The Jeju Massacre Was a Hidden Crime of America’s Cold War

South Koreans tend to memorialize the tragedies of their modern history by date. The Korean War is 6.25 for June 25, 1950, the day it broke out; the Gwangju Uprising is 5.18, for May 18, 1980, when a ten-day popular revolt began before the military drowned it in blood. The same kind of shorthand exists elsewhere in East Asia — 6.4 for the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 and 3.11 for the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 — but nowhere is it as deeply embedded in collective memory as in South…