[KS] Koreanstudies Digest, Vol 122, Issue 9

Bruce Cumings rufus88 at uchicago.edu
Mon Aug 12 10:42:31 EDT 2013


I very much enjoyed Frank's post, and the fascinating people he  
references. An Ho-sang's studies in Germany did indeed pre-date 1933,  
and I forgot to say that in my post. But it is clear in my account of  
him in my  book.



Regards,

Bruce



On Aug 10, 2013, at 6:39 PM, <koreanstudies-request at koreanstudies.com>  
wrote:

> Send Koreanstudies mailing list submissions to
> 	koreanstudies at koreanstudies.com
>
> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> 	http://koreanstudies.com/mailman/listinfo/koreanstudies_koreanstudies.com
>
> or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> 	koreanstudies-request at koreanstudies.com
>
> You can reach the person managing the list at
> 	koreanstudies-owner at koreanstudies.com
>
> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> than "Re: Contents of Koreanstudies digest..."
>
>
> <<------------ KoreanStudies mailing list DIGEST ------------>>
>
>
> Today's Topics:
>
>   1. Re: Mein Kampf (Frank Hoffmann)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Sat, 10 Aug 2013 11:26:04 -0700
> From: Frank Hoffmann <hoffmann at koreanstudies.com>
> To: Korean Studies Discussion List <koreanstudies at koreanstudies.com>
> Subject: Re: [KS] Mein Kampf
> Message-ID: <20130810112604638013.9f5f9e67 at koreanstudies.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Little to add to Professor Cumings' summarizing notes (based on his  
> own
> research) about Yi P?m-s?k, his Chos?n Minjok Ch'?nngny?ndan and
> Nazism. That all makes perfect sense.
>
> Maybe this: with the Internet and all its amazing possibilities of
> information gathering I noticed that some of my own perceptions are
> changing, caused by the connections we are now able to make, that 20  
> or
> 30 years ago were just not visible so easily, because we could not  
> make
> keyword and name searches in millions  and millions of documents, or
> even in "just" the major Korean newspapers. For a small piece I am
> preparing right now (that's how I got to that Yi P?m-s?k quote) I am
> looking at Korean students in Europe during the 20s, 30s, and 40s, and
> while already having done exactly that many years ago, what I am now
> able to find is very amazing when it comes to how much details can be
> found, and what connections can now quickly be checked and established
> between the various 'players.'
>
> FOR EXAMPLE, Professor Cumings mentions "An Ho-sang [1902-1999], the
> first Minister of Education"--one of those who had studied in Nazi
> Germany, and indeed a convinced Nazi. I suppose that must be the  
> reason
> why the Deutsch-Koreanische Gesellschaft e.V. (German-Korean
> Association) continuously honored this specialist of Hegel and a
> Koreanized version of Aryan race theory (_The Korea-Dong-I Race_,
> 1972/1974) with short biographical essays until even after his death.
> In 1974 the West German government went as far as to award him the
> Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit (Verdienstkreuz 1. Klasse) for
> his continuous wonderful service to spread "German" "culture" to  
> Korea.
> Alles ganz wunderbar, if people stick to their convictions!
>
> But in spite of An's continuos role in all kind of organizations,
> mostly in Korean academia--and here I come with my note about the
> connections and details that do change (at least my) perceptions of
> what role which people played: An Ho-sang left Germany years before  
> the
> Nazis came to power, was later mostly influenced (and consequently
> influenced others) by Nazist "philosophy" and various other
> publications, both from Germany and through his study of Japanese
> materials. But there is another player that is completely new to me,
> and that is Kang Se-hyo?ng, born in 1899 (anyone finds out when he
> passed away, please let me know, thanks!). He had this typical
> upper-class career, got imprisoned for over half a year because of
> activities during the March First Movement, but then studied  
> philosophy
> at both Waseda U and Sophia University in Tokyo. (As late as the late
> 1980s, as I recall, I still met a professor from Sophia U praising
> Fascist ideologies in private conversations. And you can also see that
> if you go through their university journals, of the Philosophy Dept.)
> So, Kang Se-hyo?ng got nicely prepared there with pre-Nazi nationalist
> and race theories. He then went on to Berlin and studied philosophy
> here, during the 1930s, and became an ardent propagator of Nazism and
> the Hitlerjugend (HJ, Hitler Youth) to Koreans (plenty of articles!).
> The Hitler Jugend organization thanked him in person. I only became
> ware of Kang by that mentioned Japanese scholar, Fujii Takeshi, just
> two days ago--am still looking into various documents. But yes, it
> seems he met and likely influenced Yi P?m-s?k (when he visited). Kang,
> other than An Ho-sang, seems to have had a rather limited intellectual
> capacity--Kang did fall for the most brainless and barbaric Nazi
> slogans (even from a contemporary point of view), and he translated
> everything nicely into Korean (and Japanese)--did not even transform
> like An did with his "Dong-I Race" theory to East Asia. But what I  
> see,
> after just going through a lot of documents, is that he was the guy
> that did actively split the Korean community in Berlin and the rest of
> Europe--that's how it looks to me. He was able to do so because of his
> work with and for the German-Japanese Society, which had a similar
> control and spy function than later the post -1945 cultural sections  
> of
> embassies (e.g. the that of the ROK embassies). Koreans active in the
> cultural area, arts, literature, teaching at universities, etc., had  
> to
> do most of that during the Nazi period by working with the
> German-Japanese Society. In any case, while no great intellectual  
> but a
> man with a slave mentality and a devotee to pure Nazism, he still
> gathered power and and was one way or another seemingly convincing. At
> the other end of the scale, as a left-wing activist and amazing  
> scholar
> (responsible for the standardization of today's Korean orthography)  
> was
> Yi K?ng-no (alias Li Kolu, 1893-1978) who had also studies philosophy,
> but actually was one of the most important Korean "Han'g?l scholars,"
> and the main organizer of Korean anti-Japanese demos in Germany and
> Europe. Both were at different times in Berlin, but both left their
> followers and organizations, as it now seems. After Kang Se-hyo?ng had
> returned to first Japan, and later to Korea, he continued to be active
> in politics, became a member of the ROK National Assembly and the
> Director of Department of Defense (do I translate that correct? ???
> ????). (His wife, by the way, Wikipedia knows it all, is former
> Prime Minister Lee Hoi-chang's aunt, which is not all too surprising:
> http://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/???). Kang Se-hyo?ng had his hay days in
> the late colonial period and the years after liberation, exactly as  
> one
> of the main propagandists for the Chos?n Minjok Ch'?nngny?ndan, and
> other groups he tried to establish--all seemingly modeled on the
> paramilitary Hitlerjugend. After the Korean War, of course, and with a
> continued strong American lead and pressure for some sort of  
> democracy,
> that was even too much for the Rhee government. Have a look at a 1955
> newspaper article, a very bitter-sarcastic attack against Kang, who is
> even (still being an Assembly man) declared a psychopath, a mental
> case, because of his open propagation of Nazi ideologies. The article,
> though, makes very clear that Kang himself was absolutely straight
> forward about all this, even declared himself to represent the "German
> faction" within the Assembly--that is the Nazi-trained
> ultra-nationalist faction. By 1955 his time of influence was over, but
> in the 40s he was the man.
> There is *much* more to all this ? will try to put part of that into
> the texts I mentioned.
>
> Mentioned newspaper clip -- see below.
>
> Best,
> Frank
>
>
> -------------- next part --------------
> A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
> Name: KANG_1955.jpg
> Type: image/jpeg
> Size: 236863 bytes
> Desc: not available
> URL: <http://koreanstudies.com/pipermail/koreanstudies_koreanstudies.com/attachments/20130810/48f3c359/attachment.jpg 
> >
> -------------- next part --------------
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Fri, 9 Aug 2013 22:34:27 -0400, Bruce Cumings wrote:
>>
>> It has been amusing to read the various posts on Kim Jong Un
>> allegedly handing out copies of Mein Kampf  to aides and associates.
>> First, the explicit or implicit assumption that this is just one more
>> good reason to revile this regime, more evidence of its depravity
>> (even though we have no proof that the story has any basis in fact);
>> then a couple of people point out that this book can also be found
>> fairly easy in South Korea; then the trail of this discussion grows
>> cold, until Frank brought us today's learned post by a Japanese
>> historian--with the tag that I might also have written about this
>> same phenomenon. I appreciate the reference and truly loathe tooting
>> my own horn. But my discussion of these very same things runs through
>> both volumes of my Origins of the Korean War--yet often I was just
>> representing what secret internal American reports in the late 1940s
>> said over and over again: that Yi Pom-sok's "Blue Shirts" were
>> offshoots of Chiang Kai-shek's fascist youth wing by the same name
>> (Chiang, of course, chose blue in the 1930s because black, brown and
>> green were already called for; Yi Pom-sok was just copying Chiang);
>> that the U.S. Occupation tried to clean up his Blue Shirts by
>> officially funding and sponsoring them as the Korean National
>> Youth--yet the KNY was secretly reported over and over again to have
>> been engaged in terrorist activities; that a more virulent "youth
>> group" (many members were in their 40s), the Northwest Youth, was a
>> self-proclaimed terrorist organization, wreaking havoc throughout the
>> South; that An Ho-sang, the first Minister of Education, was a clear
>> fascist who admired Hitler and German philosophy and had a degree
>> from Jena University in Germany (he was no dummy, a very interesting
>> man in many ways, who trumpeted the chuch'e idea--his version--in his
>> books and speeches; but still, a fascist); that the head of the Seoul
>> Metropolitan Police, Chang T'aek-sang, was another admirer of fascism
>> who was still sporting a Hitler/Tojo/Charlie Chaplin-style moustache
>> in 1947, when it had, so to speak, gone quickly out of fashion
>> elsewhere in the world--and on and on. Yi Pom-sok's leadership of the
>> KNY made him very powerful; he was South Korea's first Defense
>> Minister. You find in his writings of the time similar emphases as in
>> Dr. An's, if in short form: admiration for Hitler and fascism,
>> discussion of chuch'e, focus on "one singular, pure ethnic people,"
>> namely the Korean minjok--and then of course we had Syngman Rhee's
>> ideology, Ilminjui, which Americans could never understand; this too
>> was a reflection of Chinese influence, but instead of Sun Yat Sen's
>> progressive Three People's Principles, you have Rhee's One People
>> Principle: Koreans first, Koreans always, Koreans forever. But one
>> can understand the popularity of such ideas: 80 years of history had
>> taught Koreans that if they don't look after their own interests and
>> focus on them, they can be sure no one else will.
>>
>> To study Korea as a foreign scholar is to engage in a profound
>> exercise in difference: in the late 1960s translations of Mein Kampf
>> were available in most book shops in Seoul, and on street book carts;
>> I saw them many times, but I did not know the meaning of what I was
>> seeing--what was the attraction of this book, which is mainly an
>> ignorant stew of racial and ethnic stereotypes? A leader whom I
>> admired from the late 1940s, Yo Un-hyong, like so many other leaders
>> at the time, referred to mein kampf--my struggle, naui t'ujaeng. That
>> doesn't make him a fascist, but it does make him different from
>> liberal imaginings. After he was assassinated in July 1947--with the
>> support and connivance of Chang's police, I am convinced--at his
>> funeral huge, swaying crowds carried signs saying this: Sun of the
>> Nation (minjogui t'aeyang). Need I point out that North Korea was
>> already saying the same thing about Kim Il Sung?
>>
>> People like Yo, Kim, An, and indeed both Korean regimes, came out of
>> an interwar milieu that had turned much of the world toward extremes
>> of left and right, with the middle ground falling away; liberalism
>> was barely breathing, except in the US and UK (and in both it was
>> also threatened by extremes of left and right). Yet always, always, I
>> would read internal laments by American officials that these very
>> same folks--Yo, Kim, An, Rhee--were not putting down the roots of
>> liberalism.
>>
>> Anyone who has read H. D. Harootunian's Overcome by Modernity would
>> not be surprised by Deputy Prime Minister Aso Taro's remark last week
>> about Hitler doing a good job in revising the Weimar Constitution.
>> These are outbursts from the political id of the rightwing of the
>> LDP. They are manifestations of a time when fascist ideology was
>> dominant in Japan, when Prime Minister Abe's grandfather, Kishi
>> Nobosuke, was a rising star in Manchukuo. Both Koreas emerged from a
>> similar interwar milieu. The occasional remnant signs of this past
>> are no more surprising then the continuing reverence among many
>> Lousianans for Huey Long, whose statue stands outside the Capitol
>> Building in Baton Rouge.
>>
>> Santayana was not quite right when he said that those who cannot
>> remember history are bound to repeat it. It is more a matter of not
>> knowing history, of studying a country and a civilization going back
>> to antiquity without taking upon oneself the necessary labor of
>> trying to exclude one's own dearest beliefs, lest they cloud an
>> apprehension of Korea's very different historical roots.
>>
>>
>>
>
> --------------------------------------
> Frank Hoffmann
> http://koreanstudies.com
>
> End of Koreanstudies Digest, Vol 122, Issue 9
> *********************************************





More information about the Koreanstudies mailing list