Posted on 07/22/2010 9:10:24 AM PDT by reaganaut1
...
Bruce Cumings’s “Korean War,” [is] a powerful revisionist history of America’s intervention in Korea. Beneath its bland title, Mr. Cumings’s book is a squirm-inducing assault on America’s moral behavior during the Korean War, a conflict that he says is misremembered when it is remembered at all. It’s a book that puts the reflexive anti-Americanism of North Korea’s leaders into sympathetic historical context.
Mr. Cumings is chairman of the history department at the University of Chicago and the author of “The Origins of the Korean War,” a respected two-volume survey. He mows down a host of myths about the war in his short new book, which is a distillation of his own scholarship and that of many other historians. But he begins by mowing down David Halberstam.
Mr. Cumings, who admires Mr. Halberstam’s writing about Vietnam, plucks the wings from “The Coldest Winter,” Mr. Halberstam’s 2007 book about the Korean War. The book, he argues, makes all the classic mistakes popular American historians tend to make about this little understood war.
Mr. Halberstam’s book is among those that “evince almost no knowledge of Korea or its history” and “barely get past two or three Korean names,” Mr. Cumings writes. “Halberstam mentions the U.S. Military Government from 1945 to 1948, which deeply shaped postwar Korean history — in one sentence,” he adds. “There is absolutely nothing on the atrocious massacres of this war, or the American incendiary bombing campaigns.” Ouch.
Americans need to get past the idea, Mr. Cumings says, that the Korean War was a “discrete, encapsulated” story that began in 1950, when the United States intervened to help push the Communist north out of the south of Korea, and ended in 1953, after the war bogged down in a stalemate.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I read that when I was a sophomore in high school. Other books that I read as a teenager are listed here.
It deeply impressed me ... I asked my (retired officer) father about it, and he pulled the book off his shelf and handed it to me. It had been required reading for him as a junior officer.
It's well worth reading several times. I have my own copy, now.
Concur with “extraordinarily breathless and informationless review.” Reviewer didn’t cover the author and book as much as he lectured us with Cummings’ revisionist claims.
Bruce Cumings is a well-known scholar who is notorious for his pro-North Korea leanings and his Bash-America-First prose.
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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?
loved klinger... who’s transvestitism was just a ploy to get out... and not a lifestyle choice was a funny bit... lessened to some extent as the season went on...
i remember as a youngster thinking it was about the two vietnams, but realized i was mistaken when i found out i was living in two americas... aaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrggggggh
when will this conditioning stop....
t
Cumings is chairman of the history department at the University of ChicagoHuge surprise.
That’s a lie right there. The American forces firebombed entire towns and effectively destroyed most of the civilian infrastructure of North Korea as they were retreating from the PLA.
I’ve heard from actual surviving veterans of the war(on the Chinese side), about dozens, sometimes scores of frozen PLA and NK corpses, sometimes stripped naked in -40 degree weather, shot in the back of their heads execution style by U.S and UK marines.
And yes, from what I’ve heard as a child, PLA and NK troops did also committed atrocities, they would gag U.S Marines and then bayonet them in the stomach so that they would die slow and suffer as much as possible.
War is hell.
OK dude!! So you’re a Chicom pretending to be an American. Paid well by your Chicom slave drivers are you?
Hey, I’m as American as you are. Besides, I’m just recounting stories I heard as a kid from actual veterans of the Korean war. I’ve no doubt as to the honesty of those accounts, or do you believe that the U.S military is lily white and incapable of war crimes?
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