The Korean War: A History

 

A review

 

If one were to read just one book about the fierce and very destructive war that took place on the Korean peninsula 1950-1953, this rather short (268 pages counting the endnotes) 2010 effort by Bruce Cumings, the retired chairman of the department of history at the University of Chicago, would not be the one that I would recommend.  To the contrary, it would be just about the last book I would recommend if the reader were to go into the subject knowing very little.  What it would be especially good for, though, would be reinforcing the leftist prejudices that the typical American college student takes away from his or her experience in higher education these days, particularly if they have attended one of the elite institutions.

 

If you already know quite a bit about Korea and the Korean War, and you’ve never heard it before from the perspective of the other side, not so much the Chinese or Soviet but the Communist North Korean side, the book might make worthwhile reading.  I’m probably among the few Americans who knew about the bloody 1948-1949 Jeju uprising against the Syngman Rhee government that had been more or less imposed upon the Koreans in the South by the Americans, not to mention the better-known 1980 Gwangju Uprising in South Jeolla Province against Chun Doo-hwan’s feckless authoritarian government.  I knew, also, that that southwest corner of Korea had long been a hotbed of peasant rebellion and a communist breeding ground, but I had to learn from Cumings about the 1948 Yeosu-Suncheon rebellion in that same area. 

 

All such tales of leftist agitation and revolt and savage repression at the hands of the authorities are right in Cumings’ sweet spot.  His first experience with Korea and mine came at the same time, 1967-1968, when he was in Seoul teaching English for the Peace Corps and I was an ROTC-commissioned Army lieutenant stationed not far away at a U.S. Army post on the outskirts of Incheon, a quick and cheap train ride from Seoul.  I met there once with a group of Peace Corps folks, and Cumings might well have been one of them.  Joining the Peace Corps was one way, at the time, to avoid being drafted and possibly sent to fight in Vietnam.  That’s one of the main reasons to this day why people from the Peace Corps generally fit the left-wing stereotype.  Cumings, certainly, seems never to have grown out of it.  And why should he?  Pursuing a career in American academia, he has found a very good fit for his clear bias.  It speaks volumes that the leftist William Leuchtenburg and the far-left Eric Foner are the only two people who have been the president of all three of the major national organizations of historians, the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society of American Historians.

 

Solid Man of the Establishment Left

 

As an establishment historian, Cumings has been throughout his career right in the heart of what I have dubbed the NOMA, the national opinion-molding apparatus.  The key members of that apparatus are the GAME, government, academia, media, and entertainment.  Coincidentally, my next encounter with a Peace Corps person, also of a well-known leftist bent, was during the first summer session of economics graduate school at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1968.  Actually, he had yet to experience the Peace Corps at that time.  He was on his way out of grad school after just one year, disillusioned with the theoretical nature of graduate economics and perhaps out of his depth intellectually, to serve the Peace Corps in Swaziland.  His career would eventually touch prominently on all parts of the GAME.  We’re talking about Chris Matthews, of MSNBC’S “Hardball with Chris Matthews” fame.  He was the first economics grad student I met there, at a house party that my two housemates and I hosted in our apartment.  I was taking only a course in Chinese history that first session because of the interest stimulated by my year in Korea.  Matthews and I spent virtually the entire time at the party talking to one another, because I was interested in what I was getting into, and he was interested in my experience.

 

In his note on sources for his 2018 On Desperate Ground: The Marines at the Reservoir, the Korean War’s Greatest Battle, the popular writer Hampton Sides lumps Cumings’ book with I.F. Stone’s 1969 book, The Hidden History of the Korean War as “revisionist” histories of the war.  That says quite a lot, because Stone hardly hid his pro-Communist orientation and his book was published by the fringe left-wing Monthly Review Press, while Cumings’ book, by contrast, was published by Random House, the largest book-publishing company in the world. 

 

With the Random House blessing and its publicity machine behind it, the Cumings book is positioned to be almost as influential concerning American attitudes toward the Korean War as another book was in 1947 concerning the ongoing civil war in the world’s most populous country.  That was the The Unfinished Revolution in China, a book by the Polish-born U.S. resident but longtime resident of China, Israel Epstein.  It was completely on the side of Mao Zedong’s Communists. The New York Times gave the book a glowing review.  Here is the review’s conclusion:

 

The incubators of this new generation were the liberated and guerrilla areas behind the Japanese lines, where men organized to defend their own homes and families.  Out of that there has grown a movement of solid millions in vast blocks of territory.  I doubt if the landlords will ever get the bridle on those peasants again; and it also looks as though they will reject the bite of doctrinaire Marxism.  It all makes exciting reading.

 

Thus America’s “newspaper of record” made the eventual victory by the Reds sound not just understandable and inevitable, but even palatable to the American public, something to be welcomed, even celebrated.  The chosen writer of that review was a very established member of the first three letters of the GAME at the time, Owen Lattimore. 

 

Epstein defected to Communist China in 1951 where he became editor-in-chief of the English-language Communist Party propaganda organ China Reconstructs, later called China Today.  He remained in that position until his retirement at age 70 in 1985, with a five-year interruption during the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1970s, when he was imprisoned on charges of plotting against Zhou Enlai.  And we have this from Wikipedia: “In 1951 Communist defector Elizabeth Bentley testified to the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, ‘Israel Epstein had been a member of the Russian secret police for many years in China.’"

 

Lattimore, for his part, would write a column on July 17, 1949, in the leftist New York newspaper, The Daily Compass, entitled “Korea – Another China” that concludes like this:

 

Korea is another chapter in the same unhappy story.  I have yet to meet an American who knows all the facts and believes that Syngman Rhee is either a popular or a competent President of South Korea.  In spite of high-pressure elections, his Legislature is more badly split against him than China’s was against Chiang Kai-shek.

 

The thing to do, therefore, is to let South Korea fall—but not to let it look as though we pushed it.  Hence the recommendation of a parting grant of $150,000,000.

 

Concerning Lattimore’s recommendation, Senator Joseph McCarthy wrote on pp. 127-128 of his 1952 book, The Fight for America:

 

In this connection, it should be noted that nearly a year before the Korean War started, Congress voted $10,300,000 military aid for South Korea.  This was not done upon the recommendation of the State Department.  The Congress was entitled to believe that this $10,300,000 was being spent rapidly for airplanes, tanks and guns for South Korea.  However, whenever a member of Congress asked the State and Defense Departments how the $10,300,000 was being spent, the answer was, “We cannot tell you for security reasons.”

 

After the war in Korea began, Senator [William] Knowland [R. CA] put into the Congressional Record (August 16, 1950,  p. 12600) the facts which showed that the State Department had succeeded in keeping the expenditures for the arming of South Korea down to $200, which was spent for loading some wire aboard a West Coast ship which never reached Korea.

 

Thus did the State Department plan to “let South Korea fall” into the Communist hands without letting the Congress or the American people know that “we pushed it.”

 

Cumings tells us on page 89 that the very next month after Lattimore wrote his article the very-much-connected man made precisely the recommendation to the U.S. State Department that he had made in the obscure leftist New York newspaper.  Cumings spins the episode by making it look like something of a victory for Lattimore because he volunteered that revelation to the press, arguing that that recommendation of his was the sole reason for the allegations of Senator McCarthy that he was a Soviet agent. 

 

As one might expect, the staunch anti-Communist McCarthy gets the standard liberal-establishment treatment from Cumings.  In his index, there is no entry for his name, only for the “McCarthyism” slur.  By contrast, Cumings treats Lattimore as something of a hero, a wise visionary, representative of a number of foreign policy “experts” who suffered at the hands of this dangerous demagogue.  Interestingly, in a generally favorable article September 2000 article about Lattimore in Johns Hopkins Magazine, the university where he taught, Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson revealed that this persistently popular “McCarthyism,” pejorative was coined by none other than Owen Lattimore.

 

The Real Origins of the Korean War

 

Cumings would have us believe that his own book is the last word on the origins of the war, but he fails to address himself to the fundamental question of why, at the end of the Pacific phase of World War II, the United States voluntarily divided Korea into two zones of occupation, with the Soviet Union in the North and the United States in the South, something that was almost guaranteed to make war inevitable and looked like a needless gift to the Communists.  The Soviets had a non-aggression pact with Japan throughout the war.  They finally agreed to let the U.S. use its territory for bombing Japan and its territories at the Yalta Conference in February of 1945, but it never happened.   

 

The closest that Cumings comes to revealing his thinking on this question is in this passage on page 105:

 

After Pearl Harbor, American policy toward Korea shifted dramatically.  The United States had never questioned Japanese control of Korea after 1905, when Theodore Roosevelt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for arranging the Portsmouth Treaty ending the Russo-Japanese War, and blessed what he took to be “modernizing” efforts in Korea.  By mid-1942, however, State Department planners began to worry that a Korea in the wrong hands might threaten the security of the postwar Pacific, and made plans for a full or partial military occupation of Korea upon Japan’s defeat.  Franklin Roosevelt had a shrewder policy, a four-power “trusteeship” for Korea (the United States, the USSR, Britain, and Nationalist China) that would get Japanese interests out and American interests in, while recognizing the Soviet Union’s legitimate concerns in a country that touched its border.

 

It is encouraging to see that there were, indeed, people in the State Department at the time who were thinking strategically, but Cumings tells us that they were overruled by FDR.  At the same time, he gives his own bias away by calling a policy that amounted to a giveaway to the Soviet Union as “shrewder” and volunteering that that country’s concerns were legitimate because Korea “touched its border.”  “Touched” is the operative word here.  That’s a border that is all of 10.7 miles in length, and, as we stress, the Soviet Union was not a belligerent in the war with Japan.

 

And in Franklin Roosevelt, he’s talking about the most pro-Communist president the United States has ever had, a man who presided over a government that was fairly laced with very influential Soviet agents who had quite a bit of influence on his policies.  Cumings might have the excuse that his book was published in 2010, and the best book on that subject, Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government, by M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein didn’t come out until 2012, but there was already a wealth of information available on that subject that any serious historian should have known about.   Witness, the book by the Soviet spy defector, Whittaker Chambers, was published in 1952, after all.  In that book he writes of his 1939 meeting with Roosevelt security chief Adolf Berle in which he presented Berle with a list of Soviet agents who had high level positions in the Roosevelt administration.  The only one on that list that we ever really hear about is the State Department official, Alger Hiss, but it also included his brother Donald, in the State Department as well, but, even more importantly, Roosevelt assistant Lauchlin Currie, who was especially close to Owen Lattimore and was an important adviser on policy in the Far East.  The Venona Project later revealed that another close Roosevelt aide, David Niles, was at least a collaborator with the Soviets.

 

Berle, who was quite anti-Communist, took the information to Roosevelt, and FDR blew him off.  Chambers, seeing that his revelations were being ignored, went into hiding, fearing for his life.  Evans and Romerstein write that, rather than being warned off the Chambers-named Soviet agents, Roosevelt actually requested that Alger Hiss accompany him to the vital Yalta Conference, about which I believe there is a consensus even among our historians that the United States made many needless concessions to the Soviet Union.

 

Cumings, himself, wrote in Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History that America “thoughtlessly divided Korea,” suggesting that that was a major contributory factor to the “civil war” that followed.  Here we provide the full quote as it appears on the Cumings Wikipedia page, in which he exhibits a bit more balance than one finds in his 2010 book:

 

The Korean War did not begin on June 25, 1950, much special pleading and argument to the contrary. If it did not begin then, Kim II Sung could not have "started" it then, either, but only at some earlier point. As we search backward for that point, we slowly grope toward the truth that civil wars do not start: they come. They originate in multiple causes, with blame enough to go around for everyone—and blame enough to include Americans who thoughtlessly divided Korea and then reestablished the colonial government machinery and the Koreans who served it. How many Koreans might still be alive had not that happened? Blame enough to include a Soviet Union likewise unconcerned with Korea's ancient integrity and determined to "build socialism" whether Koreans wanted their kind of system or not. How many Koreans might still be alive had that not happened? And then, as we peer inside Korea to inquire about Korean actions that might have avoided national division and fratricidal conflict, we get a long list indeed.

 

But had the advice of those anonymous State Department planners been followed, the United States would not have been put on the conciliatory road of dividing Korea into two zones of occupation in 1945.  As it happens, there was another strong, patriotic Korean leader that the United States could have rallied behind and supported after defeating the Japanese who was greatly opposed to the country’s division.  According to his extensive Wikipedia page, he “is revered in South Korea, where he is widely considered one of the greatest figures in Korean history.”  That is Kim Ku, the long-time leader of the non-Communist Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea, which fashioned itself as the country’s government-in-exile.  He spent most of that time in China.

 

Once the country had been divided it’s doubtful that any leader of the South could have been wise enough to prevent civil war from occurring, but Kim, without U.S. backing, lost out to the U.S. exile, Rhee Syngman (always rendered Western style as Syngman Rhee) in the power struggle that ensued and was assassinated in June of 1949.  It’s still not resolved as to who was ultimately responsible for that assassination. 

 

Kim Ku doesn’t even show up in Cumings’ index.  We do find him mentioned in the text, though.  It is from a U.S. government report written, “A short two years into the occupation [of South Korea]....”  The entire excerpt from pp. 107-108 makes for interesting reading:

 

The leadership of the Right [sic]...is provided by that numerically small class which virtually monopolizes the native wealth and education of the country.  Since it fears that an equalitarian distribution of the vested Japanese assets [that is, colonial capital] would serve as a precedent for the confiscation of concentrated Korean-owned wealth, it has been brought into basic opposition with the Left.  Since this class could not have acquired and maintained its favored position under Japanese rule without a certain minimum of “collaboration,” it has experienced difficulty in finding acceptable candidates for political office and has been forced to support imported expatriate politicians such as Rhee Syngman and Kim Koo [sic].  These, while they have no pro-Japanese taint, are essentially demagogues bent on autocratic rule.

 

The fledgling agency that produced the report was the CIA, created by the National Security Act of 1947.  Curiously, Cumings has no specific reference for it.  It seems to have a lot of truth.   For those of us who have come to think of the CIA as a right-wing, Communist-fighting outfit, the talk of “equalitarian distribution” of Japanese assets has an odd Marxist ring to it, though, which Cumings makes even more so by inserting “colonial capital.”  Little known is the fact that the one of the most heavily Communist-penetrated parts of the U.S. government was the OSS, the precursor of the CIA.  For his part, in the Cumings lexicon, in this book at least, the U.S. opponents are almost always fashioned as “anti-colonialist” or “nationalist.”  You’d think he was in deathly fear of being accused of “McCarthyism” should he use the word “Communist.”

 

Speaking of Communists, let’s look at another name that is missing from Cumings’ index but shows up in his text.  We are speaking of Alger Hiss.  This is from page 218:

 

It is well known that McCarthy’s assault on officers in the China service ruined American expertise on East Asia for a generation, but [Sen. Richard] Nixon’s attack on Alger Hiss (a dyed-in-the-wool internationalist) may have had worse consequences: anyone in pinstripes became suspect—people seen as internal foreigners—and the State Department was fatally weakened.

 

May we suggest that this weakening of public confidence in these leftist ideologues and worse whom Cumings dubs presumably neutral “experts” was entirely merited, and I am certain that the young Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts would have agreed with me.  Here are some key passages from a speech he delivered in Salem, Massachusetts on January 30, 1949, on the loss of China to the Communists:

 

When Ambassador Patrick Hurley resigned in 1945 he stated, "Professional diplomats continuously advised the Chinese Communists that my efforts in preventing the collapse of the National Government did not represent the policy of the United States.  The chief opposition to the accomplishment of our mission came from American career diplomats, the embassy at Chungking, and the Chinese and Far Eastern divisions of the State Department."

---

Our policy in China has reaped the whirlwind. The continued insistence that aid would not be forthcoming unless a coalition government with the Communists was formed was a crippling blow to the National Government. So concerned were our diplomats and their advisers, the Lattimores and the [John K.] Fairbanks, with the imperfections of the diplomatic system in China after 20 years of war, and the tales of corruption in high places, that they lost sight of our tremendous stake in a non-Communist China.

---

This is the tragic story of China whose freedom we once fought to preserve. What our young men had saved our diplomats and our President have frittered away.

 

Mind you, Kennedy was very much an anti-colonialist, and the President he was talking about was the flag bearer of his own Democratic Party.

 

Once China had fallen to the Communists, the political position of the North Koreans was greatly strengthened.  An all-out assault upon the South became a lot more feasible than it would have been with a non-Communist ally of the South at their back. 

 

The two big causes of the Korean War that we have identified, the post-WW II division of the country at the 38th parallel and the fall of China to the Reds in 1949 were both heavily influenced by the concessions to the Soviets that Roosevelt made at the Yalta Conference and Truman made at the Potsdam Conference and, perhaps even more importantly, those two Presidents’ decisions on how to bring an end to the war with Japan.

 

When the war ended rather abruptly after the dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and then a few days later the Soviet Union had finally attacked Japan in Manchuria, the United States was hardly in any position militarily to prevent the Soviet forces from occupying all of Korea.  One can imagine that there was a sigh of relief in Washington when Josef Stalin agreed to our unilateral proposal to divide the zones of occupation at the 38th parallel.  But it didn’t have to come to that. 

 

The Main Missing Man

 

At this point, we introduce the key person missing not just from Cumings’ index but from his text, as well.  We are speaking of Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal, whom Truman made Secretary of Defense in 1947 when that position was created by the National Security Act.  Here is the key paragraph from his Wikipedia page:

 

In the early months of 1945, Forrestal, along with [Secretary of War Henry L.] Stimson and Under Secretary of State Joseph Grew, strongly advocated a softer policy toward Japan that would permit a negotiated armistice, a face-saving surrender. Forrestal's primary concern was not the resurgence of a militarized Japan, but rather "the menace of Russian Communism and its attraction for decimated, destabilized societies in Europe and Asia," and, therefore, keeping the Soviet Union out of the war with Japan.  So strongly did he feel about this matter that he cultivated negotiation efforts that some regarded as approaching insubordination.  

 

Wikipedia goes on to explain that after dropping the bombs and Japan still had not surrendered, Truman finally took Forrestal’s advice, that is, to tell the American people that it was “unconditional surrender,” while agreeing to the lighter surrender terms that were essentially what Forrestal had proposed months before.   

 

The case is very strong that if Forrestal’s earlier advice had been taken, the United States would have occupied the entire Korean peninsula before the Soviets were in a position to do anything about it and even that China would not have eventually fallen to the Reds.     

 

To be sure there would have been social unrest such as occurred on Jeju Island and in South Jeolla Province, but it’s hard to see how it could have developed into an all-out war.  Backing someone like Kim Ku, who seems to have had wider public support, instead of Syngman Rhee might have been a wiser course for the United States.

 

Americans, the Bad Guys

 

South Korean police and military forces in the war were quite brutal; the Korean army contingent in the Vietnam War was also noted for its brutality.   The United States military also has a great deal of Korean civilian blood on its hands, and Cumings fairly well wallows in the atrocities of these allies, particularly the No Gun Ri massacre.  In that incident early in the war in central South Korea, little known outside Korea until an AP story about it in 1999, American troops, similar to the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, killed an estimated 250-300 civilians, mainly women and children.  As in Vietnam, not to mention Cambodia and Laos in that war, as well as in Japan and in Europe in World War II, the Americans did most of their killing of civilians through heavy bombing from the air.  With a shortage of obvious military targets in the North, much of the American military aerial ordnance was used simply to lay waste to any structures they saw, taking civilians with them.  Cumings observes that the American ordnance often, quite unforgivably to my mind, was napalm.  The concluding paragraph of the No Gun Ri massacre Wikipedia page gives a more complete and balanced summing up of the question of civilian victims of the war than anything one might find in Cumings’ book, though:

 

Of all American wars, the Korean War is believed to have been the deadliest for civilians as a proportion of those killed, including North and South Korean non-combatants killed in extensive U.S. Air Force bombing throughout Korea, and South Korean civilians summarily executed by the invading North Korean military.  The commission also recommended that the Seoul government negotiate with the United States for reparations for large-scale civilian killings by the U.S. military.  This did not occur. At the outset of the No Gun Ri investigation in 1999, Defense Secretary Cohen said in Washington and Assistant U.S. Secretary of State Stanley Roth was quoted as saying in Seoul that the United States would consider investigating any similar Korean War killings that came to light. But the 1999–2001 investigation was the last conducted by the United States.

 

From Cumings one could easily get the impression that American racism was at the root of apparent American callousness toward Korean lives.  On page 80, he references British war correspondent Reginald Thompson:

 

Thompson was appalled by the ubiquitous, casual racism of Americans, from general to soldier, and their breathtaking ignorance of Korea.  Americans used the term “gook” to refer to all Koreans, North and South, but especially North Koreans; “chink” distinguished the Chinese.  Decades after the fact, many were still using the term in oral histories.  This racist slur developed first in the Philippines, then traveled to the Pacific War, Korea, and Vietnam.        

 

I am here to testify from my own experience in Korea that the use of the derogatory expression had apparently died out among American soldiers there by 1967.  I don’t think I ever heard anyone use the expression even once there.  I am reminded of Hollywood movies depicting Southerners freely using the “n” word in public gatherings, particularly during the Jim Crow period.  I can’t speak for the entire South, but I was raised in rural Eastern North Carolina in the heart of the tobacco-growing region, and I can tell you that the use of that word in public—even an all-white public—was completely off limits.

 

There’s no place in Cumings’ leftist war summary for American military kindness toward civilians, like its long-term support for Korean orphanages, ongoing when he and I were there, and the massive civilian boatlift from the North Korean port city of Hungnam that occurred in the wake of General Douglas MacArthur’s Chosin Reservoir debacle when the Chinese caught him by surprise with their massive entry into the war.  As with Kim Ku and James Forrestal, one won’t find the Hungnam evacuation in Cumings’ index, and there’s not a word about it in his text, either.  The large Wikipedia page on the subject, which deals almost completely with the American military aspect of the evacuation, mentions the civilian rescue only with this short concluding paragraph:

 

A remarkable number of refugees, over 86,000, had been lifted out of Hungnam. Including those evacuated from Wonsan and Songjin, the total number of civilians taken out of northeastern Korea reached 98,100. About the same number had been left behind for lack of shipping space.  The evacuation included 14,000 refugees who were transported on one ship, the SS Meredith Victory—the largest evacuation from land by a single ship. This was made possible by a declaration of national emergency by President Truman issued on 16 December 1950 with Presidential Proclamation No. 2914, 3 C.F.R. 99 (1953). Among the civilians evacuated and brought to the South were the future parents of former South Korean President Moon Jae-in.  Five babies were born on the ships and were nicknamed Kimchi 1–5 by US sailors.

 

These civilians were largely Christians fleeing Communist oppression.  The “racist” Americans had no obligation to rescue them.

 

“Balanced” Reporting, Bruce Cumings Style

 

It seems that neither the Americans nor its Korean or its non-Communist Chinese allies can get any credit from Cumings.  Check out this passage from page 220:

 

But once Japanese economic influence flowed back into South Korea and Taiwan in the early 1960s, along with a generous showering of U.S. aid, these two economies were the most rapidly growing ones in the world for the next twenty-five years.

 

Who’s the racist?  Great native ability and the embrace of capitalism and the free market by both governments certainly have played the biggest role in their economic success.  I might add to that with my own experience.  The Korea of the Seoul area that I observed struck me as more cosmopolitan and refined than the United States.  I subscribed to the U.S. military newspaper, Stars and Stripes and the Korean English-language Korea Times.  Poor as they were, the Korean broad sheet was only eight pages in length, that is, two large pieces of paper.  Nevertheless, it contained a good deal more international news than did the Stars and Stripes.  It might even have had more international news than the massive New York Times.  The expatriate American Korea Times columnist James Wade, in describing Koreans of the South used a term that I have never seen anywhere else, he called them “xenophiles.”  The attitude was, as Wade put it, was that “anything that is foreign must be better.”

 

I would offer that that attitude, more than anything else, has been responsible for South Korea’s economic miracle.  It is the precise opposite of North Korea’s Juche, or total self-reliance, which is a perpetuation of the attitude, with Stalinist overtones, that made Korea the “Hermit Kingdom” for centuries and held its development back.  But check out Cumings’ “balanced” approach to the two  Koreas as he describes them on page 211:

 

Both Koreas became garrison states and the North remains perhaps the most amazing garrison state in the world, with more than a million people under arms and young men and women both serving long terms in the military.

 

Cumings, as we have noted, is hardly alone in American academic circles, but no person with even the slightest amount of gumption would choose the adjective “amazing” for the breathtakingly totalitarian, suffocating state of North Korea.  He must know better, because his own book about North Korea is on this recommended list of 20 books about North Korean defectors, mainly written by the defectors, themselves.  Then again, check out this Amazon review of that 2004 book entitled, “A Nation Only Bruce Cumings Could Love.”  

 

Then we have this sentence from the concluding paragraph of his Korean War book on page 243:

 

In the aftermath of the war two Korean states competed toe-to-toe in economic development, turning both of them into modern industrial nations.

 

Really?  He might be counting on the ignorance of the average reader, but, today with the Internet, quite a few people have seen the night satellite photograph of the Korean peninsula that shows the South ablaze with light and the North as dark as a tomb, except for a little flicker for Pyongyang.  It tells you all you need to know about the economic development of the two Koreas.

 

In that first summer session at UNC-Chapel Hill I earned some extra money working in the library periodicals room.  I noticed there a weekly publication called The Pyongyang Times.  Its purpose was to put the country’s best foot forward, but it really achieved the opposite of its purpose.    In its own way, it was as revealing as that satellite photograph.  One could feel the abject fear radiating from every page.  One got the feeling that every writer was deathly afraid that he had not managed to praise the Great Leader Kim Il Sung enough, and he would be sent off to a labor camp or worse.  I see from Wikipedia that the newspaper is still being published and apparently hasn’t changed much.  Perhaps in his retirement Cumings can pick up some extra money by offering his service as a consultant.

 

David Martin

 

 

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