Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 (37 page)

The resistance against the Japanese had been largely Communist, which gave Kim Il-sung’s former guerrilla group a degree of legitimacy, and the Soviets helped him to entrench himself in the North. The Americans tried to help their own candidate, an American-educated politician called Syngman Rhee, by getting the United Nations to create the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea
(UNTCOK)
to supervise elections throughout the peninsula. If the Soviets agreed to this commission, Rhee would likely win the
election, as the U.S.-controlled zone had twice the population of the Soviet zone. If they refused, then Rhee could at least be put in charge of the south.

In November 1947, St. Laurent, then still secretary of state for external affairs, agreed to Canadian participation in
UNTCOK
, but Prime Minister Mackenzie King refused. He believed, quite correctly, that the Russians would bar
UNTCOK
from the North, and he also suspected that the Americans had already decided to hold elections only in South Korea and wanted Canada in
UNTCOK
merely to help legitimize the decision. King sent Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs Lester Pearson to Washington to explain his concerns to President Truman. Pearson was hardly reassured by Truman’s response: “Don’t worry, you won’t get into any trouble over there, and if you do we are behind you.” Moreover, the president kept emphasizing that Canada was the most respectable member on the commission—and “that was exactly what worried Mr. King.”

St. Laurent’s resignation threat worked: King agreed that a Canadian member could be appointed to
UNTCOK
, although the representative was instructed to withdraw if it became clear that Russian cooperation was not forthcoming. He was to have nothing to do with organizing an election
in South Korea alone, which would merely freeze the division of the country. But Roosevelt had given King better advice than St. Laurent, despite the considerable handicap of being dead.

The Russians predictably refused to admit the
UNTCOK
commissioners to their zone of Korea, and the United States used its huge majority in the United Nations to ram through a motion resolving that elections be held “in those parts of Korea accessible to the Commission.” (Canada was one of two countries to vote against it.) And in February 1948, while Canada’s representative in Korea, Dr. George Patterson, “happened” to be away in Japan, the other members of the commission decided to hold elections in South Korea only. Patterson had left instructions that he should be contacted if anything important came up while he was away, but this was evidently not considered an important matter.

The May 1948 elections duly produced a Republic of Korea in the American-occupied part of the peninsula, run by Syngman Rhee with ample assistance from the army and the secret police. Canada made it clear that it would regard any government of South Korea resulting from the 1948 elections as the creation of the U.S. occupation authorities and not of the United Nations, but the Americans had achieved their aim. Two and a half months later, the Soviets retaliated by recognizing Kim Il-sung as the leader of the “People’s Democratic Republic of Korea” in the North—and less than two years after that, we all got the Korean War.

T
HEY WERE BACK DOING WHAT THEY HAD ALWAYS DONE
. Governments knew what needed to be done, but they still couldn’t bring themselves to do it. They understood that war is a systems problem, yet they allowed themselves to be swept back into an alliance, a great-power military confrontation and an actual shooting war practically before the ink was dry on the UN Charter. Why is it so hard for human beings to break out of the war system?

Prior to the twentieth century, most people did not see war as a problem in need of a solution.
Losing
a war could be a very big problem, but the solution to that was to be good at war. It was the First World War, with its unprecedented level of destruction, that changed all that, and for the first time a number of serious people in positions of power addressed the problem directly. As people who lived and worked within the institutions of the state, they naturally emphasized the need to change the rules by which states operated, and in operational terms they were quite right. But they were not aware of how deep the roots of the problem go.

The creators of the League of Nations knew that it would be very hard to put an end to war, as it has played a big role in civilized societies
from the earliest times. At a rough guess, 95 percent of the civilized states that have ever existed were ultimately destroyed by war. As the great-great-grandchildren of the Enlightenment, however, most of these people would have shared Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s belief that before the rise of civilization, when human beings lived in the “state of nature,” they lived in peace with one another. The problem was the behaviour of states, and it could be solved (if only very slowly and against great resistance) by changing the rules.

Then along came the archaeologists and anthropologists of the next half century, who discovered that warfare had been even more prominent in the lives of the thousands of generations before civilization. The hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists, who lived in groups of a hundred or less, whose attitudes and values evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, were fundamental to shaping what we now call human nature. They matched Rousseau’s description of “noble savages” in the sense that they were deeply egalitarian—but they were also extremely warlike. Indeed, the cumulative toll of deaths from war in these little societies was far higher than anything seen in civilized warfare. It took a long time for this fact to inform public debate about war and peace, for it was most unwelcome news and strongly denied by many. But however disheartening, it could not be ignored: in every place and time, human beings have almost always fought wars.

And after that, from the 1970s on, came the primatologists, with the further bad news that our closest relatives among the higher primates (and almost certainly our own pre-human ancestors) also fought wars. If this behaviour is not actually inscribed in our DNA, it is at the least deeply ingrained in our culture all the way back to
Homo erectus
.

Jane Goodall’s discovery in 1973 that the chimpanzee troop she was observing in Tanzania’s Gombe National Park actually waged a kind of war against neighbouring bands came as a great surprise at the time, but subsequent studies by a number of primatologists—some chimpanzee bands have been observed for forty years now, with each member named and his or her behaviour recorded over lengthy periods of time—confirmed that fighting between rival groups of chimps is widespread, chronic and very serious. How relevant is this to human beings?

Our line of descent separated from that of the chimpanzees five or six million years ago, but about 98 percent of our genetic material is still common to the two species. Until ten or twelve thousand years ago, all our human ancestors made their living in essentially the same way as chimps, by foraging for food in small bands. Both humans and chimpanzees were hunters as well as gatherers—chimps hunt monkeys regularly, and do so in coordinated groups using clearly conscious strategies—but chimpanzee “warfare” is hampered by the fact that they lack weapons, and it is very difficult for chimps to kill each other with their bare hands. As a result, most successful raids involve a number of male chimps from one band attacking a lone chimp from another, with some holding
him down while others pummel and bite him—and even then the victim is often still alive when the attackers leave, although he generally dies afterward. But it
is
warfare, in the sense that it is purposeful and calculated.

According to primatologist Richard Wrangham, who did his earliest work with Goodall’s team in Gombe in the early 1970s, chimpanzees conduct deliberate raids and make considerable use of surprise. Nor is it just blind aggression, triggered by the proximity of a chimp from another band: these raiding parties wait and count the calls of other troops to see if they are outnumbered, and almost always withdraw rather than attack unless they can catch a single chimp from a rival band on his own. Moreover, although the great majority of killings involve the ambush of single chimps separated from their groups, a campaign may be waged over a period of months or years until all the males of the rival band have been annihilated. Once that is done, the territory of the defeated group may be taken over and the surviving females incorporated into the victorious group—but the infants will be killed.

Two more things, both with worrisome echoes in human behaviour. One is that chimpanzee bands typically have a territory of about 35 square kilometres, but spend almost all their time in only the central 15 square kilometres. The rest is equally rich in resources but they treat it as a no man’s land, presumably because of the danger of ambush and death at the hands of a neighbouring troop. The other thing is that this endemic chimpanzee warfare, according to long-term studies of several troops, eventually causes the death of about 30 percent of males and a much lower but still significant proportion of females.

Similar studies of human hunter-gatherers who still lived in intact societies were almost never made by direct observation. In the 1930s, however, anthropologist Lloyd Warner conducted extensive interviews among the Murngin people of Arnhem Land in northern Australia, who had only recently come into regular contact with Europeans. Trusting the strong oral history tradition among preliterate peoples, he
reconstructed as best he could from interviews the scale of warfare among the Murngin in the late 1800s. The Murngin numbered about three thousand people and lived in many separate bands of the classic hunter-gatherer type. Out of a fighting-age population of about eight hundred adult males, Warner estimated that around two hundred died in warfare over a two-decade period at the end of the nineteenth century. Twenty years is roughly the length of time that any individual male would have been regarded as an active warrior, so these figures translate into a 25 percent death rate from warfare among males.

The Murngin rarely fought pitched battles. The great majority of clashes followed the usual hunter-gatherer pattern of raids on sleeping camps or ambushes of severely outnumbered opponents. In most of these events, only a few individuals, or one, or most frequently none at all, were killed, but the clashes were so constant that over a lifetime Murngin men stood as great a chance of dying in war as the conscript soldiers of Napoleon’s France or Hitler’s Germany. The same pattern of constant low-level warfare was reported by other anthropologists studying the Eskimos of northwestern Alaska, the Mae Enga horticulturalists in highland New Guinea and the Yanomamo in the Amazon forest. Indeed, the latter two groups were both losing about the same proportion of their populations to war—25 percent of males and 5 percent of females—and their territories consisted of a relatively safe central area and a bigger buffer zone that they only entered in large groups.