Well, I guess this is something to keep in mind when reading Eric Alterman discussing Korea:
But first, one person upon whom I frequently rely for my understanding about the Koreas is Bruce Cumings.
Well, alrighty then…
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Add that dude to the list of Commies to send to Guantanamo when the towelheads leave the place…
“Axis of evil”, “pygmy”. Hell that ain’t nothin’ compared to the shame I felt when, in 2000, North Korea paraded Madeleine Albright around like Jane Fonda.
http://www.freerepublic.com/fo.....2613/posts
As an American, I demand an apology, dammit!
Enough said. Next…
I’m always of two minds when Bruce Cummings is mentioned. To me, he has never been anything other than polite and kind. He has helped me with research and gone out of his way to find references for me or to help me locate sources. He is, at least to me, a gentleman full of respect and kindness.
Then, I see what he writes and his opinions on the two Koreas and China and Russia and I just want to vomit. How can such a good person write and think such appalling things? I wonder what kind of medication he was on when visiting North Korea and writing about the paradise that it was before the evil Americans tore it away, chewed it up and spit it out.
He has certainly made sure his name and writings will be argued until the end of time.
That’s consistent with what one K-scholar — you’d recognize the name — tells me. In person, Cummings is apparently a first-class human being: polite, sincere, and generous. He’s probably also the most discredited historian since March 1945, when Josef Goebbels sat by Hitler’s beside reading him Thomas Carlyle’s “History of Frederick the Great” to take the edge off the rumbling of the Russian guns.
No, the Soviet archives have not been kind to Mr. Cummings. And I fear (I should say, believe) that there is more such dusting-up ahead of us.
Glad to hear the positive comments about Cumings/Cummings as a human being. On the plus side, he did master Korean, no mean feat. On the negative side, garbage in, garbage out. More likely, as time passes, Cumings will fade into the list of discredited historians however hard the true believers of the far left try. Perhaps he will be fortunate enough to find some other period of Korean history he can research and write about to redeem his scholarship.
My copy of North Korea: Another Nation didn’t even take the shit off my ass as I wiped…..
I have heard, and someone please correct this if it’s wrong, that Cumings’ command of Korean is not at all fluent but that his wife and (depending on who is telling the story) his assistants are the ones doing all the Korean-to-English legwork. Basically, he tells them what he’s looking for and they find it.
I have no idea if it’s true or not, but I have heard that from at least two independent sources. Of course, this could just be something made up to smear someone who was regarded with disdain, an attempt to make an academic hack look like even more of an academic hack.
Anyone able to affirm or dispute this?
I don’t think Cummings had his wife or any legion of graduate student assistants around to help him when he did the archival work for the Korean war books; he was still basically a grad student himself when he began that project. There’s a difference between fluency and having sufficient reading ability.
On a side note —- I saw on TV tonight (FOX News of course) a prof at a univ. in Wisconson who is teaching a class — I believe it was — on introduction to Islam —- who is teaching as a block in class schedule —- how the 9/11 attacks were a black ops operation done the US as part of a long planned strategy to get the War on Terror started. He kept talking about the mountain of scientific evidence that the US was clearly behind 9/11 and most likely behind the attacks in Spain and Britian later on…….
I still can’t believe I used to believe the more education a person had, the smarter they were…..what a dumbass…..
Sperwer,
Don’t take this the wrong way, but what you’re saying is speculative, right? I mean, you are saying you suppose it’s plausible he himself could have sufficient reading ability, you’re not saying for sure that you know that he in fact does, right?
usinkorea, that whole the-more-education-a-person-has thing works out in the aggregate, but for some individuals, a little knowledge can indeed be a dangerous thing.
The couple of times I’ve seen Cumings interviewed as a specialist in Korean-language documentary programs in Korean TV he has spoken in English. But that doesn’t say anything about his reading ability, does it.
One of my professors at Kyung Hee had Cumings as a professor at Northwestern. He said his verbal Korean skills are legit.
For what it’s worth, I once helped arrange a Bruce Cumings address at a local think tank.
He was, as everyone else says, a thoroughly pleasant man. He gave his address in English, saying, reasonably enough, that he felt a little rusty to deliver an academically-tinged speech in Korean. Yet as far as I could gather, he didn’t speak Korean to any of the assembled Koreans in person either.
As I recall, Mr. Cumings delivered — to an extremely sceptical and very conservative audience — a strenuous denial that he had actually said South Korea started the war.
I count myself among the first rank of Cumings bashers but, considering how strongly he attacks Korea-watchers who only speak the “World Language,” I find it hard to believe that homie would not have a good command of Korean.
> denial that he had actually said South Korea started the war.
Because he never did say or write that. That would be a gross-over-simplification of his 1300+ pages of “Origins of the Korean War”. His points were a lot more subtle and complex, and closer to being true, than that. He is accused by far-right-wing commentators (who apparently never read the books) of a much more extreme position than he ever took. His work did bring to light many factors of that crucial five-year period that nobody else had reported on or discussed; he increased our understanding of that time, the mistakes made and crimes committed by many parties. Many have disagreed with his interpretations of events, but he has never been shown to have deliberately falsified any of the evidence that he presented for his arguments.
And give him credit that when the Russian archives were made available to the scholarly community, he cleanly and publicly admitted where he had gotten it wrong, and revised his ideas in future publications… He is an honorable Scholar worthy of the name — unlike, say, Noam Chomsky.
I disagree with quite a bit of his perspectives, but I do think he is worthy of that much defense.
Sanshinsŏn, I’m not convinced. Has Cumings retracted his screed of a foreward of I.F. Stone’s “Hidden History of the Korean War”? Or, for that matter, what was he doing in his post-humiliation book (I think it was “Korea’s Place in the Sun”) in which he went into painstaking (and often speculative) detail about alleged atrocities by US and ROK forces in the Korean War while giving short-shrift to far, far, far worse and considerably more numerous alleged atrocities by the North Koreans during the same period?
Cumings has done a great deal of damage in guiding Korea’s left down a dangerous path, one that, if the US-ROK alliance crumbles as so many of the blog participants seem to wish it would, will eventually have been far more detrimental to Cumings’ beloved Korea than anything the Americans ever actually did.
Cumings Origins of the Korean War was arguably the only piece of scholaship he has done.
That was an academic work — but it was also so guided by an overt bias that was easy to see - anyone not familiar with other academic work on Korea would be doing a big disservice to themselves to only read Origins.
The bulk of the rest of his work has been a huge embarrasment to the word “academic”.
It has been in the very same ballpark as a Chomsky.
By North Korea: Another Nation —–
it was clear he had thrown out the window any pretension of trying to be a scholar — and fully embraced his position of the Chompsky-ite of Korean studies.
I would also say this —-
His work in Origins was FAR from being “closer to the truth” than others had looked at for the time period in question.
It was a perfect example of a scholar using a very deep seated bias to twist things again and again and again and again and again to fit that bias. It was clear at the time. We did not need the Russia archives to open to know that. The only people who didn’t want to know that were the people who wanted to agree with him.
And above all —-
Origins and the whole of Cumings’ career has very little to do with North or South Korea.
It has ASOLUTELY EVERYTHING to do with the Vietnam War and internal American society.
Some good points, i admit.
But as i said it has never been shown that he was dishonest or corrupt in his scholarship — just biased to leftist viewpoint, and he’s hardly the only biased scholar around. Sometimes i get the impression here that some of you think that the leftist viewpoint should not be heard, ought to be censored. I like to look at all reasonable sides to an argument, to keep a balanced mind, and enjoy talking to or reading intelligent people on the left, so often excluded from America’s mass-media; they have something to say…
If you look at the history and scholarship of the Korean War and the five years before it, it was very heavily biased; the blunders of the American government and the crimes of the SK rightists and ROK gov were totally whitewashed, while those of the Communists were amplified. Then you can see the value of what Cumings uncovered — the other side of the story, perhaps. Now in the 21st Century the record is better-balanced, the serious discussions come closer to the truth of the situation.
Clearly, nobody should read him alone as suggested above, he should be read in conjunction with all the other academic-level writings on the subject, including those who refute his ideas. That South Korea’s young generation has taken him as Gospel, using his scholarship to back up foolish & dangerous political ideas, is not really his fault, as i see it — that happens to Professors all the time. The American far-right-wingers surely have a long record of abusing scholarship towards partisan ends themselves, yes…?
Sanshinsŏn wrote:
But as i said it has never been shown that he was dishonest or corrupt in his scholarship — just biased to leftist viewpoint, and he’s hardly the only biased scholar around.
I would say he’s disingenuous and his arguments specious. Whether that borders on dishonesty or not is beside the point: his willful distortion of the truth to bend it toward his agenda has been extremely detrimental.
Sometimes i get the impression here that some of you think that the leftist viewpoint should not be heard, ought to be censored.
I don’t believe bullshit should be paraded around as truth, whether it’s from the left or the right. Cumings’ work has been used and abused by pro-Pyongyang forces, perhaps to the point of setting the ROK down a path of future damage and destruction. He is an academic mountebank and he deserves the scorn and derision he gets. That’s not censorship.
I like to look at all reasonable sides to an argument, to keep a balanced mind, and enjoy talking to or reading intelligent people on the left, so often excluded from America’s mass-media; they have something to say…
Does being on the left mean you have to accept or agree with the charlatan academia of someone like Cumings? That, too, is nonsense.
If you look at the history and scholarship of the Korean War and the five years before it, it was very heavily biased; the blunders of the American government and the crimes of the SK rightists and ROK gov were totally whitewashed, while those of the Communists were amplified.
That is not set right by lies and attempts to whitewash the North’s more severe and more numerous atrocities, particularly when it was the North that started the war.
Then you can see the value of what Cumings uncovered — the other side of the story, perhaps. Now in the 21st Century the record is better-balanced, the
serious discussions come closer to the truth of the situation.
Bruce Cumings is still trying to promote a bullshit point of view, one that engages in shameless apologism for North Korea. That is not better balanced.
That South Korea’s young generation has taken him as Gospel, using his scholarship to back up foolish & dangerous political ideas, is not really his fault, as i see it — that happens to Professors all the time.
Whiskey, tango, fuck! Bruce Cumings is actively trying to promote his viewpoint. It’s not like he was sitting in a bar and in a drunken stupor said something about North Korea and then some author who overheard it decided to run with it: he writes more books and gives lectures expounding and espousing his distorted viewpoint on South-North-US relations.
While buyer beware is an important lesson, the manufacturer is still responsible for purveying a wildly faulty product.
The American far-right-wingers surely have a long record of abusing scholarship towards partisan ends
themselves, yes…?
Shame on you, Sanshinsŏn. Shame on you. Shame on you.
I am a critic of Cumings but I am not a far-right winger by any definition of the term. For you to suggest that the right doing that makes it somehow okay (or less not-okay?) for someone like Cumings to do this on the left, for you to suggest that criticism of Cumings and his writings comes from the right or is intrinsically right-oriented, for you to muddy the criticism with such a smear…
Shame on you, Sanshinseon. Shame on you.
Kushibo:
You are correct. Although I’ve met Cummings a few times, I have no basis of assessing his Korean language ability; I’m just assuming that when he was doing Origins his reading ability must have been pretty good, because it’s difficult to imagine he had much help combing through the archival materials. Obviously, he used a lot of KMAC material, but he also cites an awful lot of untranslated Korean sources.
My impressions of Cummings were also of someone who was unusually courteous and even gracious, but at the same time so wedded to his own ideological biases that he often seemed literally incapable of understanding questions or facts that suggested their inadequacy. As USINKOREA correctly observes, Cummings weltanschauung was formed by a very simple-minded version of the leftist critique of the Vietnam War and that both determined and (because of its anachronisticity) deeply corrupted his scholarship on Korea. I say corrupted because it’s more than just the presence of an overt ideological bias in the Origins. The bias overwhelms the material, leads Cummings to misrepresent a lot of it and raises so many questions regarding the what he may or may not have included or suppressed as to make the books very suspect and nearly useless (unless of course you are a true beleive in his thesis - which is both the point he was trying to achieve - a sort of anti-hegemonic hegemony of the data — and why I don;t think corrupt is too strong a word. I have to part compnay with Sanshinseon here because, although Cummings has acknowledged some factual errors when he really didn;t have any choice, unless he wanted to be considered daft, he just keeps going on with the worst sorts of innuendo and rhetoric and aplogia for the NORKS. He’s just like Chomsky - maybe worse, because his whole field is history; Chomsky at least still may have some credibility as a linguist (I don’t know).
I agree he was honest as far as academic integrity goes.
I would not say he went out to twist facts to fit his agenda.
His inner, subconscious agenda is so strong, it just worked out that way.
And the point is that it is not a reading of Korean histroy from the left —
—- it is a reading from the fringe which can be easily recognized by most others.
And there is a danger from making the fringe figure too much in the discussion —– it begins to validate view points that shouldn’t be validated.
When I was an English lit major, one of my profs said, “It’s true no one interpretation is absolutely right, but it is also true there are clearly wrong ones.”
I think that is important enough to keep in mind.
Which is why I gave a Bingo to Kushibo’s “I don’t believe bullshit should be paraded around as truth”
“intelligent people on the left, so often excluded from
America’s mass-media”
That’s a generous reading of the situation that a whole lot of people would disagree with.
How far to the left do your own views have to be to consider the US media shuns views from the left????
“If you look at the history and scholarship of the Korean War
and the five years before it, it was very heavily biased; the
blunders of the American government and the crimes of the SK
rightists and ROK gov were totally whitewashed, while those of
the Communists were amplified.”
—–I don’t think that is true. It might fit South Korean academic thought, but I don’t think it fits with what you find in American scholarship…
Cumings’ North Korea Another Nation should sum up his career.
It is an utterly worthless piece of crap book.
It is not worth the ink and paper it is printed with.
Anyone who picks it up who doesn’t come into it a fringe true believer —
—will easily see the fact he spend SO MUCH of his time writing about the United States in it —-
in a type of style and tone that clearly sets him out as a defender of Pyongyang —
—for the simple reason he believes the US is worse —–
shows his reaction to being proven so wrong by both the evolution of history and the Russian archives
he has tossed aside all pretense.
I know I am repeating myself, but it is they key to his position in the world of academia.
And by the evolution of history -
I mean North Korea’s utter collapse in the 1990s.
It became impossible for anyone to continue to argue that North Korea was on par with the South or better developed - economically and socially.
But Cumings has decided to do this impossible.
I wish I hadn’t flushed my copy of NK Another Nation —
there is one point in the book where he is finally admitting some terrible things either the senior or junior Kim did -
- and his response?
“They were communists, right?”
I was a glib jab and could have been read as a backhand denial rather than admitting the truth.
It really was contemptable.
It made me want to punch him in the face.
And it should.
He does know what happened in the 1990s.
It seems to have perhaps sobered him up to some of the things done by Pyongyang before the 1990s.
But —-
again —–
all that matters is that the US in Vietnam trumps everything else.
The title is NK: Another Nation.
The title itself should piss people off.
It is saying NK is just another nation in the world - like a France.
What it means to Cumings is — “At least North Korea isn’t as bad as Johnson/Nixon and the US!!”
That is contemptable, whether you dislike US politics or have a left of center view point or not.
You don’t have to champion evil dictatorships to attack US foreign policy…..
OK, i see… Actually i have never read his later books, Place in the Sun and Another Nation — i’ll take your word for it that they are pretty bad and way-overly biased… Some people go off on an ideological tangent and never recover their balance, just keep getting farther out in left field. You’re probably right that his anti-American obsession resulted from watching what happened in Vietnam — that affected a lot of people that way.
Kushibo has a very emotional reaction to Cumings, it seems — says that he’s a liar who intentionally promotes bullshit for pernicious reasons, tho i’ve not seen any other serious reviewer claiming that… but OK, i know that you’ve studied the subject some. I don’t think i was making any “smear” up there as you say i should be ashamed of, however — just may be trying a little too hard to be even-handed.
I went through the “Origins” books at Yonsei grad school in the modern Korea-America relations class of well-known historian Lew Young-ik, an open admirer of Prez Rhee, very Conservative and pro-American in outlook, certainly a Korean on the Right (as well as a very Strict professor, he gave me a B, my only non-A in that program!). Perhaps you took the same course in a different semester…?
He picked his way through those books very critically, pointing out all kinds of details that he thought were off and interpretations of events that he thought were biased, but he never suggested that Cummings was a liar or not of academic quality — i’m sure that if he thought so he never would have assigned the books for our class. Rather, in fact, he told us that these works were important milestones in the modern understanding of what happened during that period, that every serious observer of modern Korea had to read them (while remaining conscious and careful of the leftist bias) — not only to learn how to refute their general outlook, but also because they contain plenty of event-reporting that was not previously available. His views largely shaped the opinions i’ve been presenting here…
But you have your own opinions, Kushibo, and if you think that he presented nothing of value and should only be bashed, that’s OK.