Imperial Perspectives (Part XIII)

by Jim Miles

2006

The Americans arrived on the scene in Eastern and Southeastern Asia in the middle of the nineteenth century, riding their gunboats into the harbours of Japan, Korea, China, and the Philippines. They followed in the wake of many European nations, the Portuguese, the British, the French and other nations that wanted their version of ‘free trade’ with the Chinese people. During and after World War II the American empire tangled directly with the Chinese empire, mainly with their support of the corrupt Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek. American ground personnel, logistical support, and marines assisted Chiang Kai-shek, along with the “Flying Tigers” based in Burma and the rapidly ubiquitous CIA. Part XIII of Imperial Perspectives looks at the Asian wars.

XIII The Asian Frontier

American history reads in a linear fashion with three wars in the region. First the Second World War, which supposedly ended with the dropping of the atomic bombs. Secondly the Korean War which broke out in 1950. The third war, conceived as mostly separate from the other two, is the Vietnam War. They are all ultimately one and the same thing, an American attempt to rid China of the communists under Mao, in order to preserve their business interests and ‘spheres of influence’ in Asian markets, and only superficially to prevent the domino effect of the red menace. Americans were involved in all three areas at the same time and are still pressing on the Chinese frontier to this day.

Vietnam and Korea were superficially different kinds of wars, yet both have their genesis in the same post World War II muddle of empires collapsing, regrouping, rebuilding, and in the case of the United States, starting to impress its power in more significant ways. The histories of both are similar, with occupations, moments of freedom, occupation by Japan, then artificial political division after the war. Non-democratic puppet governments were propped up by U.S. power in both countries. Nuclear weapons were threatened and then denied as the military personnel and policiticians aregued about the efficacy of the weapons, finally settling on the concept of ‘limited warfare’, using ‘conventional’ weapons.

Most importantly, for the perspective offered here, an indigenous group of people were denied their own land, their own inheritance by a variety of imperial forces of which the United States was only one. The land was occupied as a new frontier of business, labour, and resources for different homelands – Chineses, French, Japanese, and American in Vietnam, and Chinese, Japanese, and American in Korea. The height of this denial of indigenous sovereignty was the issue of elections: given the chance, both countries would have voted for a unified government had the imperial powers allowed that to occur. No surprise that they didn't. Different wars geographically, the same wars empirically.

Vietnam

Without going into the details of the war, as there is plenty of that in existence, there are some themes or commonalities with previous and subsequent American actions. Two of the broader themes include the avoidance of war by the rich and powerful, and the idea that foreign policy is under control of a ‘cabal’ or particular set of government people.

During the American Revolution, the rich and powerful were able to buy their way out of fighting against the British. This idea resurfaced in Vietnam with the draft-deferment system, “in which promising students and professionals – mainly middle- or upper-class young men – were kept out of Vietnam in the name of national security and the nation's welfare, while the poor and working class fought the war.” [1] From Rockefeller and Carnegie through to Cheney and Wolfowitz, the pattern holds the same. Today's army is all volunteer, but the majority are still the working class and the poor, looking in part for a way to improve themselves educationally, as part of the military promise for a better future. As the current debacle continues in Iraq, fewer and fewer enlistees are signing on and the standards for enlistment are becoming lower and lower, going beyond the working poor to the destitute and the criminal.

Another political tendency from the Vietnam War that is also apparent in other wars is the idea that each war is a result of a particular government or set of foreign policy makers at that particular moment of time. The war in Iraq was directly set off by Bush and his neoconservatives in 2003. Kennedy took the U.S. into Vietnam. Truman led the Americans into Korea. Bush was fighting ‘terrorism’, the others were fighting ‘communism’, but “although there were particular individuals in power who were spearheading this process, it reflected deep-seated tendencies within U.S. foreign policy that had roots in capitalism itself.” [2] The two most deep-seated of those tendencies are wealth accumulation and military force: “capitalism is a system uniquely determined by a drive to accumulate…characterized by a process that we now call globalization”; and “Military interventions in…Vietnam…belonged to the larger phenomenon of imperialism…and to the U.S. role as hegemonic power of the capitalist world.” [3] American governments come and go but a militarily supported business empire has remained constant.

Vietnam was not just a war, the wrong war in the wrong place, or the right war in the wrong place, or at the wrong time – it had no validity at all other than being another in the ongoing sequence of extending the American empire's need for markets, resources, and labour to accumulate wealth for its corporate citizens at home.

Korea – Post war events

With Stalin not interested in entering the war for fear of the U.S. starting a global war, with the Chinese not willing to advance across the 38th parallel, and with the U.S. almost willing but unprepared to use up to a requested forty nuclear weapons, the Korean war ended in a stalemate in a line of trenches that approximated the 38th parallel. Although a truce has been signed, the two sides are technically still at war, and the truce line transgressions have continued.

North Korea was fully devastated by the war, with most major infrastructure damaged or destroyed, and the agricultural production devastated by the bombing of major dams that destroyed villages and crop land in the major rice producing areas. South Korea suffered considerable destruction as well, but with the retention and re-establishment of the already existing landowners and business leaders, the south prospered economically under the dicatorship of Syngman Rhee and American financial, military, and CIA support. [4]

The immediate post war effects in South Korea are comparable to the Soviet interventions in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The United States supported dictatorship of Syngman Rhee established its own secret service and and its own paramilitary vigilante organization to suppress any latent democratic socialist activities. The Korean army remained under American military control “as much…now..as it was at the time of the Cheju massacre” [5] which eliminated a progressive socialist government on that island. As late as the 1960s there were 350,000 agents in the Korean Central Intelligence Agency and like its American benefactor the jails “were filled with opponents of every kind; torture was routine.” [6] What was good enough for Latin America, what was good enough for the Soviets, was good enough for the Koreas and the Philippines (used by the Americans as a supply base for both the Korean and Vietnam fronts) where the long term consequences involved “mass movements fought against oppressive dictatorships imposed and supported by the United States.” [7]

The long term economic outcomes were significantly different because of the strategic importance of South Korea as an ideological and military bulwark against communism and the importance of Korea and Japan as financial markets and consumer resources to sustain the American economy. As the Cold War progressed two convictions supported these developments, “that robust and continuing economic growth is an imperative, absolute and unconditional” [8] and “that by itself the internal American market was insufficient to sustain the necessary level of economic growth.” [9]

These statements refer to the internal American economy and its need to find offshore resources and financing; the prosperity and supposed democracy of the other countries was incidental to American control and prosperity. The U.S. military intervened to “reassure, anticipate, intimidate, preempt, influence, guide and control. It did so routinely and continuously.” [10] The use of empirical military force to reap new markets and resources had moved from the Indian frontier to a global frontier, the new era of globalization had arrived in full force.

The American economy and its allied economies of East Asia did not grow according to the ‘scientific’ laws of economics and free market capitalism and its accompaying ‘open and transparent governance'. The Korean and Japanese economies, following on the reality of the American model, were subject to all the manipulations that military occupation, one party rule, corporate business monopolies and cartels, and the re-establishment of the previously dominant elite could manage.

Japan

The only winner in the Korean war and the Vietnamese war, if one had to look for a winner, was Japan. In a similar move of reconstruction as with Europe, the Japanese economy surged as it provided labour and materials in support of the American war effort. It provided a garrison base for the military in Korea and later the military in Vietnam, serving as a transportation hub for both areas. Its factories and industry were quickly reconstituted under the control of those who controlled them from before the war.

In Japan the military involved itself with supporting a government of convenience, enabling that government to use its own military to violently suppress any hint of democratic socialism or any democratic action that did not succumb to American propaganda and countermeasures. The business world was quickly rebuilt, as with Germany, as a bulwark for the containment of communism, a containment that could also be labelled ‘containment by consumption’in Japan as it became a rapidly growing technocratic economy superficially fascinated by all the trinkets and toys of modern production technologies.

The indigenous populations in American controlled areas has always suffered and the people of Okinawa, historically a part of the Japanese empire, were subjugated again by the total military dominance of the Americans. With the threat of communism strengthening in China, it proved expedient to restore the old elite, to keep those in the establishment in power and in control. With the superficial appearances of a democracy, the Japanese Diet was controlled by the business elite; the government, with one of its first leaders being a Japanese war criminal, and with the CIA's support, was the same old Japanese power structure that had been in place before the war.

Notes