Review by mim4@mim.org
2 February 2003
Reading of the standoff between the Clinton administration and north Korea over the latter's nuclear reactor at Yongbyon in Bruce Cumings' 1997 book Korea's Place in the Sun, one is reminded of Mao's dictum, "Make trouble, fail, make trouble again, fail again... till their doom--that is the logic of the imperialists and all reactionaries..." Cumings quotes extensively from bourgeois-mouthpiece editorials written ten years ago that could have appeared today, as they use the same, tired, non-specific invective.
For example, Cumings chides the fishwrap hacks of the early nineties for manufacturing the appearance of north Korean aggression by claiming that the north's army was concentrated near the demilitarized zone between north and south Korea--without noting (a) that this was not out of the ordinary or (b) the south's army and the 37,000 Amerikan troops in Korea were also concentrated near the demilitarized zone (pp. 468-470). Compare that to the recent wire report "U.S. Satellites See N. Korea Activity," which contained no new information but alleged the north had "11,000 artillery pieces" "that could rain between 200,000 and 300,000 shells per hour on South Korea." No mention is made of south Korean firepower or the fact that the Amerikans have access to nuclear artillery shells (and missiles and bombs). A shorter follow up story, "Pentagon: N. Korea Not Mobilizing Army" repeats the "11,000 artillery pieces" mantra verbatim.(1)
More striking--and more disturbing for those of us who don't want to see the capitalists nuke the humyn race into oblivion--Cumings' book reminds us that the earlier conflict also sprang from Amerikan nuclear threats. In January 1993, Bill Clinton authorized "Team Spirit" military exercises in Korea, based on a plan to invade the north which called for tactical nuclear strikes on "hard targets" like underground bunkers. Then the United $tates announced it was retargeting nuclear weapons from the former USSR to north Korea. North Korea responded by withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty-- justifiably, since "it is a basic principle of the nonproliferation regime that countries without nuclear weapons not be threatened by those that possess them." North Korea rejoined the Treaty after "Team Spirit" stopped (pp. 474-475).
The Bush Administration made similar public threats in its Nuclear Policy Review, leaked last March.(2) The Review named north Korea as a potential nuclear target and talked of the need for bunker-busting nuclear weapons. North Korea cited this "open declaration of nuclear war" when it again withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty on January 10 of this year. (3) Thus, in each case, Amerikan saber-rattling preceded any discussion of a north Korean nuclear weapons program. (It wasn't until last November that U.$. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly claimed north Korean officials told him they were developing nuclear weapons--something the north has strongly denied (4), although you'd never know that reading the New York Times.)
Cumings does a public service reviewing the history of U.$. nuclear weapons in Korea, which the United $tates acknowledges were there at least from 1958 to 1991 (pp. 477-483). This sordid story includes several near-misses, including after the famous 1976 axe fight in the demilitarized zone. Evidently the commanding U.$. general received permission to delegate authority to launch artillery and rocket strikes, "yielding the possibility that tactical nuclear weapons might be used without central command and control" (p. 481). Cumings also mentions the "formidable" south Korean nuclear weapons program begun in the seventies, something government mouthpieces fail to note when they rail against north Korea's alleged program (p. 482). Cumings quotes Amerikan government sources, making it clear that "Korean lives were hostage" to American nuclear policy aimed at containing north Korea, China, and even its allies in south Korea and Japan (p. 480).
Cumings is a bourgeois internationalist and believes economic cooperation between north and south Korea and the United $tates can avert war. There is some truth to this--at least as far as cooperation between the north and south is concerned--and this makes Cumings preferable to say, George Bush. However, Cumings overlooks the inherent rapaciousness of U.$. imperialism. This leads him (for example) to overestimate the significance of the 1994 "Agreed Framework" deal where north Korea promised to shut down its nuclear reactors in exchange for fuel oil, more modern reactors, and peace negotiations from the United $tates. "[By the turn of the century, i.e. now] if all goes well, the United Stats and the DPRK [north Korea] should finally have established full diplomatic relations and the North's energy program should be in full compliance with the energy regime."(p. 486)
The United $tates reneged on almost every promise it made in the "Agreed Framework."(4) Nuclear reactors which were supposed to go on-line this year are far from completion (only the concrete foundations are there). No peace talks or talks on normalizing U.$.-north Korea relations have been held. The United $tates had been supplying north Korea with fuel oil (when the north shut down its reactors it became dependent on outsiders for its energy needs) but the Bush regime stopped these shipments at the end of last year--another factor behind north Korea's decision to restart its reactors.
Cumings' rosy predictions have failed because the United $tates saw an opportunity in the north's distress, caused in part by loss of subsidies from the former Soviet Union and natural disasters--and exacerbated by U.$. policy. For example, due to lack of electrical power, the north's fertilizer production fell by more than 80% in the nineties, severely hampering its modern agricultural sector.(4) Why compromise when you can starve 'em out and have it all? Notably much of the foot dragging on the "Agreed Framework" occurred during the Clinton administration.(5) Although Clinton may have been too clever to put north Korea in the "axis of evil" or whine about how much he "loathes" north Korean leader Kim Jong Il, his fundamental policy towards north Korea was not much different than Bush's.
Nor are the Amerikans' aggressive moves solely aimed at the north. These provocations provide them with an excuse to keep increasingly unpopular Amerikan troops in south Korea--or even increase them.(6) The Amerikan imperialists also seem to be wary of a unified Korea as a competitor. MIM has argued that the Amerikans are willing to share their booty with European and Japanese imperialists in order to promote "peaceful" joint exploitation of the Third World--but that's no guarantee the Amerikans are willing to offer that deal to emerging capitalist powers in Asia.(7) Some imperialists clearly do not want that. Since the "Asian financial crisis" the United $tates has withdrawn some of the privileges granted south Korea and Taiwan (e.g. in terms of access to the U.$. market), and even called for the IMF to break up some of Korea's large capitalist firms.
Ironically, however, U.$. machinations may drive the north and south together but out of the U.$. orbit--a possibility which has some at the New York Times nervously wringing their hands.(8) Completion of railway links between north and south will give south Korean capitalists greater access to Chinese and Russian markets, while strengthening north-south ties. Not coincidentally, the United $tates has obstructed the completion of these railway links.(9)
Aside from these contemporary issues, Korea's Place in the Sun provides a useful overview of the Korean war and south Korea's economic development. Cumings line on the Korean war is basically correct: it began as a civil war with roots in indigenous social conflicts (e.g. peasants vs. landlords) and was transformed into an Amerikan war of aggression (p. 298). The puppet south Korean regime had almost completely collapsed by the time the United $tates landed its troops in Pusan (pp. 267-268). Cumings also devotes a sub-chapter (pp. 243-247) to Amerikan support for the unpopular Rhee regime during the guerrilla war in south Korea that preceded the conflict with the north.
MIM has written elsewhere (9) that one of the reasons for the capitalist economic success of the "Four Tigers" (e.g. Korea and Taiwan) was communist- inspired land reform (in the case of Korea, the Korean Communists actually carried out much of the land reform during the war). Cumings' chapter on the post-war south Korean economy (pp. 299-336) gives another reason for its particular success: war profiteering. Then-president Park Chung Hee essentially sold the United $tates south Korean troops to use in Vietnam. "After several months of negotiations, the Koreans squeezed a large pile of cash and aid commitments out of Washington, estimated at $7.5 million per division... [A]bout $1 billion in American payments went to Korea in the period 1965-1970. Scholars estimated that this arrangement annually accounted for between 7 and 8 percent of Korea's GDP in the period 1966-1969 and for as much as 19 percent of its total foreign earnings...
"Vietnam became a frontier for Korean enterprise... Vietnam absorbed 94 percent of Korea's total steel exports and 52 percent of its export of transportation equipment... All this underlines the way in which warfare in East Asia was handmaiden to economic growth in the period 1935-1975."(pp. 321- 322)
Cumings later argues that the Korean path to capitalist success is a model for other Third World nations (p. 325). He's missed the point of his own research, however. Most countries will not be given tons of dough by Uncle Sam along with access to Amerikan markets. South Korean leaders were fortuitously able to extract a "rent" from the Amerikans, basically because they were on the front lines of the revolutionary struggle. Other countries (e.g. the Philippines) have tried to do follow the Korean path and failed. As inflated as it is, the U.$. market is not big enough to suck up surplus product from more than a few select countries.
Although he's somewhat sympathetic to the Korean Communists' struggles against feudalism and foreign domination up to the Korean war, Cumings' chapter on post-war north Korea is mostly disposable. More than two-thirds of the chapter is devoted to gossip, psy-war and psychoanalysis--the same kind of "to understand north Korea you have to understand Confucianism" crap that he correctly dismisses out-of-hand in the case of the south (pp. 300, 398- 419). We do learn some interesting facts from the other third. For example, contrary to Cumings own claims about the bankruptcy of the "self-sufficient model" for economic growth, the north Korean economy grew faster than the south's from the end of the war until the middle seventies (pp. 423-424).
Bruce Cumings, Korea's Place in the Sun , New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1997. 527 pp. hb.
The following review expands on some of the earlier historical points in Cumings book.
Notes:
1. Associated Press, 31 Jan 2003.
2. MIM Notes 255, 1 Apr 2002.
3. Korean Central News Agency, 10 Jan 2003, www.kcna.co.jp.
4. www.zmag.org/elich_korea.htm
5. Cumings also misread Jimmy Carter's 1994 peace mission which led to
the "Agreed Framework." Cumings suggests that by announcing a potential deal
live on CNN, Carter placed pressure on then Korean leader Kim Il Sung.
Gregory Elich, on the other hand, argues persuasively that the live broadcast
was meant to put pressure on the Clinton administration, which was gunning
for war. "A State Department official later reflected, 'The shocking thing
about the Carter visit wasn't that people were disappointed that someone was
going. It was when he got the freeze, people here were crestfallen" (see note
4).
6. "Admiral seeks deterrent force in Korea crisis," New York Times, 1 Feb 02.
7. "Imperialism and its Class Structure 1997,"
http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/mt/imp97/index.html.
7. "Seoul looks to new alliances," New York Times, 26 Jan 2003.
8. See e.g. MIM Theory 4.
9. "U.S. Accused of Blocking 'Sunshine Policy,'" Los Angeles Times, 15 Jan
2003.
Book review: Korea's Place in the Sun
Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History
by Bruce Cumings
W.W. Norton & Company, 1997
527 pp. pb.
MIM solicited and edited the following review from a Pennsylvania prisoner. We provided the prisoner with the book free of charge, thanks to a donation from a supporter. A review by MIM focusing on events in late 2002 and early 2003 starts on page 1 of this issue.
While most of the world only knows of Korea with the beginning and ending of the Korean War, Cumings explores the pre-Korean War period including the interests and power struggles of other nations affecting Korea, and the post- Korean War period including two military coups and several popular rebellions.
Cumings starts with an early history of Korea and in just the first two chapters covers in more detail of Korean history than is readily available in most history books. Korea has long been known as the "Hermit Kingdom," but most historians do not discuss the reasons why Korea struggled to become and stay the "Hermit Kingdom." Instead, they simply gloss Koreans "xenophobic." Cumings concludes Korean desire for isolation was the direct result of past foreign incursions into Asia, including examples such as "the Little War with the Heathen" (as the New York Herald called it), which involved one hundred French and Amerikan marines. Such invasions dating back as early as China's Opium Wars of 1839-42 molded Korea's attitudes towards foreigners.
Cumings third chapter covering 1905 to 1945 or the pre-Korean War period is perhaps the most thought-provoking part of the book. It details the deliberate undermining of Korea by other nations (China, Russia, Japan, British and the United $tates), all wanting a division of the Korean Peninsula into spheres of influence. When these negotiations failed, in 1904 Japan launched a surprise attack on the Russian fleet at Port Arthur. This led to the treaty signed in 1905, brokered by Theodore Roosevelt. Diplomatic notes exchanged between Roosevelt and the Japanese acknowledged a trade-off between the Philippines and Korea: Japan would not question American rights in its colony, and the U.S. would not challenge Japan's new protectorate. As long as the direction of Japanese imperialism was toward Korea and Manchuria, which pushed it away from the Philippines or the many British colonies, it had the blessing of London and Washington. Korea was simply used as a bargaining chip.
The Korean independence movement was so strong that the Japanese realized their repressive rule was out of date and began a "cultural policy" of tutoring Koreans for a distant day of independence (much as the United $tates did in the Philippines). This, of course, was only a tool of subversion, so the Japanese could corral, co-opt, and moderate independence activists. Despite the many hardships Korean militants founded such groups as the Korean Communist Party (KCP), Uibyong, Korean Provisional Government (KPG) and many more, all practicing internationalism and resistance.
Cumings points out that this resistance was not monolithic. "Japanese progress attracted many Koreans before 1905 and enticed or subverted all too many thereafter; colonial officials used divide-and-rule tactics, although more so after 1919 than before; far more Koreans serviced the colonial dictatorship than most would like to admit."
Modernization and exploitation went hand in hand under Japanese colonialism, which led to Koreans eating millet while exporting high quality rice to Japan. Korean enterprises were held back (the Japanese directly owned 70% of the businesses in Korea). The Japanese also used slave labor and forced 100,000-200,000 women and girls into sexual slavery as "comfort women."
Cumings dispels the notion that U.$. involvement in Korea began with the war that came in 1950. The critical period that led to national division and opposing states that still exist today was the years from 1943 to 1953, after WWII when Korea gained independence from Japan. There was no Korean justification for dividing Korea. Again the United $tates used Korea as a bargaining chip, this time as a buffer between them and their Cold War enemies, the USSR. The Amerikans ignored Koreans' needs to such a degree that they used the Japanese in Korea to retain control. South Korean opposition was suppressed and the peasant tenants' needs of redistribution of land blocked. The United $tates backed the landowning class, who during the colonial period profited while everybody else suffered.
While Amerikan "history" textbooks blame the North for a "sneak" attack and invasion, Cumings correctly concludes the Korean War was a civil war is based on internal contradictions of land, wealth and ideologies.
The Korean Communists fought a war on all fronts: Conventional, guerrilla, and political war over the people's committees and land reform. In other words, this was a people's war, like the subsequent war in Vietnam, and it also called forth an appalling American response. From the first days of war the Americans contemplated the use of atomic weapons in this "police action." The North has always been under the threat of nuclear annihilation, including the use of high radiation cobalt bombs for the effect of creating a "no-mans land" for at least 60 years cutting the Korean peninsula in half with a radiation band.
Regarding China's participation in the war, Cumings argues that China entered the war not just to protect its border. Rather, Mao Tse-tung determined early in the war that if the North Koreans faltered, China had an obligation to come to their aid because of the sacrifice of so many Koreans in the Chinese revolution and the anti-Japanese resistance.
In conclusion, Cumings notes: "The true tragedy was not the war itself, for a civil conflict purely among Koreans might have resolved the extraordinary tensions generated by colonialism, national division and foreign intervention. The tragedy was that the war solved nothing, only the status quo ante was restored, only an armistice held the peace. Today the tensions and problems remain."
South Korea's economy was based on the U.S. willingness to indulge countries like Korea sitting on the fault lines of the cold war. Cumings points out that Syngman Rhee was a master at wheedling so many direct grants out of the U.S. that by the end of the 1950s they accounted for five-sixths of all Korean imports. The largesse of the U.S. was extreme, accounting for $12 billion in the years of 1945-65, and for 100 percent of the ROK government budget in the 1950s. Rhee used the U.S. funds to create a modernized Korea and used anti-Japanese rhetoric to deflect attention away from the many Japanese collaborators who served in his government.
However the U.S. always wanted a "normalization" between Korea and Japan in an effort toward economic stability amongst its allies in Northeast Asia. It wasn't until Park Chung Hee's 1961 coup that this was realized. In this normalization, and at a time when Korea's exports were 200 million, the ROK received from Japan a direct grant of 300 million, loans of 200 million, and private firms put in another 300 million in investments. Park used this influx of funds to realize his slogan "Chol un Kungnyok" (steel= national power). Park was also very adept at wheedling grants and loans exploiting such situations as the Vietnam War (see parallel review by MIM).
Those who praised South Korean development rarely spoke of the dark side of Korea, that despite having "the Miracle on the Han" South Korea had one of the most repressive and unstable political systems in the world. Park Chung Hee came to power in a coup and was ousted by a coup. Chun Doo Hwan, his replacement and head of the Military Intelligence, reinstated full martial law. Chun later agreed to permit election of the next president by direct popular vote but only after massive protests calling for democratic reforms. Roh Tae Woo was elected. However, under Roh the military co-existed with the ruling bloc while it exercised veto power over opposition groups. Roh arrested dissidents using the National Security Law at a rate of 3.3 per day during 1989. Roh's successor jailed Roh and Chun for the coup in December 1979 and the Kwangju massacre, where the military (with U.$. backing) killed over 1000 anti-dictatorship protestors. Present day Korea still has the National Security Law, under which any person who praises or encourages "anti- state activities" can be prosecuted, and North Korea remained defined as an "anti-state organization."