Chapo Trap House - 648 - No More Targets feat. Brendan James & Noah Kulwin (7/25/22)

Episode Date: July 26, 2022

It's Blowback Season 3 Day! The boys are joined by Traitor Brendan James the occluded producer and his comprador running dog Noah Kulwin to talk Korea, the forgotten war. Topics include: why Korea is forgotten while Vietnam never goes away, popular misconceptions of the North Korean people and government, the fruitiness of American general Douglas MacArthur, allegations of the American use of bio-weapons during the Korean War, and much, much more. For all things Blowback go to: blowback.supportingcast.fm For all our upcoming live show dates + tickets, go to: chapotraphouse.com/live

And by the way, Rocket Man should have been handled a long time ago. Little Rocket Man, Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and for his regime. The United States is ready, willing and able, but hopefully this will not be necessary. That's what the United Nations is all about. Will could come up a little, if you don't mind. Coming up, coming up, up, up, up. Speaking. Get in there.

How's that? How's that? For some reason he's quiet to me, but I can still hear everybody. Me too. I don't know what it is, but it's fine. All right. Oh, that's better. Well, just my own fucking life.

Okay. There we go. All right. You're listening to the Chopo Trap House amateur hour. We're here with professional rounds and buffoons running around here, but you got the morangatangs got into the freaking recording studio or playing with the knobs and buttons. If everyone could hear that, we're all trying to get our half hard dick into a woman's pussy. That's what we think was on the other side of the glory hole.

I think it was a smoking hot woman's. Definitely a 10 out of 10 smoke show on the other side of that hole, cut the wall of the men's bathroom. We were 50% hard and just jammed it in there. All three of our dicks are trying to go through the glory hole at the same time, like the three stooges. Stooges out. The dowager's apartment.

Get out of here. Shout ahead. Okay. This is Chopo amateur hour. We're here today interviewing professional, professional, neatly produced podcast blowback. It's the blowback boys. I hope you guys, hey, hope everyone out there is beating the heat. We're killing it today with two cool fellas by the name of Brendan James and Noah Colwin.

We are talking season three of the amazing professionally produced podcast blowback boys. How's it going? Howdy. It's all right. It's all right. I don't mind the more spontaneous kind of free flowing atmosphere of this show. I don't think I would ever really want to associate myself with it in any way beyond being a guest.

Well, it's like, it's like when you're a kid and you go over to your friend's house and it's kind of dirty, but he is the cool M rated video games. Yeah. This is rated M, this podcast. Absolutely. Rated M for, for men in a glory hole. Yes. Okay.

Boys, it's so good to be, I mean, by the way, Brendan, I mean, like, I don't think you, I mean, you'll never be associated with Chopo trap house. So I just want to make that a hundred percent. You'll never, ever be associated with his name has been rent for the escutcheon and burned. The producer vanishes. The included producer. Yes.

Yes. Off your ass out of all those pictures of us. Next. Thank you. But boys, we are, we're here to talk blowback season three. It's dropping today. It's the premier day. So first let me ask you, how is the premier going?

You know how those overseas box office? I mean, are you going to need to be saved by that or does domestic BL look baffo for blowback season three, the Korean Chronicles? I don't know. I prefer the Chronicles of Korea as in the style after the Chronicles of Riddick. We had to, for overseas markets, we had to edit out the gay kiss that we did. Yes. But I think that, I think that that doesn't, that doesn't affect the spirit of the show

taking that out. So. It's been very in America from American podcast to have two host kiss, you know, the Chinese version of blowback season three, you know, it's a hearty handshake. It's been a very tastefully edited out, but I mean the message, the message, the revolutionary message stays true. Absolutely. Also, there's an added little bit about the necessity of the else, the People's Liberation

Army of China to defend the Taiwan Straits at all costs against American incursions. We do kind of have that in the show. Yeah, really? Right. So that's not wrong. Let's get into it. Season one, the Iraq war, season two, Cuba, season three, Cuba. Korea.

I just love that's how John F. Kennedy called it that. Like people were waiting for the fucking, they were waiting for missiles to rain from the sky and scour the flesh from their bones and they were hearing the president talk about Cuba until. Well, I mean, that's actually what they, that's why they called the video game that they, it was because of that, because of how JFK pronounced Cuba. Well, also there's a clip I think we played in season two where I think it's during the debate with Nixon.

JFK is like, we are receiving word that Castro is a Marxist, that Raoul Castro, he calls them Raoul. Raoul. You've heard that Ray from Star Wars is a Marxist, and I was just like, Raoul, what is it? Yeah, I like Boston. It's like a random number generator as accents. You just like, you've no fucking idea what's, you know, like what word you come up with,

what they will have, what they will churn out at the end. It's chaotic. So not, not Cuba, not Cuba, not, not Raoul, we're talking Korea. And I guess what I want to begin with you is that, I guess, just like in the American historical imagination, the Korean war is most often referred to as the forgotten war, or, you know, a war forgotten no more, or, hey, what happened with Korea? Was that a thing? Oh, we forgot it.

Oh, well. And originally, like in thinking about, okay, why is Korea the forgotten war, sort of similar to the war of 1812? It's like, I used to think, well, it's just because we lost, right? So that's why, oh, we decided to forget it. We lost it. So no one talks about it anymore. But I mean, we lost the Vietnam War and nobody has shut the fuck up about that for the last,

like 70 years. There's been so many goddamn movies about Vietnam, so many songs about Vietnam. It's just post-Vietnam syndrome. It's just like, we've never stopped thinking about Vietnam, a war we also lost. So what's going on here? Even the one thing that is about Korea in popular culture, MASH, the television show and the movie, they're just about Vietnam. Yep.

We say, Matt, we make that exact point in the first episode. Because yeah, at the time, like MASH was a huge show. It definitely, you know, the word Korea is in it, but it is just a big allegory for the war that was going on at the time. There's a John Prine song, like, hello in there where the lyric is like, Davey died in the Korean War, don't even remember what, like... We lost Davey in the Korean War, and I still don't know what for, don't matter anymore. It's like hyper-cliché, it's beyond cliché.

Which is the problem for us because our whole show is, hey everybody, turns out the memory hole sucked this war into the oblivion, and it's like, with this one, sort of the official history beat us to the punch because it is now, you know, you genuflect and you say the forgotten war and the troops that fought, we don't remember them and blah, blah, blah. So I think that that cliché is kind of, we try to make sense of why we have started calling it that all of a sudden. Well, I mean, outside the charming and lovable antics of, you know, Hawkeye Pierce, Trapper John, Dago Red, Hotlip Sulehan, you know, radio, radio rocking, who's the other fucking

guy? Attention all personnel, attention all personnel, I am, there's hate and there's love. Alan Alda, Alan Alda going into the mess hall demanding that they put up more pictures of black people. Throwing the boombox over the DMZ. Yeah, so, yeah, so I guess where I'm going with this is like, okay, so Vietnam, a war that was lost but not forgotten, Korea, a war that was also lost, but like severely memory halt.

And I guess like where I'm going with this is that like, Korea as the forgotten war is not a forgotten just because we lost it, but there's like, it's sort of a propaganda term because if something's forgotten, as you say in the first episode, it's like, well, nothing really important happened there. So it's just really like, there's no history of account happened. So like, did anyone really die even? I mean, who knows? I don't know.

It's a very minor affair. So what do you think is really going on with the memory glory holding of the Korean War? One of the things that I would sort of, it's something that I actually only thought about in the last like week or so as we were putting it together, but basically in, you know, like the standard line about the Holocaust, like literally the one thing that, you know, sort of is goes along with the pedagogy about how people learn about the Holocaust and events is never forget. So that's because we're told that like the Holocaust is like, you know, this history

making genocide. And in the case of the Korean War, I find that, you know, like I found that like there is this constant invocation to forget. And as Brendan was saying, it's because it's like, well, you know, maybe it has it's connected to like what we're doing over there or what we rather what we did over there and continue to do. And in this case, it's because, yeah, America directly participated in or assisted to the point that it directly participated in, you know, stuff that as guests, you know, people

that we talked to for the show, you know, basically say is on the level of genocide. And that's just a shorthand for the whole scope of horrors that forgetting a war helps you blot out. Well, I would say we didn't participate. We ran it. I mean, the most, the most destructive, I mean, I think we did an interview the other day and someone asked us, did anything surprise you about about this, this season or in researching this season.

And I actually will say that while we knew the contours of what happened and wanted to do a show about it, really getting into the level of destruction, it did surprise me. It actually did surprise me how thoroughly we destroyed North Korea and the brutality of it on every level. So you know, there's one reason we don't want to remember it is I think there's several reasons. There's so many reasons, of course, because unlike Vietnam, it did not happen during the era that like that, that cultural moment that the rest of us are forced to, you know, live

under the shadow of forever with like boomers, you know, having their moment in the sun to protest something and to feel as though their, you know, government is betraying them and they tell a story about it forever after. In the 1950s, things were rather more buttoned up and you don't have that synergy. Also unlike Vietnam, which was viewed as kind of and was crudely imperial, where we're just taking over from the French, we don't belong in that country, what are we achieving, blah, blah, blah. But even in the canned history, when you do see it, it is the idea that, well, the North

did invade the South, you know, that's, you know, that's on them. And then we had, we were forced to intervene. And also, actually, it wasn't just the U.S., it was the U.N. actually, you know, technically was not an American war, it was the United Nations police action. It was a police action by the U.N. All these little terms starting to sanitize it. And of course, it's the founding, ooh, some thunder there. It's the founding, you know, case study of what would become the go-to method of quote-unquote

intervention, which is liberal humanitarian intervention to help somebody else. So that gives it this air of legitimacy as well that is not like Vietnam. And then, yeah, even more than Vietnam, it's, I think, convincingly argued we destroyed that place on a level that is indistinguishable from how we describe, you know, Nazi policy or some of the worst atrocities of World War II. And the other thing that I'll, you know, I want to emphasize there is that, like, this is continuity in two respects. First, it's continuity in terms of the deadliness of the American military involvement, the

people who executed the firebombing over Japan, who were the biggest advocates of an aggressive nuclear strategy, like Curtis LeMay. These were the people who were, in effect, running the show as far as bombardment goes in Korea. And that was the American ballgame if we're talking about, like, you know, what the actual investment was and what the linchpin of the American strategy there was dropping a ton of bombs. And then the other piece of where the continuity is important to affirm what Brennan was saying

is that the role of small state politics, let's call them, the idea of a country like Korea, which is a small state compared to Japan and China, and the other larger powers with which the U.S. is really, you know, thinking through what it wants to do in Asia. The idea of Korean, or of small states as being really effective in diplomatic imperial competition is also a 20th century, I would argue, like American tradition dating from it. Sort of, we sort of try to illustrate in the show, I think, from the real beginning of the age of American overseas imperialism in the decade of, you know, the successful

annexation of Hawaii ultimately, and the efforts to also bring the Philippines and Cuba, you know, as we talked about last season, into the American orbit. Well, okay, you talked about like the, sort of, the canned history of, like, if you were to find it and encounter it in a history textbook or have some of the news explained to you, like, why there is a North and South Korea, like, okay, like, the North invaded the South. I mean, could you just sort of describe for us what the canned history of justification for why America fought the Korean War in the first place, but also then, like, what you

discovered in researching the show in terms of, like, what the real story is? Yeah, I think that the, as you say, the potted history is that after World War II, in which there was supposed to be a new order of international law, Joseph Stalin ordered his puppet in North Korea, which had, Korea had been divided at the end of World War II after it was liberated, that Joseph Stalin ordered Kim Il-sung to invade the South for reasons that aren't entirely obvious in this version of history to take over the Korean Peninsula. The North did so. And as we kind of mentioned a second ago, the United States had to rally the international

community to put together a UN force to push them out. And then, depending on your politics, I think, there's an emphasis on how we overreached and should have just done that and then gone home, or that, you know, it was justified. We got cocky. Yeah, that we got cocky, etc. Or that it was all justified, again, depending on your point of view. What we try to offer in the show and lay out is, I would think, a more accurate history that's also more up to date based on actual Soviet archives being opened up and other

things is that it's very convenient for Americans to tell themselves this all erupted on June 25th, 1950, that it sprung into life the Korean War at that exact moment. But in fact, that disintegrates the closer you look at it, because for several years before the quote-unquote Korean War, tens of thousands of people, as many as a hundred thousand people, were slaughtered in the South, Koreans, by the Southern government under suspicion that they were communistic or, you know, plotting against the government or just too independent. There's an island called Jeju Island in which most of this happened because it was supposed

to be an autonomous island of the government crackdown. So how much sense does it make that before the Korean War quote-unquote started, a hundred thousand Koreans were dead? And then you start to see that the division of Korea itself in World War II was actually just another escalation of what had long been a conflict between nationalists, communists, collaborators with the Japanese, and that this has been a civil war boiling for a long time that entered a new phase in 1950. And in fact, most of the border clashes leading up to 1950 were started by the South, not

the North. And of course, there was this massive, there was this massive, you know, extermination campaign as it was called at the time in the South. So you can get into the ways that the North justified its attack, but ultimately what it was trying to do is what both regimes wanted to do, which was unify Korea. This 38th parallel, this line was by everyone seen as temporary. And it was not a border. That's an important point that you guys make in the first episode.

This idea of the 38th parallel, like, oh, like the North Koreans sold, like they crossed the 38th parallel. The 38th parallel was not in any sense an internationally recognized border. It was a line that was drawn by like essentially the U.S. State Department. Correct. And so the fact that like the North Koreans, they like, oh, they didn't recognize or disrespected it. Well, like no one else in the world did either.

This is a line that the U.S. drew to separate the communist North from like the nationalist, capitalist, like, you know, our allies in the South. And the U.S. officials, State Department, whatever, it was a sacrosanct line when the North crossed it. When we pushed the North out of the South Korea and then quote unquote rolled back into North Korea, it was then referred to as a quote unquote imaginary line. So when the North Koreans are crossing a border in their own divided country, it's a sacred line that everyone recognizes in their violating international norms.

When we do it, it's an imaginary line. So I think that very idea complicates the entire notion of Koreans invading Korea. So this is something we try to lay out in the show. And then, of course, along with that, hopefully, you know, nice bit of context, you then see what the what the war actually was like and why China, for example, started to participate in the war later on. I want to get into the actual prosecution of the war, how brutal it was and some of the characters involved on both sides.

But before we get into that, I want to talk about like North Korea, because, you know, like as a result of the Korean War or the fact that it was on, I guess, from our side at a loss or a draw, if you want to be charitable, there are two Koreas, like there's North Korea and South Korea, and just sort of the ways in which North Korea is still talked about to this day, because it was a member of the axis of evil, it has nuclear weapons, it's testing missiles. It is still very much considered like, you know, a rogue state that is talked about and imagined as both an existential threat to peace and security of the world, if not like even

like the West Coast of the United States in terms of their missiles, but also at the same time a completely backwards fucking like completely backwards bankrupt backwater joke of a country. And with like, you know, a totalitarian, like abused populace who like, you know, cries every time they say or think the name dear leader and all this shit, but like the like in the first episode they show you you have a quote from the other like famous quote from Donald Rumsfeld, where he's talking about if you look at like the satellite images of North and South Korea at night, you will see the South lit up like a Christmas tree a vital

center of commerce capitalism and global markets and then you look at the North cross the 38 parallel, it's just black, it might as well be off the map, it might as well be the fucking ocean, it's just like it doesn't exist. And he's like, how could this come to be? You know, and then like you have a quote from someone, one of the guests you interviewed that talked about sort of the artificial way in which that satellite image is created despite like whatever reality it reflects, but like just in terms of what is what is that comment by Rumsfeld reflect on how America sees North Korea and its people and like its culture

and just the history of that country? Yeah, it's it's one that doesn't seem to deserve a history in America. It's a country that we just I think really in the 1990s is when it becomes the sort of Saddam Gaddafi style heel, because as a tiny bit of context up until that point, because North Korea had a horrible decade in the 1990s, up until that point, North Korea had long outpaced the South in development, it industrialized very quickly somehow it was able to rebuild from being 40 every city being 40 to 90 percent destroyed in the war to turning things around quite quickly delivering a higher standard of living and it was actually that the North

back in those days that would send food aid to the South. I don't think people in our day and age can really conceive that. What went wrong in the 90s was they were obviously denied of the majority of their trading network once the Soviet block fell apart. They were victim of sanctions by the United States and then there were two horrible floods that racked the country followed by a drought and that any road to recovery was blocked at every turn by the United States because we wanted to starve them out literally and there was a famine in which at least half a million people died.

At that point, the North is also starting to look for a nuclear guarantee which itself is impressive if you think about it because up until that moment, the North actually was very late to the nuclear party on the South on the Korean Peninsula. We introduced nukes there in the 50s, the South tried to start its own clandestine program in the 80s or the 70s and it wasn't until basically the late 80s that the North said I guess we should start thinking about a guarantee. This is after being demolished as a state by the United, being holocausted essentially by the United States only a couple decades before.

So the state obviously reflects that reality. It is a garrison state. There are some interesting parallels with Israel actually. I wouldn't say point for point, but there's some funny coincidences. But we exaggerate the level of grayness and totalitarianism there. And I'm not saying that political practice in North Korea is a great model, but it's very explainable and it is deeply, deeply exaggerated. I think in our first episode on I Run This Montage, there's just one MSNBC lady who

she's listing the horrible things about North Korea and what sets it apart from the world. And on that list is murder and rape. And it's just like crime, it's one of the few countries where crimes happen. It's just like anything. Why is that on the list? And then of course, there's all these other great things she says. Do you know North Korea keeps a significant population of their own citizens in prison? No, Brendan, it's different though.

It's their state authorities do the murder and rapes. Do you think of any other country where that happens? No. We don't do that here. And there's a real money quote where she says they actually organize their people into a class-based system that orders their lives. Wow, that sounds terrible. But anyway...

Oh, it's bad there. I sure don't want to live there, but I wonder why North Korea is like that. What happened? And then of course, on the nuclear question, just to close it out. And by the way, it is not one giant concentration camp. That is a parody of what it is like there. There are obviously restrictions on a lot of things that Americans would not want. And it doesn't mean that it's a lovely place to live at all times.

Although again, I think we do cartoonize what the entirely of the country is. And we speak to several people who have been there, and they have a very different picture than what you would hear on the news. However, the other thing is the nuclear... Dennis Rodman featured guests. Yeah, co-host. But the nuclear point is another point entirely, which is not hard probably for listeners of this show to understand that they don't want to go the way of Saddam and Gaddafi, much

as Iran did not want to go that way. Well, and that's the other... I think one of the things that the Korea story, I think, sort of really tests the American liberal stomach of, which is that it is not a government that conforms to the American stereotype of what a quote unquote free society is supposed to look like, to use how John Foster Dulles himself characterized the free world to which a state like South Korea belonged, whereas North Korea didn't. And in spite of that, it's also then you look at the overwhelming evidence, which is that

the New York Times will run gigantic, glitzy, interactive investigations into how North Korea illegally gets oil. Why is it a problem that North Korea gets oil? Because apparently you can use it for weapons. You also can use it to keep people's lights on and help them get to work and stuff, but it can also be used for guns. So we treat it and have made it into a pariah state that is like the Nazis, except it's still around in spite of it, as if, again, and this is where I think the racism also

comes up, where it's that, well, why is it that this government is able to stay in power there for 70 years? And why is this continuity of government exist? And a lot of it is this idea, again, of brainwashed orientals or something like that. And it is, you know, it's not, it couldn't at all be because of our crazy sanctions, or the salty earth, earth war that we waged. Also there have been many times that governments in both North and South have tried to take steps toward reunification, because that was the goal of the North Koreans in the 1950s.

As it was also the goal of the South, both of them didn't recognize the 38th parallel and they wanted to reunify the country. The difference was the North had a broadly popular government that was socialistic, which is the type of politics that got you killed in the South, and a lot of people had them. And the South was a deeply corrupt and unpopular government that had already killed tens of thousands, if not 100,000 people. And so the North calculated almost correctly that it could unify the peninsula by force and that this re-government would collapse, which it actually did until we stepped in.

Because people want to, when they imagine North Korea in 1950s, and they imagine it as the hermit kingdom dictatorship, but like, the communists in North Korea had the same popular legitimacy that they did in Europe at that point, because they were the ones who were driving up the fucking fascists. To that point, actually, like, to that point, I think like this would be a good point too, but trust the leaders of the Korean War on the North and South, Southern sides, Kim Il-sung in the North and Seung-min Ri in the South, what are their biographies and like leadership styles?

What does that tell you about the respective political movements and the forces that they've represented and the forces that brought them into conflict? Sure. I'll take Ri, you take Kim. I guess with Ri, the like, Ri is a, you know, he is basically able to be a credible political figure in South Korea at the time of the sort of events of our story in the late 40s and early 50s, because, yes, he was, you know, against Japan, but he wasn't in the country, so he couldn't have collaborated with Japan and to then discredit himself.

So he is like, you know, as, as, he is the, you know. Which most of the other Southern leadership was, tinted by collaboration. He's like how Ocrumbo got to not vote for the Iraq War, even though he was in the fight against Japan, or, or how Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld was sent to Brussels before Watergate happened. So he didn't have his political career tarnished by, by Watergate. Yes. Yes. Singman Ri was getting a bunch of PhDs in America.

He studied with Woodrow Wilson, who's also, you know, viewed as like, at least on the international level, like as the kind of father of, you know, liberal internationalism and so on. And Singman Ri, you know, certainly, you know, like spent a lot, you know, studied under him and came away and went back to be a statesman in his home country and promptly turns into a gangster autocrat. Yeah. He is a, you know, he, he consolidates all of the power in the state as much as he can

in the executive. And a lot of the way in which the power is enforced locally, I mean, it's, it's, you know, in the second season, when we talk about Cuba in the 1940s and fifties, we describe it as, you know, borrowing the title of a book, you know, gangsterismo, which is to say that you have a, you know, sort of backwards agriculture economy. And then the nascent bourgeois life is just plagued with corruption and craft. And it's dominated by right-wing and military figures. And Singman Ri is, you know, just sort of like, he's a, he's a great example of how,

you know, often the heads of these movements are not, are just not remarkable other than just that, like they're brutal and venal figures who represent the brutality and venal of their right-wing, you know, political movement so perfectly. And just to put a finer point on it, that the nature of the government in the South with Singman Ri at the top was overwhelmingly Japanese collaborators or rather collaborators with Imperial Japan, which was for decades, you know, the colonial, uh, occupier of Korea. That meant that the government was from the get-go and the U.S. had a part in putting that government together, uh, since we were occupying the South.

And not just like the same DMV officials went over, but like, you know, like the, like literally the same, like, you know, like secret police officials from who are one day working for the Japanese are, you know, not, you know, if not literally the next, maybe a couple weeks later working for the South Koreans. Also paramilitary groups, a lot of, you know, youths like sort of brown shirt style gang, stuff like that. Now, now in the North, there was Kim Il-sung and, and, and his sort of comrades from World War II, because, uh, unlike Singman Ri, Kim had been fighting in really the worst of the

worst conditions in Manchuria during World War II. And he was even, there was even a, uh, the Japanese hated him so much, he was such a particularly effective, um, resistance figure that they founded a get-Kim squad to specifically hunt down and kill Kim Il-sung. So that's a pretty good pedigree when liberation happens and people are looking for a leader and he was, uh, he and several of his top guys were like, like the Cuban guerrillas, they were, they were known for, for actually sticking around and fighting for the country. United States and South Korea for decades, it was the official line that Kim Il-sung

was in fact an imposter who had stolen a dead guerrilla's identity in order to take power in North Korea. He was Don fucking Draper? Yes, yes. And that was like, that was the, you know, it was, it was kind of startling to like, you know, re, you know, going back and reading, you know, the New York Times articles, uh, you know, about like, create this time and, and then you just see it. It's right there that like Kim Il-sung, who was an imposter whose identity was believed

of and stolen. And it's, you know, under like Hanson Baldwin, their military editor or whatever, you know, there's, it's very the like, you know, the hermit- The Kookie Midscope go all the way back. Yes. Yes. So that's a pretty top shelf, goofy, you know, crazy myth, Alcon seed, but there is a lot of other stuff of that caliber in this story, for sure.

It's like, it's like when people think that, uh, that Joe Brandon is dead and he or, or what, do people think he's dead? Is that a current? Honestly, no, they, I think they're more happy. People who hate Brandon right now are much more happy with people thinking, yeah, that's really him. I think what you're thinking about is the people who think Joe Kennedy Jr. is alive. Oh, okay.

Yeah. And he looks like, and he looks like this like homely Italian man. Yeah. Yeah. But yes. So anyway, the differences reflected in the government again with the South being a gangster state, the North was kind of your typical, um, you know, mid-century socialist thing where yes, there was basically a one-party state governing a, with a popular revolutionary

program to redistribute land, uh, to, uh, uh, reform education, health, uh, you know, there was a literacy program just like there was in Cuba. Um, and of course, very different attitude toward the collaborators with Japan, uh, which again was legitimizing. And you also brought up the Manchuria point, which I think is, is crucial to bring up, which is that like, you know, this was an internationalist like struggle, like it wasn't like the Korean war, yes, it was a, you know, Korean civil war functionally, but it was also, you know, taken in a, in a, in a, in a wider context.

It was also part of the struggle where you had had many of the people leading the struggle for the North and North Korea, they had become, you know, battle tested and it effectively, you know, cut their teeth fighting in Manchuria in these like horrid conditions. So you know, Kim, in a sense, like, yeah, scan his corgorellas were in Manchuria. And what's more, so much of the leader, you know, the, the leadership and the, and the strategy and the tactics and just the, the manpower of the KPA, the Korean people's army, when had, you know, they had been forged in the, you know, this cruise, their own crucible of Manchuria, which by the way, then, you know, you wonder like, gee, why is it that

the like, you know, Ur brainwashing movie, the Manchurian candidate is about a bunch of people who can't remember, you know, all this stuff that is again related to, you know, this, I mean, like the, the shock troops, when the Americans initially get their asses kicked in June 1950, they were all guys coming back from Manchuria. So yes, it was very different governments, but they, they were essentially thought to be temporary states that there was going to be a reunification, which nowadays, you know, North and South Korea sounds as natural as North and South Carolina, but this was such a live question for decades.

And in fact, war almost broke out again several times because of how live a question it was. Okay. So I, it's like, those are the people like on the North and South Korean side, basically like the South Korean government were sort of gangster nationalists and Japanese collaborators in the North were basically the people who, people who fought the Japanese. Yeah. You got Robin Hood versus Vidcud quisling here. Who are you going to pick if you're just a regular simple Korean peasant?

Also, I just want to add on that, on that point of democracy, the first mass elections is Suzy Kim, who's also the scholar who makes the point about Rumsfeld you mentioned earlier. She's a guest on the show, incredibly, incredibly great book called Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution. She points out that the first mass elections in Korea ever were in not the democracy of South Korea that we sponsored, they were in the North. And it was a preferential voting system. It wasn't exactly like American elections, but it was massively enthusiastic.

It wasn't like American elections. It worked. Yeah. And, and that is how people made, you know, the, the democratic decisions. Now, of course, the war brutalized a lot of stuff, including political practice in the North. And a lot of this more openly participatory stuff gets subsumed into a classic. I saw that.

That was, that was our whole, that was the goal. Yeah. Make sure this does not happen. So, so, so the North nevertheless had to, by the political logic, it took on the popular elements of, of what was going on in that revolution, because Korea had a revolution just like Cuba had a revolution. It's just kind of overshadowed by the fact that their revolution was met by even more violently than, than Cubas was by a whole assault on the peninsula.

I think that's because it had to, it was defining the new terrain, because if you think of, like, I, I, I endorse the Michael judge thesis of the Cold War as really World War Three. This is my judge of Beavis and Butthead. Yes. No, death was just around the corner. Another podcaster shout out to him. He's talked about how you, the Cold War is better understood as World War Three as, as the continuation of really the second war after what the West understood to be essentially

a truce in which the Communist bloc sort of thought of is like a more permanent armistice similar to the way Stalin and Hitler viewed the Ribbentrop Molotov pack. And that the Korean war is the first like hot outburst of a war that is going to continue across the world, but just not in Europe until 1991, basically. Well, I mean, definitely the United States, the, the flashiest, you know, aspects of foreign policy that we're being talked about all centered around Europe and Asia was just not supposed to matter, at least as far as prestigious ideas of American, you know, post war policy went.

But then, yeah, as you say, the first thing that breaks out, quote unquote, breaks out is in Asia. But for that reason, it was all the more sort of deranged that this idea of Stalin commanding his puppet in North Korea, because by the way, the Russians or the Soviets did not install Kim Il-sung. The Stalin didn't want much to do with the Korean war at all. Kim said, you know, does this, is this all right with you? You know, Stalin's the biggest, you know, most powerful head of a communist state.

So Kim ran it by him, but Stalin didn't command him to do it. He actually said you also should, you know, make sure that Mao's okay with you doing this. But no one ordered him to do it. It was his own policy because he was, in addition to being socialist, he was nationalist and he wanted to unify Korea. Okay, that's a very different read on the situation than we're told. I might disagree with that thesis, though, about like the truce versus armistice, because the Soviets were deeply interested in a long peace with the West.

We go into that in episode two or episode three. Right. No, I mean, is that they thought that they were, they thought that they were in a truce period towards a negotiation of a larger peace, the way that you had the gap between, you know, the end of World War One and the signing of Versailles or whatever. I think the US never thought that US never thought of it in those terms. Correct. Absolutely.

They always thought of it as that we are going to initiate violence again, but that I completely agree. It's advantageous to us. I completely agree with that. Korea was the perfect spot to do it, a limited amount of risk of escalation and you establish literally a line. Well, I mean, all the war that can then like settle along that line and be far away from power so that you won't trigger a nuclear war until, until a guy, until a guy named

General MacArthur comes along and proves that the Versailles is just we were in Jenkins directly into China. Let's get to that part of the story because, okay, as we get to the terms of it, like sort of similar to Vietnam, the US like national security state, which is really like nascent at the time. And the Korean war was really the, truly in many ways, the creation of the national security state that we would use to fight World War Three, you know, or IE the Cold War. But like, okay, you have a government in the North that is socialist and is basically broadly

democratically popular so that like, if the country were to be unified either at the ballot box or with the bullets, that the Norths would be the victors. Correct. They invade the South. We have to make them, the United States gets involved, sorry, the UN police action gets involved. Then you introduced an American cast of characters, including Harry Truman, Curtis LeMay, and like you said, the old corn cob pipe sucker himself, General Douglas MacArthur.

How did it go from being like we need to contain the Cold War along this border, keep it away from power and keep it away from Europe and make sure the nukes don't get fucking launched to a, what came very, very close to a nuclear conflict and basically incineration of the entire global population? Well, General MacArthur had a very interesting mother named, I'm not kidding. I'm pinky and she, I think, really developed in him a uniquely powerful desire to conquer and to essentially produce a zero sum mindset because she was sort of a Norma Bates figure and I don't want to lean too hard on the psychology, but she dressed him as a girl until he was

in his teens. She moved across the street when he went to West Point and had dinner with him every night and asked him to keep her updated on all the gossip at the school and this guy was, it was Olivia Soprano situation. He was awesome. You can disagree with treating your son that way, but she created an awesome adult. She did. The guy was fabulous.

This is like deep MacArthur lore, but when he, he argued with FDR and FDR went, you'll not talk to your president that way and MacArthur stormed out of the White House crying and then threw up. That's awful behavior. Yes. I think he's the guy who like had an affair with his niece. No, I don't think he ever had an affair with his niece. It was over Cleveland.

No, no, no, it's, that might be, I don't know, the teenage girl that he was. I think you have a general who did this, not like, uh, but no, uh, MacArthur was one of the greatest generals we've ever had. Well, he also, I mean, my favorite, like MacArthur nugget is that, because this is like, it kind of just illustrates like the crazy paradoxes of the guy when he was at West Point. He also testified before Congress about being hazed. And like, you know, so, so I want to, I want to also, so here, think about this though. So like, you know, in historical context, the like these days, like the military academies

are a joke, but once upon a time, you know, like, you know, a military academy is where Napoleon was born for, you know, for what it's worth. Like they used to actually be viewed as the place where like the operators of the, of a state where it were hatched and the idea of like hazing and scandal at one of them. You know, it's, it's, it's more crazy now, but MacArthur testified and everything. And then he went back to school and was apparently like pretty well-liked and popular. He was very successful. Like he didn't, you know, he didn't suffer for it.

And I think to me, like that is like the funniest, I think it was just a lot of beating. And then they're like the, the book I read, I just assumed that like, it's, you know, it's like, it's just like, they tell you like, Oh, it was a lot of rough and tumble, you know, drinking and memorizing. So we're holding this shit out of you. England. That's how you create the driven, repressed sadists that you need to command a fucking worldwide empire.

I just, I, I, I Stop being fruity. Yes. You know, you know, who loved MacArthur was our, it was the special boy president. He would always bring up MacArthur's and if he could see us now. If, if generally the guy that could see us down, that's okay. That's okay. Another incredibly pretty straight guy.

MacArthur. MacArthur would have been like military dictator of America, but then like every, all the most evil senators did mean girls to him. What a great ending to a life. You're not far off, man. You're not far off. You know, like literally what happened. There's a quote here in the, just for some more color here in the David Halberstam book

I want to read, that I just found was funny, talking about MacArthur, MacArthur hated all presidents, Roosevelt to him was Rosenfeld, and Truman, he would refer to, and Truman, he would refer to as quote, that Jew in the White House, Harry S Truman, his aid or whatever says, which Jew in the White House, the puzzled Bowers once asked, Truman, MacArthur answered, you can tell by his name, look at his face. So quite the character, like a hillbilly, that is, he got damn true, not even thinking amazing. Independence, Missouri, we're probably the only Jew who ever went there was lynched.

Yes. Yeah. Harry Truman like showed up to the White House wearing like a fucking piece of candy rope from his ass genitals or hide around a seersucker suit. Yeah. But what you're getting at, Will, is that there is a, one of the threads of this season is within the American ruling class on the issue of Korea, there is a serious standoff because Truman and the sort of fancy boys like Dean Atchison, they are enlightened.

They want to kill, you know, two to four million Koreans, but nice and tidy, keep it restricted to that little peninsula to draw a line in the sand, literally in the coming Cold War. MacArthur and the hardliners, maybe you guys like Joe McCarthy at home, they want this to be a final showdown. They're not interested in the long piece. This needs to bring in China and the Soviets, which of course, halfway through the Korean War, they test their own nuke. So the standoff between Truman trying to contain the supreme commander in the East who is actually

running the war and starts to go over Truman's head. This is a whole other aspect of, you know, like a whole other showdown. And I think also one of the other things that made the season kind of fun is that, you know, as that pressure from MacArthur is mounting in this really crazy way, you also have on the home front, not just in the form of the anti-communist politics, but also like really serious economic pressures that are, you know, for the first time since Pearl Harbor, really beginning to bear on the American public. The, you know, for example, the period of 1950 to 51 is now being talked about again,

just because it was one of the last like half dozen periods or so of high inflation. And to my mind, part of the way in which the Korean War manifests also as a response to like economic pressures and the idea that a total war economy is a way of sustaining the, you know, growing capitalist state without having to actually compromise on the distribution of the pie in many meaningful ways. And you know, working also further to secure the, you know, the butt end of that by making sure that there is, you know, like the plantation economy is ready to exploit abroad that you need, you know, or sorry, as they're also known foreign markets.

Yeah, well, I mean, like back to those satellite images with your guests, the point she makes about like, oh, like North Korea, it's just like there's no electricity there. Well there are tons, there are huge swaths of like Africa and Asia that have like way less electrical infrastructure than North Korea does that are equally if you flew a satellite fucking spy satellite over them 10,000 times, yes, create that composite image would be even more off the map, but they are integrated into this global plantation foreign market system. So like, so it's not, it's not really an issue that you can't see that they're like Christmas

trees lit up after the war during during the like the half century after the war, South Korea got more American investment in aid than Africa did entirely. Yep. South Korea is a very small country. It's a very small country postage stamp, the entire continent of Africa that is basically given the system we're talking about a direct wealth transfer. Yeah, there were moments where the South Korean budget was just United States aid. Like the government's budget period was just U.S. money.

And frankly, what we talk about in the final episode is, you know, good on Sengmin-Ri, he was sucking that teeth drug, you know. Well, and then you have like, you know, and then it's like, who's that money going to support after, you know, after a Dazzler like Sengmin-Ri, it ends up being like this just fucking carousel of, you know, like this is the thing, right, is that it's more money than all of Africa got and it's going to the worst people in the continent. Yeah. Yeah.

The military absolute criminals, military gangsters and, you know, the court, the, the, the heads of the Kyball who are, you know, collaborators with the Japanese, et cetera, et cetera. Like it's, it's cartoonish, you know, and there's shables. Is that it? No, the column. Like the kid, the, the, just these family based on day, et cetera. Like sitting on top of the economy, like fucking cartoon fat cats and it got him a gilded age

comic strip. There's a, and this is a, on, on the South Korean side, there's a, there's a great story of, we talk about it in episode 10, but one of the military dictators, really the first military dictator, Park Chung-hee, he is assassinated, not, it doesn't seem like it was a proper coup. But he's at a KCIA safe house because the Korean CIA was literally called the KCIA. It's like K-pop. Yeah, exactly.

And we helped set it up, obviously. And they collaborated by the way, they, they also, by the way, they set up the unification church that is now in the news because of obviously ties to the assassination of Abe. But anyway, the, the military dictator is, is talking with his spy chief and out of nowhere, the spy chief whips out a gun and shoots the president dead. It's sort of, I think, I think the clip I dropped because they're going, how can we, how can we talk about these, you know, what can we do to address these problems of these people in the streets and the Americans don't care.

And it almost is like in a history of violence, it goes, you can do something, I guess. You can die. And he just whips out a gun, blows him away. But then, you know, it's chaos and another, you know, strongman shows up and how do you fuck that up? How do you fuck that up? It's how do you fuck that up? Because then, then there's just as Noah said, a carousel of all of these horrible, like

gray military bureaucrats just running that country forever. And then even when they, you know, the great Gosling, yes, but, but anyway, yeah, so, so it's, it's actually a very interesting thing to look at what happened in the decades after. There's like these raids where there was a assassination team sent into the Blue House, which is the presidential, you know, palace in South Korea, Kim Il-sung tried to just ice the military dictator. Okay, okay, wait, wait, I did not know about the North Korean commando raids, try to assassinate literally in the Korean White House, the Blue House.

Yes. There was a South Korean commando unit that was trained to retaliate for the Blue House assassination attempt. What happened with all of the commandos who were trained to do that raid? That story is fucking insane. Well, I mean, Brennan could say more a bit about it, but just up front, it was, it went even worse than the Bay of Pigs by the standards of the people who imagined it. Yeah.

Like the Bay of Pigs, they did land. Yeah. Yeah. Unit 684 is the name of this crack team that South Korea assembled, and they trained under horrible conditions. It was about, it was like a couple dozen guys, and it said that they were all criminals, like it was like a dirty dozen type thing, but I don't know if that's actually factually true, that might have been initially planned, but they just took civilians.

At any rate, they were training to assassinate Kim Il-sung, and they were horribly just like beaten and brutalized by their trainers, by their military superiors. For years and years, and then because I think relations thawed in the early 70s, this is near the end of the 60s, by the early 70s, relations were kind of thawing. So after seven of them died because one was from malnutrition, and then the others were just executed because they were either doing crimes or rapes or like drugs. They were all, you know, they were just deleted from the team. Then finally, they are approached by their military trainers and said, you know what,

actually, this is all called off. You're not going to go assassinate Kim. The plan's off. And these guys mutiny, and they go, fuck that shit, they kill almost all of their handlers. They leave the island, they hijack a bus in the mainland and go to Seoul, where they stand off with police and soldiers, and all of them die either by getting shot or by blowing themselves up with their own hand grenades. It is an insane story.

They were called Unit 684, and we talk about it in the show, but I had never heard of that before we did the show. Yeah, that story, I mean, yeah, when you said it was like a good chunk of the people who were trained for this raid were executed by their own commanders for desertion or fucking insubordination, years before the raid was ever going to take place or ever was even intended to take place. Yes. And if you use a movie about it that they made in Korea, I think they did.

Well, it would make an excellent movie. I mean, that's what I'm saying. Obviously. Obviously. Let's do an American remake. Yeah. Get all the Chris's in there. The Greyman.

Yeah. The Greyman. Now we're talking. Yeah. The Greyman. Oh, Russo Brothers. Get on in. I just want to go back to the prosecution of the war itself as we alluded to at the beginning.

The genuine barbarity and genocidal level of violence involved in it. So basically, after World War II ends, the American military machine is like the colossus distraughting the globe. America is the only major country more or less left unscathed by World War II. The idea that we could be defeated or fought to a stalemate by North Korea and China came was a huge shock. So what happened after the U.S. military planners and forces decided, hey, you know what? The 38th parallel.

That's just an imaginary line we made up. Let's go all the way in. Let's take the whole North. And then what happens after China intervenes in the war and then what happens in the actual prosecution of the war for the Korean people and for the men fighting it? Well, in fact, the Americans get their asses kicked in the earliest moments of the war and are driven to the southernmost tip of South Korea. There was obviously a great deal of sort of racist underestimation of the Korean forces.

You had the military editor of the New York Times saying that they were essentially apes and when things went sour, there were headlines. I think I have a headline here from the AP that's something like, G.I. Joe learns that the Gooks are good fighting men. That's a headline. And by the way, that slur is interesting in that it follows the MacArthur family from the Philippines, one of the first imperial holdings of the U.S. in Asia into the Pacific Theater.

So then it's used against Japanese and then where MacArthur also fights. And then also it goes into Korea. And then, of course, the whole point of a slur is these are all different nationalities, but they're all supposed to be the same. And then it went on to Vietnam. And then it went on to Vietnam, obviously, exactly. So at first, the North Koreans almost do it. They almost unify the peninsula.

That is when the Americans get a shot in the arm. MacArthur recovers quite handily and it has to be said pretty brilliantly with an invasion at Incheon, which is on the West Coast, catches the North Koreans behind their lines and then completely reverses everything. So then the North Koreans are in bad shape and they're retreating up the peninsula, which is when the Chinese come in. Now Mao was very conflicted about the entire idea that Kim had in the first place. But among other reasons, he couldn't very well say, hey, I just finished up my own civil

war and unified my country, but you shouldn't be doing the same. Don't try that. You know, we had to give it the nod. Then once MacArthur started to use quote unquote rollback as a conspicuous road straight to China's border, knowing as we know now that he was looking to enlarge in the war and bring in what he thought was the real prize, which was China, probably out of some mixture of both ideological solidarity and real politic, the Chinese dispatch troops to Korea. And MacArthur in a very, I think I have stone argues pretty well, MacArthur knows this and

tries at every point to play down the chances for clashes when he knows there will be clashes and then play up the idea that the Chinese are doing atrocities when they aren't doing atrocities, anything that can exacerbate the war. So then at that point, the Chinese drive the US right back down the peninsula with the North Koreans again, but then the pendulum swings the other way once the US starts getting hip to the guerrilla tactics that the Chinese and the North Koreans are using. And then there's a stalemate. And that is when the air war, which had been the US is, you know, unchallenged in the skies

ever since the beginning of the war, the next two years of the war are the on the ground as a stalemate, but it's complete slaughter from the air. And that's when you get the phrase that kept cropping up in our, you know, our research was no more targets. We bombed the country so thoroughly, we bombed the South as well, but we bombed the North so thoroughly with more, you know, per capita bombs than were dropped in the entirety of World War Two that 40% to 90% of every North Korean town was just rubble. And it was unparalleled.

I mean, well, I guess it wasn't unprecedented in the sense that it was taking Dresden or the fire bombings of World War Two and just applying it to an entire country with napalm as well, which was called the Wonder Weapon. And napalm actually, historian Bruce Cummings is sort of the preeminent historian of the war. And he's the one who told us that this amounted in his estimation to a genocide, and it was right around the time the genocide convention was being formed that we were doing this. He argued that the effects of napalm and the fire bombing was actually worse in Korea

than it would be in Vietnam, in which it was also, of course, devastating because of the nature of North Korea's geography and the concentration of the cities. This wasn't napalm being dropped in rural villages where people would, even though fires are getting, think places are getting set on fire. In North Korea, people ultimately had to start living in caves entirely. They were living underground. They started to live underground. And as a way to just, it became a way of dealing with the fact that America wanted to continue

the war and what the form that the war took at that time was a stalemate until the diplomatic conditions changed such that the Americans were able to make peace on terms that they, as in the Americans, were comfortable with. Yeah. In addition to all those conventional bombings, is it also not true that the United States might also have included some less conventional weaponry in its attack on North Korea? Some sort of icky style weapons. Some gross stuff.

Some weapons with Chipotle sauce. Well, NOAA really covered most of this on the research side. So, NOAA, do you want to talk about the... Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're talking, folks, about the allegations that the U.S. used germ warfare against the Chinese and Korean troops, which is a longstanding allegation of those countries and has also been alleged by many investigators and researchers in the West as well. Yeah.

So, we interview, we have two guests whom we really focus with us about. The first is Jeffrey Kay, who is on Twitter and a really, really fascinating and smart guy who has done a lot of the archival research on this and along with Nicholson Baker has published some of the most interesting stuff about it in recent years. And Jeff has sort of brought back and resurfaced a lot of the evidence that had been conjured, and I don't say conjured in the way it made up. I mean, a lot of the evidence that had been assembled by the Soviet Union and China in the years after the Korean War and after World War II because the evidence that sort of Jeff

and some speaking about is that there were active biological weapons development programs that gave the Air Force basically to have the capability to use weapons that could do the kind of germ warfare that was ultimately described and alleged on multiple occasions by North Koreans in the course of the war. The two dates that they specifically alleged this took place was in the fall of 1950. So, after the, like, during basically the period of American retreat, then the second was in 1952 is when the next set of allegations are made. And the first set of allegations are made a few months afterward or whatever.

But the lie of the allegations are part of the discussion of the war as the war is being waged. Yeah, I was just going to say that there's, because what's undisputed is the sort of mangola of Japan was a guy named Shiro Ishii who ran what people may recognize as Unit 731. This was, you know, a sort of germ warfare division. I mean, it was really just an all purpose kind of horrifying experimentation on human beings mutilating them, leaving them out in the cold to see how long they would die of

frostbite and then, of course, testing diseases on them. This is, you know, just a matter of fact that the Japanese and Unit 731 existed. You can see Shinzo Abe in a photo back when he was still with us in a plane that says 731 on it giving a thumbs up. And sorry, and so after the war, much as, you know, in the tradition of say Operation Paperclip or, you know, Gladio stuff, MacArthur welcomes figures from this program into respectable society and much like napalm, which was, you know, used near the end of World War II or the looming threat of the A-bomb also innovated during the war.

The U.S. is the allegation, of course, is that they were trying out this other thing they had inherited from their enemies. And the, you know, to put a bow on it, the 731 research tools and individuals were, you know, reporting, as shown, journalists, including a guy named John Marks who published a book in the late 70s through the New York Times publishing imprint called The Search for the Manchurian Candidate. He describes how the CIA sent people, you know, with the explicit intention of conducting experiments using material gleaned from Unit 731 in Korea.

So, you know, we don't know, like, a lot of this remains, you know, a lot of the evidence remains very, you know, sort of like, you know, the idea of a smoking gun as a metaphor is very irritating for many reasons. But, you know, will there ever be, you know, a flight manifest of, here's a bunch of anthrax or smallpox that the Air Force dropped someplace, no. But there is, however, you know, the other person we interviewed for the season about this was a guy named Tom Powell, whose father was a journalist named John Powell, who was based in China at the time.

And John Powell was prosecuted by the federal government for reporting on the allegations of bacteriological and germ warfare. And the Soviet Union and in China, they organized an international committee to even investigate these allegations headed by the respected scientist Joseph Needham. But the, you know, like, the people who attempted to, you know, even just do basic, you know, attempt to do basic truth telling about this, like Powell, were prosecuted. And so, the, you know, entire thing has ultimately, it's, you know, it's difficult to talk about in terms of certainty of fact, but the preponderance of evidence, I would say, you know, I think

our show sort of demonstrates is that, you know, it's like it deserves to be taken far more seriously than the American government would have, you believe. One more button on it that's fascinating is the other supposed legacy of the Korean war is brainwashing. The American POW is getting brainwashed. Yeah, we want to talk about, like, you know, the major representations of the Korean war and popular culture. The Manchurian candidate is probably the biggest one.

And like, yeah, like the Errol Morris documentary Wormwood suggested, like, to speak to this point about the idea of, like, oh, like, these American POWs who would show up in propaganda movies or come home with accounts of, you know, war crimes or germ warfare. If you could create, in the popular imagination, this idea like, oh, no, they were victims of, like, the secret Chinese brainwashing program that could get you to say and do things that were wholly untrue. You know, Brendan James is the kindest, warmest, most courageous human being I've ever met. Yeah, nonsense.

But I think what's interesting to group these two issues together, because that is why the convenient explanation of brainwashing starts to come up and we play this documentary that Reagan was in. He kind of hosts it. It's like half-film, like, reenactment of these troops getting brainwashed and half-documentary, if you want to call it that. But who is one of the guys who assesses the pilots who allege germ warfare? Jolly West.

Dr. Lewis Jolly West. Okay, all right. Case closed. Case closed on that one. I guess, like, the last little, like, digression I want to bring up before getting into sort of reframing this in the present day in, like, current politics and, you know, power in the globe is the bit you have about, like, diplomatic cables which would seem to imply of a huge role for Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalists in Taiwan in essentially starting

the Korean War as a way to prevent Taiwan from being taken over by the Chinese Communists. Yeah, yeah. Peter Dale Scott uses the research of Friend of the Show and a guest of ours, Bruce Cummings, to argue. This is, you know, his argument that Chiang Kai-shek and the cause of the Chinese Nationalists was the primary reason for the Korean War. I mean, I think we air that. It's an interesting argument.

I don't know. You could probably debate it different ways, but it's certainly true that on both sides of the war, Taiwan and China were really the more important issues to guys like Dean Atchison and to guys like Mao Zedong, because Mao wasn't really terribly interested in getting involved in Korea until the U.S. blocked the Strait of Taiwan. And so it was really possibly either a motivating factor or a very, very nice perk that the conflict in Korea allowed the U.S. to shield and protect Chiang Kai-shek at a moment that it looked like he was really down for the count.

And this is where the, you know, the convergence or rather the, you know, the China lobby as sort of an entity. Like if you go to the Truman Archives website and you look at, you know, the different boxes that they have for the, you know, Truman presidency that you can look at, they have one, you know, a lot of them are pretty generic, but one that they have that like really stands out is just like Truman and the China lobby. And it's because it was this, you know, I think it's kind of hard to, I think oil, maybe fossil fuels maybe come close today in industrial commodities, but like the, you know, this was

a group of business interests that, you know, included the founders of the John Birch Society that included some of the biggest, you know, business interests of the day armaments leaders, manufacturers, and yes, they were supportive of Chiang Kai-shek, but the China lobby and the cause of China in this way, it was a, you know, it was a, I think a symbol of a, you know, and, you know, of what they viewed as this, you know, I mean, and I'm sympathetic to the Peter Dale Scott's argument here that it was, you know, part of the reason that they were so aggressive on Chiang was because, yeah, they viewed this strategic, they viewed protecting Chiang is much more strategically significant than say Korea, but those people

as Korea becomes the more significant ongoing crisis, it is those China lobby figures, you know, through the guys of MacArthur who end up becoming the people that are really driving events. So, you know, it's one of the things, I guess, a little bit frustrating about calling them China, the China lobby, because really it's like, you know, the warfare state to use tomorrow, another book's title. All right. Well, let's, let's just, let's talk about North and South Korea in the present day,

because I mean, like, since the end of the, well, I mean, I guess the Korean War never really ended, but until like the, you know, hostilities, I guess, ended in the DMZ and joint security area where established, so like US policy towards North Korea has more or less remained unchanged. I would say not, not exactly because there was a moment of hope in the 90s that was sort of the basis for what was called the framework agreement and won't get too bogged down in details here, but basically the Clinton administration, after hitting the North Koreans really hard in addition to using the famine that was happening there as a way to kind of wait out the clock.

Once that became clear, it wasn't going to happen. There was an agreement struck up and a lot of diplomacy that happened where Jimmy Carter intervened in, in the mid 90s to smooth over a arrangement where the North would stop pursuing nuclear energy without the, you know, approval of the International Atomic Energy Agency and that the US as a guarantee would build, help build light water reactors. So, you know, if you want your nuclear energy, we'll help you do it and everybody wins. And we're not worried about you, you know, quote unquote blowing us up or whatever, even though I think at this point listeners might understand why the North wanted a nuclear

guarantee, you know, against any aggression from the United States. That was going to be, and a lot of people thought it was the basis of a lasting thought. Right when Bill Clinton was actually going to have a summit in Pyongyang, which Madeleine Albright had at that point visited and State Department people had visited, had come back with a policy of engagement, George W. Bush may or may not have won the 2000 election. And so when the Bush people came in, they made it very clear to the Clinton people, the transition team said, we're not into any of that shit. We're not interested in the Pyongyang summit, don't go, so Clinton didn't go, because if

you go, we're just going to undo all of it, and indeed the same thing for this framework agreement. So then the Bush years are extremely chaotic, mostly we put on negotiations in order to blow them up. This is of course the era of John Bolton as a key figure of international policy. And then Obama's approach was quote unquote strategic patience, which was another way of saying not doing anything, except covert action to hack into their missiles and stuff, which we did, and give the South more missile missile defense systems.

People have called it nothing for nothing. So then you get Trump. And that's when things get really spicy, because it's completely, I mean, it's completely unforeseen that he would oversee the biggest breakthrough in diplomacy for decades. And it's also sort of fitting that like, in spite of the fact that it was legitimately the biggest in decades, and you know, it should not be taken lightly, it was also sort of Trump hitching his hitching his wagon to forces that were already sort of germinating on the Korean peninsula itself.

Yeah, I had to watch so many clips of MSNBC people, you know, for this show to hunt and gather for, you know, representative stuff in the media. I think Rachel Maddow is really on one and at some point about how Trump is legitimizing the totalitarian dictator, blah, blah, blah. And the point, I guess, was supposed to be that Trump wasn't giving Kim anything. He was just out of nowhere getting Kim the prestige he needed with the rest of the world. And that until that Trump meeting, Kim was completely isolated, which is completely wrong. The entire year or so before Trump met with Kim, there was an incredibly promising period

of diplomacy. It was called the Sunshine Policy in South Korea, with South Korea's then President Moon Jae-in, and they were already collaborating in new ways and opening up spaces for trade and building railways, Kim and the South Korean president. Trump probably saw an opportunity in that the same way he would have, if say, you know, Israel and Palestine started having constructive conversations and stepped in to quote unquote make a deal. And that was after he called Kim Rocket Man for, you know, six months.

He completely flipped. And we talked to some peace activists in the show who were talking, it's really tragic how incredibly excited they were at this moment, Trump or no Trump, it was looking like things might actually be coming together the way it kind of looked like in the Clinton years. But then we learned that Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, who are actually running the show, we all know Trump doesn't have terribly involved vision or managerial style on this stuff, that Bolton and Pompeo were sabotaging everything. And the North Koreans eventually said, you know, can you please take off the sanctions

since 2016, not even all the sanctions, just the latest ones, at the summit with Trump and Hanoi and Trump walked out and he just said no. And then that was the end of that. You have a, in the last episode, you have a great quote from a Biden official discussing what President Joe Brandon's policy towards North Korea is now. And they describe it as, you described the Obama years as strategic patience and nothing for nothing. And then he just, they described the Trump years as everything for everything.

And they said, what is Joe Biden's policy? It's a little bit of both. Yep. It's halfway in between nothing for nothing and everything for everything. So it's something for something. Something for something. Yep. Except it's not something for something because we're not doing any, we're not talking to

them. We're not giving, we're not giving anything to them and we're not getting anything back. A thing of nukes for free. Yeah. I mean, and what's really interesting is like, they know that the Cummings makes this point. Like the, the missiles can be bought off. The North Koreans are like, look, buy, buy us out. We have these missiles.

If you want to take them away, put you in a couple of intercontinental ballistic missiles today. You are not driving across that DMZ without all of these fucking missiles. Okay. Israel, Israel was actually going to stop North Korea from doing a deal with one of, I can't remember if it was Iran or Pakistan or something. And they were sending an emissary to North Korea in order to scuttle the deal and give the North Koreans, I don't know if it, I can't remember exactly what the package was.

And the North was like, sure, fine. Buy us out of this, of this other thing and we'll cooperate. And then, and the US stopped it. So at least Israel knew that you can't get something for nothing. And unlike North Korea, we probably couldn't buy them out of their nukes either. Yeah. Exactly. I guess just like to, just sort of, just to take a broader view here.

This is now the third season of blowback, as I mentioned in the first episode. The first season was about the Iraq war. The second season was about Cuba and, you know, all the attempts at the Cuban counter-revolution and the Kennedy assassination and Operation Mongoose. Now, season three, the Korean War. How do you see this season and the topic of Korea fitting into like the broad arc of blowback and this kind of like recovered history that you guys have created over the past three seasons of this show?

Like, how does this story fit in and inform the larger arc of blowback? You know, you could actually sum it up if you wanted to be sort of pithy about it. Colin Powell gave this quote that we actually use in season one at the end of the Gulf War after, you know, kicking Saddam's ass, where he says, I'm running out as, you know, the head of America's military, essentially. He said, I'm running out of villains. I'm running out of demons. I'm down to Castro and Kim Il-sung.

So there you have it, Saddam, Castro and Kim Il-sung that he summed it up. Those are our first three seasons here. And I think that the way they connect, what felt natural about going into Korea was that we started in the 2000s and then actually went backwards in time for our second season and then went backwards once again. There's a lot of through lines. There's these questions of WMDs who has them, who's allowed to have them, why they might want them.

That's a through line. But there's also the, and in fact, the North Koreans, you know, want a nuclear guarantee because they don't want to go the way of Saddam and the Cubans wanted one because they didn't want to go that way either all the way back in the 60s. But we like to bring it back to the Bush administration, and I start the season with a clip from Rumsfeld because I think just being our age, that is when a lot of this stuff crystallized. It's not like the Bush administration represented something drastically new, but it did represent

a sort of more honest or stark declaration of what all these seasons of our show are about. I don't know if you... I mean, I think the only thing I would add is that one of the things that we've had in the advantage of each of, I guess, the first season, this was less true, but between less so, but like with this season and last season, you know, there was a premise that is in a lot of Americans' minds, even if, you know, a lot of people may not think of themselves as the kinds of peoples who accept those premises naturally.

Cuba is a horrible, desperate, like, totalitarian society. That North Korea is like a backwards, hermit kingdom, like, unworthy of our engagement. You know, that those are kinds of, you know, that like, those are just like so... such radically untrue as sorts of... as basic perspectives that to me, part of it is, you know, what is a sort of... has linked them, you know, as a... is in part that, like, yeah, there's this opportunity to, you know, as, you know, like, there's a reason that these events are the photo negative of what Colin Powell is holding up so often, you know. All right.

My last question, my last question before we wrap things up for today, obviously, we all love blowback for, you know, the camaraderie, the chemistry between, you know, Brendan and Noah, and all of the meticulous historical research, but when I think of blowback, what's my favorite things? It's the Great Varelli, Brendan James soundtrack. It's the John Carpenter, like, synth style music that you come up with, Brendan, as a, you know, are doing an original score for your podcast, and like, each season, you've knocked it out of the park, so just, I know we're going to have a little preview of the

music at the end of the episode, but if there's anything you want to say about coming up with the original score for blowback season three, and just that John Carpenter vibes that you're channeling, my friend. Thank you. Thank you, Will. That's high praise coming from you, a fellow carphead. I should say, first of all, the soundtrack is going to come out on August 1st. It was a lot of fun to put together, and we got to even work with some string players

this time. It was really fun. There's actually some live strings, which is a great delight. I've never had, you know, real musicians play my stuff before, so I hope people like it. That's the best music that we've had in the show yet, and I would sort of think the track I'm going to give you guys is called American Caesar, and it is actually a piece of music that was used in a trailer for season two that people wanted for a long time, and so

I went back to the drawing board and kind of made it a full track rather than a kind of little bite-sized thing, so we can play out to that, but it was a real fun thing to make the score again, and whether it's entirely pretentious to make a score to a podcast or something that people actually want, I couldn't say, but we definitely, I think it's a part of the show now, and we like having the music be another aspect of the show that people enjoy. So yeah, the great Varelli, the soundtrack's going to be called The Blue House, and if everything goes right, it should be coming out on August 1st.

All right, well, today, episode one of Blowback, season three, just dropped. If you're listening to this episode right now, just start, you're probably already a blowhead, but you've got all the blowholes out there. If they want Blowback season three, how do they get it this time around? So if you want to listen to Blowback season three, go to blowback.supportingcast.fm and sign up. It's that simple. You can listen through an RSS link with your preferred podcast app.

It doesn't work on a couple of them, including actually Stitcher, interestingly enough. And if you have any questions or issues with signing up, you can email help at supportingcast.fm. But if you sign up, you will also, in addition to getting the 20 episodes of the show all at once, you will get access, you will get a code rather, to get access so you can buy half off posters for the Blowback artwork, because we know you people love it so much, and we do too. Great art by Josh Lynch. It's so good, especially the seasons.

You'll have an ad-free archive of all of the show's episodes, not just the seasons. And we're also going to have, we're also, we also have some extra, you know, original music on there. There's some B-sides and some demos for people who like the music. And actually, the bonus episodes from the past, which include two of you gentlemen, we have the one with Matt Crisman and Felix Biedermann. Felix's episode has not been available to non-subscribers before, I don't think. So that's the one where you and Noah talk about a rock-war era.

We talk about what races of women are the best today. Yeah. They're really like the big departure from most Blowback themes. I don't really know why we did it, but like you can listen to it now. Yeah, it's now available. So there's a lot of good news going along. Well, what about the Blowback episode? Andrew Tate bulls in.

What about the Blowback episode featuring Will Menaker? That's always, that's always been one of the most downloaded. That's a main episode. Well, that's, you know, so people have always had access to that. I love it. You kindly. Yeah. By the way, just one last thing.

Chris, maybe I'll send you this. There is a great Trump clip that I found in this season. He's in the debate with Joe Biden and Biden's, you know, hacking away because he legitimized North Korea or whatever Trump did. And Trump just goes, he goes, listen, listen, they tried, they tried to beat with him. He didn't like Obama. He didn't like Obama. The way he says Obama and the way he did, he says, I did, he didn't like Obama is his

top 10 delivery. I'll dig that clip up. They tried to meet with him. They tried to meet with him. He wouldn't do it. He didn't like Obama. He didn't like him. He wouldn't do it.

There's that clip from the 2020 election. It's not like Korea related. It's Trump at a rally and he says, Obama, utter confidence. I also, I'd be remiss. I forgot. I almost mentioned this. So apparently Nancy Pelosi is going to Taiwan. Hell yeah.

That's still happening. Let's do it, baby. Let's be legends. So I want to say, you know, you know who else took a politically significant, you know, virtue signaling trip to Taiwan. That's right. Then called the Formosa. The general Chiang Kai-shek.

Well, no, he was already there. I'm saying. But no, Nancy Pelosi is, I guess, you know, making sure she has returned. Yeah. Listen, is she actually just fleeing herself to Taiwan after being, you know, discovered that her husband has been doing insider trading the entire time they have drinking and driving is legal in Taiwan is insider trading. She's going to deploy her golden triangle shaped parachutes.

Yes. Yeah. Anyways. Okay. Well, gentlemen, Brandon James, Noah Coleman, blowback season three, the Korean war, the Korean, the Korean chronicles, Chronicles of Korea is out now. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us. Always is your way.

Thanks, guys. Thank you. In addition to blowback, which you should be listening to, you should also be buying tickets for the Chapo fall tour upcoming in October, Saturdays in October in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Tickets available at chapotraphouse.com slash live. And also as a final addendum, Felix, it was Patton who fucked his niece. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. General George Patton. Fucked. I knew it was another general. Yes. Okay. Yeah. All right.

Wrong theater. That does me. That does seem like more of a Patton thing to do. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Classic Patton. Well, yeah, I mean, like someone, someone would be like, isn't it weird? You fucked your niece.

And he'd be like, if you don't fuck your niece, I don't want you in my army. What's the fucking point of having a niece if you can't have sex with her? Carthaginian fuck nieces. That's what made them take Rome. I'm picturing George C. Scott as Patton say, screaming that with his George C. Scott scream. Didn't he play Patton? He did. Yeah, he did.

He did. He did. He did. He did. He did. He did. He played Mussolini as well. I never knew this in a TV movie about Mussolini.

I really want to see that. Oh, man. He seems like he'd be perfect. No dumb son of a bitch ever won a war by not fucking his niece. You win a war by making the other guy not fuck his niece. Anyways, yeah, Hitler did that, too. It's true. He did hit fuck his niece as well.

That's what that's why Patton wanted to ally with the Germans after the war. It's one of those instances where you really don't need to say, you know, who else wanted to fuck their knees or fuck their knees because it's already not a great thing to be. It's interesting, though, because Hitler's niece that he fucked was his blood niece, but Patton's was through marriage. And that difference is the difference between Nazi Germany and the United States. Well, back season four, niece fucking of great world leaders and generals. Let's fucking go.

All right. Till next time, gentlemen. Bye. Bye. Thank you for listening. Music Music Music

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