, but I don't see how I can exclude it. Better man, sir. I know I killed at least four men in Korea. three with a hand grenade and one with my service automatic.

I may have killed others. A soldier doesn't always know. So if we weren't in Korea for the usual freedom spreading, what was the U.S. actually doing there once war broke out? Truman's infamous phrase for the war was a police action, meant to protect the South from the communistic north. In this case, the U.S. was able to call its support for a brutal government, something else entirely.

And if this sounds like an awfully big pill for the American public to swallow, that far from protecting helpless Koreans, we were instead supporting the people doing most of the killing, the press, the military, and the White House made sure there were some equally big myths in place to help choke that down.

Because of all the past over details about this war, there is one very ominous question in particular. that hangs over all of this. The question of just exactly how brutal America's war was against Korea. I mean, does it rise to the level or fit the description of something like genocide, do you think? I think it is genocidal in that it targeted a civilian population for, you know, just time and time again. Man. It isn't Benix.

It is the warmest place to hide. The war, first and foremost, obviously, changed Korea, but it also changed the United States. This season will see how the Korean War was used quite consciously to fuel the buildup of something that came to define the rest of the 20th and certainly the 21st century, something we still live with today, the national security state in America. This shaped the economy of the United States, the politics of the United States, and the material changes at work here that came after World War II and during the Korean War, also required a Cold War mythology that would go on to fester and mutate, even after America moved on

from the Cold War itself. And one thing we would really like to do in this season is place things in a moment and a time that was not self-awarely the breakout of the Cold War. That's how we see things now. And of course, therefore, how we process and understand the events at the time. But not too many people, including, you know, quite importantly, the entire leadership of countries like the Soviet Union, a big factor in the Cold War. Not everyone was planning on their being one in the first place, as we'll see. Perhaps some in the U.S. government were, but for the most part, the period leading up to, and even during the Korean War, was not felt as the beginning of the Cold War, but the aftermath, just a few years after the most destructive conflict in human history, the Second World War. This was really supposed to be the dawn of a new era, potentially the beginning of a long piece.

Scholar Masuda Hajimo, in his book Cold War Crucible, argues that the Cold War was really not an actual description of a situation, a war being fought, but a mindset, or a fully artificial state that was built or imagined, arguably from the top down, but eventually with the participation of ordinary, Americans, in their own ways, from their own places of fear and alienation. And as we'll see, this was supposed to be the dawn of peacetime.

But America wasn't the only victor of World War II. Communists and socialists had, by sheer numbers and sheer intensity, led the resistance that defeated the Axis' powers, and this produced not only the fresh international prestige of the Soviet Union, but also great enthusiasm for communist and left-wing parties. not only in, say, Korea and China, but also in Europe. Finally, into the palace courtyard sweeps the long black car bearing one of the greatest military leaders of all time, Marshal of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin. And this was a very direct threat to the very rich and powerful United States that was now the point man of international capital after the war. In Washington, the sphere of communist subversive activities has developed into hysterical frenzy which grows

I personally certainly do believe that the Communist Party should be outlawed. However, I'm not an expert on politics or of what the reaction would be. If I had my way about it, they'd all be sent back to Russia or some other unpleasant place. And so we will see a new red scare, which would mobilize post-war America against this new and growing reality. But it did not simply target communists at home, or, abroad. It actually targeted anyone really of any political persuasion who was fighting for civil rights, women's rights, labor rights. Now, in fact, many of those organizing around these things were communists, but many were not. And on the civil rights question, for example, you really

see the official racism of the day back in America in the late 40s and early 50s demonize not only the Asian hordes abroad in China and Korea, but also the black and brown enemy within. People we would now call cold warriors, but who were then referred to as senator and congressmen, they would refer to all of these people as communists. President

Truman always enjoyed playing the role of the homespun, easygoing man from Independence, Missouri. But those close to him knew that beneath this appearance, there was a hard, inflexible core of determination. In October of 1950, he prepares to meet a man who will test this strength. The flamboyant General Douglas MacArthur. Like Truman, he possesses an iron

will. Like Truman, he is accustomed to wielding great power. So these two men will meet in a fateful rendezvous. The encounter is the prelude to a bitter controversy that will shadow both their lives. This is a story of men in crisis. This season is stuffed with characters. We're going to be meeting the soldiers, the workers, the villagers, the apparatchiks, the diplomats, the politicians, and the military brass. We'll brush up against some characters whom we've met before, from Richard Nixon to John Foster Dulles, to Nikita Khrushov to John F. Kennedy. And as usual, we'll highlight here in our first episode some of the larger-than-yxed

and life figures of the people that you'll be seeing in this story. Kim Il-sung was one of the founders of modern-day North Korea, or the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. He was born around Pyongyang, into a family that challenged the Japanese colonial authority that ruled Korea in the first part of the 20th century. Kim followed this path into his young adulthood, and before long, found himself fighting in the deathly terrain

of Manchur. in northern China, the first collaboration between the communists of that country and those in Korea. The Japanese invaders found Kim to be such a particular threat or thorn in their side that they unleashed a Get Kim squad, which was specifically dedicated to hunting down this man who would become the future leader of North Korea. Kim was not, as the canned history goes, a puppet of Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong. Scholarship of the past few decades has revealed him, in fact, to be very much his own man with his own agenda. His ultimate goal in the story we're telling would be to unify his country come hell or high water after its artificial division by the

United States in 1945. Although, if you would rather take it from the United States or South Korean propaganda disregard all of this because that official line is that Kim Il-sung was in fact an imposter. Vice President Nixon receives a cordial welcome from President Singman Rhee as he visits Seoul on his round-the-world goodwill tour. During his day, Mr. Nixon gave further assurances of America's devotion to the Korean cause. Now, Singman Rhee was the name of Kim's opposite number in South Korea. Unlike most of his fellow political elites in the south, Rhee was not a one-time collaborator with the Japanese colonial government.

But while Kim was sweating it out and risking his life in the trenches of Manchuria, Rhee was living a comparatively tranquil life in the United States, studying under Woodrow Wilson, taking the respectable road. A nationalist and anti-communist, Rie would return to Korea after World War II and partner with the U.S. military government to create a deeply corrupt anti-communist police state that fought more or less a war within its own borders far before June 1950. One American officer summed up Rhee like this. Politically, he stands somewhere between Chen Kaishek and the late Benito Mussolini.

Rie was actually a pain in the ass for the Americans to deal with, in fact. But he was deemed the only figure who could hold together a southern regime and prevent a left-wing government from taking over the whole peninsula. This is not merely another phase of the Korean campaign. This is a fresh, unprovoked, aggressive act, even more immoral than the first. Dean Acheson represents the prim and proper philosopher cast in the U.S. government at this time. A learned guy with a genteel and respectable approach toward carving up nations and lining up the chest pieces of the world. You may remember him already as that kind of guy since he was called in for one last,

job during the Cuban Missile Crisis we discussed last season, during JFK's ex-com meetings. And indeed, this season, we'll see Atchison in his prime, leading President Harry Truman through the Korea crisis, in fact, sometimes making the actual decisions on behalf of the president. Because to Atchison and his camp, the North's attempt to unify the country in defiance of the United States was a matter of prestige and economics. He once said, quote, prestige is the shadow cast by power. end quote, and the North Koreans had clearly challenged this. The revolutionary alliance that was building up in the east

was simply not a part of Atchison's strategy for the region, which he thought of as a quote-unquote great crescent, linking Northeast Asia with the Middle East. Atchison, while helping Truman wage an anti-communist war and build an anti-communist state, would still himself become the target of hardliners at home, who considered anything less than a total war on communism at home and abroad, a sign that you were in fact a fifth column, and in Atchison's case, a blue-blooded red.

The United States policy of let the dust settle was continued, permitting nationalist China to become an easy victim of communist propaganda, subversion, and finally military conquest. Speaking of hardliners, this season contains a very interesting group, a lobby, you might say, better known as the China Lobby. This was a network of politicians, businessmen, and operatives, who, in the wake of communist wins in mainland China in the 1940s, backed the disgraced and deposed former dictator, Genkaisimou Chang was for many decades

the presumed lifetime leader of the Republic of China. His nationalist party, the Kuomintang, had for decades held the real prestige, even from communist states like the USSR. Chang and his fellow nationalists waged a brutal civil war against the rag-tag communists for decades until those rag-tag forces, led by Mao Zedong,

won out in 1949. After that, Chang and his cronies fled to Taiwan, then called Formosa, one of the few remaining parts of China that had not been united by the revolution. From there, he set himself up as the once and future king with a lobby of supportive American elites, pushing President Truman for a more aggressive policy

to get Chang back in charge of the Chinese mainland. Some, such as Peterdale Scott, argue that Chiang Kai Sheck played a larger role than is usually acknowledged in starting the Korean War. And he cites friend of the show Bruce Cummings on this point. Sir John Pratt, an Englishman with four decades of experience in the China Consular Service and the Far Eastern Office, wrote the following in 1951.

The Beijing, communist, government, planned to liberate Formosa, Taiwan, on July 15, 1950. And in the middle of June, news reached the State Department that the Singman-Ree government in South Korea was disintegrating. The politicians on both sides of the 38th parallel were preparing a plan to throw Singman-Ree out of office and set up a unified government for all Korea. Thus, the only way out for Chang Kai Sheck was for Rhee to attack the North, which ultimately made Dean Atchison yield and defend nationalist China in Taiwan. And we'll see Chang and his American pals throughout our story, so remember to keep an ear out for the General Isimo. America's number one soldier, General Douglas MacArthur, celebrates his 70th birthday in Tokyo.

The city school children surprise him with a special greeting in English. Finally, of course, there is General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Far East. Douglas was raised by his mother, Pinky MacArthur. And Pinky, like other mothers at the time, who were primping their children for the elite, actually dressed Douglas in a dress until he was a preteen. She taught him to worship his dead father,

a military man himself, who went on to govern one of the first U.S. colonies in the Philippines. And when Douglas went to West Point, Pinky moved across the street. The two would have dinner every night. As historian David Halberstam put it, Pinky was always there to remind Douglas there was more to conquer. After rising through the ranks, MacArthur ended up commanding U.S. forces in the Pacific during World War II, fleeing his childhood colonial home of the Philippines as the Japanese swept the region.

MacArthur returned, however, to reclaim not only the Philippines, but the Pacific Theater. This, at least, was his larger-than-life legacy after the war. And indeed, he won the Medal of Honor and accepted Japan's surrender. So when the Korean War broke out, President Harry Truman, or that Jew in the White House, as MacArthur once called him, Truman knew who to call. A member of Team Chiang Kai-Shek and a right-wing darling, General MacArthur, will struggle in our story to impose his own version of the war over Truman. Not a war limited to Korea, in fact, but a final showdown with China, the Soviet Union, and global communism. Every once in a while, a tough, uncompromising subject comes along that corresponds to the

screaming headline of a newspaper. It's real, it's true, and sometimes it concerns you. That subject came along in the startling, shocking news about our prisoners of war in Korea. Now, we're going to start the season, as we've done the last two, with a deep dive on Korean history. from its heyday as a unified kingdom across the peninsula, right up through World War II. And we'll talk about how the Cold War and the Korean War didn't seem so inevitable at the time they took place. During the Second World War, under FDR and Stalin, the U.S. and USSR actually seemed poised to cooperate beyond their fight against fascism. At least, that's what many communists, all the way up to Joseph Stalin, we're hoping.

Then, at the close of World War II, we'll look at how the infamous 38th parallel was drawn across the Korean Peninsula. And despite the agreement to divvy up Korea, like, say, Germany, Koreans themselves pushed to unify the country. In the summer of 1950, war breaks out between north and south. How did it happen? And why? Once the U.S. gets involved and invades the peninsula, the war starts to unfold, we see conflict within the American ruling class, with guys like Truman on one side and guys like MacArthur on the other. And this conflict as to whether the Korean War should remain localized in Korea or whether we should take the fight to the communist home base up in China and the USSR plays out in real time.

And in Korea, Americans will also experiment with new kinds of warfare and new kinds of weaponry. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a recent, terrifying memory. So is the months and months of firebombing of Japan that preceded those A-bombs. And the military leaders who commenced that strategy, including, of course, General Curtis Bombs Away LeMay, well, those are the men now running the show in Korea. Korea absorbed more American bombs in three years than the U.S. dropped in all of World War II. Speaking of Japan, although it was only a couple years before an enemy of the United States, Japan was now a happy and willing member of the post-war community.

And so collaboration with our former Axis enemy was in order. This meant that people like Japanese officer Shiroishi, a biochemical weapons expert, war criminal, and leader of Japan's Unit 731, were quietly brought under American protection. rather than prosecuted for their crimes. Were guys like Ishi and his particular line of work useful? And finally, when things seemed to have reached a stalemate, Truman, his secretary of state Dean Atchison,

and the Joint Chiefs, all fumbled for a way out of war in Korea that did not mean starting a world war with China. And that meant confronting the most popular man in America. General Douglas MacArthur. More sobering, at least for me, in terms of the research that I've done, kind of some of the intelligence reports written by U.S. intelligence officials that were part of the U.S. military occupation forces, some of them that are quite aware, actually, of what's politically at stake, right, about in their report just how badly formulated U.S. policy is. Well, South Korea and the U.S. maintained that Kimu Song was an imposter as a matter of high policy for decades. Even now, America refuses to treat North Korea as yet another nation in the fabric of the international world order and instead punishes them with sanctions. The North Koreans also believe that if Kim Jong ill,

hadn't given them nuclear weapons, they would go the same way that Saddam and Gaddafi went. So as in previous seasons, we've interwoven our story here with interviews to shed light on the finer points of the history. And this season, you'll hear from people such as Susie Kim, Bruce Cummings. You'll hear from activists such as Christine On and Elizabeth Beavers, a filmmaker, Anna Bernowski, and journalist Tim Sharrock. And if you want to get the full interviews with those guests, and others, the full interviews with them will be in the bonus episodes that come with this season if you sign up. The topics that we talk about with them range from the Cold War economy to women's role in the Korean Revolution to contemporary American-Korean relations. You'll also

get access to all of the previous seasons of blowback about Iraq and Cuba, ad-free. And that is not all, because we know many of the fans very, very kindly enjoy the music of this show. This season's soundtrack is coming out soon, as usual. But, And subscribers will also get an entire bonus feed of extra music, demos, outtakes, and yes, even some unreleased tracks from previous seasons. And lastly, subscribers are going to be getting discount codes for the forthcoming run of blowback posters. The fantastic artwork provided by Josh Lynch, as you've seen for seasons two and three by now. And stay tuned on August 1st for the soundtrack. It'll be called The Blue House by My Alter Ego.

The Great Vorelli. It'll be available on Spotify, Apple, and if you want to shell out a few bucks for it, it'll also be on Bandcamp, the Blue House by the Great Vorelli. So with that, let's go, and let's head into episode two. Sign up for season three right now

at www.blowback. That is, www.blowback.show. And hit the big button that says subscribe. We'll see you on the other side. Goodbye. Harry Truman Doris Day, Red China, Johnny Ray, South Pacific Walter Wichel, Joe DiMaggio Joe McCawley, Richard Nixon, Stu to Baker, Television, North Korea, South Korea, Maryland, Monroe. Rosenberg's H-bomb, Sugar, A, Panone, John, Randall, the King and I, and the Catcher in the Rye,

Eisenhower vaccine, England's got a new, Queen, Moshy and Oliveracci satire and a goodbye We didn't start the fire It was always burning since the world's been turning We didn't start the fire