I wonder what fraction of young people know the U.S. fought in the Korean War, or even approximately when it occurred.
i saw it all at the 4077th... for 9 long years the brave north koreans battled to save their country from the intrepid likes of american fascists like winchester and honeycutt who sought to oppress the prolitariat in their capitalist ways...
/s
In American academia, all you need to do is set the US in a bad light, make a bold controversial claim....... American is sort of like modern art, a pile of $hit that really says nothing to anyone but has self loving pseudo intellectual idiots that want to be different standing around and pontificating about its meaning. of course they all have their Euro gay shoes and glasses while they discuss the deep meaning of a Piss Christ or some work by Boise.
What you have today is that the “documentary,” even the “hard sciences,” are being contaminated with what amounts to BS (non scientific, illogical, mass produced junk that is marketed and sold like Global Warming). Look at Michael Moore and his so called documentaries. Crap....crap.....crap. But it sells, and it makes self important people have something to talk about, it allows them to feel like they have some depth, sophistication, culture...... Morons.
What do you expect from a lefty writing revisionist history about a communist fomented “civil war” and subsequent invasion by the chicoms? Notice that the review doesn’t even mention China?
I don't recall the exact number produced by a survey but remember being astonished at how many Americans believe that WW II was fought in XIX century --- against the British. What should we expect them to know about a smaller war such as Korean?
I would automatically distrust any “history” written after about 1975 or so. Some of them may be creditable; most are little more than revisionist propaganda, attempts to erase our country’s future by rewriting its past.
“His book is a bitter pill, a sobering corrective.”
This book is BS.
The review of the new book gives no examples of any reliable evidence, so it is difficult even to assess its claims.
However, the author claims that we are ignorant in regarding North Korea as “Stalinist.” There is a difference, of course. But then to prove his point he says that there were never great purges in North Korea. The author (and reviewer) do not know the facts.
Kim Il Sung systematically eliminated all his opposition, including better-known communists. In one of his official biographies, it explains that when his forces were almost eliminated from Korea, he surprised everyone by launching a new, thorough purge. At the point when we are so weak, why does the Leader conduct a purge? people wondered. But the genius of the Leader (so his biography says) is that he realized that this was the best time to conduct a purge, to strengthen the resolve of his forces.
So there is evidence even in North Korean accounts, that purges were characteristic of the Kim regime. We have modern, first-person accounts of the prison camps in North Korea, and an interesting point is that most of them are by people who were imprisoned for rather minor reasons, or for being related to some suspected opponent. This is typical of a terror regime, and is just like Solzhenitsyn’s account in Gulag Archipelago.
The review reads more like a press release by the publisher. There is absolutely no attempt at balance, the reviewer seems completely unaware of any countervailing or contrary opinions, except to dismiss them, even the distinctly liberal David Halberstam’s.
No serious historian would make any of generalizations and conclusions that Professor Cumings toss off so casually.
Bruce Cumings is a well-known scholar who is notorious for his pro-North Korea leanings and his Bash-America-First prose.
“
a squirm-inducing assault on America’s moral behavior during the Korean War
“
When will academia in America have a moment of honesty...
and just merge their departments of history with their creative
writing programs?
Cumings is chairman of the history department at the University of ChicagoHuge surprise.