Why has Korea been forgotten?

29 comments

  1. It helps that we “won” or at least didn’t disastrously get our asses kicked.

  2. I think the Vietnam war just lasted a lot longer. It was a large part of people’s lives for a long time.

  3. Part of it was the lack of fanfare surrounding the war, it wasn’t a televised war like Vietnam. Another part of it was that in the decade or so after WW2 the general public was very uninterested in another war, and as a result a lot of veterans came back from the war and not many of their countrymen were particularly interested in their experiences in some weird country called Korea. The Coldest Winter is a great book on this subject.

  6. Korea was a UN sanctioned use of force as well as the fact that North Korea is and was overtly backed by imperialist China

  7. It’s not as interesting of a culture moment. Vietnam is key to 60s counter culture. There is a lot more media around it, even the biggest Korean War movie/show MASH is more a reflection on Vietnam than Korea.

    On top of that 1.7 million Americans fought in Korea. Largely doing so with pride as they saw their older brother bask in glory in world war 2. I have Korean War vets in my family, they still consider it an honor.

    3.1 fought in nam and came back to angry protest. Many vets were broken.

  8. Because in Korea we were definitely fighting the bad guys, and even if the guys we were helping weren’t great they at least decided to become a democracy on their own.

    Meanwhile it’s a much harder argument to say we were on the right side in Vietnam. Also lots more American war crimes in that one, and because it was longer and more recent it has a higher profile

  9. The Vietnam War was a clandestine invasion that hi-jacked a dissident movement which was not completely unreasonable. Indeed the South Vietnamese Communists were only one faction of the dissidents though they took over by being the most ruthless as well as to give them their due the most professional (the closest thing to professional insurgents were Communists some of whom operated in more than one country). Vietnam only evolved into a traditional invasion in the endgame.

    By contrast Korea started with an open invasion. It was conceded that North Korea was due a drubbing, to encourage the others as the saying goes. After WWII, no one was prepared to stand for nonsense.

    Also the government of Vietnam was rather distasteful. After all we never had distasteful allies before, oh wait, we had Bourbon France in the first war we ever fought as sort-of the United States (the American Revolution). Seriously news people rather focused on it and got people to wonder whether we were on the right side. Personally I think South Vietnam would have overcome it’s teething problems and evolved into something like South Korea or at least Singapore.

    Also no one paid attention to how nasty the enemy could really be. Reporters did not get among them much and that created a skewed picture. In reality they not only did a lot of not-so-precise terrorism, but assassinated tens of thousands primarily for being potential political competitors. That meant anyone who might be an authority figure, not just offing informants like every underground group does. Village elders, religious leaders, in one case a bicycle racer. It wasn’t as flamboyant as the Khmer Rouge. More like that old proverb of the King who showed how to rule by going into a field and clipping every grain that grew above the others, that representing the leaders of people he conquered.

    A final thing was there was a social change. There was a vocal segment of the young that wanted to latch onto any cause, good bad or indifferent. Ending Jim Crow was a good cause but the enemy’s cause at the time was no better than ambiguous and equally to the point was an enemy’s cause. In a way that was the reason; if the grown-ups were for it they were agin it.

  10. It is a bit of a hypocritical ideal generated by the Boomers…where both wars are similar (Northern Communist side invades the Southern one, US intervenes and drops a shit ton of bombs on the country to force the Commies out)…but only the Vietnam War is viewed controversially.

    The way I see it, Vietnam very likely would not be seen as a ‘black mark’ type war if the US committed and invaded the North and sent millions of troops and refugees packing out of Vietnam as it conquered it. Then, after a decade or two of a dictatorship, Vietnam turns into a fruitful capitalistic democracy just like what happened in Taiwan or South Korea.

    Of course, Vietnam lasted too long. If people don’t want change, you either leave or you need to force it to change – which the US doesn’t want to do as it’s not really conductive to its geopolitical strategy or ideals as a global hegemon – particularly as an ‘establisher’ of capitalistic, Democratic safe havens/boundaries.

    Essentially, the actual controversy is not whether it was good or bad….it’s whether the US wants to get mired by it because it cannot commit to or establish its goals.

  13. No one felt that the Korean War was unjustified, Vietnam was morally way more messy and complicated. The Korean war was as cut and dry as World War II but was much smaller in scale.

  14. The US had more allies, the Korean War wasn’t on TV every night, and it only lasted three years.

  15. My guess: we were right in the middle of the ruling class and government-induced Red Scare for Korea, while we weren’t during Viet Nam. Also, Viet Nam was on TV everynight.

  16. I think there was also just more support for Korea since the North had invaded the south

  17. Because the America of the 1950s was a very different country than the America of the 1960s. The US was just coming off victory in WW2 and its ascendance as a global superpower and American society (which had just collectively won the largest war in history) didn’t have the culture of dissent that the US had pre WW2 and later on during the 60s.

    The period from US entry to WW2 until the Civil Rights era was probably the most collectivist and conformist in US history. To add to this, this was the peak of the “Red Scare” and when McCarthyism reached its peak. The American public was at the time fervently anti communist, and after Americans just watched the fall of China the American public was concerned about a repeat happening in Korea and elsewhere, with eventually the US turning Communist.

    In the late 50s and into the 60s things began to change away from the collectivism the country had embraced since the attack on Pearl Harbor. Civil Rights protestors like Rosa Parks began changing the racial status quo in the country, and left wing academics finally began getting influence on college campuses across the country (which is probably the biggest change from the immediate post WW2 period).

  18. Something people forget is that the US was a liberating force in Korea against Japan whole the US originally supported French imperialism in Vietnam when the war began. Americans were welcomed by the Koreans at the end of the Second World War. The Soviets and Communist Korea was also deeply unpopular with large segments of the population, hence why the migration of people was so unbalanced even before war broke out, with more migrants going from the more industrial and less populated North to the more agricultural and more populated South.

    Some would argue that the North had more legitimacy because it spring out the framework of the PRK, but people forget that the Soviets took the framework and worked to purge non-Socialist factions. Despite it’s name as a People Republic, most supporters of and in the PRK were actually Right-wing and/or Nationalists

  20. From a U.S. perspective, they “won” Korea. South Korea was nearly entirely conquered by the time the U.S. got involved and the end result was at least a kind of victory, if not a full one. I think if Vietnam was over in the same amount of time with the same result, it wouldn’t have been as controversial.

  21. Korea actually succeeded, and was ultimately a good, just war opposing hostile Eastern Bloc expansion. Vietnam just ended up being unwinnable, and was then dragged on, causing unnecessary bloodshed for an ultimately inevitable outcome, that only got more and more hopeless as it dragged further on.

  22. Went in with a UN mandate. Fought five years after WWII ended. The Republic of Korea still exists…and is thriving.

    Vietnam is only remembered because that’s the when the Baby Boomers had to fight, and they didn’t like it but had the numbers to tell everyone about how much they didn’t like it for sixty years now.

  23. Partially the lack of media coverage, partially the short length, partially the lack of outrage and massive political movements regarding it.

  24. Others have listed good reasons for one thing is add is the Vietnam has a major insurgency element which always makes wars harder amd more complicated which makes them more controversial

  25. one word: Media.

    By the vietnam war, you had the war in your living room with graphic footage of combat, interviews with tired soldiers, actual accounts of bad events occurring and the futility of the war etc etc.

    Then you had televised protests, televised speeches by activists, etc that all helped normalize resistance to and distaste for the war.

    Add to that the long duration of the conflict and the large number of lives it touched, and it’s easy to see why it’s held in such disdain today.

  26. A few reasons. First, Korea was much more justified. Second, Korea ended with a better result. And third, the war was 3 years to Vietnam’s 20.

  27. We were fighting in Korea for ~3 years. We were fighting in Vietnam for close to 15.

  28. The Korean war was sandwiched between WW2, Vietnam War, and the Cold War. We didn’t remain in Korea long, South Korea became our ally and future TV manufacturer of TV and washing machines. And North Korea is North Korea.

  29. The main difference was that Korea was a traditional knock down drag out fight like WWII, while Vietnam was an insurgency like Afghanistan.

Leave a Reply
You May Also Like