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... a considerable achievement that the United States had been able to maintain the support of the Western allies for her anti-Communist program. The United Nations Commission on Korea, charged with pursuing the eventual objective of supervising the unification of the divided nation, now maintained a permanent presence in the South, monitoring the mutually hostile activities of Seoul and Pyongyang and seeking "to observe and report any developments which might lead to or otherwise involve military conflict in Korea." It is a backhanded tribute to the vestiges of democracy that persisted in the South that, in the elections for a new National Assembly in May 1950, Syngman Rhee's bitter unpopularity was fully reflected. The parties of the Right gained only 49 seats against 130 seats won by Independents and 44 by other parties.
With the advantage of hindsight, it is evident that United States policy in postwar Korea was clumsy and ill conceived. It reflected not only a lack of understanding, but a lack of interest in the country and its people beyond their potential as bricks in the wall against Communist aggression. This failure, it may be suggested, lay close to the heart of the United States' difficulties not only with Korea, but also with China and subsequently with Vietnam. The occupiers' enthusiasm for the reproduction of American political and bureaucratic institutions in Asia held little charm for Koreans with different attitudes and priorities. Japan, alone in Asia, represented in the 1940s, as it represents today, the single glittering example of a society in which American political transplants took firm root. Only Japan was sufficiently educated and homogeneous to adapt thenew institutions successfully. In Japan alone the traditional leaders of society were not identified by their poorer compatriots with an intolerable measure of injustice, corruption, and collaboration with foreign oppressors. In those parts of Asia where they exerted influence, the Americans honorably attempted to mitigate the worst excesses of landlordism and social oppression. But they never acknowledged how grievously these evils damaged their perpetrators as credible rulers in a democratic society. Again and again in Asia, America aligned herself alongside social forces which possessed no hope of holding power by consent. Chiang Kai Shek's followers, like those of Syngman Rhee, could maintain themselves in office only by the successful application of oppressive force.
Yet the United States is also entitled to argue before the bar of history that a more enlightened and idealistic policy in postwar Korea would have caused the country to fall to the Communists. The local Communists' credentials as fighters against the Japanese, their freedom from the embarrassments of landlordism and corruption, would almost certainly have enabled them to gain some popular mandate in 1945-46. Whatever their initial willingness to form a coalition with Koreans of the Center and Right, would the moderates not have suffered the same inexorable fate of death or impotence that befell so many Eastern European politicians of that period, not to mention those of North Korea? Diplomatic historians have convincingly shown that in 1945-46, contrary to American belief at the time, South Korea did not form part of the Soviet expansion plan. Yet how were the contemporary leaders of the West to know or to guess that this was so, that Stalin had indulgently decided to exclude Korea from the fate that had befallen Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary? In the late 1940s it seemed, upon sufficient evidence, that the purpose of the Soviet Union was to test the strength of the West at every possible point and to advance wherever weakness was detected. Dr. Syngman Rhee and his followers appeared at least to represent strength and determination at a period when these were at a premium. In historical assessments of the postwar period, it is sometimes forgotten that the Russians were as deeply feared by many Europeans as the Germans a few years earlier. The appeasers of Hitler had become objects of derision and contempt. Those who observed the Red Army's dreadful record of rape and pillage i n Eastern Europe, the unquestionable readiness of Moscow to employ murder as an instrument of policy, felt nothing but scorn for the would-be appeasers of Stalin in Europe or in Asia.
Nor did American manipulation of South Korean politics seem anything like as awful a matter, even in liberal circles, in 1945 as it might forty years later. In the course of the Second World War, none of the partners of the Grand Alliance had shown any greater sensitivity toward the human rights and feelings of Asian peoples than the chiefs of the Military Government displayed in Seoul from 1945 to 1948. If Korean policemen sometimes tortured or killed civilians, if their leaders accepted bribes, if their politicians behaved like mafiosi — was not this the way "these people" had always done things? Was it not merely a higher form of Western arrogance to seek to impose Western ideas of humanity upon a society in which dog was a culinary delicacy — customarily strangled and depilated with a pine taper in the course of preparation — and where fried crickets and boiled silkworms featured prominently in local good-food guides? The American record in Korea between 1945 and 1950 must be judged against the indisputable reality of Soviet expansionism, of Stalin's bottomless malevolence. No charge against the Rhee regime can blunt the force of one simple truth: that while the United States deliberately declined to provide South Korea with the means to conduct armed aggression, the Soviet Union supplied North Korea with a large arsenal of tanks, artillery, and military aircraft. The events that unfolded in the summer of 1950 demonstrated that American fears for the peninsula were entirely well founded, whatever the shortcomings of Washington's political response to the situation.
Copyright © 1987 by Romadata Ltd.
