Free The Korean War by Max Hastings Page A

to the heart of the United States’ difficulties not only with Korea, but also with China and subsequently with Vietnam. The occupiers’ enthusiasm for the reproduction of American political and bureaucratic institutions in Asia held little charm for Koreans with different attitudes and priorities. Japan, alone in Asia, represented in the forties, as it represents today, the single glittering example of a society in which American political transplants took firm root. Only Japan was sufficiently educated and homogeneous to adapt the new institutions successfully. In Japan alone, the traditional leaders of society were not identified by their poorer compatriots with an intolerable measure of injustice, corruption and collaboration with foreign oppressors. The most powerful weapon in the communists’ armoury in Asia was their appearance of commitment to personal honesty and selflessness, against the remorseless corruption and cupidity of their opponents. Many Asians discovered too late that the merits of private honesty were outweighed by the bitter cost of losing public freedom. In those parts of Asia where they exerted influence, the Americans honourably attempted to mitigate the worst excesses of landlordism and social oppression. But they never acknowledged how grievously these evils damaged their perpetrators as credible rulers in a democratic society. Again and again in Asia, America aligned herself alongside social forces which possessed no hope of holding power by consent. Chiang Kai Shek’s followers, like those of Syngman Rhee, could maintain themselves in office only by the successful application of oppressive force.
    Yet the United States is also entitled to argue before the bar of history, that a more idealistic policy in post-war Korea would have caused the country to fall to the communists. The localcommunists’ credentials as fighters against the Japanese, their freedom from the embarrassments of landlordism and corruption, would almost certainly have enabled them to gain a popular mandate in 1945–46. Whatever their initial willingness to form a coalition with Koreans of the centre and right, would the moderates not have suffered the same inexorable fate of death or impotence that befell so many East European politicians of that period, not to mention those of North Korea? Diplomatic historians have convincingly shown that in 1945–46, contrary to American belief at the time, South Korea did not form part of the Soviet expansion plan. Yet how were the contemporary leaders of the West to know or to guess that this was so, that Stalin had indulgently decided to exclude Korea from the fate that had befallen Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Rumania, Hungary, Austria? In the late forties it seemed, upon sufficient evidence, that the purpose of the Soviet Union was to test the strength of the West at every possible point, and to advance wherever weakness was detected. Dr Syngman Rhee and his followers appeared at least to represent strength and determination, at a period when these were at a premium. In historical assessments of the post-war period, it is sometimes forgotten that the Russians were as deeply feared by many Europeans as the Germans a few years earlier. The appeasers of Hitler had become figures of derision and contempt. Those who observed the Red Army’s dreadful record of rape and pillage in Eastern Europe, the unquestionable readiness of Moscow to employ murder as an instrument of policy, felt nothing but scorn for the would-be appeasers of Stalin, in Europe or in Asia.
    Nor did American manipulation of South Korean politics seem anything like as awful a matter, even in liberal circles, in 1945 as it might forty years later. In the course of the Second World War, none of the partners of the Grand Alliance had shown any greater sensitivity towards the human rights and feelings of Asian peoples than the chiefs of the military government displayed in Seoul from 1945 to 1948. If Korean