Korean Historical Revisionism in the Media
Update: The Marmot has much more insight on this by directly tracing the MacArthur/three-day-orgy story to a North Korean textbook. Astonishingly, OhMyNews figured this out. Must read to believe.
The U.S. media are also beginning to catch on to the MacArthur story and the blood-libels revisionist thinking that propels it. Let’s hope they’ll eventually get a better grip than this story in Newsweek online by B.J. Lee (HT to Occidentalism–which will be a new addition to my blogroll).
Lee takes us for a nauseating ride down the “why do they hate us” path, one rutted with gratuitous apologias about “Washington’s ham-handed foreign policy” and sympathetic falsehoods describing the redvests as “skeptical of the national myths developed during the decades of postwar authoritarianism.”
Either Mr. Lee thinks he’s fooling us or he hasn’t done his research in regard to the redvests’ attitudes toward the creation of national myths or authoritarianism (I’ll go out on a limb here and say that people who think North Korea should have been left to reunify Korea under Kim Il Sung would soon have every Korean kid forced to memorize odes to his immaculate conception.) Further down, Lee cashes out his credibility for the scrap value by citing hack historian Bruce Cumings, who must be the most discredited authority since the Iraqi Information Ministry fled Baghdad.
The real weakness of Lee’s piece, however, is his intellectually and journalistically lazy avoidance of The New National Mythology and the absence of objective truths behind it. MacArthur ordered a three-day ogry of race-pollution, you say? That’s certainly challenging the old conventions. I’d rather he’d told us the matzo’s actual Christian-child-blood content.
Do not read within twelve hours of eating.
A far worthier effort comes from the invaluable Andrei Lankov in the Asia Times. Lankov gets to the source of the problem–shallow minds who are writing a new generation of radicalized textbooks jam-packed with half-truths:
The textbook dedicates quite a few pages to the 1946 land reform in the North, whose radicalism is favorably contrasted with the sluggishness of similar measures in South Korea. Basically, it’s true: the South Korean government of 1948-1950 included too many landlords to be enthusiastic about land redistribution. But there was something in the story that made one laugh: the book failed to mention that from beginning to end, land reform in North Korea was planned by Soviet military authorities.
Land reform was promulgated in the name of nascent North Korean authorities, but Kim Il-sung simply signed the documents that had been prepared for him by Russian officers. This is evident from Russian papers on land reform, which were declassified and published in South Korea years ago. But these facts do not fit the authors’ concept and hence are not mentioned in the textbook.
Lankov’s piece is a must-read for anyone interested in the roots of anti-Americanism in Korea, in part because Lankov is an expert on North Korea who can deftly puncture such “national myths.” His decisive debunking of the leftist myth that the United States used biological warfare against Korean civilians–a debunking backed by records from the Soviet archives–justifies a full reading of Lankov’s piece by itself.
Lankov can also foresee how the myth of North Korea’s bucolic communalism ends–with more xenophobia:
One cannot help but wonder: what will happen when the North Korean regime collapses and when the scale of its brutality becomes blatantly obvious? What will these intellectuals then say? I suspect that many of them will change their minds and will start blaming the regime’s exceptional cruelty on malevolent foreign influences, on these scheming brutal Russians whose involvement is now denied or played down.
However until then, with the true scale of atrocities still remaining unknown (at least denied by those who are oblivious to the obvious), every “progressive” intellectual in South Korea is still supposed to believe in the authentically Korean regime that once flourished north of the 38th parallel.