Antares posted:

Reading actual histories and saying its ambiguous is being a tankie while repeating whatever caricature your famously ignorant culture produces in defense of the series of dictators we propped up in ROK is just being logical. Given the role of race science in the UN campaign in Korea i guess that's appropriate.

KPA attack (or counterattack) was more coordinated which is suggestive but the KPA was superior in every way to ROKA. Again actual scholars using primary sources can't determine who started the attack that day.

fishmech posted:

It's super clear who was attacking who and there's absolutely no reason to pretend like it's up in the air.

Tacky-rear end Rococco posted:

Ethnonationalism is extremely bad, except when it's good, like when it's done by nominal socialists. Then they have the right to reunite the nation by force. Then it's amazing and shouldn't be questioned.

Grapplejack posted:

weeelllll

Chomskyan posted:

Defending mass rapes to own the "tankies"

Koramei posted:

Yeah, Syngman Rhee's regime had been quite intentionally deprived of military equipment by the Americans expressly because they were worried about him starting an invasion. There were skirmishes back and forth in the leadup to it, but the only side that could have started any serious invasion was the North.

And to be fair Rhee probably would have invaded, had he not been deprived of that stuff--he very much wanted to keep the war going until reunification at just about any cost, and kept arguing as such right to the bitter end.

Antares posted:

Reading actual histories and saying its ambiguous is being a tankie while repeating whatever caricature your famously ignorant culture produces in defense of the series of dictators we propped up in ROK is just being logical. Given the role of race science in the UN campaign in Korea i guess that's appropriate.

mlmp08 posted:

America has done some very bad things, but deciding that as a result, North Korea’s invasion of South Korea with the at least passing consent of the USSR was a very good thing is a hell of a take.

It didn’t work out well for much of anyone.

North Korea started the war; what the hell else do you call a coordinated surprise attack after telling the USSR that you intended to invade South Korea?

mlmp08 posted:

America has done some very bad things, but deciding that as a result, North Korea's invasion of South Korea with the at least passing consent of the USSR was a very good thing is a hell of a take.

It didn't work out well for much of anyone.

North Korea started the war; what the hell else do you call a coordinated surprise attack after telling the USSR that you intended to invade South Korea?

Koramei posted:

It's the framing it as an invasion between two sovereign, entrenched and disparate foreign powers (as people in the West tend to conceptualize it) vs it being a civil war as a reaction to an unfairly imposed partition. The same stuff happened with e.g. Vietnam, which was incidentally massively less unified under a single national identity than Korea had been, but we frame the whole war and Ho Chi Minh's reunification differently because...I don't know. I guess because North Korea is still so obviously lovely.

Party Plane Jones posted:

what

qkkl posted:

Most South Koreans would have rather lived under communist rule in a unified Korea than in a US puppet state.

Antares posted:

Reading actual histories and saying its ambiguous is being a tankie while repeating whatever caricature your famously ignorant culture produces in defense of the series of dictators we propped up in ROK is just being logical. Given the role of race science in the UN campaign in Korea i guess that's appropriate.

KPA attack (or counterattack) was more coordinated which is suggestive but the KPA was superior in every way to ROKA. Again actual scholars using primary sources can't determine who started the attack that day.

mlmp08 posted:

North Korea started the war; what the hell else do you call a coordinated surprise attack after telling the USSR that you intended to invade South Korea?

mlmp08 posted:

Acknowledging US racism and imperialism doesn’t require you to also characterize North Korea’s mass invasion as a very successful ad hoc counterattack against South Korean puppet-state aggression.

Antares posted:

I cannot possibly provide you a precis on white supremacy on the Something Awful forums if you have no interest or background in seeing it to begin with, there is plenty of literature.

Party Plane Jones posted:

List any of it then?

Antares posted:

I've said like 8 times that literally no serious person claims to know who attacked first that day

Party Plane Jones posted:

List any of it then?

Antares posted:

The Korean War by Bruce Cummings is very good and contains lots of primary quotes.

quote:

Cumings displays a limited grasp of sources that have emerged since he published his second volume on the war's origins in 1990. Since then an enormous number of government documents have become available on the roles of the United States, the Soviet Union and China on the origins, course and impact of the war, and historians have produced a substantial new literature devoted to interpreting them. For example, in "Undermining the Kremlin: America's Strategy to Subvert the Soviet Bloc, 1947-1956" Gregory Mitrovich demonstrates that George F. Kennan's version of containment during 1948 and '49 was not limited to Western Europe and Japan, as Cumings suggests. Mitrovich and others have demonstrated persuasively that the Kennan-drafted National Security Council document 48 provided the rationale for an active if non-military campaign to roll back Soviet power. Cumings's apparent unfamiliarity with this revelation leads him to misinterpret the evolution of American views on the nature of the Soviet threat.

Cumings also ignores evidence from archives in China and Russia that sheds light on the lead-up to North Korea's invasion of the south. Cumings lays emphasis on a Chinese role in the attack, but newly released documents show that Beijing was largely left out of the pre-war planning while Moscow was intimately involved.

Cumings's assertion that the Republic of Korea government in the south was "in total disarray" on the eve of the North Korean attack ignores or downplays the fact that it had recently defeated the guerrilla movement below the 38th parallel and implemented important measures to control inflation and advance land reform. Cumings dwells on the failures of South Korea's army during the war, totally ignoring the contribution the army made to the defense of the Pusan Perimeter and its manning by mid-1952 of over 50 percent of the front line on the United Nations side. Cumings makes some striking omissions, too. He spends considerable space on such topics as the North Korean perspective and American atrocities from 1950-53. He fails, however, to explain U.S. policy during the occupation or describe the eventual emergence of the Republic of Korea as an economically prosperous and democratic state that contrasts dramatically with the economic basketcase and brutal regime in North Korea.

For readers desiring a sermon on the shortcomings of the United States in Korea from World War II to the present, this book is a must read. Those wanting an up-to-date account of the war in all its complexity should look elsewhere.

Party Plane Jones posted:

Antares posted:

yeah i can quote amazon reviews that agree with me too.

Antares posted:

yeah i can quote amazon reviews that agree with me too.

Party Plane Jones posted:

this is the washington post

Antares posted:

oh well they aren't neoconservative at all. show me all their iraq war takes

Antares posted:

Agree, the historical fact of mutual aggression and conflicting accounts of who did what first in an unrelated event are the same as Nazi apologism.

I'd really like to stress that if you cannot see racism/white supremacy in European or American foreign policy/empire you are out of your loving mind. It's completely explicit both at the time and in the post-hoc and modern characterizations of the conflict. cf the way people talk about the Kims as "crazy" or totally invalidate South Korean sentiment towards peace & de-escalation because the conniving foreigners are tricking the sponge brain president.

Antares posted:

I've said like 8 times that literally no serious person claims to know who attacked first that day

Furia posted:

Bragging and celebrating troops, that thing that’s been going on

Vincent Van Goatse posted:

This is a straight-up lie.

You don't have multiple divisions and tank brigades hanging around the border plus logistics arrangements to advance all the way to Busan if you don't intend to invade.

fishmech posted:

It is known that Kim Il Sung ordered the attack unprovoked, just as it is known that Hitler ordered the invasion of Poland

Koramei posted:

I don't even understand why you'd try to argue that the North didn't strike first in the Korean War. First it makes you look like an idiot, but it also doesn't even preclude the other side from having committed atrocities or anything.

Antares posted:

But regardless of whether KPA or ROKA started the war I don't think Americans slaughtering 20% of the population was good.

Vincent Van Goatse posted: