The 1948 Jeju Civil War

Download or read book The 1948 Jeju Civil War written by Wolcott Wheeler and published by . This book was released on 2019-03-10 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A serious historical study, THE 1948 JEJU CIVIL WAR by Wolcott Wheeler is the shocking, true story of one of the least-known cases of genocide of the 20th century, recognized as the authoritative account in English. Between 1948 and 1949, brutal South Korean dictator Syngman Rhee, with the help of the U.S. Army and government, massacred an estimated 30-80,000 innocent civilians on the impoverished island of Jeju (formerly known as Cheju) out of a total population of 300,000; 40,000 villagers fled in terror to Japan. Rhee crushed an agrarian revolt by a starving peasantry, sparked by his vicious police-state tactics and oppressive taxation, through mass murder and scorched-earth tactics reminiscent of what the U.S. later deployed in Vietnam. Knowing full well it was untrue, he falsely labelled the justifiable rebellion as a Communist revolt and used this excuse to commit one of the most horrifying instances of mass murder in modern times. Originally published to wide acclaim in 1998 and translated into Japanese, THE 1948 JEJU CIVIL WAR has been cited by several major historical works as the definitive account in English of this barbaric crime against humanity, including Prof. Chalmers Johnson's 2000 bestseller BLOWBACK: THE COSTS AND CONSEQUENCES OF AMERICAN EMPIRE; Prof. Allan R. Millett's 2005 book THE WAR FOR KOREA, 1945-1950: A HOUSE BURNING; and Prof. Grace H. Cho's 2008 academic study, HAUNTING THE KOREAN DIASPORA. It is also cited prominently on Wikipedia and many other Internet websites as an authoritative source on the subject.THE 1948 JEJU CIVIL WAR features a rich selection of rare (and graphic) historical photographs documenting this massacre, plus hard-to-find academic resources, many before unavailable in English. Wolcott Wheeler is a writer who lives in New York. Shortly after graduating from Princeton University, he became a screenwriter for Columbia Pictures in Hollywood and later lived in Japan. He is a historian, a journalist, a published haiku poet, and a literary and political essayist who has published academically. He is fascinated by Asia and Asian history. To write THE 1948 JEJU CIVIL WAR, he visited Jeju several times to conduct first-hand research, and he acquired valuable historical research material (featured in this edition) on this obscure subject from South Korean activists and intellectuals.