DOUGLAS GINSBURG, Federal Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C. Circuit:
The United States entered the Korean War to stop the spread of communism. Korea was our first shooting war of the Cold War era.
Once occupied by Imperial Japan, Korea was split into two nations after World War II – the communist North and the democratic South. In 1950, North Korean troops stormed across the border to unite the nations by force. South Korea appealed to the United Nations for help. A coalition led by the United States drove the North Koreans back across the border and, in three years, fought them to a standstill.
Why was communist rule so feared? Well, history supplies ample reasons. In the Soviet Union the communist government murdered millions of peasants to seize their land. Soviet communists starved millions of Ukranians to death. In Soviet concentration camps, gulags, millions of citizens were worked to death. During his Great Terror, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin executed anyone suspected of disloyalty to the regime. Another million people.
Communist dictator Mao Zedong surpassed Stalin as historys’ worst mass murderer. Like Stalin, after seizing power, Mao murdered millions of his own people. Untold millions more starved to death under Mao’s communist economy and his disastrous cultural revolution in the 1960s and 70s.
Communism rejects everything we cherish in our republic: freedom of speech, press, and religion. The right to vote, to assemble, to petition government. Above all, communism sets the government as the peoples’ master, not their servant.
Today, South Korea is a healthy democracy with a thriving economy. Meanwhile, North Korea is an impoverished tyranny inspired by Stalin and Mao – now the world’s most repressive regime.