We just posted the second hour of the Dean’s interview with Professor Cumings… if you’d care to watch you can find it here…

http://mslawmedia.org/2011/12/cumings-korean-war-part-2/

We look forward to hearing your reactions…

He is sourcing secret senate testimonies that he himself only came to know recently and is claiming that North Korea’s actions are justified because they MUST have known back in 1950′s exactly what Acheson testified to in the US senate. An assumption Bruce Cummings never bothers to verify or substantiate.

And George Marshall’s amazing note? North Koreans knew about that too? Koreans knew of the pro-japan sympathizers in the government and the military. But the facts are, at the time they were the only ones prepared to defend South Korea against aggression by the North. Only in early 2000′s did the truth and reconciliation commission finish its work to reveal the extent to which pro-japan sympathizers played in the role of South Korea’s revival.

And It’s false to claim more innocent North Koreans citizens were killed when almost all of South Korea (except Busan perimeter) was occupied by the North. The war took place in every inch of soil of Korea. You think the South Koreans were somehow miraculously spared of damage in war? Did North not utilize artillery? Ask Bruce Cummings for me where exactly does the ancient artillery pieces in North Korea still aimed at Seoul have come from if not during the war?

The Diplomat’s comment above spells out exactly where Bruce’s scholarship stems from. His mistaken belief that North Korea is above reproach because he can understand where they come from. Even your assertion about Yi Dynasty reeks of assumptions. Yi dynasty was famed for its reverence for scholarship rather than militarism. Look to Japan’s Invasion of Chosun by Toyotomi Hideyoshi in 16th century, and what sorry state Korea’s military was under by then. If Chosun was truly military first, we would have been more successful in repelling invasion by Mongols, Ming, Khitan, Manchus. Your lack of knowledge about things that you espouse is astounding. That you have a lectern from which you are actually allowed to indoctrinate your students is just beyond nauseating.

Please be a bit more humble. Study a bit more. Soldiers from US, Canada, Ethiopia, New Zealand, Turkey, Netherlands, etc. did not die defending South Korea under the banner of UN to have their sacrifice cheapened by your backhanded scholarship. I owe my existence and life to their sacrifice, and this personal fiction masquerading as historical scholarship is just absolutely ridiculous.

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.