The Korean War: A History (15 page)

The primary academic McCarthyite was Karl Wittfogel, who had a strange trajectory out of the same milieu as Bertolt Brecht: he was the leading ideologue of the German Communist Party in the early 1930s, and the leading proponent of Karl Marx’s theory of “the Asiatic Mode of Production.” Stalin purged him for reasons that are not entirely clear, and Wittfogel came to the United States and established himself as a scholar with his magnum opus,
Oriental
Despotism.
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Marx’s theory appraised Asia by reference to what it lacked when set against the standard-issue European model of development: feudalism, the rise of the bourgeoisie, capitalism. A brutal satrap presided over a semiarid environment, running armies of bureaucrats and soldiers, regulating the paths of great rivers, and employing vast amounts of slave labor in gigantic public works projects (such as China’s Great Wall). The despot above and the cringing mass below prevented the emergence of anything resembling a modern middle class.

Leon Trotsky, his biographer Isaac Deutscher, the Soviet dissident Nikolai Bukharin, and Wittfogel all likened Stalin to Eastern potentates, especially Genghis Khan, and thought his regime was a species of Oriental despotism, the worst features of the “Asiatic mode of production” coming to the fore. It is stunning to see Trotsky open his biography of Stalin with a first sentence remarking that the old revolutionist Leonid Krassin “was the first, if I am not mistaken, to call Stalin an ‘Asiatic’”; Trotsky depicts “Asiatic” leaders as cunning and brutal, presiding over static societies with a huge peasant base.
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“Cunning” and “shrewd” were standard adjectives in stereotypes of Asians, particularly when they were denied civil rights and penned up in Chinatowns by whites-only housing restrictions, leading to uniform typecasting from a distance—peering over a high board fence, so to speak. “Brutal” was another, at least since Genghis Khan, with Pol Pot and Mao reinforcing the image in our time. The broadest distinction, between static or indolent East and dynamic, progressive West, goes all the way back to Herodotus and Aristotle.

Marx never really investigated East Asia, but learned enough to know that if China fit his theory, Japan with its feudalism (and “petite culture”) clearly did not. Wittfogel, however, applied his notions of Oriental despotism to every dynastic empire with a river running through it—China, tsarist Russia, Persia, Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Incas, even the Hopi Indians of Arizona. By this time he had done a full-fledged, high-wire
tenko
(Japanese for a political
flip-flop), reemerging as an organic reactionary and trying to reproduce himself in, of all places, Seattle—the most thoroughly middle-class city in America. Wittfogel wrote for many extreme-right-wing publications and played a critical role in the purges of China scholars and Foreign Service officers during the McCarthy period. Hardly any scholars would testify against Owen Lattimore, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s prime professorial target, but the University of Washington furnished three: Wittfogel, Nikolas Poppe (a Soviet expert on Mongolia who had defected to the Nazis in 1943), and George Taylor, a British scholar-journalist.
²⁹

After teaching in the Philadelphia area in the mid-1970s—where I was pleased to meet Olga Lang, Wittfogel’s first wife (“Why did you divorce?” I asked. “Irreconcilable political differences,” she answered)—I wound up at the University of Washington, which has one of the oldest East Asian programs in the United States. Around that time Perry Anderson published
Lineages of the Absolutist State
. At the end of this magisterial book rests an eighty-seven-page “Note” on the theory of the Asiatic mode of production,
³⁰
where Anderson shows that Marx’s views on Asia differed little from those of Hegel, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and a host of other worthies; they were all peering through the wrong end of a telescope, or in a mirror, weighing a smattering of knowledge about Asia against their understanding of how the West developed. Nor did Marx ever take the “Asiatic mode” very seriously; he was always interested in one thing, really, and that was capitalism (even when it came to communism). Anderson called Wittfogel a “vulgar charivari” and recommended giving this theory an unceremonious burial, concluding that “in the night of our ignorance … all alien shapes take on the same hue.” I eagerly recommended his book to my colleagues: a good friend said, “He doesn’t know any Chinese.” Another responded, “Isn’t he a Marxist?”—meaning Anderson, not Wittfogel.

The theory never really got a proper burial, though, it just reappears in less-conspicuous forms. It isn’t politically correct to say “Oriental” or “Asiatic” anymore (even if some haven’t gotten the
message). Stalin is long dead, but Stalinism is apparently not, and it’s still okay to say almost anything about Stalinism. Furthermore, lo and behold, one set of “Orientals” has kept it alive: journalists use the term time and again to describe North Korea, without any hint of qualifying or questioning their position. The idea that the DPRK is a pure form of “Stalinism in the East”
³¹
goes back to the 1940s, and was constantly reinforced by Berkeley’s Robert Scalapino, a Cold War scholar who came along in the late 1950s and benefited as much as anyone from the post-McCarthy accommodation between the right and the middle.

North Korean political practice is reprehensible, but we are not responsible for it. More disturbing is the incessant stereotyping and demonizing of this regime in the United States. When Kim Il Sung died in 1994,
Newsweek
ran a cover story entitled “The Headless Beast.” Assertions that his son is simply crazy abound, but when they enter the thinking of fine analysts such as Steven Coll in
The New Yorker,
³²
a magazine with a venerable tradition of fact-checking, you might ask which psychiatrist diagnosed Kim? Another expert recently wrote, as if everyone knows this, that North Korea is “a hybrid of Stalinism and oriental despotism.”
³³

Kim Jong Il, of course, specializes in do-it-yourself stereotyping, masquerading as the Maximum Leader of a Communist opéra bouffe in elevator shoes and 1970s double-knit pants suit, fattening himself while the masses starve, which makes it hard to argue that “Oriental despotism” is not the name of his politics. But there is no evidence in the North Korean experience of the mass violence against whole classes of people or the wholesale “purge” that so clearly characterized Stalinism, and that was particularly noteworthy in the scale of deaths in the land reform campaigns in China and North Vietnam and the purges of the Cultural Revolution. Nonetheless, North Korea remains everyone’s example of worst-case socialism and (until 1991) Soviet stoogery, leading American observers whether at the time or since to deem it impossible for the DPRK to have had any capacity for independent action in 1950.

In fact Kim and his late father, and the ideologues around them, continue the ancient monarchical practice in East and West of “the king’s two bodies,” a body politic and a “body natural.” The latter is an ordinary, frail human being who happens to be king, who will go to his death like anyone else: Kim Jong Il, in short, with the dyspeptic, cynical, irritated face of a man who, from birth, had no chance of living up to his father—yet he has to be king. The other is a superhuman presence, an absolutely perfect body representing the god-king, maintained through the centuries as an archetype of the exquisite leader. (And with this you get North Korean inanities such as Kim Jong Il scoring eagles on his first golf round.) In death the body natural disappears, but the soul of the god-king passes on to the next king. In Pyongyang this translated into Kim Il Sung’s “seed” bringing forth his first son, Jong Il, continuing the perfect “bloodlines” that his scribes never tire of applauding. The family line thus becomes immortal, explaining why Kim Il Sung was not just president-for-life, but remained president of the DPRK in his afterlife. The high-level defector Hwang Jang-yop told Bradley Martin that the two Kims “turned Stalinism and Marxism-Leninism on their heads by reverting to Confucian notions.”
³⁴

North Korea is thus a modern form of monarchy, realized in a highly nationalistic, postcolonial state. “The social unity expressed in the ‘body of the despot,’” Jameson pointed out, is political, but also analogous to various religious practices. That the favored modern practice of such regimes should be nationalism (the leader’s body, the body politic, the national body) is also entirely predictable. But the Western left (let alone liberals) utterly fails to understand “the immense Utopian appeal of nationalism”; its morbid qualities are easily grasped, but its healthy qualities for the collective, and for the tight unity that postcolonial leaders crave, are denied.
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When you add to postcolonial nationalism Korea’s centuries of royal succession and neo-Confucian philosophy, it might be possible to understand North Korea as an unusual but predictable
combination of monarchy, nationalism, and Korean political culture.

We who live in Western liberal society have our subconscious automatically (if imperfectly) produced from birth and we take for granted the relatively stable societies that we join as adults, so that we do what is expected without necessarily thinking about it. Civil society is thus internalized and reproduced, as an outcome of centuries of Western political practice. The creation of such habits, however, the spontaneous production of good citizens and good workers, loyal subjects who are also afforded the opportunity of disloyalty, appears as an opaque mystery where it does not exist—how can social exchange be so open, so fluid, so simultaneously orderly and threatening even to the powers, and yet so stable? “The ways by which people advance toward dignity and enlightenment in government,” George F. Kennan wrote, “are things that constitute the deepest and most intimate processes of national life. There is nothing less understandable to foreigners, nothing in which foreign influence can do less good.”
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It is our blindness, our hidden complex of unexamined assumptions, that constitutes the core of Kim-hating—what makes him simultaneously so laughable, so impudent, and so outrageous; we revile him, while he thumbs his nose at us and our values and gets away with it. We have proved over seven decades that we do not understand North Korea and that we cannot do anything about it, however much we would like to. We can do something about our prejudices.

Korea is the place where the Cold War arrived first, where it never ended and never left, and where we can still see it on cable television. In Cold War bipolarity we are in the right, our motives are pure, we do good and never harm. They are a hateful mob,
criminal when not just Communist, invisible (or even aliens and Martians in 1950s movies), grotesque, insane, capable of anything. We are human and dignified and open; they are inhuman, a mysterious, secluded Other with no rights worthy of our respect. We would happily go home if the enemy would only do the right thing and evaporate, disappear, efface themselves. But the enemy is obstinate, persistent, ever-present in its malevolence (in the summer of 2009, day in and day out, CNN presented news about the North under the title “North Korea Threat”). After seven decades of confrontation, the dominant American images of North Korea still bear the birthmarks of Orientalist bigotry.

A
t 11:00
A.M.
on August 9, 1945, the B-29 nicknamed “Bock’s Car” appeared over Nagasaki, with a bombardier named Kermit Beahan sitting in the Plexiglas nose of the plane. It was his twenty-seventh birthday. He released a plutonium-239 bomb called “the Fat Man,” weighing nine thousand pounds. Dangling under a parachute, it took forty seconds to fall one and a half miles to its point of detonation, five hundred meters above the red domes of the Catholic church at Urakami, long admired as the most splendid Christian cathedral in East Asia. A thirty-six-year-old Catholic priest named Ishikawa was ministering to patients in Urakami Hospital on that hot, sultry morning. The day of the Ascension of the Virgin Mary approached, and his flock wanted to confess their sins in advance of the grand festival planned for August 15. Around eleven o’clock, as he returned to his room, “a sudden white flash filled the corridor with light,” followed by “a great roar” that flung him through the air, where he struck his head on a concrete post. Somehow he stumbled back to the chapel, where nurses found him lying on the floor. They roused him and, in spite of his head wounds, he administered last rites to the walking dead who soon appeared at the doorstep of the hospital. A Korean, Father Ishikawa later returned to his homeland where he became a Catholic bishop and lived into the late 1970s.
¹
(At least ten thousand Koreans, mostly conscripted laborers, perished at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)

The next day John J. McCloy, then with the War Department, asked Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel to retreat to an adjoining room to find a place to divide Korea for the purposes of accepting the surrender of Japanese armed forces. They chose the 38th parallel because, as Rusk later said, it included the highly centralized
capital at Seoul in the American zone. The United States consulted no other powers in coming to this decision, least of all any Koreans. But McCloy, of course, was already a charter “wise man,” and he carried the day. This decision was embodied in General MacArthur’s General Order Number One issued on August 15, 1945, a highly political demarcation that directed Japanese soldiers to surrender to Chiang Kai-shek in China and northern Vietnam (but not to Mao or Ho) and ended up being the first critical act in the Cold War division of East Asia. Soviet armed forces had entered northern Korea on August 8 and swept southward, but they accepted the 38th parallel decision silently, without comment or written agreement. The XXIV Corps on Okinawa, led by Gen. John Reed Hodge, drew occupation duty in Korea but could not disembark until September 8—in spite of so much prodding from Washington to get there quickly that Hodge later referred to it as “that scramble move.” Soon this corps, composed of the 6th, 7th, and 40th infantry divisions, which had suffered grievous losses in the bloody “last battle” on Okinawa, was in full occupation of Korea south of 38 degrees—just as the State Department had long planned.