By Michael Breen
In a story on anti-Americanism prompted by the anti-U.S. beef demonstrations, The Wall Street Journal last week quoted an official of one of the organizing groups expressing the long-held gripe that the United States had ``interrupted the Korean War.''
In other words, the most significant consequence of U.S. entry into the war in 1950 was not the rescue of South Koreans from communism, but rather the sealing of the division of the country into two rival states. This idea still has legs because we live with that consequence today. This autumn, North and South Korea celebrate, if that's the right word, their 60th birthdays.
The underlying assumption here is that, as national unity is a good thing, interrupting it was a bad thing.
You don't often hear the opinion that the United States should not have intervened expressed out loud. But it is one that some South Korean socialists share not only with the North Korean regime, but also with American TV viewers when they see Koreans burning their flag on TV, and with many young American soldiers wondering why the hell they have to spend winter in some hole in the Korean countryside.
But in couching the analysis in these terms, the socialists are concealing a fib. The truth is they don't really think that unification is the overriding moral good. If they did, you'd hear them criticizing the Chinese intervention a few weeks later into the war on behalf of the defeated North Koreans. But they don't do that.
The fact is that both sides believe in unification on their own terms and that half a country is better than nothing. In other words, both sides think it was worth fighting for their half. Back at the time of division, most Koreans thought both regimes were the same, but 60 years on, I've yet to meet someone who argues that the peninsula would have been better off united regardless of which side won.
But let's go with the unificationist theme and ask, what would the peninsula look like if the U.S. had not stepped in?
This question has occurred to me in recent days, not so much because of the gentleman quoted in The Wall Street Journal, because the answer has been on the front pages of newspapers.
Burma.
Here's what happens to a country of nice people when it is run by incompetent socialist generals who consult fortune-tellers before they make decisions and who want the world to leave them alone.
Had North Korea won the war, of course, a lot of the South Koreans we know and love would not be here today. They would have been shot for crimes against the people, such as owning land and believing in religion. (Similarly, we must admit, that, contrary to what people were taught in school on this side of the fence, southern justice was equally vicious. Had South Korea won, many on the losing side would have been made to dig their graves and then been shot in them).
After that, what would have happened?
This question really involves stripping away those features of North Korea that exist in reaction to the southern enemy. Being communists, North Korean leaders would still have had to find enemies to feed to the ovens of their ``revolution'' and so, we may assume, would still have needed to categorize society into hostile, wavering and supporting classes. Being communists, their ideas of justice would not have evolved under western influence.
Also, being communists, their economy would have hit the ceiling it did hit, after reconstruction, in the '60s.
It would be rational to assume that, as an industrialized nation in the Soviet camp, that Pyongyang by now would be Asia's Prague. But, as the theme of his revolution was independence, Kim Il-sung would have felt no need to remain within any bloc. He and his cohorts would have demanded the right to suppress their people and ruin their own economy by themselves.
If their position at the crossroads of major power interests had permitted, they would have, in the past half century, slipped quietly into the background, like Burma, which went from being the most promising economy in Asia at the time of the Korean War to what it is today. Burma is led by a band of poorly educated, superstitious men in uniform who have demonstrated on the world stage that, just as with North Korean leaders, in their approach to leadership the first priority is protecting their own power and privileges.
Would unified Korea have been better off as the Burma of Northeast Asia?
Actually, such a question is academic because countries are concepts. What matters is people. For those killed, bereaved or suppressed as a consequence of the Korean War and the division, the answer would be yes. For the rest of us, it is clearly no.
Michael Breen is president of Insight Communications Consultants in Seoul. He can be reached at mike.breen@insightcomms.com.