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73 of 98 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Poor, Misunderstood Kim Dynasty, June 27, 2004
This review is from: North Korea: Another Country (Hardcover)
In "North Korea: another country, the unitiated reader will get a good short introduction to Bruce Cumings and his views on the present-day Korean Peninsula, in all their infuriating clarity. Cumings is right on several things in this book and wrong on much else. He is right to criticize the Wesern news media's coverage of North Korea for focusing almost entirely on its bizarre features while making little effort to figure out why it is so, and what the leadership is thinking. Perhaps if a country is so bizarre as to be unknowable, the news media are relieved of the responsibility of digging into it to inform their readers. One example of this was the coverage of Kim Jong-Il's 2001 visit to Russia by train. The US media focused on his unwillingness to fly and other trivia, but largely ignored the key point: a one-month absence showed he had great confidence in his grip on power. Cumings is also right to inform readers of the devastating strategic bombing campaign that the US Air Forces unleashed on North Korea in 1950-53. The US forces brought their WWII experience intact to Korea and proceeded to flatten the North. It is important for Americans to know this, not because the USAF should have done differently in supporting our ground combatants, but because a) it is a matter of history and b) it helps explain some of the subsequent political and military behavior of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, to give the North its full title. By the time of the 1953 Armistice, Kim Il-Sung was as great a believer in US air power as General Curtis LeMay. Kim ordered the burrowing of underground facilities of all kinds, from hangars to factories. One can also draw a line from that war experience to the later North Korean determination to develop nuclear weapons. What is most tiresome about Bruce Cumings is that he constantly tries to excuse present-day North Korea. He avoids the obvious: that the only proper comparison is with South Korea. In that comparison, North Korea comes off very badly indeed. Having worked six years in Seoul as a US diplomat (in the late '70's and from 1988-92) and having later visited North Korea five times with an international organization, I see no excuse for North Korea's being the way it is, except for the obvious one -- keeping the Kim Dynasty and close supporters in power at the expense of all other North Koreans. To retain a semblance of objectivity, Cumings provides ritualistic interjections to the effect that of course North Korea is not a nice place. On page 199 of his "Korea's Place in the Sun" (1997), Cumings states it would have been preferable for Kim Il-Sung's 1950 invasion to succeed, calling it a "purifying upheaval that might have been pretty awful," but not as bad as the Korean War or the 1960 uprising against Syngman Rhee or the 1980 Kwangju Uprising. (In the latter two events, the death toll was measured in the hundreds, not the millions.) In this breathtaking scenario, he asserts that a Korea unified under Kim in 1950 would have moderated over time, "as did China, as Vietnam is doing today." What Professor Cumings manages to gloss over in these short sentences is nothing short of stupefying. As John Merrill points out in "Korea: The Peninsular Origins of the War," over 100,000 Koreans were killed on the peninsula in left-right violence even before the North invaded the South on June 25, 1950. Kim Il-Sung carried out brutal purges in the part of Korea he did control, and was ruthless in imposing his rule in the North. Success for Kim in 1950 would have been bloody indeed and would have left South Koreans without hope of economic or political improvement, and Kim without any incentive for either. As for Cumings's breezy comparison with China, he surely knows how many millions died in Mao's mad schemes like the Great Leap Forward. Few South Koreans who remember the war would appreciate his consigning them to the tender mercies of the Kim Dynasty. Though he states the point less clearly here, Cumings is still distressed that Kim was thwarted in 1950. In general, Bruce Cumings explains North Korea's structure and behavior as being more Confucian than Communist. He draws on the structures and traditions of the Yi Dynasty or Chosun Korea (1392-1910) to illuminate the North. There is a fair amount of truth in that comparison. Where his simile runs onto the rocks is the nearly total militarization of North Korea, which has only accelerated after the dynastic succession to Kim Jong-Il, who initiated the "son-gun" (military first) policy. In Confucian Chosun times, military officials clearly took a back seat to civilian scholar-officials. To me, the best comparison to make with that central aspect of the North is with the highly militarized and regimented Japan between the world wars. A reader wanting to learn more about North Korea would do far better to read "North Korea Through the Looking Glass" by Katy Oh and Ralph Hassig. It is far more objective and thorough.
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27 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good book, but read carefully, January 30, 2005
This review is from: North Korea: Another Country (Hardcover)
I can understand many of the other reviews of this book calling it slanted, biased, or infuriating. Cumings is *not* trying to be objectively balanced and thorough, but rather trying to point out what should be widely known, but is instead ignored in what passes for U.S. media "coverage" of North Korea. He is often sarcastic or laconic, and is relaxed where most writers get breathless. That can easily be misread as forgiving or apologetic.
Basically, he takes for granted that we know about the nastier aspects of North Korea from reading the newspaper, and the standard view of the Korean War you get from reading American histories of the 50s. What he points out, for instance, is that if one were to read the Pentagon's discussions of massive nuclear bombing in the 50s and exercises in the 1970s and 80s with nuclear-armed fighter planes from the isolated outlook of the North Koreans, one can perhaps understand their claim to be threatened by the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Now, the American side obviously has no real interest in starting a war that could kill millions, but doesn't that still resemble a nuclear superpower posing a threat to a small, isolated, friendless country?
The main point of Cumings' book is just how poorly the U.S. media cover the North Korean issue: only during a crisis, the same old scary stories about the antics of crazy old Kim Jong Il get recycled yet again, and the South Korean and CIA intelligence reports get quoted, no matter how incomplete they may be.
Cumings also points out some uncomfortable truths about the absolute devastation of North Korea during the Korean war; that the US felt threatened by what they saw as a vast, monolithic, global, unrelenting Communist threat does not change the fact that all of the devastation happened on the Korean peninsula.
If you want to keep seeing North Korea in black-and-white, by all means, read something else. If you want to read about how horrible North Korea's regime is, this is not the book. If you want to understand why MacArthur, Ridgeway, et al. made the decisions they made, or understand the right-wing dictatorship of South Korea had until the 80s, read a different book. If you want to get some idea of how the complicated history of the 20th century might look from the other side of the DMZ and get the decoder ring to understand North Korea's bizarre diplomacy, this book is a good start.
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52 of 75 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Next Year's War, December 11, 2003
This review is from: North Korea: Another Country (Hardcover)
No matter how open-minded and cosmopolitan you are, it is hard to think that North Korea is anything other than a deeply weird country. On the one hand it is a communist dictatorship, but on the other it is apparently a theocratic monarchy. With the possible exception of Albania and Pol Pot Cambodia, no Communist country produces a propaganda that is more offensive to Western principles, one of relentless flattery to the Kim dynasty. It is a deeply chauvinistic culture, only that endlessly harps about the virtue of self-reliance and seems to think that all human accomplishment revolves around North Korea. Yet one can see that many of the electronic devices are actually imports while one sees Korean operas that sound suspiciously like "Swan Lake." Everywhere there is the most garish kitsch about the Kim's, far surpassing Marx or Stalin or Mao, and everywhere one can see the Great Leader's quotations. (Such as "It is important to play the piano well.") All the foreigners are constantly watched and monitored. Thanks to lengthy military service Korean men appear to remain virgins well into their late twenties and early thirties. When Kim Jong Il realized that smoking was bad for his health, he not only stopped, but forbid his General Staff as well. But this is only part of the story, as Bruce Cumings points out in his brief but important book on the subject. As a book, it has the major weakness that much of what he has said he has written before in his books on the origins of the Korean war and his general history of Korea. But considering that the United States might end up in a conflict that could kill millions of people, it is vital that everybody read this book. The current regime is a very unpleasant one (Cumings calls it "abhorrent"). It has at least 100,000 political prisoners and perhaps 150,000 in its local gulags. Although its economy and living standards may have been as good as South Korea's as late as 1978, its dogmatic economic policy and secretive nature helped worsen major flood and draughts to cause a famine that killed at least 500,000 people. Its leadership is cruel and it is suspicious, but Cumings reminds us that it is not paranoid. If it has 700,000 troops on the border merely 100 kilometres from Seoul, Cumings reminds us that South Korea has 540,000 troops, presumably healthier and better armed, on its border merely 100 kilometers from Pyongyang. Cumings reminds us that behind the monarchical façade the party is dominated by the generation of anti-Japanese guerrillas. Of the forty top leaders of North Korea in 1997 only one, Kim Jong Il himself, is under the age of 60. The average age of the Politburo, excepting Kim, was 72. This is important for a number of reasons. The Japanese were brutal occupiers, extorting hundreds of thousands of Koreans for forced labor and forced prostitution. Many of its quislings and pimps became the backbone of the South Korean state, including its greatest leader, President Park. Not only did the Korean Communist Party have to face the Japanese, they also had to face the paranoid purges of their Soviet and Chinese "allies," which Kim Il Sung was lucky to escape with his life. Then came the Korean war, in which North Korea faced a truly horrific aerial bombing. Perhaps a quarter of the North Korean population was killed, as dams were destroyed and 867,000 gallons of horrific napalm were used in the first four months alone. That is one reason why much of the North Korean military/industrial infrastructure is underground. Another reason why is that the United States has always had a nuclear threat against the North. After his dismissal General MacArthur spoke of using cobalt bombs to seal the border altogether, apparently unaware that the cobalt he would have used would have been enough to destroy all life on the planet. This was not simply one powerful man's lunacy though. The threat was a constant theme in Korean war planning. After the armistice, and despite a provision in it preventing qualitatively new weapons from entering the peninsula, John Foster Dulles allowed nuclear weapons into the South. This was done not so much out of a fear of the North attacking the South, as to discourage the South from attacking the North. For years the United States has had plans of initiating nuclear weapons within an hour of a potential Northern attack. Cumings reminds us that nuclear signers of the Non-Proliferation Treaty are not supposed to threaten non-nuclear signers, and that the 1994 agreement required the United States to give formal assurances not to threaten the North with nukes. Thanks to Republican opposition, those assurances were never given. It is in this context that Cumings writes of the current nuclear crisis. The North Korean regime is not very likeable, but it is not the West's enemy, nor the United States'. And if it has survived the fall of the Soviet Union, the first nuclear crisis and a major famine there is no good reason to believe that is going to go anyway anytime soon. And one should point out that Korea's democrats, who have suffered things infinitely worse than our doughty warriors against "political incorrectness," have consistently called for a peaceful tactful policy. A deal, involving the end of North Korea's missile and uranium reprocessing technology in return for a formal peace treaty and mutual recognition has been possible and was possible at the end of the Clinton presidency. But that would require the current president to actually know something about North Korea. Maybe someone should give this book to him for a Christmas present.
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