Guerrilla History - A History of American Imperialism in Korea - US Out of Korea! w/ Ju-Hyun Park of Nodutdol

Episode Date: August 23, 2024

In this episode of Guerrilla History, we have an vitally important conversation with Ju-Hyun Park of Nodutdol.  In this conversation, we discuss the recent history of American imperialism within Korea, recent developments in the Korean Peninsula regarding stances towards unification and nuclear disarmament, and Nodutdol's new campaign US Out of Korea.  Be sure to keep up with the campaign at usoutofkorea.org, take part, and share this conversation and the resources within with your comrades!   The two episodes regarding the DPRK mentioned at the beginning of this episode were North Korea & Industrial Agriculture w/ Zhun Xu and History of Sanctions on the DPRK & China w/ Tim Beal, be sure to check them out!   Ju-Hyun Park is a writer and activist with Nodutdol for Korean Community Development.  Their writing has appeared in a variety of outlets, and they can be followed on Twitter @hermit_hwarang. Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory 

You wouldn't remember Den Van Booh? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Welcome to Guerrilla History, the podcast that acts is a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present.

I'm one of your co-host, Henry Huckimacki. Unfortunately, right now at least, not joined by my co-host, Adnan Hussein, who always has things going on, but we hope that he will be able to make it into the program very soon during this conversation. Of course, Adnan is a historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. We have a really great conversation coming up today on a really fascinating and very important topic. But before I introduce the guests, I'd like to remind the listeners that they can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this one by going to patreon.com

forward slash guerrilla history. That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can keep up to date with everything that Adnan and I are doing individually as well as what the show is doing collectively by following us on. Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-Skore Pod. And we also have an Instagram, which I typically forget the handle of. I think it's guerrilla underscore history, but listeners, you can find it if you're interested. Now, we have a really great guest today in a very important topic.

We're joined by Chujan from Nodotol, and we are going to be introducing the U.S. Out of Korea campaign today. So, Chou Yan, it's nice to have you on the show. Can you tell the listeners a little bit more about yourself before we get into the conversation? Absolutely. Thanks for having me on, Henry. Really good to be here with the guerrilla history podcast. My name is Chuyang Park. I am a member of Nodhul for Korean Community Development. Nodudu is an organization that for the last 25 years has organized Korean diaspora in the U.S. in support of the anti-imperialist and national liberation causes of Korea.

Today I'm here to help introduce the U.S. Out of Korea campaign, which is a recent initiative that we've launched, which I'm very excited to talk to you more about. And I believe we're going to spend a good chunk of this episode, also getting into the history and the present conditions that are framing this initiative from our org, which is just one of my favorite topics to discuss. Yeah, absolutely. Of course, we are a history podcast, so there is going to be quite a bit of discussion about the history in preface to talk. about the current campaign, just so the listeners are aware of what the general structure of this conversation is going to be. We're going to start with talking about kind of modern history of Korea and involvement of the United States within Korea. And then we're also going to be talking about some recent changes that have been taking place within policy stances on the Korean Peninsula and then getting to the campaign at the end of this conversation. I also want

to let the listeners know that we do have a couple of episodes that. about Korea in our catalog to that jump out to mind. We had a recent episode about agricultural policy in North Korea, which listeners may find interesting. That was with a good friend of the show and a personal friend of mine, Shun Shue. I can link to that in the show notes. I highly recommend listening to that.

And we also had an episode in our Sanctions' War series, which was focused on the DPRK and China. Again, that does cover some of the history as well and focuses primarily on the impact of sanctions on the DPRK and China. So again, I will have that linked in the show notes, listeners, if you want to listen to a bit more from us about this topic. But I'm going to turn into the conversation now. We're going to get into a brief primer on that kind of recent Korean history. So I'm just going to leave the floor open to you for helping the listeners understand where many of the current movements are taking root from.

We have to understand that modern history. So if I say, can you tell us a little bit about, you know, Korean history, particularly from the time of occupation onwards, where would you start that? And then how would you go about telling the listeners, you know, that brief primer to help them get caught up and understand the movements that then take place from there? Well, for starters, thank you for qualifying with an era. You have no idea how often I just get asked, can you tell us about Korean history?

To which I usually respond, do you have 5,000 years? Because that's how long it's taken. If we want to understand Korea's modern history, it's modern situation, I think the occupation under the United States is a great place to begin. However, there's a preface that needs to go along with that,

which is really that the modern history of Korea is the history of its national liberation struggle. And what I mean by a national liberation struggle is the experience of a nation, a definitely existing historic people and society under imperialism as a global system of capitalism. And that experience for Korea really begins in the 19th century when the arrival of Western powers to East Asia and also the development of capitalism within Japan brings Korea into contact with the capitalist world system as yet another colony to be exploited by these various powers. Now, that could be a whole episode unto itself. So just to fast forward through that process,

the really important cliff notes from this period are that Japan wins out in this process and formally annexes Korea as its colony in 1910. And for the next 35 years, Korea is a colony of Japan. It wasn't the first colony of Japan, but for a very long time, it was the largest and most profitable colony of Japan, and also a very strategically important one, because it linked Japan with the continent of Asia and provided a bridge for logistics, for military supply routes into China, where, of course, Japan would invade as part of its efforts to take over the broader Asia region, what was known as the Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere as part of World War II. Now, this is a colonial experience of history.

There's really brutal exploitation that occurs in this time. And of course, naturally, there's going to be resistance that forms as well. That resistance also goes back to the 19th century and really matures through the 20th century as Korean independence fighters of various political persuasions and factions, although with a very strong affinity with communism, fight what is essentially an international war for the liberation of Korea as part of the greater global war that's taking place against fascism in Asia, in Europe, and beyond. Now, to bring us to the beginning of U.S. occupation, what we do know is that World War II

ends with the defeat of Japan, and that defeat is brought about through a number of factors. The maritime war in the Pacific certainly plays a large role, with the U.S. playing a considerable part in that. There's also the land war in Asia itself, which is mainly a case where credit has to be given to the Chinese and to the Soviet Union for their very brave sacrifices made to bring down imperialist Japan and really to ensure that there was a total military defeat of Japan, which did not only occur in the Pacific theater, but on the continent of Asia as well. Now, towards the end of this war, Korea begins to emerge as a sort of problem for the allies, particularly for the United States and the capitalist wing of the Allies in World War II. The issue is that Korea presents something of a conundrum. On the one hand, there have not been very clear plans laid for what to do with Korea after World War II. There were several discussions that were held in Yalta in Tehran about what exactly that formulation should look like.

There were ideas of trusteeship kicked around, ideas of a four-way occupation, but nothing had really been cemented. At the same time, the end of World War II is making very clear to the U.S. that its next rival, its next sort of global confrontation is going to be with the Soviet Union. and given that circumstance, it's incredibly important for the U.S. from a strategic standpoint to maintain an edge over the Soviet Union basically everywhere, but East Asia in particular is very important. And as the war is coming to a close, the U.S. has no foothold on the territory of the continent itself, right? They have more or less assured that there will be an occupation of Japan and that it will be primarily led and only really led by the United States. But when it comes to the Korean Peninsula, they simply have no troops there.

So what the United States does, a couple of days after the bombing of Hiroshima in Nagasaki, is it assigns two colonels in the Pentagon with the task of finding a dividing line in Korea in order to establish two occupation zones. This was not a decision that had been formally agreed to by any of the other allied powers. It was certainly not a decision that involved Korean people at any level. And what was essentially decided was that the 38th parallel would be the dividing line. And the reason for that was that it ensured the capital's whole would remain in U.S. hands, will not remain, but rather be placed into U.S. hands.

And this is really imperative for the U.S. to do rather quickly because the Soviet are already sweeping down the peninsula. They barreled through Manchuria, like a knife through butter very easily with, you know, the Japanese army so worn down from its many, many years of fighting in China. And then once they reached Korea, they were also having a very easy time just going through it because the Japanese had no real base of support among the Korean people either. So this line is drawn to essentially stop the Soviet advance. And it's not really something that is negotiated between any powers. The U.S. sort of just declares it. And then the Soviets more or less acquiesce. And, you know, we can get into the political implications of that, but that's not

the purpose of this episode. So we now have a situation where Korea has been divided, but that did not occur with any kind of consultation or consent from the Korean people. And of course, Koreans had been fighting for our own independence, our own deliberation for multiple decades. we could say at least 50 years, arguably longer. And the situation in Korea also was not one where Koreans were just sitting around thinking, oh, well, we'll just wait for the United States to make a decision, and then we'll know what's going on. From the instant that Japan declared its surrender, there were very swift moves made by political forces in Korea to move towards an independent state.

And something I referenced earlier is that, you know, there were a variety of political persuasions among the Korean resistance, right? There were communists, and communists had a very strong influence. I do want to be very clear about that. There were also nationalists who, a lot of whom could frankly be described as part of the right wing. And then there were many people who sort of like fell in the middle of that. At the same time, there was a sort of broad acceptance and support for socialism. as an idea because there was some level of political education existing within the society. Yeah, just to follow up, or I guess kind of drive to a point that I want us to dwell on for just a

moment. So you mentioned that there was no consultation with the Korean people in terms of this division, this planned division of the Korean peninsula. And that's absolutely true. You know, the United States essentially by itself decided, hey, we're going to divide this peninsula into two zones of occupation. There was one moment at which there was, maybe not consultation, but a feeling out of Korean feelings taking place, which was a poll that was famously commissioned by, I believe, Douglas MacArthur, in order to determine what the political persuasions and the feeling of how administration of the Korean Peninsula should be administered after the war had ended. And instead of me recounting the commissioning and the results of that poll, I'm going

to turn it back over to you because, as you mentioned, there was a variety of political persuasions that were involved in Korea. And many of these various political factions were heavily involved with the resistance to Japanese occupation. And so there was a lot of support to various factions. But in terms of the actual ideological support, this poll paints a pretty vivid picture, I think. So I'm going to turn it over to you to kind of explicate on this specific point. Yeah. Thank you so much for teeing up that point. So there was a poll conducted in 1946 by the U.S. military government of Korea. And that's important to note that the U.S. established direct military rule over the southern occupation zone. That's actually not something

that happened in the north. And it's a key element to how these sort of divergent paths emerged in But this poll was conducted about essentially asking, what political system do you support for Korea's future? And the options were capitalism, socialism, and communism. And lo and behold, the results of the poll were that 70% of people supported socialism. Now, the extent to which, you know, there was like a very, like, deep grasp of what all these different systems meant, I think, is debatable to an extent because Korea as a society also had been deprived of educational. means under the Japanese occupation. But what was understood by the broad masses of people was that the capitalist system, the sort of free market that the Japanese had maintained at their expense, did not actually serve them, right? In fact, it was a system that relied upon

their exploitation, upon their degradation as human beings. There's a long, long list of Japanese colonial crimes that can be recounted. We're a little more focused on the Americans at the moment. So I think we'll have to save that for a little bit later. But all this to say, you know, Koreans had a clear sense of what they wanted their political destiny to be, particularly at that juncture following the defeat of Japan in World War II. And this was really being expressed through the political project that was being built in Korea itself, which was the Korean People's Republic. The Korean People's Republic was something that had been pursued by the Korean people in the immediate weeks following the surrender of Japan after World

War II, and the principal organ for its formation was something called the Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence, which called for the organization of people's committees across the peninsula. And these people's committees were a little bit diverse in their political character, in their exact political structure. It really varied in terms of where exactly you were, in terms of what a people's committee could look like. But in every instance, they were essentially expressions of self-rule for the Korean people. And there was a broad unity across the society around the question of land in particular, and around the question of ownership of means of production that had previously been concentrated in the hands of the Japanese colonists and their Korean lackeys, which was the landlord class.

So these questions of land, of the nationalization of industries, and also the introduction of gender equality, other progressive reforms, constituted a really broad agenda that was supported by a wide swath of not only the Korean masses, but the various political forces that were at work in the peninsula at the time. Yeah, and just to insert myself briefly before you continue, this result of the poll was, indicative of the feeling across the entire Korean peninsula. You know, when people hear that the Koreans were very strongly in support of socialism, of course, guerrilla history listeners are not going to be your average person in, you know, the Western imperialist corps who believe all of the propaganda that takes place there. But when you hear that, you may immediately think that this is a poll being conducted in the northern part of the Korean Peninsula specifically.

leave. No, this is a Korean wide fall. The support was extremely strong in the South. And of course, at that time, Kim Il-sung was perhaps the most popular person in all of Korea. Although, you know, it was more of a movement at that point rather than being associated with one person. But he was extremely popular as a result of his exploits during the Second World War and resistance to Japanese occupation. The reason I bring this up is because it's important for the the listeners to understand that there was a lot of support for socialism in the South. And that led to a lot of violence in the South against socialists and against people who were associated with labor organizing and people who were advocating for disrupting the landlord class. So I want to make sure that we hit that this was a very popular movement within the South as well. And that the reason that we see such violence, which we don't typically hear about in the West, the reason that we see such violence is because socialism was a popular movement in the South at that time. So I just wanted to insert that there briefly.

Yeah, and I really appreciate you bringing that to bear. I think that's a very tight summary of what we're talking about here. And it really had to do with the political vehicle of the people's committees and their very clear agenda for land reform, for the nationalization of industry for these other measures, which were deeply threatening to not only the ruling class in Korea, but also to U.S. capitalist interests in Korea as well. And so that's why when the U.S. arrived in Southern Korea in 1945, the first thing they did was declare that the Korean People's Republic was illegal. And in a matter of months, they also outlawed the people's committees themselves. So what we need to understand is that Koreans were already embarking on our own

process of decolonization, our own process of seizing back control of the productive forces, of control of politics, our lives, our land from the former colonial apparatus. And then what the U.S. did was they came in. They not only interrupted that process, but brutally worked to destroy and then actually used the remnants of the colonial apparatus to set up a new sort of imperialist order in Korea. And, you know, I mean that quite literally in the sense that they brought in the same Korean policemen, the same bureaucrats, the same military officers who had previously served the Japanese to form the actual apparatus of the government that they were installing in Southern Korea. And as you were mentioning, this led to extreme violence.

against the people of Southern Korea. And that was because not only was socialism a popular movement, but there was a very strong desire for independence and there was an immediate need for the majority of Koreans who were peasants who were not in a strong economic position to acquire land, to acquire the ability to feed themselves and their families which they had been deprived of for so many generations under Japanese colonialism. And so naturally, when the U.S. came,

destroyed their political institutions, sought to reassert the dominance of the former parasitic classes, the majority of people fought back. They fought back as workers in unions organizing general strikes. They fought back through the form of armed rebellion. They fought back through riots. Just one year after the U.S. occupation of Southern Korea began, there was essentially an uprising that swept the entire South of Korea, that's remembered as either the autumn uprising or the Tegu uprising, because that is the city where it began. And that is a very clear indication that just one year in the Korean people were already willing to take up extreme measures in order to change their political circumstances. And that was because the rule that the U.S.

introduced in Southern Korea was so barbaric, was so brutal. They essentially gave free reign to the landlord class and the police to exploit the people according to their free will. And so naturally, there was going to be resistance to that. And to sort of fast forward through these years, other key events that are important for people's understanding. Just to dwell on that point for just one more moment, if we can, regarding this savage repression of the socialist movement within the South and within repression of the labor movement within the South,

unfortunately, I don't have my specific numbers. It's unfortunate because my wife is actually very interested in Korea at the moment. So she has all of my books about Korea, which I have annotated with notes and numbers and things like that. So I don't have my numbers with me, unfortunately. But the sheer scale of the repression in terms of the number of people who are jailed, tortured, and murdered in the South was massive. I don't know if you have any of those numbers yourself. Like I said, unfortunately, my numbers are with her right now. But it's important that we understand that the scale of that repression is really what makes.

it possible for American intervention during the war on Korea to have the impact that it doesn't, to allow them to even have some sort of a foothold in the South as that intervention begins? Because as we had mentioned previously, the labor movement and the socialist movement in the South was really, really strong. It was only as a result of that repression taking place before explicit American military intervention, that there was any possibility. So if you have anything that you can add in terms of the scale of that repression prior to the intervention, kind of softening the bulkhead as it were for the American intervention to come, I think that that'll be also useful for us to understand here before you continue and then get us up to

the American intervention itself. Yeah, absolutely. And I will say, you know, the numbers around this period, there's a wide range. A lot of it has to do with the fact that so much of this history was repressed for so long, given that the role the U.S. continued to play in Korea after the Korean War armistice. And so that's created this really wide historical rift that actually impacts our ability to really know a lot of these finer details. But there is some information that we can say with certainty. One is that in terms of political repression, there were twice as many political prisoners in Southern Korea alone than in the entire Korean peninsula under Japanese occupation. So that's something of like 20,000 prisoners by the end of

1949. In addition to that, between 100,000 and 300,000 people were registered under something called the National Guidance League, which was modeled on similar Japanese, fascist, sort of civil society organizations that were intended to implement what was essentially ideological change amongst the population by identifying, well, we can, I guess, describe as dissidents and then forcing these people to, you know, enter a registry and then be put through some kind of, you know, programmatic procedure where they would be continuously sort of followed up with in order to ensure that they were not pursuing their political aims. And a lot of these people ended up being massacred in the early days of the Korean War, which is why I sort of bring that

In terms of the death toll prior to 1950, the numbers do range pretty widely there. The most conservative estimates place it at about 100,000. There are claims that have emerged in later years, particularly following the South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which did not really begin its processes until the 21st century due to the political repression of the South Korean dictatorships. The most extreme numbers that have come out of that process estimate over a million deaths just before 1950, just in the southern half. So even going by, you know, the more, so going by, you know, this range of estimates,

there are a number of historians who feel that they can state with confidence that roughly 2% of the population of Southern Korea was killed before 1950. And the context where what was occurring is not only the strength of the labor movement, the strength of socialists as a political force in Korea, but also the fact that Korean people flatback. Korean people were not willing to accept the occupation of the peninsula, its division into two separate states. And I mentioned earlier the Tegu uprising. There was also a subsequent uprising on the island of Teju in 1948, which was very, very key and actually led to the spread of a guerrilla war throughout Southern Korea that lasted not only until the start of the

the official start of the Korean War in 1950, but even beyond the end of the Korean War armistice, the last guerrillas were sort of routed or surrendered in actually 1957, which is four years well after. And the Cheju uprising also led to the Cheju Massacre, which is probably the single greatest crime that we can point to pre-1950 in Korea, because this was a process by which the newly formed Republic of Korea or South Korean military and police. oversaw a scorched earth campaign on this island of 300,000 people, killed somewhere between 30,000 to 60,000 that we know of, drove at least an additional 40,000 people away.

So we can say with confidence that they may have depopulated a third of the island, whether by means of displacement or killing. And then they also burned down something like 70% of the villages on this island as well. And so when we think about the brutality of the Korean War to come, we need to look at Jeju as a pre-indicator of them, because this is where a lot of these tactics scorched earth of this sort of indiscriminate killing or being implemented in Korea by the U.S. and then would be repeated across the peninsula once the official war began. Yeah, and just another thing that I wanted to throw in here is, you know, you mentioned that

this massacre was supported by the U.S. many people think that the U.S. didn't have a super direct involvement in the Korean peninsula before 1950. Just look at who the president of the southern part of Korea was, Singman Rhee. And if you think that Singman Rui was doing things without American involvement or without American support, then you just don't know the history whatsoever. I don't know if you want to say anything about Singman Rie before we get to the actual outbreak of the war itself. I think that he's a fascinating character for many reasons, most of them bad. So feel free to say what you want about Sigmund Ria.

And then we'll turn to the war because I definitely want to make sure we have time to talk about the campaign during this conversation. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Sigmund Rie is a very interesting political character, I will say, because he actually emerged from the independence movement itself. And then ended up spending a lot of his time in the United States where he pursued this very very, you know, bourgeois strategy of sort of trying to appeal to the powers that be in the U.S. to, as the path to assuring Korea's independence. And then, of course, he became the primary instrument of U.S. domination over Korea when he actually returned and became their

sort of hand-picked president of the Republic of Korea. I think, you know, one thing I'll note about U.S. involvement in Cheju and in other places is that it's not just that the U.S. was aware of this or that they supported what was going on, the U.S. had direct oversight over the South Korean forces that were in Jeju and in other places implementing a campaign of counterinsurgency. A campaign that really used in many respects genocidal means to achieve its ends because the purpose was to just blot out all life and therefore to undermine the capacity of guerrillas to fight back.

And that's not something that the U.S. was just sort of. of aware of but standing on the sidelines for they were receiving direct reports of what was going on. They were advising directly in the situation. They were giving orders about what to do. And then beyond that, they were also the forces that had organized the New South Korean police, the New South Korean military, and given them tons of training, tons of support. And on top of that, we're also in direct communication with a lot of the fascist paramilitaries that were doing a lot of the extreme dirty work in Jeju and throughout the peninsula as well. And this is a kind of basic model of counterinsurgency that we can see throughout the global south, throughout the

duration of U.S. imperialism. And a lot of these tactics were being refined and further developed with new technologies in Korea for the first time as this was occurring. So there is a very wide-reaching sort of implication to these strategies that were pursued. So then turning towards the actual war itself, you know, we're going to be talking about the Korean War. It's also frequently called the forgotten war. And in the West, it is typically forgotten. But it is certainly not forgotten in the Korean Peninsula because the war is still ongoing. An armistice was signed in 1953, but the war has officially not ended. So it's like I mentioned at the beginning of this conversation, we do plan on how to

having a full episode dedicated specifically to the war itself and the way that the war unfolded. So I'm not asking you to give like a blow-by-blow description of the war. But of course, we can't understand the impact of American imperialism in the Korean Peninsula up to the present if we just skip over the war itself. So anything that you want to say about the war before we turn to American involvement in the Korean Peninsula after the war, feel free to bring up. Absolutely. Yeah. I think the main takeaways that people need to understand about the Korean War are the scale of violence that was unleashed and the political consequences of that. I think to start, let's think about what it meant for South Korea. In South Korea, the Korean War provided an occasion to liquidate the left. And I mean that in the most literal of terms, because as I mentioned before, there was this National Guidance League. where many socialists and activists who could be described as fellow travelers or accused of having social sympathies were forced to register. And then as soon as the war began, South Korean police and military began hauling these people out of their homes, out of prisons, throwing them into mass graves,

and killing them by the literal thousands. And so what that meant in terms of the long-term political consequences for South Korea is that a lot of the leadership, a lot of the experience, a lot of the experience, that was built up, not only through resistance to the United States from 1945 to 1950, but from the colonial period as well, was more or less expunged from the society. And that had very deep ramifications for the course that kind of future left projects in South Korea would take. The other thing that we need to understand about the Korean War is that this was a strategy of indiscriminate warfare that was pursued by the United States. And that applied to both sides. of the peninsula. In the early days of the Korean War, the forces of the Republic of Korea or South Korea

were in retreat. And as they were in retreat, there were a number of U.S. troops that were already on the peninsula. This is prior to the landing at Incheon. And what we know from cables that were that have been revealed from the U.S. ambassador to South Korea at the time, from confessions by U.S. troops after the armistice, is that there were very clear orders given. to fire on refugees in battle zones, the argument being that there could not be a distinction made between combatants and non-combatants, and therefore there was a military priority in essentially exterminating all living things in places that were designated to be battle zones. We don't, even to this day, really understand the full scale of that sort of violence.

I mentioned the Truth and Reconciliation Commission earlier. That Truth in Reconciliation Commission has found credible, reports of more than 8,000 cases of war crimes, that's just in South Korea, more than 80% of them committed by South Korean and U.S. forces, which is a very different picture of the war than the one that gets presented as just this one of naked North Korean aggression, right? Yeah, just to underscore that point, because I think that, you know, I don't want it to pass the listeners. The Truth in Reconciliation Commission, which is a South Korean commission, was the one who found that more than 80% of at least somewhat credible war crimes evidence

was committed by the South Korean Army and United States troops. That's not a report that's coming out from the DPRK saying that the South Koreans are the ones committing war crimes. That's a truth in reconciliation commission of South Korea pointing that out. So it's just worth underscoring that, that that number is, if anything, probably conservative, it's certainly not going to be inflated because that is them telling on themselves. Absolutely. It's them telling on themselves and it's also the information that could be gleaned 50 years later. So those are just the cases where people survived, right?

They either survived the war crime itself or they survived the 50 years after to them be able to tell their story. So how many other cases are there where there were no survivors or people who did survive just never had the opportunity to have their testimony hurt? And so this is just a great historical weight that exists in South Korea, I will say, and that I think, you know, is just part of the legacy of the Korean War that many don't understand. Now, to also get into the violence in the north, right, because the U.S. did march north of the 38th parallel. they did push all the way to the Yalu River. And for the entirety of the Korean War, they waged this brutal aerial bombing campaign that deployed more bombs, more napalm, on this tiny Korean peninsula than on the entire Pacific Theater of World War II. More than 600,000 tons of bombs, more than 30,000 tons of napal. And on the ground as well, the U.S. was pursuing the strategy of what

was essentially extermination. There were direct orders given that anyone who was a member of the Workers' Party of Korea or affiliated with the Workers' Party of Korea, a very broad definition, should be done away with. 14% of Korea versus the 38th parallel was part of the WPK. So when you take into account the fact that those 14% also have siblings and parents and children and neighbors, essentially the entire population was marked for extermination. as the U.S. Army was marching north. And so that's how we end up with these massive death tolls in Korea. The range on the estimates of deaths runs between 3 million and 5 million people.

That's something like close to 20% of the entire Korean population at the time. And so this is a scale of brutality of just loss of life happening in a very compressed period of time. And that really, really shapes the politics of both sides of the peninsula. In the south, there's the question of the politics of memory. There is the question of the political legacy that's left behind when you just exterminate a broad section of the political forces in any given society, particularly the socialist and communist ones. And then in the north, there is this memory of this sort of apocalyptic violence that was brought down on them. by this military power that was so much more advanced from a technical standpoint,

able to just do things that Koreans in the North had no capacity to really match in any sort of military way at the time. And then there's also the sort of enduring pride of the fact that in spite of this horrific violence that was unleashed, these incredible odds, that the U.S. did not end the Korean War with a clear victory, that the DPRK is still standing to this day. And so we need to understand that vantage point to also really understand the internal politics of the DPRK as well, because this is really a founding moment for the DPRK as a kind of political entity and it's sort of the political identity that's been carried forward through generations.

Of course, there's a lot more that could be said about the Korean War. And as I mentioned, as I mentioned, we do have plans for discussing the Korean War at depth in future episodes, at least one episode, but almost certainly more than one, as there is so much to say. But that is not the main focus of this episode in particular. So I want to turn us past the Korean War and talk about American involvement in the Korean Peninsula after armistice. Because in 1953, an armistice agreement was signed, again, noting that the war is still ongoing. But an armistice was signed in 1915. And part of that Armist's disagreement was that American troops would not be present in the Korean Peninsula. And one would think that with that sort of implication that American troops would not be within the Korean Peninsula,

that perhaps American involvement in American control of events within the Korean Peninsula would be lessened after 1953 when that agreement was signed. However, anybody who knows the history knows that that is absolutely not the case. So can you talk a little bit about some of the conditions that were signed within that armistice agreement and then talk about what actually happened and the role that the United States has played in the Korean Peninsula post-armistice? Right. So as you mentioned, the armistice was signed in 1953. It was signed between China, the DPRK, or North Korea, and the United States. Notably, South Korea was not a party to the armistice. And the reason for that is actually because Zingman, wanted the war to continue and wanted to fight until the bitter end. So that's something to just sort of note about, you know, the political character of the South Korean government at the time. Now, in terms of the conditions of the armistice itself, as we're noting, you know, an armistice

is a ceasefire. It's not a peace treaty, right? It doesn't bring about a political solution to the war, but it was establishing the means by which that political solution might be reached. So the first most important provision that people should know about the armistice is that it called for the full withdrawal of all foreign troops in Korea within a matter of months. And the Chinese were very quick to follow up on this, but the United States was not. The U.S. extended its presence in Korea and has actually never left since then. The reason they were able to do this is because they rushed a mutual defense treaty with the South Korean government, which then established this sort of parallel legal process and structure

that then was able to give the sort of veneer of legitimacy to their permanent occupation of Korea. Now, there was supposed to be a political solution in Korea reached as part of the Geneva Conference, which was also going to be resolving the first Indo-China war, the first liberation war that Vietnam was fighting against the French. The outcome of that was that essentially there was no conclusion reached. And so the Korean War has been in the state of legal suspension ever since. And that is a really key aspect of what has conditioned U.S. involvement in Korea ever since, because the U.S. is officially at war on the Korean Peninsula. And the Korean Peninsula is officially a peninsula at war as well, which really informs the sort of strategic logic that the U.S. pursues there. As I mentioned, the U.S. has never fully withdrawn from Korea. To this day, there are 28,500 troops in Korea itself. There are 62 U.S. military. military bases that are directly controlled by the United States. Under the terms of the mutual

defense treaty, the U.S. also has access to all of South Korea's military facilities. So effectively, all South Korean military bases, they're also U.S. military bases. That's the military condition in Korea. In terms of, you know, the extent of U.S. involvement, I think we can sort of break things down into sort of three categories, political, economic, and military, right? From the political advantage to give the tightest summary possible, the U.S. backed some of the most brutal right-wing regimes anywhere on Earth in South Korea well into the 1980s. And these were governments that ruled through military rule, martial law, governments that made use of torture, disappearance, concentration camps to repress their own people, particularly the labor movement. And of course,

that was tightly bound up with U.S. economic interests in Korea as well. The U.S. U.S. pumped billions of dollars into the reconstruction of South Korea after 1953. And a lot of this money went towards the development of industry in South Korea, which is part of the story of how South Korea became the sort of advanced industrial capitalist powerhouse that it is today. It's actually a really key aspect of the story. And just worth noting that for the first couple of decades after the Korean War, actually the DPRK was the richer and more developed of the two Koreas. It was not, people today look at the Korean peninsula and think of,

oh, well, you know, there's famine and the DPRK. And South Korea is this technological paradise. But it took a couple decades, actually, for the American support of industry in South Korea to even help it catch up with the DPRK. And that's something that we've talked about in, I believe, both of the episodes that we've, that I mentioned at the beginning of this recording. So, yeah, sorry for that intervention.

but just it's worth noting that economically U.S. involvement was really key in terms of not only catching even the DPRK, but also creating what South Korea is today. Right, absolutely. That's a really pertinent point. I mean, and I think I would throw in there that this was despite the DPRK always having less land and fewer people than the ROK. We talk about Korea being divided in two. It's really like a one-third, two-third sort of division in terms of territory and population. So even in spite of that, there was still a higher standard of living in the DPRK well into the 1980s. And, of course, the development that occurred in South Korea was of an entirely different character

than what was going on in North Korea because this was using the capitalist model, using the exploitation of labor, and really fast-tracking a process of industrialization that in other countries took centuries. In South Korea, it was compressed into one generation, so the process of people being dispossessed from their villages, forced off their land, pushed into urban centers, made into an industrial proletariat, climbing the sort of economic process from having light industry, producing things like textiles and wigs and electronics, to heavy industry, producing things like cars and ships and

steel, all happened in a very compressed amount of time. It all occurred through substantial U.S. and Japanese investment, a lot of which was also secured through South Korea's involvement in the Vietnam War. South Korea was the second largest military presence in Vietnam during that period on, you know, the side of the United States and the imperialist powers. And that's really key to getting into this next point, which is the military dimension of U.S. involvement in Korea since the end of, since the Korean War armistice in 1953. The U.S. has really been using South Korea as in many respects a military base and really a military colony to advance its interests and project power throughout the region. And this is not only because of the large presence

of U.S. troops, the number of military bases, all these things are really important, but it's also the fact that the U.S. this entire time has retained operational wartime command over the South Korean military. What that essentially means is that the South Korean military is pretty much an appendage of the U.S. military. Now, folks who are familiar with the history of the region also know that Japan has had its so-called peace constitution since the end of World War II, although that's more or less been unraveled in the last couple of years. And something we need to understand is that South Korea as a society has provided the bulk of military personnel for the entirety of the U.S. empire in the region for this entire time, because Japan was

being limited in the amount of military forces it could develop, that placed extra pressure on South Korea to provide those military forces on its own. And that's why, in comparison to Japan, South Korea has mandatory conscription, but Japan does not. So this is an element of the colonial aspect of Korea's relationship to Japan and now to the United States that's really tarried on for more than a century at this point, since we can trace it all the way back to the beginnings of World War II. The last sort of point I'll make about the military dimension is, of course, the geographical significance of Korea. Korea is at the very edge of East Asia, but also if you look at a map of just Northeast Asia in particular,

encompassing the Russian Far East, encompassing China, encompassing Japan, what you'll very quickly recognize is that actually the Korean Peninsula sits at the center of all those forces. And so it's a very, very strategic point for the U.S. to project power through. And that's not only why, the U.S. has sustained its occupation in Korea for this long, but also why from 1958 until 1991, the U.S. station nukes in South Korea. It was the United States that first introduced nuclear weapons to Korea, first introduced a nuclear crisis on the peninsula. And for all those decades, those nukes were pointed directly at North Korea, the Soviet Union in China, which is really the origins of, you know, this so-called nuclear crisis that we hear so much about today,

but which is only ever presented to us by capitalist media as something that North Korea is responsible. Yeah, it's absolutely true that when people think about nukes in Korea, again, the guerrilla history listeners probably accepted from this, but if you ask a typical person in the imperialist corps about nuclear weapons in Korea, the only thing that comes to mind is the DPRK. It does not come to the fact that the Imperialist West, the United States, was the one that had introduced nuclear weapons to the Korean Peninsula and for decades had the only nuclear weapons in the Korean Peninsula,

and they were all pointed in one direction. It was only much, much later that the Korean nuclear apparatus had begun. Now, we're going to talk more about nuclear weapons in just a second, and we've been talking about the influence of the West and the United States particularly in the Korean Peninsula, but it's also important that we think about the political stances that we're taking place and changing and morphing in slight ways in the Korean Peninsula, and this is going to be relevant as we get toward the end of this answer, because there have been some changes that have taken place recently with regard to political circumstances. stances within the Korean Peninsula. But when we're talking about the stances, we're primarily talking about dearmament, and we're also talking about a peaceful reunification of the Korean Peninsula. So can you talk a little bit about the stances towards these two goals, particularly, within the Korean Peninsula by the respective governments within the Korean Peninsula,

as well as perhaps the feelings of the populace of those countries, in the Korean Peninsula. And then, as I said, there was some continuity. Of course, there's been changes over the decades, but there was some continuity in both of the governmental policies of Korea up until very recently. So, you know, can you bring us up to those changes? Yeah, absolutely.

This is a really critical piece of understanding where Korea is today. And it also really informs why we have launched this campaign as noted. before getting into this, I think it's important to just state from the jump that the paradigm I'm about to describe in Korea effectively no longer exists. And so we're now talking about an era that's closed. But as you were explaining, there were two sort of planks that we could understand a lot of inter-Korean politics through, particularly in the last couple of generations, I would argue roughly about the last 50 years. That's denuclearization on the one hand, and peaceful reunification on the other.

Peaceful reunification is, I think, a little bit clearer to understand in terms of a process and in terms of what it was. Peaceful reunification was a position that the DPRK espoused for a very long time, effectively since the signing of the Korean War armistice, and it was supposed to be founded on three principles, that it would be a process that, as the name implies, would be peaceful. So achieve through nonviolent means, it would be independent in that it would not involve any foreign powers in having a say over how the process of reunification went. And it would be premised on this notion of great national unity in that, you know, that would be seen as the chief political goal

of reunification process. And there were a number of proposals that were thrown around. The DPR case position for a very long time was the idea of a federal republic. And the notion here was that there could be a one-state two-systems sort of arrangement, organized under a federal system where there would ultimately be some form of ultimate centralized power that would be democratically established that would take into account the needs of, you know, the two sides or the two systems that were involved, and that's now a unified society. That was a position that, you know, within South Korea had some support. There were also others who thought that it was to centralize, there should be some kind of confederal system, conversely, where there would be a

little bit more sort of like autonomy and leeway for particularly the capitalist society to continue. And then, of course, there is the other variation of reunification, which is reunification by absorption, or really an annexation. That's a model where either side, but particularly South Korea, accomplishes regime change in the North, by any means necessary, destroys the socialist state, and subsumes its society into the capitalist system. This is more or less sort of what happened in Germany, and so sometimes this is also referred to as the German model. And there's a variety of ways that's been promoted. Oftentimes it's sold as like, well, North Korea will just collapse one day anyway. They've been

saying that for many decades. Let me just say it's not happening. The other sort of approach is that this would be accomplished through military means, right? So I think when it comes to the question of reunification, we need to understand that there is broad support for reunification across the Korean political spectrum, across the masses of Korean society on both sides of the DMZ. The precise formulation of reunification is where there have been the most profound differences. And, you know, there were a number of accords that were made between the North and South Korean governments, particularly since the 21st century, that affirmed their commitment to the reunification process. And this is something that for many people is considered and has been considered the ultimate political goal of, you know, any political project in Korea on either side of the 30, on either side of the DMZ. But as I've been saying, we're now in a different era.

I do want to get into those shifts, but, you know, before that to just sort of delve into the denuclearization question a little bit as well. We're often told, you know, in the imperialist corps that, you know, the U.S., or sorry, not the U.S., that North Korea, the DPRK, just has this fanatical desire to possess nuclear weapons and threaten the world that it's not interested in diplomacy. Nothing could be further from the truth. You know, as we've already established from the beginning, it was the U.S. that introduced the nuclear nuclear. threat in Korea. The U.S. also has South Korea under its nuclear umbrella, which means that regardless of where the nukes are placed, the U.S. has a standing legal commitment to use nuclear weapons in Korea in the event of war, if it's deemed strategically necessary. And on top of that, you know, the DPRK engaged in a number of negotiations processes with the United States that

were premised on the question of denuclearization. In fact, the U.S. wouldn't really engage the DPRK diplomatically until it began to develop a nuclear program, and then there was a need scene for that. I think one story I like to tell is in 1974, the DPRK sent a letter to the U.S. Congress asking for a peace treaty. That letter was effectively ignored, but something like 15 years later, the U.S. and the DPRK were sitting down at the negotiating table. Why? It was because the U.S. had determined that the DPRK could be developing, you know, facile material capable of creating nuclear weapons with. And for the last 30 years, the DPRK or North Korea has engaged in a number of multi-year negotiations processes

concerning its nuclear arsenal. At every single point, it has made efforts to demonstrate its sincerity and the fact that it's acting in good faith. It has moved to decommission the Yongbyn nuclear complex. It has taken a number of other measures to demonstrate its seriousness. From the most recent talks with Trump, the DPRK made a commitment to stop testing nuclear weapons. That's a promise they've continued to uphold, despite the fact that the U.S. has broken its own promises. But it's because the U.S. continues to break its own promises that each one of these diplomatic efforts has failed. And that's where we're here where we are today. Absolutely. And before we turn towards recent changes in the stances within the Korean Peninsula, I just wanted to mention that this is like the quintessential example of the security dilemma within international relations theory. So if you're looking at what the security dilemma is, it's basically that if a country is looking at strengthening itself and providing itself with the means to provide its own security, that can then be viewed as an aggressive.

or offensive act by oppositional powers. So if you look at it and how it unfolded, and I'm just basically summarizing what you said in this explanation of the security dilemma, essentially what happened is the United States brings in all of the offensive weapons into the Korean Peninsula, which then forces the DPRK to advance its own nuclear weapons program

or its own protection. However, how is that then viewed by oppositional powers to the DPRK. Well, the DPRK is advancing a nuclear weapons program. Look at these crazy people. They want to end the world. No, I'm sorry. You have to look at it from the perspective of the people of the DPRK. The entire Korean Peninsula is being filled with weapons pointing at the DPRK. I should say the south of the Korean Peninsula is being filled with weapons that are pointed directly at the DPRK. If they do not try to strengthen themselves for their own security,

what are they doing in order to ensure the survival of their society? Of course, they have to do something. And what was the route that they were able to take and that was going to provide the most security for themselves? Of course, that was a nuclear weapons program. And as you mentioned, that nuclear weapons program is what caused the United States to start dealing with the DPRK diplomatically. However, how is that viewed from abroad by opposition to the DPRK is a crazy offensive action.

These people that are crazy, they just want to end the world. They don't care about any ramifications of this. It's some barbaric act to have nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula. I'm sorry, the United States had nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula far before the DPRK had its own nuclear weapons program. So I often use this when discussing the security dilemma as like one of the quintessential examples and one of the easiest to understand examples because it's so clear that the nuclear weapons program of the DPRK is for their own security and for the ability to protect themselves.

However, it is not viewed as such by oppositional powers. So I just wanted to throw that out there. Again, it wasn't really adding much to what you said, just summarizing it and using it as an example of the security dilemma, which is something that more people need to be familiar with because it does help you think through a lot of these problems, particularly when you're living in the Imperial Corps, which I am not, but many people who are listening to this are. But can we talk about the changes in the stances within the governments of the Korean Peninsula recently, and why the campaign, the U.S. out-of-Korea campaign, had begun as a result of these changing positions within the Korean Peninsula. Yeah, absolutely. And just to build on, you know, the point you were making, the maximum estimate of the DPRK's nuclear arsenal is maybe 40 warheads.

The United States is over 5,000. They've not only used them against civilians and warfare and Hiroshima and Anasaki. if you know anything about the Marshall Islands, about the atoll of Enoituk, then I probably butcher the pronunciation on that. Then you also know that a number of U.S. nuclear tests also deeply impacted civilians in the Pacific in particular, but also around the world and even within the continental U.S., right? So when we think about who is the real nuclear threat to the world today. Let's have a real appraisal of history and comparative strength as well. But let's get into, you know, these changes that have occurred in Korea and what we're sort of describing as a paradigm shift in inter-Korean relations. What signals this paradigm shift is really two recent

decisions from the DPRK. The first was in 2022 when the DPRK declared that its nuclear status is now be reversible. What that meant is that they would no longer entertain the prospect of denuclearization as part of any diplomatic talks with any foreign power. That puts a definite end to the past 30 years of the DPRK's approach to diplomacy with the U.S. in particular. And it's really due to the repeated failure of those diplomatic engagements that the DPRK has chosen this route. I think that's something that really needs to be impressed upon audiences. The U.S. has always presented itself as, you know, being willing to engage these negotiations as being the more rational party to these negotiations, but it hasn't treated those

negotiations as negotiations. In negotiations, you compromise, right? You talk about what your separate interests and needs are and how you can arrive at them. But the U.S. essentially holds the position that North Korea has no interest no rights that need to be respected or upheld through these processes and has more or less tried to treat every round of negotiations as a surrender. And so it's because of that that the DPRK is now closing the door on denuclearization, which doesn't necessarily mean they're saying no to any future diplomacy. What they are saying is that we will no longer engage in this type of diplomacy

that seeks to just undermine our leverage, weaken us as a power, and prepare the away for eventual regime change in the DPRK. So that's the first major change that's occurred in the last couple of years. The other major change came at the start of this year, and that was the announcement that the DPRK, for the first time ever, would no longer pursue peaceful reunification with the R.O.K or South Korea, that amounts to an absolute sea change in Korea's political conditions. And what it means is that we're now in completely uncharted waters. You've never been in this situation before. Now, the reason the DPRK arrived at this conclusion is because, based on

the military and political realities in Korea, it was determined that South Korea, the R.K, can no longer be viewed as a reliable or equal partner. in the process of national liberation, in the process of constructing a future for Korea. And that is really based on the behavior of the South Korean government that's currently in power, as well as the behavior of the United States in the last few years. I think we can broadly say that for many decades, the U.S. approach to North Korea has been premised on this kind of two-pronged approach. On the one hand, you use military provocation and threats, primarily in the force, primarily through the form of the U.S. occupation of Korea, U.S. war drills in Korea, and you use that to corner and rattle the DPRK and try to force them to the negotiating table where you then use diplomatic means to try to weaken them and isolate them.

After many, many decades of this, the DPRK is saying no to the continuation of this strategy, more or less. And that's where the new position on peaceful reunification comes from, because they're recognizing the role that the South Korean government is playing in that U.S. strategy, particularly the government that's been in power since 2022 under President Yun Saadjol and the People's Power Party, which is an atrocious name for a right-wing party, but that's what it is. Yeah, I was just wondering if you could tell the listeners a little bit about Yunso Kyo. I feel like, again, probably more guerrilla history listeners are familiar with him than most, but I would say that most Americans, if they know him at all, only know him because he sings American Pie and plays the guitar, but don't actually know anything about him. That listeners is a specific reference. He played American Pie on the guitar for Biden shortly after he came into power.

but I feel like most Americans have no idea of who this guy is. And as you mentioned, there's the change in government really signal the sea change within within South Korea as well. So a little bit about him would be useful, I think. Yeah, absolutely. And I will say that American pie moment deeply seen as humiliating by a lot of Korean people. This is a head of state, not Frank Sinatra. Why are you, like, putting on a performance for a more important?

Yeah. Yunso Kjol is the current president of South Korea. He was elected in 2022 by the narrowest margin in all of Korean history, not just South Korea, all of Korean history, less than 1% of the vote. Razor thin. He is also probably the most unpopular head of state in at least modern Korean history. His approval ratings have been frequently. under 20% for the entirety of his administration. He's only been in power for a little over two years, right? And it's also been an administration characterized by the most pro-US policy

out of possibly any leader in South Korean history, and that's including the dictatorships. It's a administration that from the very moment it entered office declared its right to launch preemptive strikes against the DPRK. It's an administration that has, that last year, declared the DPRK to be its principal enemy. There were a lot of headlines circulated earlier this year when the DPRK responded in kind. So we have to know it was the R.O.K. The government of Eun Sokiller that started that process. He's also a leader who has really thrown the masses of South Korean people under the bus,

not even under the bus, just into the meat grinder. Let's be frank. He is waging an open war against South Korea's unions, wielding something known as a national security law, which is an anti-communist law that's been on the books since 1948, the founding of the Republic of Korea. Using this law to attack union organizers, attack labor, smear them as not only communists, but as foreign agents. And there are now thousands of South Korean labor organizers that are under federal investigation. And that is why many in South Korea refer to his government as a prosecutorial dictatorship

because he is wielding the power of the prosecutor's office, the equivalent of the Department of Justice here in the U.S., to really tamp down on any kind of political opposition, particularly from the working class, but also even amongst the liberal forces as well, even elements of the corporate media in South Korea that are not entirely in line. with what he wants to see, or his party wants to see, rather. I don't want to individualize it too much as just about him. And I think another really key thing is that the Yunso-Guel administration has been essential in brokering a new alliance with Japan that includes the United States.

This is known as the Jackus-J-A-K-U-S alliance. And this is not only an alliance that brings South Korea into a military agreement with its former colonizer or really the beginnings of military agreements since there's still a lot of foundations to be made. But additionally depends on the erasure of Japanese colonial crimes from history and from public consciousness as part of this effort. There have been so many survivors of Japanese forced labor whose demands for justice have been just extinguished by this administration. These are people who are at the end of their lives, right? Japanese colonial was now set eight decades ago.

So these are people who, in many cases, are close to 100 years old. They've carried this burden their entire lives. All they have really wanted is some semblance of justice, some semblance of recognition of what was done to them. And that is what's being thrown out the window to pave the way for this trilateral alliance, for what is really the linchpin of a riotizing Asian, iteration of NATO under U.S. leadership. And these are all the political conditions that are

informing the DPRK's new view of South Korea or the ROK, that this is a colonial entity. There can be no process where this entity is treated as an equal in the shared future of the Korean people. I know we're running short on time, so I want to make sure that we have an opportunity to discuss the U.S. out of Korea campaign. I know you are, have a lot of involved with the campaign. So can you let the listeners know what the goals of the campaign are and also, of course, where they can find out more about the campaign and where they can get involved with the campaign? Absolutely. So we've delved into this paradigm shift. And so I think one thing I want to say is that Korea, as it stands right now, is in a much more volatile position than

ever before. And what's really key here is that conditions have changed to an extent that there is no clear off-ramp to any current escalation. And yet, the imperialist strategy of the U.S. has not adapted because they are still committed to the strategy of aggression. And that's mirrored in the fact that last year in 2003, U.S. forces Korea conducted over 200 days of war drills in Korea. They brought nuclear-capable weapon systems, things like B-2 bombers, aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, to Korea on more than 20 different occasions. And very likely, when this episode is released in a week or two, the U.S. will be conducting some of the largest exercises that it conducts anywhere on Earth on an annual basis in Korea. These exercises are known as

the Uliji Freedom Shield war games. These are massive. war games that mobilize tens of thousands of troops from the U.S. and South Korea. They rehearse bombing the Korean Peninsula, the invasion of the North. And something that is especially disturbing at this time is that there are developments that have taken place over the last couple of weeks that indicate that there are now much clearer or explicit plans being laid for the deployment and the potential use of U.S. nuclear weapons in Korea against Korean people. And that's not only part of the exercises that are taking place in this month in August, but it is a really key thing we need to keep our eye on

for the future, because the U.S. of course, claims its war games are defensive, that its plans to deliver U.S. nukes to South Korean forces to use in war are defensive. You don't make plans to drop nuclear bombs and get to say that they're defensive only. A nuclear bomb in Korea, the entire Korean peninsula is roughly the same size as Utah. You can't drop a nuclear bomb anywhere on the peninsula without affecting the entire population. So this is a plan to nuke the Korean people. It's a plan to implement annihilation, essentially genocide against the Korean people. And we need to be very, very clear about what is happening in Korea now

and why the U.S. is pushing so much for these drastic measures, and it's because Korea is proving to be a very key battlefield in the new Cold War. As I mentioned before, it's in that central position. It's also a place where the contradiction between the forces of imperialism and anti-imperialism are now at their sharpest, speaking for the region. There are other places where the U.S. is attempting to push towards war, pushing a lot of militarization. But Korea is the place where those forces meet on a land border. It's one of the most militarized points, not only in the region, but throughout the world.

And it's also a place where the political stakes are very, very high for all the parties involved. And so that is why there is a need for this U.S. out-of-Korea campaign now. Now, in terms of what we're trying to do with the U.S. out-of-Korea campaign, essentially what we see is that there is a need to build mass-concounter around the question of Korea, around the question of U.S. imperialism, not only in the region, but around the world, and that we not only need this mass consciousness, but real public opposition to come from within the imperial core. Because right now, the U.S. enjoys a completely free hand when it comes to Korea. People barely know that the U.S. is up to anything in Korea. And if they do

know, there is no expression of this kind of opposition, right? Our say, if you will, in what the U.S. is doing in Korea simply is not a political factor at the moment. It's not something that decision makers in the Pentagon or in the White House need to consider when they lay plans for Korea. It's not something they take into consideration at all, actually. So we're launching this campaign because we feel that there is a need to build that solidarity, to build that visible political opposition, and that is part of our task as anti-imperialists. in building a wider anti-imperalist front within the belly of the beast. And so that's why the U.S. out-of-Korea campaign is also formulated around a very specific plan.

We have four key demands that are part of our campaign. The first, as the name implies, is U.S. out of Korea. We want all U.S. and weapons systems out. We want all Korean land, water, airspace, returned. the second is actually an end to the U.S. South Korea alliance because it's not enough if the U.S. just leaves overnight. It still has legal access to all of South Korea's military facilities. It still has operational wartime control over the South Korean military,

and there are also a number of combined commands that establish an structure for the militaries of the two countries to be integrated. So we see all of that as part of the alliance system, including the new alliance with Japan. We want all of that done away with. The third demand is an end to all aggression against North Korea. So that means an end to all sanctions from the United States and also the sanctions that have been imposed through the UN Security Council, which the U.S. is, of course, a permanent member of. And then as an addendum to that, we also need an end to all U.S. war games in Korea. What is the U.S. doing spending 200 days out of the year conducting war drills in Korea?

What is the U.S. doing laying plans to deliver nukes for use in Korea? Look at the state of our worlds. Look at, you know, the tremendous wealth that is concentrated in the United States. Not only the wealth, but also speaking quite frankly, like a lot of specialization in terms of what the U.S. is able to do technologically, what its labor force is able to accomplish, all of that could be put towards the actual betterment of humanity, right? We face really stubborn problems in the world today. We're looking at an apocalyptic climate situation.

We're looking at billions of people in poverty, lacking access to regular food, lacking access to clean water, to basic health care. These are all things we have the means to achieve, and yet we're not doing it. And that brings us to the fourth demand, which is to end the work. Right. and we're defining the war economy in terms of the exorbitant spending that the U.S. is putting into the war, into policing, and into prisons. With war alone, if you count the budget of the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, several other areas where the U.S. allocates budget every year,

the United States government is spending over $1.5 trillion each year, just on the military. It goes up by a couple hundred billion when you throw in what goes into policing, what goes into the mass incarceration system in this country. Where's the money for housing? Where's the money for education? Where's the money for health care, for stewarding our environment? Right. And as we were kind of alluding to before, this is both a matter of where's that money for the domestic population of the U.S.

And also where is that money to contribute and that talent to contribute to what has to to be international efforts, right? Efforts at achieving real cooperation to solve what are collective problems that require collective solutions. And so that's the platform of the U.S. out of Korea campaign. All that's going on in Korea in terms of the very volatile situation that's developing is why we have launched it. And we are determined to continue with this campaign, to build up the political forces that are

needed to realize actual change in the United States and really throughout the world. And we know that we have support from a lot of folks because we launched this campaign on July 27th, so a little over three weeks ago at the time of this recording. We have 48 endorsing organizations already, and we are certain that there are only going to be more. In just a couple of days, we're going to hold rallies in Los Angeles, in San Francisco, New York City, D.C., opposing the war games that are about to take place in Korea, while the majority of the population is distracted by the spectacle of the DNC. So, as a final point, very much want to encourage everyone to tap into this campaign.

Go to USoutofKorea.org. Very simple website to remember. Read the campaign demands for yourself. See the endorsing organizations. If you belong to an organization. take this to your organization. Consider endorsing as well. Because our purpose here is not only to push forward the process of national liberation for Korea to activate our own diaspora here in the U.S. as a political force in that historic process, but really it's to bring the multinational,

multiracial working class of this country into that struggle as well, because that's a struggle against imperialism. And the struggle against imperialism is really the struggle for all of our futures. It's the struggle of working people here in the U.S. have control over politics, to be able to stop wars, to be able to stop exorbitant spending on destruction rather than on things that sustain life. So that's what we're fighting for here, and that's why we're coming on this show, because it's not just something that involves us as Korean people, but something that we see as everyone having a role in, and we want you to be a part of it. Absolutely.

And of course, we'll have all of that linked in the show notes for the listeners to be able to just be able to click and get directly to the site and to see the demands and be able to endorse if they are a member of an organization. In closing, before I have you read yourself out and tell the listeners how they can find you, do you have any reading recommendations for the listeners? is because it seems to me that Korea doesn't get nearly as much focus as it deserves. Even within the left, it doesn't get nearly as much focus as I think it deserves. And I'm assuming that many of our listeners are interested and do want to learn more.

And I'd like to give you the opportunity to let them know what you would recommend for them to check out in order to become more informed on that history and the political dimensions of Korea. Absolutely. I will say this is a very extensive topic and I have yet to encounter a good book that is also short that covers this history in depth. So I am going to make some recommendations I don't usually make because I do think this is an audience that is maybe a little bit more likely to engage in some of those deeper readings. And I'm actually going to recommend some authors first. The first is, of course, Bruce Cummings, who is a really seminal historian in at least English scholarship

on Korea, and that's because he played a key role in bringing to light previously unknown U.S. war documents from the Korean War. So I would say anything related to the Korean War, anything related to South Korean development, Bruce Cummings is a very key source. He has this tome known as the origins of the Korean War. It's two volumes, very, very long. But if you want to know more about particularly that period between 1945 to 1950, that is essential reading. And it will have way more data, way more information than could ever be conveyed in a recorded conversation. He, of course, has a number of other books, particularly concerning the Korean War, particularly concerning South Korea's development. I would recommend him for those

topics as well. Another author who has written extensively on capitalist development in South Korea in particular, that I would recommend is Martin Hart Landsberg, who is also another scholar working from the English language primarily, but has, I would say, the gift of being able to condense very in-depth economic information in very tight summaries, which I think your listeners will find very valuable. I also want to lift up the work of Hagen Koo, who is a South Korean scholar who has produced a lot of work, particularly about the labor movement in South Korea. I think that's also essential history that people should be engaging with. When it comes to the question of North Korea, the scholarship is a little bit harder.

I'll just be upfront about that. I think that there are a number of sources in English that do provide some good overviews, particularly to understand the political military dimensions of relations with the U.S. So I would recommend immovable object by A.B. Abrams. This is another very long book, but one that really goes into detail about specifically the history of the U.S. North Korea relationship, which I think is a topic that probably is of more interest to listeners. And then lastly, there are a number of books that I would also recommend when it comes to trying to understand the DPRK's own development and its own socialism. I will say that, you know, one of the

best things to do is actually to engage, you know, some of the theorization that's come out of the DPRK itself, which is usually not something that people are encouraged to do. We're just sort of taught to, like, look at those things as blanket propaganda. But I'm in recommending this from the standpoint that if you want to understand a topic, if you want to understand a society, you need to engage with the way that society describes itself, right? So I will just open with that. In terms of books that have been written from the outside, I would recommend the Socialist Korea a case study in the Strategy of Economic Development.

This was written in the 1970s by Jacques Hirsch, and I believe the second author's name was Ellen Bouch. There is also another book that was written around the same time as Socialist Korea called Modern Korea, The Socialist North Revolutionary Perspectives in the South and Unification by Kim Jong-Sik that's spelled K-I-M-B-Y-O-N-G-S-I-K. This is actually a really interesting perspective because Kim Jong-Sik was actually a member of the Supreme People's Assembly of the DPRK representing the overseas Korean community in Japan. So he has a very unique perspective that he brings to bear to this work.

And he actually, particularly when it comes to the sort of economic indicators, of development in the DPRK up until the time of his writing, I would say it's one of the best sources in terms of being able to provide that information in a very condensed and sort of shortened format. It is still quite dense, I will say. Maybe not the most riveting read in some points,

but I do think that it provides a lot of essential data that I'm sure your audiences will find. Yeah, awesome. Thanks so much for those recommendations. I'm also going to put one out there. So those were good recommendations on the history and political development. I have a recommendation that's going to be a little bit more out of left field, but it's also a shameless plug because it's a book out from Iskra Books.

And, of course, I'm an editorial board member of Iskra Books. We have a publication that came out recently, Internationalism in Practice, Claudia Jones, Black Liberation and the Beastiel War on Korea. Claudia Jones, of course, being one of our favorite, you know, political commentators and theorists from the 1940s, 50s. We've discussed her in our episode on Black Communist Women with Dr. CBS. She's come up in various other conversations. But in any case, this is a very short work that is essays primarily from Claudia Jones in the early 1950s in that period of the war on Korea. and her essays on black internationalism,

black liberation, and black solidarity with the Korean people in the face of U.S. imperialism. And it also features other essays from Gerald Horn, Denise Lynn, Betsy Yun, Tion, Paris, and Kim Il-sung. So that might be of interest to the listeners. It's not a history of Korea. It's not an examination of Korea itself. But if you're interested in those international connections

between the black liberation movements and the Korean people, that might be a book that's worth checking out. And of course, Iskra Books offers every book that we put out as PDFs for free and get those at IskraBooks.org. Or you can order the book. It's small and it's very inexpensive. Yeah, you want to say something? Yeah, I'll just throw in that Betsy Yun is also a member of Notadol. So this is actually a Notadol Iskra collaboration. So definitely check that one. It's another reason why I brought it up. I was hoping that you would jump in with that. So, I know that you have to go very soon. Can you tell the listeners how they can keep up to date with you and Nodotul on social media,

anything else that you would like to direct them to in closing? Absolutely. First off, I'll reiterate, go to U.S. out of Korea.org, not just to check out all the information that we have there, but you can also sign up for email updates from us. So if you want to stay in touch with the campaign, that's a great way to do that. In a definition, you can follow N-O-D-U-T-O-L on basically any social media platform. We'll be there. And that's a great way to keep track of the analysis that we're putting out, the sort of actions and events that we're calling for, things of that nature.

we're constantly working to provide political education and to provide avenues for mass participation in anti-imperialism. We want you to be a part of that. So go follow, keep up with us, and join us on this long journey for not only U.S. out of Korea, but really U.S. out of everywhere. That is the goal that we are all aiming for. And it's not something that we can do on our own. We definitely need everyone walking alongside us, and that's why we want you to be participating in this campaign with us. As for you, you're a great follow on social media yourself as well, so I'm going to make sure that you tell the listeners how they can find you. Okay, I usually don't do this. I'm forcing you to. I'm sorry. All right. You can follow me at Hermit underscore Huatang, H-E-R-M-I-T-U-A-R-A-N-G.

I don't tweet as much as I used to. That's probably for the best. But, yeah, you can follow me if you like. I still put out errant thoughts here and there. But really want to impress upon folks the need to follow the campaign, follow the organization as the best way to keep up with what's going on. Yeah, absolutely. And I want to thank you so much for your time.

We recorded this pretty early in the morning. and, you know, it was great to be able to actually meet you. I know we've been following each other for quite some time, but it's our first virtual meeting with one another. And I'm hoping that we'll have the opportunity to collaborate again going forward because I really had a great time with this conversation. Absolutely. Really appreciated the invite.

Been a longtime listener of guerrilla history. So it's great to be here. Deeply admire the work that you've been doing, Henry, and appreciate the solidarity. and so. Yeah, absolutely. So then just to read us out, listeners, Adnan was unfortunately unable to be at the recording today. He had something come up at the last minute, but you should definitely follow my co-host Adnan Hussein on Twitter. That's H-U-S-A-I-N. You should follow his other podcast, The M-A-J-L-I-S. Just make sure you're not following the Radio Free Central Asia podcast

of the same name. It's the one from MSG-P-Q-U, Muslim Society, Global Perspective, the project at Queen's University. It's a podcast that focuses on the Middle East, Islamic World, Muslim Diaspras. It's a great show, and I know that they have a few things in the works right now. That'll be coming out soon. As for me, listeners, you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995, H-U-C-1-9-95. You can help support guerrilla history, allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to patreon.com, forward slash guerrilla history, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history,

Follow us on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod, again, G-E-R-R-I-L-A-U-L-A-U-Pod. And I think our Instagram handle is Gorilla underscore History. I should probably look that up sometime, but, you know, you can find us. All right. And until next time, listeners, solidarity. I'm going to be able to be. Thank you.