Koreas Place In The Sun [Paperback]

Bruce Cumings's survey of Korean history confronts head-on this ignorance - and many of the preconceptions that go with it. On the one hand, he provides an engrossing and well-written narrative concentrating on the last 150 years of Korean history, informed and enlivened by his own experiences in both North and South. On the other, he sets out to challenge conventional wisdom on several key issues. Other reviewers have referred to Cumings's "leftist bias", but this is much too simple. What Cumings is doing is attacking the unexamined narratives and ideologies of his readers, both American and Korean.

Thus he lays out a sympathetic explanation of the traditional Korean value system, which emphasized hierarchy and the proper relationships between superior and subordinate. He explains Japanese imperialism not as pure and ahistorical evil, but as a process of exploitation that was not only a national catastrophe, but also part of the globe-spanning disruption of existing economic and social relations that we call modernization.

He shows that the Korean war was not an abstract battle between Communism and Freedom, but a very complicated civil war between diverse elements of the left (not only the government of the North, but also independent, grassroots elements seeking local democracy and a fairer distribution of land) and the right (composed mainly of a small section of Japanese collaborators and large landowners who were organized by the US to repress the popular socialist movements in the South). He exposes South Korea's "economic miracle" not as a triumph of democracy and free markets, but of authoritarian state planning. This proved to be both a major accomplishment for the nation and a terrible hardship for those who supplied the labor that made it possible.

Perhaps most challenging for his American readers, Cumings describes the terrible devastation that the US turned on the Korean peninsula during the civil war. Gut-wrenching images of the indiscriminate bombing that leveled the North's urban areas and numerous other atrocities like blowing up dams are contrasted with the cool, rational justifications US officials made for engaging in massive terrorism against the civilians of both North and South.

Cumings's method is to emphasize those realities that are suppressed or denied in mainstream accounts of Korean history. In the midst of the current crisis, where our media and leaders portray North Korea - isolated by the most powerful country in the world and seeking to use what leverage it has to secure guarantees against a US attack - as irrational and aggressive, it might be useful to read accounts that are dismissed as "revisionist" by those seeking to uphold received truths or the purity of "our side".