RES: Korea's blessing

[Brad De Long]

>Both North and South, partition led to reaction. In the North Kim Il
>Sung's regime was consolidated as the only other competing power was
>based in the now isolated South Korean wing of the party. In the South
>Syngman Rhee's belligerence was undertaken to trump the victory of the
>opposition in the elections the previous year.
>
>In the course of the war Rhee's government slaughtered suspected
>oppositionist by the thousands. Worse still, MacArthur sacked Seoul
>twice over: once taking it back from the North Koreans and then a second
>time retreating from a Chinese invasion that existed mainly in his own
>propaganda. Those dislocations, and the partition that they are based
>upon meant that it was impossible for any semblance of democracy to
>emerge in Korea, North and South. Partition frustrates the will of the
>Korean people as a whole, but it suits America's elite.
>
>--
>James Heartfield

Somehow I think that installing Kim Jong Il as Head Theocrat over all 
Korea would frustrate the will of the Korean people a good deal more 
than partition does. But maybe I'm just slow, and don't realize the 
benefits of High Stalinist-Theocratic Hereditary Monarchy-Central 
Planning by Incompetents, and of bark eating...

As a card-carrying member of the Central Committee (as well as of the 
Masonic Guild of Neoclassical Economists), let me say that a 
democratic South Korea would have suited us just fine--just as a 
democratic west Germany and a democratic Italy and a democratic 
France suited us just fine. What we wanted was wealthy trading 
partners and allies/buffer states against expansionist totalitarian 
and authoritarian regimes.

Hell, if only we had had more far-sighted people than Kissinger and 
Nixon around, we would even have realized that Allende was an asset: 
the idea that you could be Communist and also have free elections 
would have been a very powerful weapon to use to break down the Iron 
Curtain. It would have accelerated the Helsinki process...

Brad DeLong, who has an ordinate fear of Communism and an inordinate 
fear of excessive anti-communism.