[Peace-discuss] NYT on Cumings

[David Green]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/books/review/Heilbrunn-t.html?ref=books

But Cumings has done a lot of research over the years, has a superb grasp of his 
material and is never less than stimulating. As he portrays it, America became 
mired in a civil war between the North, whose leader Kim Il-sung, had gallantly 
fought against the Japanese in Manchuria starting in 1932, and the South, whose 
leadership consisted largely of collaborators with the Japanese occupation. 
According to Cumings, the North Koreans “essentially saw the war in 1950 as a 
way to settle the hash of the top command of the South Korean Army, nearly all 
of whom had served the Japanese.” Cumings suggests that “a civil conflict purely 
among Koreans might have resolved the extraordinary tensions generated by 
colonialism, national division and foreign intervention” — a resolution that 
would almost surely have ended with mass murder and a ruthless totalitarian 
state stretching across all of Korea.

We can expect this from the NYT. The reviewer's assertion at the end regarding a 
"totalitarian state"--regardless of our support for such a state in S. Korea 
during the war and for decades thereafter. The reviewer offers no evidence to 
counter Cumings' informed judgment of the outcome of a true civil war. Instead, 
he relies on Cold War platitudes, and of course doesn't connect any of this to 
the rest of Asia, including Vietnam.

DG


      
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