HISTORY: Korea vs. Korea

The history of Korea was complicated and violent long before the U.S. ever became involved. Fighting between several internal factions had been ongoing for hundreds of years before the war between the North and South broke out in 1950. From the beginning, the issue was dictatorship versus democracy, but was and is being portrayed as communism versus capitalism.

China wanted Korea to become a communist dictatorship as part of a worldwide structure, while the U.S. wanted it to be a capitalistic democracy, also as part of a worldwide structure. This phenomenon was happening around the globe. Between then and now, the governments of Russia and China have remained dictatorial, but their economies have begun slowly moving toward freer market economic systems.

Leading up to World War II, Japan was brutally attacking China, murdering entire villages of peasants — men, women and children — and forcing many into slave labor camps. If the U.S. had done nothing, Japan would never have attacked us at Pearl Harbor, but we intervened by cutting the sale of iron and oil, the resources that Japan was using to conquer China. Almost immediately after the U.S. ended the war by nuking Japan, the Chinese communists, drunk with thoughts of a worldwide communist caliphate, turned on us as if we had done nothing to save their nation from total annihilation.

Today China has moved socially and economically closer to a South Korea, but for some reason continues to prop up a monovalent, backward North Korea. In doing so they totally undermine and contradict the highly desirable image of the modern socialist nation they have worked so long and hard to achieve. Who and what is the real China — the modern nation they want to be, or just another Imperial Japan?

STEVE NOVAK

Coeur d’Alene