Kim Dong-choon is a former Standing Commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, ROK, and professor of sociology, SungKongHoe University, Seoul. He served the Korean government as a standing commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission from December 1, 2005 to December 10, 2009 As a commissioner, he directed the first government investigation of the Korean War massacres since the incidents. His book, The Unending Korean War, has been translated into German, Japanese, and English. He wrote this article for The Asia-Pacific Journal.
In 2008, President Ro Moo-Hyun made an official apology on behalf of the state for the massacres of the Korean War.
In 1996, Chun Doo-hwan, former South Korean army general who ruled as the President of South Korea from 1979 to 1988, ruling as an unelected coup leader was sentenced to death for his role in the Gwangju Massacre His successor as president, Roh Tae Woo, was sentenced to 22 1/2 years in prison. The Gwangju Uprising, alternatively called May 18 Democratic Uprising by UNESCO,and also known as May 18 Gwangju Democratization Movement. This past February 2018, it was revealed for the first time that the army had used McDonnell Douglas MD500 Defender and Bell UH-1 Iroquois attack helicopters to fire on civilians. Defense Minister Song Young-moo made an apology.
This frenzy of defamation and murder of communists in South Korea and in so very many other defenseless nations after the Second World War took place in the so called 'Free World,' still run by the white racist Colonial Powers with nearly half of the world's non-Caucasian population either outright colonial subjects or under the control of the empires of Europe and America.
Your author, who has Korean family and lived in Korea for six years, has never met a Korean happy that his or her dear family member was 'saved' from living under a communist party run government by a violent death brought about by an American war in Korean's own beloved country. From my experience all Koreans, there is only one Korea, and the northern part is looked up to for being a less Westernized behavior and practice of Korea's sensitive traditional arts, culture and traditions.
Most of the families and friends of the millions of people in countries like Korea and Vietnam, who were designated to be 'better dead than red' as in the slogan preached by Americans, don't realize that these US crimes were, and still are, prosecutable under the Nuremberg Principles of International Law, and that some day they might well receive financial compensation once Americans are no longer in the neocolonial driver seat, and a reconstituted United Nations is providing courts to adjudicate lawsuits for compensation for millions of unlawful deaths and injuries, indemnity for ultra massive destruction of property and reparations for mega theft of natural resources.
It would make little sense if the reality of the decades long American backed murderous military dictatorships in South Korea, both before, during and after the American Korean War, is left out of what is discussed, for it is the key to understanding the history up to today. And if Americans decide it be in their interests to be a friend of all Koreans, they might remember President Theodore Roosevelt cut off relations with Koreans and recognizing Korea as territory of the Japanese Empire in return for Japanese recognition of the Philippines as territory of the United States of America. President Woodrow Wilson made it official. So, after suffering thirty-five years of deadly brutal Japanese occupation, the US and Soviet Armies occupied Korea, as just that, the territory of Japan rather than with respect for the ancient nation of Korea.
No one can change bitter human history, but accepting the real honest history of horrific even genocidal events, though improbable soon given the necessity of imperialist media to maintain the horrendous lies and falsehoods of the past, will eventually be unavoidable when all documentation becomes uncovered. The job of an archival research peoples historian is to make that eventuality arrive just a little earlier than otherwise.
In the meantime, we monitor influential criminal media, fed by neocolonial capitalism's covert agency, CIA ('Criminally Insane Assassins' not Central Intelligence Agency), and continue to write tracts encouraging majority humanity to have confidence in a future featuring major sources of truthful information and an eventual just world of noble citizens.
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