SHOWDOWN IN KOREA
Villard, Oswald Garrison
Showdown In Korea By OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD WHAT is the explanation of our Government's attitude toward Korea, its hesitancy in promising the independence promptly to be given to the Philippines...
...Close to half a million have fled the country rather than submit...
...These are the principles which should have governed our relationship with Korea from the beginning of this war, and it will take more than pious promises of the kind made last week by President Truman to convince the people of Korea and Asia...
...The very fact that the Russians are in Northern Korea and have long been accused of a desire to take over the whole of the country, dictates a quick declaration of America's permanent policy in what was for so long known as the*Hermit Kingdom...
...WHO are the Koreans...
...Showdown In Korea By OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD WHAT is the explanation of our Government's attitude toward Korea, its hesitancy in promising the independence promptly to be given to the Philippines and other victims of the Japanese...
...We loaned eight officials under Dr...
...Hence, the hesitancy in the Cairo Declaration...
...The desire for independence has never for one moment died down in Korea...
...They have not forgotten that they were the first people to have a national flag, a printing press, and even an ironclad navy as far back as 1592, when they defeated an early Japanese effort to enslave them...
...Syngman Rhee, have been cold-shouldered by the State Department, and deliberately kept at arm's length...
...Let us lose no time in giving this help to Korea and getting American and Russian troops out of there at the earliest possible moment...
...Thousands upon thousands have been thrown into prison by the Japanese, for "thought crime" and other thousands executed...
...The prompt overruling of this stupid general, who could have saved the whole situation if he had explained at once that he was going to get the Japanese out as rapidly as possible, does not conceal the fact that our Government has lacked faith in the Koreans' ability to govern themselves in view of their long period of subjection and exclusion from office and administrative functions during the 40 years' rule of the Japanese...
...William Howard Taft, when Governor General of the Philippines, was denounced, ridiculed, and abused from one end of the United States to the other because he began filling offices with natives, and what is worse, actually practiced social equality with them and governed them as if they had some rights in formulating plans for their own future...
...The best answer to Russian aggression whether planned now or not, is for the United States to come right out and say that it will not consent to any other fate for Korea than complete and absolute independence, and that it proposes to see to it that this is accomplished, and that it is not to be deterred from setting up a national government immediately by fear that the Koreans may be insufficiently experienced in government to carry it out...
...Give them a helping hand, yes...
...In addition, there has been a steady underground -movement against the Japanese comparable to the French and other resistance movements...
...That he was immediately compelled to back down from this position by Gen...
...It is sufficient to point out that the Department was not interested enough to prepare plans in advance for a government to be set up immediately on our taking over...
...Korea .. . in due course...
...But the way for a people to learn to govern themselves is to start right in and make their own mistakes...
...The State Department preferred to drift...
...More than that, in this war they have supplied a Korean force to the Chinese Army, and there have been Korean troops serving with the Russian Red Army...
...They are a highstrung, sensitive, proud people, who to a remarkable degree remember their past...
...they can take care of themselves...
...Now it is here and Gen...
...What is at stake is the vital principle that self-government does not mean good government and must never be construed as meaning that...
...The Koreans are absolutely entitled to start right in now and find the way to good government by blundering as much as they please...
...The Administration seems quite willing that Thailand (now renamed Siam) should go its own way, but it doubts whether the Koreans are immediately fitted to assume the full responsibilities of independence and self-government...
...MacArthur and protests from Washington, did not wholly assuage the feeling of the aroused Koreans who have demonstrated in large numbers in their capital Seoul against this incredible American attitude of continuing in office their hated conquerors...
...If the United States is going to be true to its own ideals and live up to its pretended objectives in this struggle, the military phases of which have ended, we must royally and generously stand by the Korean people...
...It is known that President Roosevelt Insisted from the beginning of our entrance into the war that Korean independence must be a war objective, and, it is believed, that the first government should be an international one to be administered jointly by the United States, China, and the Soviet Union...
...General John R. Hodge, made the incredible blunder of announcing that he intended to administer our zone of this unfortunate country with the present Japanese officials, including the Governor-General, Noboyuki Abe...
...The spirit of liberty has steadily swayed these gifted and able people who now number no less than 25,000,000...
...It is nobody's business to say of any people who have been held in tutelage that they cannot govern themselves...
...hence, the occupying of the northern part of Korea by the Russians and the southern part by the United States...
...Almost nobody in Great Britain thought the American colonies could govern themselves when we won our freedom, and it would be amusing to turn back to the jingo newspapers of 1898-1900 and pick out the innumerable statements that appeared, when we were slaughtering the Filipinos, burning their fields, destroying their villages, and putting thousands of them into concentration camps, seeking to prove that anybody who thought that the Filipinos would ever be capable of governing themselves was simply idiotic...
...Hodge finds himself compelled to carry on with enemy officials, while our Government tries to make up its mind what he should do and how rapidly he should appoint Koreans...
...induct them in the most modern ways of financial management, yes...
...We did tremendous things for Iran at the beginning of our participation in the war, and even before...
...Why is it that the Russians have taken the northern half of Korea while we occupy the southern, and that our commanding general, Lt...
...To this the reply can be made that the United States might have picked one of the groups and placed itself squarely behind it and done its uttermost to make it ready to take over as soon as the conquest was completed and then to leave to a democratic plebiscite among the Koreans the question as to who should be the permanent leaders...
...It is not necessary to cite the fact that in other cases some of its officials have leaned to the imperialistic, or even totalitarian side, as in the handling of Franco in Spain...
...So far as is known, no civilian experts on the Korean situation have been sent to him—there are some, even though they are not in the State Department, and they could have been enlisted long ago for the emergency...
...It is intimated, too, that one of these various groups is strongly influenced by Moscow and should, therefore, not be encouraged...
...aid them with advice and counsel in every way on a big brother basis—of course...
...This is the least that we can do in honor and decency for our Korean ally and in partial redemption of our pledges...
...It is of enormous importance that Korea shall be reestablished as a free, independent, buffer state which shall stand between China and Russia, between China and Japan as a memorial to the integrity of the Amer-ican effort to purge Asia of Japanese domination...
...If not, we can blame no one if we are charged with Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy, with deceit, with weakness, with inefficiency, with the failure to stand by a country that is, and will continue to be, a key to peace in Asia...
...We can put Korea on its feet in no time at all, by friendly, sympathetic cooperation...
...THIS brings us right up against the fundamental principle of democracy—which is whether a people demanding freedom shall be held in leash until some other people think that they have qualified for government according to the latter's standards, or whether they shall be given a chance to strike out for themselves to sink or swim on their own...
...Heaven knows we made plenty in this country in the days immediately following the Revolution, and heaven knows that we have been making the gravest of mistakes and have been far from living up to our democratic doctrines ever since...
...Arthur C. Millspaugh to take over complete financial control...
...It is explained for him now that he felt that if they were not given such an international control the Koreans might readily be taken over by some nearby Power, presumably Russia, on the ground that it could not adequately govern itself and menaced the frontiers of this other country...
...Why is it that the Declaration of Cairo, which said that all the peoples conquered by the Japanese should be restored to their previous national allegiances or be set free, limited its reference to Korea by the words pledging a "free and independent...
...The excuse for this has been that there were several groups representing the Koreans, and that there was no adequate proof that any group of Koreans actually represented the Korean people as a whole, or any considerable part of them...
...It is not true that they have supinely accepted Japanese rule...
...As in the case of Japan itself, the sudden, unexpected ending of the war found us unprepared to deal with' the immediate situation...
...loan them officials, as we have loaned trained American administrators to Iran, yes...
...Plainly he had no instructions to guide him when he took over the task of civilian administration for which not one general in 50 is fitted...
...The Washington Koreans and their Chungking brethren of the Provisional Government had been put off and brushed aside as typifying problems which could be duly handled when the Japanese collapse came...
...Not at all...
...We put an Army medical officer in charge of health matters, including water supply, and especially charged him to deal with sanitation problems in the leading cities of Teheran and Ispahan...
...INSTEAD, the representatives of the Korean Provisional Government and of the Korean Commission, whose headquarters are in Washington under the leadership of Dr...
...Still, in 1919 the Koreans declared their independence...
...All those who favored independence for the archipelago were denounced as hopeless idealists and the chief denouncers were naturally the Army and Navy officers who were serving or had served in the islands...
...help them to establish an efficient constabulary, yes...
...But the right of a people to misrule themselves is as sacred as any right to govern-ment which measures up to British, American, German, Dutch, or French standards...
...Again the Japanese executed many of the passive protestors and no less than 11,000 demonstrators were flogged...
...The Koreans don't need to be policed by American and Russian army corps...
Vol. 9 • October 1945 • No. 39
