ospam (Jerome Bibuld) wrote in message ...
(snipped)
As for the U.S. invasion of Korea, begun on 25 June 1950, (almost immediately
after John Foster Dulles FLEW away from the North/South Korea border), I
concede that it would be impossible to get her/him/it even to look at
documentation of others than her/his/its preferred U. S. propaganda sources.

Dear Mr. Bibuld,

Have you read "The Hidden History of the Korean War" by I.F. Stone (1952)?

For further reading on the Korean War (1950-53):

"The Origins of the Korean War" (2 vols.) by Bruce Cumings (1981-90:
Princeton University Press) is the scholarly standard work on the subject.

"Korea: the Unknown War" by Bruce Cumings and Jon Halliday (1988) is a
good introduction for the general reader.

"Korea: the First War We Lost" by Bevin Alexander (2000: revised edition)
is a good general military history by a former official historian for the
United States Army.

"Just before the war the North Korean order of battle numbered about 95000
troops. Thus the initial attacking force was not very large; the KPA had
mobilised less than half its forces on 25 June. Arrayed against them were
five ROK Army divisions located near Seoul or north of it, with some 50000
troops. This evidence is compatible *both* with an unprovoked invasion and
with an interpretation linking the summer of 1949 with June 1950--that the
North waited until it had the majority of its crack soldiers back from China
and then positioned them to take advantage of the first major Southern
provocation in June 1950.

The American position has always been that the North Koreans stealthily
prepared an attack that was completely unprovoked and that constituted an
all-out invasion. On 26 June Kim Il Sung, on the contrary, accused the South
of making a 'general attack' across the parallel. Rhee had long sought to
'provoke' a fraticidal civil war, he said, having incessantly 'provoked clashes'
at the front line; in preparing a 'northern expedition' he had 'even go so far
as to collude with our sworn enemy, Japanese militarism'. Some of these
charges were true, but the charge of making a general attack across the
parallel us false. The possibility that the South opened the fighting on
Ongjin, with an eye to seizing Haeju, cannot be discounted, but there is no
evidence that it intended a general invasion.

The question pregnant with ideological dynamite, 'Who started the Korean War?'
is surely the wrong question. No Americans care any more that the South fired
first on Fort Sumter in their civil war; they do still care about slavery and
secession. No one asks who started the Vietnam War. Like Vietnam, Korea was
a civil and revolutionary war."

--Bruce Cumings and Jon Halliday (Korea: the Unknown War, pp. 73-4)

Civil wars often become waged with exceptional cruelty--on both sides.

"James Cameron of London's 'Picture Post' wrote about what he termed,
'South Korean concentration camps' in Pusan in the late summer of 1950:

'I had seen Belsen, but this was *worse*. This terrible mob of men--convicted
of nothing, un-tried, South Koreans in South Korea, suspected of being
'unreliable'. There were hundreds of them; they were skeletal, puppets of
string, faces translucent grey, manacled to each other with chains, cringing
in the classic Oriental attitude of subjection, the squatting foetal position,
in piles of garbage....Around this medievally gruesome market-place were
gathered a few knots of American soldiers photographiing the scene with casual
industry....I took my indignation to the (UN) Commission, who said very civilly:
'Most disturbing, yes; but remember these are Asian people, with different
standards of behaviour...all very difficult'. It was supine and indefensible
compromise. I boiled, and I do not boil easily. We recorded the situation
meticulously, in words and photographs. Within the year it nearly cost me
my job, and my magazine its existence.'

'Picture Post' never publlished Cameron's story, causing a 'mini-mutiny' on
the magazine."

--Bruce Cumings and Jon Halliday (Korea: the Unknown War, p. 92)

'To look with mercy on the conduct of others is a virtue no less than to look
with severity on your own.'
--Matthew Gregory Lewis (The Monk)

--Nick