FEATURES
What's So Funny About Peace, Love, and Kim Jong Il Bashing? An Interview With Bruce Cumings
/ Ben Bush
03.31.07
FZ: Your essay in Inventing the Axis of Evil and your recent book North Korea: Another Country address a lot of the politics behind the U.S. selection of North Korea as a dangerous rogue nation. What do you see as some of the most glaring omissions and misperceptions in the U.S. media coverage of nuclear North Korea and U.S. involvement there?
BC: The North Korean regime is a repellent regime but what is missing is the history of our relations with North Korea. The Korean War is considered a forgotten war in this country but it has never officially ended. There was never a peace treaty, only an armistice and there is a long origin to the war that Americans know nothing about.
From the beginning and for the last 60 years North Korea has been lead by people who fought against the Japanese in a godforsaken, unforgiving guerilla war in Manchuria. Kim Il Sung made his name fighting against General Tojo in the mid-1930s. Had we known anything about that we might have been able to find a way to accommodate both North and South rather than divide the country. Instead, during the U.S. occupation of South Korea following World War II, we supported many people, including major military and police figures, who had collaborated with the Japanese. We punched into a political, cultural and historical thicket without knowing what we were doing and got ourselves into a major war five years later. It’s essentially the same thing that is happening in Iraq. It’s one of the myths and maladies of American leadership: that we’re going to be able to knock over the bad guys and a democracy will sprout soon after. Sixty-two years after we first sent combat soldiers to Korea, there are still 30,000 troops there. At some point you have to ask the question, “How long are we going to stay?” The Korean War was one of the most devastating in modern history and killed millions of people but solved nothing. We haven’t solved the problem that those combat troops went there to solve in 1945, which was Kim Il Sung.
Concerning our nuclear problems with North Korea, it’s important to understand that the U.S. was the first to install nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula. We first put nuclear weapons into the South in 1958 and soon after we had hundreds of them. Because North Korea did not have the capability for nuclear retaliation, our war plans called for them to be used very early on in the event of a North Korean invasion unlike Europe, where if the Soviets and their allies invaded we were going to move back and back and back and not use nuclear weapons except as a last resort because they had them as well.
In 1991 George Bush, Sr. took our nuclear weapons out of South Korea because the military was moving towards precision-guided, high explosives that essentially could do the same thing without all the problems of using nukes. On any day of the week one of our Trident submarines can glide up to the North Korean coast and blast every city that they have. North Korea has been engaged in nuclear deterrence. It’s as simple as that.
I believe that they initially wanted to trade their nuclear weapons to the Clinton administration for normalization: to have our embassy in Pyongyang, to have security guarantees and a peace treaty on the Korean War. All of which was being negotiated in the 1990s. I believe that they didn’t want to be a nuclear power, but five or six years into the Bush administration, I’m afraid they made a decision to be one. In any case now that they’ve blown off a small nuclear weapon, it’s going to make it much, much harder to get them to give up their nuclear weapons and programs. That horse is out of the barn unfortunately and it’s going to be very hard to get it back in.
I watch CNN all the time and I’ve never once heard them say what our targeting practices are, or what our use of nuclear weapons would be in the event of a new Korean war, or mention the many decades we had nuclear weapons in South Korea. You just never get that! Instead you get a bunch of North Korean experts that I’ve never heard of and I’ve been in the field 30 years! They come on TV and usually one is representing some kind of Democratic Party point of view and another representing some kind of Republican point of view and they shout at each other, and it’s no wonder that the American people are not informed at all about what is going on.
When they run a clip on North Korea they almost always begin with goose-stepping soldiers marching through Pyongyang. You would think from this that North Koreans invented the goose-step or copied it from Hitler, when in fact Communist regimes going back to the Bolsheviks have done the goose-step. For once they might use an image from the multitude of films we have from NGOs that work in the North showing their employees working side by side with farmers to try to improve their crops. I’ve seen those films so why can’t CNN ever show them?
Last October the Kim Jong Il outfit was the most popular Halloween costume for kids. Kim Jong Il has become everybody’s piñata to throw whatever they want at him. So we’ve demonized him and made him into a horrible rogue dictator. He’s a dictator but he isn’t the madman that CNN often makes him out to be.
BC: The North Korean regime is a repellent regime but what is missing is the history of our relations with North Korea. The Korean War is considered a forgotten war in this country but it has never officially ended. There was never a peace treaty, only an armistice and there is a long origin to the war that Americans know nothing about.
From the beginning and for the last 60 years North Korea has been lead by people who fought against the Japanese in a godforsaken, unforgiving guerilla war in Manchuria. Kim Il Sung made his name fighting against General Tojo in the mid-1930s. Had we known anything about that we might have been able to find a way to accommodate both North and South rather than divide the country. Instead, during the U.S. occupation of South Korea following World War II, we supported many people, including major military and police figures, who had collaborated with the Japanese. We punched into a political, cultural and historical thicket without knowing what we were doing and got ourselves into a major war five years later. It’s essentially the same thing that is happening in Iraq. It’s one of the myths and maladies of American leadership: that we’re going to be able to knock over the bad guys and a democracy will sprout soon after. Sixty-two years after we first sent combat soldiers to Korea, there are still 30,000 troops there. At some point you have to ask the question, “How long are we going to stay?” The Korean War was one of the most devastating in modern history and killed millions of people but solved nothing. We haven’t solved the problem that those combat troops went there to solve in 1945, which was Kim Il Sung.
Concerning our nuclear problems with North Korea, it’s important to understand that the U.S. was the first to install nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula. We first put nuclear weapons into the South in 1958 and soon after we had hundreds of them. Because North Korea did not have the capability for nuclear retaliation, our war plans called for them to be used very early on in the event of a North Korean invasion unlike Europe, where if the Soviets and their allies invaded we were going to move back and back and back and not use nuclear weapons except as a last resort because they had them as well.
In 1991 George Bush, Sr. took our nuclear weapons out of South Korea because the military was moving towards precision-guided, high explosives that essentially could do the same thing without all the problems of using nukes. On any day of the week one of our Trident submarines can glide up to the North Korean coast and blast every city that they have. North Korea has been engaged in nuclear deterrence. It’s as simple as that.
I believe that they initially wanted to trade their nuclear weapons to the Clinton administration for normalization: to have our embassy in Pyongyang, to have security guarantees and a peace treaty on the Korean War. All of which was being negotiated in the 1990s. I believe that they didn’t want to be a nuclear power, but five or six years into the Bush administration, I’m afraid they made a decision to be one. In any case now that they’ve blown off a small nuclear weapon, it’s going to make it much, much harder to get them to give up their nuclear weapons and programs. That horse is out of the barn unfortunately and it’s going to be very hard to get it back in.
I watch CNN all the time and I’ve never once heard them say what our targeting practices are, or what our use of nuclear weapons would be in the event of a new Korean war, or mention the many decades we had nuclear weapons in South Korea. You just never get that! Instead you get a bunch of North Korean experts that I’ve never heard of and I’ve been in the field 30 years! They come on TV and usually one is representing some kind of Democratic Party point of view and another representing some kind of Republican point of view and they shout at each other, and it’s no wonder that the American people are not informed at all about what is going on.
When they run a clip on North Korea they almost always begin with goose-stepping soldiers marching through Pyongyang. You would think from this that North Koreans invented the goose-step or copied it from Hitler, when in fact Communist regimes going back to the Bolsheviks have done the goose-step. For once they might use an image from the multitude of films we have from NGOs that work in the North showing their employees working side by side with farmers to try to improve their crops. I’ve seen those films so why can’t CNN ever show them?
Last October the Kim Jong Il outfit was the most popular Halloween costume for kids. Kim Jong Il has become everybody’s piñata to throw whatever they want at him. So we’ve demonized him and made him into a horrible rogue dictator. He’s a dictator but he isn’t the madman that CNN often makes him out to be.
