The Jeju Massacre Was a Hidden Crime of America’s Cold War
In 1948, a US-sponsored dictatorship in South Korea launched a brutal campaign of repression on the island of Jeju. Having killed up to 30,000 people — one islander in ten — Washington’s Korean clients covered up the evidence of the crime for decades.
The Korean movie Hallan dramatizes a massacre that the US-backed South Korean dictatorship carried out in 1948. Up to 30,000 people were killed on the island of Jeju as part of a bloody counterinsurgency operation that was made in the USA. (Triple Pictures)
South Koreans tend to memorialize the tragedies of their modern history by date. The Korean War is 6.25 for June 25, 1950, the day it broke out; the Gwangju Uprising is 5.18, for May 18, 1980, when a ten-day popular revolt began before the military drowned it in blood.
The same kind of shorthand exists elsewhere in East Asia — 6.4 for the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 and 3.11 for the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 — but nowhere is it as deeply embedded in collective memory as in South Korea.
Each pair of digits separated by a dot compresses, and even conceals, the memory of mass death and the story behind it. About three million civilians were killed in the war South Koreans call 6.25. The number of civilians felled by government bullets in Gwangju or at Tiananmen remains contested, while the full nuclear toll of Fukushima may not be known for many more decades.
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