The Korean War: A History (Modern Library Chronicles)

If this book were a college course, it would NOT be Korean War 101. It would be an advanced course, perhaps even a graduate level course. That is not because the book is particularly difficult to read, but rather because it requires basic familiarity with the Korean War - or at least the conventional (American) understanding of the Korean War. Then this book proceeds to dismantle that conventional understanding.Bruce Cumings is a professor at the University of Chicago. He worked in Korea in the Peace Corps, and he now is one of the country's preeminent scholars of modern Korean history. He brings to THE KOREAN WAR: A HISTORY a lifetime of scholarship on Korea. He also brings to it a critical, sometimes acerbic, view of U.S. policies in and towards Korea since 1945 (which accounts, I think, for the fact that one-third of the Amazon reviewers give it only one star). I found that occasionally he does go needlessly out of his way to cast snide aspersions, but overall I was persuaded by the majority of his criticisms and his "revisionism". But we Americans tend to suppress Korea from our historical consciousness, and where that is not possible we favor as warm and fuzzy a narrative as possible, so honest efforts to arrive at the truth, even if perhaps a little flawed and less than tactful, are not well received. The back cover of the book bills it as "a bracing account of a war that is either misunderstood, forgotten, or willfully ignored." An apt summary, in my opinion.The most important point of Cumings's account is that the roots of the Korean War lay not so much in the global Cold War as in Korean history, especially the occupation of the peninsula by the Japanese, beginning in 1910 when Japan annexed Korea as a colony. Kim Il Sung, the long-time leader of North Korea, was demonized here in the U.S. as a wooden Communist puppet, but going back to the early 1930's he had been a fierce and heroic guerilla-leader in the anti-Japanese "Resistance." After the dust of WWII settled, what Kim Il Sung most wanted was an independent Korean nation, and what he feared and detested most about what was going on in South Korea, with the sponsorship of the U.S., was the accession to power of former Japanese collaborators and the continuation of policies of expropriation and oppression vis-à-vis the peasants. For Kim Il Sung and North Korea, "after every other characteristic attached to [the] regime--Communist, nationalist, rogue state, evil enemy--it was first of all, and above all else, an anti-Japanese entity." And the Korean War was at bottom a Civil War, rather than a far-flung hot-spot in a global "Cold War".Indeed, as the book brings home, the 38th parallel was rankly arbitrary and artificial. The day after Nagasaki, John J. McCloy asked Dean Rusk to find a way to divide Korea for the purposes of accepting the surrender of Japanese armed forces, as between the Russians, who were invading the peninsula from the north, and the Americans, which were not yet on the ground. Without consulting anyone, least of all any Koreans, Rusk settled on the 38th parallel -- in large part because that would put in the southern (American) zone the highly centralized capital in Seoul. Five years later, when the North attacked across that imaginary line, why was it "aggression across an international boundary", as opposed to a movement in force in a civil war (no different than the Union Army crossing the Potomac into Virginia)? But if indeed North Korea's attack across the 38th parallel in June 1950 was an invasion across an international boundary, why then didn't that concept also apply to the broad-scale military incursion northward by South Korean and American forces in October 1950?The Korean War was an "appallingly dirty" war, "with a sordid history of civilian slaughters." Conventional American history now acknowledges that fact in its generality, but it does not recognize that its protégé in the South was far worse in this regard than were the North Koreans. By the end of the War, the North Koreans and Chinese reportedly had killed almost 30,000 civilians and POWs. The corresponding figure slaughtered by the South Korean regime - approximately 100,000. With the outbreak of the War and the influx of journalists from around the world, outrage over the magnitude of the South's atrocities became so great that, beginning in January 1951, the U.S. imposed censorship. "Criticism of allies and allied troops was prohibited--`any derogatory comments' met the censor's black brush." Philip Knightly, in his book, "The First Casualty" (the title alludes to the epigram that "the first casualty in war is truth"), thought that American reporters were the most cowed and, therefore, the most useless.Nor does conventional American history recognize that American forces were themselves perpetrators of some heinous atrocities, the worst apparently being at Nogun-Ri. Some instances of American barbarism, including the shooting of children, actually were reported in mainstream media such as "Life" (August 21, 1950 issue) before the censor's curtain dropped in January 1951. It was not until 1999 that "The New York Times" published stories about the massacre at Nogun-Ri - by which time the Korean War had become the forgotten war and there was very little chance of Nogun-Ri becoming another My Lai. Another aspect of the Korean War that we similarly have airbrushed from our historical consciousness is our prolonged and brutal campaign of carpet-bombing. General MacArthur had wanted to use nuclear bombs; his successor, General Ridgway, wanted bigger and better napalm bombs to, in his words, "wipe out all life in tactical locality". Napalm bombing, of course, became controversial in the Vietnam War, but "oceans of it were dropped on Korea * * * with much more devastating effect."Cumings writes, "The Korean War is an unknown war because it transpired during the height of the McCarthy era (Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were indicted when the war began and executed just before it ended), making open inquiry and citizen dissent improbable." Six decades later, open inquiry into the War is way past due. And THE KOREAN WAR: A HISTORY is a major effort in that regard.P.S.: If you don't already have a basic familiarity with the Korean War, my recommendation is to read "The Korean War", by Max Hastings (which I have separately reviewed on Amazon). Cumings makes a few snide remarks about Hastings's book, but he is even more critical of Donald Halberstam's "The Coldest Winter", despite his admiration for the author.

After a lifetime of enduring a dominant historical discourse that reflects what Reinhold Niebuhr called "the moral mediocrity, on the level of which every society unifies its life," it's natural that Bruce Cumings should follow up his long, scholarly history of the Korean War with this shorter reflection about what good is it, anyway, to worry about historical truth?While Cumings uses facts about the war to motivate his musings, his book does, as some have noted, bely its subtitle, "A History." There's enough history to be of value, but the real story is in the role of historical truth.Historical falsehood is generally recognized to have geopolitical value for realist politics. Winners write history to help build what they fought for. That's the reality. So, what exactly is the point of contradicting them? Having killed the losers, are we now to kill the winners also? Is truth counterproductive?Holding truth per se as a value, as I suppose he does, Cumings' goal is to snatch victory on its behalf from the jaws of defeat by saying that the truth is necessary to cure enduring psychological and social wounds, wounds that break through even when their expression is suppressed. He gives South Africa credit for demonstrating the power of truth in overcoming conflict and creating the basis for social progress, and he hopes that more of the same will finally happen in the Korean peninsula.Cumings argues that North Korea's 1950 invasion was intended to put an end to the era of Korean history that started with Japan's occupation in 1910, encouraged as we know now by Teddy Roosevelt, an era that continued with the U.S. occupation of 1945-48 where the U.S. brought back from the Japanese forces sadistic Korean Quislings to displace local administrations in the south. In addition to intensifying social-political conflict in the south after 1948, Rhee also adopted, to the consternation of the U.S. State Department, a policy of provocation in the north meant to justify an eventual war of unification.Rhee got what he wanted, but the north's regimen of guerrilla fighting against the Japanese since 1932, largely alongside the Chinese in Manchuria, proved better training than did Rhee's underlings' collaboration with Japanese overlords. The south's army fell apart virtually immediately, succeeding only in completing during its retreat the slaughter of opponents that they had jailed in scores of localities in the south. A U.S. re-invasion saved Rhee but then erred in taking on Japan's old role by trying to conquer the rest of Korea, and potentially part of northern China as well. The U.S. suffered the same result as Japan had, but not before laying waste to the north in the hope that mass civilian deaths would break the enemy's morale. It's striking that the U.S. incendiary bombing intensified and continued long after the end of ground operations, right up to the final hours before the armistice in 1953.The truths that endure are sustained, Cumings says, by Koreans' special veneration for the ancestors killed under Japan's successors, a veneration that was maintained even though until the Presidency of Roh Myoo-hun they could not speak of the dead or give them honorable burials.The ongoing opposition of current President Lee Myung-bak to South Korea's truth commission's operations makes Cumings' contribution to remembrance materially useful. It's clear that Cumings hopes that he can carry his grain of sand in broadening the understanding of the hostility in both north and south, leading perhaps to something closer to peace.What Cumings writes of is already better known, if not acknowledged, in Korea than in the States. It surely would not hurt the cause of peace for the truth to be acknowledged more widely in the U.S. also.Being able to add Korea to the list of "their tigers, our rabbits" episodes is instructive, and the commonalities between U.S. occupation policy in Korea and Vietnam in 1945 (and indeed the U.S.'s attempted policy after liberating France in 1944) are striking.Which brings up one other benefit of the truth. As opposed to submitting to authoritarian dogma, valuing truth is a stimulus to learning.