Selling the Korean War

"Yes. This is a recent book, and it is very well researched. I think for lay people who try to understand what historians do, it really helps to know that you can’t really cover a subject without using archives and primary sources . He also looks at formerly classified secret documents. All this information gives us a window into what really happened (as opposed to what was supposed to have happened), and it’s also unimpeachable evidence. What the author found with all his research is that the U.S. government had a major campaign to massage public opinion about the Korean War, both in the United States and on a global scale. One set of files that I looked at in the State Department is very typical. You might find the Embassy in Guatemala trying to refute an article in the local press praising I F Stone’s book, The Hidden History of the Korean War . In South Africa they would counter a letter to the editor in the Johannesburg newspaper. It is just amazing how much money and personnel the U.S. had to push its interpretation of the Korean War. Essentially, that both South Korea and the U.S. were utterly blameless and that North Korea, backed by the Soviet Union and China, launched an unprovoked invasion which was courageously resisted. This is actually what many influential people believed. Another thing the U.S. did was censor the battlefield. The first six months of the war were not censored, so you get really interesting books. If I had a sixth book to recommend to you, it would be Cry Korea by Reginald Thompson, a British reporter, which was written in 1952. He covered the war in the first six months and said it was a very different war from World War II. It was really like what we came to understand to be the nature of the Vietnam War. In particular, Thompson discovered an extraordinary number of atrocities by the South Korean government, and saw that the U.S. was turning a blind eye to the situation. And it was when British and Australian reports about this came out, at the end of 1950, that censorship descended onto the battlefield. For the next two years, what you learnt about the war was what you got out of General MacArthur’s headquarters or the State Department. Well, the last thing you said is completely false, so I would tell them it is completely untrue that I overlook what the North Koreans were doing. What my critics have done is to ignore South Korean atrocities, which we now know ran at a ratio of six to one with North Korean atrocities. That has been proven by a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that laboured for years in South Korea. When South Korea democratised, we got a lot more information about things like this. I was the first person (except for former officials) to use the archives of the U.S. occupation in Korea, so there wasn’t any story to revise except the official story, which was full of holes. And I actually don’t think any historian worth his or her salt should be anything but a revisionist. If a book doesn’t say new things and revise our understanding of what happened, then what good is it? But unfortunately, particularly in this country, ‘revisionist’ is a term that you can label a person with and then others will shy away and not read their work."