The Korean War Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

The Korean War - Term Paper Example In 1945, following the surrender of Japan, American administrators divided the peninsula along the 38th Parallel, with United States troops occupying the southern part and Soviet troops occupying the northern part. The failure to hold free elections throughout the Korean Peninsula in 1948 deepened the division between two sides, and the North established a Communist government. The 38th Parallel increasingly became a political border between the two Koreas. Although reunification negotiations continued in the months preceding the war, tensions intensified. Cross-border skirmishes and raids at the 38th Parallel persisted. The situation escalated into open warfare when North Korean forces invaded South Korea on 25 June 1950. It was the first significant armed conflict in the global struggle between democracy and communism, called the cold war. After the Japanese defeat in 1945 Korea had been divided into the pro-Soviet North and the pro-American South. According to a post-war agreement , the division of Korea into the Republic of Korea (South Korea) and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) was overseen by the United States and the Soviet Union. These two military occupation zones were later to be united into an independent country, but, because of the Cold War, that objective proved unachievable for tensions between North and South Korea started to grow as the Cold War intensified. North Korean army crossed the border between the two rivals, and invaded South Korea. The United States immediately received approval for a military intervention from the UN. Canada and most Western nations, led by the United States, thought that North Korea was acting under Communist Chinese or Soviet direction. To the Americans and their allies, the Korean War demonstrated the need for containment and because of this, along with the majority of other Western states Canada participated in the UN force in Korea. The Korean conflict didn’t happen at the t ime which was favorable to Canada, for its army had been drastically reduced in size after the World War II, and the steps to increase the strength of the three armed forces to meet the nation’s commitments to the newly formed North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Canadian contingent was initially supposed to be an infantry brigade group made up of one battalion each from the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light infantry, the Royal Canadian Regiment, and the Royal 22e Regiment and signals, tank, artillery and other support units were also included. However, each regiment had to raise new battalions because the country couldn’t denude itself of its only standing army units. The country remained divided, with the American-supported Republic of Korea in control of the south by virtue of election sanctioned by the United Nations, while Soviet-supported Democratic Republic of Korea ruled the north, where elections were not held. The only unifier of the country was the civil war with each side threatening to invade the other claiming to be the legitimate government. But to do so, they needed support. The Americans denied this support to their Korean allies, mainly because the Truman administration had decided to liquidate all positions on the Asian mainland and concentrate on the defense of island strong points like Japan, Okinawa, and the Philippines- but not Taiwan. The president of South Korea, Syngman Rhee, constantly asked for support to liberate the north from officials in Washington

Book analysis Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words - 3

Book analysis - Essay Example Those individuals who have a compulsion to erase most painful memories from recall are the most vulnerable to become MPD. Those individuals who have been subject to abuse or trauma as a child have a strong incentive to discard remnants of those experiences. The trouble is that memory is a physiological-neurological construct as opposed to being purely a facet of the mind. Moreover, even this tendency toward partial amnesia is promoted by a ‘self’ that is in itself conditioned by early traumatic experience. Hence the subject is twice challenged to relieve himself/herself from the conflicted mental makeup. The outcome of this churning is the compromised solution of a MPD, whereby, the subject swings between the original composite personality and the forced-aspiring personality. The former is the personality as it is, whereas the latter is the personality desired. The interesting thing about memory is how it is tagged with verbal identifiers. These identifiers are culturally determined and are usually dependent upon the prevalent ideas, norms and fashions attached to the particular cultural milieu. In this context, memory is an extension of the language faculty in humans. Usually, it is the most emotive experience which is also the most memorable. Emotions arise out of subjective feelings. They are also fleeting and replicable in various similar situations. Hence our psyches crave for a method in which the valued experience is concretized. Words and set-phrases that were earlier acquired from the cultural environment are perused for this purpose. Hence, to answer a famous literary poser, calling a Rose by any other name, changes everything about the object and its associations. As Hacking observes in the book, the process of acquisition of memory and even the development of intelligence has a strong basis in semantics. Yet, the obvious danger is that the semantics might ‘justify’ apparently