A Massacre in Korea

 The North Korean regime—as we all know—is one of the most bizarre, eccentric, paranoid, repressive, bloodthirsty, and totalitarian governments in the world. I don't deny any of those characterizations—not of a regime that has starved large parts of its population and continues to hold them in Stalinist gulags. 

But I will say this: it's certainly not going to make the regime less paranoid, repressive, and hermetic for the United States to periodically invade the country in secret, massacre its civilians, dump their bodies in the ocean, and then quietly ignore or deny before the world that any such thing ever occurred. 

Yet—according to new reporting published yesterday from the New York Times—this is exactly what the United States did in 2019 (during the first Trump administration). 

Navy Seals were engaged in a covert espionage operation. A group of North Koreans discovered them. The Seals executed them, then searched their corpses for any signs of military or official insignia. They found none. The "two or three" people they had just murdered turned out to be civilian fishermen. 

According to the reporting, the U.S. troops then punctured the men's lungs so they would sink in the water and dropped their bodies into the ocean. Their families presumably never found out what happened to them—or where their corpses could be found. 

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At one point in his book Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act, Nicholson Baker observes, of the North Korean regime, that at least some part of the reason for its manifest brutality, madness, and eccentricity must be found in the unthinkable trauma of its origins. 

The United States—in Baker's telling—fought a genocidal air war against North Korea in the early 1950s—essentially burning much of the country to the ground; without regard to whether they were hitting combatants or not; and in many cases deliberately destroying civilian infrastructure: 

"[N]ever before or since," writes Baker, "has there been such a steady, concerted, relentless effort to destroy an entire country [....] As Bruce Cumings wrote years ago, by the end of the war, after years of napalm, the North Koreans were living in caves. There was very little left to burn." 

Out of the ashes of such a holocaust—it makes sense that the regime that would arise would be a strange and mutant growth—a post-apocalyptic death cult. And that seems to be what the nuclear-armed Kim regime is. But the question is—what made it that way? And what could make it something else? 

If U.S. and UN forces massacring Korean civilians in the 1950s made the regime more bizarre and dangerous and paranoid than it otherwise would have been—on Baker's hypothesis—

then I can hardly see how invading the country in secret and massacring innocent people today will make them less paranoid now. 

And how paranoid is the regime, really, so long as the United States "really is out to get" them? 

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In 1951, Pablo Picasso painted an image he called "Massacre in Korea." John Berger has criticized it for lacking emotional force and being one of the less effective of the painter's works. But it has always spoken to me—and I even had a print of it hanging on the wall of my previous house. 

Part of the reason I applaud the painting is that it is one of the few—if not the only—reflections by a Western artist on an otherwise forgotten atrocity. The United States has racked its conscience to some extent over Vietnam. But how many of us have spared a thought for the fire-bombing of Korea, just a decade or so before that? 

And how many of us now will think of the two or three North Korean fishermen reportedly surprised at night, in the course of their daily attempt to scrape out a humble living, in a starving country under perpetual siege at the hands of its own government—victims of the Kim regime as much as anyone

—and now brutally executed without cause or provocation, other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time—made victims too of a foreign power that claims to oppose the Kim regime? 

Who will think of their families who waited up for their return from the sea that night and never saw them again—because U.S. forces had punctured their lungs and sunk them to the bottom of the ocean like stones? 

Who was the father or daughter or brother
Or uncle or sister or mother or son
Of the dead and abandoned body?

—as Harold Pinter once asked in a poem, which he read aloud as part of his 2005 Nobel Lecture, in a stirring condemnation of the hidden and untallied civilian death toll of the U.S. invasion of Iraq— 

Did you wash the dead body

Did you close both its eyes

Did you bury the body

Did you leave it abandoned

Did you kiss the dead body