Category: History

Another Salvo: Kim Hee-sun’s Father

The accusations of the national betrayal and collaboration of relatives in South Korea’s politics continue with “confirmation” that the father of Uri party Kim Hee-sun’s father was a special operative working for the police in Japanese controlled Manchukuo (see older stories on this via Google News). The Uri party has been most aggressive in favoring a government investigation into collaboration in the colonial period. The anti-Uri Chosun Ilbo has, at least in the English edition which is all I can read at this point, been leading the way in reporting these charges in a Korea which is charged with emotions about its difficult history as a colony of Japan.

The claims of legitimacy by linking oneself to Korea’s independence movement (Kim Hee-sun apparently claimed to be the “daughter of the independence movement”) and the taint of treason that comes with being connected in any way to those who cooperated or worked for the Japanese colonial administration are powerful currency in the politics of the ROK. Only in the last few years, however, has this really bubbled to the surface in mainstream political discourse. Again, I can’t wait to get my Korean up to a level where I can plunge into looking more closely at the history of treason in the aftermath of the colonial period.

South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Law

I have been watching the development of South Korea’s fascinating “Truth and Reconciliation Law” very closely. The leading Uri party is digging up old skeletons by looking at the pro-Japan collaborators during the colonial period. This is especially interesting to me given my interest in the uses of treason in East Asia. In addition to a genuine desire to look into the dark aspects of the colonial period and point a few fingers, there are very powerful political motivations at work. Also, this law has actually caused some tension in ROK’s relations with Japan.

The most recent news is that the Uri Party have completed their final draft of the law. While I’m getting plenty of information on this through Korea’s English language media, I can’t wait until I can read more about this in Korean…unfortunately my language studies progress only slowly…

Charles Tilly: Citizenship and Boundary Formation

I went to a second talk this week at the Center for European Studies, this time one given by Columbia University professor Charles Tilly called “Citizenship, Boundaries, and Exclusion.” Although my only contact with his work was a few essays assigned as reading (and my only contact with him being the odd fix of his printer or set up of a new computer in my capacity as a faculty support techie at Columbia a few years back), I see his name everywhere. He seems to have such a powerful command in such a wide range of disciplines, both as a scholar whose work is referred to, but also, as I learned today, as someone who can smoothly jump from consideration of the complexities of contemporary Kazakh politics, to talk about the detailed history of the Jewish community in Trieste, as well as his more well-trodden fields of early modern French history and sociological theory.

According to the introduction by another professor, Tilly’s work has recently tried to create a general theory of “boundary formation” and his talk introduced an argument which seems to be a part of it. His talk yesterday began with a story about the formation of the concept of citizenship in the Pyrenees Catalan speaking communities between Spain and France in the 17th century and then went to more general observations about the rise of citizenship within the context of national boundary formation. He based much of his historical discussion on two books by Peter Sahlins called Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees and another called Unnaturally French. His emphasis, which I think ties into his broader theory, was on the idea that the modern concept of citizenship formed as a byproduct, or the indirect result of an exclusionary move. In other words, it was not so much thanks to the definition of who was “French” but out of the gradual determination of who was “not French.” This is not, in and of itself, a very creative point. Many scholars of national identity and nationalism emphasize the role of “the Other” in the creation of a national Self. In using Sahlins’ example of the Pyrenees, however Tilly was good at tracing specifically how this worked in the legal domain of citizenship, long before, as he says, “The idea of ‘nation’ was hijacked by the French Revolution.”
Continue reading Charles Tilly: Citizenship and Boundary Formation

Denazification and Iraq

I went to an interesting talk yesterday on “Denazification in Theory and Practice” given by Rebecca Boehling at the Center for European Studies. She opened with a discussion of how she got involved in doing more detailed research on the process of denazification in the early postwar occupation of Germany. She was apparently contacted before the occupation of Iraq by Ali Allawi, now the Iraqi Minister of Trade. Allawi knew about her research on the German occupation and wanted to get her technical consultation on policies for Iraqi de-Baathification. This is apparently well before the invasion, and they began a correspondence. He read some of her research on why the denazification process was a disaster. Initially, he showed her plans to go forward, in Iraq, with what was essentially the same flawed procedure the US used in early postwar Germany. After going back and forth, she claims that she managed to convince him why some of the US policies failed.

While at one point there was an offer for her to become a full technical consultant for an interim Iraqi government, apparently their correspondence died off after she asked his opinion about some of the infamous figures like Chalabi and others who were in the émigré community and he had replied that two of them she mentioned, including Chalabi, were relatives.

Apparently, Allawi didn’t end up in charge of the de-Baathification policy and the proposal they had worked on didn’t get implemented. However, after the invasion of Iraq, Professor Boehling discovered, “How much worse an American occupation could really get.” I wish I had some time to outline some of her critique on the post-WWII denazification process but I hope her work, which is still in progress, will soon be out in a paper or book form.

Pepysdiary.com

Phil Gyford is blogging the Diary of Samuel Pepys. (Link thanks to Keywords). What a fantastic application of this medium.

Imagine if there were some idle, but careful and dedicated hands that were willing to blog the diaries of other fascinating people of the past. I can think of dozens of figures in modern East Asian history alone whose diaries I wouldn’t mind skimming in my RSS feeder while eating breakfast…in small irregular doses. Not all of them are likely to be as full of interesting observations as Pepys, despite their fame and importance, but I’m sure we can all think of a few that are.

UPDATE: Kerim has found all sorts of other sites which are posting books in the form of blogs, including some other diaries.

Sheer Humanity

I’m reading an interesting book focusing on the early postwar period in Western Europe called The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945-1965. It focuses on three groups: veterans, drafted wartime laborers, and victims of Nazi persecution. The section on veterans highlights some of the diverse and often bizarre disputes involving the recognition of resistance fighters and such as war veterans – something important in the process of rebuilding national pride after liberation by the Allies. In one interesting Belgian case, a volunteer of a relief action for victims of Allied bombing applied for recognition in one such veteran organization and was questioned as to how such activities were appropriate for inclusion:

‘…our activity had no clandestine character whatsoever. We usually wore an arm-badge to be allowed on the site of the disaster. There was no risk involved and the Germans were quite positive about our action.’

The volunteer had been urged to apply for membership because the actions might be included in the clause, “works of patriotic solidarity.” But there is more,

The administration rejected the demand on the behaf of his relief work, but assured him that he was entitled to the statute under another heading of the law, since he had given shelter to two Jewish clandestines during the occupation. This the applicant refused, since, according to his own declaration, this had nothing to do with resistance, but with sheer humanity.1

There are a number of fascinating things which come out in this little anecdote. Among other things it shows the difficulty in weighing the “value” of resistance in wartime, which might include publishing anti-German pamphlets or sabotage and which implies a nation’s active contribution in its own liberation, as compared to the non-national, potentially even “collaborationist” humane act of relief work in the face of Allied bombing in a German occupied Belgium, and then the non-national, non-resistance action of hiding Jews from death at the hands of the Holocaust. Ultimately, however, what naturally got privileged in the early aftermath of any war of “resistance” were acts which contribute to a national epic of salvation from the humiliating experience of occupation or, as in the case of recognizing help for Jewish clandestines, those which counter the evils of the enemy. As the author Pieter Lagrou clearly goes on to show, however, these too become almost comically co-opted, manipulated, and recreated by the early postwar regimes that came into power.

In applying for recognition, however, this volunteer shows on the one hand a willingness to interpret an act which embarrassingly preserves the reality of Allied bombing in national memory, as “patriotic”, while on the other exposing the absurdity of recognizing aid to Jews in hiding as some kind of national service.

1. Lagrou, Pieter The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945-1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) p. 55-56

Charles Maier: The Question of Meaning

I’m really excited about starting my history PhD. I’m sure the misery and loneliness of grad school will hit me eventually but not yet. One of the professors who I hope to learn a lot from is Charles S. Maier, a professor of modern European history. I knew him from the introduction to a book on the historiography of the Nanjing Massacre and a book called The Unmasterable Past on the German historiographical debate of the 1980s called the Historikerstreit.

Since I’m meeting him soon I have been reading up on his other stuff. In an opening essay in an old 1978 book called The Origins of the Cold War and Contemporary Europe he writes about the debate between “revisionist” left leaning historians who have been motivated by the horrors of the US involvement in Vietnam to reexamine the US role in the origins of the Cold War and more traditional historians. While I don’t like a few of his terms that much, he actually has a much more balanced approach than the use of that word might imply.

He concedes several points to the “revisionist” scholarship even as he critiques it, but more importantly, I think that his article, which might otherwise be considered quite outdated in its portrayal of the field now, can be used with almost exactly the same terms to describe one of the central points of contention between “empirical” or “positivist” or “traditional” history on the one hand, and more theoretically framed, self-reflective, but perhaps more ideologically charged history that might be said to descend from the very group of scholars he is talking about here. Here is how he frames the two approaches in the case of Cold War historians of the late 1970s:

For those who stress history as bureaucratic process, all questions of historical responsibility can appear ambiguous and even irrelevant. Foreign policy emerges as the result of a competition for fiefs within governmental empires. Bureaucratic emphases can produce a neo-Rankean acquiescence in the use of power that is no less deterministic than the revisionist tendency to make all policies exploitive in a liberal capitalist order. But what is perhaps most significant about these alternative causal models is that they are addressed to different questions. The non-revisionists are asking how policies are formed and assume that this also covers the question why. The revisionists see the two questions as different and are interested in the why. And by “why?” revisionists are asking what the meaning of policies is in terms of values imposed from outside the historical narrative. The revisionists charge that the historian must pose this question of meaning consciously or he will pose it unconsciously and accept the values that help to uphold a given social system. History, they suggest, must serve the oppressors or the oppressed, if not by intent then by default. The historian who wishes to avoid this iron polarity can reply that social systems rarely divide their members into clear-cut oppressors and oppressed. He can also insist that even when one despairs of absolute objectivity there are criteria for minimizing subjectivity. On the other hand, he must also take care that the history of policy making not become so focused on organizational processes that the idea of social choice and responsibility is precluded.1

When Professor Maier quotes the “revisionists” as claiming, “The historian must pose this question of meaning consciously or he will pose it unconsciously and accept the values that help to uphold a given social system,” I think he has really struck on one of the central points here which is just as much an issue today. I would also go so far as saying that not only “traditional” history but also the field of Political Science in American universities today apply when he says, “The non-revisionists are asking how policies are formed and assume that this also covers the question why.”

What I’m getting here at is that one more obvious element of the clash between the kind of history which, in my understanding, has dominated the field for some time now, and the theoretical crisis that many find it in today, is not that there is an iron polarity between necessarily serving oppressors or the oppressed. However, I do think there is a growing consensus around the idea that there isn’t a way to just skip the “question of meaning” all together. This is something, I think Professor Maier hints at in the last line of the quote and one he goes into more detail in his work on German historians debating the historical relevance of the Holocaust.
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Columbia: Chinese Connection

There is a conference coming up (Sept 10-11) at Columbia University on its “Chinese Connection” or famous former students of Columbia who went on to become famous people. It is kind of a promotional event for the university so I think it will mostly be warm and fuzzy but may have some very interesting talks. The RSVP page doesn’t say anything about charging money to attend. There is an article on their site on the early history of East Asian studies at Columbia University. I haven’t read the whole thing, but similar celebratory tone. It is written by Professors Theodore de Bary and Donald Keene, two of CU’s giants in the field.

History Channel: North Korea Documentary

I’m in the middle of watching two horrible documentaries on North Korea on the history channel. It is a commercial break now but we have just been told that “the story goes that” Kim Jong Il murdered his brother while they swam together in a river as a child. While described as a “story” the very next statement made by some former CIA guy they interviewed was basically that murdering his own brother had a “psychological impact” on Kim which helped set the tone for his murderous career. This of course sets the tone for the remainder of the second documentary, entitled, “The Real Dr. Evil.”

While filmed in the dramatic “unsolved mysteries” or “inside report” kind of documentary style to help accentuate the eeeevvviiilll of North Korea and Kim Jong Il, it is as if someone ran an “IMPORT SCRIPT” command on the old South Korean anti-communist education system. I’m not suggesting that Kim Jong Il is a warm and fuzzy loving guy, but these dramatized shows (also very popular in Japan) accomplish nothing but to set up the DPRK as the demons they are portrayed as in old Korean textbooks.

Update: I finished watching the show. Well, I’m all fired up now to despise that cold blooded Dr. Evil Kim Jong Il and his “precious” nuclear weapons. I wonder what it must be like for these interviewees in such documentaries to have things they say get woven into these shows and whether they feel like their “main point” is getting through. In the case of one of the few “scholarly” types interviewed, Selig Harrison, who is the author of Korean Endgame and is a DPRK expert with very moderate positions currently at the Center for International Policy I am not sure he did. I found a nice article written by him for the Nation in which he reviews several recent books on Korea, including works by Cumings and Armstrong.