THE NEXT STEP IN KOREA
The Next Step in Korea THE ROUT of the Communist aggressors in Korea has loosed a torrent of oratory and essays on The Next Step in this laboratory of UN collective action. Tucked away in the...
...We felt then—and nothing has happened since then to change our position—that failure to stand up against the invaders would be a violation of our solemn commitments and an open invitation to further aggression, and would lead to the destruction of the world's greatest hope for peace—the United Nations...
...Syngman Rhee is a friend of mine, whom I have known for a long time, in both the United States and Korea...
...Rhee won't like it...
...It is in the political field that we encounter the most perplexing problems and run the greatest risks...
...Many moderate independents, fearful that the election in South Korea alone would make the nation's division permanent, abstained from voting...
...The road ahead calls for three distinct operations: One—An immediate, large-scale program of direct assistance to the people of Korea, North and South, most of whom were innocent victims in a war they didn't want...
...neither will Stalin, nor McCarthy...
...MacArthur would remain in charge of restoring civil rule in North Korea and supervising the total abandonment of military life, as he did so ably in Japan...
...Opposition newspapers were suppressed...
...It would seem to us that it would be a stroke of great statesmanship for MacArthur to ask for a UN civilian administrator, and what better choice than Ralph Bunche, winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace...
...There are conflicting appraisals available...
...Two—The prompt launching of a large-scale program of reconstruction and rehabilitation, not only to provide homes and hospitals for the homeless, the wounded, and the sick, but a long-run plan of public works and land distribution to provide the foundation for a stable economy for the unified nation...
...The pending United Nations proposal, which Rhee rejects, makes much more sense...
...MacArthur as spokesman for the United Nations...
...Although the Associated Press is not given to preaching or philosophizing, Price felt moved to report that while "educated Koreans know the UN is defending their freedom against Communist aggression, the peasants and villagers, whose homes have been destroyed, who have lost their rice crop and all that they ever possessed, do not understand what the shooting is all about...
...Rhee was elected president, and his party controlled the legislature...
...Asked what he had been telling the Communist troops as the UN forces engulfed them, the commissar replied: "I tell them we not win, but we not fail...
...It was not Rhee's fault entirely— by any means—for, as Baldwin recalls, our own military occupation officials wobbled helplessly and became a party to the worst features of Korean life...
...It provides that, for the present, the Rhee government remain in power in South Korea...
...In 1948 the United Nations ordered elections for all Korea, but the Communists refused to permit a free ballot north of the 38th Parallel...
...But The Progressive recalled then that it had warned fully a year before the explosion of June 25 that we were building badly in Korea and would pay a frightful price for our mismanagement...
...Land reform was postponed...
...which won the May elections, Baldwin said: "That feeling is already there, as the May elections showed...
...Each wants a sure thing, his own way, and never mind the democratic process...
...Baldwin went to Korea and Japan in 1947-1948, largely at the invitation of Gen...
...3. Our impatience with nations who don't see the conflict between Russia and the United States in the black-and-white terms we do, and our unwillingness to accept the fact that many peoples want nor to be tied as active allies with either of the two giants, but rather hunger for a chance to work out their own destiny as neutrals...
...Baldwin said that he felt his friend Rhee does not have the stature to rise above political animosities, to forgive his political enemies, and to reconcile discordant elements...
...I believe North Korea would show the same tendencies in an election...
...There are bugs in such a plan, of course, but it strikes us as the most hopeful, the most democratic, and the most honest approach yet proposed...
...Douglas Mac-Arthur, to survey social conditions and civil liberties and recommend a program of action...
...But authority in North Korea would be vested in Gen...
...Price explains: "Put another way, he was saying that the North Koreans would lose their invasion of the south, but that he expected the destruction, hunger, and cold to make Communism the victor in the long run...
...But the landlords in his party so slowed down that reform that it was not until too late, this spring, that a land reform law was passed...
...He came away with the conviction that MacArthur had done an extraordinary job of building the foundation for democratic society in Japan, but that Rhee had kicked away chance after chance in Korea...
...Three—The early handing over of all political authority to the people of Korea...
...Those who will talk at all usually shrug and say they do not care who rules them as long as they are left alone in peace, and they had hoped desperately for peace after the Japanese defeat...
...He is a patriot, with a strongly professed democratic faith, clouded by an obsession with Communism, "He suspected almost anyone who opposed him of Communist sympathies...
...Political opponents were arrested and jailed...
...He believed in it and worked for it...
...The logical course, after a decent interval for readjustment, would be to hold a nationwide election for the presidency and the congress of a united Korea—an election conducted under the auspices of the United Nations, and an election whose outcome, whether Left, Right, or Center, pro-American, pro-Soviet, or neutral, would be accepted by the nations of the UN as constitutionally binding until the next scheduled election...
...III Previously unpublished documents by Baldwin reveal these significant impressions of life in Korea under Rhee: "The country was literally in the grip of a police regime and a private terror which made life dangerous for everybody left of dead center...
...Rhee's regime was far from popular...
...Ben Price, AP war correspondent, had met up with a captured North Korean Communist, a political commissar whose job it had been to see that the North Korean troops fought to the death for the Red cause...
...Tucked away in the massive accumulation of comment was a highly significant Associated Press dispatch from Tae-gu, Korea...
...He was thus surrounded by forces opposed to the very reforms which he honestly stood for...
...This frank report points up three distasteful truths about American foreign policy we are too prone to shy away from: 1. Our failure to recognize the revolutionary ferment working in the world and to appraise more accurately the social and economic causes of the frustration and dis-content which lead to Communism...
...2. Our self-righteous conviction that the peoples of the under-developed areas of the earth want to live as we do, and that they have only to say they prefer democracy to Communism to qualify for our standard of living...
...Syngman Rhee, the elected president of the Republic of Korea, which is South Korea, is making the task vastly more difficult by insisting that new elections be confined to North Korea, that the United Nations withdraw at once in favor of his rule, and that his government continue in power, no matter how the elections go in North Korea, until 1952...
...Today, having paid that price—for the most part, tragically, with Korean lives and property —we have a new opportunity to help the Koreans toward the great goal of North and South alike—a free, united, independent nation...
...But for those who are bent on rescuing the hope of a free, independent, united Korea out of five years of Great Power misrule, it stands as the best hope for Korea and for the professed objectives of the UN's collective action in resisting aggression.—M...
...A moment's review of recent North Korean history may help provide a guide for democratic action...
...The first two operations are different from the third, but all three are alike in one respect—they must be administered by the United Nations until a united Korea is prepared to take over...
...In May of this year, a month before the North Korean Communists launched their aggression, new elections for the national congress resulted in a sweeping victory for Rhee's opponents—the moderates and independents who had abstained in 1948...
...Rhee was so ambitious for an independent Korea that he was willing to use even quite reactionary elements to serve that end...
...II Four months ago, when the North Korean Communists struck across the 38th Parallel, The Progressive supported the decisive action of the Truman Administration and the United Nations in resisting aggression...
...We've turned for our judgment to the most trustworthy source we know, Roger Baldwin, longtime executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, whose anti-Communism is as impeccable as his anti-Fascism...
...It is the most practicable road for a new country emerging from decades of subjugation, and dependent on the outside world for material and spiritual aid...
...He saw it was basic to Korean democracy and to that loyalty to the government which would make South Korea strong against North Korea...
...Elections were held in South Korea...
...Police terror was inaugurated under men trained in the tough Japanese system...
...H. R...
...They repudiated Rhee in favor of genuine independents left of center...
...Democracy existed mostly on paper...
...Land reform is an example...
...Inevitably, the character and program of Syngman Rhee are bound to be a considerable factor in any judgment of the course to be pursued at the end of hostilities...
...Rhee had instituted land reforms, belatedly, in the spring of 1950, but too late to check the popular trend against his government...
...Of the rising independent group...
...The Westerner, even while shocked at the concept of the callous little Communist commissar, is left with the feeling that he could be right...
...They practically dictated laws, holding a veto power and yet utterly failing to see that the only way a democracy could be created was to distribute land to the peasants who worked it, as Mac-Arthur had at once done in Japan...
...What sort of person and leader is he...
Vol. 14 • November 1950 • No. 11
