(DoD photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Chad J. McNeeley/Released)Fifty years ago, E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class rescued the study of history from the powerful. Kings and queens, landowners, industrialists, politicians and imperialists had owned much of the public memory. In 1980, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States also demonstrated that the freedoms and rights we enjoy precariously – free expression, free association, the jury system, the rights of minorities – were the achievements of ordinary people, not the gift of elites.
Historians, like journalists, play their most honorable role when they myth-bust. Eduardo Galeano’s The Open Veins of Latin America (1971) achieved this for the people of a continent whose historical memory was colonized and mutated by the dominance of the United States.
The “good” world war of 1939-45 provides a bottomless ethical bath in which the West’s “peacetime” conquests are cleansed. Demystifying historical investigation stands in the way. Richard Overy’s 1939: the countdown to war (2009) is a devastating explanation of why that cataclysm was not inevitable.
We need such smokescreen clearing now more than ever. The powerful would like us to believe that the likes of Thompson, Zinn and Galeano are no longer necessary: that we live, as Time magazine put it, “in an eternal present,” in which reflection is limited to Facebook, and historical narrative is the preserve of Hollywood. This is a confidence trick. In 1984, George Orwell wrote: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
The people of Korea understand this well. The slaughter on their peninsula following the Second World War is known as the “forgotten war,” whose significance for all humanity has long been suppressed in military histories of cold war good versus evil.
I have just read The Korean War: A History by Bruce Cumings (2010), professor of history at the University of Chicago. I first saw Cumings interviewed in Regis Tremblay’s extraordinary film, The Ghosts of Jeju, which documents the uprising of the people of the southern Korean island of Jeju in 1948 and the campaign of the present-day islanders to stop the building of a base with American missiles aimed provocatively at China.
Like most Koreans, the farmers and fishing families protested the senseless division of their nation between north and south in 1945 – a line drawn along the 38th Parallel by an American official, Dean Rusk, who had “consulted a map around midnight on the day after we obliterated Nagasaki with an atomic bomb,” wrote Cumings. The myth of a “good” Korea (the south) and a “bad” Korea (the north) was invented.
In fact, Korea, north and south, has a remarkable people’s history of resistance to feudalism and foreign occupation, notably Japan’s in the 20th century. When the Americans defeated Japan in 1945, they occupied Korea and often branded those who had resisted the Japanese as “commies.” On Jeju island, as many as 60,000 people were massacred by militias supported, directed and, in some cases, commanded by American officers.
This and other unreported atrocities were a “forgotten” prelude to the Korean War (1950-53), in which more people were killed than Japanese died during all of World War II. Cumings’ tally of the degree of destruction of the cities of the North is astonishing: Pyongyang, 75 percent; Sariwon, 95 percent; Sinanju, 100 percent. Great dams in the north were bombed to unleash internal tsunamis. “Anti-personnel” weapons, such as Napalm, were tested on civilians. Cumings’ superb investigation helps us understand why today’s North Korea seems so strange: an anachronism sustained by an enduring mentality of siege.
“The unhindered machinery of incendiary bombing was visited on the North for three years,” he wrote, “yielding a wasteland and a surviving mole people who had learned to love the shelter of caves, mountains, tunnels and redoubts, a subterranean world that became the basis for reconstructing a country and a memento for building a fierce hatred through the ranks of the population. Their truth is not cold, antiquarian, ineffectual knowledge.” Cumings quotes Virginia Wolf on how the trauma of this kind of war “confers memory.”
The guerrilla leader Kim Il Sung had begun fighting the Japanese militarists in 1932. Every characteristic attached to the regime he founded – “communist, rogue state, evil enemy” – derives from a ruthless, brutal, heroic resistance: first to Japan, then the United States, which threatened to nuke the rubble its bombers had left. Cumings exposes as propaganda the notion that Kim Il Sung, leader of the “bad” Korea, was a stooge of Moscow. In contrast, the regime that Washington invented in the south, the “good” Korea, was run largely by those who had collaborated with Japan and America.
The Korean War has an unrecognized distinction. It was in the smouldering ruins of the peninsula, that the United States turned itself into what Cumings calls “an archipelago of empire.” When the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s, it was as if the whole planet was declared American – or else.
But there is China now. The base currently being built on Jeju Island will face the Chinese metropolis of Shanghai, less than 300 miles away, and the industrial heartland of the only country whose economic power is likely to surpass that of the United States. “China,” says President Obama, in a leaked briefing paper, “is our fast emerging strategic threat.” By 2020, almost two-thirds of all US naval forces in the world will be transferred to the Asia-Pacific region. In an arc extending from Australia to Japan and beyond, China will be ringed by US missiles and nuclear weapons-armed aircraft. Will this threat to all of us be “forgotten,” too?
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
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