Patriots, Traitors, and Empires: The Korean War and Korea's Long Struggle for Freedom
Added 2021-07-04 22:51:05 +0000 UTCStephen Gowans joins Breht to talk about his book "Patriots, Traitors, and Empires: The Story of Korea's Struggle for Freedom".
They discuss the history of Korea, Japanese colonial occupation of Korea, WW2 and the Cold War, The Korean War, Kim Il-Sung and guerrilla warfare, South Korea as an American puppet state, the Soviet Union and Mao's China, American propaganda against the DPRK, the prospects for a unified Korea, and much more!
Check out Stephen's blog here: https://gowans.blog/
Follow him on Twitter: https://twitter.com/GowansStephen
Outro Music: "SNOW" by Zion T (feat. Lee Moon Sae)
Comments
I suppose you could call Korean socialism more accurately their application of Juche, rather than Juche being Korean-style socialism itself.
Adam Martin
2021-07-08 15:15:12 +0000 UTCLove Gowans and that book! I have to say, I'm a little disappointed in his explanation of Juche though, it seems to fall back on the common misconception of Juche being "Korean style socialism." I'm hardly an expert, but it's more a philosophy recognizing the need for the creativity of the masses to accomplish their revolutionary aims and socialism in their own unique ways rather than copying the models of other countries. While upholding Marxism-Leninism as a science (the vanguard party for revolution, Imperialism, etc.), it focuses on serving as an aid to building a path for the specific circumstances facing revolutionaries in different parts of the world. This shows why they provided so much solidarity to socialists that were attempting to forge their own path, such as Sankara, Nkrumah, or, most notably, the Black Panthers, who went so far as to uphold Juche at a certain point in their development (you can see it mentioned in the majority of their newspapers). Sankara's attempt to build self-reliance in Burkina Faso as opposed to falling into Moscow or Beijing's camps, Nkrumah's pan-Africanism, and the Panthers' reliance on the lumpenproletariat as a revolutionary force are all examples of what followers of the Juche idea would see as the self-reliant creativity of the masses. I guess a weird way to put it is that Juche seeks to find the objectivity of subjective conditions (although I may be wrong there). I'm hardly an expert, if you want to reach out to people on Juche, my comrades Muhammad Abdus-Salaam and Fidel Sankara are very well-read on Juche, you can find them on Facebook pretty easily and I'm sure they'd be happy to help explain.
Adam Martin
2021-07-08 15:13:37 +0000 UTCagreed. Which is why i didnt plug it in the show notes and only took out certain chunks that I felt were fair!
Revolutionary Left Radio
2021-07-07 16:55:03 +0000 UTCJust to warn everyone, that PBS documentary is pretty slanted. It has some good information in it just as a primer on the war, but I'd definitely not rely on as a sole source of information if at all possible. No mention at all of the Korean People's Republic which had emerged between Japanese and American occupations or the resistance to American occupation in Southern Korea at the end of WWII. By leaving out the 1945-1950 time frame it does some propaganda work for American empire; the war "starts" when the North "invades" the South in 1950, not when America occupies the country and crushes a nascent independence movement. Also unmentioned: the mass rape of Korean women by US troops, US bioweapons attacks on Northern Korea and China, the true scale of Syngman Rhee's massacres, etc etc. But it's PBS, which is funded by the US government and associated foundations, so what do we expect.
Matt
2021-07-07 03:25:50 +0000 UTC
