The North Korean Genocides Students Don’t Learn About in American Schools

It is estimated that there were 10 million Native Americans living in America when Columbus first sailed to it, but by the 1900's less than 300,000 remained [1].

Aside from the diseases that Europeans brought over to the Natives there were also a lot of massacres involved.

It’s likely that many of the men who committed the murdering and rape atrocities against the Natives did not come home and tell their wives about it. And if wives and teachers knew about it, they did not tell the American children about it.

Likewise, the lords that raped and pillaged throughout European history didn’t bring back their rape and murder stories back home. History just doesn’t seem to work in an accurate manner when it is still raw.

And it didn’t seem to work that way during my experiences with the public education system…

In World History II my teacher had strong momentum when it came to bringing knowledge about North Koreans to the students of our classroom.

Through this momentum we became aware of the things that were being taught to North Korean children in schools; which my teacher had likely read about in “news” pieces such as the one seen below:

“‘We love playing military games knocking down the American b*******,’ reads the slogan printed across the top with the phrase so common that it’s become an acceptable way to refer to Americans.

Another poster depicts an American with a noose around his neck. ‘Let’s wipe out the U.S. imperialists,’ it instructs.

Toy pistols, rifles and tanks sit lined up in neat rows on shelves. Yun Song Sil, the school principal, pulls out a dummy of an American soldier with a beaked nose and straw-colored hair and explains that the students beat him with batons or pelt him with stones. It’s a favorite schoolyard game, the female principal said.” [2]

Of course this all seems reasonable enough to teach American students about North Koreans. They are ruthless, taught that Americans are no more than animals, and are ready to slaughter any “yankee” man, woman, or child.

They are barbarians.

But why are they ready for this slaughter?

What stories are the American men of the North Korean war not bringing back home to their wives? What stories are teachers not familiar with as having happened during this time, and if they are, what stories are they omitting?

When I was in high school I never heard my teacher bring up the 100,000 North and South Koreans that were massacred during the Korean war by allied forces:

But [the investigation’s] work has been welcomed by survivors, such as Kim Jong-chol, 71, who escaped as a 14-year-old from one mass shooting. His father, seven-year-old sister, grandparents, and cousins were all killed.

“Those who witnessed the killings said it was pitiful. Babies were killed with their mothers holding them,” he said. “Now I want the government to find their bodies, and to erect a monument in their memory.”

Mr Kim’s father was a South Korean guard recruited into a local militia after the North’s forces overran the border at the start of the war in 1950.

When the South Koreans and Americans army swept back north, a local police chief in their district, Namyang Ju, ordered those suspected of collaborating to be rounded up, along with their families.

“We were taken to a village storage room,” said Mr Kim. “But I managed to slip the ties on my wrists and run away.

“Two days later I found the pit where they had shot the captives. I dug with my hands, and found the bodies of my grandmother and grandfather. I never found my father or sister.”

The massacre in Namyang Ju was eventually brought to a halt, but not before 460 had died — one of many such killings documented in painful detail by the Commission.

Research in US archives has found one exchange in which a US colonel gives approval to a massacre in which 3,500 suspected leftists were shot.

I didn’t hear about how Napalm was used, knowingly, to obliterate North Korean villages full of innocent people:

One of the first orders to burn towns and villages that I found in the archives was in the far southeast of Korea, during heavy fighting along the Pusan Perimeter in August 1950, when US soldiers were bedevilled by thousands of guerrillas in rear areas. On 6 August a US officer requested “to have the following towns obliterated” by the air force: Chongsong, Chinbo and Kusu-dong. B-29 strategic bombers were also called in for tactical bombing. On 16 August five groups of B-29s hit a rectangular area near the front, with many towns and villages, creating an ocean of fire with hundreds of tons of napalm. Another call went out on the 20 August. On 26 August I found in this same source the single entry: “fired 11 villages” (4). Pilots were told to bomb targets that they could see to avoid hitting civilians, but they frequently bombed major population centres by radar, or dumped huge amounts of napalm on secondary targets when the primary one was unavailable.

In a major strike on the industrial city of Hungnam on 31 July 1950, 500 tons of ordnance was delivered through clouds by radar; the flames rose 200–300 feet into the air. The air force dropped 625 tons of bombs over North Korea on 12 August, a tonnage that would have required a fleet of 250 B-17s in the second world war. By late August B-29 formations were dropping 800 tons a day on the North (5). Much of it was pure napalm. From June to late October 1950, B-29s unloaded 866,914 gallons of napalm.

Air force sources delighted in this relatively new weapon, joking about communist protests and misleading the press about their “precision bombing”. They also liked to point out that civilians were warned of the approaching bombers by leaflet, although all pilots knew that these were ineffective (6). This was a mere prelude to the obliteration of most North Korean towns and cities after China entered the war. [3]

I certainly did not hear about the time that refugee women and children were trapped under a bridge in which Eugene Hesselman of Fort Mitchell, Ky gave the order:

“The hell with all those people. Let’s get rid of all of them.’’

I also didn’t hear about the logic and reason in shooting women and elders trying to make their way through the North Korean war zone:

“The command looked at it as getting rid of the problem in the easiest way. That was to shoot them in a group,’’ he said. [‘’How many North Koreans were in there, I can’t answer that,’’ he said last night in an interview with The New York Times. ‘’But we ended up shooting into there until all the bodies we saw were lifeless.’’]

Six veterans of the First Cavalry Division said they fired on the group of refugees at No Gun Ri, and six others said they witnessed the shootings. More said they knew or heard about it.

Some veterans recalled that American soldiers, in only their third day at the front, feared North Korean infiltrators who their commanders had said were among the fleeing South Korean peasants.

American commanders had ordered units retreating through South Korea to shoot civilians as a defense against disguised enemy soldiers, according to once-classified documents found by the A.P. in months of researching military archives.

Several of the veterans interviewed agreed on such elements as time and place, and on the preponderance of women, children and old men among the victims.” [4]

I don’t remember being taught about Truman’s threat to the North Koreans of using nuclear bombs against them, at the time they had none themselves:

“At a famous news conference on 30 November President Harry Truman threatened use of the atomic bomb, saying the US might use any weapon in its arsenal.” [5]

And I don’t remember being taught about MacArthur’s plan to drop 30 nuclear bombs on North Korean villages:

“In interviews published posthumously, MacArthur said he had a plan that would have won the war in 10 days: “I would have dropped 30 or so atomic bombs . . . strung across the neck of Manchuria.” Then he would have introduced half a million Chinese Nationalist troops at the Yalu and then “spread behind us — from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea — a belt of radioactive cobalt . . . it has an active life of between 60 and 120 years. For at least 60 years there could have been no land invasion of Korea from the North.” He was certain that the Russians would have done nothing about this extreme strategy: “My plan was a cinch.” [5]