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<DIV><FONT face="Times New Roman"><FONT size=2><FONT size=3>We discussed earlier
about the sites of memory for the Korean War fallen and their relative absence
in North Korean public life. Aidan offers a very interesting comparative
perspective to this issue. I quote him: "In the West, war graves fill a gap, and
make you think. The DPRK has no such gap, and does not want people to think."
</FONT></FONT>This comment is so thought-provoking; so, if you bear with
me, I'd like to raise just one more question. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Times New Roman"></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Times New Roman">It is indeed argued that modern war cemeteries
(and tomb of unknown soliders, cenotaphs and etc) enable us to experience
the national memory and "think" the organic unity and vitality of the
nation-state. This theory has it that people achieve this moral unity and
transcend the condition of Hobbesenian individuals as they ritually identify
with the fallen and assimilate the geist of self-sacrifice their tombs are
supposed to signify. So, Aidan is absolutely right to suggest, "war graves
fill a gap (the void between individuals) and make you thinlk." However, modern
war cemeteries are not only an important instrument of political unity but they
are also a national thatre of democratic political relations. I am thinking here
of Thomas Laqueur's notion of "democracy of death," pointing to the rules of
citizen's army (including people's army) where old social distinctions become
irrelevant and the related materiality of modern war cemeteries in which big men
of battle and humble foot soldiers are equally entitled to the same minimalist
identical graves irrespective of their ranks and hierarchy. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Times New Roman"></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Times New Roman">Aiden notes, "The DPRK has no such gap, and
does not want people to think." It is extraordinary to imagine that there is a
political community in the modern world which does not suffer from the
structural contradiction between individuality and collectivity and hence has no
need for a mediativing device such as war cemeteries. But I wonder whether
we can conceive of this sociologically unique status of North Korea as a
product of its particular politics of memory rather than in terms of a
structural exotica. </FONT></DIV>
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<DIV><FONT face="Times New Roman">Jim Hoare reminds us that the battle of
Waterloo left no graves of fallen citizens. The absence is because our memory of
that battle is not a modern memory, centered on one single heroic individual and
taking the rest devoid of aesthetic relevance. I note that Korean world of
nationalism has its own equivalents of Wellington, traditionalist heroes of
war whose deaths are deified. If we accept the thesis that the difference
between Waterloo and Ipre or Verdun is epocal, can we think about the material
culture of mass death in North Korea according to the same scheme? </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Times New Roman"></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Times New Roman">In my reading, the Patriotic Martyrs' Graves
and the Revolutionary Martyrs' Graves are sites of premodern memory--presenting
one really heroic individual or family at the center surrounded by relatively
less heroic contributors, and obliterating the traces of the mass. Considering
the aesthetic supremacy of this centrist composition of collective memory,
premodern in form and anticolonial in content, and also the absence of
</FONT><FONT size=2><FONT face="Times New Roman" size=3>the traces of people's
war in the material culture of commemoration, can we think of an hypothesis that
the absence of Korean War cemeteries in North Korea is an aspect of the absolute
centrality of a dynastic model of modern history? In other words, isn't the
invisible "democracy of death" the infrastructure of the all-seeing cult of the
dead father of nation and people? Just a thought...</FONT></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Times New Roman"></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face="Times New Roman">One last note about Jim's comment on Kenneth's
US-NK joint body recovery mission story: Dead bodies are far from a minor player
in the geopolitics of the cold war. Since the Korean War where the US army lost
its GI graveyards to the communists, the lost graves of "our boys" have been an
unsettling element in the formation of US foreign
politics, later manifested by the Vietnam War MIA/POW controversies
during the Reagan era. I add that all important US state visits to Vietnam
in the early 1990s including that of Clinton included a visit to the joint
US/Vietnam MIA excavation sites. The normalization of diplomatic relations in
this context was practically inseparable from and symbolically equivalent to the
recovery of the lost American bodies. </FONT></DIV>
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