Hosts Sean Blackmon and Jacquie Luqman are joined by Gregory Elich to discuss the anniversary of the beginning of the Korean war and how the US divided the peninsula, how the war has had lasting effects on both sides of the Korean Peninsula and led to intense repression of progressive political elements in the south, and why the Korean Peninsula is so important to US imperialism.
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People’s Forum presentation co-sponsored by Monthly Review and the Korea Policy Institute.
The Korea Policy Institute’s Christine Hong and Martin Hart-Landsberg talk with the writers of the book’s new introduction, Tim Beal and Gregory Elich.
By Tim Beal and Gregory Elich
For a book on contemporary events to have a new edition seventy years after the first is a rare achievement. Izzy Stone’s The Hidden History of the Korean War has a continuing relevance for three major reasons: it is a tour de force of investigative journalism; the Korean War was a pivotal event in post-1945 history; and the combination of the two—the method of investigation and what it revealed of machinations behind the official curtain of obfuscation—can be brought to bear on a wider scale in order to understand what has happened since then and what is happening around us now, and into the future.1 There is a certain constancy in human affairs. Deceit, deception, and manipulation are characteristics of power, perhaps especially of modern “democratic” political power—what country does not claim to be adhering to democracy? In addition, the international framework fixed in place by the Korean War, dubbed the “Cold War,” is still with us despite superficial detours into rapprochement. In 1952, when Hidden History was first published, the United States was in hot war with North Korea and China, and in cold war with the Soviet Union. In 2022, when this edition is being issued, the United States is in proxy war with the Russian Federation, successor to the Soviet Union, and in cold war, perilously close to turning hot, with North Korea and China. In the United States itself, the flailing president is struggling to stay afloat in a turmoil that his administration had a major role in producing, and the political climate is increasingly intolerant of dissent, redolent of McCarthyism.2 Stone would find the situation in 2022 sadly, depressingly familiar.
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Christine Hong: Manifestations of Unending War: Korea
Gregory Elich: Yoon’s Project to Reshape South Korea
Christine Hong discusses the historical and current impact of U.S. militarism and geopolitical objectives in the Asia, with a focus on the Korean Peninsula. Gregory Elich discusses Yoon Suk Yeol’s anti-labor domestic policy and his expanding relationship with Western military alliances.
By Gregory Elich
Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History. New York: Modern Library, 2010. Cloth, $24.00, pp 288.
Any time that a book appears by Bruce Cumings, one of our foremost scholars on Korea, it merits attention. His latest book, The Korean War, is particularly welcome given the recent sharp increase in tensions on the Korean Peninsula. The past informs the present, and perhaps nowhere is that more so than in the case of the two Koreas. While South Korea has changed dramatically since the advent of democracy, it is still the case that relations between the two Koreas continue to be influenced by the war.
