[Stone illustrates how the eruption of full-scale war on the
Korean Peninsula advanced U.S. geopolitical interests and those of its
key Asian clients.] [[link removed]]

PENETRATING CURTAINS OF DECEIT: I.F. STONE’S ‘THE HIDDEN HISTORY
OF THE KOREAN WAR’  
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Gregory Elich, Tim Beal
July 2, 2021
Liberated Texts
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_ Stone illustrates how the eruption of full-scale war on the Korean
Peninsula advanced U.S. geopolitical interests and those of its key
Asian clients. _

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When the American journalist, I.F. Stone, published _The Hidden
History of the Korean War_  at the height of the military conflict
in 1952, its message did not find a warm welcome at home. In a period
of unhinged anti-communist fervor, mainstream media took little or no
notice of such an iconoclastic work, and whatever impact it had would
have to wait for a later time, when the Vietnam War encouraged more
skepticism about the motives underlying U.S. war-making. Even so,
mainstream receptiveness to critical analyses of U.S. war-making in
subsequent decades has not substantially improved, and Stone’s book
has spent far more years in out-of-print oblivion than in ready
availability.1
[[link removed]]

[| The Hidden History of the Korean War 1952 I F Stone | MR Online]
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The Hidden History of the Korean War (1952) I. F. Stone
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As Stone explains in his book, he realized that he could be persuasive
to a domestic audience only if he “utilized material which could not
be challenged by those who accept the official American government
point of view”.2
[[link removed]] Consequently,
Stone limited his sources to official U.S. and UN documents and
American and British newspapers. The approach he adopted was to
compare sources and take note of discrepancies, omissions, emphases,
and framing to arrive at a more accurate assessment of events. For
alert readers, the book continues to serve as an object lesson in
analyzing mainstream media, particularly regarding America’s
continual war-making.

Stone illustrates how the eruption of full-scale war on the Korean
Peninsula advanced U.S. geopolitical interests and those of its key
Asian clients. The country had been unnaturally divided by the U.S. in
1945 in order to protect its control of Japan and to provide a
beachhead on the Asian mainland. The division was carried out without
any consultations with the Korean people and was opposed across the
political spectrum, which made the resulting reunification war
virtually inevitable. The conflict itself boosted President Truman’s
“get tough policy”, which Stone points out “required the
maintenance of tension at home and abroad, in order to make
politically possible the imposition of a heavier burden of armament
and taxes, the rearmament of Western Germany and Japan, and the
imposition of ever greater restrictions on trade with the Soviet
bloc”.3
[[link removed]] The
war also provided the pretext for Truman to quadruple the military
budget and create a militarized economy and foreign policy that remain
with us to this day.

The war made permanent the U.S. military presence in the Asia-Pacific,
thereby removing any prospect of Taiwan’s reunification with China.
It also encouraged the deposed Chinese nationalist leader Chiang
Kai-shek to lobby conservative American political figures to support
his goal of launching a cross-channel attack on the mainland from his
base on Taiwan. For South Korean President Syngman Rhee, U.S.
involvement meant that he could continue in office in the southern
part of Korea with the prospect of taking over the northern part,
despite his deep unpopularity.

One of the book’s central themes concerns U.S. policy towards the
socialist bloc, where conservative politicians and General Douglas
MacArthur pursued goals that clashed with Truman’s. “Truman wanted
something which was neither war nor peace [with China and the Soviet
Union]. MacArthur wanted war”.4
[[link removed]] MacArthur’s
habitual insubordination frequently crossed the line into acts
intended to present Truman with a fait accompli of a political nature
that would be awkward to undo. “It cannot be said that MacArthur hid
his views”, Stone writes. “His view was that the time had come for
the U.S. by military force to oppose Communism everywhere in Asia”.5
[[link removed]] Stone
documents MacArthur’s myriad machinations in eye-opening detail,
noting that he “was trying to drag the U.S. and United Nations into
war with China and Russia. He was trying to start World War III”.6
[[link removed]]

One of McArthur’s more provocative actions came in August 1950, as
U.S. and British airplanes crossed over into Chinese territory to
strafe airfields and railways. A month and a half later, American
fighter planes attacked an airport in Soviet territory. The U.S.
formally refused to accept the Soviet letter of protest, responding
that it was a question for the United Nations to consider, as
MacArthur ostensibly operated under the name of the UN, even though
that organization had no say in any of his actions
[[link removed]].
Similarly, when eleven American fighter planes shot down a Soviet
bomber flying on a training mission over its own territory, the U.S.
refused to accept a protest note, using the same bogus argument.

MacArthur’s headquarters repeatedly issued alarmist reports about
the disposition and strength of Chinese forces in Korea, wildly
inflating estimates of its military capability. Units based in China
were continually portrayed as being on the verge of crossing the
border in support of those fighting in Korea. As one of MacArthur’s
reports put it, China “might have as many as 500,000 men… capable
of reinforcing the Communist forces in Korea”. These units, it
added, are “immune from attack on the Manchurian side”.7
[[link removed]] Stone
notes that “this emphasis on Manchuria’s “immunity” to attack
was to become a constant theme of MacArthur Headquarters”.8
[[link removed]] Indeed,
MacArthur never relented in lobbying the Truman administration for
permission to launch widespread bombing attacks on Chinese territory,
fudging the distinction between Chinese units fighting in Korea and
those who remained stationed at home. The aim behind McArthur’s
persistent threat inflations was the same as with most of his public
statements and many of his military moves. He wished to inculcate the
American public and officials with a belief in the necessity of taking
the war into Chinese, and ideally also Soviet, territory, and turning
the localized Korean War into a world war in a grand campaign to crush
the socialist bloc. The many millions of people who would lose their
lives in such an endeavor never merited consideration.

In general, American newspapers ignored the more sober-minded
assessments that other U.S. officials provided and instead ran with
MacArthur’s fear-mongering claims in their headlines. Regardless of
the reality on the ground, what newspapers fed the American public was
a steady diet of MacArthur’s fabrications. Such stories began to
produce the desired political effect. Stone reports that by January
1951, increasingly loud demands were being made in Congress to open a
second front in China, to be led by a cross-strait attack by Chiang
Kai-Shek’s forces. Pressure continued to mount in Washington, but
never enough to sway the Truman administration into following
MacArthur’s desire to light an international conflagration.

The one area where MacArthur and other rabidly anti-communist U.S.
politicians did march in lockstep with the Truman administration was
in harboring the conviction that peace on the Korean Peninsula was to
be avoided. That aim was shared by “the German and Japanese military
who wanted to rearm, and for Chiang Kai-shek whose only hope was a new
world war”.9
[[link removed]] Peace
could have come early in the first year of the war when U.S. and South
Korean forces had essentially reached the 38th parallel that divided
the two Koreas. It could also have come later that same year when U.S.
and South Korean forces had taken most of North Korea. On both
occasions, the Soviet Union and China advocated a peaceful settlement.
“Whenever peace came within talking range a common bond seemed to
appear between Truman and [Secretary of State] Acheson on the one hand
and MacArthur and [special advisor John Foster] Dulles on the other.
While only the latter seemed bent on widening the war, none of them
seemed eager for peace”.10
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The U.S. pursued a scorched earth policy in Korea, as ground troops
routinely burned villages and warplanes rained down death and
destruction. Stone observes, “one of the problems which began to
trouble the [U.S.] Air Force in Korea, judging by the communiqués,
was that there was nothing left to destroy. These communiqués must be
read by anyone who wants a complete history of the Korean War. They
are literally horrifying”.11
[[link removed]] Stone
proceeds to provide several quotes which amply illustrate his point,
with villages being attacked by rockets, strafing, and napalm
saturation bombing. Typically, the tone of the reports demonstrated a
“complete indifference to noncombatants”, which Stone rightly
found disturbing.

There were some passages about these raids on villages which
reflected, not the pity which human feeling called for, but a kind of
gay moral imbecility, utterly devoid of imagination–as if the flyers
were playing in a bowling alley, with villages for pins.12
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One of the examples listed is from a captain who led a group of four
planes, whose mission report concluded, “You can kiss that group of
villages good-bye”.13
[[link removed]] This
destruction is all the more tragic as in the five years prior to the
outbreak of war, a popular revolutionary movement in the north had
begun to make substantial improvements
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its villagers through land reform, popular literacy programs and other
initiatives. Ironically, one of the victims of this scorched earth
policy was Seoul itself, as the U.S. bombed it in 1950 to slow the
North Korean advance. At least 1,500 civilians
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killed, but an investigation into this bloodbath, along with many
others, was later covered up
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the Lee Myung-bak administration in 2010.

Stone is enlightening in his description of how the U.S. undermined
peace negotiations to ensure the continuation of the war. At one
point, late in 1951, an “almost hysterical fear of peace made itself
felt when the shooting stopped” after an agreement was reached on a
ceasefire line, where “Red troops played volleyball within range of
UN trenches”.14
[[link removed]] President
Truman was insistent that fighting should continue until every point
of disagreement had been negotiated. Progress, however, failed to
materialize due to American intransigence. “One could almost feel
the relief in Washington as the truce talks bogged down again in an
endless wrangle over air bases and the exchange of prisoners”.15
[[link removed]] U.S.
negotiators succeeded in drawing out the process for another year
after the publication of Stone’s book, as tactically pointless
conflict added to the death toll, all to serve Washington’s
geopolitical ambitions and the machinations of Syngman Rhee and Chiang
Kai-shek.

The _Hidden History_ was published nearly 70 years ago but wears its
age remarkably well. As Bruce Cumings points out in his 1988 preface,
the book concludes with “tantalizing uncertainty” and “many
still-unanswered questions”.16
[[link removed]] That
is one of its strengths; Stone eschews glib certainties and doesn’t
claim to know more that he can know. Later investigators have access
to information not available to Stone, such as archival records, but
more importantly they know what came next so they come at the issues
with a different perspective. However, it is more than a matter of
fresh information coming to light. Stone follows Socrates in focusing
on the question even if that does not lead to a definitive answer. We
cannot know what public figures such as Acheson really thought, we can
only surmise from what they do and say. Uncertainty is never
completely vanquished and the questioning must go on.

There are at least four major reasons that make Stone’s book
enduring: the crucial role of the Korean War, the concept of
“limited war” as a proportional instrument of imperial power, the
role of local clients within the broader canvas of imperialism, and
the false narratives of imperialism that validates the book’s title
of “Hidden History”.

The Korean War as a Pivotal Event

The Korean War was a pivotal event, bedding down the Cold War,
establishing the permanent war economy and putting imperialism at the
center of U.S. foreign policy. It was the moment when the business of
America
[[link removed]] moved
from commerce to war. The Military Industrial Complex,
[[link removed]] despite
Eisenhower’s valedictory warning, became a major economic and
political pillar of the U.S. state, if not its keystone. The military
carved out a hallowed place in American society and for years has been
the most trusted institution
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the country.

Although the fighting on the Korean Peninsula has been suspended by an
armistice, the U.S. continues to wage war on North Korea, mainly
through the use of sanctions, causing economic distress, food
insecurity and malnutrition
[[link removed]]. The war
continues because the U.S. wants to preserve its monopoly, vis-à-vis
small countries, on nuclear weapons (“non-proliferation”) and its
forward military position against China. Korea remains America’s
longest war (1950 to the present) and the peninsula is the likeliest
place for war between the U.S. and China to break out.4
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Limited War and Imperial Power

Both “World Wars” were just that–wars unlimited by geographical
constraints. The Soviet breaking of the U.S. monopoly on the
combination of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles, together with
its support for anti-colonialism, raised the specter that a local war
against a country which could not retaliate would become not merely a
global war, but one in which, for the first time, the U.S. would be
vulnerable. The rise of China has compounded that danger. The
opposition of Truman and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to MacArthur’s
desire to extend the war to China resonates in Washington today: while
planning to win a war with China remains necessary, it is no longer
sufficient, the U.S. must also consider how to limit war and its
costs.5
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The Korean War took total war, that involving all of society with no
distinction between military and civilian components, to new extremes,
particularly through the use of indiscriminate mass bombing
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was worse even than that of the Second World War, but it also marked
the end of U.S. invulnerability and hence delineated the limits of its
global power. This was particularly evident in the Vietnam War, where
the U.S. was very careful not to provoke Chinese intervention
[[link removed]].
It is also the main reason
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U.S. has not invaded North Korea since the armistice.

The Role of Clients in Imperialism

Throughout history, imperialist expansion and rule have been based on
much more than the deployment of overwhelming, brute force. They have
always involved an alliance between the imperial power and local
clients. The alliance is unequal of course, but is nonetheless subject
to constant negotiation. Stone brings the role of local agents,
Syngman Rhee and Chiang Kai-shek into focus. They served America but
with their own agenda in mind. Chiang Kai-shek had far more
substantial credentials than Rhee. He was a genuine national leader
but was incapable of solving China’s problems. Having lost both
popular support and then the civil war, he looked to Washington to
rescue his fortunes. The Chiefs of Staff were too canny to attempt to
restore him to power, but they did afford him protection on Taiwan and
that separation from the mainland continues up to today. The ‘Taiwan
issue” faded from prominence after Nixon’s rapprochement with
China, but has resurfaced as the U.S. confrontation with rising China
has intensified.

Syngman Rhee was of less standing as a national figure but more
central to U.S. involvement in Korea. He was brought in by the U.S.
and airlifted out by the CIA in 1960 when popular opposition made him
too much of a liability. The history of South Korean leaders since
then has been a checkered one. Dictators such as Park Chung-hee have
been more successful in handling U.S. pressure than the progressive
democratic ones such as the present incumbent Moon Jae-in.
[[link removed]] Despite
having been swept into power by the Candlelight Revolution, which
toppled Park’s daughter, Park Geun-hye, and the opportunities
presented by Kim Jong Un’s peace offensive in 2018 and Trump’s
fumbling willingness to engage with Pyongyang, he has been too weak
[[link removed]] to stand up to American
pressure and will finish his term of office with little achieved in
respect of peace with the North. The role of President of South Korea
has always been a limited one because of U.S. dominance, but as Kim
Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun demonstrated, there is some potential to
nudge the U.S. towards peace.

Hidden War–Deceptions, Machinations and Obscured Motivations

All war utilizes deception but American imperialism positions it at
the epicenter. Duplicity is America’s very essence, if for no other
reason that it denies its imperialism.

Too often even critical reassessments of U.S. foreign policy take the
line that it was a matter of good men, with the best of intentions
being misled by faulty intelligence and over-confidence:

… we escalated the war in Vietnam on wrong information, on mistaken
and misinterpreted reports of torpedo attacks. In 2003, we launched a
pre-emptive war on the grounds that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass
destruction at the ready. Wrong again. Today the fog of this war is
also lifting…17
[[link removed]]

Stone generally goes beyond this superficiality, though he is not
immune from it. Truman he sees as an “honorable and decent specimen
of that excellent breed, the plain small-town American” who wanted
peace but was constrained by domestic considerations–the charge of
appeasement:

… how to fight off the Red-scare bogey at home, if one was also open
to attack for making an agreement with Moscow? The difficulty of
dealing with the Russians was clear enough, but even clearer was the
political danger at home. How negotiate without give-and-take? But how
give anything at all without being charged with “appeasement”? To
“get tough,” to avoid negotiation, to carry on a sniping campaign
just short of actual warfare-this was the line of least political
resistance.

His analysis of the domestic constraint is astute enough; it remains a
basic reason why the U.S. finds it so difficult to negotiate, and to
keep to deals–what the Russians have labelled
‘not-agreement-capable’.18
[[link removed]] It
manifests itself in respect of Korea today but is a more general
problem of governance. However, Truman is the president who started
the Cold War, so Stone’s assessment of him here is inadequate.
Truman was also deeply racist.19
[[link removed]]

With the passage of time and the exigencies of power–it was Truman
who desegregated
[[link removed]] the
U.S. military–his racism was muted though “even after blacks
hailed him as their champion, he continued to sprinkle his private
conversation” with crude racial slurs.20
[[link removed]] It
is reasonable to assume that Truman, along with other American leaders
then, and now, were more willing to accept the carnage deployed on
Korea, as with Japan before and Indochina later, than they would have
against Europeans.

Stone was a man of his times, who had to make a living, with
inevitable compromises, but who in general stands out as a beacon of
good journalism. How he styled his name illustrates some of the issues
he faced. Born Isidor Feinstein Stone he was persuaded in 1937 to call
himself I. F. Stone to hide his Jewishness; we tend to forget how
prevalent anti-Semitism was in America before the postwar rise of
Jewish political power made it unfashionable in public. “Jew” and
“Communist” were often used interchangeably. But he personally
called himself “Izzy” and was very active in leftwing politics. He
was not lacking in courage.

It is not that Izzy Stone provided conclusive answers to these four
themes and the other topics covered in his book. How could he? What he
does, however, is far more important. He starts the process of
investigation, of challenging conventional wisdom and in so doing,
provides empirical evidence upon which Marxists and anti-imperialists
can build subsequent analysis. He followed in the footsteps of
radicals such as Mark Twain, Jack London, and Upton Sinclair but
reached further into foreign affairs. He has been followed by others,
but far too few, with most people working in mainstream media or
academia being either stenographers, mindlessly (but safely)
regurgitating the official line, or megaphones, spewing out propaganda
to serve some hidden objective of the ruling elite.

We would well do with more Izzy Stones–they are a rare breed–but
perhaps the real solution lies within ourselves. _The Hidden
History_ is not the product of access to secret stashes of
information. He used what is now called open-source materials and that
is accessible to us, much more than it was in his day. This surely
means that Stone’s most important lesson is that we can all try to
do what he did–read carefully with a critical eye. There are plenty
of other histories hidden behind curtains of deceit.

Notes:

* ↩
[[link removed]] Originally
published by Monthly Review Press it has appeared in various editions,
including a Kindle one. A pdf of the 1998 edition, with preface by
Bruce Cumings is available here
[[link removed]].
* ↩
[[link removed]] I.F.
Stone, _The Hidden History of the Korean War_, Little Brown Edition
(1988), p xxi.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Stone,
104.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Stone,
106.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Stone,
92.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Stone,
92.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Stone,
181.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Stone,
181.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Stone,
104.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Stone,
201-2.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Stone,
256-57.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Stone,
258.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Stone,
259.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Stone,
346.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Stone,
346.
* ↩
[[link removed]] Preface
to the 1988 edition
[[link removed]] of
the book.
* El↩
[[link removed]] len
Goodman, “_Dispersing the fog of war, from Vietnam to Iraq,_”
[[link removed]] Baltimore
Sun, 2 February 2004.
* ↩
[[link removed]] The
Saker, “_Why the recent developments in Syria show that the Obama
Administration is in a state of confused agony_,”
[[link removed]] The
Saker, 23 September 2016.
* ↩
[[link removed]] William
E. Leuchtenburg, “_The Conversion Of Harry Truman_,” American
Heritage, November 1991.
* ↩
[[link removed]] William
E. Leuchtenburg, “_The Conversion Of Harry Truman_,” American
Heritage, November 1991.

_GREGORY ELICH is a Korea Policy Institute associate and on the Board
of Directors of the Jasenovac Research Institute. He is a member of
the Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea, a columnist
for Voice of the People [[link removed]], and one of the
co-authors of Killing Democracy: CIA and Pentagon Operations in the
Post-Soviet Period
[[link removed]],
published in the Russian language. He is also a member of the Task
Force to Stop THAAD in Korea and Militarism in Asia and the
Pacific. His website is [link removed] 
[[link removed]] Follow him on Twitter at @GregoryElich.
 _

_TIM BEAL is a retired New Zealand academic who has written
extensively on Asia with a special focus on the Korean Peninsula. His
recent work includes the entry on Korea for The Palgrave Encyclopedia
of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism (New York: Springer, 2019),
‘U.S. Imperialism, the Korean Peninsula and Trumpian Disruption’
(International Critical Thought, Beijing, 2020), and ‘In Line of
Fire: The Korean Peninsula in U.S.-China Strategy’
[[link removed]] (Monthly
Review, New York, 2021)._

_LIBERATED TEXTS [[link removed]] is an independent book
review website which features works of ongoing relevance that have
been forgotten, underappreciated, suppressed or misinterpreted in the
cultural mainstream since their release.
Although not exclusively, we are interested in texts with
anti-colonial, anti-imperialist themes and those related to the
history of Marxism, communism and revolution globally._

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