Bruce Cumings, North Korea, and Burma...I mean Myanmar
This book review on Korea studies criticizes western "experts" who write about Asian cultures distant from their own without first shedding any baggage of stereotypes and generalizations they may carry with them. This might be a problem with contemporary group-think on Burmese politics.
What I want to argue here is that the intellectual mileau of scholarship on Korean Cold War history is similar to that of Burma's, not that Burma is substantially like North Korea.
"Balance and proportion are vexed questions because of the North Korean regime’s own habit of lying, and its grotesque exaggeration of its achievements and the merits of its leaders. Anyone wanting to find out about the country begins with a farrago of outlandish claims and heroic myths, goes on to what the ‘Dear Leader’ says, what DPRK scribes are told to write, what the outside experts claim, what the reporters report, what some other government offers up..."
[Censorship in Myanmar is notorious]
"The American role since 1945 raises another enormous problem of balance and bias, beginning with the simple fact that Rhee, Park and the KCIA’s Kim would not have come to power without American backing, and continuing with the common assumption that the US has been an innocent bystander for the past sixty years, having nothing to do with the nature of either Korean regime..."
[Biased ethnocentric historiography has been a big problem in the post-WWII era, see David Hackett Fischer (1970) Historians Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Thought, pp. 228-229, for references to Burma]
"Political violence adds an essentially insoluble problem: for example, we know a great deal about North Korean prison camps;..."
[Political prisoners have been a problem since independence]
This book review is by Bruce Cumings author of "The Origins of the Korean War" volumes 1 and 2. Cumings has paid for his attempts to see things from both sides of the fence, in a sense his attempts to be objective. He was blacklisted from South Korea and is often accused of immorally defending the North Korean regime. In the end he was simply wrong about a lot of things and his work discredited:
"In a book concluded in 1990 he argued that the Korean War started as 'a local affair,' and that the conventional notion of a Soviet-sponsored invasion of the South was just so much Cold War paranoia. In 1991 Russian authorities started declassifying the Soviet archives, which soon revealed that Kim Il Sung had sent dozens of telegrams begging Stalin for a green light to invade, and that the two met in Moscow repeatedly to plan the event. Initially hailed as 'magisterial,' The Origins of the Korean War soon gathered up its robes and retired to chambers. The book was such a valuable source of information on Korea in the 1940s, however, that many hoped the author would find a way to fix things and put it back into print." [From the Atlantic Magazine]
Can historians make tentative conclusions subject to future revision? Tentative conclusions don't seem to be enough to publish a paper book with, particularly weighty tomes like Cuming's, but an online weblog? The trouble is that historians probably don't want to share their ideas online because they will not receive due credit for these ideas, in academia the citations that translate into reputation and credibility, the coin of the realm in academia (my interpretation). There is no way of citing weblogs or at any rate it would often be difficult to even determine who was the first to come up with an idea if academic publishing was made into a more informal affair.
What I want to argue here is that the intellectual mileau of scholarship on Korean Cold War history is similar to that of Burma's, not that Burma is substantially like North Korea.
"Balance and proportion are vexed questions because of the North Korean regime’s own habit of lying, and its grotesque exaggeration of its achievements and the merits of its leaders. Anyone wanting to find out about the country begins with a farrago of outlandish claims and heroic myths, goes on to what the ‘Dear Leader’ says, what DPRK scribes are told to write, what the outside experts claim, what the reporters report, what some other government offers up..."
[Censorship in Myanmar is notorious]
"The American role since 1945 raises another enormous problem of balance and bias, beginning with the simple fact that Rhee, Park and the KCIA’s Kim would not have come to power without American backing, and continuing with the common assumption that the US has been an innocent bystander for the past sixty years, having nothing to do with the nature of either Korean regime..."
[Biased ethnocentric historiography has been a big problem in the post-WWII era, see David Hackett Fischer (1970) Historians Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Thought, pp. 228-229, for references to Burma]
"Political violence adds an essentially insoluble problem: for example, we know a great deal about North Korean prison camps;..."
[Political prisoners have been a problem since independence]
This book review is by Bruce Cumings author of "The Origins of the Korean War" volumes 1 and 2. Cumings has paid for his attempts to see things from both sides of the fence, in a sense his attempts to be objective. He was blacklisted from South Korea and is often accused of immorally defending the North Korean regime. In the end he was simply wrong about a lot of things and his work discredited:
"In a book concluded in 1990 he argued that the Korean War started as 'a local affair,' and that the conventional notion of a Soviet-sponsored invasion of the South was just so much Cold War paranoia. In 1991 Russian authorities started declassifying the Soviet archives, which soon revealed that Kim Il Sung had sent dozens of telegrams begging Stalin for a green light to invade, and that the two met in Moscow repeatedly to plan the event. Initially hailed as 'magisterial,' The Origins of the Korean War soon gathered up its robes and retired to chambers. The book was such a valuable source of information on Korea in the 1940s, however, that many hoped the author would find a way to fix things and put it back into print." [From the Atlantic Magazine]
Can historians make tentative conclusions subject to future revision? Tentative conclusions don't seem to be enough to publish a paper book with, particularly weighty tomes like Cuming's, but an online weblog? The trouble is that historians probably don't want to share their ideas online because they will not receive due credit for these ideas, in academia the citations that translate into reputation and credibility, the coin of the realm in academia (my interpretation). There is no way of citing weblogs or at any rate it would often be difficult to even determine who was the first to come up with an idea if academic publishing was made into a more informal affair.
posted by Jon Fernquest at 1:14 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home