Bruce Cumings

Cuming's The Korean War blasts apart our brainwashing that the N. Koreans were alone responsible; in fact, both sides were itching to invade and only needed a pretext. The U.S. carried out a genocidal campaign against the North, employing napalm incendiary carpet bombing with some 1.5 million civilian casualties and almost resorted to nukes which were loaded and ready. The U.S. also aided the corrupt Rhee regime in slaughtering 200,000 leftists Genghis Khan-style in the South including many show more wrongly implicated innocents (US troops themselves carried out many My Lai-style massacres). Blueprint for the Vietnam War. The reason few today seem to know anything about this is that the U.S. Govt censored everything and it all went down the memory hole. The brutal, paranoid post-war N. Korean regime is largely a product of this history. show less

This short book is hard to evaluate because it contains a lot of inside baseball/score-settling with other historians, which only serves to reinforce the author’s point that Americans know virtually nothing about the Korean War, generally misperceiving it as being about the Cold War when it was and remains primarily a civil war and the outside country of most importance is probably Japan, whose occupation set the stage for rebellion against former collaborators (who made up a big chunk of show more the political class of South Korea until very recently). Cumings emphasizes the atrocities committed by South Koreans and occasionally Americans, while acknowledging that North Koreans also did plenty of harm which has yet to be exposed via a truth and reconciliation commission as in the South. There are meditations on the nature of history and memory that strive for poetry, but don’t quite get there; still, I did learn something about the intractability of the conflict and the ridiculousness of seeing Korea as simply a stage on which the West-Communist Bloc struggle played out. show less

This is not a survey of said conflict and is such an unusual choice for the Modern Library Nonfiction catalogue. Cumings asserts that for myriad reasons the Korean War drifted out of collective consciousness. The American stewards of the War (Acheson MacArthur) never understood the origins and prosecuted it in a heavy handed way which only exacerbated antipathy between North and South. The author asserts that the war can only be understood in the context that Japan made Korea a colony in the show more early 20C and that the ruling elite of the South collaborated with the Nipponese until the end of WWII. The propaganda of the time (racist Orientalism) used the grievance of Koreans invading Korea as it is moral compass. This was followed by the subsequent US/UN invasion of the North -- which isn't viewed as egregious. Then the Chinese came roaring across the Yalu and it became rather cold outside. Unfortunately this book launches asides at other books on the conflict, books I have lined up to read over the next couple days. show less

Awesome. Debunks the standard propaganda about Korea.To understand where and why Korea is where it is now is to look back to "the holocaust that the North experienced during the Korean War [1959-53:].” & holocaust is not an exaggerated term...for instance the number of napalm bombs dropped there outnumbered the Vietnam war. It cannot be understood apart from a terrible fratricidal war that has never ended, the guerrilla struggle against Japanese imperialism in the 1930s, its initial show more emergence as a state in 1945, its fraught relationship with the South, its brittle and defensive reaction to the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and its interminable daily struggle with the United States of America.” show less