The atrocities of US soldiers on the territory of the DPRK have been remembered since the 50s of the last century.
The events on the Korean Peninsula continue to be the focus of the world's attention. Either American President Donald Trump declares that he has a nuclear button larger than that of Kim Jong-un, then he suspects that he has a mental illness. The tension is growing. Although these days there is hope for the reconciliation of the two Koreas. North expressed a desire to participate in the Olympics and even a dialogue between the two leaders took place. How it all ends, we will tell, but for now let's turn to history. It becomes clear from it that it is not the Americans who need to scare the whole world with North Korea, but quite the opposite …
Many historians believe that the start of the Korean conflict in the early 50s was the monstrous massacre carried out by the subordinates of the South Korean dictator Rhee Seung Man before the official opening of hostilities. So, according to the historian Kim Dong-Chu, 100,000 civilians - members of the so-called Bodo League - became victims of state terror in the south of the peninsula. According to other sources, 200,000 were executed. In total, according to information from South Korean human rights activists, 1.2 million people were killed, even remotely related to this organization or in the slightest degree sympathetic to the left forces in the country.
Shooting lists
"Bodo" literally translates as "care and guidance." And the League itself was formed by the South Korean government in 1949, immediately after the brutal suppression of the 1948 Jeju Uprising - it began on the South Korean island of Jeju and lasted more than a year. A speech by supporters of the South Korean Workers' Party, which made up half of the island's population, was covered in blood. Tens of thousands of tortured and killed, 70 percent of villages and villages burned down by government troops, 40,000 destroyed houses - this was the result of the reprisals against those dissatisfied with the policy of Rhee Seung Man.
Therefore, soon an organization was established, ostensibly for the "re-education" (this is another meaning of the word "bodo") of citizens who sympathized with the Communists and the Labor Party of South Korea. In fact, Southern President Lee Seung Man (an ardent Americanist) was simply compiling detailed lists of all those who disliked his truly tough style of government. These were poor peasants, progressive youth, people who had not yet recovered from Japanese aggression and American interference in the internal affairs of their country. When all of them were identified and counted, it turned out that the number of people registered in the Bodo League was 300,000.
However, in addition to these people, the secret services also listed several hundred thousand "unreliable" citizens who "not so zealously" supported the militaristic policy of the South Korean leadership. These were the ones who were included in the lists drawn up by the Japanese invaders and inherited by the Korean National Police (KNP), created under the close leadership of the US Military Administration in 1945. And the leadership of the KNP constantly demanded that its subordinates expand the list of "unreliable", sending special quotas to the localities.
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Thus, up to 70 percent of people who fell under suspicion did not know by sleep or spirit that they were not “enemies of the nation”, but not friends of the state.
Enforce
Of course, this sounds too naturalistic, but "you can't throw words out of the song": members of the Bodo League were not only shot, but also killed in all possible ways: they were drowned in the sea, stabbed with bayonets, killed with rifle butts, thrown into mines and mines … After the beginning fighting, fearing an offensive by North Korean troops, the special services of the southerners received an order to expedite the elimination of political prisoners in prisons and especially unreliable citizens.
Admiral of the South Korean Navy Nam Sang-hoi, being already in retirement, recalled how, when retreating, he was forced to give an order to his subordinates without trial or investigation to drown hundreds of unwanted people into the sea, to decide whose fate, according to him, there was no time left. Both the Americans, the British, and the Australians sometimes witnessed the massacres of "unreliable" citizens by the military police of South Korea.
In some cases, British troops, which were part of the UN forces, were even forced to prevent extrajudicial killings of people who allegedly sympathized with the North Korean regime. This, for example, happened in Seoul in December 1950 (when the doomed people had already been taken to execution) and in other places outside the Korean capital. And in response to a British inquiry to the Americans, Deputy Secretary of State Dean Rusk assured allies that the United States was doing everything in its power to prevent such reprisals.
Although, when the commander-in-chief of the united coalition, General Douglas MacArthur, was reported on war crimes, he replied that this was an "internal affair" of the Republic of Korea. But the most monstrous thing about these "internal affairs" was that the South Korean special services did not stop even before the murder of old people, women and even children. Such facts, for example, were uncovered in 2008 by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Daejeon, South Korea, when many remains (including women's and children's bodies) were found in an old buried trench. In total, according to the results of the Commission's work, 7,000 people were hastily buried in this place.
The bodies of 400 Korean citizens lie in and around the trenches in the Daejeon prison yard during the Korean War in September 1950. These people were tied up and killed by the retreating communist forces before the 24th US Army platoon entered the city on September 28th. The prisoners had to dig up future graves themselves before being shot. War correspondent Gordon Hammock is on the left.
According to The Korea Times, human rights defenders in Busan, Seoul, Jinju, Masan (now Changwon), Ulsan and many other cities and provinces awaited the same dire finds. Similar mass graves are found constantly in South Korea. The place of detection of some becomes the result of a random combination of circumstances: for example, as a result of water erosion of the soil after the next typhoon. Other mass graves are sought specifically by studying archival documents. Such a find was made in the 2000s by journalists, exploring an abandoned mine.
UN-mandated war criminals
By the way, this became possible largely thanks to the declassified documents of the occupying American administration, which, half a century later, provided them to the Korean side. Is it because the United States kept this "military secret" for so long that the Americans themselves pretty much "inherited" on the Korean Peninsula during that conflict? At least, it is no longer a secret for anyone that, as the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War destroyed a quarter of the population of Soviet Belarus, so the American troops, under the cover of a UN mandate, shot or simply destroyed 35,800 civilians in Sinchon County alone - every fourth …
By the way, a county is not even a province (region), but a district in our opinion. Imagine what a person experiences when in his native, say, Leninsky or Kirovsky districts, armed militants shouting to the whole world about "liberation" and "democracy" begin to slaughter and kill his children, wife, relatives and neighbors. And then it turns out that "nothing happened": this is just a UN peacekeeping operation. Something of the type of "compulsion to the world," that is, to rest - eternal rest.
Comparing the "military" actions of the United States in the occupied territories of Korea with the monstrous crimes of the fascists in the USSR is by no means an exaggeration. Remember the shots from documentaries and feature films about the war, when German planes methodically ironed an evacoelon, a train with the wounded or a column of refugees, pouring machine-gun fire on people or covering them with powerful bombs. The Americans in Korea were also "entertained" in exactly the same way.
The favorite "fun" of the US soldiers was to shoot at civilians. And it doesn't matter at all whether these citizens were members of the Bodo League, or just walked by. For example, in 2007, the British Air Force made public documents about a story that took place in the Korean village of Nogylli, where the Yankees frolicked to their heart's content, destroying a whole column of hundreds of civilians sneaking into the rear of the Southerners - that is, essentially to the Americans.
There were at least 60 such incidents! But the most interesting thing is that, as soon as researchers, historians and journalists began to refer to the original source with the BBC data, almost all the pages from the BBC website that compromising the Anglo-Saxons disappeared (this is also the corporate identity of the Western media). So the "try to prove" shadow boxing continues. And if the president of South Korea back in 2008 publicly apologized for the innocent people killed in 1950-1953. compatriots, it is unlikely that the Koreans will wait for something like this from the United States, which consider themselves victors in all wars of the past and present centuries. As you know, the winners do not apologize to anyone, because they are not judged.
Vitaly Karyukov