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Another tragic anniversary almost passed and gone; 70 years of the Korean War. A war stemming from the U.S. division of a postcolonial Korea because it thought the country couldn't govern itself after Japanese occupation, yielding a north and a south that had never existed before
A war most Americans know nothing about; a Cold War-era conflict that means most Korean Americans who lived through it tell a sanitized version; a war that killed millions of civilians, often in the cruelest ways. Welcome to U.S. warfare, napalm, chemical, carpet-bombing style.
What happened in the Vietnam War first tested and perfected in Korea. A war that never ended. The division reduced to a caricature, no mention of the years preceding and how it came to be that a unified, colonized territory became, suddenly, two completely opposed nation-states.
I remember organizing events around the 60th year anniversary in D.C. 60 years! Isn't that enough? My grandparents, their generation, who survived so much, who faced so many contradictions of division and the aftermath, no longer alive to tell us what it was like.
Meanwhile every new U.S. administration goes back to zero knowledge, some have as their best policy advisor some twenty-something Korean American, others keep feeding off of neocon warhawks. While the mainstream thinks the DPRK should implode, that's not a solution.
What will it take for the Koreas to achieve real, lasting peace? When will we look at the history of all that has been bloodily suppressed, the movements and people killed by US-supported dictators, instead of blithely claiming the U.S. (HA!) helped build S. Korean democracy?
To be clear, as a diasporic Korean in the U.S., my relationship to the Korean War began in deep silence, a 'you don't have to know about it, you're American' from family. I focus on the U.S. role because it's so critical and literally no one here learns about it. M*A*S*H ain't it
Korean War survivors live in many of our communities; they may still startle at a loud sound, feel crazed when a child calls "mama!" and feel dread at the sight of an airplane overhead. We have not heard their stories enough. We still do not know the heavy human costs of this war
