Bruce Cumings, a professor at the University of Chicago, wrote The Korean War: A History, an eye-opening explanation that exposes the truth. He recounts stories of violent revolts, bloodbaths, and other horrors. His extensive research is combined into a compelling book that is able to disprove historical fabrications. He provides numerous sources, including official U.S. government documents, and with them, he challenges the reader to reevaluate their conceptions.
Before the Korean War was “either misunderstood, forgotten, or willfully ignored, but thanks to Cumings, people can adjust their perspective. He describes the war in great detail, showing the reader that America was never the hero that it’s so commonly portrayed as. Four million Koreans died; nearly two-thirds were innocent citizens and in the end, all sides were equally at fault for the tragedies that had occurred.
He argues that the Korean War started when Japan overran Manchuria. They were harsh and unjust and at the end of World War II, Koreans were happy to see them leave. When they divided the North from the South with the 38th parallel, the South became a U.S. protectorate and the North was under the Soviet Union. The war officially began in June of 1950.
To the United States, the war seemed like a separate struggle in comparison to World War II. Regardless, they still felt threatened as Communism continued to spread. Even though Korea wasn’t a strategic priority, America didn’t want to seem negligent towards Communism. Cumings states, “Here was the Vietnam War we came to know before Vietnam—gooks, napalm, rapes, whores, an unreliable ally, a cunning enemy, fundamentally untrained GIs fighting a war their top generals barely understood, fragging of officers, contempt for the know-nothing civilians back home, devilish battles indescribable even to loved ones, press handouts from General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters apparently scripted by comedians or lunatics, an ostensible vision of bringing freedom and liberty to a sordid dictatorship run by servants of Japanese imperialism.”
Cumings reveals massacres executed by each party, proving that contrary to propaganda and popular belief, America was never the hero. They helped organize and arm strong military forces. According to Cumings, the U.S. had participated in more civilian massacres than North Korea. They had dropped over half a million tons of bombs and thousands of tons of napalm.
The US caused a slew of predicaments because they were “without forethought, due consideration, or self-knowledge, the United States barged into a political, social, and cultural thicket without knowing what it was doing, and now it finds that it cannot get out.” America really had no idea what they were doing. Cumings argued that they didn’t win the war because “they never knew their enemy – and they still don’t.” The Americans fought savagely, killing many innocent people.
Back in the homeland, Joseph McCarthy was stirring up the public. America’s problem was “not a matter of forgetting” but from the McCarthy’s “culture of repression.” Cumings traces America’s current foreign policy to Korea, where they have multiple international military bases, a considerable army, and a permanent national security. He believes that this is the result of a careful and constrained policy of restraint growing into a perpetual and incessant worldwide crusade. Cumings ends the book by saying the United States is “the policeman of the world.”
To Asia, the war began long before American interference and continues to GO ON, lasting generations that still remains to plague present-day Korea. It wasn’t like Poland, invaded by the Germans in World War II. It was a civil war, “a war fought primarily by Koreans from conflicting social systems, for Korean goals. It did not last three years, but rather it had a beginning in 1932, and has never ended.” He explained that the North Koreans felt as though the war was a convenient method to “settle the hash of the top command of the Southern army, nearly all of whom had served the Japanese.”
Cumings asserts that the North Korean government is an “unusual but predictable combination of monarchy, nationalism, and Korean political culture.” He goes on to explain that “there is no evidence in the North Korean experience of the mass violence against whole classes of people or the wholesale ‘purge’ that so clearly characterized Stalinism, and that was particularly noteworthy in the scale of deaths in the land reform campaigns in China and North Vietnam and the purges of the Cultural Revolution.”
After three long, brutal years, there is still “no closure” to this “appallingly dirty” war. The war never formally ended and instead, it tapered off with a truce in 1953, but the consequences continue to pervade Korea, and America as well, even now, sixty years later. Cumings writes that it “solved nothing” and that everything was “all for naught.”