The Korean War: A History (10 page)

Kim Il Sung, Kim Chaek, Choe Hyon, Choe Yong-gon, and about two hundred other key Korean leaders were the fortunate survivors of pitiless campaigns that dyed the hills of Manchukuo with Korean blood. But in 1945 these guerrillas came back to Pyongyang, colonized the regime, and in typical Korean fashion began intermarrying, producing children, and putting them through elite schools. Their descendants are the power holders in North Korea today. Regardless of Pyongyang’s preposterous and ceaseless hagiography, in short, Kim Il Sung has an impeccable pedigree in the resistance. So did his family: his father was jailed for
anti-Japanese activities in 1924; he died soon after his release two years later. Kim’s middle brother, Chol-ju, reportedly died at the age of twenty in Manchukuo after his arrest in 1935 by the Japanese. Kim’s uncle Kang Chin-sok, elder brother to his mother, was arrested in 1924 and served thirteen years in a Japanese prison. The North foregrounds hundreds of similar family stories. Chu To-il, subsequently a vice-marshal of the KPA, lost one of his brothers in a Japanese “pacification” campaign, two others died as guerrillas on the battlefield, and his mother starved to death at a blockaded guerrilla base. Yi O-song’s father also starved to death in a guerrilla base, even though he was in charge of food supplies. Yi’s brother-in-law was executed, and his two sisters, part of his guerrilla group, both died of starvation. Extremely malnourished himself, Yi never reached full adult growth. In 1971 Yi, by then a lieutenant general in the KPA, became headmaster at the Mangyongdae Revolutionary School, successor to the School for the Offspring of Revolutionary Martyrs first established in 1947 for the hundreds of orphans collected by then. The devastation of the Korean War sent many more thousands of children to this parentless haven, and into the leadership. This is the central educational institution for the North Korean power elite, and the symbolic crucible for molding the astonishing “family state” created out of the ashes of two devastating wars.

The paramount interest of this elite was to have the big army and the full panoply of military equipment that they so sorely lacked in the 1930s. At the founding of the KPA on February 8, 1948 (many years later they changed the founding date to April 25, 1932), the essential features of this garrison state were on full display. Only Kim Il Sung’s portrait was put out, instead of the usual tandem portraits with Stalin. Kim’s speech laid emphasis on the necessity for a self-reliant nation to have its own army: “At all times and in all places our Korean people must take their fate into their own hands and must make all plans and preparations for building a completely self-reliant, independent nation in which they alone are
the masters, and a government unified by their own hands.” The KPA, he said, grew out of the Manchurian guerrilla struggle, with a tradition of “a hundred battles and a hundred victories.” He made no reference to Soviet help in building the KPA.
²²
A year later, on the first anniversary of the KPA, Kim was for the first time referred to as
suryong
, an ancient Koguryo term meaning “supreme” or “great leader” that had been reserved for Stalin until then. This was a complete heresy in the Communist world of that time, but it became his title thereafter, down to his death in 1994.

After the USSR collapsed in 1991 a picture emerged of Kim Il Sung in a Soviet uniform with some kind of medal on his lapel. Like Ho Chi Minh, Kim had a “dark period,” whereabouts unknown (in the latter’s case, 1941–45), and when some hard evidence finally turned up of a clear connection to Moscow, it was munched over time and again.
²³
In my reading, this information was never balanced with hard facts that we learned long ago—in the work of the Soviet dissident Roy Medvedev, for example—that Stalin ordered every last Korean agent in the Comintern shot in the late 1930s, and began his many mass deportations of subject populations by moving some 200,000 Koreans from the Soviet Far East to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan (tens of thousands of whom died on this forced exodus),
²⁴
in both cases on the racist grounds that they might be Japanese spies, subject to Japanese influence, or generally unreliable—plus one couldn’t tell them apart from Japanese. Kim’s relationship with the Soviets turns out to have been quite modest and uneasy.
²⁵

Andrei Lankov has proved, based on Soviet internal materials, that Moscow had no “clear-cut plan or a predetermined course of action” when it occupied the North in August 1945, and proceeded for many months to improvise and get by with daily ad hoc decisions
taken on the ground, with little direction from Moscow. Kim Il Sung was not handpicked by the Russians, but for a number of months was subordinate in Russian minds to the nationalist leader Cho Man-sik; Kim was going to be the defense minister under an interim regime headed by Cho. By February 1946 Kim was at the top of the power structure, “almost by accident,” in Lankov’s words.
²⁶
Even if, however, Stalin had handpicked Kim Il Sung and installed him in Pyongyang as his faithful servant, that would not have been too surprising, since he did that throughout Eastern Europe. Still, it would be entirely biased not to point out that the United States engaged the services of an exile politician who had spent the previous thirty-five years in America, named Syngman Rhee, and that the main wartime spy outfit, the Office of Strategic Services, had deposited him in Seoul in an intelligence operation designed (1) to get him there before any other exile leaders, and (2) to make an end run around State Department objections to favoring any particular politicians—especially Rhee, who had angered Foggy Bottom by pretending to be “Minister Plenipotentiary” of a “Korean Provisional Government” that never governed any Koreans.
²⁷

I
t is a matter for wonder: a moment, now here and then gone, nonetheless “returns as a ghost”—and then “the man says ‘I remember’ and envies the animal.” Cattle grazing and cavorting in a field live in the present, they cannot dissimulate, they cannot but be honest. The child, playing between the hedges, is likewise oblivious to past and present. But his play, too, will be disturbed and he will come to understand the words “it was.”
It was
—“words that cause a man conflict, suffering, satiety, and fulfillment”—thus “to remind him what his existence fundamentally is—an imperfect tense that can never become a perfect one.”
¹

Gustav Meyrink wrote that “knowledge and memory are one and the same thing.”
²
A soldier has knowledge of a battle at Hill 79, and memory of it. But Meyrink is not quite right. Knowledge is of course about memory, but memories also have histories. They come and go, often without our sensing
where
they come from—or where they go; they are unstable, they change, they evolve, they mutate in ways independent of thought. Temporal and physical dislocation, displacement, oscillation, movement forward and back, confidence, panic, experiences acquired and lost—the human memory recapitulates the lived experience of the refugee. Michel Foucault’s reasoning closely followed Nietzsche’s on the inaccessibility of the origin and the discontinuous development of human consciousness—one that acquires experience, forgets, dissembles, remembers, represses, blots out one memory with another—in an unsteady progress toward a settled mind of integrity, remembrance, and wisdom. Memory comes down to us through “sedimented layers” of previous apprehension and interpretation, as people experience history, lodge it in memory, and then rewrite it to suit their
needs—particularly where individual complicity in crimes is at stake. This plastic power preserves psychic peace at the cost of repression, but it is also a positive trait—“a testament to the creativity and ingenuity of the species,” as Tina Rosenberg put it. Yet people strive against all odds to preserve “the sovereignty of the subject,” a life narrative with a beginning, middle, and end.
³

The opposite of remembrance, or of keeping promises, is forgetfulness. It allows us “to close the doors and windows of consciousness for a time,” Nietzsche wrote; as an active faculty, forgetting is “like a doorkeeper, a preserver of psychic order, repose, and etiquette.” Human beings need forgetting, just as its opposite, memory, is an act of will; it requires one “to think causally,” to compute, to reflect, and to anticipate—this is “the long story of how
responsibility
originated.” To be responsible is to be serious about husbanding memory. Forgetfulness is a matter of will, too, “an active and in the strictest sense positive faculty of repression.” We humans are weak; we need to forget. However, people cannot but remember that which is “burned in”; only that which “never ceases to
hurt
stays in the memory”—pain is the most powerful aid to mnemonics. Virginia Woolf had the same insight: trauma confers memory, “an underground river of recollection.”
⁴
Here, in essence, is the reason why Koreans remember, and Americans forget.

The Korean War, more than any other war in modern times, is surrounded by residues and slippages of memory. The Great War’s place is indelible “in modern memory,” its annihilating violence a permanent reminder of war’s carnage. World War II was the good war, an outright victory to be celebrated. Vietnam tore the United States apart. With Korea there is less a presence than an absence; thus the default reflexive American name: “the forgotten war.” Its veterans feel neglected and misunderstood—they are also forgotten. South Koreans experience a knot of terrible loss, tragedy, bitterness, fate, invisible burdens, an inner negation pushing them
down and bending them inward, which they call
han
. North Koreans remember a scourge that claimed, on average, at least one member from every family. But here is the party of memory—laser-focused, burned-in remembrance of things past.

For years I rejected the “forgotten war” rubric; the
unknown war
seemed much better. But for Americans Korea is both: a forgotten war and a never-known war. The war began to disappear from consciousness as soon as the fighting stabilized: the first time it was named “forgotten,” to my knowledge, came in May 1951 as the title of an article in
U.S. News & World Report
. (Likewise, as early as 1973 Martha Gellhorn wrote that “consensual amnesia was the American reaction, an almost instant reaction, to the Vietnam War”; television reinforced the forgetting by maintaining “a respectful silence” after U.S. troops departed in 1973, even though this suddenly “forgotten war” was hardly over.
⁵
) Veterans also decided that this sobriquet fit Korea—based on their hard-won experience in the field, and their uncomprehending reception when they came home. “Now that the war is over,” says the Chorus in
Antigone
, “forget war.” But if the war is never over, how can it be forgotten?

For Americans Korea is just one among several wars best forgotten, since we are batting only one for four in big wars since 1945, just another transient episode among a myriad of interventions in Third World countries that do not bear close examination if one cares about amour propre, but have unsettling ways of coming back to haunt us—in Iran, for example, or Guatemala. Yet a surfeit of information and experience leaves even the most inquiring person with “a huge quantity of indigestible stones of knowledge,” so we would rather let our knowledge rest quietly within, “like a snake that has swallowed rabbits whole and now lies in the sun and avoids all unnecessary movement.” It is a strange and disturbing thing, this human-all-too-human failing—because “one would think that history would encourage men to be
honest
.”
⁶

The American “perfect tense” leads with a complete automaticity toward the dogma that the Korean War was started in 1950 by Stalin and Kim Il Sung, it ended in 1953 (whether as a victory, stalemate, or defeat depends on your partisan politics), and its sobriquet ever since has been “the forgotten war.” But let us assume that all we need know is the alpha: Kim Il Sung, aided by Stalin, pushed the button on June 25 and that’s how this war started. We successfully contained him and restored South Korea—the omega. A nagging problem still remains: unlike Hitler invading Poland, Tojo attacking Pearl Harbor, or Saddam Hussein invading Kuwait, Koreans invaded Korea. What do we make of that? In the midst of the terrible crisis in December 1950 that ineluctably followed upon the American decision to “liberate” the North, another view surfaced: that of Richard Stokes, the British minister of works, who intuited a paradox. The 38th parallel decision in 1945, taken unilaterally by Americans, was “the invitation to such a conflict as has in fact arisen”: