The Korean War was one of the bloodiest chapters in Korean history.

It was a civil war that nearly ignited World War III.

We are united in the testing, I'm in a slavery.

A war that took the lives of tens of thousands of American GIs and millions of Koreans.

What we did in North Korea has never really been acknowledged.

The Korean War set the template for Vietnam.

The Korean War is one of the most vicious violent, nauseating wars of the 20th century.

It was a war many Americans don't remember and Koreans can never forget.

The United States dropped more ordnance on North Korea in that three-year war than we dropped during the entire Second World War.

The North Koreans and for the state ideology of North Korea.

The Korean War is not a memory. It's still very much alive.

There's no way to understand what's going on today without understanding of the Korean War.

How can you understand this Korean conflict that we are having without understanding of the origin of their conflict?

Hello everybody and welcome back to RevLeft Radio.

Today's episode has been long in the making.

I've long wanted to do an episode on the history of Korea, of the DPRK, on the Korean War specifically.

A few months ago I asked on Twitter some good guests for a possible guest to come on and talk about that topic.

Stephen Gowens was recommended and specifically this conversation will be rooted around his book, Patriots, Traitors and Empires, the story of Korea's struggle for freedom.

It's a wonderful book. It works as a history on its own right but also a counter history of sort of people's history from the perspective of Koreans and of the DPRK more broadly and really highlights.

First Japanese occupation of the peninsula and then after World War II the US continued occupation and the puppet government set up in the South and the continued brutality sanctions and threats of invasion lov'd at the North by the Americans and their allies.

So this is really crucial, crucial history to understand. As I say in the episode you cannot understand the present day political situation between the US, the DPRK and South Korea without understanding this history.

I hope people get a lot out of this and come to a better, more well-rounded conception of this situation broadly because if you just rely on the US educational system and popular culture in the mainstream media to tell you about North and South Korea you're going to have an absurdly childish understanding of that region of that peninsula.

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