Frog in a Well

Continuing on the subject of the new, controversial history book 해방 전후사의 재인식 (‘A new understanding of Korea’s liberation’), I wanted to link to this rather helpful article from Joongang Daily which lists the contrasting views of the book and its more leftwing 1979 predecessor (해방 전후사의 인식) on a number of key subjects. And here is my even-more-simplified version of the same list:

1. Responsibility for the division of Korea:
(1979) It was Syngman Rhee’s fault basically.
(2006) Stalin gave the order to establish a government in North Korea in September 1945, so basically it was his fault.

2. Views of the Korean War:
(1979) It is one-sided to claim that North Korea invaded. It was actually a civil war [pace Bruce Cumings] to reunify the peninsula.
(2006) The Korean war was actually an international war, part of the USSR’s strategy of keeping the US in check.

3. Perspectives on Syngman Rhee:
(1979) Rhee was an anti-democratic American lackey
(2006) Rhee was a Machiavellian politician who made progress on the political/democratic front and laid some of the foundations for South Korea’s later economic growth.

4. Evaluation of North Korea’s Kim Il Sung:
(1979) Kim Il Sung got rid of (North) Korea’s colonial semi-feudal past and fostered a new democratic state.
(2006) Kim Il Sung organised North Korea after liberation like one of his guerilla units with mass mobilisation campaigns and the like.

5. Removing remnants of Japanese colonialism:
(1979) North Korea was successful in removing the remnants of Japanese colonialism while South Korea wasn’t due to US reluctance.
(2006) Remnants of Japanese colonialism continued in both North and South after liberation.

I have to say that on most of these issues I think I fall down on the side of the latest, supposedly rightwing, book. Since I am certainly not rightwing in my views of Korean history (or anything else), it does make me wonder again whether the Korean press have really been giving the correct impression of this book. I think part of the problem here is that the left-right debate over history (and other things) is perceived in a certain way in South Korea, for historical reasons.

In the past it has been a confrontation between authoritarian anti-communism and Stalinism. The problem is that both sides in this equation have really been disintegrating over the last decade or more. Hence this attempt to create a new more ‘rational’ right that disassociates itself from the authoritarian past, is not obsessed with ‘reds under the bed’ and accepts the achievements of Korea’s democracy movement. On the other side there are also now many on the left who do not accept the left-nationalist version of Korean history that is basically an application of Stalinist ideas straight out of 1950s Soviet textbooks. I suppose the ironic thing here is that a number of the centrist/liberal politicians who are currently in power with Roh Moo-hyun’s government were closely associated with the 1979 book or the left-nationalist movement of the 1980s and so perhaps have a closer allegiance to the ideas that it contains than do people who are to their left.

For some further reading on the reaction to this book you can have a look at this article from Oh My News, which reports on a recent speech by Sŏ Chung-sŏk, head of the 역사문제연구소, or Institute for Korean Historical Studies (who publish the journal 역사비평). He makes a couple of interesting points. First, he thinks that this book has been published for political reasons and it is strange that they are specifically attacking such an old book since the work of many progressive scholars has since revised a lot of what was said in the original 1979 book. He also claims that many of the people who have written articles for the new book are not specialists annd hence their work is somewhat suspect. This sounds like a bit of a cheap point, but if you look at Sŏ’s own publications list he certainly is in a position to comment on the historiography of the postwar period.

Another couple of history-related articles from the English-language Korean media that were brought to my attention on the mailing list of the British Association for Korean Studies. They concern another controversial issue, but this time an internal one that reflects the right-left divide in South Korea. A long awaited book has just been published which aims to act as a corrective to what is seen as the prevailing left-nationalist view of Korea’s modern history. The book, 해방 전후사의 재인식 or ‘A new understanding of Korea’s liberation’ is in two parts, one on the colonial period and the other on the period after liberation. A number of current political issues make all this particularly ‘hot’ at the moment: the investigation into Japanese collaborators (headed by veteran left-nationalist historian Kang Man-gil); the government’s policy of rapprochement toward North Korea and the South Korean right’s attempt to repackage itself as a ‘New Right’ untainted by former military regimes or corrupt regionalist politics.

This from the Joongang Daily article:

A new history book by a conservative group of scholars was published yesterday, under the title “New Understanding of Post-Liberation History,” in a challenge to the left-leaning classic of the same title, minus “New,” published in 1979. The 1979 publication carried much significance with progressives and left-leaners in society, with its leftist stance on the country’s history after Japanese colonial rule.

This from the Donga Ilbo article:

European history professor Park Ji-hyang [actually she’s a specialist on British history – Owen] and economics professor Lee Young-hoon of Seoul National University, Korean literature professor Kim Chul of Yonsei, and political science professor Kim Il-young from Sung Kyun Kwan University edited the newly released book. The book contains 28 thesis papers from both at home and abroad, and includes conversations among editors on how to overcome the problematic mindset of national supremacism and the belief in the necessity of the people’s revolution portrayed in the previous book on the subject, “Understanding the History Before and After Liberation.”

Having read these articles I’m quite intrigued to read this two-volume collection of articles, if only to find out what it actually does contain. The two newspaper articles seem quite contradictory – they associate the project closely with the South Korean right and particularly the so-called New Right and yet the writers actually seem to be quite broad. It’s hard to tell from this whether the book really is an attempt to give space to good history about some of the most controversial periods of Korea’s modern history or whether it is really designed to push the rightwing view of history and revive some of their favourite figures from the past like Syngman Rhee and Park Chung-hee.

Reading these articles it should be remembered that both of the newspapers they come from are part of the triumvirate of the rightwing establishment media, often referred to as Cho-Chung-Tong (ie Chosun Ilbo, Joongang Ilbo, Donga Ilbo). That, or perhaps the fact that the journalists haven’t read the book, could be behind the slightly confusing impression.

There are also, I think, some problematic assumptions in these articles that need to be picked up on. I wondered in particular about this idea that the authors and their papers have been chosen as “writings that have no political color”. It strikes me rather that when the editors say that wanted to choose history that was not ideological they are limiting their definition of ‘ideological’ to the left nationalists. Then there is the unquestioned assumption in these articles – that South Korea has come to be dominated by a ‘distorted’ left-nationalist view of history. Now I think there is quite an element of truth to this when it comes to the academic establishment, where the left-nationalist view of history (what Noja called the ‘Kang Man-gilian’ version of Korean history a few posts back) has become hegemonic since the 80s. But this is certainly changing and to imply that this view extends throughout South Korean society would, I think, be quite a stretch. Academic discourse perhaps has proportionately more influence on general public discourse in Korea than it does in many other places, but there are also many other competing influences, not to mention a state education system that up until the 1980s, at least, was teaching a rather different version of history.

More on this in part two.