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The Korean War: 1945-1953, by Hugh Deane. San Francisco, California: China Books & Periodicals, 1999. Paper, $14.95. Pp. 246.
The title says it all. History as taught in the United States dates the war from the North's "invasion" of South Korea on June 25,1950. But Old Korea Hand Deane introduces his sharp analysis of the war with an apt quote from the leading U. S. scholar of Korea, Bruce Cumings. "For Americans," Cumings pointed out in his massive two-volume history, "the war began with a thunderclap in 1950. For Koreans, it began in 1945."
Their "revisionist" point, of course, is that U. S. suppression of a popular leftist movement in South Korea, carried out from 1945 by the U. S. military government and its designated comprador regime of Syngman Rhee, is responsible for the civil war that still, despite recent steps toward rapprochement, defines the legal relation of the two Koreas. In Deane's view, then, the events of June 1950 merely mark the massive U. S. military intervention in a civil war that Rhee's puppet army had lost within a few days.
Deane provides important eyewitness reports on the U. S. suppression of the left from his first arrival in October 1945 as a junior naval officer, to his journalistic assignments in 1947 and 1948. Deane was one of handful of U. S. reporters (notably including Mark Gayne) who defied military censors. He sent the Allied Labor News and later the New York Compass accurate accounts of the savage persecution of labor unions and other popular organizations and the consequent guerrilla warfare that raged through South Korea from 1946.
Deane contrasts the limited resistance to the war in the United States with the massive protests of the Vietnam War. He credits the righteous opposition of Monthly Review (which published I. F. Stone's Hidden History of the Korean War...