Quoting Max Hastings’s The Korean War, page 38:

The 12,000 Japanese in their ranks were sent home. But the 8,000 Koreans who remained—the loyal servants of a brutal tyranny in which torture and judicial murder had been basic instruments of government—found themselves promoted to fill the higher ranks, while total police strength in South Korea doubled. […] A long roll call of prominent torturers and anti‐Nationalist fighters under the colonial power found themselves in positions of unprecedented authority. In 1948, 53 percent of officers and 25 percent of rank‐and‐file police were [Imperial] Japanese‐trained. By a supreme irony, when the development began of a Constabulary force, from which the South Korean Army would grow, the Americans specifically excluded any recruit who had been imprisoned by the [Imperialists]—and thus any member of the anti‐[Imperial] resistance.

(Emphasis added.)

Likewise, Jeremy Kuzmarov notes in Modernizing Repression, pg. 81:

The [American Military Government of South Korea] retained 80 percent of pro‐[Imperial] officers above the rank of patrolman, including northern exiles experienced in suppressing the anticolonial underground. As Colonel William Maglin, the first director of the KNP, commented, “We felt that if the Korean element of the KNP did a good job for the Japanese, they would do a good job for us.” A June 1947 survey determined that eight of ten provincial police chiefs and 60 percent of the lower‐ranking lieutenants were [Imperialist]‐trained, a crucial factor triggering opposition to the police.

Raise your hand if you notice anything familiar.

  • @afellowkid
    5•2 years ago

    USAMGIK’s policies in South Korea and the resulting South Korean dictatorships are among some of the most atrocious things I have learned about tbh.

    All throughout Korea, People’s Committees were already at work un-doing the Japanese colonial era policies, taking control of property turned over to them by the Japanese, and kicking collaborators out of their positions of power. When the U.S. military showed up, they completely ignored the People’s Committees’ authority and started demanding that they turn over their recently-returned property to the U.S. military government. As this was a ridiculous demand, the People’s Committees would refuse to turn over the properties as well as refuse to abandon their government offices. In response to this the USAMGIK would approach collaborator cops to arrest the committee members or just straight up attack the committees violently and kill them as well as attacking citizens who supported the committees.

    USAMGIK basically set a precedent of violently suppressing all opposition to their authority by taking advantage of reactionary elements throughout the South, first by using collaborator cops to arrest People’s Committees and take their property, then populating all levels of the government functions the committees had been doing with collaborators, businessmen, and landlords, and re-instating colonial-era collaborator cops and officials to their positions. This actually resulted in a near-famine at one point because the USAMGIK came in and messed up the rice management system to establish a “free market” in rice managed by landlords and businessmen which turned into a black market and hoarding nightmare and people’s rice rations decreased to half of what they were in the Japanese colonial era. When they were on the brink of famine due to all of this, the U.S. imported a bunch of grains as emergency relief and re-instated the Japanese colonial era policies on rice management and farmers would get beat up by local thugs for not meeting their quotas.

    As time went on and more and more reactionaries fled away from the North into the South, there also became a phenomenon of extreme right-wing anti-communist paramilitary gangs forming, such as the Northwest Youth League, who was eventually purposely sent in to Jeju island as a death squad, where the last holdouts of People’s Committees were still functioning as the only form of government and opposing the division of Korea into North and South.

    The Northwest Youth League gradually started wearing military and police uniforms as they transformed into this killing force. Here is their logo by the way:

    Anyway, the U.S. also flew in Syngman Rhee, one of their main preferred candidates for leadership in the South, who the CIA referred to as an “imported expat” and who had been living in the U.S. for almost 40 years at that point, and the CIA also said that he was an extreme rightist and would immediately begin eliminating all centrists and leftists as soon as he came to power (and yes, that’s what he and his government did). The U.S. also rescued him when the people rose up against him in the 1960s, the CIA flew him out to Hawaii where he lived the rest of his life.

    I could go on but the U.S. policy in South Korea is reprehensible and very illustrative of U.S. policies and strategies in the world and the kind of states they end up forcibly forming through violence, against the wishes of the people, to prop up their interests and unpopular/deadly policies and how they really treat their “allies” and how they lean on and empower the most reactionary elements of society to kill off the leftists and grassroots people’s movements.