Books of The Times - Bruce Cumings’s ‘Korean War,’ Corrective on Conflict - NYTimes.com
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. Next week the
United States and South Korea will 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’s “Korean War,” a powerful revisionist history of America’s intervention in Korea. Beneath its bland title, Mr. Cumings’s 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.
Mr. 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.
Mr. Cumings, who admires Mr. Halberstam’s writing about Vietnam, plucks the wings from “
The Coldest Winter,” Mr. 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.
Mr. 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,” Mr. Cumings writes. “Halberstam mentions the U.S. 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.
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Americans as a whole have no understanding of the complexities of the Korean Civil War nor the fact that America committed many atrocities there. As a result of this lack of knowledge most Americans have no idea of the degree of resentment felt by the general
South Koreans populace toward the United States. The U.S. is often seen as an imperial power. Totalitarian China is consistently viewed with far less disdain than the United States and contemporary world events are often viewed through this perspective of Korean history. This can be extremely disconcerting and surprising for Americans living in South Korea who have been taught to focus on the fact that America freed South Korea from both Japanese imperialism and the onslaught of North Korean and Chinese troops during the Korean War losing over 37,000 troops just during the latter war. Learning history is an indispensable tool necessary for understanding contemporary attitudes. We all have so much more to learn about our history.
John H. Armwood
