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Current time: March 29, 2024, 6:57 am

Poll: Was the Korean War worth fighting?
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Yes
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No
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other
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Should we have fought harder in the Korean War?
#21
RE: Should we have fought harder in the Korean War?
(December 7, 2015 at 11:29 pm)vorlon13 Wrote:
(December 7, 2015 at 10:57 pm)Catholic_Lady Wrote: I don't have an answer. But if anyone is interested in some toilet bowl reading here's an interesting article about North Korea written by one of my favorite bloggers:  http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/20-things-...as-in.html

Some pretty crazy/bizarre stuff going on over there.


Like building a hotel, over 1000 feet tall, with 7 revolving restaurants on top in a country that does not allow visitors and has no food ??

[Image: article-2245054-166956B7000005DC-340_634x642.jpg]


Damn, you just can't make up bizarro shit like that. 

And in the period when the construction was suspended for lack of funds to finish the hotel, it was a sore subject and taking a picture of the unfinished hulk or talking about could get you executed.  And since it's the tallest building in North Korea by far, making sure it wasn't in a picture could be a problem.
 The granting of a pardon is an imputation of guilt, and the acceptance a confession of it. 




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#22
RE: Should we have fought harder in the Korean War?
LOL, just checked wiki, and the hotel sat unfinished for 16 years.

Also, as of now, apparently, it still isn't finished.

Huh
 The granting of a pardon is an imputation of guilt, and the acceptance a confession of it. 




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#23
RE: Should we have fought harder in the Korean War?
Yeah, he talked about it on the blog. Them people are crazy.
"Of course, everyone will claim they respect someone who tries to speak the truth, but in reality, this is a rare quality. Most respect those who speak truths they agree with, and their respect for the speaking only extends as far as their realm of personal agreement. It is less common, almost to the point of becoming a saintly virtue, that someone truly respects and loves the truth seeker, even when their conclusions differ wildly." 

-walsh
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#24
RE: Should we have fought harder in the Korean War?
What people often forget is the relative poverty of North Korea on the Korean Peninsula is actually a comparatively recent thing. It wasn't always the case, and from the end of Korean War in 1953 until the early 1970s the reverse was true. North Korea both enjoyed both higher growth rates and higher average standard of living than South Korea. From near the end of Korean War until 20 years afterwards, it was our ally the freedom loving brutal right wing military dictatorship in South Korea that looked like by far the worse of two evils for the Korean people to anyone who didn't looked at the world strictly through the glasses of NATO vs Warsaw Pact.
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#25
RE: Should we have fought harder in the Korean War?
(December 7, 2015 at 6:15 pm)CapnAwesome Wrote:
(December 7, 2015 at 6:13 pm)Minimalist Wrote: No one gave enough of a shit about NK on either side to pay the price to continue fighting.

Yeah, but should we have? I mean look at what happened. Also was the Korean war worth fighting? I'm having a hard time saying that it wasn't right now.
The war was a land grab by the US.  The North actually has more resources than the South.  The US had some great propaganda but it treated its own black military personnel who fought there like shit.  I seriously doubt if anyone in Washington at the time gave a rat's ass about the people there.  

The problem with places like North Korea, Cuba, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia is that when some local rebel takes over he runs the country like he personally owns it as a family business.  All of the other local yokels stand around and kiss the dear leader's butt instead of blowing his head off and taking over.

Anyway, as a consequence of the Korean War South Koreans are now free to enter the US without visas and a lot of them come here to have babies so that they can have dual citizenship in case the crap starts to hit the fan there.
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#26
RE: Should we have fought harder in the Korean War?
(December 7, 2015 at 5:55 pm)CapnAwesome Wrote: This is an idea that I've been thinking about more and more and it's a hard one for me to come to grips with since I generally have considered myself a pacifistic/non-interventionist.

Most people are aware of the totally messed up state of North Korea, where people live in a starvation/slave state, everyone worships the Kims as though they were living Gods, and there are literally concentration camps where generations of people are born and die. Comparatively South Korea is a well off democracy that enjoys the relative freedoms of the first world. My question is: should we have fought harder and longer in the Korean war and made all of Korea more like South Korea? A lot of times wars like Vietnam and Korea are portrayed as a complete waste of American lives, but when you consider that generations of people in North Korea are living in a brainwashed slave state and we helped save generations of South Koreans from living under the same slave state, it's hard to say that the lives weren't spent in a greater moral good and wouldn't it be an even greater moral good if we had stayed longer and liberated all of Korea for the future?

Keep in mind these are not rhetorical questions, I'm really not sure.

If we had I might not be here... So there's that. Or at least 1/2 of me would not be here anyway.

It wasn't North Korea we could not beat. It was China. We had North Korea on it's heels and almost pushed them completely out, very quickly. (almost like the attack on Iraq) but we did not have the infrastructure/roads to keep our front line well supplied. Then China backed by russia were funneling troops and materials into the breech on the north korean side, and we fell back and lost all the land we'd gain to the 38th paralell. (the current old and New North Korean boarder.)

Technically our conflict is still active, we are just at a cease fire. We do not invade because again China supports the Kims, and now they have nukes, and even worse they have artillery that can hit Seoul from within their boarders (no defense for that)

If we would have kept pushing we would have been in an all out war with china and russia which by then also had nukes (which is why we did not use ours) and is also what started the cold war stalemate.

So that also means alot if not all of you d-bags would not be here either.

So no, we should not have pushed any further than we did. Yes it sucks for those stuck under the kims, but it also sucked durning and before WWII being annexed by Japan when their claim to korea was a 'war prize' for supporting the allies after WWI, which turned the whole country into Japanese slaves. And before that China owned korea or rather parts of it. (Think england and scotland) Korea has always been in the middle of conflict, and has very little identity of it's own/not forced on it by other cultures. Even now western influence causes a sharp divide between older and younger generations. right now under the kims as bad as we might think it to be, that family's rule is actually pretty close to how Korean society would be without any outside influence. As a result many N.Koreans would rather die than live any other way.
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#27
RE: Should we have fought harder in the Korean War?
(December 16, 2015 at 1:38 pm)Drich Wrote:
(December 7, 2015 at 5:55 pm)CapnAwesome Wrote: This is an idea that I've been thinking about more and more and it's a hard one for me to come to grips with since I generally have considered myself a pacifistic/non-interventionist.

Most people are aware of the totally messed up state of North Korea, where people live in a starvation/slave state, everyone worships the Kims as though they were living Gods, and there are literally concentration camps where generations of people are born and die. Comparatively South Korea is a well off democracy that enjoys the relative freedoms of the first world. My question is: should we have fought harder and longer in the Korean war and made all of Korea more like South Korea? A lot of times wars like Vietnam and Korea are portrayed as a complete waste of American lives, but when you consider that generations of people in North Korea are living in a brainwashed slave state and we helped save generations of South Koreans from living under the same slave state, it's hard to say that the lives weren't spent in a greater moral good and wouldn't it be an even greater moral good if we had stayed longer and liberated all of Korea for the future?

Keep in mind these are not rhetorical questions, I'm really not sure.

If we had I might not be here... So there's that. Or at least 1/2 of me would not be here anyway.

It wasn't North Korea we could not beat. It was China. We had North Korea on it's heels and almost pushed them completely out, very quickly. (almost like the attack on Iraq) but we did not have the infrastructure/roads to keep our front line well supplied. Then China backed by russia were funneling troops and materials into the breech on the north korean side, and we fell back and lost all the land we'd gain to the 38th paralell. (the current old and New North Korean boarder.)

Technically our conflict is still active, we are just at a cease fire. We do not invade because again China supports the Kims, and now they have nukes, and even worse they have artillery that can hit Seoul from within their boarders (no defense for that)

If we would have kept pushing we would have been in an all out war with china and russia which by then also had nukes (which is why we did not use ours) and is also what started the cold war stalemate.

So that also means alot if not all of you d-bags would not be here either.

So no, we should not have pushed any further than we did. Yes it sucks for those stuck under the kims, but it also sucked durning and before WWII being annexed by Japan when their claim to korea was a 'war prize' for supporting the allies after WWI, which turned the whole country into Japanese slaves. And before that China owned korea or rather parts of it. (Think england and scotland) Korea has always been in the middle of conflict, and has very little identity of it's own/not forced on it by other cultures. Even now western influence causes a sharp divide between older and younger generations. right now under the kims as bad as we might think it to be, that family's rule is actually pretty close to how Korean society would be without any outside influence. As a result many N.Koreans would rather die than live any other way.

I think Drich nailed it, and I really have nothing to add except that, like him, my wife wouldn't be here either. She was born near Seoul and orphaned at a very young age before being adopted by an American family in California. Needless to say, if not for the U.N. intervention pushing back the N. Korean attack, we never would have met.
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#28
RE: Should we have fought harder in the Korean War?
(December 7, 2015 at 8:39 pm)vorlon13 Wrote: [Image: north-korea-funny-facts-6.jpg?w=1000]

Five dummies around a crazy man.  They could have easily strangled him and taken over but they didn't have the balls to do it.
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#29
RE: Should we have fought harder in the Korean War?
"Why don't they kill us?"
- Calvin Candie
I am John Cena's hip-hop album.
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#30
RE: Should we have fought harder in the Korean War?
The Korean War as it turned out to be was in a large part due to miscalculations on both sides.    But the enlargement of the war to directly involve China, thus leading to a stalemate and a permanently partitioned Korea is due to our miscalculation, in particular, those of the state department and Douglas MacArthur.

After the allied landing at incheon, North Korean forces were quickly routed, and allied forces occupied most of North Korea.  It was clear the North Korean regime would not last as it is without direct Chinese intervention.   China issued repeated warnings to the allied forces to not approach to within 100km of the Chinese border, and implied they would let the situation stand so long as allied forces do not directly push up against their borders.  The war would have concluded as a conclusive allied victory, with a more or less unified Korea under western influence, Kim dead or in exile, and perhaps a narrow strip of neutral zone on the Korean side of Yalu River between China and Korea,  had that warning been heeded.  

But the state department and MacArthur completely neglected to possibilities that the Chinese were not bluffing, and either overlooked, or ignored, how serious a direct military threat this would appear from the other side of Yalu.  So the US neither heeded the Chinese warning, nor prepared for Chinese intervention, and pushed blindly on towards the Chinese border, unprepared to meet serious military challenge.  As a result the allied forces suffered a crushing defeat and were driven back out of North Korea within a few weeks of Chinese intervention, which happened exactly like the Chinese said it would happen.    This is what set up the stalemate and the subsequent partition of Korea.

This was one alarmingly clear instances of courting diseaster by looking at the world through ideological lenses rather than through clear appreciation of the interests of all parties effected by our actions.

In this way, Korean War is a foreshadowing of the cause and manner of the diseaster in the middleeast and Afghanistan 50 years later.
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