Dennis Prager: South Korea is the Most Ungrateful Country in the World

Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. He may be contacted through his website, dennisprager.com.

...For decades, there have been anti–U.S. demonstrations in South Korea. And each time I wonder the same thing: Do these people have any idea what that living hell known as North Korea is like? Do these people understand that the United States is the reason they are so free and prosperous, completely unlike their fellow Koreans who had the horrible luck not to be liberated by America? Do these people know how many Americans died to enable them to be free?

Whenever I confront someone who claims that America’s wars abroad were fought for economic gain or to extend its alleged imperialist empire, I ask the person about the Korean War: What imperialist or economic reasons were there to fight in that country?

The answer I most often receive is, “Frankly I don’t know too much about the Korean War.” And it’s a good thing for the critics of America’s wars that they don’t know much about the Korean War. If they did, they would either experience cognitive dissonance or have to severely modify their position on America.

Just five years after a war-weary America celebrated the end of World War II, Americans were asked to fight the successor evil to Nazism — Communism — in Korea, a country most Americans could not identify on a map. In an earlier version of what happened in Vietnam, the Soviet Union and China backed a Communist attempt to take over the southern half of the Korean peninsula — the northern half had been Communist since the end of World War II — and install a Stalinist tyranny over the non-Communist southern half....