My Take | Like the Korean war, perhaps the Cold War has never ended
- First exposed more than 70 years ago, the same terrible problems and mortal dangers face us today, including the possibility of nuclear annihilation
In January 2018, The New York Times ran a story titled, “Korean war, a forgotten conflict that shaped the modern world”. The US Navy’s Naval History and Heritage Command has a lengthy archive that is titled, “Remembering the Forgotten War: Korea”.
It seems strange that Americans would “forget” a conflict as seminal in the last century as the Korean war, which marked the first salvo of the Cold War. The Koreans themselves never forget, especially those in the North.
After all, it was the most horrendous event that ever happened to their country. This week marks the 70th anniversary of the armistice, and the war is forgotten no more. For one thing, it actually never ended. And given the escalating tensions, the worst between the two Koreas in so many years, a resumption of the war is not entirely out of the question. This, and the fact that their respective backers, China and the United States, are at loggerheads, should scare everyone.
“The number of Korean dead, injured or missing by war’s end approached 3 million, 10 per cent of the overall population. The majority of those killed were in the North, which had half of the population of the South; although the DPRK [the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] does not have official figures, possibly 12 to 15 per cent of the population was killed in the war, a figure close to or surpassing the proportion of Soviet citizens killed in World War II.”
Note that it’s the US military’s own assessment that the bombing of Korea was worse than that of Japan, even including the dropping of two atomic bombs. Here, I think we have a pretty obvious answer as to why Americans would want to forget and Koreans never would.
Why the devastation? The US Air Force called it “Bringing the war to the people.” That’s what most of us would call deliberately targeting the civilian population. It’s a war crime, and Air Force General Curtis LeMay subsequently admitted as much on record. After practically every urban target was blown to smithereens, the US started bombing dams to flood farms and destroy crops to induce food shortages, if not a famine.