Forgetting Korea: The Korean War in popular memory, 1953–2014

2018 ◽  
pp. 157-178
Author(s):  
Grace Huxford
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Korean War ◽  
The United States ◽  
British History ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Relative Neglect ◽  
War Aims ◽  
Second World

This chapter suggests that the awkward nature, purpose and outcome of the Korean War led to its relative neglect in British history and popular culture, unlike in the United States where both its anti-Communist rhetoric and proximity to the Vietnam War gave its veterans greater prominence. Together with its distance from Britain, unclear war aims and the growing dominance of the Second World War in British culture, charted in the other chapters of this book, this final chapter examines the ‘forgotten’ war in the context of post-1953 British history. It first examines the significance of forgetting war in the twentieth century, before turning to Korea’s cultural history in the post-1953 era and the lives and attitudes of its ‘forgotten’ veterans. It suggests that Britain’s Korean War veterans have a unique degree of agency as guardians of this war.

Mr. X and the Pacific

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul J. Heer
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Korean War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
The Impact

This book chronicles and assesses the little-known involvement of US diplomat George F. Kennan—renowned as an expert on the Soviet Union—in US policy toward East Asia, primarily in the early Cold War years. Kennan, with vital assistance from his deputy John Paton Davies, played pivotal roles in effecting the US withdrawal from the Chinese civil war and the redirection of American occupation policy in Japan, and in developing the “defensive perimeter” concept in the western Pacific. His influence, however, faded soon thereafter: he was less successful in warning against US security commitments in Korea and Indochina, and the impact of the Korean War ultimately eclipsed his strategic vision for US policy in East Asia. This was due in large part to Kennan’s inability to reconcile his judgment that the mainland of East Asia was strategically expendable to the United States with his belief that US prestige should not be compromised there. The book examines the subsequent evolution of Kennan’s thinking about East Asian issues—including his role as a prominent critic of US involvement in the Vietnam War—and the legacies of his engagement with the region.

4. From colony to competing states

2020 ◽  
pp. 69-86
Author(s):  
Michael J. Seth
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Korean War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Republic Of Korea ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Japanese Colonial ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Second World

As the Second World War came to an end, most Koreans hoped that their nation would be an independent and prosperous state. ‘From colony to competing states’ shows that, instead, events took an unexpected turn. Korea became both free of Japanese colonial rule and simultaneously partitioned into two occupation zones by the United States and the Soviet Union. From these zones, two separate states were created: the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea; two societies with different leaderships, political systems, and geopolitical orientations. When North Korea attempted to reunify the country in 1950, foreign powers again intervened resulting in the Korean War, a costly conflict that left the peninsula still divided.

9. Confronting the Soviets

2018 ◽  
pp. 97-109
Author(s):  
Craig L. Symonds
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Korean War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The World ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Primary Mission ◽  
The U.S

At the end of World War II, the U.S. Navy was more than twice as large as all the rest of the navies of the world combined. The inevitable contraction that followed was less draconian than after previous wars because of the almost immediate emergence of the Cold War. ‘Confronting the Soviets: the Cold War navy (1945–1975)’ explains that while deterring a Soviet missile strike remained a primary mission of all of America’s services throughout the Cold War, the United States also confronted a series of smaller wars around the world. These included the Korean War, unrest in the Middle East, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Vietnam War, 1965–74.

Epilogue

The Sit Room ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 279-284
Author(s):  
David Scheffer
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
The United States ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Peace Agreement ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Colombian Government ◽  
Syrian Conflict

A result from which “all ugliness will flow again.” WARREN CHRISTOPHER THE BOSNIAN WAR took three years of intensive diplomacy to end, while combat and atrocities were unremitting. The talking phase of armed conflicts has veered wildly from days to decades in recent history, and often failed completely when one side fought to achieve outright military victory. There were no negotiations to end World War II; only total defeat of the Axis Powers sufficed. The Korean War ended in a stalemate absent any substantive talks, and the United States and North Korea remained, technically, at war, for decades thereafter. Negotiations to end the Vietnam War began in 1968 and continued into the next decade only to be eclipsed by the total victory of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces in 1975. The catastrophic Syrian conflict began in 2011 and continued unabated despite years of U.N.-sponsored talks in Geneva. The Colombian government and the indigenous guerilla group, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia–People’s Army (FARC), finally ended their civil war in 2016 with a peace agreement after 26 years of on-again, off-again negotiations....

Secrecy, Conspiracy, Cinema and the CIA in the 1970s

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Willmetts
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Government ◽  
Documentary Films ◽  
Historical Authenticity ◽  
Polar Opposite ◽  
Second World

This final chapter examines the figuration of the CIA in the wave of paranoid conspiracy films that were made in the 1970s. Still suffering from the reverberations of Watergate and the Vietnam War, in 1975 America faced another season of scandal after the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a series of damning revelations of nefarious CIA and FBI activities in the New York Times. This compounded a culture of suspicion that had already set in, especially in Hollywood, by the beginning of the 1970s. The conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s, films like Three Days of the Condor and The Parallax View, were the polar opposite of the semi-documentary films that represented American espionage in the aftermath of the Second World War. Whilst the latter lauded the United States government as the arbiter of historical authenticity, the former perceived state secrecy and deception as nefarious obstacles that prevented citizens from knowing the truth of their history. Secrecy figures as history’s aporia, and few types of film express this better than the paranoid conspiracy thriller.

Accidental Allies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phuong Tran Nguyen
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Korean War ◽  
The United States ◽  
South Vietnam ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Henry Luce ◽  
Failure To Protect ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Good And Evil

Most accounts of the Vietnam War describe it as a war of choice, but this chapter argues that it was, in many ways, a war of necessity. Attempts to implement a purely pragmatic, minimalist Cold War strategy in Asia were doomed when the Korean War drew the United States into an unplanned but then-vital nation-building campaign with accidental allies in South Korea, Taiwan, and eventually South Vietnam. This chapter traces the origins of this moralistic component of Cold War policy and politics, particularly the Christian missionaries and their heirs, like publisher Henry Luce, who formed the China Lobby and Asia First bloc. By helping to frame the Cold War and America’s commitment to Asia as an epic struggle between good and evil, they set the stage for Indochinese refugee admissions based on moral, rather than legal, grounds, and as the very least America could do to atone for its failure to protect stalwart anti-communist allies.

The Rise and Decline of the American Century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William O. III Walker
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Korean War ◽  
The United States ◽  
International Crises ◽  
American Century ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Lyndon Johnson ◽  
The Cold War

This book discusses how U.S. officials, influenced by publisher Henry R. Luce in an essay in Life magazine in 1941, strove to create an American Century at the close of World War II, and beyond. The United States, Luce held, must seek comprehensive leadership, that is, global hegemony. The advent of the Cold War hastened that undertaking. Communist victory in China’s civil war in 1949 and the start of the Korean War in June 1950 made the Cold War international. U.S. officials implemented the dual strategy of global containment and multilateralism in trade and finance in order to counter Soviet influence. By the late 1950s, however, a changing world, which the nonaligned movement epitomized, was questioning U.S. leadership and, thus, the appeal of the American Century. International crises and adverse balance of payments meant trouble for Luce’s project in the early 1960s. The debacle of 1968 for Lyndon Johnson, as seen in relations with allies, the Vietnam War, and a weak dollar, cost him his presidency and curtailed the growth of the American Century. Richard Nixon then attempted to revitalize U.S. leadership through détente with the Communist world. At most, there remains today a quasi-American Century, premised largely on military power.

Aliens

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leilani Nishime
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Racial Differences ◽  
Korean War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global Citizens ◽  
Battlestar Galactica ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Interracial Relationship

This chapter examines the visual exclusion of multiracial Asians. It also looks at television and film's overt use of multiracial tropes to signal utopic/dystopic futures. The science-fiction television series Battlestar Galactica follows the logic of post-race, wherein racial differences are acknowledged but then ignored. The show's narrative hinges upon the survival of a child, Hera, the bi-species and multiracial child of the cyborg Athena (Korean American actress Grace Park) and the human Helo (Euro-American actor Tahmoh Penikett). Hera's representation resonates with images of the multiracial children of servicemen from the Korean War and Vietnam War, images that tie Asian adoption to concerns about the role of the United States as global citizens and global police. Yet as the story continues, attention moves from the adoptive child to the interracial relationship of her parents. This movement mimics similar shifts in the ways the United States imagines itself in relation to Asia, and how it rewrites its neocolonialism through the celebration of gender-normative heterosexual romance. Hera's role in the series requires her to be symbolically present but physically absent to give coherence to a story that evolves from one of conflict and colonialism to a tale of highly gendered immigration and assimilation.

Chinese Communist Policy Toward the United States and the Myth of the ‘Lost Chance’ 1948–1950

1994 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 475-502 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael M. Sheng
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
Korean War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Korean War

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Sino-Soviet conflict intensified and at the same time the Sino-American rapprochement was well under way. When the Americans began to search for an answer to the question of ‘Why Vietnam’, some US foreign relation documents in the later 1940s were released, which indicated that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had made certain friendly overtures toward the United States. Since then, it has become a widely-accepted interpretation among scholars that Washington ‘lost a chance’ to win over the CCP from Moscow in the late 1940s. The fundamental premise of this interpretation is that the CCP earnestly bid for American friendship and support as a counterweight to pressure from the Soviet Union. It is argued that the CCP sincerely sought the US recognition right up to the middle of and that it was only after their bids for American support were rejected by Washington that the Communists had to choose the ‘lean-to-one-side’ policy. In short, Washington's shortsighted policy in 1949 ‘forced Beijing into Moscow's embrace’, and therefore set in motion a train of disastrous events: the Korean War and the Vietnam War. A promising postwar Asian balance in favour of the US was ruined.

The Role of the Mongolian People’s Republic in the Korean War

2018 ◽  
pp. 97-130
Author(s):  
Denzenlkham Ulambayar
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Korean War ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central Intelligence Agency ◽  
Intelligence Agency ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
History Of

Since the 1990s, when previously classified and top secret Russian archival documents on the Korean War became open and accessible, it has become clear for post-communist countries that Kim Il Sung, Stalin and Mao Zedong were the primary organizers of the war. It is now equally certain that tensions arising from Soviet and American struggle generated the origins of the Korean War, namely the Soviet Union’s occupation of the northern half of the Korean peninsula and the United States’ occupation of the southern half to the 38th parallel after 1945 as well as the emerging bipolar world order of international relations and Cold War. Newly available Russian archival documents produced much in the way of new energies and opportunities for international study and research into the Korean War.2 However, within this research few documents connected to Mongolia have so far been found, and little specific research has yet been done regarding why and how Mongolia participated in the Korean War. At the same time, it is becoming today more evident that both Soviet guidance and U.S. information reports (evaluated and unevaluated) regarding Mongolia were far different from the situation and developments of that period. New examples of this tendency are documents declassified in the early 2000s and released publicly from the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in December 2016 which contain inaccurate information. The original, uncorrupted sources about why, how and to what degree the Mongolian People’s Republic (MPR) became a participant in the Korean War are in fact in documents held within the Mongolian Central Archives of Foreign Affairs. These archives contain multiple documents in relation to North Korea. Prior to the 1990s Mongolian scholars Dr. B. Lkhamsuren,3 Dr. B. Ligden,4 Dr. Sh. Sandag,5 junior scholar J. Sukhee,6 and A. A. Osipov7 mention briefly in their writings the history of relations between the MPR and the DPRK during the Korean War. Since the 1990s the Korean War has also briefly been touched upon in the writings of B. Lkhamsuren,8 D. Ulambayar (the author of this paper),9 Ts. Batbayar,10 J. Battur,11 K. Demberel,12 Balảzs Szalontai,13 Sergey Radchenko14 and Li Narangoa.15 There have also been significant collections of documents about the two countries and a collection of memoirs published in 200716 and 2008.17 The author intends within this paper to discuss particularly about why, how and to what degree Mongolia participated in the Korean War, the rumors and realities of the war and its consequences for the MPR’s membership in the United Nations. The MPR was the second socialist country following the Soviet Union (the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics) to recognize the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) and establish diplomatic ties. That was part of the initial stage of socialist system formation comprising the Soviet Union, nations in Eastern Europe, the MPR, the PRC (People’s Republic of China) and the DPRK. Accordingly between the MPR and the DPRK fraternal friendship and a framework of cooperation based on the principles of proletarian and socialist internationalism had been developed.18 In light of and as part of this framework, The Korean War has left its deep traces in the history of the MPR’s external diplomatic environment and state sovereignty

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document