Two Koreas–How?

In this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, Feb. 21, 2014, p. A11, is a story, “Koreans Split by War Reunite.” The story reiterates a false history of how the two Koreas were separated. “The reunions serve as a reminder that despite the division of the peninsula after the 1950-53 Korean War, the border divides blood relatives.”

Leaving aside the sad fact–this is, after all, The Wall Street Journal, hey–that the above sentence makes no real sense, I get the gist from surrounding text. The actual history swallowed in this nonsense sentence is that the United States of America divided the two Koreas in July 1945, immediately after WWII. Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel, then in the U.S. Army, knew that the Soviets under Joseph Stalin wanted to take the entire Korean peninsula and incorporate it into the Soviet Union. They were also aware that the U.S. Army did not have the troops in place to prevent this.

Rusk and Bonesteel looked at a map of Korea hanging in the conference room where they were meeting, saw that the 38th Parallel looked like a good place to draw a boundary line between North and South. They drew it and presented their plan to the Soviets, who agreed. Thus the Koreas were divided.

I know this because my dad was secretary to the American negotiating team brought in by the U.S. and Russia (then the dominant state of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics, otherwise called U.S.S.R.) I have his handwritten notes from the negotiations, and included a bit of these in my book about this division: The Jade Locket and the Red Star: An Untold History of the Invasion of Korea and Why Korea Is Now Two Countries Instead of One, available on Amazon as a paperback book, with photographs, or Kindle.

 

 

Korea: Cracked Child

Perhaps if any child grows up in any culture being fed lies and too much food, that child has a chance to grow up tubby, ignorant, and with iffy, unstable mental health, with little compassion or ability to see much reality.

Unfortunately Kim Jong Un, autocrat of North Korea, seems to be that child. Perhaps he is so desperate to be thought an adult that he’s going to shake his missiles at the USA, which does not like being threatened. It would be good to treat him like the barely-more-than-a-baby he is, and not retaliate, but he has the power to hurt people, all the Asians near North Korea–South Korea and Japan being the ones particularly under threat–and Americans at nearby bases, plus anyone else who incurs his juvenile wrath.

Kim and his father and grandfather all attended more to building their war machines than feeding their people. Hence the widespread starvation among North Koreans. Instead of ample good food, North Koreans have been fed a steady died of Hate the USA.

Of course, when the US divided North from South Korea and American and Soviet negotiations failed to put Korea together again, we, the food-rich USA, helped set this up. South Korea, in the division, received far more arable land than North Korea did. But can you imagine how the USA and other countries would be happy to help if North Korea would stop being the Asian bully?

For the story of how this division came about, see The Jade Locket and the Red Star, by Joan Uda, ebook on Amazon.com.

BELOW: Generals Archibald Arnold and John Hodge saluting in front row of dignitaries during US-USSR negotiations, March 1946. Personal collection. Archibald Arnold was my father’s CO. General Hodge was commander of American forces in Korea.

Korean Unrest

Is anybody interested in why North and South Korea are divided after centuries of being one country–until 1945? It isn’t an ancient division; it’s the USA who divided one people into two, splitting families, creating intensive poverty in one Korea–the North–because most of the farmland, factories, and railroads were in the South.

It’s the USA and Soviet Union who failed to restore the Koreas to one nation; read how in The Jade Locket and the Red Star, available for Kindle on Amazon. Well researched and based on photos, Army documents, and other documents.