Among the subjects of instruction in schools are the local language, spoken and written; the techniques of computation, arithmetic and algebra or geometry; the principles of the physical world, chemistry and physics; and the story of the country in which the school is located—unless it is a colony in which case the story of the country that rules it. That story and its episodes is what is commonly known as history. Sometimes it is taught generally. At some point a distinction may be made between local or national history and the greater odyssey know as world history. In the Anglo-American educational tradition established by Matthew Arnold and John Dewey, the aim of school instruction is to instill in the pupil or student a sense of virtue and national pride capable of sustaining citizenship and duty to the State (euphemistically described as democracy in the US).
History is first and foremost a moral subject, as opposed to a scientific investigation, something like catechism or homilies at mass. The graduate should have imbibed enough of the national theodicy to continue to judge the affairs of which he learns in a manner consistent with the national ideals. The pupil is carefully shielded from that contentious atmosphere otherwise known as historical scholarship, lest it interfere with indoctrination. If history is written by the victors, the first place they celebrate is in the history books used in formal education.
When in the wake of 1989, many scholars claimed the “end of history” had arrived, they also meant the end to any necessity of contemplating other ways to explain the events constituting the American Empire. However, in 1865, the victors in the civil war aka as the war between the States and among the vanquished the “war of Northern aggression”, the history books were written to explain and justify the defeat of the southern states, the destruction of their economy, and the military occupation of their territory. In the campaign to expand US power into the western peninsula of Eurasia in 1917, the history books had to be re-written to make all the immigrants from belligerent countries into sanitized Americans who could then be recruited to invade the lands of their forefathers bearing moral superiority. After 1945, the history of the hostilities formally declared on 7 December 1941 was revised to obscure the support for fascism and highlight the perennial battle against communism. When the US continued its efforts to control the Asian mainland after the defeat of Japan, the government found itself compelled to end Jim Crow. The reaction to this intrusion into the social order established to reconcile North and South was the introduction of “sub-national history” in the former Confederacy, reviving the rebuttals of abolitionism and industrial expansionism that had been the formal motives for the attacks on Southern sovereignty. Even after the so-called Civil Rights Era had ended, a South Carolinian was taught quasi-national history more intensively than national or world history combined. Memory of a war that had ended more than a century ago constituted the essence of South Carolinian identity for those who attended school.
Bruce Cumings, in his works recounting and analysing the war whose beginning in Korea is dated in 1951, has written that “civil wars do not start, they come.” His definitive two-volume study The Origins of the Korean War establishes that the core of the conflict was a civil war in the Korean nation. As such the enduring conflict whose greatest violence exploded between 1951 and 1953, arose in Korean society and with the defeat of Imperial Japan exploded in the vacuum created by that brief cessation of foreign domination. That is the Korean War which continues to this day, the war unknown in the US because US national history does not recognize the sovereignty of other nations, especially those populated by brown, yellow or red peoples. Professor Cumings also wrote that the Korean War has been erroneously called the “forgotten war” when it should be called the “unknown war”.
Of course the thousands of US soldiers, sailors and airmen who participated in the wholesale slaughter of Koreans and the wanton destruction of at least half of the peninsula did not forget the war, even if they reluctantly discussed it. Nor have the Koreans who survived the heaviest saturation bombing campaign ever conducted (until Vietnam) forget the war.
Already during the active combat operations, journalist I.F. Stone was able to establish the US government’s policy of concealing the war from the public at large. In his Hidden History of the Korean War (review), Stone relied solely on official pronouncements and the reporting by the mainstream media to show how what was known about the war was consistently kept as unknown as possible. Needless to say once the Chinese Peoples’ Volunteer Army had forced the US war machine, operating behind a UN fig leaf, to accept a stalemate, the hiding continued.
Not only was the civil war character of the Korean conflict denied—and hence the Korean authority to resolve the internal domestic disputes—the actual role of the US as a party to war against all of Korea was hidden by the claim that US Forces were merely commanding UN troops. Hence the active imperial objectives of the US government (and the interests it represents) were never officially recognized and or negotiated. Neither the Korean state constituted by the US nor that constituted by Koreans in the north were able to dispute the legitimacy of the US as an invader of their country.
So the Korean War is unknown in two senses. The essentially Korean nature of the civil war is denied and, therefore, untaught. The US invasion of Korea in 1945, as part of its manifest destiny to control China through Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines, is completely obscured or distorted by an utterly false implied analogy with the occupation of Germany.
In recent years there have been some attempts to at least show the extent of US barbarism in Korea. In fact everything Americans had come to hear about their war against the Vietnamese had been practiced full throttle in Korea. The virtue of telling a history of the Korean War might be to demonstrate the patterns in US warfare against target countries. It might show that the myths of US wars for freedom have always been just that. That knowledge might lead to a more critical view and consideration of contemporary lies and concealment by government, armed or civilian. Recounting US atrocities can be instructive. However, without adequate context, pupils are left with shock and awe but little to ripen their understanding. Since the task of history instruction remains unchanged, exposures such as the massacres perpetrated by US troops remain anecdotes, even if very brutal ones. In contrast, an examination of the origins of civil war in other countries, like Korea, not only acknowledges that other countries have histories independent of the United States. It also permits consideration of such questions as “what would have happened had the British successfully intervened on the side of the Confederacy in the US Civil War?” That could lead to recognition why Britain was actually considered an enemy of the US until 1917?
While it may often be impossible to identify the beginning of something, it is therefore crucial to examine the end of it. The Korean War has not ended, either for Koreans still deprived of their 1000-year-old sovereignty, which Americans helped Japan end in the beginning of the last century. It has also not ended for the US which pretends it is not a formal belligerent whose intervention in the peninsula was driven by grand strategic goals in East Asia, goals the pursuit of which it has yet to abandon. In the nearly century of endless wars waged by the US throughout the world, the refusal to acknowledge either starts or finishes is part of the policy of deniability. No one attacked by the US or NATO or some American force wearing “UN Blue” can ever openly claim its rights to self-determination or self-defence under the UN Charter because those attacks are extra-legal, extra-territorial, and extra-vicious. If history instruction is to contain more than national apologetics and catechism, then it might start with viewing the nation among the community of nations. The gaps that need to be filled are those which comprise international law, aka the law of nations, and the international humanitarian law adopted with the UN Charter, as a ratified treaty binding elements of US law. Then one could begin to ask pupils and students to reflect on the conduct of their government in accordance with international standards rather than parochial rules fabricated in foreign policy think tanks or departmental committee rooms. Then the massacres and carpet bombing of Korea would not be mere shock and awe anecdotes but the point of departure for investigating the content of a truly moral and responsible role for the US in the world.