The Marmot’s Hole

In the Weekly Chosun magazine, the Korea Military Research Institute’s Kim Haeng-bok looks at how interpretations of the Korean War and its origins have changed over the years.

Broadly speaking, study of the origins of the Korean War has passed through three stages. The oldest school of thought believed the war began with a North Korean invasion of the South at the instigation of and support from Soviet leader Josef Stalin. Beginning in the 1960s, however, American revisionist scholars cast the origins of the Korean War in a very different light, blaming the United States and South Korea for the war and characterizing North Korea’s invasion of the South as a “war of national liberation.” This school of historical science would have a profound impact on South Korean scholarship, with the revisionist view becoming dominant in Korea during the 1980s.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of the Soviet archives, however, the revisionist school would come under serious fire in 1990s, and a new view of the origins of the Korean War would take form. Like the original school, this new school blamed North Korea for invading the South, but rather than blame Stalin as the prime mover behind the invasion, it instead regarded North Korean leader Kim Il-sung as the mastermind behind the attack. The revisionist school, however, won’t go away. Rather than being consigned to the dustbin of history, revisionists now argue that it’s unimportant to debate who started the war and how since the war ultimately a war of liberation, and blame U.S. intervention in the Korean War for preventing the unification of the country.

In case you are interested, I’ve translated the piece below. Enjoy.

The Korean War, which began at the 38th parallel 56 years ago on June 25, 1950, continued to rage brutally on the Korean Peninsula for three years, one month and two days. Yet even the memory of the Korean War, which could be called the most shocking event in Korea’s modern history, is helplessly heading toward oblivion as time passes.

But with various claims being raised, the debate over interpretations of the war is growing fierce. In particular, the erstwhile established opinion that the war started as a result of a North Korean invasion and hence the North bore responsibility for the conflict is being attacked by some scholars, who claim it to be an anti-Korean interpretation based on anti-communism, and this is causing confusion among the young who didn’t experience the war directly. Even with secret documents being released after the collapse of the Soviet Union revealing that the Soviets intervened in the Korean War, there are still people who view the Korean War as a “war to liberate the Korean people.”

Early scholars of the Korean War found the conflict’s origins in “Stalin’s aggressive imperialism.” Put briefly, this view posited that the war was planned, prepared for and led by Josef Stalin. Yet different claims were raised as to Stalin’s motivation for starting the war. First there was the theory that Stalin started the Korean War to disperse to the Far East growing American military pressure in Europe after the formation of NATO. Another theory was that the Soviets started the war to put in check U.S. moves to conclude a separate peace treaty with Japan at the exclusion of Moscow. Another was that the “expansionist” Stalin was always looking for weak spots to expand Soviet power; with U.S. troops being completely withdrawn from South Korea in the summer of 1949, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson excluding South Korea from the American Far Eastern defense perimeter in his January 1950 press conference, and South Korea’s conservatives being roundly defeated in the general election of May 1950, Stalin may have judged that South Korea was one such weak spot.

Besides these, there are other interpretations: Stalin may have started the war to watch the American and Western response before putting into practice his strategy to communize the world, that through successfully communizing South Korea through a North Korean invasion, U.S. prestige would suffer, and through a display of Soviet power, he could encourage communist forces in other Asian regions.

These theories, predicated on the view that the war broke out under Stalin’s initiative, are characterized by being analysis based not on official documents clearly proving the causes of the war, but rather on circumstantial evidence. Accordingly, despite the reality of war being clear, the explanations interpreting the war have instead caused confusion.

While research into the Korean War was handled rather carelessly in Korea, in the United States, research into the war was yielding partial results. In particular, in the 1960s, against the background of the fiercely raging anti-war movement and civil rights movement, a new academic school of “revisionist scholars” appeared in the world of American historical science, particularly diplomatic history, with research into the Korean War taking on a new aspect.

“Revisionism” is academic jargon referring to a school of Cold War history research that unfolded in the 1960s, primarily in the United States. Scholars of this school, basing their theories on the historical materialism of Marxism and neo-Marxism, claimed that from the 19th century, the United States had pursued an imperialistic foreign policy out of economic necessity, and that this policy had caused the Cold War. In so doing, these scholars raised the flag of revolt against the established theories. Some of these scholars began examining the causes of major wars in which the United States participated, the Korean War among them.

Revisionist theories grew influential after the appearance Bruce Cumings’ work. In examining the background of the Korean War, Cumings, classified as a member of the so-called “New Left,” came into the academic limelight by analyzing a tremendous amount of material scattered in the United States, Korea and Japan and constructing an uncommonly (for a foreign scholar) systemic understanding of Korean modern history. A factor allowing him to produce such works of painstaking effort was that he was greatly helped by the brisk release of material from Korea, the United States, Great Britain and elsewhere beginning from the late 1970s.

Represented by Cumings, revisionist theories as to the origins of the Korean War were that the war began because of an arms race between North and South, that Syngman Rhee’s calls to unify the country through an invasion of the North had provoked the North’s invasion of the South, and that the strengthening of U.S. military commitments to South Korea had provoked the North. While furtively computing responsibility for the war onto the United States and South Korea, they granted onto North Korea national legitimacy, intentionally excluded Soviet support for the war and designated the war as a “war of national liberation.”

Revisionist theories about the Korean War were greatly influential not just in the United States, but also to Korean scholars of modern history. In the 1980s, bookstores across the country were flooded with modern histories of Korea written from the revisionist perspective. Revisionism, which was no more than just one non-mainstream school of American diplomatic history, had become in Korea the mainstream school of modern history research for nearly 10 years until the early 1990s. The result of the barrage of revisionist work on the Korean people and academia was that their theories and claims became the dominant mainstream interpretation of the origins of the Korean War. This period was when Marxism and critical social theory was on the rise in the United States as well.

Yet because of revisionism’s ideological biases, flaws in its methodology, and its limited access to materials, it faced reevaluation after the end of the Cold War. If we look at Cumings’ work, the first problem is the research methodology. Which is to say, because he decides the conclusion beforehand, and then builds his theories and selects and uses historical data conforming to that conclusion, he does not yield objective results.

Revisionist interpretations of the Korean War faced intense criticism entering the 1990s, and its value was greatly shaken. The expression “revisionist with his head hung low” depicts the situation well. This was partially because of errors of interpretation connoted by their view of the Korean War, but more decisive was the mass release of historical materials from the communist world following the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. Seen from the angle, the revisionists were sort of intellectual victims of the Cold War.

Recently, the international debate over the origins of the Korean War has taken a third position—that the war started at North Korea’s initiative with Soviet support. This point is clearly proven by several official documents. The theory goes that the North Korean army’s invasion of the South was preemptive and full-scale, and was meticulously planned and prepared for ahead of time. That is to say, Kim Il-sung, who misjudged that the U.S. military would not intervene and that South Korean communists would rise in revolt in concert with an invasion, invaded South Korea after convincing Stalin. When you comprehensively look at several historical materials, Soviet political and military control over North Korea just prior to the start of the Korean War was nearly perfect.

Just because of this, however, the revisionists have not disappeared, nor has there been founded a new school of research that could completely conquer them. The revisionists, even while acknowledging that the war began with a North Korean invasion of the South, maintain their claims in altered form, positing that since the war was fundamentally a “people’s liberation war,” it was meaningless to discuss an “invasion of the North” or “invasion of the South,” and that had the United States not intervened in the conflict, Korea would have been unified.

These claims connote that even if the North started the war, what’s the problem?

Yet avoiding seeking who was primarily responsible for the Korean War, which caused massive material and human losses, and who started it is neither politically or academically appropriate. If the revisionists had been able to find evidence lending support to the view that the war began with a South Korean-U.S. invasion of the North, they would be calling for us to thoroughly inquire into who started the war first. Their claim that since the war was a “war of national liberation,” it was meaningless to inquire into who started it suggests that it would be OK for North Korea to start a “war of national liberation” at any time.

Moreover, they express regret that because of the intervention of UN military forces, the Korean Peninsula was not unified under communist rule, since without the participation of the American-led UN force, South Korea could have been communized by the North, and the Korean Peninsula may have been unified under the red banner. Yet it is extremely contradictory to blame outside intervention in response to the invasion when Kim Il-sung started the war after dragging in outside factors, namely the Soviet Union and China.

The reality of national division and ideological factors are still stumbling blocks in objectively examining the truth of the Korean War. Moreover, another factor behind the fact that despite the tons of research, there are still many things about the war that remain unknown us is that almost all Soviet, Chinese and North Korean documents pertaining to the war have yet to be released. When these materials are made public, the truth behind the Korean War will become clearer.