I myself am a five-year resident of Korea, so I naturally am interested in the subject at hand.

I am originally from Chicago and I still manage to keep up with the “worldview” from my hometown. One way I do this is to listen to WBEZ, Chicago’s NPR station. BEZ has a program, titled Worldview, that does a good job of educating the locals on global issues. And whenever an issue related to Korea arises, they call in none other than Bruce Cumings. Last spring, I listened to a ten-minute clip with Bruce and the host discussing the “rise in anti-Americanism” in Seoul. What I listened to blew my mind.

In Chicago (and elsewhere for that matter) the name “University of Chicago” carries a massive amount of weight. Mr. Cumings proceeded to blame American troops, and their heinous crimes against the Korean people. I was so infuriated. At the time, I was working as a teacher trainer for the city of Seoul and I was acutely aware of the true origins of the xenophobic attitudes found on the peninsula. As you all know, the media, eucation unions etc., have fomented this feeling for a long time.

Anyhow, I felt strongly enough about it to send Mr. Cumings an e-mail stating what I saw as the real sociological reasons behind the phenomenom. His response was stunning. I should have saved it……but basically it read like a mad-blogosphere leftist rant about imperial rapists (he asked me to imagine foreign troops stationed i Central Park raping American women!!!)

I had a hard time believing that a grown man had written it, let alone a U of C professor. I suppose it’s possible a TA (Korean) wrote it, but after reading about Bruce’s previous inability to move out of the 60’s, I’m pretty confident it was him.

I have no opinion about his scholarship, but I have a strong suspicion that he is a man who starts his research with a conclusion, and works backwards from there.

PING:
TITLE: Eyes on Korea: 12-09-2003
BLOG NAME: Winds of Change.NET
JAN 9/03 TOPICS INCL: Masterful analysis of reunification, Future of U.S. Forces Korea; South Koreans killed in Iraq; China & Korea fight over ancient history; Josh Marshall on Korean diplomacy; Riots; Bruce Cumings attacks; Hunger strikes; North Korea…

PING:
TITLE: more Korea goodness
BLOG NAME: jessicaharbour.com
Believe it or not, that’s Lee Young-ae of Joint Security Area and One Fine Spring Day fame, channeling Madonna circa 1986.Anyway, the Marmot has posted another roundup of posts and reports about Korea over on Winds of Change. I…

It dawned on me when NK intercepted the US spy plane in internatinal air space that NK seeks to understand well what it can and can’t get away with.

The intercept was such a weak action by NK. They have done much worse and could have done many other things to put greater pressure on the US — like testing a nuclear bomb or firing another ICBM or any number of things they’ve done over the years.

They held back, I concluded, because they knew they couldn’t afford to alienate China at at time when China is finding it hard to sit on the fence with big US pressure.

The North Korea that calculates that much wouldn’t not respond to a US provocation with “total war” as everybody says. They would have to strike back in a significant way, because they must maintain the “crazy Koreans!” image, because it gains them so much leverage in negociations and garners them much needed riches from the scared nations.

But any tit-for-tat use of the military could spiral out of control.

So again, the calculation is that it is better to watch the North Koreans die alone than risk the shedding the blood of others.

Your comments are well taken, and I agree that a war with the North Koreans is something that we should try our best to avoid. We are greatly assisted in this aim, however, by the fact that North Korea would like very much to avoid a major conflagration as well, especially a major conflagration it knows it can’t win. I’m not convinced we need “progress” to avoid the situation described in Young-hae Chang’s “Operation NuKorea” - assuming that the North Korean leadership is concerned, first and foremost, for its own surivival, the regional power structure (with North Korea at the bottom) guarantees that, barring a miscalculation of truly biblical proportions, North Korea will not be starting a war anytime soon. And frankly, even IF the US decided to launch airstrikes against North Korean nuclear targets, I don’t believe the North Koreans would respond by starting a regime-terminating war. I say (and will continue to say) a lot of bad things about the North Koreans on this blog, but two words I have never used (seriously) to describe the North Korean leadership are “crazy” and “suicidal.”

One more thing before I go - the “progress” made during the Clinton Administration was no “progress” - it was a lost bet. It’s fairly common knowledge now that the concessions made by the North Koreans were made with the expectation that North Korea would go belly up before the US had to make good on those concessions. The North Koreans, for their part, hedged their bets as well by continuing a clandestine nuclear program. Given that the “progress” was based on false expectations from everyone involved, it seems to me rather poor term to apply in this case.

I’d write something much more coherent, but I’m a bit sleepy at the moment.

It is easier for South Korea, China, Japan and the US to
watch NK’s die alone than seek regime change and lead to
death of the citizens of any of those other countries.

I just wish the rest of the people would admit that choice.

But they never do, do they? They cringe from the word “appeasement”
and switch it to terms like progress and diplomacy and “finding a way”
to “turn North Korea around.”

We would rather pretend we are going to get “adequate inspections” and
use aid as a means to force NK into reforms, but the reality has always
been —- the cost of seeking a North Korean collapse (and possible
explosion outward) or take them out through direct military confrontation
are to high.

I should say, because it is the central point, we mean “costs to us”
because the cost to the North Koreans is going to be high no matter
which path is taken….

But at least we get to feel better about ourselves….

first off, a bit much is being made by many of cumings the supposed jerk and not enough about the issue at hand. while i’ll grant that character flaws obviously must be taken into account in assessing the validity of fact claims (especially in the maddening absence of source citations… lord, undergrads get eviscerated for less), it seems that much (i’m not saying all) of the criticism is based on avoiding the policy issues.

that said, i think IMADTTS skillfully captures the crux of the dilemma (sorry marmot, for filling your blog with another’s work, but s/he doesn’t have comments)
“As for the contention that ???뱊o one really knows what Bush wants from his Korea policy,??? I thought that Bolton made it clear: The End of North Korea. The determination of Bush to eliminate the Kim Jong Il regime and his unwillingness to treat Kim Jong Il as if he were simply another world leader is exactly what Cumings et al have pilloried Bush for. In this case, I think they??р꽓re right: refusing to acknowledge or deal with North Korea may make the U.S. feel morally consistent but it probably won??р꽓t make the regime go away any time soon and, therefore, will do little to relieve the plight of the North Korean people.”

Now, i’d say the bipolarism of the Bush admin. is indeed true and can be found within the State Department. Powell has been far more on the diplomatic side (see http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2002/10983.htm where Powell says “we wholeheartedly support South Korea’s sunshine policy”), even as Burton takes the “crime and punishment” (leon sigal’s term) regime destruction approach.

More importantly, it is IMADTTS’s final assertion that seems irrefutable.

Unless you feel that agreement in any shape or form = appeasement, perhaps you can overcome the distaste for Cuming’s partisanship to acknowledge that the reason he spares Clinton is because under Clinton (via Carter of course) progress was made, while under Bush, domestic politics or personal conviction are making such progress impossible. In sum, the hard line is in effect, no line.

For those who shun “agreasement,” let’s just say that your moral calculus is far more cold than even the former CINCROK, Gen. Luck (no commie hippie obviously), who has assessed the situation as such: “If you fight, you win. But you spend a billion dollars, you lose a million lives, and you bring great trauma and hardship on the psyche of both countries, so I’m not sure winning is a win. . . Every day we don’t fight, we win.” (http://www.thebulletin.org/iss.....sigal.html)

Granted it’s a shitty win, but at least one in which the peninsula remains habitable (even if, yes, that habitation means the repression of the DPRK).

A little off topic, but I would recommend that those who advocate regime change at all costs to take a short while to meditate on Young-hae Chang’s powerful “Operation NuKorea”. While it is obviously wrong to compare the power of such art to the harrowing testimony of “Hidden Gulag” and the other material at freenorthkorea.net, it does provide some flesh and blood, if even abstractly (yes, a paradox, i know… such is art), to our contemplation of the ultimate “what if?”

I asked someone who went through school with Cumming, and he confirmed
much of my guess about him. He is clearly a product of the Vietnam Era.
They way I described him in this conversation is that he has made a career
out of trying his damnest to make the Korean War the Vietnam one.
This other well-known Korean scholar said, “Sure. At that time, with all
the stories coming about about how the US government was lieing to us and doing
all this nasty stuff, you started to ask questions about what other terrible things
they’d been doing.”

Cummings isn’t alone in this. He is a part of his generation. It was also a generation
that had significant numbers of intellectuals who fought hard to ignore the reality of the
Soviet Union well into the 1980s, because they wanted to believe in an alternative system to
the corruptive nature of capitalism they saw especially personified in the United States.

But Cummings is a more extreme version than the norm from this group. He is still doggedly
fighting the battles of the 1960s and 70s.

And I think people should call him on it.

He does show it most in these articles. Search around the internet and find his reaction to
the AP story of the Nogunri Massacre and see how much Vietnam colors his thought.

And heck, I’ll go even further. Cummings is a dangerous type of intellect, much like the Korean-
German Song. They have the allure of great scholarship and have great intellect,
but that just makes their final products that much worse.

What I mean is, how many of you after reading Cummings believe, if he were made Ultimate Arbitrator
between North Korea and the world, he would work things out in a way that they would be so much better?

That his great scholarship has lead him to understand the situation better and thus able to make it all
great if he had the power to do as he wished?

That is what bothers me greatly about people like Cummings and Chompshky and Said.

They are so wrapped up in finding ways to strike at what they don’t like, they distort reality to the point
they hamper making things better.

The fact that I’ve heard from a couple of people that Cummings has thin skin and a sharp tongue when people
critize his giving a pass to North Korea on most occasions only makes me feel I’d dislike him as a person as
much as I dislike his career as a scholar.

Is that really true? Let us go back in a time machine 10 years and have a war that brings an end to the Pyongyang regime. Well, such a war would have killed a lot of people. But would it have killed as many people as died of starvation and illness and from being in concentration camps? It would have killed different people and South Korean and American people. But might it on balance have saved more North Koreans than it caused the death of South Koreans?

We face the problem going forward of trying to guess what the death toll will be for continuing to leave the Pyongyang regime in power. How to count that per year? What sort of spike will there be if the Dear Leader sells some nukes to some Middle Eastern customers? There’s a lot of uncertainty in trying to guess the numbers of those future deaths.