This is not a survey of said conflict and is such an unusual choice for the Modern Library Nonfiction catalogue. Cumings asserts that for myriad reasons the Korean War drifted out of collective consciousness. The American stewards of the War (Acheson MacArthur) never understood the origins and prosecuted it in a heavy handed way which only exacerbated antipathy between North and South. The author asserts that the war can only be understood in the context that Japan made Korea a colony in the early 20C and that the ruling elite of the South collaborated with the Nipponese until the end of WWII. The propaganda of the time (racist Orientalism) used the grievance of Koreans invading Korea as it is moral compass. This was followed by the subsequent US/UN invasion of the North -- which isn't viewed as egregious. Then the Chinese came roaring across the Yalu and it became rather cold outside. Unfortunately this book launches asides at other books on the conflict, books I have lined up to read over the next couple days. ( )

“The same kind of inquiry is needed into American massacres such as Nogun-ri, the unrelenting firebombing of the North, and one of the most astonishing cover-ups in postwar U.S. history, the black-and-white reversal of the truth of what happened in Taejon.”(Cumings page 174)

Cumings details many aspects of the Korean War, including:
Nations involved (Korea, China, Japan, Russia, US, Britain)
Firebombings and massacres
US napalm use
Peasant uprisings
Infrastructure bombings
Political motivations
Perspectives of many differing points of view, and how they interacted
Firsthand testimonies

I learned how the Korean War marked the beginning of the building of permanent US bases in foreign nations. These foreign occupations are what US is, and deserves all the attention Cumings gave. ( )

This short book is hard to evaluate because it contains a lot of inside baseball/score-settling with other historians, which only serves to reinforce the author’s point that Americans know virtually nothing about the Korean War, generally misperceiving it as being about the Cold War when it was and remains primarily a civil war and the outside country of most importance is probably Japan, whose occupation set the stage for rebellion against former collaborators (who made up a big chunk of the political class of South Korea until very recently). Cumings emphasizes the atrocities committed by South Koreans and occasionally Americans, while acknowledging that North Koreans also did plenty of harm which has yet to be exposed via a truth and reconciliation commission as in the South. There are meditations on the nature of history and memory that strive for poetry, but don’t quite get there; still, I did learn something about the intractability of the conflict and the ridiculousness of seeing Korea as simply a stage on which the West-Communist Bloc struggle played out. ( )