Reuters/Official US Army Photograph via National Archives To understand why the war was so devastating for the Korean people, it is useful to divide its horrors into three overlapping phases: the anti-communist politicide during the lead-up to war and its opening stages the mobile front lines and successive occupations of the first eight months and the aerial bombing of North Korea that lasted until the armistice in 1953.Ī South Korean refugee holds her belongings as she flees from Pohang, August 1950. It also turned millions more into refugees, and left hundreds of thousands of Korean families divided until the present day, many never knowing whether their relatives were alive or dead. Let us first consider the Korean War as a war on civilians, which killed as many noncombatants as it did combatants - around 2 million, according to various estimates. ![]() In what follows, I will consider first the experience of the war itself for the Korean people, and then the ways in which the war has been interpreted. Depending on their attitude toward the Soviet Union, socialists have either seen the Korean War as a fight for freedom by a plucky, independence-minded people against the might of US imperialism, or as a great power struggle between Washington and Moscow, shorn of the complexities of social upheaval and civil war that accompanied the end of empire and the beginning of partition in Korea itself in 1945. Meanwhile, in the two Koreas, official discourse has for decades subjected the war to various forms of historical amnesia - the “historiography of oblivion,” to borrow Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s term - diverting knowledge and understanding into narrow channels, in a way that often runs counter to the experience of those who were caught up in the conflict.įor its part, the international left has tended to view the war in simplistic terms, when it has bothered to take notice of it at all. ![]() Mainstream commentary in the United States has often described Korea as a “forgotten war,” overshadowed by Vietnam and the social upheavals it helped foment. We should take this opportunity to recover the memory of both what this war meant for the Korean people and its place in twentieth-century history. ![]() June 25 marks the seventieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950.
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