North Korea, like Cuba, is a country suspended in time, one that exists off modernity’s grid. It’s a place where the Cold War never ended, where the heirloom paranoia is taken down and polished daily.
Korea’s Cold War chill is heating up. Four months ago a South Korean warship was sunk, and a South Korean-led international investigative team concluded that North Korea was responsible. Today the US and South Korea begin
large-scale naval exercises off the coasts of the Korean Peninsula and Japan in a show of force.
The world will be watching, and here’s a book that American policymakers may hope it won’t be reading: Bruce Cumings’ The Korean War, a powerful revisionist history of America’s intervention in Korea. Beneath its bland title, Cumings’ book is a squirm-inducing assault on America’s moral behavior during the Korean War, a conflict that he says is misremembered when it is remembered at all. It’s a book that puts the reflexive anti-Americanism of North Korea’s leaders into sympathetic historical context.
Cumings is chairman of the history department at the University of Chicago and the author of The Origins of the Korean War, a respected two-volume survey. He mows down a host of myths about the war in his short new book, which is a distillation of his own scholarship and that of many other historians. But he begins by mowing down David Halberstam.
Cumings, who admires Halberstam’s writing about Vietnam, plucks the wings from The Coldest Winter, Halberstam’s 2007 book about the Korean War. The book, he argues, makes all the classic mistakes popular American historians tend to make about this little understood war.
SCRATCHING THE SURFACE
Halberstam’s book is among those that “evince almost no knowledge of Korea or its history” and “barely get past two or three Korean names,” Cumings writes.
“Halberstam mentions the US Military Government from 1945 to 1948, which deeply shaped postwar Korean history — in one sentence,” he adds. “There is absolutely nothing on the atrocious massacres of this war, or the American incendiary bombing campaigns.” Ouch.
Americans need to get past the idea, Cumings says, that the Korean War was a “discrete, encapsulated” story that began in 1950, when the US intervened to help push the Communist north out of the south of Korea, and ended in 1953, after the war bogged down in a stalemate. The US succeeded in containment, establishing the 4km-wide demilitarized zone that still runs through Korea’s middle, but failed miserably at the war for the north, an attempt at Communist rollback.
Cumings argues that the Korean War was a civil war with long, tangled historical roots, one in which America had little business meddling. He notes how “appallingly dirty” the war was. In terms of civilian slaughter, he declares, “our ostensibly democratic ally was the worst offender, contrary to the American image of the North Koreans as fiendish terrorists.”
Cumings likens the indiscriminate American bombing of North Korea to genocide. He writes that American soldiers took part in, or observed, civilian atrocities not dissimilar to those at My Lai. An official inquiry is needed into some of these events, he writes, for any kind of healing to begin. (He also writes that this war, during which nearly 37,000 American soldiers died, deserves a memorial as potent and serious as Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial.)
THE BIGGER PICTURE
Among the most important things to understand about North Korean behavior then and now, Cumings writes, is the longtime enmity between Korea and Japan. Japan took Korea as a colony in 1910, with America’s blessing, and replaced the Korean language with Japanese. Japan humiliated and brutalized Korea in other ways. (During World War II the Japanese Army forcibly turned tens of thousands of Korean women into sex slaves known as “comfort women.”) About this history Cumings writes, “Neither Korea nor Japan has ever gotten over it.”
North Korea, which is virulently anti-Japanese, remains bitter and fearful of that country and of the US. It will do whatever it can to stay out of the hands of South Korea, where leaders have long-standing historical ties to Japan.
Cumings, in The Korean War, details the north’s own atrocities and acknowledges that current “North Korean political practice is reprehensible.” But he says that we view that country through “Orientalist bigotry,” seeing only its morbid qualities. We wrongly label the country Stalinist, he argues.
“There is no evidence in the North Korean experience of the mass violence against whole classes of people or the wholesale ‘purge’ that so clearly characterized Stalinism,” he writes.
HIDDEN HISTORY
The most eye-opening sections of The Korean War detail America’s saturation bombing of Korea’s north.
“What hardly any Americans know or remember,” Cumings writes, “is that we carpet-bombed the north for three years with next to no concern for civilian casualties.” The US dropped more bombs in Korea (635,000 tonnes, as well as 32,557 tonnes of napalm) than in the entire Pacific theater during World War II. Our logic seemed to be, he says, that “they are savages, so that gives us the right to shower napalm on innocents.”
The Korean War has its share of awkward sentences, and Cumings makes at least one mistake of his own, referring to Michael Herr’s 1970 nonfiction book Dispatches, about the Vietnam War, as a novel.
But this lean book may put some readers in mind of Wartime, Paul Fussell’s acidic attack on some of the comforting myths about World War II. Cumings’ prose, at its best, is reminiscent of Fussell’s stylized, literate high dudgeon.
Witness the carnage in this passage from early in The Korean War: “Here was the Vietnam War we came to know before Vietnam — gooks, napalm, rapes, whores, an unreliable ally, a cunning enemy, fundamentally untrained GIs fighting a war their top generals barely understood, fragging of officers, contempt for the know-nothing civilians back home, devilish battles indescribable even to loved ones, press handouts from General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters apparently scripted by comedians or lunatics, an ostensible vision of bringing freedom and liberty to a sordid dictatorship run by servants of Japanese imperialism.”
This year is the 60th anniversary of the Korean War’s conventional start. Even from this distant vantage point, Cumings writes, there are still multiple unpleasant facts Americans have not learned about this war, “truths that most Americans do not know and perhaps don’t want to know, truths sometimes as shocking as they are unpalatable to American self-esteem.” His book is a bitter pill, a sobering corrective.
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