Opposition in Australia, Japan,
and South Korea to the U.S. War in Indochina
Wednesday October 23
View on youtube by clicking here https://youtu.be/0I2J2bdbcO0
During the 1960’s
and early 1970’s sustained popular opposition to U.S. intervention in Indochina
developed in countries thought of as U.S. allies. US bases in Australia, Japan and South Korea supported the war effort. Australia and South Korea sent troops. In the case of Australia, opposition advanced beyond forms of verbal dissent to include a significant
degree of draft resistance. Three knowledgeable observers of, and participants in, opposition will share their experiences in peace movements that were not well known to US activists.
Rowan Cahill is a graduate of the universities of Sydney, New England, and Wollongong. Conscripted for military service in 1965 in the recently introduced selective National Service scheme, he became a Conscientious Objector and prominent in the Australian student, anti-war and New Left movements of the 1960s and 70s. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation began its dossier on him in 1967. He has variously worked as a farmhand; as a teacher in schools, the prison system, universities; as a freelance writer; and for the trade union movement as a publicist, historian, and rank and file activist. He has published widely in mainstream, trade union, social movement, and academic publications. Author of numerous books his most recent, co-authored with Terry Irving, are Radical Sydney: Places, Portraits and Unruly Episodes (UNSW Press, 2010) and The Barber Who Read History: Essays in Radical History (Bull Ant Press, 2021). Currently he is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Wollongong (New South Wales). (photo by Monica Donoso)
Blog: http://radicalsydney.blogspot.com.au https://rowancahill.net/
Associate Professor Bobbie Oliver is an Honorary Research
Fellow and Director of the Centre for Western Australian History at the
University of Western Australia. Although old enough to have been snared in the
last few rounds of the notorious birthday ballot had she been male, her peace
activism dates from a later period after studying Gandhi's peace movement in
India. She taught and researched in Australian labour history and civil
liberties at Curtin University from 1997 until 2018, and has published two books
and several chapters and articles on the Australian peace movement. Her
most recent publication is Hell No! We Won't Go! Resistance to
Conscription in Postwar Australia (Interventions Publishing,
Melbourne, 2022). An earlier book, Peacemongers, which tells
the history of Australian conscientious objectors to military conscription from
1911 to 1945, is being republished by Cambridge Scholars, Newcastle Upon Tyne,
UK, and should appear in late 2024 or early 2025.
Book Review Editor, Labour History
Vice President, Australian Society for the Study of Labour
History
Terry Provance Moderator After graduating from college in 1969, I became involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement first organizing locally in Pittsburgh and then eventually with national groups like Harrisburg Defense Committee for Dan and Phil Berrigan, Pentagon Papers Trial and Medical Aid for Indochina. I began working with the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia in 1973 to oppose US nuclear weapons until 1983 when I went to graduate school in Berkeley, California. I received a fellowship and then studied two years in South America and worked with human rights groups in Chile. I returned to Pittsburgh where I pastored a local United Church of Christ congregation for 5 years and then worked in its national office on peace and justice issues for 10 years. I then worked 12 years with Oikocredit, an international anti-poverty organization, as its Executive Director in the United States. I retired in 2012.
Tim Shorrock is a journalist and writer based in
Washington, DC. He grew up in Japan and South Korea during the Korean and the
Vietnam wars and was actively involved in the antiwar movement from the time he
was in high school. During the 1970s, he was active in the Indochina Peace
Campaign in California. Starting in the 1980s, Shorrock reported extensively on
the Japanese and Korean labor and peace movements and broke important stories
about the interventionist role of the US military and the CIA in both
countries. In 2015 he was given an honorary citizenship by the city of Gwangju
for his reporting on the secret background role played by the US government and
military in the events surrounding the 1980 Gwangju Democratic Uprising in
Korea and the imposition of martial law by the infamous general Chun Doo Hwan.
This year, the city’s archives published a three-volume book translating into
Korean the 3,000 US documents Shorrock obtained under the Freedom of
Information Act to write his stories. Over the past 45 years, he has published
in numerous US, Korean, and Japanese publications, including The Progressive,
Salon, Hankyoreh, Sisa Journal, Newstapa, and Sekai. He was a correspondent for
The Nation magazine from 1983 to 2023 and is the author of SPIES FOR HIRE: The
Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. Shorrock is now working on a book
about the tripartite US military alliance with Japan and South Korea and last
visited Japan, Okinawa, and South Korea in 2023.
https://timshorrock.com
For video from Melbourne, Australia's Moratorium protest in 1971, click here
AUSTRALIAN ANTI-INDOCHINA WAR ACTIVITY 1962-72:
A POTTED HISTORY & CONTEXT
by Rowan Cahill
[Panel contribution to webinar “Opposition in
Australia, Japan, and South Korea to the U.S. War in Indochina”, Vietnam Peace
Commemoration Committee, October 2024.]
In 1962 the
conservative and rabidly anti-communist Australian Government of Prime Minister
Robert Menzies sent 30 military advisers to join the South Vietnam and US war
effort in Vietnam. In 1964 this was substantially increased to combat troops. During
the course of Australia’s participation
in the war, which ended in 1972, some 60,000
Australians served, of whom 523 died as the result and some 2400 wounded.
Amongst those who served, and amongst these casualties, were 16,000 conscripts.
Australia
has never felt at home in Asia and through much of the twentieth century tried
to maintain itself as a white racial society. A settler-colonial state created via
Britain’s invasion beginning in 1788, and war with and dispossession of the
First Peoples, Australia is an island continent a bit smaller in size than the
US (minus Alaska and Hawaii), sparsely populated, 53% of it desert or nearly so.
Today it hosts a population of nearly 27
million. In the 1960s some 11 million.
Federated and
independent as a nation since 1901 it has historically looked for and to a powerful
friend/ally to come to its aid in times of perpetually feared invasion. Its
experiences with Japan during World War II, which included air and naval
attacks on Australian soil and in its waters, heightened this fear.
Until the
Fall of Singapore and the end of British power in Asia in 1942, followed
post-war by India’s exit from the British Empire, the ‘Mother’ country provided
this security, real or imagined. Subsequently, based on the close military and
strategic relationship forged during World War II between Australia and the US,
successive Australian governments have attached the nation to the military and
strategic interests of the US.
In November
1964 the Australian government introduced Conscription. The Australian Army was
not sizeable enough to do the job ahead
in Vietnam and recruitment drives were not yielding the quality of manpower
needed.
A selective
scheme was concocted involving all males as they turned 20 years of age, a year
before they gained the right to vote. To avoid compromising the economy and the
workforce, the scheme was designed to select 1 in 12 males, letting the rest
get on with their lives. By the 1970s, these odds had lengthened to 1 in 17.
All up from
its introduction until it ended in 1972, some 63,735 males were conscripted out
of a pool of 804,000 registrants.
Conscription
involved two years of continuous full-time military service followed with
another three and a half years of part-time service in the Army Reserve.
Selection was by the spin of a lottery barrel with ballot balls representing birth dates.
Draws were made twice a year depending on which
half of the year your birthday fell.
The scheme
created two classes of conscripts. Males already in the workforce who were
conscripted went straight into the army. Males who were conscripted whilst
engaged in university studies could defer military service until the completion
of their first degree, providing there were no failures along the way. This
gave them time to understand the nature of the war in Vietnam and for those who
figured the war was wrong, how to express this. Thus the nation’s universities
became hotbeds of agitation, organisation, resistance.
By the
mid-1960s there were more university students in Australia than ever before. Post-World
War II, Australian governments had determined that national security and
economic growth needed more and higher education, there had been a post-war
baby boom, and accommodating expansions of school and university systems.
Initially Australia’s
intervention in the Vietnam War and Conscription had widespread public support.
Saying NO to both in the early years was no easy or simple matter as it took
place in a national culture profoundly ignorant of Asian histories, societies,
and cultures – a national culture
susceptible to simple anti-communist Cold War rhetoric and Domino Theory
political understandings.
Initial
opposition tended to be quietist and educational. The preferred mode of protest
took the form of Letters to the Editor, petitions, small peaceful
demonstrations, educative public meetings with guest speakers aiming for media
coverage of dissident opinions, and the circulation of literature contesting
government policies.
The first
voices raised and actions against the war came from long established political
organisations and from activists with track records and/or family links to a dissenting/oppositional
past, and from a peace movement with a history, traditions, and links that can
be traced back to the early twentieth century and Australia’s involvement in
the Boer War.
But that
was the quiet before the storm and opposition
intensified and grew. Protest actions became increasingly
confrontational and disruptive. There was a mushroom growth of anti-war,
protest groups and organisations. Cheap offset print technology produced a
tsunami of protest literature.
Symbolic of
increasing militancy was the Australian tour of US President Johnson in October
1966. While the Australian Prime Minister declared ‘All the way with LBJ’, in
the streets protestors disrupted his cavalcade, there was police violence in
retaliation, and in Sydney the hosting Premier of NSW told his driver to ‘run
over the bastards’. The following year the militant and powerful Seamen’s Union of Australia
dramatically placed bans on Australian merchant ships taking war materials to Vietnam.
Producing a
substantial and dramatic shift in public opinion against the war was the Tet Offensive
in February 1968. This dramatically exposed the spurious ‘we will win, we are
winning’ claims of both the Australian and US governments. So effective were mounting
protest and opposition that in 1969 the Federal government considered draconian
legislation to curb free speech, the right of assembly, and anti-war protest
generally.
But it was
a tide that could not be turned. In 1970 and 1971, Australians turned out three
times in tens of thousands in its cities and towns in Moratorium protests
against the War and Conscription. The largest of these took place in Melbourne
with an estimated 70,000-100,000 present. By this time the Australian
government was considering withdrawal from Vietnam but had no time frame. And
as far as it was concerned, the protestors according to one of its leading spokesmen
were “political-bikies packraping democracy”.
These
Moratorium protests were the result of hard and difficult work by activists who
managed to cobble together united action from amongst the many protest
organisations, factions, interests across the nation, thus mobilising people intergenerationally
across divides of politics, ideologies, race, gender, social class,
religion.
Amongst
early and high-profile critics of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War,
and of Conscription, were prominent members of the centre-left Australian Labor
Party, Australia’s oldest political party. The party had taken Australia
through World War II but lost national office in 1949 in a Federal election
featuring a Cold War fear mongering campaign launched by conservative forces.
It had been out of office since, and these early critics were isolated voices
in their Party.
It wasn’t
until much later that the party’s leadership and rank and file had read the
wind and that efforts by anti-war/anti-conscription activists within the party
were successful. In October 1969 the Labor Party promised to immediately withdraw
Australian troops from the Vietnam War if elected, and in 1971 to end
conscription. All of which immediately happened following its election to the leadership of the nation at
the end of 1972. And with this too, the bonus release of anti-war resisters from
prison and cancellation of a backlog of prosecutions against a legion of activists
yet to be arraigned.
Rowan
Cahill
24 October
2024
Opposition
in Australia, Japan, and South Korea to the U.S. War in Indochina
Tim
Shorrock - Japan and South Korea
I begin my
talk with four points:
1. The Japanese
antiwar movement was one of the largest and most powerful in the world. It began
during the early days of US intervention in Vietnam shortly after the Korean
War and continued through the 1970s. The movement was largely focused on the
role of US military bases in Japan/Okinawa during the Korean War and in Vietnam,
as well as the US-Japan Security Treaty first signed in 1952 and renewed against
massive protests in 1960 and 1969. It was a fight for peace as well as a
struggle for independence from US hegemony and control.
2. The
South Korean antiwar movement was largely underground until the country, led by
citizen protests, won its democracy in the late 1980s. In the period after the
Korean War and during the US war in Vietnam, South Korea was under a military
dictatorship led by General Park Chung Hee, who had been trained and served in
the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II. Open opposition to US forces
and holding anti-American views publicly was nearly impossible. It got even
harder in the late 1960s, when Park sent troops to fight alongside US
counterinsurgency forces in South Vietnam. The Korean movement was therefore a
fight for democracy that turned into a struggle for reparations for the
Vietnamese people in the late 1990s and 2000s.
3. The Japanese
and South Korean antiwar and peace movements were closely linked in their
struggles against the US drive to militarize both countries and integrate them
into the enormous American military platform in East Asia. They had a huge
impact on the US conduct of the war and the Japanese and Korea public's
attitude towards Vietnam. But in the long run, they failed to bring either
independence or peace. Japan now hosts the largest contingent of US troops in
the world, with South Korea not far behind. The US under self-imposed Status of
Forces Agreements with Japan and Korea continues to virtually occupy both
countries militarily.
4. I
experienced and participated in the Japanese antiwar movement while I was
living there in the 1950s and 1960s and reported extensively on the South
Korean democratic movement in the 1980s. My introduction to Vietnam came in
1963, when I visited Saigon with my family while on an ocean voyage from Europe
to Japan. During the war, I was subject to the US draft (I escaped with high
lottery numbers) and was active in the US antiwar movement until the end of the
war in 1975. So much of my analysis is directly from my own observations and
experiences.
An
Overview of Japan and South Korea's role in the Vietnam War
From 1948 on,
Japan became the keystone for US military power in East Asia. That year, the United
States “reversed course” in its occupation of Japan, moving from
demilitarization and democracy to focusing on the containment of
communism. Almost
overnight, US policy shifted from punishing Japanese officials responsible for
World War II to enlisting them in a global war against communist forces
wherever they were. The shift inside Japan was symbolized by the rise of Nobusuke
Kishi, who was prime minister from 1957 to 1960. Kishi was minister of commerce
and industry in the wartime Tojo Cabinet that declared war on the US and
labeled a “Class A” war criminal for helping run Japan’s colonial empire in
Manchuria and Korea (his grandson, Shinzo Abe, was prime minister twice and was
a US favorite until he was assassinated in 2022)
Muto
Ichiyo, a Japanese writer who worked closely with the US antiwar movement in
the 1960s, explained the Japanese shift to me in a 1981
interview in Tokyo. “The part of Japanese imperialism which was made powerless
after the defeat in the war wanted, of course, to revive itself," he said.
“But they knew perfectly well that the situation had changed. They knew also
that fighting against America again would be both impossible and purposeless.
So they adopted a very clear-cut strategy: Japan will concentrate on the
buildup of the economic base structure of imperialism, while America will
practically rule Asia through its military forces.”
Japanese
industry profited handsomely by supplying the Pentagon with steel, munitions
and even napalm when the United States fought wars in Korea and Vietnam. Then,
as Washington propped up South Vietnam's Ngo Dinh Diem, South Korea’s Park
Chung Hee, the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos and Indonesia’s Suharto with vast
quantities of military aid, Japan kept their economies alive with financial aid
and investments from Mitsui, Sumitomo, Mitsubishi and other major corporations.
THE KOREAN
WAR was the catalyst for the monumental shift in American policy in East Asia from
peace-maker to empire-builder. Essentially, it set the stage for the
militarization of the Korean Peninsula and, later, Japan. It's also important
to remember the war also began US involvement in Vietnam. When Truman ordered
US ground troops into Korea in 1950, he also began aiding the French colonial
army in Vietnam and, incidentally, sent the US 7th Fleet into the Taiwan
Straits to prevent China from completing its takeover of Taiwan.
The Korean
War was fought by U.S. forces directly from bases in Japan. Even today, the
largest US bases in Japan and Okinawa fly the UN flag as integral parts of the
U.S.-run "UN Command-Rear" established in Japan as the
logistics and planning headquarters for Korea. Once the armistice was signed in
1953 (by the US, North Korea, and China), the US network of bases became the
perfect jumping-off point for the war in Vietnam. The Pentagon transformed its air and naval bases in Japan,
Okinawa, and South Korea into a massive platform for regional war.
South
Korea's role as a junior partner in the empire was sealed in 1965 when its
military rulers sent over 300,000 troops to back up the U.S. military in South
Vietnam. After President Nixon's shift toward "Vietnamization" in
1972, the Korean forces outnumbered American troops by a two-to-one margin.
JAPAN'S
ANTIWAR MOVEMENT. Now I'll return to the antiwar movement in Japan. It began
with the Korean War. The Japanese people, who had suffered through the
indiscriminate bombing of over 60 cities by US B-29s in the last months of
World War II, were disturbed by the American use of their bases to bomb Korea
and the enormous buildup of U.S. forces in Okinawa during that war.
Then in 1954, the US hydrogen bomb "Bravo" dropped over the Pacific
island of Bikini poisoned a crew of Japanese fishermen, sparking Japan's first
anti-nuclear movement after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I
trace the Japanese movement against the Vietnam War back to 1956. It began at Tachikawa Air Force Base, a huge US airfield in western Tokyo
that I could literally see from my family's back porch in the 1960s. In 1955, a
year after Bikini, the US military announced plans to use Tachikawa for
transporting nuclear weapons. To do that, it needed to use the surrounding
farmland for longer landing and takeoff distances. In response, farmers,
villagers, students, unionists, and Buddhist priests in Sunagawa, the small
village adjacent to the base, began a campaign of nonviolent protests and
occupation of the farmland. Tens of thousands of people, including Diet members
from the Socialist and Communist parties, joined the protests, which forced the
US military to cancel the expansion in 1957.
But after this, the US
simply built bases for nuclear bombers in Okinawa, which remained under US
military rule until 1972. The anti-base struggle at Tachikawa set the pattern
for many of the protests during Vietnam.
Japan doubled down on its support after the US
Marines landed in Vietnam in 1965. By then, its prime minister was Eusaku Sato,
Kishi's brother. He became a big-time cheerleader for US in Vietnam. When President Johnson
began bombing North Vietnam in 1965, Sato could hardly contain his
enthusiasm. In one visit to Washington, D.C., he endorsed the U.S.
efforts to stop communism at a speech at the National Press Club. He was so
emphatic about his support for the war in his meetings with President Johnson that
he became known as LBJ's favorite foreign leader.
But to millions of Japanese, Sato was a
warmonger. Their land was being used as a base to bomb and lay waste to another
Asian country, and many felt ashamed. The rage was compounded as Japanese
commuters watched long trains of jet fuel being shipped to US bases moving
through Tokyo (I recall seeing these black cars slipping through crowded
stations like Shinjuku and feeling embarrassed and sickened). As Japanese
reporters began sending back stories from South Vietnam of the extensive U.S.
bombing and shelling throughout the country and the brutality of General
Westmoreland's search and destroy operations, public opposition grew to the war
and Japan's complicity in it.
Most
of the early demonstrations were organized by the "old left," made up
of the Communist Party and its affiliated unions. By 1967, the war was a deeply divisive political issue in Japan
and a rallying cry and symbol of the Japanese new left and the
Zengakuren student movement. That year, two events brought many
ordinary Japanese into the streets and sparked a new citizens peace movement:
the desertion of sailors from the USS Intrepid, a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier,
and a port call to the southern port of Sasebo by the USS Enterprise, the
nuclear-powered carrier that was leading the airborne assault on North Vietnam.
This movement, new to Japan, was much broader than the leftwing student and
labor groups and included housewives, environmentalists and farmers.
The best
known of the antiwar organizations was Beheiren, "Peace in Vietnam
Committee," led in part by Muto
Ichiyo, who I mentioned
earlier. It was organized in 1965 to create links between the Japanese movement
and antiwar forces in the US and Europe. Beheiren came to national attention
when the four US airmen from the
Intrepid deserted their posts
in the US Navy base in Yokosuka and sought assistance from the group, many of
whom spoke English.
Eventually,
hundreds of American deserters escaped from the killing fields of Vietnam and
Southeast Asia through Japan, many of them ending up in the Soviet Union and
Sweden. Beheiren housed the deserters and kept them out of the clutches of the
U.S. Naval and Army intelligence. Eventually, the deserters were escorted to
northern Japan, where they boarded fishing boats and other vessels that took
them to the Soviet Union. When the US demanded that Japan crack down on this
underground railroad, the Japanese government had to confess that they had
broken no laws: it was perfectly legal to escort a foreigner across Japan and
help get them board a boat out of the country. It was also during this time
that US antiwar activists such as Jane Fonda and the late Donald Sutherland,
began funding GI Coffee Houses at US military bases in Japan and Okinawa to
work with active duty GIs who were protesting the war.
Labor
unions allied with the Socialist and Communist parties as well as the New Left
were also deeply involved in the antiwar movement. In 1968, when massive
protests against LBJ's escalation of the war shut down the city of Tokyo,
leftwing train conductors affiliated with one of the New Left groups
collaborated with the student-led protests to shut down several commuter lines,
paralyzing the city. Unions were especially active in US-occupied Okinawa.
Workers at major US bases went on strike several times during the war, once
during a wave of US bombing raids on North Vietnam. In response, the US military flew in top
officials of the AFL-CIO to help break the strikes.
The
Japanese movement culminated in 1969 with massive demonstrations against the
renewal of the US-Japan Security Treaty. They are still the largest protests I
have ever seen in my life. During that year, dozens of universities were seized
and shut down by students affiliated with one of the two factions of the
Zengakuren. One of them was International Christian University in western
Tokyo, where my father worked as an administrator. It was closed down for over
two years until Japanese police were called in to end the strike (after my dad
had left his job). Protests in Japan
continued through the 1970s. One of the largest took place in 1973, when the
aircraft carrier USS Midway was homeported in Yokosuka for the first time.
SOUTH
KOREA's ANTIWAR MOVEMENT. In 1960, Syngman Rhee, the Korean leader since 1945, was
overthrown in a popular revolution. The US was tired of his rule (as well as
his hatred of Japan) and supported the new liberal government by flying Rhee
out of the country in a CIA aircraft. Over the next year, Koreans continued
their citizen revolt by calling for a neutral, unified Korea without foreign
armies on their soil and seeking justice for the thousands of innocent
civilians executed by the Rhee regime during the Korean War. But everything
changed in 1961, when Park Chung Hee took over in a military coup. In 1965,
under pressure from the US, he signed a normalization treaty with Japan. Thus
began South Korea's antiwar movement.
The 1965
treaty was signed amidst massive demonstrations and another declaration from
Park of martial law. One of the protest slogans was "The US is not our
master." It was spot-on, because the US had sought the treaty as it was
getting bogged down in Vietnam and needed military help from South Korea and
economic assistance from Japan. That year Park sent the first Korean troops to
Vietnam; they eventually numbered over 300,000. They were responsible for many
massacres and in some towns and villages were considered worse than US troops.
By 1973, 3,806 Koreans had been killed in combat and 8,779 wounded. During the
war, those statistics were never made public. To hide the soldiers' role from
the Korean people, the dead were returned secretly to Osan US Air Force Base;
the families were then notified and given indemnity. Foreign reporters were prohibited
from photographing the returning dead and any reports of atrocities by Korean
soldiers were censored.
Public
protest was virtually impossible. In 1972, fearing a total US military pullout
from Korea, Park declared martial law again and transformed South Korea into
one of the first torture states. By 1973, South Korean jails were filling up with
peasants, workers, and students. Even in Park's home town, peasants
demonstrated against government confiscation of land to build factories. Their leaders
were arrested and tortured and charged with being "communist
agents."
Yet the
democracy movement would not be silenced. In 1973, the opposition leader Kim
Dae Jung (elected president in 1997) led South Korean resistance to military
rule. That fall, over 60 demonstrations against Park took place. A statement by
Christian youth summarized the resistance perspective: "Thinking of none
but itself, Japan's economic takeover is not only making Korea a serving maid
to Japan's economic advantage, while bringing about the economic ruin of our
people, but is also increasing the Korean government's corruption and
dictatorship."
In October
1979, Park was assassinated by the
director of his own KCIA.
Over the next year another general - one of the many Korean soldiers trained by
the US to fight in Vietnam - seized power in a rolling military coup that began
in December 1979 with his takeover of the Korean Army and climaxed on May 17
with the expansion of martial law throughout the country. Over the next few
days, General Chun Doo Hwan slaughtered hundreds of people in the city of
Gwangju, sparking the first armed revolt in the South since the Korean War. But
the US covered up his crimes and threw its support to him, as did the ruling LDP
leaders in Japan. But, inspired by Gwangju, Korean citizens organized and
fought against the dictatorship, finally winning their democracy in 1987.
Under
Korea's new democracy, the press was now free to investigate the past. Thus
began the South Korean movement against the Vietnam War and in support of
reparations for the Vietnamese people who were the victims of South Korean
military violence. In 1999, reporters from the progressive newspaper Hankyoreh made the first findings, including
an incident from 1968 in which Korean Marines assembled around 70 resident of
the village of Phong Nhi and executed them. Similar massacres of civilians by
South Korean troops occurred in around 80 places during the Vietnam War, with
the death toll estimated at around 9,000 Vietnamese civilians.
Koreans organized several organizations to support
the Vietnamese victims, including the Civil Society Network for a Just
Resolution to the Vietnam War Issue and the Korea-Vietnam Peace Foundation.
They travelled to Vietnam to visit sites of the massacres and meet victims. In
2020, they helped one Vietnamese victim file a damages lawsuit in Seoul, and in
2023 a Korean judge ruled that veracity of her claims and ordered the
government to pay her around $23,000 in restitution. Many other claims like
that have been made, but the current Korean government of Yoon Suk-yeol has
refused to pay, and is appealing.
In the
end, the Japanese and Korean movements were effective in building democracy and
reining in US power in their countries. Yet today, nearly 50 years after
Vietnam's liberation, both countries are in a three-way military alliance with
the US that continues to dominate Asia and threatens war with China and North
Korea. The resistance continues, however. In Okinawa, where the governor was elected on
a platform to remove the US Marines, protests continue daily at Henoko, where
the LDP government is building a new base for the Marines. Many of the Koreans
active in the democracy movement of the 1980s are still speaking out against US military policy in Asia
and the Pacific. Both movements have built strong people-to-people ties with
Vietnam. In contrast, the US antiwar movement (in my opinion) abandoned Asia
after the Vietnam War and left the region to be defined for Americans by the
Pentagon and the far right. That was a historical error of huge proportions and
has resulted in the militarized US policies we see today throughout Asia and
the Pacific.
Tim
Shorrock is a journalist and writer based in Washington, DC. He grew up in
Japan and South Korea during the Korean and the Vietnam wars and was actively
involved in the antiwar movement from the time he was in high school. During
the 1970s, he was active in the Indochina Peace Campaign in California.
Starting in the 1980s, Shorrock reported extensively on the Japanese and Korean
labor and peace movements and broke important stories about the interventionist
role of the US military and the CIA in both countries. In 2015 he was given an
honorary citizenship by the city of Gwangju for his reporting on the secret
background role played by the US government and military in the events
surrounding the 1980 Gwangju Democratic Uprising in Korea and the imposition of
martial law by the infamous general Chun Doo Hwan. This year, the city’s
archives published a three-volume book translating into Korean the 3,000 US
documents Shorrock obtained under the Freedom of Information Act to write his
stories. Over the past 45 years, he has published in numerous US, Korean, and
Japanese publications, including The Progressive, Salon, Hankyoreh, Sisa
Journal, Newstapa, and Sekai. He was a correspondent for The Nation magazine
from 1983 to 2023 and is the author of SPIES FOR HIRE: The Secret World of
Intelligence Outsourcing. Shorrock is now working on a book about the
tripartite US military alliance with Japan and South Korea and last visited
Japan, Okinawa, and South Korea in 2023.
Website: https://timshorrock.com
Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/c/DMZEMPIRE
Twitter/X:
@TimothyS
