A Note on Atrocities

...Rusk wrote: "Each evening at dusk refugee mothers with their sick children still line up quietly before the Maryknoll Sisters clinic in Pusan so they may be among 2,000 patients to be seen the next day...

...It can be assumed that if Americans did realize what we have done in Korea the majority would condemn our war-making as an atrocity—not only against the Korean people—but against our own civilization, since it is obvious that we can not convince the Asian peoples that "our side" stands for humanistic principles by practising the exact reverse...

...Yet it is a fact, well-documented in our own press, that our techniques of waging total war in Korea (as formerly, in Japan) have subjected civilians to appalling cruelties, and have produced such total devastation (with slow death from disease and starvation so prevalent) that any attempt to isolate some particular act or acts as "atrocities" can serve only to dramatize the artificiality of such moral standards...

...During 1953, in a series of articles reporting on conditions in Korea, Dr...

...A night's bombing left it wasteland...

...106 • DISSENT • Winter 1954...

...and if the reports in the U. S. press can be taken as evidence, these "death-marches" were not due to deliberate brutality...

...But the term "atrocity" — when used in the official sense — is a "legal" term carrying with it the stigma of international condemnation, and the threat of legally administered punishment...

...Acceptance of brutality as a necessary device to insure victory leads precisely to that moral callousness which is one of the distinguishing features of the totalitarian mind...

...Winter 1954 • DISSENT • 105 Civilian casualties were heavy...

...At the same time, however, our top military command increasingly steps up its terroristic methods of warfare which assume that any civilians who hap pen to get in the way of military opera tions are as "fair game" as the armed forces of the enemy...

...Deaths caused by such conditions are of course atrocities when judged in human terms...

...There will be 8,000,000 Koreans, primarily in rural areas, who must rely on `herb doctors' for their medical care as no trained physicians are available...

...So far, however, popular opinion, which rises to a fury at the report of a "Red atrocity" against an American soldier, has seemed totally indifferent to our own mass production atrocities against Korean civilians...

...Ital...

...No American can face such a possibility without shock and bitterness...

...But our official denunciation of the enemy's sadism (along with our editorial blasts and provocative headlines) seem less an expression of genuine concern for tortured human beings and more the expression of a desire to whip up popular support for a policy of revenge—a policy, that is, which can only lead to more such inevitable atrocities...

...The U. S. Army report on "Red" atrocities charged that 1,057 to 2,384 Americans died in "death marches...

...Conditions for the enemy — soldiers and civilians alike — were, in general, as bad if not worse than those reported for POW...

...It is more like a blackened community of the dead, a charred ghost town from which all the living have fled before a sudden plague...

...The prisoners-ofwar were made to march because the enemy did not have transport...

...This attitude, of course, is true for "both sides" in any conflict...

...The U. S. military regulations establish standards for the behavior of American troops and any individual who trans gresses can be dealt with severely under military law...

...and the 104 • DISSENT • Winter 1954 conditions were terrible because the marches took place in a country overwhelmed by war, and at a time when the U. S. Strategic Bombing Command was blasting railroads, strafing roads, and causing general chaos...

...in the midst of such misery death is such an 'informal affair' that burials are not only per formed without ceremony, but hundreds of bodies lie about unburied until the military authorities have to step in and take action if only to clear the way for unhampered military operations...

...This is to say that whatever miseries we have caused, although we may deplore them, are accepted as having been "forced on us...

...On the one hand, mistreatment of cap tured U. S. soldiers is considered to be a crime for which North Koreans could be brought to trial and punished...

...The ROK Army hospitals are still crowded with 20,000 disabled men whose definitive care has been completed but who cannot be discharged as they have no place to go...

...Writing of the ROK capital, Seoul, Dr...

...The Japanese volume consists of 146 pages of photo graphs of Tokyo taken after the mass bombing raids by the U. S. Strategic Bombing Command during World War II—scenes of ruin, piles of charred bodies, and similar horrors...

...This U. S. report of North Korean and Chinese atrocities against "our side" may find a place on Asiatic bookshelves next to a similar picture-book published in Japan this past August...

...Simultaneously techniques of warfare have been developed which make civilians the major victims of war, and whatever torture or horror these noncombatants must put up with are accepted as "necessary" aspects of total war...

...the enemy also is, obviously, destructive...

...That the Japanese consider these mass raids as "atrocities" is suggested by the captions: "Charred bodies of a young mother and her baby" ; "In the repeated B-29 raids, 540,000 houses were burnt and 2,860,000 people lost their homes" ; "The residen tial section of Tokyo was particularly vulnerable to incendiary bombs because Winter 1954 • DISSENT • 103 of the highly inflammable nature of the houses of wood and paper...

...When civilians starve or freeze, camped out on the rubble of their bombed-out homes it is considered to be a deplorable but unavoidable condition of modern war...

...An American, thumbing through this volume today would probably feel distress at the pictures, but would be unlikely to equate these civilian victims of U. S. mass-bombing with similar scenes in Korea today...

...Given the fact of war the major crime of which the enemy was guilty was poverty...

...Some of our correspondents have faithfully reported our uninhibited bombing operations, and not a few of them have condemned them, not only as avoidable, but as destructive of American ideological and political interests, not only in Korea but throughout Asia...

...Smallpox, typhoid and typhus rates skyrocketed and thousands of persons froze or starved to death...

...A "legal" atrocity is a deliberate cruelty or injustice not necessitated by the exigencies of war...

...All through the night shots were fired at confused wandering white-garbed farmers...

...According to the New York Times analysis of the Army report, the majority of the atrocities consisted of long marches to prisoner-of-war camps under terrible conditions...

...An individual American— outside of combat—who kills or mistreats a Korean is liable to arrest, trial and pun ishment...

...On August 30, Dr...

...THIS IS THE MORE TRUE because of the fact that although some of the atrocities, charged against the North Koreans and Chinese enemy by the U. S. Army, were caused by deliberate brutality either to gain information, or to satisfy sadistic impulses — the majority (as reported) were caused by conditions of war over which the enemy had no control...

...In the burning town there was much mourning...

...Anyone who will bother to go back through the files of the New York Times (to mention only one source) and read the accounts of our war-making by our own correspondents must conclude that the idea of total de struction of a nation not only does not disturb our high military command, but is accepted as legitimate war-making...

...As a Times correspondent wrote on Feb...

...and neglect in prisoner-of-war camps including poor food, little or no medical attention, and "callous treatment" including beatings...

...Simultaneously we assume that miseries caused by the enemy prove his sadistic nature...

...It seems no longer to be a city at all...

...THE DESTRUCTION OF KOREA beggars description...

...added...

...Or this (Oct...

...For example, turn back to the New York Times of Jan...

...Finally, it might be argued that while terrorism is, so to speak, a built-in part of totalitarian regimes, it is not organically related to the structure of American society...

...Millions of people are herded into makeshift refugee concentration camps, perpetually one jump ahead of literal starvation, and thousands die every day from hunger, exposure and disease...

...Rusk described it as a city whose "pre-war population of 1,500,000" was reduced "to around 700,000" ; with "all public utilities and industries . . . either obliterated or seriously damaged...

...Our individual private grief and shock for our individual tortured and dead is human and real...

...In view of such medical conditions all over Korea it is not necessary to assume a sadistic nature on the part of "the enemy" to account for their neglect of prisoners of war...

...On October 28 of 1953, the U. S. Army released an 87-page extract from a report of its "Korean War Crimes Divi sion" which, according to the New York Times, included the "grisly description of the fate of thousands of prisoners-of war" illustrated by "fourteen pages of of ficial photographs...

...Under such conditions, how is it pos sible to assign responsibility for bodies dug out of mass graves...

...In view of the general and overwhelming misery and destruction in Korea, our official military charges directed against enemy atrocities are bound to seem directed toward strategic rather than humanitarian ends...

...19, 1951 and read the account of the "two mil lion refugees, most of them hungry and cold, frantically seeking to escape from the narrowing war front...

...This means that by the old standards of today one's own fighting men, when captured by an enemy, are entitled to more humane treatment than are the enemy's women and children whose murder — by explosives, fire, or starvation — is not considered to be an atrocity when committed by "-our side...

...The point is, however, that the waging of total war decisively influences the social structure and moral make-up of the countries involved...

...The terrible destruction in Korea is not, of course, wholly due to U. S. methods of waging war...

...Or this (March 24, 1951) : "Earlier, fighters had blasted the thatch-roofed villages of the area, leaving little more than flames and slowly rising spirals of smoke to mark their locations...

...Similarly the bad food and poor medical service in the POW camps seems, in general, not due to deliberate brutality or callousness, but to the fact that food was limited for everybody and medical supplies were scarce...

...Howard A. Rusk, medical expert for the New York Times, wrote that: "Four years of fighting have resulted in nearly 1,000,000 civilian casualties and complete destruction of nearly 500,000 homes...

...21, 1951 "the Communists had left their homes and schools standing in retreat while UN troops, fighting with much more destructive tools, left only blackened spots, where towns once stood...

...We are constantly reminded that international conferences have labored to work out rules to govern the treatment of prisonersofwar in order to protect captured soldiers from unnecessarily brutal treatment...

...Although our correspondents faithfully report these consequences of our techniques of warmaking these reports are buried, often under misleading headlines, while the atrocities of the enemy are thundered in provocative headlines, and blazing editorials and radio programs...

...Under the actual conditions in Korea many of these deaths were as unavoidable as though these men had been shot down in combat...

...21, 1950...

...This shocking scene must be a commonplace in Korea, with civilian victims of both sides buried in "mass graves," and—if we can believe our own correspondents—lucky to be buried at all...

...The Army's report on "Red atroci ties" is illustrated in the New York Times by a picture showing "civilian victims of North Koreans being removed from mass grave at Chonju...

...These two items seem to spell out our predominant attitude toward atrocities...

...As soon as the parachutes began to drop from the planes the farmers took off for their holes...

...An illustration of our own moral schizophrenia was provided on page 3 of the New York Times for Aug...

...22, 1950) : "The North Koreans at this small town were the most surprized Koreans seen yet...

...Such natural grief for our own dead, however, ought not to blind us to the fact that our way of fighting the war—by total destruction of all industry, along with cities, towns, and farming villages — caused casualties into the hundreds of thousands of civilians, and brought total destitution to virtually the entire surviving population of the country...

...19, 1950) : "The besieged capital of North Korea looks from the air like an empty citadel where death is king...

...There, virtually side by side, were two enlightening items: One was a speech by General MacArthur, denouncing the North Koreans for atrocities to prisonersof-war and threatening dire punishments for the commanding officers who might be considered responsible...

...Press accounts from American correspondents describe a nation whose industry, agriculture, communications, cities, towns and villages have been turned into rubble heaps...

...It is a fact, however, that, because of our terrible mechanized power, it is the U. S. which has been most responsible for the mass devastation...

...When a prisoner of war freezes or starves to death in a "death march" it is an "atrocity," and the U. S. Government presents a report to the UN and asks for public debate and condemnation...

...THE PROBLEM OF WHAT CONSTITUTES an atrocity needs some popular discussion...

...The question of why there has been so little popular opposition to this sort of warfare can be, at least partly, explained by the fact that most of us don't know anything about it...

...the other was a column by Hanson Baldwin (The Times military expert) explaining that our strategic bombing in Korea—by which we had destroyed whole industrial areas and killed numerous women and children—was losing us friends among the Korean population...

...Other statistics are equally staggering — 9,000,000 dislocated people, 100,000 orphans and 300,000 widows...

...NOTHING BETTER ILLUSTRATES the moral schizophrenia of our society than the generally accepted notion of what constitutes a wartime "atrocity...

...For example read the account of a paratrooper operation (published on Oct...

...On the other hand, the slaughter of Korean wo men and children by our Strategic Bomb ing Command is criticized only on the grounds that it might prove to be un sound tactics, since it might arouse an tagonism which would interfere with future political operations...

...and would certainly not equate the victims of U. S. mass-bombing, in either Japan or Korea, with the victims of either Japanese or Stalinist atrocities...