Rating: 
Summary: Poor, Misunderstood Kim Dynasty
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Surprisingly slanted, rarely insightful.
Review: Prof. Cumings, who has been very famous for so-called revisionist historical studies on the Korean War, esp. 'The Origins of the Korean War I & II, has been one of the most reliable Korean watchers in the world. The reality of the North Korea has been hidden in a veil of secrecy, so that discours on the country would be very dubious or biased, partly because information on the country has been extremely limited and partly because there have been a lot of political intrigues such as explosions of airplanes and kidnappings by he state agency. It cannot be denied that the Kim Jong Il Regime is responsible for those criminals. Prof. Cumings, however, claimes that unless we overcome too much simple dichotomy between Good and Evil, we would remain far away from resolving the historically profound problem. Prof. Cumings insists that we must be sachlich (Weber). Such cool-headed insight must be drived from his excellent historical studies. A brilliant and insightful work.
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