Beyond collective amnesia: a Korean War retrospective

International Social Science Review, Fall-Winter, 2001 by Paul G. Pierpaoli, Jr

For nearly three decades after the end of the Korean War, American veterans of the conflict--along with increasing numbers of historians and other scholars--bemoaned the fact that Korea had become a "forgotten war." In fact, in the United States there were signs that the war was being forgotten even as it was being fought. After fifty years of retrospection, however, it has become readily apparent that the Korean War marked a great watershed in Korean and Cold War history, not to mention a sea change in U.S. history. Why, then, was there this early popular and academic amnesia toward a conflict that killed more than 34,000 Americans and several million Koreans and Chinese?

As with all such sweeping historical dilemmas, the explanation of such phenomena is at once complex and multi-faceted. First, it is helpful to view the Korean War as one that was wedged tightly between the "good war" and the "bad war"; that is, between World War II and the Vietnam War. (2) Occurring less than five full years after the end of World War II, the Korean War was often and perhaps unavoidably compared with and subsumed by the myth and memory of the Second World War. On the surface, at least, the Korean Conflict seemed to have emerged like an unwanted mutation from a linear, Darwinian-like process that seamlessly linked World War II with the Cold War and its early evolutionary process. Thus, from the start, the Korean War became a prisoner of the rigid mentality and ideology of the early Cold War and furthermore seemed to have been denied the full internal and external processes of memory and myth that Paul Fussell saw as such an integral part of the history and memory of World War I. Perhaps on the one hand the Korean War "inherited" too much myth from World War II. And on the other hand, perhaps it "generated" too little myth of its own. As a result, the war and its generated--and regenerated--myths never became "part of the fiber of our own lives," as Fussell put it. (3) And if that had not been bad enough, America's growing quagmire in Vietnam began in earnest and in large scale only ten years AFTER the Korean armistice. Vietnam, of course, would quickly overshadow any lingering doubt--not to mention lessons learned or unlearned--from America's first war of communist containment on another artificially-divided Asian peninsula.

Second, it is imperative to examine structures of power and hegemony and how they worked at various levels in order to understand how and why the Korean War was fought and how the memory and history of the conflict have been thus far constructed. Indeed, the discourse of the war and its immediate aftermath begs to be studied and interpreted more fully. Recently, adherents of discourse theory and the new cultural history have suggested the use of Michel Foucault's methods to understand that "the power to shape the symbolic systems of language and meaning is the power over `knowledge' and `reality.'" (4) If this is the case, then it seems only logical to extend that theory to include the shaping of myth and memory, which are inextricably linked to "knowledge," "reality," and "history" in the Foucauldian sense. Much more remains to be done from this perspective, both from a domestic and geopolitical vantage point. Understanding the discourse and structure of the war's representation from the standpoints of myth, memory, and reality is the key to unlocking the historiographical vault surrounding the Korean War. As far as hegemonic constructs are concerned, the Korean War fit a forgettable trajectory of American Cold War foreign policy that kept certain nations--like West Germany and Japan--within America's sphere of defense dependency. As Bruce Cumings has written, "In Korea, the United States picked up the glove of the Japanese empire and sought to keep South Korea and Taiwan within Japan's historic economic area ... [similarly] in Vietnam [it] picked up the French glove." (5) In the same fashion, the American involvement in the Korean War fit into a larger schema that viewed Northeast Asia as an integral part of the United States' imperative to maintain and expand liberal capitalism around the world. In this sense too, Japan (and by extension Korea) lay at the epicenter of America's sphere of economic dependency in Asia. As reductionist as this may appear on the surface, it is nonetheless important to understand the history, memory, and legacy of the Korean war from a hegemonic, international perspective.

Aside from these theoretical and philosophical explanations, there are other more concrete--but certainly no less important--reasons why the Korean War received so little attention in the immediate postwar decades. The fact that the war was a stalemate and appeared inconclusive to the adherents of Communist "rollback" did nothing to advance the cause of memory and history. Furthermore, Americans were not conditioned to fight limited wars with vague and shifting goals. Without an unconditional victory, Americans preferred amnesia to self-doubt or introspection. The Korean War was also highly politicized in the United States--but in a most peculiar and destructive way. The politics of early 1950s anti-communism and the toxic politics of McCarthyism offered criticism of the war and its outcome from a harrowingly narrow perspective. Indeed, criticism or vocalized frustration over the war from a perspective other than that of the prescribed anti-communist. Right was considered anathema and may well have resulted in any number of serious and negative repercussions. By 1951, American culture--not to mention the Korean War--had become viciously politicized. In the early 1950s, the political climate unleashed by the war in Korea equated social reform, racial justice, and measured criticism with political subversion--if not outright treason. History focused on conformity and consensus. So is it any wonder, one should ask, that a conflict like the Korean War was quickly consigned to the outer reaches of the American psyche and memory? (6)