#kwangjudiary — Public Fediverse posts

... While the arrogance of his statement was stunning (how can mass murder be dismissed as not measuring up to "our standards"?) so was Carter's reasoning: the uprising and anguish in Kwangju had been reduced to another global Communist plot, one more nagging dilemma for American diplomats fighting in the trenches of the Cold War. The national security mentality was personified by Holbrooke, who had worked his way up the State Department ladder by dutifully serving United States interests in Vietnam and the Philippines before being named Assistant Secretary for East Asia and the Pacific by Carter. As Bruce Cumings reminds us in his penetrating introduction to this book, Holbrooke suggested to Congress during the crisis that Americans were paying far too much "attention to Kwangjoo" without proper consideration of the "broad questions" of Korean and U.S. security inter- ests. General John Wickham, the U.S. military commander in Korea who signaled U.S. support for Chun in an infamous interview with the Associated Press in August 1980, later suggested that Koreans were "lemmings" who would follow anybody with a military uniform. And who can forget that, eight months later, Chun Doo Hwan, the man responsible for the carnage in Kwangju, was walking the corridors of the White House as an honored guest of President Reagan?

From Kwangju Diary: Beyond Death, Beyond the Darkness of the Age (1999)

Most of the South Korean oppositionists believed President Carter's human rights diplomacy was at work and had great expectations for it. They interpreted the upsurge of anti-Americanism in Iran after the revolution as the outcome of the administration's miscalculated support for the Shah...

... the citizens of South Korea, like people in similar straits in the Philippines and Indonesia, quickly learned that President Carter had no desire to offend a friendly military dictator at the height of the Cold War. Early in the morning of May 27, the 20th Division of the Korean Army invaded the city center of Kwangju and crushed a ragtag army of young students and workers who had taken up arms against the military and decided to fight to the end. As the press flashed images of dead and shackled rebels being dragged through the streets of Kwangju, Carter's military and security advisers, led by Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Richard Holbrooke, coldly explained they had instructed U.S. commanders to release the Korean troops from the U.S.-Korean joint command to restore "stability" in South Korea and "maintain the national interests of the United States" in East Asia. Their words conveyed the message, well understood in Korea since the 1940s, that American officials viewed the Korean peninsula as a problem child of U.S. foreign policy, its people and their democratic notions an annoyance at times of global tension.

The tone was set on June 1,1980, by President Carter himself in a nationally televised interview on CNN. After admitting that "there is no doubt....democratization has been given a setback" in Korea, he was asked by journalist Daniel Schorr if U.S. policy in Korea reflected the conflict between human rights and national security then raging within his administration. "There is no incompatibility" between the two concepts, Carter snapped. In his judgment, he told Schorr, South Korea in 1980 typified a situation where "the maintenance of a nation's security from Communist subversion or aggression is a prerequisite to the honoring of human rights and the establishment of democratic processes." While he of course preferred to see "every nation on earth democratic," the United States "can't sever our relationships with our allies and friends and trading partners and turn them all over to Soviet influence, and perhaps even subversion and takeover, simply because they don't measure up to our standards of human rights."...