This essay argues that although the Korean War devastated most of the Korean Peninsula, the question of responsibility and the reality of the postwar period have never been honestly reckoned with in South Korea.
The author states that although South Korean and U.S. forces had pushed the North to the brink of collapse, Chinese intervention reversed the war, prolonged it for three years, and left millions of soldiers and civilians dead while devastating most of the peninsula.
He further criticizes South Korea for not demanding any real reckoning from China, even though China’s intervention lengthened the war and increased the scale of the tragedy.
The essay also contends that the Syngman Rhee regime purged opponents as political criminals and imposed a politics of fear through control of thought and speech, denunciation systems, and secret police, while silencing those who personally remembered the Japanese period and implanting “false memories” into children through media and public education.
In this telling, the regime contributed nothing to South Korea’s social or economic development, but instead imposed oppression, carried out mass killings, deepened poverty, and then concealed that shame while teaching fabricated anti-Japan history.
The piece presents this concealment and falsification as one of the central pathologies of modern South Korean history.

2019-03-18
Most of the Korean Peninsula was devastated.
Incidentally, toward China, which prolonged the war and increased the number of victims, South Korea has not demanded even a single word of reckoning or historical accountability.

What follows is a continuation of the previous chapter.
At first, the South Korean army was driven back into the southern part of the peninsula, but with the entry of the American military it regained momentum, and within four months had reached the Yalu River on the border between China and North Korea.
However, just when the war should have ended with the destruction of North Korea, Chinese intervention pushed the front back once again to the 38th parallel, and in the end the war continued for a full three years.
As a result, millions of soldiers and civilians became victims, and most of the Korean Peninsula was devastated.
Incidentally, toward China, which prolonged the war and increased the number of victims, South Korea has not demanded even a single word of reckoning or historical accountability.
Even after that, Syngman Rhee continued to remain in the position of dictator until the middle of 1960.
Rhee purged not only communists but also those who opposed him as political criminals, and thoroughly suppressed demonstrations and protest movements.
Koreans who remembered the Japanese period were outraged at the time, saying, “How is this supposed to be ‘liberation’?
Is this not a society far worse than life under Japanese rule?”
Syngman Rhee controlled this movement through a politics of terror involving control of thought and speech, systems of denunciation, and secret police.
In this way, he monitored and suppressed pro-Japan thought and behavior, created a division between generations by making those who knew the Japanese period from experience fall silent out of fear, and implanted “false memories” in children through the media and public education.
During the Pacific War, Korea was not bombed, was not subject to actual conscription in practice (*with only a small number conscripted before the war ended before they were sent to the front), and experienced only the requisitioning of goods and compulsory labor, treatment extraordinary for a “colony.”
As a result, when the war ended, the Japanese mainland had suffered massive war deaths and been reduced to ashes, while Korea was left almost unharmed.
In other words, after the war, the economic and social conditions of Japan and Korea had been completely reversed.
And yet by the time Syngman Rhee was gone, South Korea had fallen into the ranks of the poorest countries, and the condition of the two had reversed once again.
In the end, Syngman Rhee contributed not a single thing to the development of South Korean society or economy, but merely wielded dictatorial power, imposed oppression, massacred large numbers of his own people, and drove the country into poverty.
Incidentally, since the South Korean government still conceals this shameful chapter and, on the contrary, fabricates massacres by the Japanese military that never existed and teaches children a false history, is it not something like an accomplice itself?
To be continued.