By Tim Shorrock | December 16, 2020 | Originally published in Responsible Statecraft Last week, Joe Biden nominated two veteran advisers, Antony Blinken and Avril Haines, to lead his foreign policy team as America’s chief diplomat and director of U.S. intelligence. Both will have their work cut out for them to meet the new president’s vow to repair relations with America’s allies and, as Biden has said, “lead the world and not retreat from it.” But there is one part of the world where Blinken and Haines’ experience with multilateral solutions could prove to be problematic and even potentially destructive: the Korean Peninsula. Progressives have voiced considerable concern that Biden could repeat the mistakes of the previous Democratic administration, particularly its failed “strategic patience” policy towards North Korea. In effect, the Obama national security team viewed the DPRK as an illegitimate, “rogue” state unworthy of being a negotiating partner. “Many of us believed that the most likely long-term solution to the North’s nuclear pursuits lay in the North’s collapse and absorption into a South-led reunified Korea,” Jeffrey Bader, a diplomat known as the “architect” of Obama’s Korea policies, wrote in his 2012 memoir. Such views were also central to Biden’s nominees. “Too many hard-liners who do not have a proper and updated understanding of North Korea seem to be surrounding Biden,” a reliable source in South Korea who is close to President Moon Jae-in told me just after Biden’s election. He didn’t identify anyone by name, but could have been speaking about Blinken and Haines. During Obama’s years in office, Blinken rose to the position of deputy secretary of state, while Haines moved from being the top legal adviser to the National Security Council to deputy director of the CIA. Together, they helped shape the administration’s attempt to stop North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, relying on a combination of military pressure, secret cyber-attacks, and sustained economic sanctions. At one point, Haines even visited Pyongyang as part of a “secret back channel” between the CIA and North Korean intelligence, the Wall Street Journal reported in 2019. From a Korean perspective, however, there were two critical problems with their approach. First, Blinken and Haines developed their policies in close consultation with the conservative South Korean governments of Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye, who are now disgraced and in prison for corruption. Lee, a former Hyundai executive, and Park, the daughter of the former dictator Park Chung Hee, had both opposed the pro-engagement “Sunshine Policies” followed by former Presidents Kim Dae Jung and Roh Tae Woo from 1997 to 2008. They urged Obama — who developed an unusually close relationship with Lee — to take a harder line, and his team was happy to oblige. The shift could be seen in Obama’s rhetoric on Korea: In 2013, as the first U.S. president to attend the official armistice commemorations at the Korean War Memorial, he delivered a militaristic speech that revived an old right wing trope that the war, which ended in a bitter stalemate and left millions dead, was actually a “victory.” But the new, get-tough approach backfired. While Lee and Park were in power, military tensions with the North spiked and inter-Korean relations reached their lowest ebb since the end of the Korean War. After Park was impeached, Moon, who had been chief of staff to President Roh, won the presidency. During his campaign, which I witnessed while living in Gwangju, he promised to reinvigorate the Sunshine policies of his predecessors and rejected the confrontational stance of Presidents Lee and Park — and by extension, their American counterparts. Second, as part of their collaboration with Lee and Park, Blinken and Haines were instrumental in Obama’s initiative to create a de facto trilateral military alliance between the United States, South Korea, and Japan, Korea’s colonizer from 1910 and 1945. This occurred as Obama and his advisers sought to shift U.S. policy from the Middle East to the Pacific as part of their purported “Asia Pivot.” Blinken was key to this effort. According to Frank Jannuzi, who was an East Asia specialist for Biden when he chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Blinken “helped lead a trilateral coordination mechanism on DPRK policy, consulting closely with Japan and the ROK.” Januzzi, now the president of the Mansfield Center in Washington, said in an interview with the Japan Times that Blinken’s initiative placed “a high priority on avoiding gaps” in the three-way relationship with Tokyo and Seoul. It was successful, but only in the short term. In 2015, after direct intervention by Obama and Blinken, Park and Shinzo Abe, then Japan’s Prime Minister, signed an agreement that temporarily ended an acrimonious dispute over the Korean “comfort women” that the Japanese military had abducted to serve as sex slaves during World War II. As the Washington Post reported, the pact cleared the way for a “closer alliance” between Seoul and Tokyo that would limit China’s growing influence and “help keep North Korean aggression in check.” To Blinken, the agreement was a big win for America. “This wasn’t just a question of wanting our two friends to get along; it mattered strategically,” he told the Post. But in Korea, the agreement was widely condemned, largely because the victims themselves — the courageous women who had come forward to tell their stories about Japan’s crimes — weren’t even consulted. Not long into his presidency, Moon repudiated the pact as a “political agreement that excludes victims and the public” and demanded new negotiations with Abe. Obama’s (and Blinken’s) hopes for a trilateral alliance were a failure, and South Korea’s rupture with Japan widened even more during the Trump administration. Finally, there’s another, more sinister element to Obama’s “strategic patience” that’s also been rejected by the present government in Seoul: regime change. It’s often forgotten that, under Obama, joint military planning to bring about the end of the Kim government in Pyongyang in case of a war was a key part of U.S. policy. Haines made this abundantly clear in 2017, when she was the keynote speaker at a Brookings conference on U.S. strategy on North Korea. In her speech, Haines argued that the U.S. pressure campaign of “robust” sanctions against the North to prevent it from becoming a “nuclear weapons state” must be accompanied by “intensive contingency planning” in preparation for a “collapse” of the Kim regime. Such planning, she emphasized, “must be done not only with the Republic of Korea, but also with China, and of course Japan.” The U.S. partners, she added, “should have a clear expectation in the event the situation deteriorates of what each country’s military will do in order to avoid miscalculations and unintended escalation.” Contingency planning, of course, is what militaries do, and remains a central focus of the U.S.- South Korean Combined Forces Command. In 2015, U.S. and Korean generals signed off on “OPLAN 5015” that, in case of a North Korean attack, called for strikes on the North’s “core military facilities” as well the removal of its top leaders; it updated the previous “OPLAN 5027” that had been in place since the 1970s (in his recent book “Rage,” the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward reported that, in 2017, the Pentagon “carefully reviewed and studied OPLAN 5027 for regime change in North Korea,” adding ominously that the U.S. response could have included “the use of 80 nuclear weapons.”) Haines’ proposal at the Brookings conference, however, seemed to go much further than these bilateral plans. The fact that a U.S. intelligence officer would think Japan — with its sordid history in Korea as a colonial power — had any military role on the peninsula at all is astounding. Beyond that, the contingency plans drawn up under Obama were both risky and rash; in 2016, U.S. and South Korean forces carried out military exercises that included “decapitation raids” by special forces targeting Kim and other leaders, sparking an angry reaction from the North. It seems likely that these actions contributed to Kim Jong Un’s fears of a Libya-style regime change operation in North Korea and solidified his determination to complete his deterrent “nuclear force” in 2017. Moreover, President Moon explicitly rejected the regime change strategy when he made his historic outreach to Kim Jong Un in 2018 and publicly warned the United States not to launch a unilateral strike on the North. We’ll have to wait for the Biden administration confirmation hearings to see if Blinken and Haines have changed their views. But in one of his last interviews before Biden’s election, Blinken seemed to suggest a return to the Japan-focused multilateralism of the Obama years. “We have to work closely with allies like South Korea and Japan and press China to build genuine economic pressure to squeeze North Korea to get it to the negotiating table,” he told Mike Morell, the former CIA Deputy Director, on CBS News (ironically, Morell could soon be working for Biden as well). “We need to cut off its various avenues and access to resources – something we were doing very vigorously at the end of the Obama-Biden administration.” That may sound both tough and multilateral, but it’s exactly what President Moon and South Korean progressives hope to avoid. Americans hoping for a constructive relationship with South Korea and a peaceful resolution to the nuclear crisis with North Korea should be concerned, too — and hoping that Blinken and Haines have learned from their mistakes. South Korea is an independent, sovereign country that has seen too much violence, and deserves our support and respect as it tries to make the peace after 75 years of war. Tim Shorrock is a Washington, DC–based journalist and the author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing and a Korea Policy Institute Associate.

By Dae-Han Song | November 3, 2020 Greetings from the Korean Peninsula. On behalf of the International Strategy Center, I thank you for the opportunity to address your readers as we approach the November US presidential elections. It's a tragic condemnation of the long standing US policy towards North Korea that when Trump came into office stating that he'd sit down at the table with North Korea, some of us in the Korean social movement actually harbored hopes he might offer something different from every other previous president (Republican or Democrat). Even as many of us condemned all of Trump's other policies and actions, some of us quietly hoped that (based on some calculus of political and commercial interests) he might be driven to accomplish something previous US presidents had not: a peace treaty. After all, North Korea had been pursuing peace in the Korean Peninsula for decades, and South Korea had just overthrown a president by a citizen's uprising demanding a society based on peace and justice. Yet, as Trump's actions failed to live up to his grand statements or promises, it was only a matter of time before his former National Security Advisor John Bolton revealed the truth: Trump was swayed by the vicissitudes of short term political advantage rather than any sort of vision (even if politically self-serving) of peace in the Korean peninsula. While we weren't surprised, we couldn't but feel slightly disappointed. Yet, that is the tragedy of the Korean Peninsula. We have been divided by the United States ever since 1945 regardless of our wishes. The South Korean government is constantly extorted by Trump to pay an ever greater share of the costs of maintaining a US offensive perimeter against China by its troop presence in South Korea under the pretext of a North Korean menace. South Korean society remains marred and misshapen by the division, with a National Security Law that still limits the freedom of expression and thought, and Korean men are forced to spend 18 months of their youth in the harsh and authoritarian military service. Even after the 2016 Candlelight Uprising transformed Korean society and paved the path towards a more progressive administration, the limits of South Korean policy towards North Korea is set by the mighty power of US Empire, not ourselves. Unfortunately, it seems like the Democratic Party can offer nothing better than a puerile partisan response to Trump's limited diplomatic advances by reverting back to Obama's policy of strategic patience: do nothing hoping North Korea will collapse. In moments when the future appears dim, we must find the solution not in the presidents of countries but in people that have always fought for peace and justice. Currently, as people in the United States mobilize around the economic impacts of COVID19 as well as the systematic oppression and killing of Black people, it seems a good moment to build ever greater solidarity and education between movements such as these that are building a society based on a just peace. That's why we, in the International Strategy Center, stand in solidarity with the Korea Policy Institute and put ourselves as a resource for bridging movements in Korea and abroad. When hope cannot be found, it must be built. in solidarity, Dae-Han Song International Strategy Center Dae-Han Song is a Korea Policy Institute Associate and the Policy and Research Coordinator at the International Strategy Center (goisc.org/home), an organization in Korea focused on building bridges between social movements in Korea and those abroad.

Instead of further militarizing the region and applying more sanctions and pressure, which are harming innocent North Korean civilians, the next administration should engage in the hard work of sustained diplomacy based on specific, concrete next steps. By Christine Ahn | October 28, 2020 | Originally published in Common Dreams At last week’s presidential debate, the American people were presented with two widely divergent points of view on how to address North Korea’s growing nuclear arsenal: Either engage with its leader (and thereby “legitimize” a “thug”) or apply more sanctions and pressure in order to “control” North Korea. But this is a false dichotomy. Meeting or not meeting with the North Korean leader hasn’t been the failure of U.S. policy. And more pressure and sanctions will not convince North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons arsenal. To make any substantial progress, the next administration must take a wholly new approach to achieve a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula. Most urgently, the next administration should officially end the Korean War with a peace agreement. Contrary to the belief held by most Americans, the 70-year-old war never officially ended and was only halted by a fragile ceasefire signed in 1953. That means that the risk of an escalation (intentional or accidental) that triggers a full-scale — potentially nuclear — war remains, endangering us all. Both the Trump and Obama administrations depended on a mixture of sanctions, political isolation, and the threat of military force to try to compel North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program. But both “maximum pressure” (Trump) and “strategic patience” (Obama) failed to make progress toward that goal. A positive step was the 2018 Singapore Agreement in which the United States and North Korea agreed to establish new relations toward a peace regime and a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula. While North Korea has improved its military capability, it has not tested any long-range missiles or new nuclear weapons since then. But since last year’s Hanoi Summit, talks between North Korea and the United States have stalled. That’s because engagement with North Korea was not accompanied by a fundamental change in U.S. policy. The United States keeps expecting that pressure will convince North Korea to unilaterally disarm without providing any sanctions relief or security guarantees. The status quo means more nuclear weapons, more human rights violations, more separated families, more suffering from sanctions, and the ongoing risk of nuclear war. What actually put the prospect of denuclearization on the table was the possibility of peace that began with the 2018 Olympics diplomacy between North Korea and South Korea. It manifested in the Panmunjom Declaration, in which President Moon Jae-in and Chairman Kim Jong Un declared “that there will be no more war and a new era of peace has begun on the Korean peninsula.” The Declaration calls for inter-Korean economic and civic projects and replacing the Armistice Agreement with a peace agreement. But the United States has impeded these reconciliation efforts. Instead of further militarizing the region and applying more sanctions and pressure, which are harming innocent North Korean civilians, the next administration should engage in the hard work of sustained diplomacy based on specific, concrete next steps. Diplomacy isn’t a “gift” to North Korea; it’s what needs to happen to get to peace. Talking with North Korea should not be viewed differently from what Washington does with any authoritarian power. Ignoring North Korea only kicks the can down the road in addressing Pyongyang’s growing nuclear capabilities and arms proliferation. Furthermore, a majority of Americans support the United States negotiating with adversaries like North Korea to avoid a military confrontation. Specifically, the next administration should replace the “all or nothing” stance with step-by-step, reciprocal, verifiable actions to advance denuclearization and peace. That could mean building confidence through opening liaison offices, easing sanctions, facilitating reunions between Korean-American families and their loved ones in North Korea, and formalizing a moratorium on North Korean long-range missile and nuclear testing and U.S.-South Korea military exercises. But most crucially, we must end the Korean War. This continued state of war is not a mere technicality; it’s the root cause of militarism and tensions that must be resolved if there is to be real progress with North Korea. The good news is that there are growing voices in Congress that recognize the importance of peace with North Korea as a crucial step towards denuclearization. There are now 50 members of Congress who have co-sponsored House Resolution 152, which calls for an end to the Korean War and a peace agreement. Notably, all of the Democratic contenders for the next chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee — Reps. Brad Sherman, Joaquin Castro, and Gregory Meeks — are co-sponsors of this important resolution. The status quo means more nuclear weapons, more human rights violations, more separated families, more suffering from sanctions, and the ongoing risk of nuclear war. It’s in everyone’s interest to change course with a realistic, concrete plan toward peace and denuclearization, but this is ultimately in the hands of the next U.S. president. Americans must urge him to choose wisely. Christine Ahn is a founding board member of the Korea Policy Institute and the National Campaign to End the Korean War.  Ahn is also the Executive Director of Women Cross DMZ, a movement of women globally walking to end the Korean War, reunite families, and ensure women’s leadership in the peacebuilding process.

By Hyun Lee | November 8, 2020 An interview with Han San-gyun, former president of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU). The interview was conducted on July 31, 2018 by Hyun Lee, KPI Associate and ZoominKorea contributor Translated by Jane Lyon Lee and Kyung Rae Lee In December 2015, Han San-gyun, then-President of the Korean Confederation of Unions (KCTU), was imprisoned for his role in leading resistance against then-President Park Geun-hye’s wave of repression against labor. Long noted as the most militant and progressive of Korean trade union organizations, the KCTU was a primary target in Park’s campaign to crush the labor movement. Public outrage over Park Geun-hye’s crimes and misdeeds grew into a mass national movement called the Candlelight Revolution, which ultimately drove her from office and led to her arrest and imprisonment. The KCTU played a key role in that movement. Lee: The last time I interviewed you, President Han Sang-gyun, was November of 2015. At that time you were putting your efforts towards creating a united front of progressive forces led by the KCTU--to fight against labor market reforms, and to oppose the anti-democratic policies of the Park Geun-hye administration. Since then, a lot has happened. I think it is because of those proactive actions by the KCTU that the Candlelight Revolution was possible. Through that movement, there was a change in the government, but I’d like to hear your thoughts. Han: In 2015, I declared a people’s uprising and actually it was from that point on that I was targeted and pursued by the Park Geun-hye government. After that, amid a total awakening, the demands of the people were heard. That anger was reinforced when it became known that the collapse of farmer Baek Nam-gi was the result of a high water pressure cannon stream [fired at protesters].[1] We saw then that those in power would use whatever means available--not to take care of basic rights and democracy but to maintain their own power. After witnessing that, to protect myself, I went to Jogyesa [Temple] for several days. Korean society was in denial.[2] The government’s public security measures were horrific and though the government did not wield guns or knives, it was an extremely serious situation in which no one could act freely. I was thinking that if at this point, the KCTU, as representative of organized labor, were to succumb to them, then wouldn’t the anti-democracy, anti-labor, anti-history Park Geun-hye government just forge ahead with even more egregious actions? They wanted us to kneel down to authoritarian suppression, but the KCTU was born as an organization dedicated to justice, democracy, and to the rights of laborers, and is an organization that will not kneel down. As an organization that does not bow down, the KCTU resisted and had to endure a really difficult time. And then I brought to the forefront fundamental issues of Korean society: the labor problems, issues of class polarization, and grievances of the working class. The Park Geun-hye government was destroying democracy. It had to be called out for its anti-history, anti-labor path of governance. Up to that point, I had been involved in organizing the masses, and saw the reality of angry laborers, farmers, the poor, youth, and students. But then [when I was imprisoned] I was separated from society. I look at those mass uprisings from my personal point of view, and see that there are many different opinions as to how the rest of society connected itself to this, and how it all evolved into a movement. As you pointed out in the question you asked, I agree that the role that the KCTU played in all this was not a small one. The Railroad Union strike really played a decisive role in the Candlelight Movement as it secured a physical position in Gwanghwamun [Plaza, in Seoul]. Lee: When was that? Han: It was the fall of 2016. It went on from the fall, so citizens were able to pick up their candles and participate. The momentum of this strike made it possible for Gwanghwamun to be established as a place where citizens could safely protest and call for the resignation of Park Geun-hye. That moment marked the birth of what is today the Moon Jae-in government. It was also the time when the minority party came to publicly show its face in politics. This time was also about whether Park Geun-hye should be impeached right away through an early election, whether we should withdraw from the frontlines for safety reasons, whether the first and second lines of defense should be dispatched, and a lot of other unbelievable conversations. This was when the KCTU and others in the democracy camp decisively demanded that Park Geun-hye had to resign. With that, things naturally moved down that path. This process spread, but the KCTU did not just play a role in Seoul at Gwanghwamun. There were the rural areas and cities across the country--there was no place we didn’t go, making it possible for the people who could not get to Seoul to gather in the streets. The workers did everything to safely manage the assembly [of the people]; they installed speakers and emceed. Doing all this took enormous strength, and they made all kinds of posters and signs. The KCTU is a flagship organization and has done this kind of thing throughout its history. Of course, this will have to be further evaluated by others, but if the KCTU had really created a massive strike that effectively stopped all production, logistics, and service, and without going to constitutional trial, had condemned the unrighteous power of the state, it would have been the most revolutionary thing ever done. I regret that we did not go that far, but would the anger of the Korean society really have been revealed if we had done that? Everyone was so skeptical at that time. Amidst those circumstances, we created momentum that gave rise to a sense of hopefulness. I’d like to sum up things that way. Lee: As you have said, the KCTU stood at the forefront during the most difficult times, and you brought together a broad spectrum of progressive forces to maximize full power. How was this possible? Han: On the one hand, we were completely surprised. I, too, from prison, was amazed at the situation. But eventually, although each group differed in terms of where they were headed, and their standards of worth, this was a matter of coming together as one, cohesively, and then jumping over ideological differences, the different views of common sense and justice, among the women, men, young, and old. There was really an indescribable national anger. This anger was over the mishandling of government affairs and the atrocities committed by the Park Geun-hye government. No one could disagree that injustice had been done. There was a time when I made a direct order telling others not to demand my release from prison. My reason for doing this was one of justice and out of fear that there would be an amplification of the demands and ideas of individual units. Instead, everyone, despite having their own individual different thoughts, became one as they stood at the forefront of justice. Lee: Please explain the process of preparing the mass gatherings. Han: In 2015, the KCTU introduced the first-ever direct re-election. There were four slates that came forth as candidates for the direct re-election. When we went to meet the union members at the different sites, we had already set the platform. That platform included opposition to labor market reform, holding a general strike in April, organizing a mass demonstration in November, and correcting the wrongs of the anti-labor policies of the Park Geun-hye government. As a result, cooperating partners had already agreed to the platform and our slate was elected. No one predicted that we would win the election. The reason we were elected was because there was a sense of urgency that things should be done differently than had been done up to that point. We then needed the decision of the approval committee, so we opened a proxy system and via that system, the platform was passed unanimously. Upon passage, we knew that nothing would change unless we fought. Why? The Park Geun-hye government had defined labor, the KCTU, and the National Teachers Union as enemies. We came to the conclusion that if we compromised with our enemies, we would be left with only two choices in the end--to kneel before them or to oppose them and fight alongside labor. Because fighting would be hard for the workers alone, we met with other social progressive groups such as farmers, the urban poor, youth, and student groups. With all of us at the table for discussion, something surprising happened at that meeting. When we insisted that the Park Geun-hye administration had to resign, the representative from the farmers was in agreement, and the representatives of the urban poor, the youth, and the students were all in agreement, too. This momentous decision took just twenty minutes to make. This is written in the police reports. Just like that, it’s in there, but there probably had never been a case in which a decision for public progress had been made so quickly. It was important that regardless of difference in opinion, we came together as one voice. In this way, the bureaucrats who had previously been unable to see that the people’s anger had reached a boiling point saw now that anger was boiling. Because of this, the decision was reached so clearly and the direction set forth was so exact. Lee: So, you went to prison. What were you charged of doing? Han: At first, they charged me with instigation, and then they made up some crimes I never heard of before to frame me. Lee: What was that? Han: Things like paralyzing the city and inciting a coup, and conspiring on those kinds of enormous things. In the end, they could not convict me on any of those charges. So after that, [the charges] turned into violations of traffic and riot laws, and ten or more other crimes around obstruction of official duties and obstruction of the execution of special public services. I was convicted and received a sentence of three years. I was released on April 21 of this year [2018] with six months remaining on my sentence. Lee: Please talk about your experience of being in prison. While you were in prison, the Candlelight Revolution happened. Park Geun-hye was impeached. How did you feel then? Han: When I was in prison, I was actually still the president of the KCTU, so the KCTU officers would come to the visitors’ room and we would give and receive updates to each other. We were forced by [the authorities] to either kneel down in front of them or courageously fight the war to the end. As I say this, I think if we had prepared for 100,000 to gather, 100,000 people would have gathered. If we believed in the people and that 500,000 would gather, 500,000 would have gathered. With the anger of the farmers and laborers in the current situation, if we said 1,000,000 would come at any moment, 1,000,000 would gather. It was to this level that, with confidence, trust, and love, we were going to forge ahead. No matter how tyrannical the Park Geun-hye government was, they could not win over public consensus. We continued to send this message—be confident; let’s not waver here. Those people were inflicting fear and we had to overcome that fear. We continued like that and the situation changed. The candlelight spread like wildfire. Park Geun-hye was impeached and then jailed. One by one, things happened and the process expanded. I too was surprised by it all. Actually, I believed that eventually a day like this would come, but I didn’t know that it would come this quickly. I looked to the sky and to farmer Baek Nam-gi and to all the martyrs that came before us. The strength of the workers in Korean society was leading to significant change. From then, although I was trapped alone within the prison walls, I thought, "I am no longer imprisoned.” I lived each day with a full heart. Lee: Even now, there is a lot of change on the Korean peninsula. Exchanges between the North and South have started and conversations between the North and the United States are happening. What do you think about the current state of affairs? Han: I am not an expert on the Korean peninsula's state of affairs. That is difficult to answer, but just seeing things from the perspective of the workers, this is a government that has made new connections in relations between the North and South--a vein that had been blocked. The two are validating each other, making promises, and more than at any other time, national support and hopes are high for peace, reconciliation, prosperity, and the path to unification. I think that since the [2018] meeting at Panmunjom between Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in, a feeling of confidence has spread that if the people of the North and South put their minds together, we can do anything. This feeling is particularly true in South Korea. I think that in order for us to realize that, the exchanges among the workers and exchanges among the people need to be fundamentally better. There must be a goal-oriented consciousness. When that way of thinking expands and accumulates, no longer will our people’s future and happiness be determined by external forces and imperialistic power. On the other hand, the two leaders met at Panmunjom and sat together at the Dobo Bridge. Just seeing them talking with each other, seeing them honestly sharing with each other the many issues of the peninsula’s peoples--this created a consensus that regardless of social status or generation, there is no reason we cannot make this peninsula a place overflowing with vitality of economic development and reconciliation without war. If you look at it, in a way, this has been the greatest outcome [of the exchange]. Of course, in order to do this, we have to look at how specific efforts and organized labor are going to play a part. Actually, when the special zones in the North are expanded and South Korea puts forward capital, we will need the citizens to oppose further private investment in North Korea via the exploitation of workers and low wages. Our important homework and preparation going forward are how we, especially workers, are going to demand from capitalists that the process be one of mutual prosperity. Lee: From the perspective of labor, what kind of country should a unified Korea be? To that end, how should labor participate in the South-North talks, and have their voices thus far been heard? Han: Korean society, particularly South Korean society, has been centered on an ideology of separation and anti-communism, which is really an abnormal basis on which to form a democracy. We do have a democratic republic, but as we just discussed, it is clear that the ideology I just mentioned and an anti-communist framework have produced an imperfect democracy. This peace process will determine the collapse or survival of those who have enjoyed power without any particular skills and have ruled via anti-communist propaganda and an ideology of separation. We shall see, but many experts predict that the incompetent right wing will inevitably become obsolete. This will mean the entire political spectrum will shift to the left, and a new force will occupy the right. If the current government in power becomes the center-right, then the positions the progressive forces take up will become a critical viewfinder in establishing new inter-Korean relations. Ultimately the progressive working class has an absolute historical responsibility to go through a rebirth. Actually, I will be sixty very soon. I wonder to what extent we really know about the North based on all our brainwashed learning. How much do we know about North-South absurdities? How much do we know about the real meaning of the Korean peninsula's geopolitical position in terms of Sino-U.S. relations? We need a more generalized argument around this issue. Truly, what kind of process is necessary for peace and prosperity on our Korean peninsula? Lee: Last week, I visited the site where the SsangYong laid-off workers were protesting. The administration in power has changed; how do you see this problem getting solved? Han: The Moon Jae-in government took office and pledged the creation of a labor-respecting society as a priority and a basis for its policies. Naturally, many workers have high expectations, and in many respects, there have been partial successes. Moon has said things like, "You must join labor unions in order to secure the rights of workers," and that he would work until such-and-such year to ratify the ILO agreement so that the right to form a labor union becomes common sense. And then there was talk about the exploitative pyramid structure of dispatched labor, and problems of outsourced labor, and in relation to this, the necessity of a government decision to overcome the current laws in this regard. But all these issues are being hindered one at a time by privileged groups like the Korean conglomerates (chaebol). In addition, the extremely conservative media has reached a peak in its negative distortion of the income-led growth model advocated by the Moon Jae-in as leading to South Korea’s downfall. In the conflict between the government and labor, the foremost issue was the National Teachers Union as well as non-union issues. In addition, at the forefront of the conflict between labor and capitalists is General Motors (GM) Korea. Despite the fact that a court ruling found that GM Korea’s irregular workers were illegally dispatched, the workers still remain in the distressing predicament where they are still laid off and unable to gain reinstatement as regular employees. This is the real crux of the labor-capitalist conflict. In the case of the SsangYong conflict, the government--albeit a previous administration--was complicit. For example, there was the violent and murderous [former President] Lee Myung-bak government and his policy of suppression and its willingness to turn a blind eye to [SsangYong’s] accounting manipulation. This is just coming to light, but Supreme Court Judge Yang Sung-tae’s business ventures are also an issue, as well as the Supreme Court’s deal with the Park Geun-hye administration to baselessly overturn the ruling that SsangYong’s lay-offs were unjustified. When we look at this, really, whether it was the mistakes of the Lee Myung-bak government or the Park Geun-hye government, the Korean government made mistakes. In this regard, it would not be acceptable for the Moon Jae-in government to drag its feet or tepidly address these mistakes, and then claim to be a government dedicated to justice. I am very concerned that on his formal visit to India, President Moon will deliver a message internationally, saying that the SsangYong layoff has been resolved. The president needs to know that the SsangYong problem is not just a simple SsangYong-specific issue; we are at a point with this where any worker in this country could be kicked out of his job. There is no greater trauma than being a worker who is kicked out because your boss does not like how things are going. In other words, it is as if the citizens of this world are playing musical chairs with each other and amidst this, a loud warning bell is sounding, calling for things to get fixed. In addition, Korea's national violence is an important problem that was uncovered by the deaths of workers, as in the case with SsangYong. Without a doubt, the SsangYong problem is said to have left the most painful scar on the Korean society. So I see that it is the absolute duty of the Moon Jae-in government to make sure the first steps it takes are towards resolving the pain and anguish caused by these problems in Korean society. I hope these issues are resolved quickly and even if only it is the making of the decision to do so, the 119 employees must have their employment reinstated [3]; there must be a national apology to those individuals, and they should be compensated. If this problem is drawn out any longer or spreads and ends up tied to another death, how can we say there is justice? Lee: What plans do you have now after your release Han: I always have the mindset of a worker and the greatest happiness in my life is doing everything I am capable of to help those workers who are in the hardest and most difficult places. This is what I believe has the greatest value and how I will live my life. Lee: Do you not have any more specific plans? Han: I was released six months earlier than I thought I would be, so I missed making specific plans before I got out. I am going around to different sites and am listening to the voices of workers, the voices of those workers who have been kicked out, those being discriminated against, and the problems of women laborers. Lee: Do we again need a united front of the progressive groups? Han: The united front of progressive groups does not happen by just talking about it. Up to now, when we have talked about such total unity, it has always been in terms of making requests of the heads of the progressive groups, urging them to play a role, and then just staring at their mouths to see what they will say. This has been the history of the progressive movement. But it is my thought that we are repeating this history and have been unable yet to open the door to a new path. I have a question as to how we can bring about a real chemical reaction of dynamic energy to obtain justice. I am thinking that at this moment in time, we need a bottom-up grassroots movement that the workers create themselves. [1] Baek Nam-gi was a 68-year-old farmer who was struck by a high-pressure jet fired by a police water cannon at a demonstration on November 14, 2015. Baek was knocked unconscious and remained in a coma until his death on September 25, 2016. [2] Located in downtown Seoul, Jogyesa played a crucial role as a site of refuge and collective organizing for the Candlelight Revolution. [3] An agreement on reinstatement was reached shortly after this interview took place. Hyun Lee is a Korea Policy Institute Associate, the U.S. national organizer for Women Cross DMZ and Korea Peace Now! — a global campaign of women mobilizing to end the Korean War.

By Moon Chung-in | November 2, 2020 | Originally published in Hankyoreh It is diplomats’ job to reevaluate alliances to suit our interests, and they shouldn’t be criticized for it South Korea’s conservative establishment has been harshly critical of the Moon administration’s attitude toward the South Korea-US alliance. The latest controversy concerns recent remarks by Foreign Minister Kang Kyung-wha and Lee Soo-hyuck, South Korean ambassador to the US. During a video conference hosted by the Asia Society on Sept. 25, Kang described the alliance with the US as an important anchor for Korea but said that Korea would probably not join the Quad Plus framework if that meant automatically disregarding the interests of other countries. Lee’s contentious remarks came during the parliamentary audit on Oct. 12. “Just because South Korea chose the US 70 years ago doesn’t mean it must choose the US for the next 70 years. Moving forward, we can only choose the US if that’s in our national interest,” Lee said. The conservative opposition party and some newspapers have said that such remarks greatly harm the South Korea-US alliance and inflict a deadly blow on the national interest. They insist that these remarks reveal that the South Korean government intends to betray the US and side with China. Even setting aside the national interest, these critics assert, the South Korea-US alliance should be further strengthened because of our shared values and ideals, including democracy, human rights, liberty, and the market economy. This argument might seem reasonable at first glance. But under the microscope, its flaws become apparent. Misrepresenting Kang and Lee’s remarks The first issue is its misrepresentation of Kang and Lee’s remarks. Both Kang and Lee spoke on the presupposition that the South Korea-US alliance will be maintained in its present state. But what they argue is that South Korea ought to carefully examine the national interest when deciding the future character and direction of that alliance. In all honesty, I don’t understand why that’s so controversial. More specifically, we need to be able to answer the following key questions before we abandon our strategic partnership with China and join ranks with our American allies. The first question is whether the China policy currently being pursued by the Trump administration is legitimate and logical enough. As Harvard University professor Stephen Walt has observed, an alliance is greatly affected not only by the balance of power but by the balance of threat. That suggests that South Korea would need to feel a strong threat from China in order to join the US’ front against China. Koreans don’t feel a “clear and present” danger from China But the majority of Koreans don’t feel a “clear and present” threat from China. In fact, there are even suspicions that the US’ move toward a confrontation with China, including containment, encirclement, and coercion, is due to the domestic political factor of the imminent presidential election. After all, the US is still far more powerful than China, and China itself wants a diplomatic solution. During the 45 years of the Cold War, Koreans suffered from the division of the peninsula and the ensuing war, an entrenched military standoff, and the limitations of a divided country. Thus, they’re hardly about to welcome yet another cold war. The second question is whether South Korea’s national security will improve if we march alongside the Americans. I’m skeptical about that. Wholeheartedly joining the US-led front against China would require Korea to allow the installation of another THAAD battery and the forward deployment of intermediate-range ballistic missiles on the Korean Peninsula. Washington would also expect Seoul to actively participate in military actions in the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, and the East China Sea. That would inevitably mean hostile relations with China and turn the Korean Peninsula into the front line of a new cold war. China would aim its Dongfeng missiles at South Korea and would make aggressive military moves in the Yellow Sea and South Korea’s air defense identification zone, called KADIZ. Could such a situation really be described as an improvement of our national security? Most sensible Koreans wouldn’t want Korea to be entangled in a sharp military conflict between the US and China. Siding with US in exclusion of China would only further endanger Korean Peninsula Third, siding with the US could further complicate the geopolitical alignment on the Korean Peninsula. Since China withdrew its military from North Korea in 1958, it has only provided extremely limited military assistance to the North. Under a new cold war, however, China would bolster a trilateral alliance with North Korea and Russia. Beijing would generously provide Pyongyang not only with weaponry but also with petroleum and other logistical support. Such developments would only make a peaceful solution to the North Korean nuclear issue even more improbable. Instead, it would definitely aggravate the threat of North Korea’s conventional weapons. We must not disregard the fact that expanding our alliance with the US could deepen our security dilemma. Economic retaliation from China would be devastating to S. Korea The final consideration is the South Korean economy, which — needless to say — is part of our national interest. As of the end of 2019, China accounted for 25% of our exports and 21.3% of our imports, both figures double that of the US. If Korea were to artificially decouple from the Chinese market or incur economic retaliation from China, Korea would obviously suffer a serious shock. Furthermore, that shock would hit SMEs and microenterprises in the tourism industry harder than it would hit conglomerates. It’s doubtful whether the South Korean government would take action against China that could jeopardize the livelihood of those SMEs and microenterprises. Let’s return to the comments made by Kang Kyung-wha and Lee Soo-hyuck. They weren’t trying to suggest that South Korea shouldn’t maintain its alliance with the US. Rather, they were saying that South Korea ought to carefully consider its national interest when it sits down with the US to define the future character and direction of that alliance. The challenge facing South Korea’s diplomats is that shared values and historical continuity, while important, cannot take priority to the national interest. It’s not helpful to blindly attack our diplomats as they attempt to tackle that challenge. Moon Chung-in is professor emeritus at Yonsei University

By Gregory Elich | October 8, 2020 | Originally published in the Counterpunch A review of A Violent Peace: Race, U.S. Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific by Christine Hong Christine Hong’s marvelous book, A Violent Peace: Race, U.S. Militarism, and Cultures of Democratization in Cold War Asia and the Pacific, arrives at a time when Washington’s Indo Pacific Strategy is driving U.S. political, economic, and military confrontation in the Asia-Pacific, as the culmination of a long process that began in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. A Violent Peace examines how the United States sought to encompass the Asia-Pacific “within the securitized contours of U.S. military empire,” and the responses to that policy by “a range of people’s struggles – black freedom, Asian liberation, and Pacific Islander decolonization.” Hong focuses her political analysis through the the literary and artistic lens of relevant works by black authors Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, Japanese writer Kenzaburō Ōe, Japanese-American artist Miné Okubo, and Philippine-American novelist Carlos Bulosan. Following World War II, the United States swiftly expanded its military presence in the region and established and supported reactionary client states. It aimed to roll back socialism and pursue economic, political, and military domination throughout the region. Those goals remain unchanged to this day. As Hong writes: “Understanding the role of U.S. police and war power within the political economy of postwar U.S. ‘democracy’ entails critically revisiting World War II’s structural legacies. How we explain postwar U.S. militarism—its reliance on superior force to achieve political ends in foreign and domestic arenas—depends on our grappling with the transformation of the United States during World War II, a time of Jim Crow, into a boundary-blurring, total-war state, permanently mobilized not only for war abroad but also for war at its very core.” The United States imposed regional postwar democratization and development based on how it defined those terms. This was a political project that was “realized at the barrel of a gun,” subsuming Asian and Pacific nations into American military and police power projection that encircled China and the Soviet Union. The U.S. introduced a democratization model that established postwar Japan as an important client state and anchor for the projection of U.S. war power throughout the region. Rehabilitating capitalism and providing opportunities for Western investors were prioritized as goals over meeting the people’s needs, despite the fact that many Japanese urban areas lay in ruins, and the population faced food shortages and mass unemployment. For U.S. capitalism, a more pressing task than improving peoples’ quality of life was to solidify a system that would serve U.S. power, and the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps “enlisted the Japanese police in routing out labor organizers with alleged Communist Party ties.” This policy planted “the ideological seeds of anticommunist U.S. police actions to come,” including the wars in Korea and Vietnam. “In the dawning Cold War order, wartime allies thereby morphed into peacetime targets whereas former rightist foes in Japan and the region were rehabilitated as linchpins of anticommunism.” The Marshall Islands served as a sacrificial offering to U.S. nuclear weapons development. The disregard shown by U.S. officials toward islanders is stunning in its inhumanity. Residents of three islands that were downwind from the Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb test on March 1, 1954 were not evacuated until three days later, by which time their “hair began falling out in clumps” and “their skin displayed burn patterns.” In the view of American officials, U.S. administrative control over the islands trumped the territorial rights of the inhabitants, giving the United States “the right to close areas for security reasons,” as it “anticipated closing them for atomic tests.” Returning the Rongelapese to their contaminated homes was regarded by American researchers as an opportunity that would “afford most valuable ecological radiation data on human beings.” What better test subjects could there be? As Merril Eisenbud, director of the Atomic Energy Commission’s Health and Safety Laboratory, observed in an internal 1956 memorandum, “While it is true that these people do not live…the way Westerners do, civilized people, it is nevertheless true that these people are more like us than mice.” One may question just who is civilized and who is uncivilized in designating Marshallese people as “model organisms for biomedical study.” As Marshallese politician Tony deBrum noted, “Some of our people were injected with or coerced to drink fluids laced with radiation. Other experimentation involved the purposeful and premature resettlement on islands highly contaminated by weapons tests to study how human beings absorb radiation from their foods and environment.” Hong observes that in this context, “no Marshallese could sustain the illusion that near-likeness meant an assurance of their humanity.” Although the Marshallese were routinely denied medical care, U.S. researchers diligently conducted examinations and blood tests to gather data. Noting islander resentment, researcher Robert Conrad suggested that “next trip we should consider giving them more treatment or even placebos.” In a scathing public letter to Conrad in 1975, Rongelap magistrate Nelson Anjain wrote: “There is no question about your technical competence, but we often wonder about your humanity.” U.S. policy in the postwar Philippines followed a familiar pattern, prioritizing opportunities for Western investors to exploit the land, labor, and natural resources. The United States “installed, most flagrantly in the office of the president, Filipino collaborators with the Japanese” and “secured military basing rights, transforming the Philippines into a launching pad for its anticommunist insurgencies in the region.” Inevitably, leftist guerrillas who had fought against Imperial Japanese occupation discovered that with the advent of peace, they were transformed into “targets of brutal U.S.-backed counterinsurgency campaigns.” Postwar decolonization in the Asia-Pacific generally failed to free the region’s nations from domination, transferring that relationship from Imperial Japan to the United States. “Having returned in the garb of antifascist liberator,” Hong observes, “the United States erected a formidable extraterritorial garrison state, unleashing catastrophic violence throughout the region and placing the Asian communist opponents of Japanese fascism in its war machine’s crosshairs.” In contrast to the punishment meted out to erstwhile wartime allies, the United States installed in power many of those who had collaborated with Japanese occupiers, valuing their experience in fighting against liberation movements. Hong points out, “In rehabilitating the empire it succeeded, the Pax Americana, as a military-imperial regime in its own right, strategically gave new life to subfascist figures who had served under the Japanese, thus thwarting the process of decolonization.” U.S. power abroad is interrelated to issues of class and race at home. As was often the case when American soldiers encountered the local citizenry in Vietnam, there was and is a mirrored pattern at home. In both environments, “racial profiling presumes guilt not just by association but by location, sweepingly conflating racialized humanity with areas where ‘mere presence in a certain place’ is tantamount to a crime.” In that context, people are erased as individuals and incorporated into the category of “perceived threat.” In the postwar era, the persistence of black exclusion from U.S. society contrasted with the image of inclusion provided through the U.S. military’s desegregation. This “liberal cover of integration, coalition, multiculturalism, and democratization” masked what was mainly “un-visible” to the U.S. domestic population – the “U.S. national security apparatus, military-industrial complex, empire of bases, and permanent war economy.” The military offered a politically equivocal personal emancipatory model that was essentially “extractive and destructive.” The “harnessing of race to the war machine required that racial labor risk its own obliteration” in performing its role in a “lethal agenda geared toward the devastation of distant lifeworlds.” The image of the military’s inclusivity “belied the U.S. war machine’s brute geopolitics and antihumanism.” Black radical appeals to the United Nations General Assembly, such as W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1947 petition and William Patterson’s 1951 indictment We Charge Genocide, outlined a structural relationship between U.S. domestic and foreign policy, “construing racism within the United States to be the domestic expression of a global pattern of U.S. imperialism.” These appeals fell victim to intensifying Cold War pressures and the unequal power relationship between imperialism and Third World nations. Patterson approached several UN delegations, only to be informed that while they were in sympathy with the appeal, “championing such a petition, no matter how valid, would not be diplomatically prudent.” The United Nation’s human rights program was, and remains so today, inextricably bound with U.S. power. “Any account of black radical human rights as an oppositional politics,” Hong explains, “thus must theorize U.S. dominance in the Cold War system, the very institutional basis for human rights that emerged out of World War II’s ashes.” U.S. domestic repression against oppositional voices during the Vietnam War, including COINTELPRO, the CIA’s Operation CHAOS, and other repressive mechanisms, blurred the distinction between the home front and war front, unleashing a “national security juggernaut” against “Americans perceived to be enemies.” The methods deployed against activists and organizers “uneasily mirrored, though by no means on the same scale, U.S. strategies of pacification and neutralization in Vietnam.” Racial counterintelligence aimed to neutralize enemies both at home and abroad. “Predictably,” Hong notes, “each author of black radical human rights petitions to the UN – Du Bois, Patterson, Newton, and Seale – as well as key affiliates like Robeson, would be subjected to counterintelligence investigation.” Hundreds of thousands of American citizens were the targets of investigation and surveillance, while COINTELPRO engaged in burglaries, disinformation programs, and efforts to create discord and conflict within oppositional groups. “The vast military-industrial complex and intelligence apparatus that emerged from World War II paved the way” for police militarization and human rights violations throughout the “U.S. military empire, including at its imperial core.” In the space of a short review, it is only possible to touch on a few of the book’s themes. A Violent Peace covers a much broader spectrum of topics, from which even the most knowledgeable reader will find much to learn. Christine Hong has written a profound and multilayered analysis of the U.S. military’s role in the postwar Asia-Pacific, and its relationship to militarized repression at home. Enriched by a deeply sympathetic understanding of black and Asian oppositional voices, Hong’s book exposes the reality behind comforting myths about the American democratization mission. With great eloquence, she draws insightful connections between race, class, and power, while vividly demonstrating how the expansion of U.S. power into the Asia-Pacific in the postwar era has led to the world we live in today. Deeply considered and thought-provoking, A Violent Peace is essential to understanding our current predicament. Gregory Elich is a Korea Policy Institute associate and on the Board of Directors of the Jasenovac Research Institute. He is a member of the Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea, a columnist for Voice of the People, and one of the co-authors of Killing Democracy: CIA and Pentagon Operations in the Post-Soviet Period, published in the Russian language. He is also a member of the Task Force to Stop THAAD in Korea and Militarism in Asia and the Pacific. His website is https://gregoryelich.org  Follow him on Twitter at @GregoryElich.

The US Peace Memorial Foundation awards the US Peace Prize to recognize and honor the most outstanding American antiwar leaders. These courageous individuals and organizations have publicly opposed military interventions such as invasion, occupation, production of weapons of mass destruction, use of weapons, threats of war, or other actions that threaten peace.  By honoring these and other courageous role models, we hope to inspire more Americans to speak out for peace and to work to end the hatred, ignorance, greed, and intolerance that lead to war. The Board of Directors of the US Peace Memorial Foundation has voted unanimously to award the 2020 US Peace Prize to The Honorable Christine Ahn, “for bold activism to end the Korean War, heal its wounds, and promote women’s roles in building peace.” Michael Knox, Chair of the Foundation, thanked Christine for her “outstanding leadership and activism to end the Korean War and halt militarism on the Korean Peninsula. We applaud your tireless work to involve more women in peace building. Your efforts over the last two decades are greatly appreciated in the U.S. and around the world. Thank you for your service.” There will be a virtual event on November 11 with Medea Benjamin and Gloria Steinem celebrating Ms. Ahn and her work with Women Cross DMZ. Please attend. In response to her selection, Ms. Ahn commented, “On behalf of Women Cross DMZ and all the courageous women who are working to end the Korean War, thank you for this tremendous honor. It is especially significant to receive this award in the 70th anniversary of the Korean War — a war that claimed four million lives, destroyed 80 percent of North Korean cities, separated millions of Korean families, and still divides the Korean people by the De-militarized Zone (DMZ), which in reality is among the most militarized borders in the world. Sadly, the Korean War is known as the ‘Forgotten War’ in the United States, even though it continues to this day. That’s because the U.S. government refuses to negotiate a peace agreement with North Korea while continuing to wage a brutal war of sanctions against innocent North Korean people and impede reconciliation between the two Koreas. Not only is the Korean War the longest standing overseas U.S. conflict, it is the war that inaugurated the U.S. military industrial complex and put the United States on the path to become the world’s military police. I humbly accept this award on behalf of the countless and nameless Korean activists whose lives have been destroyed in their quest for peace and reunification, as they faced tremendous obstacles by forces that continue to profit from this unended war. For me, too, the road to peace has not been easy. I have been redbaited, surveilled, denied entry to my homeland, and, hardest of all, alienated within my own family. But this peace prize sends a strong message of hope to the diasporic communities here in the United States. It not only affirms our mission of peace but also the critical role that women play in that effort. It’s time to move U.S. foreign policy away from endless wars that have sown chaos and violence in our homelands, and to recognize the leadership of women in creating the conditions that normalize peace. I am eternally grateful to the US Peace Memorial Foundation for recognizing me, Women Cross DMZ, and all the people who have devoted their lives to seeing peace in Korea.” Christine Ahn has been a strong and outspoken advocate for peace in Korea for nearly two decades, working for a formal end to the Korean War with a peace agreement, normalized relations, and tangible demilitarization on the Korean Peninsula. Ms. Ahn focuses on including women in the peace-building process by organizing initiatives, campaigns, and educational projects that encourage women to take an active leadership role. She has planned and participated in women’s peace walks across the demilitarized zone, traveled with delegations to provide humanitarian aid to North and South Korea, met with Korean leaders, and addressed the United Nations as well as the U.S. Congress and Canadian Parliament, challenging both governments on their anti-Korea, pro-war foreign policy. Ms. Ahn is the Co-founder, Executive Director, and International Coordinator of Women Cross DMZ. A columnist and author, she has been the keynote speaker at major universities and is frequently interviewed by the media. The other 2020 nominees were Daniel Ellsberg, Thomas C. Fox, Tulsi Gabbard, Alfred L. Marder, Whatcom Peace and Justice Center, and World BEYOND War. You can read about the antiwar/peace activities of all recipients and nominees at the US Peace Registry.

By Hyun Lee | January 20, 2020 By Hyun Lee | January 20, 2020 | Originally published by Truthout.org In both Iran and North Korea, the Trump administration has pursued an aggressive policy of “maximum pressure” — crushing economic sanctions, diplomatic isolation and military threats — in order to thwart their nuclear ambitions. In both cases, “maximum pressure” has not only failed to achieve the desired goal but has had the opposite effect: ramping up tensions and hardening both countries’ resolve to obtain nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, sanctions are having devastating consequences for ordinary citizens in both countries. Despite summit meetings and the exchange of what Trump described as “love letters” between him and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, peace between the two countries seems as out of reach as ever. At the end of 2019, Kim declared that as long as “the U.S. persists in its hostile policy towards the [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea], there will never be the denuclearization on the Korean peninsula” and warned that the world will soon witness their “new strategic weapon.” Maximum pressure took us to the brink of war with Iran. If we don’t change course, we will find ourselves in the same place with North Korea. It’s time for Washington, with its entanglements around the world testing the limits of its military and alliances, to reconsider its security objectives and course-shift away from endless wars How Did We Get Here? In the last year, it seemed as if the U.S. and North Korea were poised to make a historic breakthrough toward peace. If you ask U.S. officials, North Korea is entirely to blame for the lack of progress in negotiations. But by refusing to abandon the maximum pressure policy — the same failed approach we just saw result in disaster with Iran — the Trump administration may have botched its last opportunity to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula. In a dramatic turnaround from threatening “fire and fury” in 2017, Trump took a decidedly friendlier route when he began meeting with Kim Jong Un in 2018. Engagement worked. North Korea took steps to build trust, including by voluntarily freezing its nuclear and long-range missile tests, beginning to dismantle a rocket launch site and a nuclear test site, and returning 55 boxes of remains of U.S. servicemen. The U.S., for its part, scaled down joint military exercises with South Korea, but the exercises continued nonetheless. The U.S. also stymied South Korea’s efforts to re-engage the North at every step. At Trump and Kim’s second summit in Hanoi in February 2019, Kim reportedly offered to completely dismantle the Yongbyon nuclear complex in exchange for the partial lifting of UN sanctions — a “big, big deal” that would eliminate the “heart of their nuclear program,” according to leading nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker. But Trump rejected the proposal and instead bluntly proposed that Pyongyang basically give up its entire weapons arsenal — a plan which North Korea had previously rejected. Kim announced he would wait until the end of 2019 for the U.S. to come to the table with a different offer. But when the two countries’ negotiators finally met in Stockholm in October 2019, the North Koreans walked out, saying the U.S. brought “nothing to the negotiation table.” North Korea repeatedly made clear that it will only resume negotiations when the U.S. has removed all threats to its security and development. North Korea closed out 2019 reiterating that point. At a meeting of the Central Committee of its Workers’ Party at the end of 2019, Kim criticized the U.S., saying its “true intention is to seek its own political and diplomatic interests while maintaining the sanctions to gradually deplete and weaken our strength.” He announced that his country “will steadily develop necessary and prerequisite strategic weapons for the security of the state until the U.S. rolls back its hostile policy towards the [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea].” The U.S. military intervention in Libya led Pyongyang to vow it would never follow the “Libya model” of denuclearization. Now the assassination of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani will likely only reinforce its resolve. After all, the Pentagon has already deployed attack drones in South Korea and worked out a plot to decapitate North Korea’s leadership. Not only has Pyongyang decided to tighten its hold on its nuclear weapons as a guarantee of its survival, it is also strengthening its alliances with Beijing and Moscow to tip the balance of power in its favor in a region that is vital to U.S.’s economic and political interests. The pattern is obvious: when the U.S. is willing to engage in diplomacy and take reciprocal steps toward peace, it moves forward with North Korea. When it doubles down on sanctions and military exercises, talks fail. Just as it has in Iran, maximum pressure on North Korea will inevitably backfire. The Human Toll of “Maximum Pressure” “Maximum pressure” has also taken significant tolls on the ordinary citizens of Iran and North Korea. According to two recently released reports, sanctions are impeding the delivery of humanitarian aid in both Iran and North Korea. What’s more, sanctions against North Korea disproportionately impact women by targeting the industries in which they are heavily represented, such as textiles (82 percent of workers), by producing greater social disorder (which leads to increased gender discrimination and violence), and by harming their access to food, water and health care. If broad-based sanctions are intended to result in policy changes, there are no signs of such a scenario playing out in Iran or North Korea. As the authors of “The Human Costs and Gendered Impact of Sanctions on North Korea” state, “studies suggest that sanctions are particularly prone to failure in this respect when they aim to force major policy changes, when they target authoritarian countries, and when they are tightened over an extended period of time. It has also been observed that sanctions can be counterproductive by actually cementing political unity — the so-called ‘rally around the flag’ effect.” The Choice Before Trump, and Peace as the Way Forward Now that North Korea has clarified that it will resume its nuclear weapons and missile development until the U.S. drops its “hostile policy,” the choice before the Trump administration is also plain: either prepare a political and military response to North Korea’s “new path” or end all hostile relations. As long as the U.S. refused to drop its maximum pressure policy, Pyongyang has been honing its missile technology and strengthening its relationships with China and Russia. North Korea now has the ability to hit the U.S.’s largest overseas military base in South Korea with a missile that can evade the U.S.’s missile defense system. Russia recently announced that it put into service a hypersonic nuclear-capable missile system that can strike the United States at 20 times the speed of sound. China also unveiled the world’s longest-range intercontinental nuclear-capable missile, believed to be able to reach the U.S. in 30 minutes. Currently, the U.S. does not have a defense against either weapon. An alliance of China, Russia and North Korea poses a considerable challenge to U.S. supremacy in the region, especially if the current crisis with Iran further mires the U.S. in the Middle East. The U.S.’s reflexive response to the tipping balance of power in the region is to rally South Korea and Japan into a trilateral alliance that cements Cold War divisions against China, Russia and North Korea. But this requires considerable arm-twisting of its allies. The Trump administration exerted unparalleled pressure on South Korea’s Moon Jae-in government to reverse its decision to terminate an intelligence-sharing agreement with Japan — a key to the trilateral alliance. What’s more, the Trump administration recently demanded that South Korea pay $5 billion — five times more than in the past — for the cost of stationing U.S. troops there. This has sown growing resentment among South Koreans against the U.S.’s authority over their country’s affairs and could lead to irreparable fissures in the U.S.- South Korea alliance. There is a more sensible option: make peace with North Korea. U.S.-North Korea relations have been governed by a fragile armistice for the past seven decades. In order to transition to a permanent peace regime, both sides need to pledge to not attack each other, agree on measures to eliminate the risk of future wars and discuss a plan for gradual arms reduction by all parties. To that end, the U.S. Congress can and should help forge that new path by passing H.Res.152, which calls for a formal end to this war that was supposed to be resolved more than a half-century ago. Replacing the armistice with a peace agreement can also be the catalyst for a shift toward a multilateral peace and security system that facilitates cooperation between the U.S., China and Russia to gradually diminish the threat level — constructive for both Northeast Asia and the Middle East. It’s time for the U.S. to reconsider its failed policy of maximum pressure and endless wars. It may have avoided escalation with Iran, for now, but it is most certainly headed back to collision with North Korea. And 2020, which marks the 70th year of the un-ended Korean War, may be Washington’s last chance to change course. Copyright Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission. Hyun Lee is a Korea Policy Institute Associate, the U.S. national organizer for Women Cross DMZ and Korea Peace Now! — a global campaign of women mobilizing to end the Korean War.

Signs commemorating 4.3 and the ongoing struggle against military base construction in Jeju. Jeong Eun Annabel We | April 6, 2020 April 3rd is a day of commemoration in South Korea for what is known as the Jeju Uprising against national division, militarism, and state violence. This article reflects on the significance of this date, based on my participation in a peace tour of 2018. In late June of 2018, a delegation of activists, artists, and scholars visited Jeju Island in South Korea. Several South Korean academic groups, activist organizations, and schools organized the peace study tour to educate participants about the island’s past and current histories of resistance against state violence and imperialism. 2018 marked the 70th anniversary of Jeju island’s “4-3 Sakŏn” (4-3 Incident), alternatively known as the April Third massacre, or the Jeju Uprising. Jeju, a tiny island off the eastern coast of southern Korea has a paradoxical reputation—one of the most beautiful islands on earth, a World Heritage site of unparalleled marine life and rock formations but also the site of some of the most brutal military massacres between 1947 and 1954 in modern history. This history was “buried” throughout much of the Cold War. After Korea’s liberation in August 1945, the peninsula was almost immediately divided at the 38th parallel by the United States. The United States and the Soviet Union then occupied the southern and northern halves, respectively, from 1945 to 48. But liberation was also promptly followed by the formation of grassroots political organizations called the People’s Committees all throughout the peninsula. Although these committees flourished in the north, they were targeted for suppression in the south. Despite the division, those groups persisted, attempting to install democratic elections that reflected the people’s sovereignty. In this context, the April Third Uprising began under the U.S. military occupation in 1947 and lasted seven years until 1954. Police from mainland Korea shot at and killed civilians at a public gathering at Kwandŏkchŏng on March 1, 1947, on the anniversary of the movement for national independence (originating from the March First movement in 1919 under Japanese colonial rule). Events escalated quickly, leading to an across-the-island general strike on March 10, 1947. The U.S. military government in South Korea labeled what was a general protest of the murders as a “communist” revolt and deployed a paramilitary youth group called Sŏbukch’ŏngnyŏndan (Northwest Youth Group), which to this day many Jeju islanders consider a terrorist group. As torture, imprisonment, and murders ensued, U.S.-backed South Korean president Syngman Rhee planned a May 1948 general election in South Korea, which would have effectively solidified the national division against the wish of many Koreans. When Jeju islanders protested the election, as did many others on the peninsula, amid the ongoing paramilitary lockdown on the island, the U.S. military government in South Korea sent an army to Jeju to quell the protests on April 18, 1948. In August of the same year, Rhee’s government came into power in South Korea; in November, martial law was declared in Jeju, and the police and military committed massacres of many islanders who hid in the mountains. It is estimated that up to 30,000 people, or 10% of the island’s population, was killed. The uprising ended with trials of Jeju people in a military, rather than civilian, court, which was not legally justified. Although the South Korean government has since retracted the charges and ruled the principals as innocent, many Jeju islanders continue to seek reparations and to make the U.S. government recognize its role in the massacres. Beyond the span of these 7 years of resistance, April Third Uprising demands the need to understand the larger context of militarism and struggle for sovereignty in Jeju, from Japanese colonialism (1910-45) to U.S. military occupation (1945-48) to South Korean government’s militarization of the island (1948-present). A site of long historical struggle of resistance against external military infringements, Jeju’s latest struggle (from 2007 onwards) has been over the construction of a huge South Korean naval base in the town of Gangjeong. In this spirit, many events of the 2018 peace tour were planned to commemorate this history, and the tour addressed what has happened on Jeju since April 3, 1948 with the aim of connecting Jeju’s history to broader questions of South Korea’s relation to war, militarization, and the United States. During the five-day tour, over 40 participants visited the island’s sites that marked Jeju’s resilience as a community. I participated in the tour with the Overseas Organizing Committee, and our principal partner organizations in South Korea were the Human Rights Foundation Saram (인권재단사람), Institute for Korean Historical Studies (역사문제연구소), and People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (참여연대). The Jeju tour of 2018 in fact marked the third in a series of Peace Study Tours organized by multiple South Korean, U.S., and U.K. groups of scholars and activists. The peace study tours were originally conceived by the now-dormant Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea (ASCK, http://www.asck.org). ASCK sought to intervene in the broader U.S. public’s views of Korea by transforming how U.S.-Korea relations and history were taught in higher education – work, which is being continued by others now. Likewise, the peace study tours aimed to change the U.S.-Korea relationship towards peace. The first peace tour took place in 2013 with a focus on war crime sites such as No-gun-ri where the U.S. army massacred civilians during the Korean War in 1950, and the second peace tour took place in 2015 with a focus on the demilitarized zone (DMZ). Bringing South Korean and overseas academics and activists together at sites of conflict, the peace study tour has provided an opportunity for its participants to plan future work grounded in a more critical understanding of the unending Korean War. Their aim has been to foster participants’ work in our respective arenas to achieve peace on the peninsula. April 3rd is a day of commemoration in South Korea and throughout the Korean diaspora for what is known as the Jeju Uprising against national division, militarism and state violence. This article reflects on the significance of this date, based on my participation in a peace tour of 2018. In late June of 2018, a delegation of activists, artists, and scholars, from the United States and South Korea, visited Jeju Island in South Korea. Several South Korean and U.S. academic groups, activist organizations, and schools organized the peace study tour to educate participants about the island’s past and current histories of resistance against state violence and imperialism. 2018 marked the 70th anniversary of Jeju island’s “4-3 Sakŏn” (4-3 Incident), alternatively known as the April Third massacre, or the Jeju Uprising. Jeju, a tiny island off the eastern coast of southern Korea has a paradoxical reputation—one of the most beautiful islands on earth, a World Heritage site of unparalleled marine life and rock formations but also the site of some of the most brutal military massacres between 1947 and 1954 in modern history. This history was “buried” throughout much of the Cold War. After Korea’s liberation in August 1945, the peninsula was almost immediately divided at the 38th parallel by the United States. The United States and the Soviet Union then occupied the southern and northern halves, respectively, from 1945 to 48. But liberation was also promptly followed by the formation of grassroots political organizations called the People’s Committees all throughout the peninsula. Although these committees flourished in the north, they were targeted for suppression in the south. Despite the division, those groups persisted, attempting to install democratic elections that reflected the people’s sovereignty. In this context, the April Third Uprising began under the U.S. military occupation in 1947 and lasted seven years until 1954. Police from mainland Korea shot at and killed civilians at a public gathering at Kwandŏkchŏng on March 1, 1947, on the anniversary of the movement for national independence (originating from the March First movement in 1919 under Japanese colonial rule). Events escalated quickly, leading to an across-the-island general strike on March 10, 1947. The U.S. military government in South Korea labeled what was a general protest of the murders as a “communist” revolt and deployed a paramilitary youth group called Sŏbukch’ŏngnyŏndan (Northwest Youth Group), which to this day many Jeju islanders consider a terrorist group. As torture, imprisonment, and murders ensued, U.S.-backed South Korean president Syngman Rhee planned a May 1948 general election in South Korea, which would have effectively solidified the national division against the wish of many Koreans. When Jeju islanders protested the election, as did many others on the peninsula, amid the ongoing paramilitary lockdown on the island, the U.S. military government in South Korea authorized the military suppression of the protests on Jeju on April 18, 1948. In August of the same year, Rhee’s government came into power in South Korea; in November, martial law was declared in Jeju, and the police and military committed massacres of many islanders who hid in the mountains. It is estimated that up to 30,000 people, or 10% of the island’s population, was killed. The uprising ended with trials of Jeju people in a military, rather than civilian, court, which was not legally justified. Although the South Korean government has since retracted the charges and ruled the principals as innocent, many Jeju islanders continue to seek reparations and to make the U.S. government recognize its role in the massacres. Beyond the span of these 7 years of resistance, April Third Uprising demands the need to understand the larger context of militarism and struggle for sovereignty in Jeju, from Japanese colonialism (1910-45) to U.S. military occupation (1945-48) to South Korean government’s militarization of the island (1948-present). A site of long historical struggle of resistance against external military infringements, Jeju’s latest struggle (from 2007 onwards) has been over the construction of a huge South Korean naval base in the town of Gangjeong. In this spirit, many events of the 2018 peace tour were planned to commemorate this history, and the tour addressed what has happened on Jeju since April 3, 1948 with the aim of connecting Jeju’s history to broader questions of South Korea’s relation to war, militarization, and the United States. During the five-day tour, over 40 participants visited the island’s sites that marked Jeju’s resilience as a community. I participated in the tour with the Overseas Organizing Committee, and our principal partner organizations in South Korea were the Human Rights Foundation Saram (인권재단사람), Institute for Korean Historical Studies (역사문제연구소), and People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (참여연대). The Jeju tour of 2018 in fact marked the third in a series of Peace Study Tours organized by multiple South Korean, U.S., and U.K. groups of scholars and activists. The peace study tours were originally conceived by the now-dormant Alliance of Scholars Concerned about Korea (ASCK, http://www.asck.org). ASCK sought to intervene in the broader U.S. public’s views of Korea by transforming how U.S.-Korea relations and history were taught in higher education – work, which continues in other forms. Likewise, the peace study tours aimed to change the U.S.-Korea relationship towards peace. The first peace tour took place in 2013 with a focus on war crime sites such as No-gun-ri, where the U.S. army massacred civilians during the Korean War in 1950, and the second peace tour took place in 2015 with a focus on the demilitarized zone (DMZ). Bringing South Korean and overseas academics and activists together at sites of conflict, the peace study tours have provided an opportunity for its participants to plan future work grounded in a more critical understanding of the unending Korean War. Their aim has been to foster participants’ work in our respective arenas to achieve peace on the peninsula. Tour Details and Highlights The tour began with a full-day symposium in which scholars and activists discussed the past, present, and future of April Third massacre’s significance. The symposium covered the historical silencing of survivors’ voices in South Korea, how Jeju people have sought to heal themselves, and how state violence continues on Jeju, most glaringly in the imposition of the South Korean naval base in Gangjeong village. The highlight of the symposium was the group exercise led by the activist/Gangjeong jikimi (protector of Gangjeong) Ttalgi. How far were groups willing to go to protect the symbolic island (towels) they were asked to stand on? When “the state” came to displace them, only one out of about seven groups was able to stand their ground. The exercise revealed the difficult nature of the fight that Gangjeong villagers had faced. Since the first announcement that a naval base would be installed in Gangjeong, local and international protest has interrupted the construction through various tactics. Yet, in spite of this ardent protest, the base was completed in 2016, inflicting great environmental damage on the area. The struggle of Gangjeong people exposes Jeju’s subjection to state surveillance and violence in the past and present because of its strategic location. The second and third days of the tour consisted of visits to multiple April Third memorial sites around the island, led by staff of the Jeju Dark Tour NGO. At all sites—the communal cemetery at Seoddal oreum and the “lost village”—the extent of loss that the local community experienced was palpable. At the Daejong elementary school, soldiers rounded up the villagers in the schoolyard and fired shots at them; at the children’s graveyard, we paused to recall the children buried there who were killed in the elementary school shootings. Yet these sites of massacres, in spite of the violence enacted there, were so quietly mundane that they made one think of the prevalence of violence on Jeju and how the surviving residents chose to deal with it, which sometimes meant enduring silence while living alongside neighbors who were complicit perpetrators of this violence. After learning about this history, we moved on to another site, Seoddal oreum, where the villagers initiated a lawsuit against the South Korean government and succeeded in gaining recognition and compensation. On the last day of the tour, we visited Gangjeong, the most striking part of the tour. We joined the daily rally that Gangjeong activists continue to hold and learned more about the history of their resistance and the more recent developments for the villagers in living with the military complex situated within the village. Although protests have always been peaceful, over 600 people have been arrested. Indeed, the Moon Jae-in government has not relieved Gangjeong people of their hardship, even as it, by way of comparison, has enacted reconciliatory measures on the issue of the April Third massacre. Confronted with the spectacle of a U.S. Aegis warship in the waters off Gangjeong, we could deduce that the base, though constructed by the South Korean military, serves U.S. military needs. Indeed, it is too large for the ships in South Korean navy but is suitable for aforementioned large U.S. Aegis warships. Sitting at the southernmost tip of South Korea, the base is, geographically speaking, better situated for U.S. actions against China rather than for the purported aim of South Korean defense against North Korean attack. Moreover, the naval base devastated Gangjeong’s natural environment. To make way for the base, Gureombi, a natural rock formation along the shore, was blown up with dynamite. At the time of our visit, six warships had come in, some leaving behind large amounts of waste. At one point, nuclear waste was left untreated for a week in Gangjeong; the Jeju government didn’t have any radiation detectors and it took some time for Jeju University to treat the nuclear waste. Gangjeong’s sea used to be a lively dolphin habitat, but dolphins have long since left. Interestingly, Gangjeong activists endeavor not only to inform visitors like us about these issues but also to educate military workers, including soldiers. Construction workers and soldiers have confessed to their prior ignorance of Gangjeong’s history, but after talking with the activists, felt compelled to vote in secret for political representatives who support the Gangjeong people’s cause. The island continues to be militarized. For example, the construction of the second airport in Jeju, begun in 2018 and projected to finish by 2035, amounts to the building of a second airbase against the wishes of many islanders. Conclusion The tour left a mark on all of us: we witnessed the pain of Jeju people’s daily struggles with militarization on their island. In my conversations with the activists from South Korean organizations, I learned that a major challenge to anti-militarist activism in South Korea partly lies in the faltering attention span of the media and concerned individuals. Once a military project reaches an irrevocable point, the media, both global and national, move on to other sites. Gangjeong has suffered such inattention, adding further injury to its wounds. What we need to remember about April Third Jeju Uprising, then, is that even as militarization is a process that is ongoing, so, too, is the resistance on the ground. Ongoing resistance in Gangjeong is closely linked to activism in other sites, such as Sosongri where Terminal High Altitude Area Defense installation, an American anti-ballistic missile system, has been deployed, and the planned site of the second airport in Jeju. Those of us outside of South Korea need to remember and honor such efforts on the ground. In 2018, to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Jeju April Third massacre, the South Korean government under Moon Jae-in issued an apology to the Jeju people. In the past, the progressive administrations of Ro Moo-hyun in 2003 and Kim Dae-jung in 1996 had likewise issued acknowledgments (although Kim described Jeju April Third massacre as caused by communist rioters), while the conservative administrations of Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye did not. In January 2019, the South Korean Supreme Court reversed the martial court decisions that found Jeju civilians “guilty” and decided that eighteen people from the April Third incident were innocent. However, the South Korean government has yet to issue reparations. Professor Huh Sangsoo, who studies the issue and has visited the United States to discuss this matter with members of the U.S. Congress, says that the U.S. government needs to address its role in the April Third incident as well as Korea’s national division. Korean and American scholars, activists, and community members continue to raise U.S. and South Korean public awareness about Jeju, akin to efforts made with regards to the ongoing Korean War. Scholars of the Jeju April Third massacre have been making the case for why the United States needs to address its responsibility and issue reparations. Understanding the Jeju April Third massacre/uprising is a critical part of the broader effort to bring peace to Korea, especially as we are reminded this year of another tragic benchmark, the 70th anniversary of the ongoing Korean War. As we advocate for the signing of a peace treaty to finally end the Korean War and press for reconciliation between South and North Korea, please take a moment today to remember those who endured April Third. Jeong Eun Annabel We, Ph.D. Rutgers University, New Brunswick, has written on the larger issue of militarization in the Pacific incorporating discussions of Jeju and the Yemeni refugee crisis that coincided with the above Peace Tour (“The Transpacific Tempest,” Cultural Dynamics 31.4 (Nov 2019): 375-398). She thanks the South Korean activists and scholars who organized the tour, and the Jeju residents and activists for their spirit and generosity. Dr. We was one of several members of the NYC group Nodutdol for Korean Community Development (www.nodutdol.org), who joined the 2018 Peace Tour. Nodutdol works to educate about the need for peace and reunification of the Korean peninsula in the broader context of de-militarizing the Asia-Pacific as well as addressing issues of inequity and racial injustice in the US. #JejuUprising #KoreanWar #SouthKorea

From Reencounters: On the Korean War and Diasporic Memory Critique, by Crystal Mun-hye Baik. Used by permission of Temple University Press. © 2020 by Temple University. All Rights Reserved. | May 2020 BooDaeChiGae (2005), this video installation by Ji-Young Yoo In Reencounters: On the Korean War and Diasporic Memory Critique,a deeply important study of the aesthetics of the war-forged Korean diaspora published by Temple University Press last year, Crystal Mun-hye Baik, Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside, examines the critical power of the cultural work of Korean diasporic subjects. Weaving a luminous thread through multiple diasporic sites, Baik, also a founding member of the 2020-23 Teaching Initiative to End the Korean War, sheds light on a range of projects, including material from the Legacies of the Korean War oral-history archive, that refuse the smoothness of dominant imperial humanitarian narratives around the Korean War. With the power to enact discursive ruptures, Korean diasporic culture, as Baik movingly contends in this introduction to her book, demands to be understood as a site of emergent political possibility. An Introduction In the corner of a gallery room is a small video monitor placed inside a U.S. military C-ration can. Since the video installation is propped on top of a low eating table, viewers must squat, kneel, or sit to peek into the can’s metallic interior. As the audience looks on, a time-lapse scene glows on the screen: American cheese, Spam, and Campbell’s Pork and Beans appear neatly arranged across a table covered with a green-and-blue checkered cloth. While fragmented comments in English and Korean are heard throughout the video, a pair of hands dexterously deposits the food into a large pot simmering with tofu, kimchi (pickled cabbage), and water. Through a rapid sequence of close-up shots, the camera captures the softening of the foods as they melt and disappear into the bubbling red mixture. Abruptly, the cooking demonstration ends, only to be looped again and again for passing spectators. Titled BooDaeChiGae (2005), this video installation by Ji-Young Yoo hints at the beginnings of the Korean War as well as its indiscernible implications in contemporary social life.[1] Budae jjigae (a word that translates as “army base stew” in English) first surfaced in Uijeongbu, a city north of Seoul and home to an installment of the U.S. Second Infantry Division. Following the outbreak of full-scale combat fighting on the Korean Peninsula in 1950, starving Korean civilians scavenged military bases for leftovers, excising Spam and other processed meat from heaps of garbage and mixing their coveted findings with vegetables, noodles, and water to create filling stews. As the number of American soldiers stationed in Korea soared during the next two decades, the popularity of budae jjigae also grew. Symbolizing American abundance in the face of scarcity among Koreans, canned meats became sought-after commodities in the black market, so much so that the South Korean government deemed the smuggling of Spam a crime punishable by imprisonment or even death. As Grace Cho notes, American products such as Spam also hint at a sexualized web of taboo relations, given that Korean women romantically associated with U.S. soldiers gained access to food exclusively sold at military retail stores or the Postal Exchange (PX).[2] To support their families, some resold tins of Spam for lucrative profit in Seoul’s wealthiest districts, while others crafted makeshift versions of army base stew following their migrations to the United States as the married partners of U.S. servicemen.[3] In the ensuing decades, these very same women would become the primary visa sponsors of family members attempting to settle in the United States. While these fragmented stories of deracination, displacement, and migration resist forming a single or coherent narrative, budae jjigae’s racialized and gendered origins index the diversified ramifications of an unfinished, transnational war. Enduring and traversing borders, budae jjigae embodies militarized occupation and precarity, as well as improvisedsurvival. Paradoxically, it has morphed into what some now describe as a delectable “East-West fusion dish” served at late-night dive bars, trendy restaurants, and homes across the United States and South Korea.[4] I open Reencounters: On the Korean War and Diasporic Memory Critique with a description of BooDaeChiGae because Yoo’s work poignantly captures a juxtaposition of diffused consequences taken up in the pages that follow. Namely, by moving away from spectacular forms of militarized violence solely affixed to battlefields and combat warfare, this book concerns itself with a more complex range of conditions characteristic of a suspended seventy-year conflict. This analytical shift from the extraordinary to the ordinary is crucial, given that the Korean War’s extended life engenders diasporic repercussions that are integral rather than exceptional to daily life: while armed fighting on the peninsula was halted by a 1953 armistice, efforts to definitively end the war with a finalized peace treaty co-signed by North Korea, China, and the United Nations Command (led by the United States) never came to fruition. Reflective, then, of the war’s status as to-be-concluded, Yoo’s BooDaeChiGae gestures to how the militarized origins of mundane objects, everyday relations, and social phenomena remain murky, if not unintelligible, to contemporary audiences. As expressed by Sarah Park on Still Present Pasts’ online commentary board, Yoo’s installation performs a disturbing disjuncture between the habitual ways we casually perceive and consume everyday commodities and the devastating histories of violence, loss, and survival embodied by those very objects: “Among my Korean American friends, this dish is really popular because it is both easy to make and delicious. Until I saw this exhibit, I never realized how this dish is a symbol of the Korean War.”[5] Attending to the sedimented consequences of the Korean War, this book examines how accumulated forms of racialized, gendered, and sexual violence are recodified, across space and time, into bureaucratic immigration policy, multigenerational familial relations, and profitable enterprises removed from the immediacy of warfare. As the visual artist and writer Sukjong Hong discusses in Chapter 2, the Korean War is no longer just a “bomber jet,” but surfaces as the foods we consume, the spaces we inhabit, the immobilities that mark our lives, the personal histories we are unable to access, and the people we are forbidden to or cannot name. To both track and trouble these muddled distinctions between “wartime” and “peacetime” (as Mary Dudziak might put it), this book pulls together an interdisciplinary archive of diasporic memory works, including oral history projects, time-based performances, and video installations that activate reencounters with the Korean War.[6] Here, reencounters as a concept captures how diasporic memory works catalyze moments of return and remembering that denaturalize naturalized temporalities, solidified presumptions, and historical knowledges. More specifically, diasporic memory works mediate epistemological openings by gesturing to radically different memories of survival, refusal, and resurgence that exceed Cold War historical narrations of the United States as the benevolent liberator of Korea. Indeed, in the twenty-first century, the Korean War’s protracted entanglements are irrefutably linked to a globalized Cold War logic that banalizes the Korean conflict as an altruistic action that only U.S.-centered diplomacy can resolve. As we shall see, this naturalized telos and temporality of the Korean War—as a drawn-out “action” that, nevertheless, is slowly inching toward a conclusion punctuated by U.S. victory—assumes that militarized division is essential for rather than oppositional to American hegemony in the North Pacific. In response to this damaging logic, reencounters actuate subversive memories of recalcitrance and insurgency that discompose the Cold War façade of American benevolence. These “othered” memories, then, pave the way for potential moments of accountability necessary for healing among affected subjects. In this context, healing is incommensurate with a curative stance solely dependent on a politics of (inter)national recuperation and definitive resolution. Rather, I argue that profound healing germinates when war subjects are able to explicitly name, work through, and account for a concatenation of violent consequences while reckoning with irretrievable losses that (inter)national politics can never fully rectify. While this process of “working through” is informed by confrontations with militarized colonial violence, it also provides the foundational means for what Dorinne Kondo describes as reparative creativity.[7] Kondo extends Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytic focus on the individual subject’s “depressive position,” a stance that registers the graduated phases an infant must navigate to come to terms with the “real of separation” from the mother. Reparative creativity, writes Kondo, materializes through artistic imagination that actuates deep healing, which is made possible only through painful encounters with structural inequalities.[8] More precisely, Kondo argues that it is this arduous and fraught labor of “working through” that provides the groundwork for the reparative. In light of Kondo’s astute observations, this book considers the multitude of ways in which healing commences when subjects, through re-memberings mediated vis-à-vis diasporic memory works, refuse and insist beyond the U.S. state’s narrative concerning the Korean War. Reencounters therefore catalogues a resignification process insofar as cultural workers andtransnational audiences are moved to reconsider what they are seeing, hearing, and touching. By facilitating these moments of uncertainty, even of unknowing, diasporic cultural works underscore the blatant contradictions of American liberalism while activating other mnemonic possibilities that exist in tension with and against the militarized “division system” in Korea.[9] As detailed later in this Introduction, reencounters as a concept offers three core considerations that deepen existing studies of the Korean War in transnational American scholarship. First and foremost, this book moves away from generalizable trauma-based approaches that dominate much of Asian/American cultural studies on the Korean militarized conflict. While in dialogue with productive terms such as “intergenerational hauntings” and “postmemory,” trauma-based framings, I argue, at times obscure the specific conditions of the ongoing Korean War. Second, while state-facilitated arbitrations for Korean peace are centered on the United States, genuine peace, security, and healing cannot be premised on the United States’ continued presence in the peninsula, a provision demanded by the U.S. government to end the Korean War. Rather, by turning to the everyday as a vital terrain of mnemonic intervention and remembering otherwise, this book demonstrates the prominent role played by the United States as the chief architect of violence and insecurity in Korea and the North Pacific. Relatedly, as Lisa Yoneyama discusses in her work, I assert that Korean decolonization and true justice exceed the delimited realm of high-stakes (inter)national political negotiations overwhelmingly dominated by a small circle of patriarchal state actors.[10] Third, by conversing with a rich genealogy of transnational American scholarship that addresses the machinery of U.S. militarized governance and colonial ambitions in Asia, this book draws on the cultural as a generative arena for political critique. The cultural, as Raymond Williams reminds us, cannot be reduced to “finished products and activities” indicative of isolated positions; nor is it shorthand for mimetic practices of poetics and representation.[11] On the contrary, the cultural is a vibrant politicized realm shaped by contemporary relations of power and social conditions, even while it encompasses a confluence of vestigial and emergent formations. In conversation with Williams’s commentary, scholars such as Sarita See, Mimi Thi Nguyen, and Cathy Schlund-Vials insightfully mobilize cultural forms and practices to identify the collateral damage inflicted by U.S. intervention in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Cambodia, respectively.[12] See, for instance, deploys the concept of disarticulation to describe how Filipinx artists produce a “visual and rhetorical grammar” to eviscerate the logic of American militarized colonialism in the Philippines.[13] Nuancing such an argumentation, this book examines how U.S. militarized occupation generates its own seeds of demise, so to speak, by paradoxically producing diasporic excesses,or non-normative subjectivities and spaces deemed expendable to the U.S. and South Korean national agendas. Diasporic excesses activate cultural practices of resistance and regeneration that refuse to be narrowly confined to the arena of militarized security and state-adjudicated justice. This book’s diasporic memory works therefore do not merely attend to the violent foreclosures or impossibilities of U.S. militarized empire—a rhetorical move that tends to treat U.S. governance as a stable or homogeneous “thing” that is all encompassing and exacting in its formidable power. Instead, I underscore how political, cultural, and social alterities always already exist in relation to and alongside dominant forms of power, which resonates with Macarena Gómez-Barris’s description of the smaller gestures or micro-spaces of resistance submerged within, against, and beyond (settler) colonial infrastructures.[14] In part, the capacity of diasporic memory works to facilitate reencounters relies on their characteristics as aesthetic mediations. While this book’s selection of diasporic memory works is quite eclectic in form, praxis, and medium, these cultural sources share an overarching set of qualities: they are multisensorial multimedia projects that crystallize through dissolving lines, cacophonous sounds, and divergent temporalities. Emerging more as experiential processes than as inanimate artifacts, diasporic memory works demonstrate how the aesthetic, or aisthesis, encompasses the expansive realm of the senses, embodiment, and perception.[15] My interdisciplinary use of this concept is informed not by the Kantian discourse of beauty or the disciplined bounds of art history, but by a much more capacious engagement that segues with Sylvia Wynter’s theorization of cultural forms as “deciphering practices”: through perceptual means, aesthetic mediations facilitate reapprehensions of surrounding phenomena and codified knowledges.[16] In this way, Reencounters underlines the disconnections between how war’s structural elements are commonly perceived and the “bodily ontologies” that constitute their becoming in the world.[17] To be clear, my focus on the ontological does not oppose epistemological concerns. Instead, the ontological and epistemological are interrelated, since the former is accessible only through a preexisting matrix of organizing principles. After all, the ways in which subjects, phenomena, and histories are seen, touched, and encountered in the world—or the “traditional patterns of assigning meaning to that which appears to our senses”—rely on a prevailing nexus of power, knowledge, and meaning making.[18] In conceptualizing diasporic memory works as aesthetic mediations that enable self-conscious reckonings with Cold War dominant history, I find Jill Bennett’s articulation of casus a generative starting point to challenge the assumed links between perception and signification. I am drawn to Bennett’s incisive commentary precisely because her expansive scholarship takes cues from varied (inter)disciplines—ranging from art history and critical theory to affect studies, visual culture studies, sociology, and performance studies—only to theorize beyond the discrete bounds of such knowledge regimes. In attending to aesthetics as “the dynamics of form,” Bennett draws on the casus, or “the case, happening, instance,” as a methodological approach to examining a “concrete problem” through expressive culture.[19] Using an inductive process, Bennett insists that cultural works are characterized by their capacity to convey the “nature of experience and presumption,” rather than their “subsuming experience” under a calcified theory “imported from the outside.”[20] Cultural works as aesthetic mediations, then, “bring experience to bear” to produce “different material and immaterial ways of connecting.”[21] At their most dynamic, aesthetic formations induce enlivened, if not confounding, encounters that unmoor normalized assumptions. Consequently, by treating these interactive moments as the driving engine for epistemological openings, Bennett insists that we are able to ask what “art and imagery does—what it becomes—in its very particular relationship to events.”[22] Yet Bennett refrains from equating aesthetics to a “single ideal of ‘activist art’” or rendering cultural production as a “serviceable” action that fulfills an insular political objective.[23] On the contrary, aesthetic mediations are “points of orientation”because the focus of study is not the artworks per se but how they direct audiences toward a cascading of divergent memories and interpretations.[24] In this way, it is the activated space of encounter that foregrounds the contradictory elements of hegemonic discourse. To demonstrate this condition, I return to an earlier observation regarding Sarah Park’s interaction with BooDaeChiGae.In her response to Yoo’s video installation, Park’s expressed memories are less about the nostalgic particularities of cooking army base stew than about the perceptual dissonance that surfaces as she reconciles the pleasurable experiences of eating budae jjigae with its links to warfare. By defamiliarizing the familiar, BooDaeChiGae intimates how popular narrations of war, including heroic depictions of American soldiers and liberal stories of multiracial love, are interlaced with discordant memories of continued military presence, peninsular division, racial and sexual violence, and fugitive survival. This montage of historical fragments foreground the incongruent memories and dissident elements that bleed into the here and now. Park’s reencounter with army base stew resonates with Bennett’s commentary by reflecting the multifaceted, multitemporal dynamisms at play within a cultural work: aesthetic mediations function less as a preserved “record” or “flashback” of a fossilized past than as an experiential means of reinhabiting a past that fuses into the present. In this way, reencounters do not necessarily “restore subjective experience to history” but “[generate] new ways of being in the event.”[25] Extending Bennett’s consideration of aesthetics in relation to history, memory, and temporality, I underscore that reencounters do not merely destabilize the everyday through modes of rupture and deconstruction. What emerges in the wake of such unsettling moments instead are alternative iterations of historical time and political possibility that exist relationally with and against Cold War historiography. Here alterity refers less to wholly imagined pasts or futures untethered from the lifeworlds we inhabit than to how radically different renderings of thepast(s) and present(s) already dwell within the embodied realm of lived experience. Such memories, however, remain illegible to the dominant language and framing logics of Cold War historiography. Diasporic memory works, therefore, draw our attention to contradictions and critical oppositional memories that trouble the Cold War temporalization and prolongation of the Korean War as a good and just project. As Yoneyama, Jodi Kim, and Heonik Kwon remind us, the Cold War should not be treated as a congealed period that commenced with the end of World War II and culminated with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.[26] Indeed, given the protraction of Korean division and the absence of peace treaties among Japan, Russia, and North Korea, the very suggestion that we live in a “post”–Cold War moment reflects what Yoneyama describes as a “geographical provincialism” associated with the Western Hemisphere.[27] Emerging instead as an assemblage of epistemes, nationalistic feelings, and geopolitical relations of power, the Cold War is a shape-shifting system of governance and knowledge production that situates the United States as the noble defender of global capitalist freedom, democracy, and autonomy. In a related sense, the Cold War positioning of the United States as an altruistic power is associated with a conceptualization of modern time that idealizes the U.S. state as a paternalistic anticolonial power devoted to rehabilitating “less developed” nations in desperate need of political tutelage. Far from functioning as an abstraction removed from the grist of contemporary life, the liberal logic of Cold War American exceptionalism is deployed by the U.S. state to rationalize the devastating costs paid by civilians who must live alongside the U.S. military for their own “security” and “protection.” Consequently, the United States’ prolonged presence in sovereign spaces, including South Korea, naturalizes an incremental timeline in which American occupation is recoded as a transitive move necessary for the maturation of “developing” nations. Relatedly, American militarized excursions into sovereign territories provide necessary security for allies partnering with the United States against the global “War on Terror.”[28] Through this circuitous reasoning, the entrenched Cold War discourse of American goodness and its implied matrix of positive effects and affects—or as Mimi Thi Nguyen describes it, the feelings of love, gratitude, and indebtedness associated with America’s “gift of freedom” to the world—are used to further bolster the U.S. military’s geopolitical investments in South Korea and elsewhere.[29] While the U.S. state has stood by this lofty tale of altruism for the past seven decades, these imperatives are blatantly upended by contradictions that tell us otherwise. As Inderpal Grewal states, many within and beyond U.S. territorial borders criticize America’s “legitimacy as a proponent of freedom and democracy given its history of wars and colonialism, [and] of being a racial settler state.”[30] Certainly, in relation to Asia, glaring conflicts emerge as one barely scratches the surface of Cold War historical discourse. In Korea, the U.S. military’s on-the-ground practices repudiate the state’s justification of its presence on the peninsula to protect South Koreans against vicious attacks by the communist Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). The United States, in fact, indiscriminately perpetrates racial, sexual, and gender violence against Koreans under the guise of benevolence and protection. Manifestations appear when one knows where to look: for example, in the inequitable terms of the U.S.–South Korean Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which dictates the conditions of U.S. occupation; in the all-too-common incidences such as the 1992 murder of the military sex worker Yun Kumi by an American soldier; or in the evictions of farmers to allow the construction of military bases. In each of these instances, it is imperative to inquire into the valence of meanings associated with “peace” and “security”—and more precisely, whose interests and safety are prioritized and protected and who or what is deemed expendable to American global securitization. As Chandan Reddy puts it, the United States’ grandiose vision of Cold War security is built on and “with violence,” since U.S. governance shares a symbiotic relationship with modes of racial and sexual brutality perpetrated against subjects deemed dispensable to U.S. geopolitical interests.[31] In a conjunctive sense, I also point to how Cold War geopolitics has failed to produce an outcome long prophesized by the United States: North Korea’s total collapse and its unequivocal absorption into a global capitalist infrastructure. Exemplified by the belabored history of triangulated negotiations between the two Koreas and the United States, as well as vociferous civilian protests against U.S. military interests, the thwarting of an idealized Cold War trajectory is underscored by feelings of exhaustive wariness, postponement, and déjà vu. To illustrate this chronicity, we might briefly sketch out the repeated cycle of diplomatic arbitrations among South Korea, North Korea, and the United States in the past twenty-five years. In 1991, the two Korean states signed an inter-Korean agreement on reconciliation and nonaggression; however, the agreement was undermined by U.S. concerns over the DPRK’s nuclear arms program. In 2000, North Korean and South Korean leaders met during a historic inter-Korean summit to jointly sign an eight-point peace declaration that the Bush administration eventually rejected. In 2002 and under the banner of the Global War on Terrorism, the U.S. government recognized North Korea as part of the “axis of evil,” along with Iran and Iraq. More recently, the April 2018 meeting between DPRK leader Kim Jong-un and South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in reaffirmed a two-state commitment to establishing peace on the peninsula, despite the Trump administration’s constant threats against North Korea. In each of these instances, the United States has deterred rather than facilitated direct North Korean–South Korean negotiations for peace. This chronic cycle of negotiations alternates between the threat of resuscitated armed conflict and peace, serving as a sobering reminder of the United States’ tenacious hold on Korea. It also accentuates how Korean and Korean diasporic refusals discompose such hegemonic relations of power. That is, the inherent contradictions of Cold War telos and temporality, as sharply foregrounded by Korean and Korean diasporic critiques, demonstrate how the vital terrain of cultural and social life coheres as fertile ground to enact critical memory interventions. When we return, again and again, to a range of obscured subjectivities, militarized bodies, and occupied spaces with a renewed commitment to remembering otherwise, we receive opportunities to “sever any simple connection between seeing and revealing.”[32] Consequently, as points of disorientation,diasporic cultural works mediate, as Walter Benjamin might suggest, vexed memories that contravene Cold War political discourse’s cemented portrayals of a foregone past and inevitable future.[33] Conjuring contradictory memories precluded from dominant historiography, this reinterpretation of the past as plural transforms one’s orientation toward the future insofar as the present moment embodies a pressing sense of multiplicity that cannot be easily pacified. For Yoneyama, this dialectical approach to history, so characteristic of Benjamin’s perceptions of historiography, “reclaims missed opportunities and unfilled promises in history” so that “historical knowledge [will] remain critically germane to present struggles for social change.”[34] Just as BooDaeChiGae registers enduring histories that exceed how the Korean War is popularly scripted for an American public, this book is attuned to a curation of memories that provide complex portrayals of how diasporic subjects survive, live, and create beyond the devastating ruination of war. I argue that when it is performed enough, the Cold War’s rhetoric of American exceptionalism—no matter how uniform, polished, or natural it may seem—reveals its own confused gaps that permit us to remember otherwise.[35] Reencounters and Trauma-Based Frameworks Throughout this book, I treat the Korean War’s calamities less as exceptional aftereffects than as structuring conditions of contemporary life. This approach reflects how the systematization of accrued impacts, or what Lauren Berlant describes as crisis ordinariness, produces an arresting juxtaposition between explicit forms of militarized brutality and more muted expressions of violence that reflect the Korean War’s paradoxical status as ever present and forgotten, as a political entanglement and an anticommunist victory, and as continuing and to be ended.[36] In other words, this book does not catalogue how subjects of war move on following the shock of a single event. Instead, Reencounters attests to the complicated ways in which the protracted Korean War contributes to the forging of social life in South Korea and North Korea, the United States, and other spaces. As Marisol de la Cadena states, to “speak conceptually” is to “speak with the empirical and at times, with what escapes the empirical.”[37] Along the same vein, my conceptual use of reencounters gestures to how seemingly “soft” or “mitigated” forms of violence, including political economic conditions and social formations, are anchored in militarized histories that are difficult to initially diagnose or recognize. Addressing the Korean War’s effects through the prism of reencounters provides a key contribution to transnational American studies—and, in a narrower sense, to Korean War memory studies—by moving beyond a singular focus on trauma-related concepts such as intergenerational hauntings and postmemory. In choosing this approach, I do not intend to deny or obscure the irreparable harm produced by the Korean War across time and space. Reencounters as a concept, in fact, indexes the damaging consequences of a conflict that continues to affect millions of lives on and beyond the Korean Peninsula. Rather, in suggesting this shift in foci, I underscore how trauma-based framings that foreground the psychic afterlife or “postmemory” of a catastrophic event do not fully capture the historical, social, and political complexities that characterize the contemporaneity of the Korean War. To elaborate on this observation, I briefly refer to how trauma-based concepts are dominantly deployed within Korean War memory scholarship. As further unpacked in Chapters 2–4, cultural studies of the Korean War primarily address the conflict’s repercussions as spectral traces that evade sociological instruments of ethnographic documentation (or hauntings) or as hidden imprints energetically inherited by younger generations (or postmemory).[38] For scholars, including Grace Cho, the ghostly ramifications of the Korean War do not simply reference missing or deceased bodies; they also register the “unexamined irregularities of everyday life.”[39] More precisely, Cho’s compelling use of hauntings accentuates how the fragmented remnants of imperialism and war, including the experiences of Korean “comfort women” and military sex workers, remain ever present in our daily orbits as invisible or barely discernible traces.[40] In another critical scholarly work, Daniel Kim draws on the concept of postmemory (which I expand on shortly) to track how the horrifying experiences of the Korean War are vicariously felt by second-generation Korean/American narrators. Due to their own temporal and geographical distance from the Korean armed conflict, these young narrators can “map” the war’s lingering effects only through tentative acts of imagined approximation.[41] In effect, these distinct yet related concepts of hauntings and postmemory push against the oft-cited portrayal of the Korean War as “over” or “forgotten” by challenging the rational ordering of linear time into discrete epochs of past, present, and future. In fruitful conversation with these key analyses, this book provides a different entry point to examining the Korean War’s persisting effects and affects. Namely, I attend to durable repercussions that are readily seen, heard, and felt by different publics but are intuited or named as something else altogether. My focus, therefore, is not so much on the invisible or lingering remnants of war that exist beyond an ocular scope or the traumatic secrets vertically passed down from one generation to another. As Ruth Leys attests, generalizable descriptions of unresolved pain seamlessly transferred to younger generations reproduce ahistorical accounts that essentialize trauma as a “timeless entity with an intrinsic quality.”[42] Instead, by foregrounding the messy vicissitudes of theKorean War, I investigate the morphing conditions and causal effects that continuously transfigure militarized subjects, spaces, and phenomena into seen yet illegible manifestations of war in the first place. As Judith Butler suggests, the question of recognizability, or how we comprehend things as they are, registers the “general terms, conventions and norms” that “prepare a subject for recognition.”[43] Consequently, to be recognizable is not a self-evident or an a prioristatus but a position that is historically, socially, and politically constituted. A central point of this book, then, is to scrutinize how the byproducts of war are alchemically transfigured through the bureaucratic language and beautifying practices of contemporary governance and political subjectivity. Chapters 1 and 2, for instance, discuss how post-1950 Korean militarized migrations are repackaged into successful U.S. immigration histories, while Chapter 3 addresses how the Korean War’s racialized gendered subjects, including transnational adoptees, are reclaimed by the South Korean state as welcomed “returnees” and vibrant contributors to the country’s economy. Chapter 4 considers how militarized colonial outposts such as Jeju Island are recalibrated into desirable tourist destinations, and the book’s concluding chapter problematizes the ways in which North Korea is portrayed as both an abstracted sign of communist evil and a popular object of comedic relief gleefully consumed by Americans. These discussions elucidate the structural processes that sublimate the Korean War’s manifestations into commonplace knowledges, desired commodities, and economic returns, and these chapters deploy a range of diasporic memories to contest such logics.[44] In prioritizing legibility and recognition rather than visibility and invisibility, Reencounters wrestles with a profound question posed by Simone Browne in reference to the nature of war, racial and sexual violence, and neoliberal surveillance in the twenty-first century: “Is [something] really invisible or is it rather unseen and unperceived by many?”[45] Located within a broader discursive context, the prevalence of trauma in Korean War memory studies reflects the significant impact of European Holocaust studies in the United States since the late twentieth century.[46] In this lineage of scholarship, which includes interdisciplinary works by Giorgio Agamben, Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Marianne Hirsch, and Primo Levi (to name a few), the Holocaust is explicitly identified or intimated as the paradigmatic experience of catastrophe in the modern era.[47] Consequently, these works situate the difficult work of remembering, or memory work, within the context of the Holocaust. For instance, Hirsch uses the medium of photography and the family album to relay the belated quality of trauma as it relates to the Holocaust. As Hirsch explains, the circulation of Holocaust family photographs as “trace” or “fetish” signify how these visual objects paradoxically embody elements of life and death.[48] Here she draws on Roland Barthes’s description of the photograph as a “carnal medium” that serves as a material connection to a loved one who has passed—and, more specifically, the portrayal of a disappeared family member in a domestic setting far removed from the Nazi concentration camp. Hirsch portrays the Holocaust family photograph as a document that “capture[s] that which no longer exists,” as well as “the desire and the necessity, and at the same time, the difficulty, the impossibility, of mourning.”[49] In part, this perceived difference between what is depicted in the photograph as a relic of the past (a portrait of a loved one) and what the photograph signifies in the here and now (the annihilation of that very person) is conditioned by the temporal distance that marks the entwined acts of looking and remembering. Coining the term “postmemory” to signify such a process, Hirsch underscores how this concept “characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their births” and “whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated.”[50] Put differently, postmemory captures the deferred quality of a past trauma that is psychically passed onto and vicariously felt by younger subjects. These younger generations therefore bear the ethical brunt of parsing through a traumatic collection of disruptive memories, or mnemonic “leftovers,” that preceded their own births and consciousness. In the past twenty years, Hirsch’s conceptualization has been taken up by scholars concerned with conflicts beyond the Holocaust, including the Korean War. Such interdisciplinary leaps attest to the important insights that postmemory offers. Yet I suggest that applying postmemory from one historical and disciplinary context to another ineluctably produces discursive gaps that obfuscate the particularities of the Korean conflict in at least two crucial ways. First and foremost, the Korean War is not a hidden afterlife that dwells in the contemporary moment solely through psychic and emotional traces. The Korean War remains a tinderbox with life-threatening implications, as clearly demonstrated by the Trump administration’s renewed threat of nuclear warfare in 2017 and 2018 and anteceded, more specifically, by Donald Trump’s assertion that the United States would “totally destroy” North Korea if tested or pushed.[51] While it is true that younger Koreans did not directly experience the armed conflict waged between 1950 and 1953, trauma-based frameworks assume that it is primarily the psychic and emotional traces of a “past” violence that gnaw at the seams of daily life. In contrast, I explore the radically different and divergent relations that multigenerational Korean and Korean diasporic subjects share with the unfinished war, which cannot and should not be limited to the period between 1950 and 1953. Refraining from describing the Korean War as an event that can be accessed or “known” only through its invisible residues, I examine diverse manifestations that congeal as political, social, and affective formations seemingly removed from the context of war. Second, by exploring how the Korean War inhabits and habituates the everyday, Reencounters contends with how war functions as a normative element rather than a disruptive force of neoliberal life. Certainly, this observation is not unique to the Korean War but intimates the state of permanent war in which the world finds itself, albeit with uneven implications for differently racialized populations. For Catherine Lutz, militarization in the United States, or the “contradictory and tense social processes in which civil society organizes itself for the production of violence,” entails more than the allocation of resources toward brute violence.[52] As an administrative process, it also encompasses the most bureaucratic of tasks, spanning from the crafting of sizable defense budgets and the hammering out of national policy agendas to the robust build-out of public health, educational, and economic infrastructures, which consolidate the territorial interests and political stakes of the United States. In fact, the U.S. military-industrial complex commenced with the beginnings of the Korean War and expanded during America’s intensive involvement in Southeast Asia from the 1950s to the 1970s.[53] In the twenty-first century, warmongering and war making in all of its variable forms are complicit with the formulation of political and economic affairs, ranging from resource extraction, land speculation, and tourist industries to corporate production, commodity consumption, and the technocratic logistics of circulating goods across the globe.[54] Because war is so thoroughly “threaded through the fabric of contemporary life,” the effects of militarized intervention, occupation, and conflict are seemingly “everywhere and nowhere at all.”[55] This book thus foregrounds the destructive ways in which the longue durée of the Korean War embeds itself within the “non-militarized” systems of international migrations, political partnerships, and national economies. In particular, by underscoring the collapse between militarized and civilian life, Reencounters recounts the tragedy of the Korean War less as a cataclysmic trauma that breaks from the status quo of American (inter)national policy than as a damaging node within a much longer trajectory of governance that traces back to the U.S. state’s duplicitous role as both adjudicator of formal justice and propagator of violence. Given this context, I posit that trauma-based concepts inadequately account for U.S. militarized empire and its continual enactments that exceed the normative temporal delineations around the Korean War. Cold War Historical Discourse and Critical Revisionisms Before elaborating on my selection of diasporic memory works through the feminist analytic of the diasporic,I would like to sketch out the dynamisms of knowledge production underpinning Cold War and Korean War memory scholarship in the past thirty-five years. To clarify, this overview does not comprehensively survey Korean War memory studies in the United States. Instead, it situates this book’s diasporic memory archive within a transnational and interdisciplinary field of intellectual, activist, and cultural production that challenges the core tenets of Cold War political discourse and historical narration. In particular, it elaborates on the logic of militarized security and peace as it relates to the United States’ intervention in and occupation of Korea. As astutely observed by Christine Hong, the Korean War is remembered in the United States through a Cold War historical lens.[56] In short, this narratology recognizes the Korean War as a necessary “police action” taken by a benevolent U.S. military to safeguard the freedom, self-determination, and liberty of the Korean people against the evils of communism.[57] During the past seven decades, popular media has reified and reproduced these perceptions, in productions such as American television shows (The Big Picture, M*A*S*H), a bevy of studio-produced films (Battle Hymn [1957]; War Hunt [1962]; The Manchurian Candidate [1962]; Inchon [1982]), and dozens of comic book series. The Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, however, may best exemplify these sentiments.[58] Opened to the public in July 1995 and located on the far western edge of the National Mall, the memorial includes nineteen stainless steel statues of male soldiers; a mural wall consisting of black granite panels with more than 2,400 overlaid photographs of Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Coast Guard personnel; and a small pool hugged by a semicircular wall inscribed with the phrase, “Freedom Is Not Free.” Other inscriptions include one stating that America’s “sons and daughters” were sent to Korea to “defend a country they never knew and a people they never met.” Justified by a diligent desire to remember—or, more precisely, to not forget—the Washington, DC, memorial suggests that the clichéd discourse of the Korean War as forgotten is not so much about the absolute erasure of the conflict from public culture and memory. Instead, the incessant desire to selectively remember indexes the instrumentalized ways in which the contentious discourse of the Korean War as forgotten reconstitutes itself as a recuperative mode of remembering. This mode of remembering, then, atones for and reclaims American soldiers as heroic subjects worthy of National Remembering. Thus, for the American public, remembering the Korean War links to the sacrifices made by American soldiers on the behalf of a weaker nation unable to protect itself against the horrors and violence of communism. Yet, as Hong puts it, two competing historical framings since the 1980s have challenged the sanctity of this Cold War discourse: (1) the emergence of critical revisionist accounts during the 1980s, which reexamine the complex origins of the Korean War in relation to U.S. global ambitions; and (2) the testimonial turn of the 1990s, which centers on the eclipsed experiences of Korean civilians who survived the armed conflict and continue to live with the precarious consequences of U.S. military occupation. These overarching perspectives, of course, are not catchall categories belonging to a logical telos; nor do they supplant preceding interpretations, as attested to by the Cold War’s tenacity in the contemporary moment. Instead, these alternative framings reengage the dialectics of knowledge production in relation to the Korean War and accentuate the social and political factors that led to the diversification of war memories since the 1980s. In particular, while Cold War historiography narrates the Korean War as a Manichaean struggle between the good (the United States and the West) and the evil (the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea), the sweeping social movements and critical revisionist scholarship of the 1980s in Korea and Asia destabilized this dominant narration by questioning the implied asymmetrical power conditions between South Korea and the United States. In South Korea, the 1980s was a crucial decade of political activism and radical knowledge production that called for systemic changes within state governance and society as a whole. Galvanized by the South Korean military state’s massacre of up to two thousand civilians in the Gwangju Uprising of May 1980, civilians organized a popular democratic uprising, the Minjung (People’s) movement, which agitated for the end of dictatorial rule and the ousting of the American military presence from the country. As Namhee Lee observes, the Minjungmovement encompassed an intellectual dimension by reevaluating the normative logics of the state, including South Korea’s beneficiary relationship with the United States, the privileging of economic development over distributive justice, and the statist anticommunist justifications leading to national division.[59] Eventually culminating in the first open presidential elections (1987) held in South Korea in nearly three decades, the procedural democratization of the country dovetailed with multiple calls by nongovernmental organizations, intellectuals, and activists to reassess unresolved matters related to Japan’s colonial rule in Korea (1910–1945), including the unsettled plight of Korean “comfort women” forced into military sexual servitude by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945).[60] In his groundbreaking U.S.-based scholarship published in 1981, Bruce Cumings also explores the multiple beginnings of the Korean War and the political stakes associated with the United States’ military security presence in Korea.[61] Cumings argues that the long-standing history of American military occupation of Korea is anything but liberating or benevolent: motivated by the desire for global economic and political power through the brutal containment of communism, the U.S. Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK [1945–1948]) preserved rather than dismantled integral components of Japanese colonial rule in Korea, ranging from the centralized modes of governance and social organization (e.g., the family registration system) to a preexisting military sex economy.[62] Furthermore, Cumings gestures to the Cold War complicity of U.S. occupation and Japanese rule, or what Naoki Sakai and Keith Camacho and Setsu Shigematsu refer to as the “trans-Pacific arrangement” between the United States and Japan. The two countries collude through their competing and collaborative visions of militarized conquest, the mutual disavowal of colonial violence, and the forging of a neoliberal economy characterized by an imbalance of power relations among different nation-states.[63] Spurred by this vital ground of social mobilization and engaged scholarship, the 1990s and early 2000s witnessed a burgeoning of divergent worldviews and historical narratives that further challenged the dictating bounds of Cold War knowledge production. These changes not only placed pressure on the prevailing presumptions of existing war historiography in South Korea and the United States. They also produced, as Yoneyama articulates, oppositional knowledges, activist practices, and memories that destabilized the foundational tenets of transitional justice formulated by international juridical establishments, including the United Nations, after World War II.[64] Inspired by the intellectual work of the social historian Kim Dong-choon and the investigatory research conducted by the South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2003–2008), a decentralized web of personal memories, political investigations, and oral history projects centering on the experiences of Korean civilians, as well as public reports exposing U.S.–South Korean joint military atrocities, surfaced in Korea, Japan, and the United States.[65] Within the transnational political sphere, these formal processes segued with the momentous, albeit temporary, thawing of inter-Korean diplomatic relationships at the turn of the twenty-first century. Encapsulated as part of South Korean President Kim Dae-jung’s “Sunshine Policy,” the revitalization of South Korean–North Korean relations during the early 2000s culminated in the first inter-Korean meeting in nearly forty years and the subsequent signing of the June 15 North-South Joint Declaration. In this declaration, the leaders of the South Korean and North Korean states (Kim Dae-jung and Kim Jong-il, respectively) agreed to “resolve the question of reunification independently” through the collaborative “efforts of the Korean people, who are the masters of the country.”[66] Insinuated as a rebuking of U.S.-Soviet intervention on the peninsula, the declaration paved the way for more than two hundred inter-Korean family reunions coordinated by the North and South regimes in August 2000, half of which were held in Seoul and the other half in Pyongyang.[67] More recently, Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong-un, the leaders of South Korea and North Korea, respectively, met in April 2018 without the presence of a U.S. representative to pave a diplomatic pathway toward ending the Korean War. As discussed in Chapters 1 and 2 regarding Korean diasporic oral history projects that surfaced at the wake of the 2000 reunions, I refrain from designating these diversified accounts of the Korean War as “intact,” “raw,” or “objectively truthful” mnemonic records removed from political, social, and cultural contexts. Memories, after all, are always already mediated processes that reflect the conditions of a historical moment. Yet the multiplication of pluralistic memories of the Korean War in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century undoubtedly exposes the political stakes associated with the maintenance and manufacturing of Cold War political discourse in the United States and South Korea. While Hong refers to this last discursive shift as the testimonial turn, Yoneyama addresses the changes as part of the “post-redress moment.”[68] Invoking the formal redress protocols pursued by the United States and the United Nations after 1945, Yoneyama is keen on addressing the unfinished business left in the wake of such formal arbitration processes, especially as the U.S. state’s legislative, juridical, and political channels amplified the inequities it sought to reconcile and resolve. For example, the United Nations as an international institution historically has worked to protect and expand a global capitalist economic infrastructure and (neo)liberal modes of governance.[69] In the case of Korea, American and UN policies of intervention not only contained the spread of communism; they also knowingly suspended internal decolonization efforts spearheaded by leftist grassroots organizations, such as the Committee for Preparation of Korean Independence, set into motion at least a month before the U.S. military’s arrival in the peninsula in September 1945.[70] In light of these restitutive measures promulgated under the Cold War international regime, Yoneyama insists that scholars and activists alike must reevaluate the very meaning of true justice in opposition to the post–World War II’s international nexus of governing rules and formal adjudicating processes. True justice, in other words, remains beyond the “force of law” in the Derridean sense, or outside of the extant system of juridical and legislative measures conceived by Cold War international institutions such as the United Nations and the U.S. nation-state.[71] Reassessing the relationship between the sovereign state and justice, Yoneyama reiterates that (inter)national modes of formal governance are unable to accommodate the unsettled grievances of transnational conflicts. They are unable to do so because the diasporic subjects of war are transborder figures who embody “insurgent memories, counter-knowledges, and inauthentic identities” antagonistic to “hegemonic post–World War II/Cold War epistemic and material formations.”[72] The remainder of this Introduction draws on Hong’s and Yoneyama’s crucial observations to parse out the diasporic underpinnings ofthis book’s archive of diasporic memory works. Foregrounding the linkages that bind the diasporic to the question of true justice,I consider how this book’s memory works contend with the present- and future-oriented project(s) of Korean decolonization beyond the finite sphere of (inter)national state politics. The Diasporic as Feminist Analytic While this contextualization of political, historical, and scholarly discourse on the Korean War is incomplete, I use these genealogies of interdisciplinary scholarship and transnational activism to identify the key factors driving the emanation of diasporic memory works. This book’s memory sources are eclectic in medium and format and signal the materialization of a Korean diasporic nexus across Korea, Jeju Island, Scandinavia, North America, and the Internet. They defy easy placement within any single national context, discipline, or aesthetic lineage. Yet as versatile cultural formations that emerged during a relatively condensed span of time (from 2001 until 2016), these mnemonic mediations are marked by the aforementioned shifts that gained traction between the 1980s and early 2000s. Consequently, as disconnected as they may appear to be, the memory works discussed here reflect the organic culmination, circulation, and sharing of critiques in relation to Cold War political discourse among diasporic cultural practitioners, intellectuals, and activists. Although my analysis attends to aesthetic practices located in particular social and cultural spaces, I underscore how theorization across media, sensorial platforms, and national spaces is necessary because the effects of war, militarization, and division are multimedial, multisensorial, and transnational. In pulling together an interdisciplinary assemblage of cultural works rarely discussed in transnational American studies, this book’s memory archive departs from existing scholarship on the Korean War, which tends to focus on literary sources and, to a lesser degree, filmic productions. In part, this shift in focus resonates with two crucial observations articulated by Sarita See: (1) the canonization of literary texts as the dominant site of cultural analysis among Asian/Americanists (although this is certainly changing); and (2) the presumption that cultural productions are “finished product[s]” removed from the “artistic communities and cultural moment from whence [they] came.”[73] Thus, in deploying a methodological approach that highlights the “dialectical relationship between artists, texts and context” and through the selective curation of aesthetic mediations that belong to no one field, this book rubs against what might be described as the professionalized “disciplining” of Asian/American studies as a coherent field of study.[74] In part, to think and write through an interdisciplinary lens, as Laura Hyun Yi Kang reminds us, is defined not by the act of engaging or reading across multiple disciplines but by critically analyzing the “internalized rules and norms” that dictate the properness of a disciplinary object (what counts as a “real” oral history, performance or documentary project?).[75] Thus, while each chapter focuses on a particular cultural medium, my interdisciplinary engagement with diasporic memory works simultaneously perturbs the sustaining logics that reproduce disciplinary (and disciplined) work. This mode of research and writing resonates with the overarching goals of this project, given that the diasporic racialized and gendered subjects discussed resist the nationalistic “disciplining” of the U.S. and South Korean states. Centering the concept of reencounters as the primary concept of this book, I simultaneously consider the mnemonic potentialities associated with diasporic cultural works that are open-ended processes rather than closed objects. Given my intentional focus on how heterogenous memories of war actualize a present- and future-oriented politics committed to true justice, this last point is especially integral to the composition of this book. Exploring the precipitation of reencounters across a transnational geography, I conceptualize this book’s memory sources as diasporic mediations thattrack the continuities and breaks of the Korean War’s politicized terrain. Here my use of the diasporic stresses the nation-state’s incapacity to fully account for the diffused consequences of the Korean War. In contrast to more traditional meanings associated with diaspora, such as the expulsion of a homogeneous ethnic people from an ancestral homeland, I deploy the diasporic as a feminist mode of analysis.[76] Drawing from women of color feminism and queer diasporic scholarship to conceptualize the diasporic, I attend especially to the pivotal role played by relational differences in the coalescing of social affinities and epistemes at odds with the heteronormative logics of the nation-state. That is, despite the racialized, gendered, and sexual difference that characterize the transborder subjectivities and spaces explored in this book, these militarized formations are entwined through and because of the Korean War. As Grace Kyungwon Hong cogently argues, a women of color critique does not consolidate a naturalized sense of “essence”; nor is it a universal category that unifies all subjects perceived as “women of color.”[77] Rather, by drawing on women of color feminism as a critical “reading practice,” Hong engages the creative oeuvre of writers such as Cherríe Moraga and Audre Lorde to foreground the “non-analogous” yet interconnected ways in which varied subjects are racialized, gendered, and sexualized in proximity to one another within the hierarchal context of national citizenship. To demonstrate the centrality of relational differences in the theorization of women of color critique, Hong deploys a close reading of an essayistic work by Moraga to flesh out a set of interlinked experiences that take place within the confines of a subway train.[78] While commuting on Boston’s T line, Moraga witnesses the arrest of a young black man by a white police officer. She notes that the “day before, a fourteen year-old Black boy was shot in the head by a white cop.” Self-identifying as a Chicana lesbian who passes in her “white flesh” and “gold highlights,” Moraga observes that “there are some women in this town plotting a lesbian revolution. What does that mean about the boy shot in the head is what I want to know.”[79] For Hong, Moraga’s lucid commentary illuminates how bodies contained within the train’s interior are positioned differently in relation to “white domesticity, police brutality, and segregation.” But despite these differences, Moraga and the young black man are connected “by virtue of these relationships.”[80] Deviating from the idealized American citizen defined as white, heterosexual, and male, the black rider’s and Moraga’s minoritized subjectivities demonstrate the profound ways in which the U.S. state emerges as the principal enforcer of violence rather than as a neutral arbiter of justice. Observing that Moraga’s commentary “secures an understanding that different racial and gender formations are not produced in isolation, but relationally,” Hong refuses to glorify “women of color” as the “purest, most revolutionary position.”[81]Instead, as an intersectional mode of analysis, a women of color feminist framing contends with how race, gender, sexuality, class, and ableism function as interlocking vectors that are “mutually constitutive.”[82] Attentive to how different subjects occupy varied yet interlinked positions, women of color feminism identifies the paradoxical ways in which such bodies cannot be wholly disciplined or managed by the nation-state. Indeed, in the state’s attempt to determine and police the borders of proper subjectivity, such regulations ironically produce “non-normative” formations or “deviant” socialities that surface as potential sites of struggle and alterity. Here women of color feminism’s accentuation of coalition through difference and the radical possibilities generated by structures of power dovetail with feminist articulations of the diasporic. Fatima El-Tayeb describes how the diasporic registers a shifting populace, where transnational subjects are linked by a “contemporary condition” rather than a shared ancestry or common set of ethnocentric, physiological, and biological characteristics.[83] Instead of delimiting diaspora to state identitarian apparatuses—for example, legal citizenship and blood quantum—El-Tayeb calls on the diasporic to examine how “non-normative” racialized, gendered, and sexualized contingencies exist in tension with and in excess to state-sanctioned forms of recognizable personhood. More precisely, the diasporic encompasses strategies of disidentification that permit minoritarian subjects to survive and negotiate “a phobic majoritarian public sphere that elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship.”[84] In this way, queer diaspora encompasses critiques that “[work] on and against dominant ideology” and cut through state-legislated categories of legal and legible identity.[85] In generative conversation with women of color feminism and queer diaspora, I use the diasporic as a working analytic to track how the Korean War produces openings that puncture the normalized project of American militarized security in the North Pacific. Accentuating the long-term implications of the Korean War on and beyond the peninsula, this book explores how diasporic subjects occupy antagonistic positionalities in relation to and against the dominant politics and national cultures of the United States and South Korea. Marked, for instance, as racially, sexually, and politically deviant by the state, minoritarian subjects such as the biracial children of U.S. soldiers and Korean women, leftist rebels, or North Korean loyalists exist along the edge of normative citizenries insofar as their integration into the polity is only partially complete or altogether impossible. Yet by registering a dangerous sense of unknowability, illegibility, and incompleteness, a diasporic approach conveys two possibilities. First, the Korean War’s production of non-normative bodies and categories generates diasporic excesses, or recalcitrant formations that refuse to be easily deciphered or tamed by the nation-state. In turn, these unruly diasporic elements, resulting from resistant “actions arising from concrete, structured conditions within and across defined locales,” hint at the unstable footing of American militarized presence in Korea.[86] Second, by focusing on the synergetic sharing of a contemporary condition rather than the scattering of a homogenous people from a romanticized homeland, the diasporic facilitates heterogenous lines of affinity forged through, rather than in spite of, difference. This shift from (ethnic, national, and biological) sameness to critical difference, I argue, expands how we might conceptualize solidarity efforts against U.S. militarized investments in Korea. In engaging memory works through a diasporic feminist lens, I approach the question of true justice—and more precisely, the question of Koreandecolonization—in proximity to but also beyond the finite goals of national reconciliation, reunification, and autonomy. National reconciliation is absolutely crucial to addressing the most pressing concerns emanating from division, including family separations. But peace efforts that depend solely on the nation-state as the privileged mediator of true justice inadvertently amplify, rather than resolve, conditions of hegemonic violence. On the international stage, government representatives have long anchored peace negotiations on essentialized descriptors of proper “Korean-ness,” including pure blood, cultural homogeneity, and shared ethnic attributes. As a result, the heteropatriarchal logics of national belonging are unquestionably upheld as normative values through which formal peace and justice are formulated and imagined. In the Panmunjom Declaration signed by North Korean and South Korean leaders in April 2018, for instance, national politicians emphasize the “blood relations of the [Korean] people” and the forging of a prosperous future reflective of the “whole [Korean] nation.” Who, exactly, is recognized as part of the Korean “whole nation,” and, conversely, which racialized and gendered subjects and grievances are always precluded from or perceived as irrelevant to such a discourse? In a related sense, the United States treats the prospect of peace in Korea as a national security measure, with the U.S. government aiming to broker the skewed conditions for national reunification and militarized peace. As a means to ensure American hegemony in northeastern Asia, the U.S. government affixes formal peace in Korea to the total denuclearization of North Korea paired with the indefinite maintenance of U.S. military forces on the peninsula.[87] More blatantly, Korean decolonization is associated with the demise of the communist North Korean state regime and its successful integration into a neoliberal economic infrastructure, as observed in a 2014 statement delivered jointly by President Park Geun-hye of South Korea and President Barack Obama of the United States.[88] Within these well-defined, U.S.-determined parameters, the multiple colonial origins of the Korean War remain unaddressed. At the same time, urgent questions related to the racialized and gendered differences of Korea and the Korean diaspora are relegated to the periphery, if they are acknowledged at all. By conflating genuine peace, true justice, and decolonization with national autonomy, American hegemony, and capitalism, we risk reproducing uneven power relations while reembracing monolithic renderings of Korean ethnocentric identity. With these insights in mind, Reencounters is oriented around a different task: to move our focus from questions such as, “Who is the authentic Korean national subject?” or “How can we achieve American-approved reconciliation?” to self-reflexive practices, interdisciplinary methods, and cultural mediations capable of apprehending the making (and unmaking) of Korean diasporic militarized subjects and spaces. This reorientation depends on a more capacious definition of decolonization that confronts Korea’s division system through a robust critique of its multiple colonial histories, including Japanese and U.S. imperialisms. Rather than aligning the term with the Westphalian logics of the modern state or post-1950 national independence movements mobilized against European imperial powers, this book approaches decolonization as a multiprong process that breaks down militarized colonial structures—social, epistemological, and psychic—while moving toward the actualization of true justice.[89] In the case of Korean decolonization, true justice points to a juxtaposition of conjunctive moves, including the unequivocal nullification of American hostilities toward North Korea, the removal of U.S. armed forces from northeastern Asia, reconciliation as determined by affected subjects, and the implementation of accountability measures necessary for deep healing. But, as considered in subsequent chapters, Korean decolonization is an extraordinarily volatile process that does not follow a progressive trajectory or gravitate toward an idyllic or preserved past. Instead, as an ebb and flow of converging efforts that exceed (inter)national state negotiations, decolonization embodies an extensive range of political, social, and cultural efforts that takes seriously the racialized, gendered, and sexualized effects of militarized colonial violence beyondthe ethnocentric Korean “homeland.” This reconceptualization of decolonization, I argue, is crucial to reencountering the Korean War’s toxic effects across a transborder geography of diasporic bodies and sites. Organization of the Book The main body of this bookis organized into four numbered chapters, followed by a concluding experimental essay. Chapter 1 provides a historical backdrop of the United States’ militarized occupation of Korea to better track the heterogeneous implications of an unfinished war. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 each focus on a specific diasporic memory analytic or memory practice that facilitates reencounters with the Korean War. Encompassing a geography that consists of the United States (Chapters 1–2), Korea (Chapter 3) and Jeju Island and the transpacific (Chapter 4), this radiating spatiality reflects how the Korean War’s ramifications, as well as strategies of remembering and resistance, should not and cannot be limited to the scale of the national. Although each chapter attends to a distinct geographical site, these identified locales are not insular or isolated. On the contrary, I examine how they operate as part of a transnational network of spaces linked through the geopolitical conditions of Korean division, American militarized occupation, and multiple colonialisms. In Chapter 1, “Militarized Migrations,” I consider the drawn-out implications of Cold War politics by examining the diasporic formation of a Korean militarized presence in the United States. Using legislative measures and oral histories as primary memory sources, the chapter provides a nuanced contextualization of the Korean War in relation to the Cold War narration of American benevolence and the apparatuses facilitating Korean migration following the 1953 armistice. As Ji-Yeon Yuh states, the Korean War’s status in the United States is peculiar in the sense that Korean diasporic subjects are rarely defined as refugees escaping from the horrific ravages of war.[90] Instead, they are folded into a chronological timeline marked by displacement, resettlement, and successful integration into a national polity. Subsequently, Cold War historiography recognizes Korean diasporic subjects as hardworking immigrants pushed and pulled into the United States by the allure of abundant economic, educational, and professional opportunities. In approximating the intersections of the Korean War, Cold War historiography, and Americanized political subjectivity, this book engages in productive dialogue with war and memory scholarship in Southeast Asian diasporic studies. In particular, I interrogate how Korean diasporic subjects are legislated through categories of political subjecthood disassociated from all traces of militarization.[91] As recounted in works by Yen Le Espiritu, Cathy Schlund-Vials, Mimi Thi Nguyen, and Ma Vang, the official categories of resettlement and refugee status are reserved for diasporic subjects “resuscitated” and “rescued” by the U.S. military from American-initiated wars in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. In return, these “freed” diasporic subjects are bound to an indefinite cycle of costs determined by the U.S. state. Conversing with these pivotal insights, Reencounters addresses the regenerative life-forms of militarized conflict through the lens of the Korean War. It does so by attending to Korea’s protracted militarized division, the temporal chasm that seemingly separates contemporary subjects from the conflict, and the striking ways in which Koreans are rarely recognized as refugees within dominant U.S. immigration discourses. Chapter 1 therefore reconceptualizes the everyday immigration of Korean diasporic subjects into a mode of militarized migration. By identifying the connective tissue that sutures the Cold War to Korean diasporic trajectories after 1953, Chapter 1 also exemplifies how Cold War temporality is always already gendered to the degree that the chronological ordering of time segues with heteronormative expectations. In different ways, each of the following chapters indicates how this intersection of linearity, inevitability, and heteronormativity is essential to the consolidation of Cold War historical discourse. Chapters 1 and 3 examine how the U.S. and South Korean states seek to resolve the violent displacements of the Korean War by incorporating militarized migrants into nuclear heterosexual families or national citizenries. Chapters 2 and 4 indicate how memory and mourning practices are tacitly governed by social norms pertaining to proper masculinity and the patriarchal family unit in the United States and on Jeju Island. Thus, I draw on the critical work of Elizabeth Freeman to contextualize how linear time dovetails with heteronormative expectations to produce what might be conceived of as Cold War chrononormativity.[92] While Chapter 1 introduces readers to how the Korean War’s violent displacements are repackaged into sound bites of altruistic American intervention, Chapter 2, “Aurality,” offers a direct counterpoint by reconsidering how diasporic memories reencounter and destabilize such dominant configurations. Drawing on the Intergenerational Korean American Oral History Project as an incubator for reencounters with the war, I examine how a cohort of Korean/Americans contend with the militarized repercussions of war, separation, and division within their families and beyond. An open-ended repertoire of multilayered facilitations rather than a closed repository of testimonies, the Intergenerational Korean American Oral History Projectdeploys practices of attentive listening to mediate two related tensions. On the one hand, the project challenges the Cold War schematics of power and representation that recognize the hypermasculine white American soldier as the heroic liberator of destitute Koreans. On the other hand, the project challenges two dominant tropes integral to existing Korean War postmemory scholarship: traumatic silence and intergenerational familial kinship. By troubling the commonplace rendering of these tropes through the co-production of different and shared knowledges, aural history reencounters cultivate diasporic lines of resistance and solidarity that exceed the ethnocentric confines of the nuclear family and nation-state. While Chapters 1 and 2 examine the deracinated relocations of Korean diasporic subjects in the United States, Chapters 3 and 4 shift gears by examining a reversal of migratory movements. Chapters 3 and 4 explore the ways that diasporic subjects initiate literal and imagined reroutings to Korea to contend with America’s prolonged militarized investments in northeastern Asia. Chapter 3, “Returns,” expands on the previous chapter’s discussion of non-normative genealogies and alternative social kinships by engaging kate-hers RHEE’s documented performance Sex Education for Finding Face in the 21st Century (2002)and Jane Jin Kaisen’s experimental film The Woman, the Orphan, and the Tiger (2010). Tracking the Korean War’s manufacturing of adoptee subjectivities across Asia, the United States, and Western Europe, these diasporic memory productions employ the double entendre “returns” in two related ways. First, returns indicates a rerouting of sorts as Korean transnational adoptees raised in North America and Europe find themselves back in and reencountering South Korea. Second, as “excesses” removed from the South Korean populace, adoptee returns to Korea generate unforeseeable repercussions that register the triangulated relations among American humanitarian intervention in Korea, the transnational adoption industry, and the South Korean project of nation building. Thus, while RHEE’s and Kaisen’s works offer devastating commentaries on the precarious costs of the Korean War, these artists demonstrate how adoptee returns actualize resistance strategies that contend with the Cold War benefactor-beneficiary alliance between the United States and South Korea. Chapter 3’s focus on Korean transnational adoptions should not be interpreted as a tokenized gesture to simply include “adoptee perspectives” in this book. Instead, Chapter 3 challenges the very notion of a monolithic transnational adoptee identity, as do RHEE and Kaisen themselves, while pushing against the presumption that a coherent “adoptee artwork archive” exists to examine in the first place. Thus, in juxtaposing RHEE’s and Kaisen’s works with a selection of other diasporic memory sources, I demonstrate the connective tissue linking Korean overseas adoption to different U.S. and South Korean government enterprises and militarized subjectivities. In dialogue with other cultural memory works discussed in this book, I underscore how these two artists’ diasporic memory productions unsettle dominant conceptualizations of “authentic Korean-ness” within national spaces and throughout the diaspora. Chapter 4, “Durational Memory,” considers how two diasporic artists, Kaisen and Dohee Lee, confront the militarized “present-pasts” of Korea and Jeju Island. Through the video installation Reiterations of Dissent (2010/2016{The artist uses “2010/2016” in her citation of the work} and performance MAGO (2014), Kaisen and Lee respectively punctuate how chrononormative time marshals the Korean War as a pacified past. Given its peripheral status within Cold War historical discourse and its key geopolitical location within America’s “Asia Pacific,” Jeju Island is an especially poignant space to examine the prolonged effects of the Korean War and the expansive build-out of an Americanized security infrastructure. Drawing on the Bergsonian notion of durationaltime, Chapter 4 examines how Kaisen’s and Lee’s cultural works unhinge the chronological notions of “past” and “present” through their coeval readings of two seemingly discrete events. These events include the April 3 tragedy (popularly known in South Korea as “4.3”), a U.S.–South Korean military campaign from 1948 to 1955 that decimated 20–30 percent of Jeju’s civilian population and the more recent remilitarization of the island through the construction of a new naval base in the fishing village of Gangjeong. {Just to note: I don’t like the separate numbering of points… i.e., (1) and (2). Is it okay just to phrase these 2 events as given here without numbering?} Tracking how the South Korean and U.S. states sanitize the 4.3 “incident” through the beautifying language of international tourism and national forgiveness, Reiterations of Dissent and MAGO elucidate the structural conditions that link the 4.3 massacre to the island’s contemporary militarized buildup. Yet by producing an othered sense of unruly time at odds with national reconciliation, Kaisen’s and Lee’s works perform dissonant memories that do not assimilate into Cold War temporality. These cultural works therefore mediate decolonized meanings of solidarity and agency that trouble the project of American militarized security in Jeju, Korea, and the North Pacific. In the last chapter, “An Opening,” I engage one of the most maligned manifestations of the Korean War: North Korea. Commonly described as a menace to the global community and one of the most volatile countries in the world, North Korea is caricaturized by American media outlets as an object of ludic commentary and comedic relief for Western audiences. Mobilizing Édouard Glissant’s analytic of opacity as a provocation, this concluding chapter destabilizes such ahistorical commentary while potentiating self-reflexive observations and moments of remembering otherwise. Centering reencounters as the primary method of analysis, I consider what it might mean to return to, reexamine, and untether ourselves from dominant media portrayals and Cold War political truths abundant within the American public sphere. Working through a composite of passing observations and questions, official statistics from the Korean War, borrowed poetry, and disparate imagery, this haphazard set of diasporic memory exercises does not aim to provide a singular counternarrative to the dominant stories told and retold about North Korea. Rather, as part of this book’s diasporic memory archive and an exercise in remembering otherwise through self-reflexive questioning, this conclusion—or, more appropriately, this opening—asks readers to track how and what we know about North Korea, as well as the limitations of knowing and knowledge production that always already frame our perceptions of the DPRK. In part, this (un)ending reflects the conceptual aims of this book. Namely, by taking up diasporic memory works that are open-ended—and, in some cases, literally unfinished—I deploy reencounters as an inquiry-based process that yields epistemological pathways to meaningfully engage the difficult questions posed in this book. To question is to reckon with how knowledge production reproduces its own set of blind spots associated with militarized colonial desires that seek to chart out and map, to surveil and enclose, and to make transparent for a consuming audience. This (un)ending also reflects my desire to examine the genre of the book conclusion. In most instances, the conclusion is written as an obligatory epilogue that offers some semblance of definitive closure to the text at hand. Given the fluctuating nature of the Korean War, a conclusion that serves as a platform for further questioning is more fruitful, if not imperative, for confronting the perplexing implications of this protracted conflict. My hope is that this experimental format will generate critical conversations on the intellectual work that a book conclusion should or is expected to do while calling for imaginative methodologies within transnational American studies. Crystal Mun-hye Baik is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Notes [1] BooDaeChiGae was included in Still Present Pasts (2003–present),a traveling exhibit organized by Korean/American academics, activists, and cultural workers. For more information on Yoo’s BooDaeChiGae and the Still Present Pasts exhibition, see the project’s website at http://stillpresentpasts.org/boodaechigae. See also Grace M. Cho, “Performing an Ethics of Entanglement in Still Present Pasts: Korean Americans and the ‘Forgotten War,’” Women and Performance 16, no. 2 (2006): 303–317; Ramsay Lime, “History, Trauma, and Identity: The Legacy of the Korean War for Korean Americans,” Ambrosia Journal 29, no. 3 (2003–2004): 111–129. For a compelling study of budae jjigae in relation to the “forgetfulness” of the Korean War and nostalgic feelings of “postwar” conditions, see Nicolyn Woodcock, “Tasting the ‘Forgotten War’: Korean/American Memory and Military Base Stew,” Journal of Asian American Studies 21, no. 1 (February 2018): 135–156. [2] Cho, “Performing an Ethics of Entanglement in Still Present Pasts.” [3] Grace M. Cho, “Eating Military Base Stew,” in Gender, Sexuality, and Intimacy: A Contemporary Reader,ed. Jodi O’Brien and Arlene Stein (Los Angeles: Sage, 2014), 321–324. [4] It is important to emphasize that South Korea was not an official signatory of the Korean armistice, as South Korean President Rhee Syngman advocated for the continuation of warfare until Korea was unified under ROK (Republic of Korea or South Korea) rule. The United States was recognized as the de factoleader of the United Nations Coalitional Forces in South Korea: ibid. See also Ji-Yeon Yuh, “Cooking American, Eating Korean,” in Beyond the Shadow of Campton: Korean Military Brides in America, by Ji-Yeon Yuh(New York: New York University Press, 2004), 126–153. [5] Offered as a comment on the Still Present Pasts website, http://stillpresentpasts.org/boodaechigae [6] Mary Dudziak, War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). [7] See Dorinne Kondo, World-Making: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 31–33. [8] Kondo, World-Making,32. [9] “Division system” is a term that Nak-Chung Paik coined to describe the all-encompassing effects of prolonged division in the Korean Peninsula and the broader system of Cold War power relations that affect every facet of political, social, and cultural life in Korea: see Nak-Chung Paik, The Division System in Crisis: Essays on Contemporary Korea,trans. Kim Myung-hwa, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). [10] Lisa Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). By underscoring the state’s power in (inter)national negotiations for peace, I do not mean to minimize critical social movements mobilized by civilians of the past six decades, particularly in South Korea—for instance, the Minjung (People’s) movement during the 1980s and the vociferous Candlelight Movement protests that led to the eventual impeachment and removal of President Park Geun-hye in 2016–2017). Indeed, I discuss the importance of such people-led movements throughout this book. Rather, this book critiques the stance of the nation-state as the ultimate mediator of formal justice (since the state is also the primary enforcer of violence) and compels readers to grapple with the possibilities and limitations associated with (inter)national politics. [11] Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society,new ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 49. [12] Sarita See, The Decolonized Eye: Filipino American Art and Performance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Mimi Thi Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Cathy Schlund-Vials, War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian Memory Work (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). [13] See, The Decolonized Eye,xviii. [14] Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). [15] Because the interdisciplinary literature on aesthetics is quite extensive and draws from multiple (inter)disciplines and fields (including sociology, art history and practice, decolonial studies, film and media studies, and cultural theory), I focus explicitly on the conceptualization of aesthetics in conjunction with perception, the sensorium, and the political (rather than strictly delimiting aesthetics to the “philosophy” of art, cultural production, and beauty). For instance, while their theoretical works are quite distinct, Jacques Rancière, Jill Bennett, and Sylvia Wynter each mobilizes aesthetics as a working analytic that challenges the normative arrangement of power, knowledge (and knowledge production), and social relations within the realm of the everyday: see Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006); Jill Bennett, Practical Aesthetics: Events, Affects, and Art after 9/11 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012); Sylvia Wynter, “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’: Notes towards a Deciphering Practice,” in Ex-Iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema,ed. Mbye Cham (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press), 237–279. [16] Wynter, “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics.’” [17] Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2009), 2. [18] Joseph Tanke, “What Is the Aesthetic Regime?” Parrhesia 12 (2011): 77–88, esp. 78. [19] Bennett, Practical Aesthetics,13. [20] Ibid.,14. [21] Ibid. [22] Ibid.,11–12. [23] Ibid.,4. [24] Ibid.,13. [25] Ibid.,43. [26] See Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins;Jodi Kim, Ends of Empire: Asian American Critique and the Cold War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Heonik Kwon, The Other Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). [27] As of September 2018, Japan had yet to finalize postwar settlement and normalization treaties with both Russia and North Korea: see Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins, 5. [28] Dipesh Chakrabarty refers to this as the “historical transition” period, a transitive moment in which “third-world histories” are written through the “overriding (if often implicit)” themes of “development, modernization, and capitalism”: Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 31. For astute critiques of the racialization, gendering, and sexualization of the U.S. War on Terror, see Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). [29] Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom. [30] Inderpal Grewal, Saving the Security State: Exceptional Citizens in Twenty-First Century America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 5–6. [31] Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the U.S. State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). [32] Bennett, Practical Aesthetics,45. [33] Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Essays and Reflections,ed. Hannah Arendt and translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 253–264 [34] Lisa Yoneyama, Hiroshima Traces: Time, Space, and the Dialectics of Memory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 29–30. [35] Here I gesture to the notion of “performativity” in Judith Butler, Gender Trouble,3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008), 185. While Butler deploys this concept to address the social construction of gender (and more specifically, the illusion of gender as a fixed biological entity), performativity as a methodological approach is useful in tracking the repetition, reification, and normalization of Cold War political discourse as it relates to racialized, gendered, and sexualized norms. [36] Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 10. I am grateful to Sunny Xiang for her careful reading of my manuscript and her suggestion of explicitly engaging Berlant’s conceptualization of “crisis ordinariness.” [37] Yoko Taguchi and Marisol de la Cadena, “An Interview with Marisol de la Cadena,” NatureCulture,February 2017, https://www.natcult.net/interviews/an-interview-with-marisol-de-la-cadena/ [38] See Marianne Hirsh, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). The idea of transgenerational hauntings was first offered in the collaborative work of Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham: Maria Torok and Nicolas Abraham, The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis,vol. 1[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994]). The notion of spectral elements, which resist empirical modes of documentation, refers to the influential scholarship of Avery Gordon: see Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). For a partial bibliography on recent Asian/American and ethnic studies works that address the Korean War and memory through postmemory, intergenerational trauma, and hauntings, see Grace M. Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy and the Forgotten War (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Cho, “Performing an Ethics of Entanglement in Still Present Pasts”; Daniel Kim, “‘Bled in, Letter by Letter’: Translation, Postmemory, and the Subject of Korean War: History in Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student,” American Literary History 21, no. 3 (October 2009): 550–583; Seo-Young Chu, Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Youngmin Choe, “Postmemory, DMZ in South Korean Cinema, 1999–2003,” Journal of Korean Studies18, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 315–336; Jung Joon Lee, “No End to the Image War: Photography and the Contentious Memories of the Korean War,” Journal of Korean Studies 18, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 337–370; Joseph Darda, “The Literary Afterlife of the Korean War,” American Literature 87, no. 1 (2015): 79–105; Sandra So Hee Chi Kim, “Suji Kwock Kim’s ‘Generation’ and the Ethics of Diasporic Postmemory,” positions: asia critique, vol.4, no. 3 (2016): 635–667. [39] Cho, Haunting the Korean Diaspora,29. [40] As discussed throughout this book, “comfort women” (jugan ianfu in Japanese) is a euphemism used for more than 150,000 colonized subjects (mostly Korean women) forced into sexual servitude by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Asia-Pacific War(s). To this day, the Japanese government evades accountability and responsibility for the atrocities committed against these women. For an illuminating interdisciplinary study of “comfort women” and the prolonged history of multipronged activism against the Japanese, South Korean, and U.S. nation-states, see Elizabeth Son, Embodied Reckonings: “Comfort Women,” Performance and Transpacific Redress (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2018). [41] Kim, “‘Bled in, Letter by Letter.’” [42] Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 6. [43] Butler, Frames of War,5. [44] While kyopo (or gyopo)has generally shifted from a derogatory term to a popular moniker applied to Korean diasporans or “overseas” Koreans visiting the Korean Peninsula, it retains negative connotations. For instance, kyopo is often used to refer to non–Korean-speaking diasporic subjects visiting South Korea as tourists. [45] Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 9. [46] For critiques of the suturing of memory studies to trauma studies, see Leys, Trauma; Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). [47] For a genealogy of texts that address memory through the lens of trauma, see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History,20th ed.(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016); Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (New York: Routledge, 1991); Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); and Primo Levi, Survival Auschwitz (New York: Touchstone, 1996). [48] Hirsch, Family Frames,19. [49] Ibid.,20. Here Hirsch draws on Roland Barthes’s observations on photography and death in Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photograph (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980). [50] Hirsch, Family Frames,22. [51] Donald Trump offered these remarks at the seventy-second session of the United Nations General Assembly Meeting on September 19, 2017. For a complete transcription of his remarks, see the White House government website, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-72nd-session-united-nations-general-assembly [52] Catherine Lutz, “Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization and the Current Crisis,” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (September 2002): 732–735. [53] Charles S. Young, “POWs: The Hidden Reasons for Forgetting Korea,” in The Korean War at Sixty: New Approaches to the Study of the Korean War,ed. Steven Casey (London: Routledge, 2012),155–171. See also Christine Hong, “Introduction: The Unending Korean War,” positions: asia critique, vol. 23, no. 4 (2015): 597–617. Note that I use “military-industrial complex” to mean the interlinking of the military sector with governance, academic knowledge production, social life, and the global economy. [54] For a particularly incisive engagement of the overlaps between militarized life and civilian life through the analytic of logistics, see Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). Monica Kim, The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), smartly addresses the history and consolidation of a militarized surveillance regime with the onset of the Korean War. [55] Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016),5. [56] Christine Hong, prepared remarks, Oral History Roundtable Discussion, University of California, Riverside, February 18, 2015. During her brief talk, Hong emphasized that her observations about the historiographical turns of the Korean War are informed by the commentary of Youngju Ryu of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, at The (Unending) Korean War Conference held at New York University in April 2011. [57] For critiques of Cold War historiography and the Korean War, see Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War,2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981); Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Holt, 2004); Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Christine Hong, “Manufacturing Dissidence: Arts and Letters of North Korea’s ‘Second Culture,’” positions: asia critique vol. 23, no. 4 (2015): 743–784; Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins. [58] Leonard Rifas, “Korean War Comic Books and the Militarization of U.S. Masculinity,” Positions 23, no. 4 (2015): 619–631. [59] Namhee Lee, The Making of Minjung: Democracy, and the Politics of Presentation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 7. [60] Chunghee Sarah Soh, The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Chungmoo Choi, “The Discourse of Decolonization and Popular Memory: South Korea,” positions: asia critique vol.1, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 77–102. [61] Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War. [62] Even after South Korea was established in 1948 and fighting between the two Koreas temporarily halted in 1953, elements of Japanese colonial governance remained firmly intact (e.g., centralized policing and surveillance practices, family law, and the legal-juridical system). Simultaneously, the sexual economy of the U.S. military and USAMGIK’s instrumentalization of women’s bodies for the procurement of national safety were founded on an elaborate infrastructure of public health policies and administrative channels already established by the Japanese colonial government in Korea: see Ki-young Shin, “The Politics of the Family Law Reform Movement in Contemporary Korea: A Contentious Space for Gender and the Nation,” Journal of Korean Studies 11, no. 1 (Fall 2006): 96; Dong-choon Kim, The Unending Korean War: A Social History,trans. Kim Sung-Ok(Larkspur, CA: Tamal Vista, 2009),30; Johnson, Blowback;Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War,vol. 2. See also Seungsook Moon, Militarized Modernity and Gendered Citizenship in South Korea (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Na-Young Lee, “The Construction of Military Prostitution in South Korea during the U.S. Military Rule, 1945–1948,” Feminist Studies 33, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 453–481; Katherine Moon, Sex among Allies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). [63] Naoki Sakai, “Trans-Pacific Studies and the U.S.-Japan Complicity,” in The Transpacific Imagination: Rethinking Boundary, Culture, and Society,ed. Naoki Sakai and Hyun Joo Yoo (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 2012), 279–216. See also Setsu Shigematsu and Keith Camacho, “Introduction: Militarized Currents, Decolonizing Futures,” in Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific, ed. Setsu Shigematsu and Keith Camacho(Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2010), xv–xlviii, esp. xvi. The transpacific alliance continues to take contemporary forms through global capitalist alliances such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). For a brief yet nuanced reading of the TPP’s relationship to accrued histories of colonialism, militarization, and neoliberalism, see Arnie Saiki, “TPP at the End of the Line: A Briefing on Economic Cooperation and Capacity Building,” American Quarterly 69, no. 3 (September 2017): 501–512. [64] Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins. [65] See Christine Hong and Henry Em, “Coda: A Conversation with Kim Dong-Choon,” positions: asia critique, vol. 23, no. 4 (Fall 2015): 837–849; Mark Selden and Kim Dong-choon, “South Korea’s Embattled Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus vol. 8, issue 9, no. 4; http://apjjf.org/-Mark-Selden/3313/article.html. See also Kim, The Unending Korean War. As Kim emphasized, the South Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established by South Korean President Noh Moo-hyun’s administration (2003–2008), ended its investigation in December 2005 and published a four-volume, three-thousand-page report that documents massacres and other atrocities that the Japanese colonial regime (1910–1945) and subsequent South Korean authoritarian regimes (1948–1993) committed on both sides of the peninsula. The report is marred by amnesiac conditions; for instance, it does not address crimes that the U.S. military committed; nor does it document the South Korean police regimes’ and the U.S. military’s normalized use of sexual violence, including rape. But the report was one of the first public efforts to systematically probe and scrutinize the militarized violence affecting the everyday lives of Koreans during and after the armed conflict. [66] For a complete transcript of the June 15 2000 North-South Joint Declaration, see http://londonkoreanlinks.net/2000/06/15/north-south-joint-declaration [67] Nan Kim, Memory, Reconciliation, and Reunions in South Korea: Crossing the Divide (New York: Lexington, 2016). [68] Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins. [69] For a critique of the establishment of the United Nations, the Declaration of Human Rights, and transitional justice, see Randall Williams, The Divided World: Human Rights and Its Violence (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). [70] See Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War; Martin Hart-Landsberg, Korea: Division, Reunification, and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Monthly Review, 1998). [71] Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins, 12. As Yoneyama emphasizes, Jacques Derrida conceives of true justice as a form of “alterity” and “aporia” to existing mechanisms of law, rule, and order, since these instrumentalized apparatuses tend to maintain, reproduce, and amplify violent injustices. Derrida’s own concept of justice, in relation to aporia, is based on the critical scholarship of Emmanuel Levinas: see Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice,ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3–67. [72] Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins,7. [73] See The Decolonized Eye, xxix. [74] Ibid., xxx. [75] See Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 3. [76] See, e.g., William Safran’s influential “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return,” Diaspora 1, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 83–99. [77] See Grace Kyungwon Hong, The Ruptures of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). [78] The work that Hong references here is Cherrié Moraga’s preface in Cherrié Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Latham, NY: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1981). [79] Hong, The Ruptures of American Capital, vii. [80] Ibid., ix. [81] Ibid. [82] Ibid., xvii. Here Hong refers to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theorization of intersectionality, which addresses identification through the intersection or intertwinement of race, gender, sexuality, class, and ableism (the idea of interlocking dynamisms underlying identification, however, is discussed in earlier works, including the Combahee River Collective’s Statement published in 1977): see Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (July 1991): 1241–1299. [83] Fatima El-Tayeb, European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xxxv. For other critical queer-of-color texts that engage diaspora beyond the notion of ethnic, national, and familial origins, see Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diaspora and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); David Eng, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). [84] El-Tayeb, European Others, xxxiii. [85] Ibid., xxxv. [86] Kwon, The Other Cold War,8. [87] Hyun Oh Park, The Capitalist Unconscious: From Korean Unification to Transnational Korea (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 183. [88] For a full Korean-to-English translation of President Park Geun-hye’s “Dresden Declaration” of March 2014, see http://cogitasia.com/president-park-geun-hyes-dresden-declaration. [89] Postcolonial scholars use the concept of “decolonization” to reference social movements for national sovereignty organized by and among African and Asian subjects colonized by waning European powers after 1945 (especially after the Bandung Conference of 1955). My use is more expansive and exceeds the confined realm of national politics. Indeed, in conversation with theorists such as Sylvia Wynter, Catherine Walsh, and Walter Mignolo, I approach decolonization as a radically different process that accentuates how the very concept of the progressive and enlightened “modern nation-state” is a byproduct of colonial power. Although these scholars deploy “decoloniality” rather than “decolonization” to signal this key difference, I have opted to use “decolonization” throughout this book, because this term is explicitly used by critical scholars (for example, Paik Nak-Chung, Chungmoo Choi and Kuan-Hsing Chen) who address colonial violence within the geopolitical context of Asia. For general theorizations of decoloniality and decolonization, see Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism,” boundary 2, vol. 12, no. 3 (Spring–Fall 1984), 19–70; Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). For discourses of decolonization specific to the histories of Asia and Korea, see Chen, Asia as Method;Paik, The Division System in Crisis; Choi, “The Discourse of Decolonization and Popular Memory.” [90] Ji-Yeon Yuh, “Moved by War: Migration, Diaspora, and the Korean War,” Journal of Asian American Studies 8, no. 3 (October 2005): 278. [91] Yen Le Espiritu, Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refugees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014);Schlund-Vials, War, Genocide, and Justice; Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom; Ma Vang, “The Refugee Soldier: A Critique of Recognition and Citizenship in the Hmong Veterans’ Naturalization Act” in positions: asia critique vol. 20, no. 3 (2012): 685–712; Eric Tang, Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the New York City Hyperghetto (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2015); Viet Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). [92] Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). #ColdWar #CrystalMunhyeBaik #KoreanWar #ReencountersOntheKoreanWarandDiasporicMemory #StillPresentPasts

A KPI Interview with physical anthropologist Park Sun-joo On December 27, 2019, the Korea Policy Institute (KPI) executive board spoke with Park Sun-joo, a physical anthropologist who has spent the past two decades excavating the remains of the Korean War dead, including unarmed civilians massacred by the South Korean police, military, and right-wing villagers. Since the establishment of South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2005 and its shutdown by the Lee Myung-bak administration five years later, Park, as one of the sole osteologists in South Korea, has continuously been at the forefront of efforts, both government-driven and nongovernmental, to illuminate the truth of wartime atrocities perpetrated against civilians, weathering the shifts from liberal to conservative administrations and back again. His current archival work is almost entirely donor-driven. KPI: Could you tell us about the kinds of projects you are working on now? Park Sun-joo (PSJ): To answer this question, I feel that you need to understand what projects have been worked on. Things started in 2000 when the government actually gave us funds to excavate the remains of soldiers. In South Korea, these soldiers are described as having been “killed in action” whereas in the United States, I believe the term used to describe them is “missing in action.” I was the investigation committee leader from 2000 to 2008, and this project is still ongoing. In 2008, the South Korean president authorized a nongovernmental noncombatant excavation project. The second project started in 2005 when a truth-and-reconciliation law was passed. After that law passed, from 2007 to 2010, the government conducted an initial survey to register all the victims of massacres or civilian victims. During the initial registration period, 168 [massacre] sites were identified, and the government selected 30 sites to investigate the mass killings that occurred there. During that three-year period, however, they only investigated 11 sites. They were able to identify about 1,700 remains. The law then expired and did not get extended. Although people repeatedly petitioned and undertook actions to get the timeline extended or make it permanent, these efforts were not successful. In 2014, many civil-society organizations gathered to organize support for a second phase of the truth-and-reconciliation process. But the Legislation and Judiciary Committee of the National Assembly hasn’t passed the law authorizing a second phase yet. The National Assembly right now is a bit chaotic. The law was supposed to be passed or examined this year [2019], but this year is almost over. So, in the meantime, until this gets nationally funded, civil-society organizations have formed joint investigative teams, with volunteers coming from all fields. These teams have conducted the seventh investigation at the sites. The findings from these investigations were used to put more public pressure on the National Assembly to pass a law that would formalize it as a national project. Each local government has its own legislative body and ordinance-making power. Locally, Asan City and North Chungcheong Province have funded three separate excavation projects. Last year, in 2018, in Asan City, as you might have seen in The New York Times article, 208 people’s remains were discovered at an abandoned gold mine site. They were able to identify 58 victims between the ages 2 and 12, and 85% of the remains were identified as female. They are guessing that these were families of “communist sympathizers” who worked for the People’s Army at the time of the great retreat on January 4, 1951. During the Korean War, some of the most excruciatingly painful incidents occurred during the January 4 retreat. But these incidents are not broadly known by the public. Based on findings from the Asan investigation, I presented at a public event in January 2019 in New York. The New York Times article mentioned another excavation in Asan City. Although investigators didn’t find many remains, the bones yielded a lot of DNA, which they were able to match to family members. In North Chungcheong Province, with funding of this project continuing until 2022, they are hoping in March to excavate remains from another site. The government has a plan to create a facility for memorial services. In and around Daejon City, they are trying to create a public park for all the civilian victims. There will be a contest for the park design, under the title, “Memory and Remembrance.” They plan to move all the remains to this memorial park, which is supposed to be finished by 2022. My third project focuses on Korean conscripted labor in Japan and in the Pacific during the Japanese colonial period. Geographically this extends beyond Japan to the Pacific, including sites like Saipan. From 1997 to 2005, people from civil-society organizations volunteered at an excavation in Hokkaido where they found 150 people’s remains. In 2016, they moved these remains first to Shimonoseki and then to Seoul. They were able to inter all of the remains in Baekje Public Cemetery. The Korean government, by the end of the Moon Jae-in administration, intends to repatriate between 700 and 800 remains. The fourth project I am working on is identifying the remains of the people who were killed during the colonial-era independence movement. We have been trying to find Ahn Jung-geun, the martyr who killed the Resident-General of Korea, Ito Hirobumi. We now know the whereabouts of his burial. From 2006 to 2008, we collaborated with North Korea on an excavation in Yosoon (Lüshun District, Dalian), China. We did not succeed in identifying Ahn’s remains, but we were able to narrow down where he might be buried. The South Korean government continues to support this project. One of the one hundred promises Moon Jae-in made was to find Ahn Jung-geun’s remains. One of my most recent projects is locating the remains of the Sewol Ferry victims. In Mokpo, they were only able to find 5 people’s remains out of 9. I have briefly gone over the five major excavation projects, both national and private, that have taken place after the liberation [Korea’s 1945 liberation from Japan]. People ask why we do these excavations. Our answer is that it is really important, first of all, to establish national identity and, second of all, to uplift human rights within the country. In my personal opinion, I believe that without the firm establishment of national identity and human rights, Korea cannot become a developed country. In Korean society, civilian deaths during the Korean War are not well known. In fact, these deaths have been subjected to the greatest historical distortion. Because Korean history, especially around the Korean War, has been distorted so much, we are trying to correct what has been distorted with truth. The remains that have been excavated are proof of what happened. They testify to past wrongs. They also hold meaning for rites for the dead. For the surviving families, the excavation of massacred civilians begins to redress the mistreatment they suffered. For the last 70 years, they have been treated by the entire community as families of “Reds,” or similar labels. A separate issue is what the government should do for the families of the massacred. First of all, the truth has to be investigated and illuminated. Secondly, what has been lost must be restored. Thirdly, the dead must be memorialized. Fourthly, there must be compensation. Fifth and last of all, there must be broad education about human rights. These are what we demand from the government. What’s absolutely necessary is a specialist, an expert who can oversee excavations, forensic testing, and memorial services. Because I have expertise and experience in these three areas, I have been at the forefront of these activities for the last 20 years. I am also the chairperson of the preparatory committee for memorial services. Regrettably, not too many young scholars are interested in this kind of work, but the continuation of these projects requires young blood. The biggest problem is that there are no professors who can teach forensic anthropology in college. This is why new scholars are not emerging. Culturally, Koreans regard it as a taboo to touch a dead person’s bones and remains. However, there are too many surviving families in the Korean population, and too much unresolved han remains. For this reason, this discipline really needs great attention and support. KPI: How do you organize memorial services, especially in situations in which surviving families have been living side by side for the last 70 years in the same communities with those who perpetrated the massacres? PSJ: For the last 70 years, the families of the massacred have been labeled as communists or communist sympathizers and thus were not able to participate in public life or assume any public position. Guilt by association precluded them from becoming officers in the army, municipal employees, national government officials, or judges. They could not serve in any legislative body, and they were regularly surveilled by the police. Members of these families were not able to get a better education, and even if they were educated properly, they were not able to get good jobs. As a result, they became disgruntled or voices of dissent against the government. Furthermore, most of these people were not able to get out of Korea, go overseas, or travel. Given their similar situation, these people got together often, and then created family associations of the victims of massacre during the Korean War. There are about twenty such associations throughout South Korea, and they are housed under an umbrella organization, the management of which is, of course, very hard. There’s a lot of infighting within these associations. Financially speaking, they are not very well off either, so they represent a really unhappy demographic in Korean society. Conservative administrations found it difficult to embrace these people. Yet even the Moon Jae-in administration has similarly struggled to satisfy survivors and families of massacred civilians. People who were living—and still live—in the same villages, often in rural, under-developed areas, know who the aggressors and victims were. Because the sense of victimization is still very strong and persists into the present, reconciliation won’t be easy. Ten years ago, when we were conducting an investigation in Asan City, we relied on the testimony of people who perpetrated the massacre. Our hope was to narrow down the possible burial ground so we inquired with people who were still alive. When we returned, they refused to answer our questions. They were saying, “I don’t remember,” or “I don’t know.” Most refused to talk because after they first testified, they were given the cold shoulder by the rest of the village. During the Korean War, four Hong families were killed by the rest of the village, and no one really talked about it for 70 years. In another instance, when I came to the United States, I learned there was a survivor of a massacre at an abandoned gold mine who was 6 years old at the time. The survivor was later able to immigrate to the United States and now is living in the DC area, yet he still regards Asan City as his hometown. He came to the excavation site at Asan City, and when we found the bones of a one-and-a-half year old, he actively participated in a DNA test. It wasn’t a match, but what this survivor shared of his recollections was illuminating. As a child survivor, he was struck by the fact that the wealth and property of the people who were killed were taken away and shared among the villagers. That’s why no one wanted to talk—why no one came forward to talk about these cases. It’s well-known that in 1996, the U.S. government released a trove of declassified documents, some of which were about Daejeon Sanrae Village. During the Korean War, about 1,800 to 7,000 people were estimated to have been executed in that city. One of the declassified photographs showed an ROK army officer whom people were able to identify. In 1996, this person was a really famous conservative figure. He was the chairperson of the board of directors of a private university, his daughter was a dean of a college of the university, and his son in-law was a three-star general in the ROK army. In South Korea, there are still aggressors in society. Some of these war criminals are still in power. This makes it hard to find the truth. KPI: How much national media coverage has there been about the kind of work you’re doing and related to this, how much popular awareness? Is your work beginning to make an impact on public thinking about the Korean War? Or is the violence of the war still an issue neglected by big media, even as it remains important to communities and those most affected? PSJ: The major media outlets are The Choson Daily, The Joongang Daily, and The Dong A Daily. Unless the story concerns ROK army forces or Ahn Jung-keun, the independence fighter, these newspapers do not cover our excavation work. Their indifference is intentional. Only small papers like The Kyong-an Daily, Hankyoreh, or The Seoul Daily cover the massacres, and they only reach a certain target audience, not the general population. This is not a popular topic that most people are keenly aware of. Among those people who are reading about this, though, there is a generational gap in understanding and looking at this issue. Older people usually say, “It was inevitable—all the communists were executed” or “Because it was during the war, executions without due process were justified.” The more democracy-minded younger people usually state, “These massacres were not inevitable. They could have been avoided, and now must be revisited. The truth has to come out.” However, since the excavations are not covered by the national media, popular media, or major media, few people are aware of these projects. Maybe one day popular major media outlets will cover these projects. KPI: In talking to villagers, have you uncovered any evidence of U.S. involvement in these atrocities or at least knowledge by the U.S. government of what was going on? PSJ: I offer a cautious answer. People on the left tend to believe that everyone in the ROK army knew that the police and ROK army killed civilians. I would rather say that there were a few political soldiers or a few special agencies within the ROK army that were responsible for these massacres. A few years ago, I was involved in the No Gun Ri excavation. Many people had concluded that American soldiers killed No Gun Ri people. Yes, the killing may have been carried out by American soldiers. But it might not have been intentional because the location of the shooting suggests they were trying to prevent people from coming out of the tunnel, not trying to kill everyone in the tunnel. Further investigation might be needed. Factually speaking, I can just state that a few declassified photos indicate that U.S. officers were present at the No Gun Ri site, and there are also stories and testimonies that corroborate what these photos reveal. KPI: Because we are in the United States, we are concerned about U.S. intervention in the Korean War. PSJ: As a physical anthropologist, I cannot arrive at the conclusions that need to be made by other scholars and other experts. For example, at the No Gun Ri excavation, people remember different stories and rumors—the latter mostly because they didn’t really see what was happening. Let’s say there was a lot of bombing or shooting targeting the people along the railroad where they were walking. During the excavation, we should have been able to find shells by the railroad. We did find one, which enabled me to conclude that there was bombing or shooting along the railroad. But was it intentional, and was it aimed at the people? My field doesn’t enable me to say, “Yes” or “No.” At No Gun Ri, when we were excavating, we found so many bullets around the walls of the tunnel at the entrance. This suggests that they weren’t really trying to target the people inside but maybe trying to prevent them from coming out. Uncovering the truth requires the involvement of more experts. KPI: Could you speak further about what’s holding the National Assembly Legislation and Judiciary Committee up in terms of funding for excavation of these Korean War massacre sites? Is the Moon Jae-in administration supportive or are these excavations a low priority? PSJ: Initially, we believed that after Moon Jae-in entered into office, the law extending the truth-and-reconciliation process would pass right away. The work we are doing is very important but it doesn’t appear to be a priority for his administration. The current government plan is to finish the establishment of memorial service facilities on a national level by 2021. After that, the goal is to embark on major excavations at 360 identified sites. The latter, however, requires funding, manpower, and the creation of an agency that will oversee the process. For the last decade, National Assembly members have been preoccupied with the question of how to form this agency. Should it have six or nine people on the steering committee? Such matters are not of any importance to people in the field, but they constitute the main debate in the National Assembly right now. At issue seems to be some kind of political back-and-forth between the conservative and the democratic parties. KPI: Do you know of any excavation projects taking place in North Korea? Have you collaborated on any excavation projects with North Korea? PSJ: There are remains in South Korea of Chinese or Korean soldiers or combatants that are identified as “enemy” forces. About three years ago, there was a control room in the South Korean Ministry of Defense that communicated with the Chinese Ministry of National Defense and shipped all the remains identified as Chinese to Shenyang. However, if the remains were identified as North Korean, they are still interred in the Cemetery for North Korean and Chinese Soldiers in Paju. I have demanded that the repatriation of North Korean remains be an agenda item during the joint South and North summits. This would enable us to ship the remains to the North and in turn to receive what North Korea has identified as South Korean soldiers to us. This year, at the Arrowhead Mountain former combat site near the DMZ, the North and the South were supposed to embark on a joint excavation project. But when it started, the North Korea team did not show up. The South Koreans did a little work and then North Korea also did its own excavation. I’m not aware of any other collaborations between the North and the South. If remains are identified as American, North Korea sends those to the United States because of political or financial reasons. The incentive is mostly financial. There was a rumor in the field that for each set of remains, North Korea received $50,000 or $80,000 or something like that. KPI: How have Koreans living in the United States responded to your work? Are they drawn to it or do they want to keep distance from this history, as well? How have they responded when you’ve shared your work? PSJ: I presented on my work twice in the United States, once in New York and once in Washington, DC, as well as later in Osaka and Okinawa in Japan. People who were directly impacted tend to take polarized views. Either it was all done by the government, thus sole accountability resides with the government, or they are very critical about the excavation projects, align with the wartime government, and refuse to listen to the other side. What’s needed is a more balanced view, an objective perspective that concedes that atrocities in war can happen. To adhere just to one side makes it hard to hear the other side of the story. This applies not just to overseas Koreans but also to the government and people in South Korea. In light of the widespread lack of knowledge about civilian massacres during the Korean War, those of us who disclose the facts also need to have more balanced presentations so that people will believe what they are told. KPI: What are your sabbatical plans? What will you be working on while you’re here and when will you be returning to Korea? PSJ: I retired in 2013, but I had to get back to the field, once the excavation projects started. I don’t teach anymore, but I would like to retire from fieldwork, as well. It looks likely, however, that I’ll be able to hand over these projects only when the governmental agency that oversees the project is installed. Until then, I have to keep working. My family lives in the United States. I’m the only one living in Korea. I’m currently in DC to visit my family during winter vacation and will be here until the end of January [2020]. Once the excavation starts in Asan City in March, I will have to be there. The law extending the truth-and-reconciliation process has to be passed very soon. KPI: Do you have any thoughts about what an institute like ours can do to support your work? PSJ: People in Korea and overseas Koreans really need education and information so that we can create a better society where people can live and come together as a unifying force. I ask you to join in this work. We really need the truth-and-reconciliation extension law to pass. If overseas Koreans write or contact National Assembly members, that might draw some positive attention. Alternatively, you can send volunteers to aid in the excavations. Three-to-four days—or a week—would be good. We need a lot of people. Being there at the site and feeling what really is happening is educational and meaningful. KPI: We can work on those things, and after you go back to Korea, we would like to follow your work and publicize it too. #KoreanWar #SouthKorea #WarAtrocities

By Bruce Cumings | June 25, 2020 This op-ed column, originally submitted for the 60th anniversary of the Korean War start, was killed at the last minute by a prominent newspaper on June 24, 2010, despite having been commissioned by that newspaper. KPI runs it now, in 2020, on the seventieth anniversary of the start of the Korean War, as it is controversially periodized. While the incidents specified in the op-ed are now a decade old, the stalemate it laments is unfortunately current. Despite the 2018-19 burst of summits between the United States, North Korea, and South Korea that led to joint declarations of impending peace and rapprochement and despite an upsurge in citizen activism such as the 2015 visit to North Korea organized by Women Cross DMZ, peace on the Korean peninsula remains maddeningly elusive. The Korean War at 60: No Exit In July 1987 I arrived in London to work on a documentary film. When I went through customs the officer asked me what the film was about: “the Korean War,” I said. “The old one, or the new one?” he asked, since tens of thousands of protesters had just clogged the streets of Seoul. He might ask the same question today, given the crisis over the Cheonan, the South Korean warship that was blown out of the water in March (2010). Or at one of any number of points in the past 65 years: Korea is the best example in the modern world of how easy it is to get into a war, and how desperately hard it is to get out. 25,000 American soldiers landed on this peninsula in September 1945, shortly after Dean Rusk drew a line no one had ever noticed before at 38 degrees north latitude. Today 28,000 remain, and the war has never ended. Those troops arrived, ostensibly, to hold off guerrillas under the command of Kim Il Sung; today our troops hold off his son—and his grandson. No exit might be the best epitaph for Korea, “the forgotten war.” Today (in 2010) is the 60th anniversary of the conventional start of this war, and in August (2010) will come the centennial of Japan’s colonization of Korea. Both events are inextricably related; the Kim regime traces its legitimacy back to guerrilla struggles that began when Japan established its third major colony in 1932, the puppet state of Manchukuo. Surviving guerrillas and their offspring formed the core leadership of North Korea in 1948, and ever since. Meanwhile 80,000 U.S. troops in Japan and Korea stand in for the strong Japanese military that existed before 1945, so even today we don’t know what an independent Japan would look like, and our occupation of Okinawa still rankles enough to have brought down the Hatoyama government earlier this month (June 2010). The North inhabits its own time machine, beating against a strong tide they call American imperialism. Its generals prepare not just to fight the last war, but structure their entire society as a fighting machine determined, sooner or later, to win a victory that was palpable for a moment in 1950 but has exceeded their grasp ever since. The result is a garrison state, perhaps the most amazing one the world has ever seen, with well over one million in the military and another six or seven million in the reserves—in a population of 23 million. They drape a totalized shroud over their people to keep them from being tainted by their American nemesis, yet in so doing they endow their eternal enemy with an enormous weight. American diplomacy has its own recalcitrant timelessness, its own default positions that last decades and get nowhere: those nasty, incorrigible North Koreans really have to be punished for—seizing the spy ship Pueblo in 1968, trimming a poplar tree in the DMZ in 1976, blowing up the South Korean cabinet in 1983, dumping 8000 plutonium rods out of their reactor in 1994, launching a long-range missile in 1998, another one in 2006 (on our Independence Day), a first atomic bomb in 2006 and a second one in 2009 (on our Memorial Day), and finally the Cheonan. But the punishment doesn’t bite or just further isolates a regime inured to seclusion. North Korean provocation is intrinsic to and perfectly situated within the unchanging logic of conflict since the armistice in 1953: they create an incident to get our attention; we can only respond haltingly and ineffectively, because to aggravate or escalate the problem might lead to a new war, and that invokes another default position: there is no military solution in Korea, a truth we learned the hard way in 1953, and still valid today. Another default principle in Washington: North Korea stands for nothing, has no support from its people, and will soon collapse. Since the Berlin Wall fell a bipartisan consensus has adhered to the axiom that North Korea will soon “explode or implode,” the current expression being Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s mantra that a power struggle is going on in Pyongyang since Kim Jong Il’s alleged stroke in 2008; this has now led to the absurd proposition that the Marine Expeditionary Force in Okinawa must ready itself to swoop into the North and corral any and all “loose nukes” if the regime collapses. Monarchical succession is one of the few things Pyongyang does well, because Koreans have been doing it for centuries; when Kim Il Sung died in 1994 there was barely a perturbation in the top leadership. (Loose nukes, though, might be rattling around any one of the 15,000+ underground facilities in the North—and good luck to the Marines). A third Beltway default says the U.S. is always better off with the conservatives in power in Seoul. These days American diplomats applaud the revival of a close alliance with the current administration of Lee Myong Bak, after years of estrangement under Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyon. But those two presidents were the products of Korea’s democratic revolution, whereas Lee harks back to his halcyon days as a favored businessman under dictator Park Chung Hee. Along came the June 2nd elections, on the heels of the Cheonan tragedy, and voters broadly repudiated Lee’s ruling party. Presidents Kim and Roh planted the seeds of reconciliation with the North, and they have taken deep root regardless of what we may think. The party of long memory in Pyongyang has braced itself against the pressures of past, present and future since 1945, up against the greatest military power in world history. Americans think they know this story, of a vain, feckless, profligate, cruel and dangerous leadership, symbolized by Kim Jong Il, soon to be history. But American leaders know neither the nature of this war nor the resilient qualities of their enemy (give the North another decade, and the regime will have been in power as long as the Soviet Union). This blindness is not a matter of forgetting; it is a never-knowing, a species of unwilled ignorance and willed incuriosity, which causes us time and again to underestimate the adversary—and thereby confer priceless advantage upon him. Finally, there is the evil, grinning specter of the war itself, reaper of millions of lives and all for naught, because it grinds on, it endures, it never ends. It returns in myriad forms—memory, repression, trauma, ghosts, the deaths of 46 more Koreans on the Cheonan—to taunt the living, as the odds-on survivor of Korea’s tragedies since the thoughtless division of this ancient country. Bruce Cumings, a Korea Policy Institute Associate, is Gustavus F. and Ann M. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of History and the College at the University of Chicago and the author of The Korean War: A History (Random House, June 2010). #BruceCumings #KoreaPeace #KoreanWar