<div dir="ltr"><div>B. R. Myers is not on KS to respond to Prof. Baker's post, but he posted a response on his blog site and asked for me to copy it on KS. Copied below are,</div><div>- Myers' reason for taking down the post originally and why he reposted it just recently in response to Prof. Baker's earlier post on the "Revoking a Recommendation" thread, and</div><div>- Myers' response to Prof. Baker's post "Debating DPRK role in May 18"</div><div><br></div><div>The full post is at <a href="http://sthelepress.com/index.php/2016/09/16/back-by-popular-demand/">http://sthelepress.com/index.php/2016/09/16/back-by-popular-demand/</a></div><div><br></div><div>Jiyul Kim</div><div>Oberlin College</div><div><br></div><p style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 1.75em;color:rgb(26,26,26);font-family:merriweather,georgia,serif;font-size:16px;line-height:28px"><span style="box-sizing:inherit;font-weight:700">Here is the post indignantly referred to on another site. I had withdrawn this and all other posts for the time being, because I knew that the old guard would respond by trying to deflect attention away from the issue at hand, and from textual excerpts that speak for themselves. My other postings will all be back too, don’t worry.</span></p><p style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 1.75em;color:rgb(26,26,26);font-family:merriweather,georgia,serif;font-size:16px;line-height:28px"><span style="box-sizing:inherit;font-weight:700">The South Korean left has hitherto tried to convey the impression to the West that there was no fifth column in South Korea at all. The South Korean right, for its part, refuses to show any understanding for why so many intelligent and good people chose to side with the DPRK against the Park and Chun dictatorships.</span></p><p style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 1.75em;color:rgb(26,26,26);font-family:merriweather,georgia,serif;font-size:16px;line-height:28px"><span style="box-sizing:inherit;font-weight:700">We foreigners have a special duty to get past both moldy Cold War-era narratives to the more nuanced truth. The older generation of American Korea scholars and Korea hands is just going to have to deal with this, I’m afraid. You can control discussion in the US, but not everywhere in the world.<br style="box-sizing:inherit"></span></p><p style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 1.75em;color:rgb(26,26,26);font-family:merriweather,georgia,serif;font-size:16px;line-height:28px"><span style="box-sizing:inherit;font-weight:700">To be clear: I am far from convinced that the North Koreans organized the event. But it must at least be acknowledged (as the South Korean courts have had to acknowledge) that there is good evidence for believing that North Korea had its agents in Gwangju <em style="box-sizing:inherit">as in every large South Korean city</em>, and that they did not sit quietly on the sidelines that tragic May.</span></p><p style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 1.75em;color:rgb(26,26,26);font-family:merriweather,georgia,serif;font-size:16px;line-height:28px"><span style="box-sizing:inherit;font-weight:700">Note also that I urge a critical reading of Kim’s book. I have gone to the trouble of checking several of his fascinating citations of <em style="box-sizing:inherit">demonstrator</em>testimony, and at least they match the text. (Nor do I see any evidence that he is trying to take credit for the scholarship of others.) I urge everyone to read the book, or learn Korean and read the book, before presuming to pass judgment on its content.- B.R. Myers, 16 September 2016.</span></p><div><span style="box-sizing:inherit;font-weight:700"><span style="box-sizing:inherit;color:rgb(26,26,26);font-family:merriweather,georgia,serif;font-size:16px;line-height:28px">Update:</span><br></span></div><div><br></div><div><p style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 1.75em;color:rgb(26,26,26);font-family:merriweather,georgia,serif;font-size:16px;line-height:28px"><span style="box-sizing:inherit;font-weight:700">Don Baker continues to lament that I do not observe the field’s fatwa like a good boy, and treat Kim’s book like the <em style="box-sizing:inherit">Satanic Verses</em>. May I remind him that I recommended <em style="box-sizing:inherit">Tyranny of the Weak</em> in 2013 despite being the only person in the field fundamentally opposed to the book’s thrust? Had I not found the very troubling problems I discussed in the posting below, I would still be recommending it.</span></p><p style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 1.75em;color:rgb(26,26,26);font-family:merriweather,georgia,serif;font-size:16px;line-height:28px"><span style="box-sizing:inherit;font-weight:700">Call me crazy, but I like to tell open-minded scholars of Korean history about books I’ve read that offer useful content. If I consider them sound from start to finish, I say so. If not, I urge people to read them <em style="box-sizing:inherit">critically</em>. I did this with Kim’s book just as I did with <em style="box-sizing:inherit">Tyranny</em>. </span></p><p style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 1.75em;color:rgb(26,26,26);font-family:merriweather,georgia,serif;font-size:16px;line-height:28px"><span style="box-sizing:inherit;font-weight:700">A book that consists to at least 30% of unedited passages and even whole pages from primary materials (for the most part, in the first two volumes, eyewitness and veteran demonstrator</span> <span style="box-sizing:inherit;font-weight:700">testimony) can hardly be described as “totally concocted,” can it? There is plenty of stuff in there, in the latter two volumes especially, that seems to me preposterous, like the martial-arts battle in the North Korean village described either in vol. 3 or 4. But much of what is said in the first two volumes, particularly by the demonstrators or veteran demonstrators themselves, is sound. And much of <em style="box-sizing:inherit">that</em> runs counter to the more recent and hyperbolic myth-making.</span></p><p style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 1.75em;color:rgb(26,26,26);font-family:merriweather,georgia,serif;font-size:16px;line-height:28px"><span style="box-sizing:inherit;font-weight:700">Estella says in <em style="box-sizing:inherit">Great Expectations,</em> “Moths and all sorts of ugly creatures hover around a lighted candle. Is it the candle’s fault?” And is it the fault of the good citizens of Gwangju if a few dozen North Koreans were hovering around them? What, were they supposed to check ID’s? Would the fact of a North Korean presence make their cause any less respectable, their own grievances any less legitimate? Of course not. Does the fact that there were some communists in the US civil rights movement tarnish its history?</span></p><p style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 1.75em;color:rgb(26,26,26);font-family:merriweather,georgia,serif;font-size:16px;line-height:28px"><span style="box-sizing:inherit;font-weight:700">What is at work here with Baker <em style="box-sizing:inherit">et al</em> is the misguided notion that if any piece of information serves the other side, or conforms in any way with the military dictatorships’ own propaganda, it must be denied or swept under the rug. As has happened with the Soviet archival evidence that the DPRK funded the so-called reformist parties in the 1960 election campaigns, just as the right wing had fulminated at the time.</span> <span style="box-sizing:inherit;font-weight:700">Good luck finding that evidence mentioned in new South Korean books on those parties (or on the <em style="box-sizing:inherit">Minjok Ilbo</em>).</span></p><p style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 1.75em;color:rgb(26,26,26);font-family:merriweather,georgia,serif;font-size:16px;line-height:28px"><span style="box-sizing:inherit;font-weight:700">The person really being libeled in this whole discussion is poor Kim Il Sung. By North Korean logic, he would have betrayed the revolution and the nation, and the content of all his own ROK-related speeches, had he<em style="box-sizing:inherit">not</em> done everything he could to try to make the Gwangju uprising “go wide.” That was the southern part of the DPRK, as far as he was concerned. And in that famous speech in 1955, about the first half of which such an ill-informed fuss has been made, he said quite clearly that the most feasible way of getting the south back was by riding a southern revolution. </span></p><p style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 1.75em;color:rgb(26,26,26);font-family:merriweather,georgia,serif;font-size:16px;line-height:28px"><span style="box-sizing:inherit;font-weight:700">I have too much respect for the man to believe he said to his anti-South apparatus, “I’ve been telling you for 20 years that when the next uprising comes, we’ve <em style="box-sizing:inherit">got</em> to be ready to pounce and exploit it. Well, forget all that. If there are any of our men in Gwangju now, pull them out. Let those kids fight the puppet state on their own.” </span><span style="box-sizing:inherit;font-weight:700"> What possible reason could a unification-obsessed nationalist have had to take such a line?<br style="box-sizing:inherit"></span></p><p style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 1.75em;color:rgb(26,26,26);font-family:merriweather,georgia,serif;font-size:16px;line-height:28px"><span style="box-sizing:inherit;font-weight:700">The writer of the book in question believes that the North instigated the uprising. Again: I am not convinced. (Nor, incidentally, are some of my most arch-conservative friends.) But a historian cannot dismiss sound information because there is unsound stuff in the textual vicinity, or a danger of someone else using the truth the wrong way.</span></p><p style="box-sizing:inherit;margin:0px 0px 1.75em;color:rgb(26,26,26);font-family:merriweather,georgia,serif;font-size:16px;line-height:28px"><span style="box-sizing:inherit;font-weight:700">I needn’t go into the issue of how different libel laws are here in the ROK. I just find it interesting, and unfortunately typical of our field, that Baker appears to be angrier about an unorthodox opinion than about any of the examples listed in the posting below. </span><span style="font-family:merriweather,georgia,serif;font-weight:700">— B.R. Myers, 17 September 2016. </span></p></div><div><br></div></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Sep 16, 2016 at 4:05 PM, Don Baker <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:ubcdbaker@hotmail.com" target="_blank">ubcdbaker@hotmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div><div dir="ltr">I mentioned in an earlier post this morning that Brian Myers had removed his blog post supporting the claim that the DPRK played a role in the uprising in Kwangju in May, 1980, against Chun Doohan's military coup and demanding free elections. He has now restored that blog post.<div><a href="http://sthelepress.com/index.php/2016/09/16/back-by-popular-demand/" target="_blank">http://sthelepress.com/index.<wbr>php/2016/09/16/back-by-<wbr>popular-demand/</a></div><div><br></div><div>I have read the volumes referred to in that post and they are an example of the absolutely worst sort of historical scholarship. In fact, though the author Kim Taeryŏng lives in the US and is exempt from the reach of the Korean courts, some of his fellow conspiracy theorists were sued by people in Kwangju who had been misidentified as North Korean agents who had infiltrated Kwangju in May, 1980. The people in Kwangju won and were awarded monetary compensation for the defamation of their character. </div><div><br></div><div>Any careful reader of Kim's account of what happened in Kwangju in 1980 can see that the holes in his argument are large enough to drive a truck through them. Kim Taeryŏng takes statements out of context and also mistranslates a lot of English texts. (I know one American reporter who informed Kim that he had not written what Kim said he had written. Kim refused to change his incorrect translation.) He also relies on guilt by association (often false association) to claim that if somebody talked to somebody who talked to somebody who talked to somebody who was a known "pro-Communist," then that first person must also be a Communist agent. Kim insists that that it was Kim Daejung, not Chun Doohan, who planned a military coup in 1980 and Chun did what he did only to preserve democracy in the ROK. </div><div><br></div><div>Those, and Kim Taeryŏng is not the only one, who claim that North Korean agents instigated the May 18th democratization movement ignore one inconvenient fact: why didn't the Chun regime produce any evidence at the time of dead or wounded North Koreans? Chun's troops killed a lot of people in Kwangju. If there really were North Koreans there, wouldn't at least one of those killed be a North Korean? And if a North Korean, dead or alive, has been found to be in Kwangju that May, why would Chun not have shown him or her to the press to justify that attack on that city? </div><div><br></div><div>It is not only a slander against the brave people of Kwangju to imply that they were witting or unwitting agents of the North Korean regime, it is also an affront to the standards of respectable scholarship to distort the historical record the way Kim Taeryŏng does. That should be clear to any scholar, not matter what their political orientation, who has read Kim Taeryŏng's work carefully. <span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br><br>Don Baker <div>Professor</div><div>Department of Asian Studies </div><div>University of British Columbia </div><div>Vancouver, Canada V6T 1Z2 </div><div><a href="mailto:don.baker@ubc.ca" target="_blank">don.baker@ubc.ca</a></div></font></span></div> </div></div>
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