Copyright © 1997, 2001, 2002 by Hugo S. Cunningham
Individual, non-commercial reproduction is authorized, provided this notice is retained.

Bruce Cumings, Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1997; cloth, 527 pages, $35.

[According to the jacket blurb, Bruce Cumings is "director of the Center for International and Comparative Studies at Northwestern University." He does not use the title of "professor," but I understand he is one.]

Bruce Cumings covers an interesting subject (Korea, especially since 1900), that has generally been neglected. His book is well-organized and well-presented.

Nevertheless, readers should be cautioned that Mr. Cumings is a man of the Left, sympathetic to the North Korean regime (though not slavishly so), and eager to interpret US policy toward Korea in the worst possible light. Not being an expert on Korea, I cannot argue with most of his details; indeed, I believe the facts he adduces in support of his views are generally true. Nevertheless, I have caught him intentionally distorting context (See comments on pp 443-448 below), as well as omitting material facts that don't fit his thesis. On pp. 385-386 (see below), he even boasts of being used as a source of propaganda by Korea's anti-American Left.

In summary, go ahead and enjoy the non-political aspects of his book. But before accepting at face value his contentions about Communism and U.S.-Korean relations, cross-check his claims against other sources, and weigh his values against your own.

Notes and comments (largely complaints) follow, arranged by page-number and paragraph.
"Complaints" are prefaced with "C:"; neutral "observations" are prefaced with "O:".
Each page begins with paragraph #1, even if it is only the end of a paragraph from the previous page.

C: p. 38, para 2. Japanophobia: "The symbolism" [of the Buddha at the Sokkuram grotto facing the ocean to the East] "is all the more striking, for beyond the horizon sits the rising sun of Japan. I thought of this once when a prominent Japanese scholar waxed enthusiastic about the heaven-sent geographic isolation of his home islands, separated by broad seas from the turmoil of the Asian mainland. He thought it was the main reason why Japan had a different (and of course superior) development. Called upon to comment on his paper, I remarked that the Sokkuram Buddha and many Koreans probably hoped to wake one morning and find that the islands were no longer there. The professor stomped out of the room, refusing to respond to me."

Comment: it is not the place of foreigners to gloat about disputes between third parties.

Chapter 2, pp. 86-138, "The Interests, 1860-1904"

O: p. 105--BC goes out of his way to shun universal terms like "traditionalist" or "conservative" to describe such beliefs among anti-foreign intellectuals in Korea. He sets up isolationist dissident Hong Chae-Hak (executed in 1881) as an eponymous symbol of a virtuous isolationist continuity from traditional Korea to the hermit kingdom of Kim Il-Sung.

Chapter 3, pp. 139-184, "Eclipse, 1905-1945" (Japanese rule)

O: The Japanese made themselves unpopular and disrupted traditional Korean society, notably with compulsory labor mobilization starting in 1937. They began to develop Korea's economy rapidly in the 1930s, under a centralized, authoritarian model readily adaptable to Communism. A certain minority of Koreans accommodated themselves to Japanese rule, profiting in business or advancing in the government bureaucracy.

Chapter 4, pp. 185-236-- "The Passions, 1945-48"

O: Pro-Western historians largely agree with BC, that the anti-Communist regime in the South was rather shaky and unstable before 1950, with a doubtful popular mandate. A political nucleus of domestic right-wingers, many tainted by Japanese connections, needed Western emigres like Syngman Rhee for nationalist legitimacy.

Chapter 5, pp. 237-298-- "Collision, 1948-53"

O/C: p. 238 (para 2)-- "The Korean War did not begin on 25 June 1950."

With documentation of prior Soviet knowledge of the invasion now available, BC does not mention the silly assertion of hardcore Lefties like I.F. Stone, that South Korea invaded North Korea on 25 June, and the swift, well-organized North Korean advance into South Korea was a spontaneous reaction.

BC offers 2 arguments to refute, or at least palliate, the charge of North Korean "aggression."

(1) The 38th parallel had been a simmering cauldron of provocations by both sides as far back as 1948 (hence the wider dates bracketed in BC's chapter title). While the well-planned invasion of 25 Jun 1950 may have been a major escalation, it was not an unprovoked bolt out of the blue.

[Non-Leftist historians agree with BC about mutual provocations, but go on to point out differing US and Soviet reactions: the US restrained the ROK by withholding heavy "offensive" weapons, while Stalin gave the PDRK all the heavy weapons they needed for the 25 Jun 1950 invasion.]

(2) The conflict was a civil war, and foreigners (notably the USA) should have stayed out of an internal affair (See comments on p. 298 below).




O: Section of Ch. 5: pp 288-298: "The Panic in Washington"

This is a selective recital of US atrocities.

C: p. 289 (para 2)--"By the spring of 1951 the fighting stabilized along lines similar to those that today mark the Korean DMZ.

(para 3) "That was where the war ended after another two years of bloody fighting, most of it positional and reminiscent of World War I."

All true. But why does't BC go into why the war dragged on for two more years? The answer is that the Communists dragged the negotiations out; war strengthened their societies, while a democratic society like the USA presumably would eventually give up and quit. Given the moderate demands of US negotiators after the spring of 1951 (a cease-fire in place, with POWs to go to the country of their choice), gradually escalating pressure to force the Communists to negotiate in good faith becomes far more justified.

C: p. 289 (para 3)-- "But the December [1950] crisis also led to [US] use of, or to the threat to use ... atomic, chemical, and biological weapons."

Note the weasely wording here. Even BC offers no specifics of US "use" of such weapons; he knows that if he recycled long-discredited Communist "germ warfare" propaganda, he would be laughed off the world stage. Nevertheless, he leaves the "use" phrasing there, apparently for the benefit of Communist true-believers, while tacking on the separate "threat" phrasing as a fall-back position.

(The "germ warfare" controversy belongs in any serious history of the Korean War, to provide insight into Communist propaganda methods. Apart from this one highly ambiguous reference, however, BC doesn't even mention it.)

C: Free-fire zones (forcing evacuation of civilians) in some remote areas to deprive Communist guerrillas of sanctuary-- Successful counter-guerrilla warfare is not pretty, but neither is guerrilla warfare itself, which intentionally destroys the distinction between civilians and combatants.

C: p. 293 (para 3)-- As evidence the US was planning to initiate chemical warfare in Korea, BC can come up with little more than a letter by MacArthur, which, by the way, notes "U.S. inhibitions on such use are complete and drastic..."

O/C: p. 298 ("Conclusion")-- "The point to remember is that this was a civil war, and, as a British diplomat once said, 'every country has a right to have its War of the Roses.' The true tragedy was not the war itself, for a civil conflict purely among Koreans might have resolved the extraordinary tensions generated by colonialism, national division, and foreign intervention. The tragedy was that the war solved nothing: only the status quo ante was restored, only an armistice held the peace."

Comments

(1) Set aside the question of whether there was external Communist involvement in the North. Is foreign intervention in a "civil war" always inadmissible?
(a) Examine some cases:
1. US Civil War (1861-65)-- This is the classic case, where European intervention (to recognize Southern independence) would have been considered wicked and inadmissible. The true moral dimension, however, was provided by the slavery issue: intervention on behalf of the South would have been intervention on behalf of slavery.

2. Rebellion of English colonies in America (1775-1883)-- French intervention in this English civil war was crucial to the success of the American rebels. No one (except perhaps Frenchmen ruing the cost to the French treasury) has condemned this intervention on moral grounds.

3. England's Wars of the Roses (1455-1485)-- [Foreign intervention was never an issue; nevertheless, since BC brought the subject up ...] Bloodletting was limited to the squabbling noble factions. Civilians (notably in towns) were not robbed or slaughtered, apparently because they had enough independent power to retaliate. If the Wars of the Roses had been conducted with a Leninist contempt for civilian life and liberty, foreign intervention might well have been a good thing.

(b) Are "civil" wars somehow cleaner?

Often not; the US Civil War was unusual for its observance of distinctions between combatants and civilians, honoring of agreements, and absence of postwar persecution. Civil Wars involving modern totalitarianisms tend to be utterly savage, eg Russia 1917-21 (4 million dead from combat, disease, etc, plus 5 million peasants starved out by "War Communism") or Spain 1936-38 (400,000 slain); in such cases, firmly and skillfully applied intervention by the civilized world can save many lives.

(c) Conclusion: the human species, and human rights, do not end at national borders. Outsiders should be careful about getting entangled in societies they do not understand fully, clumsily aggravating the damage. Nevertheless, morality does not require foreigners to abandon their fellow human creatures to massacre, barbarism, and despair.

(2) Was "nothing" worthwhile accomplished by US intervention against a Communist victory?

Sheltered by the US, South Korea has become a prosperous and developed country, with enough wealth to help their northern cousins. In contrast, Communist garrison states like Albania, Vietnam, and North Korea remain mired in poverty.

Though this is not of direct benefit to the Korean people, one should also note the world perspective provided by the "Asian tigers," demonstrating the universal applicability of peaceful capitalist development. The first cracks in the Berlin Wall may have been made by Korea.

US intervention did not allow the 25 Jun 1950 invasion to, in BC's words, "solve" anything. Considering what the Nazis meant by a "final solution," however, some "problems" are better left un-"solved."

Chapter 7, pp. 337-393-- "The Virtues II: The Democratic Movement, 1960-1996"

C: pp. 385-86 -- BC boasts about his role as an anti-American propagandist:

(Maybe he merely wished to stand by the truth, letting the chips fall where they may? No: see comments on pp. 443, 444, 445, and 448 below.)

"Koreans pay attention and respect to scholars, no doubt far more than they deserve (but then, this is another thing Americans can learn from Koreans). In the mid-1980s, the American embassy in Seoul had the hallucination that my work was one cause of the incessantly anti-American student demonstrations of the period. This is pure nonsense, but it flew back into my face so many times that the experience may be pertinent to our story. The first volume of my Korean War study circulated as an English-language samizdat in the early 1980s and then was translated (badly) by publishers who pirated the copyright, only to find the book banned by Chun Doo Hwan. Nevertheless, it was usually available in the right bookstores.

"In 1987 and 1988, I kept getting calls from the Voice of America or the U.S. Information Agency, asking me for taped interviews that would then be broadcast in Korea. My work was being distorted by the students, they said, and I should clear the record. The American director of the Fulbright program told that I ought to come out to Korea and disabuse the students of their false impressions. Other American historians were invited under these or other auspices to travel to Korea and set the record straight on the Korean War and other things; a couple of them did not hesitate to please the powers that be by denouncing me as a radical if not a pro-North Korean sympathizer.

"I never agreed to any of the official entreaties. Usually I would just not return their calls, but once or twice I opined that if Americans stopped backing dictators and began treating Koreans with dignity, the problems would go away and I would sink back into my ordinary obscurity."

Return to introduction.

BC goes on (p. 386) to mention some hostility he met on Seoul streets (eg neighborhood urchins shouting "monkey" and other insults), implying unpopular US policies were responsible. This is presumably true in many cases, but there is also good old-fashioned racism to consider: to some East Asians living in homogenous communities, Caucasoid Westerners are hairy, ugly, deaf-and-dumb "big-noses."

O: pp. 392-93--BC mentions twenty-four North Korean sympathizers held in Southern jails over twenty years. I wouldn't expect South Korea, as a front-line society, to release totalitarian subversives onto the street, but surely these people could have been deported to the North?

O: p. 397 (para 2)--"The unique symbol/logo of the Korean Workers Party (KWP) places a writing brush across the hammer and sickle, indicating an inclusive policy toward the educated and the expert." This is analogous to the engineer's compass in the East German logo, but, as BC observes, is in sharp contrast to Mao's China, especially during the Cultural Revolution.

(para 3) Indeed, BC says, since intellectuals/clerks are an accepted class, there is a place in this highly structured corporate society for just about everyone, except perhaps for ex-landlords, who mostly ended up in the South. (To his credit, BC notes a large gap between the luxurious living standards of a small nomenklatura, and the austere [though tolerable] standards of everyone else).

O/C: p. 407 (para 2)-- Is Kim Il-Sung's personality cult really different from Stalin's, as BC suggests? Is it part of an (admittedly bizarre by Western standards) indigenous Confucian state, with an all-wise fatherly leader and harmonious social structure?

I am skeptical how unique it is, being aware of other cults, not just in Stalin's Russia, but also in China, Cuba, Vietnam, Albania, and Romania. (While the Kim Il-Sung cult might have a Confucian resonance, the Lenin and Stalin cults resonated with Eastern Orthodox hagiography.) Somehow, once the totalitarian pressure is removed, survivors of other totalitarian states reveal that they had ordinary human reactions and skepticism all along. When Stalin died in 1953, many of his subjects were prostrate with hysterical grief, but most of them soon "decompressed" and got over it. In the late 1960s, we were told that the Cultural Revolution expressed innate Chinese character, but today's Chinese consider it an embarrassment, or at best a detoxified source of nostalgic kitsch.

C: pp. 443-450-- As a Leftist, Mr Cumings is offended by the "model minority" stereotype, the fact that most Americans admire Korean immigrants as law-abiding, hard-working go-getters. Apparently with his left-wing Korean audience in mind (See pp 385-86 above), he tries to smear America as relentlessly anti-Korean. Unfortunately for him, that gives an opening for anti-Communist Americans like me to cast doubt on his credibility.

[Note to Internet readers of this on soc.culture.korean: you have doubtless come across the vaporings of some racist trolls, but such are no more representative of general opinion than the same types who haunt other newsgroups.]

Return to discussion of BC's support for Korea's anti-American Left.

Return to introduction.

C: p. 444, paragraph 2--BC claims that Americans held a racist contempt of Koreans through the 1960s and into the 1970s. FACT: I grew up in America, and paid close attention to anti-Communist politics starting in 1966-67. Throughout that period, American perceptions of South Koreans were favorable, due largely to the courage and skill of troops they sent to aid us in the Vietnam War.

(Indeed, one might compare the late-60s American perception of South Koreans at that time with today's "model minority" stereotype, so obnoxious to BC and other Leftists. In the late 1960s, American anti-Communists admired South Koreans as model Asians [in contrast to our shaky South Vietnamese clients]: resolutely anti-Communist and apparently immune to guerrilla campaigns. Given the vigorous repression of Left-wing dissidence in South Korea, this model-Asian image may well have been saccharine and unrealistic; nevertheless, BC is fundamentally dishonest to blot out its existence and tell his Korean audience that late-60s Americans were anti-Korean.)

(During an overlapping period, ca 1952-1990, pro-NATO Kemalist Turkey was embraced by American Cold Warriors as our model Muslim state, partly because Turkey had sent troops to aid us in the Korean War.)

Curiously, on p. 445, BC cites with approval the 1970s TV-series "MASH," which tended to present South Koreans as moochers, whiners, and losers. MASH apparently earned a pass with its skeptical view of the US war effort.

Return to discussion of BC's support for Korea's anti-American Left.

C: p. 445, paragraph 1 -- In the context of alleged US anti-Korean racism of the 1960s, BC cites the villainous "Oddjob" character in Ian Fleming's "Goldfinger" as a typically vicious anti-Korean stereotype.

As my correspondent Joseph Eros reminded me, Fleming's book is guilty as charged. Neither of us, however, could figure out what a 1959 British book has to do with American attitudes in the 1960s.
BC's reference has the effect, whether intentional or not, of smearing by association the 1964 Hollywood film production of "Goldfinger." (Unlike Fleming's books, which are dated and largely forgotten, "James Bond" films remain in circulation.)
The Hollywood "Oddjob," however, was carefully presented as a North Korean. American movie audiences of the mid 1960s naturally accepted that South Koreans were loyal allies, even while North Korea was a Cold War enemy.

Return to discussion of BC's support for Korea's anti-American Left.

C: p. 448, paragraph 2 (the 1992 LA Rodney King riot, called, in Leftie terms, the "uprising" by BC)--"Nothing was more disheartening than the example of poor Koreans arming themselves " against the thugs. Why? Should they have rolled over and played dead?

(My correspondent Max Becker-Pos remonstrated with me that Cumings was not advocating surrender by Korean-American riot victims.

C: p. 448, paragraph 3 (Korean shopkeepers)--Immigrant LA shopkeeper Soon Ja Du "shot and killed Latasha Harlins in March 1991 in a dispute over a $1.79 bottle of orange juice." BC erroneously states the court "acquitted Ms. Du"; in fact, though she was not imprisoned, she did suffer other, lesser penalties. (I never saw the evidence in the case; BC seems to imply that Ms. Du was let off easy by an anti-Black legal system; I had gotten an impression elsewhere that Ms. Harlins was beating her up, and that the shooting was self-defense.) BC cites the film "Falling Down" as demonstrating White America's contempt for Korean shopkeepers. In reality, the mainstream of anti-Communist Americans respect the hard work of Korean shopkeepers; anti-Korean racism is far more important on the American Left.

Return to discussion of BC's support for Korea's anti-American Left.

C: p. 481 (the "poplar tree incident") -- On 18 August 1976, five South Korean workmen were sent to clear a tree that obstructed the view in the Panmunjom truce zone. Two US officers accompanying them were hacked to death by North Korean soldiers. The US commander later sent in enough forces to clear the tree safely, in what BC presents as war-mongering hysteria. Especially revealing is this quote (paragraph 2): "A Washington informant, whom I cannot name, told me [that US General] Stillwell ... was fearful that back in Washington Henry Kissinger might want to start a war, in order to further the lame-duck Gerald Ford's chances in the upcoming election." This kind of loony-toon conspiracy-mongering looks fine in an Oliver Stone film, but in the scholarly world, it reflects poorly either on BC's veracity, or on the quality of the people he cultivates as "informants."

(Perhaps this canard is a Left-wing counterpart to a renegade White House security guard, who retailed a fanciful story that Pres. Clinton secretly drove out of the White House evenings in search of easy women.)
(Later note [y20506]: actually, it is quite possible Prof. Cumings was duped by a US government disinformation campaign.)

C: p.482 (paragraph 1)--War planning. Supposedly American planners envisioned defensive use of nuclear weapons in Korea simply because they were cowardly bullies, who "dared not use nuclear weapons in Europe, because the other side had them, except in the greatest extremity." BC should at least have mentioned the fact that the grand prize, Seoul (with 42% of South Korea's population [p.388] and most of its wealth), was within a mere 40 miles of the border. In contrast, NATO forces in Europe could have fallen back over 100 miles without suffering irreparable damage.

O: p. 482 (3) BC writes that US military planners envisioned neutron bombs as a means to retake Seoul from North Korean occupiers: "to kill the enemy but save the buildings." This may be accurate.

I should condemn in passing, however, a thoroughly dishonest Soviet-inspired campaign in Europe against the neutron bomb, supposedly a quintessentially capitalist plot to "kill people while protecting property." In reality, the no-fallout neutron bomb was a profoundly moral way to break up a Soviet tank invasion without poisoning the countryside or civilians downwind.

C: p. 482 (4)--BC asks us to believe the massive trip-wire deployment of North Korean troops up against the border is a pacific search for a fallout shelter: "so that as many soldiers as possible could get into the South (regardless of how a war started), to mingle with ROK Army forces and civilians before nuclear weapons would be used, thus making their use less likely."

Index of some essays in article above:

Was North Korean invasion of 25 June 1950 "aggression"?
Prof. Cumings boasts of being cited as an anti-American propagandist
Is it wrong for foreigners to intervene in a civil war?

Newsgroups: soc.culture.korean
Subject: Critique of Anti-Americanism in Bruce Cumings's Korea book
From: hcunn@tiac.net (Hugo S. Cunningham)
Date: Tue, 25 Feb 1997 23:25:53 GMT

FAQ for newsgroup soc.culture.korean. Like me, the editor of this FAQ is skeptical of the Far Left.

Home page of the Korea Herald, Korea's principal English-language newspaper.

Kimsoft's Korea Web Weekly has some interesting URL links. Kimsoft themselves have left-wing sympathies.