This makes me wonder what other vile crap is hiding in so-called classified documents.
From Newsweek:
The American colonel, troubled by what he was hearing, tried to stall at first. But the declassified record shows he finally told his South Korean counterpart it “would be permitted” to machine-gun 3,500 political prisoners, to keep them from joining approaching enemy forces.
In the early days of the Korean War, other American officers observed, photographed and confidentially reported on such wholesale executions by their South Korean ally, a secretive slaughter believed to have killed 100,000 or more leftists and supposed sympathizers, usually without charge or trial, in a few weeks in mid-1950.
And to think that I always believed the machine gunning of political prisoners was something only the godless communists did. It’s things like this that make me sometimes forget that we are supposed to be the good guys.
I learned from the same Newsweek article that the news of these exicutions first surfaced on May 19 in an AP article. An article I don’t remember reading or hearing about.
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3 Responses
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I read the whole article in Newsweek. I think there is a big distinction between pulling the trigger and allowing something to happen. I’m not trying to say that allowing an atrocity to occur is okay, but there is a difference. Like one of the officers in the article said, South Korea was a sovereign nation.
There is always complaining about how the US allows things like this to happen. An yet when the US steps in and gets involved, people criticize that the US should not meddle in the affairs of other nations.
God-forbid something as evil as “nation building” were to occur. People might stop shitting in their drinking water and killing their daughters out of “honor.”
I should have been more clear. When I was referring to “we”, I meant the non-communists. I was pissed off about what the South Koreans did. I was also pissed off over the fact that this was classified for that long. I don’t think something should be classified just because it makes the United States or it’s allies look bad.
I agree about how disappointing it is that this was kept quiet for so long. But in 1950, this shit just wasn’t reported in the mass media.