TWIB-III: 24 (3/23-3/29)
Aug. 14th, 2009 02:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akujunkanAnd you thought I'd never write it. Well, I did. Many times, in fact. And, nearly four months later, I present to you a version that has had most of the extraneous obscenity edited out (although the sentiment is still there). Anyway, here are the two books I read during the week of March 23 to March 29:
1) North Korea(: Another Country) - Bruce Cumings
So here it is, folks. The book it took me a third of a year to blurb because I hate it so much. Bruce Cumings is a history professor at the University of Chicago. He is also the author of one of the most widely-read histories of modern Korea (which is currently on my TBR list). But I gotta say, if North Korea (the "Another Country" is or isn't included depending on the edition) is at all indicative of his "scholarship," thank fucking god I opted for the cheaper in-state university over UC. Because sweet J.C. on toast points, the man is a hack.
I'd heard Cumings was "leftist." Fine with me--after all, no one in their right mind would believe I toe the Republican line on much of anything. But Cumings is the sort of leftist conservatives can point to when they try to paint all liberals as ignorant idealists living in a dangerous fantasy world. To wit: Cumings sincerely believes that North Korea really isn't such a bad place, and that Kim Jong-il is really just a nice guy--or would be, if the big bad U.S. of A. would just stop being such a meanypants to him. To this end he willfully minimizes evidence to the contrary, or attempts to disregard it with a dismissive flick of the hand: Sure U.S. leaders criticize the North's human rights record, but look how many African Americans are incarcerated in U.S. prisons! As if people can't be aware of domestic and international human rights abuses simultaneously, or as if the existence of the former gives a "get out of jail free card" to the latter.
Although Cumings provides footnotes, they're sparse on the ground and one gets the distinct impression they exist solely to make the book appear academically rigorous, which it most definitely is not. I am fine with alternate histories as long as they clearly cite their source material. But if an alternative history is going to allege that Colin Powell threatened to drop nuclear bombs on the DPRK or that U.S. intelligence determined the likelihood that North Korea possesses nuclear weapons not through intense intelligence-gathering activities, but by a spur-of-the-moment show of hands, its author had better damn well footnote those allegations so readers can check his sources themselves. Predictably, Cumings does not.
Cumings is blind to his other shortcomings as well. He excoriates many in the U.S. for their attitude toward the nation's people, stating, "Every statement beginning 'Koreans are...'1" is an indication of racism. But open North Korea to a page at random (especially in its latter chapters) and just try to get five pages in either direction without encountering a phrase such as "Koreans are..." "Koreans do [...] because..." "From the Korean standpoint..." It isn't possible, because such statements are Cumings' bread and butter. Lesson here? Ethno-cultural reduction is Racist when other people do it, The Truth when Bruce Cumings does it.
And for a leftist, Cumings' attitudes towards North Korean women (and women more generally) are pretty damn retrograde. You see, Cumings repeatedly stresses how much better North Korean women have it compared to their counterparts in the South, never mind the fact that not only do women in the DPRK have to shoulder the double burden of career and housework, but they also need Party permission to marry and "the moral code is chastity and virginity; no skirts above the knee, no premarital sex2." Indeed, Cumings almost fetishizes the "purity" of North Korean women. That's bad enough, but I'd like you to keep such sentiment in mind while reading the following passage:
All of this is a shame because until very recently, the West's accepted history of the Korean Peninsula did swing too far to conservative Cold War ideologies; more people need to be made aware of U.S. support for South Korean dictatorships and U.S. wartime atrocities. But by swinging so flamboyantly to the opposite end of the political spectrum, Cumings ultimate does this goal a supreme disservice. He's such a cartoonish apologist for the modern DPRK regime it's difficult to take the few salient points he does make seriously.
1That's on page 203; the entire passage in question begins on the previous page. This and the following citations refer to the 2004 paperback edition of North Korea published by The New Press, which does not include the subtitle "Another Country."
2Page 172.
3Page 140.
2) 日・中・韓のナショナリズム - 松本 健一
Japanese, Chinese, and Korean Nationalism - Kenichi Matsumoto
Kenichi Matsumoto is an odd duck. A philosopher and political historian famous for his multivolume work on WWII-era conservative Kita Ikki, his political philosophy defies easy categorization into liberal or conservative.
Like many Japanese books, Nationalism's content is only tenuously connected to its title: the book deals mainly with some of the main historical controversies to arise in Japanese politics since the turn of the 21st century. Matsumoto takes a liberal line concerning the Yasukuni Shrine debate: he argues that no aspect of Shinto religious doctrine prevents the dis-enshrining of the Class A war criminals who have caused so much controversy at home and abroad whenever members of the Japanese political establishment visit the shrine.
His take on the textbook controversy is somewhat more libertarian. By his own admission, Matsumoto was one of the original individuals involved in the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform--the conservative group that whitewashed Japanese involvement in WWII-era atrocities. He left the group, he says, not because he disagreed with what they stood for, but because he believes "history" can only be created and understood on an individual level; thus, any collective attempt to create an official history is doomed to failure. That said, he doesn't see anything wrong with the conservative textbooks themselves, and argues that their low rate of adoption (less than 1%, if I remember correctly) demonstrates only that the Chinese and Korean governments cynically used the controversy for their own political ends. Indeed, he is much more concerned that modern Japan, with its tech fetish and concern with trendiness, has lost its soul. In this he veers very close to nihonjinronja in his belief that "Japaneseness" exists out there, rather like Plato's Forms, and that modern Japanese have somehow forsaken or diluted it.
His take on Japan's territorial disputes with Russia, China, and South Korea are very historically informative, although I fault him for his disingenuous insistence that there are no economic concerns motivating the disputes. Final verdict: the first chapter of the book, with its clear explanations of Shinto cosmology and the development of the Yasukuni debate are well worth the read, with the latter chapters much weaker in comparison.
That will be all.
1) North Korea(: Another Country) - Bruce Cumings
So here it is, folks. The book it took me a third of a year to blurb because I hate it so much. Bruce Cumings is a history professor at the University of Chicago. He is also the author of one of the most widely-read histories of modern Korea (which is currently on my TBR list). But I gotta say, if North Korea (the "Another Country" is or isn't included depending on the edition) is at all indicative of his "scholarship," thank fucking god I opted for the cheaper in-state university over UC. Because sweet J.C. on toast points, the man is a hack.
I'd heard Cumings was "leftist." Fine with me--after all, no one in their right mind would believe I toe the Republican line on much of anything. But Cumings is the sort of leftist conservatives can point to when they try to paint all liberals as ignorant idealists living in a dangerous fantasy world. To wit: Cumings sincerely believes that North Korea really isn't such a bad place, and that Kim Jong-il is really just a nice guy--or would be, if the big bad U.S. of A. would just stop being such a meanypants to him. To this end he willfully minimizes evidence to the contrary, or attempts to disregard it with a dismissive flick of the hand: Sure U.S. leaders criticize the North's human rights record, but look how many African Americans are incarcerated in U.S. prisons! As if people can't be aware of domestic and international human rights abuses simultaneously, or as if the existence of the former gives a "get out of jail free card" to the latter.
Although Cumings provides footnotes, they're sparse on the ground and one gets the distinct impression they exist solely to make the book appear academically rigorous, which it most definitely is not. I am fine with alternate histories as long as they clearly cite their source material. But if an alternative history is going to allege that Colin Powell threatened to drop nuclear bombs on the DPRK or that U.S. intelligence determined the likelihood that North Korea possesses nuclear weapons not through intense intelligence-gathering activities, but by a spur-of-the-moment show of hands, its author had better damn well footnote those allegations so readers can check his sources themselves. Predictably, Cumings does not.
Cumings is blind to his other shortcomings as well. He excoriates many in the U.S. for their attitude toward the nation's people, stating, "Every statement beginning 'Koreans are...'1" is an indication of racism. But open North Korea to a page at random (especially in its latter chapters) and just try to get five pages in either direction without encountering a phrase such as "Koreans are..." "Koreans do [...] because..." "From the Korean standpoint..." It isn't possible, because such statements are Cumings' bread and butter. Lesson here? Ethno-cultural reduction is Racist when other people do it, The Truth when Bruce Cumings does it.
And for a leftist, Cumings' attitudes towards North Korean women (and women more generally) are pretty damn retrograde. You see, Cumings repeatedly stresses how much better North Korean women have it compared to their counterparts in the South, never mind the fact that not only do women in the DPRK have to shoulder the double burden of career and housework, but they also need Party permission to marry and "the moral code is chastity and virginity; no skirts above the knee, no premarital sex2." Indeed, Cumings almost fetishizes the "purity" of North Korean women. That's bad enough, but I'd like you to keep such sentiment in mind while reading the following passage:
Sex is not the main point of [South] Korean marriages, so you get lots of male philandering and lots of horny housewives. (Friends of mine in the Peace Corps found that living with Korean families offered an unexpected treat: sleeping with the mother of the house.)3Now please consider the fact that Cumings himself did a stint in the Peace Corps in Korea and is married to a Korean, and try not to get the heebie-jeebies regarding his good ol' boy yuk-yuks over banging horny Asian housewives in this "academic" volume of his.
All of this is a shame because until very recently, the West's accepted history of the Korean Peninsula did swing too far to conservative Cold War ideologies; more people need to be made aware of U.S. support for South Korean dictatorships and U.S. wartime atrocities. But by swinging so flamboyantly to the opposite end of the political spectrum, Cumings ultimate does this goal a supreme disservice. He's such a cartoonish apologist for the modern DPRK regime it's difficult to take the few salient points he does make seriously.
1That's on page 203; the entire passage in question begins on the previous page. This and the following citations refer to the 2004 paperback edition of North Korea published by The New Press, which does not include the subtitle "Another Country."
2Page 172.
3Page 140.
2) 日・中・韓のナショナリズム - 松本 健一
Japanese, Chinese, and Korean Nationalism - Kenichi Matsumoto
Kenichi Matsumoto is an odd duck. A philosopher and political historian famous for his multivolume work on WWII-era conservative Kita Ikki, his political philosophy defies easy categorization into liberal or conservative.
Like many Japanese books, Nationalism's content is only tenuously connected to its title: the book deals mainly with some of the main historical controversies to arise in Japanese politics since the turn of the 21st century. Matsumoto takes a liberal line concerning the Yasukuni Shrine debate: he argues that no aspect of Shinto religious doctrine prevents the dis-enshrining of the Class A war criminals who have caused so much controversy at home and abroad whenever members of the Japanese political establishment visit the shrine.
His take on the textbook controversy is somewhat more libertarian. By his own admission, Matsumoto was one of the original individuals involved in the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform--the conservative group that whitewashed Japanese involvement in WWII-era atrocities. He left the group, he says, not because he disagreed with what they stood for, but because he believes "history" can only be created and understood on an individual level; thus, any collective attempt to create an official history is doomed to failure. That said, he doesn't see anything wrong with the conservative textbooks themselves, and argues that their low rate of adoption (less than 1%, if I remember correctly) demonstrates only that the Chinese and Korean governments cynically used the controversy for their own political ends. Indeed, he is much more concerned that modern Japan, with its tech fetish and concern with trendiness, has lost its soul. In this he veers very close to nihonjinronja in his belief that "Japaneseness" exists out there, rather like Plato's Forms, and that modern Japanese have somehow forsaken or diluted it.
His take on Japan's territorial disputes with Russia, China, and South Korea are very historically informative, although I fault him for his disingenuous insistence that there are no economic concerns motivating the disputes. Final verdict: the first chapter of the book, with its clear explanations of Shinto cosmology and the development of the Yasukuni debate are well worth the read, with the latter chapters much weaker in comparison.
That will be all.