North Korea: Another Country

 库明斯的《朝鲜战争：历史》是一部优秀的作品，它很好地将美国围绕其同名冲突的许多神话（甚至不是 "神话"，而是无知的空洞，其中涌入了许多关于美国基本善良的公理假设）进行了破坏。

在这一努力中，它所涉及的历史时期或多或少可以被划分为1945-1953年（是的，显然朝鲜战争在技术上仍在进行，但我们不要假装爆发为持续武装冲突的紧张局势的时期与随后70多年的好战缓和期是一样的）。

朝鲜战争是一个 "成品"，可以说，它可以作为一个历史事件来对待，它已经耗尽了自己，关于它的新信息不太可能出现（除非朝鲜/韩国的崩溃和秘密档案的开放，我猜）。

实际的朝鲜战争的 "不存在 "使库明斯的《朝鲜战争》成为一部永恒的作品：他写这本书时是真实的，20、30、40年后也不可能不真实。

当然，在如何讨论、思考和处理冲突方面可能会出现学术上的动荡，但这些只会改变研究人员与已经基本完成的事实库的关系。

总之，所有这些都是想说，朝鲜。

另一个国家》不具备这些优势。

这本书没有试图拆除一个早已结束的冲突的僵化概念，而是看到库明斯试图将朝鲜诚实地置于2003年的动荡的现代世界中。

这意味着这本书几乎一上架就已经过时了，而从出版到现在的18年里，这一点没有得到任何改善。

因此，整整一章都是关于金正日的性格和看法，反复提到金正男是朝鲜明确的继承人（事实上，我认为当时21岁的金正恩甚至没有被提及一次，这至少是相当有趣的：

大的 "灰色模糊 "能量），以及对南北关系的各种反思，这些都不再与我们当前的现实有多少相似之处。

但是！这并不意味着这本书的价值已经被时间的流逝完全蹂躏了。

这里仍然有很多东西值得一读，特别是如果你对朝鲜的看法仍然主要是由国务院备忘录和冷战宣传塑造的。

自苏联解体以来，朝鲜--从各方面考虑--都不是一个特别好的地方。

它有一个盛气凌人的钙化政府，基本商品经常短缺，有严格的信息饮食，而且生活在那里的每个人都必须面对朴妍美在乔-罗根或其他地方编造的关于他们的最疯狂的狗屎。

(题外话：西方读者最好不要对朝鲜政治制度的缺陷感到太过自鸣得意--因为我们的政府正在积极哄骗世界走向气候灾难，而且我们都被一个根深蒂固的统治阶级扼杀在摇篮里。当然，在无视人的生命方面，西方没有比其敌人更高的道德标准，而且从来没有过）。

就像菲茨帕特里克在《俄国革命》中提出十月革命的发展可能发生在一个特定的历史背景下并受到其影响一样，库明斯在本书中的主要贡献是提出朝鲜之所以成为朝鲜，是因为它已经（和正在）被做了什么，以及它自己发现和创造的条件。

他并没有像那些叫嚣着他有 "极左"（如果只是这样的话！）议程的乏味批评者所说的那样，把朝鲜局势的所有责任都从其政府的肩上推开。

事实上，他在书中花了大量篇幅感叹他们的过度谨慎和对政治权力的嫉妒，设想了一个失去的 "开放"，这个开放本可以在苏联解体后进行，但却淹没在朝鲜国家的死水里了。

这就是问题的全部。

朝鲜是 "另一个国家"，有缺点，有烦恼，有合理和不合理的不满：

是历史的产物，其中最近的部分包括日本的殖民残暴和美国的种族灭绝式轰炸和制裁运动。

可悲的是，像 "也许那里的情况很糟糕是有原因的"（你必须注意，这句话并不否认那里的情况确实很糟糕）这样平庸的说法，竟然会引发有正确思想的西方自由主义者的珍珠之争，但我想这就是帝国霸权对你大脑的影响。

说到这一点，即使你觉得所有这些 "背景 "的东西都非常无聊和虚假，这本书作为美国世界一贯欺负、虐待和欺骗朝鲜的无数方式的百科全书，功能非常好。

美国似乎沉迷于制定、改变和背弃与朝鲜的交易，这取决于其领导人认为朝鲜有多接近崩溃（以及随之而来的所有人类苦难，他们对此并不关心）。

朝鲜核计划的传奇故事，他们同意停止核计划以换取美国同意提供的轻水反应堆，但当他们认为提供非武器化的核能可能会稳定朝鲜政府并消除美国不断交战的理由时，却在最后一刻退缩了，这是一个赤裸裸的帝国虚伪的惊人例子。

库明斯本人最不愿接受的正是 "帝国式虚伪 "中的 "帝国式 "部分。

尽管他对历代 "目光短浅 "的美国政策制定者大加挞伐，并对朝鲜的实际人民表示明显的同情，但他坚持顽固的左翼自由主义，认为他无法接受美国的行为不是对任何潜在和最终崇高的政治项目的 "偏离"，而是对其作为世界主要帝国霸主的逻辑的基本表达。

像许多自由主义者一样，库明斯用历史学家的眼光看了一个多世纪的种族灭绝的白人至上主义，支持法西斯独裁者，奴隶制，老鼠线，对人类生命的反社会的蔑视，并得出结论，不，真正表达美国的基本性质的是我们一路走来的所有漂亮演讲。

这是不令人信服的。

不过，这并没有对本书造成太大的伤害。只要准备好对美国行为进行比库明斯本人更系统的批评就可以了。(更少)

Cumings' 'The Korean War: A History' is an excellent work which does a great job at taking a wrecking ball to a lot of the American mythmaking surrounding its eponymous conflict (or not even 'mythmaking', but the void of ignorance into which pours a lot of axiomatic assumptions about fundamental American goodness). It's assisted in this endeavour by the fact that it deals with a historical period which can more or less be sectioned off into the period 1945-1953 (yes, obviously the Korean War is still technically ongoing but let's not pretend the period of building tensions which erupted into sustained armed conflict are the same as the 70+ years of bellicose detente that followed). The Korean War is a 'finished product', so to say, and it can be approached and treated as a historical event which has exhausted itself and about which new information is unlikely to appear (barring the collapse of the DPRK/ROK and the opening of secret archives, I guess). The 'doneness' of the actual Korean War makes Cumings' The Korean War a timeless work: that which was true when he wrote it is unlikely to be untrue 20, 30, 40 years on. Sure, there might be academic upheavals in how the conflict is discussed, thought about, and approached, but these will only change how researchers relate to a corpus of facts that are already mostly complete.

Anyway, all of this is to say that North Korea: Another Country has none of these advantages. Rather than attempting to dismantle ossified conceptions of a long-concluded conflict, this book instead sees Cumings try to situate the DPRK honestly in the tumultuous modern world of 2003. This meant it was dated almost as soon as it hit shelves, and the intervening 18 years between its publication and now have done nothing to ameliorate that. Thus, an entire chapter on the character and perception of Kim Jong-il, repeated references to Kim Jong-nam as the DPRK's clear heir-apparent (in fact, I don't think the then-21-year-old Kim Jong-un is mentioned even once, which is at least quite funny: big 'grey blur' energy), and various reflections on relations between North and South that no longer bear much resemblance to our current reality.

But! That doesn't mean the book's value has been totally ravaged by the passage of time. There's still a lot in here that's worth reading, especially if your perception of the DPRK is still mostly shaped by State Department memos and Cold War propaganda. The DPRK is — all things considered — not an especially nice place to be since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It has an overbearing and calcified government, frequent shortages of essential goods, a strict information diet, and everyone who lives there has to deal with Yeonmi Park making up the most wild shit imaginable about them on Joe Rogan or whatever.

(Side note: western readers would do well — as our governments actively coax the world down the road to climate catastrophe and as we're all choked blue in the grip of an entrenched ruling class — not to feel too smug about the deficiencies of the DPRK's political system. And, of course, in terms of disregard for human life The West has no moral high ground over its enemies du jour and never has.)

Much in the same way that Fitzpatrick made waves in 'The Russian Revolution' by suggesting that the unfolding of October might possibly have occurred in and been influenced by a particular historical context, Cumings' chief contribution in this book is to suggest that the DPRK is the DPRK because of what has been done (and is being done) to it and the conditions it has alternatively found itself in and created for itself. He does not, as the tedious critics who screech he has a 'far-left' (if only!) agenda say, take all the blame for the situation of the DPRK off the shoulders of its government. In fact, he spends a great deal of the book lamenting their excessive caution and the jealousy with which they guard their political power, envisioning a lost 'opening up' that could have been pursued in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse but that instead drowned in the stagnant waters of the North Korean state. This is the whole point: North Korea is 'another country', with foibles and hang-ups and grievances both justified and unjustified: a product of history, the most recent part of which included Japanese colonial brutalisation and a genocidal American bombing and sanctions campaign. It's sad that a statement as banal as, 'Maybe there's a reason things are fucked up over there' (a statement which does not, you must note, deny that things are indeed fucked up over there) can trigger such pearl-clutching on the part of right-thinking western liberals, but that's what imperial hegemony does to your brain, I suppose.

Speaking of which, even if you find all this 'context' stuff very dull and spurious, the book functions very well as an encyclopaedia of the numerous ways the American world has consistently bullied, mistreated and lied to the DPRK. The US seems to be addicted to formulating, altering, and reneging on deals with the DPRK depending on how close its leaders believe the country is to collapse (and all its attendant human misery, about which they care little). The saga of the DPRK's nuclear program, which they agreed to halt in return for light water reactors which the US agreed to provide, only to back out at the last minute when they figured that providing non-weaponisable nuclear energy might stabilise the North Korean government and remove a justification for constant American belligerence, is a staggering example of naked imperial hypocrisy.

It is the 'imperial' part of 'imperial hypocrisy' which Cumings himself is most loath to accept. For all his railing against successive generations of 'short-sighted' American policymakers and obvious sympathy for the actual people of the DPRK, he clings to a stubborn left-liberalism which sees him unable to accept that America's behaviour is not a 'deviation' from any underlying and ultimately noble political project, but rather a fundamental expression of the logic of its role as the world's primary imperial hegemon. Like so many liberals, Cumings casts a historian's eye across a century plus of genocidal white supremacy, of propping up fascist dictators, of slavery, of rat-lines, of sociopathic disdain for human life, and concludes that, no, what really expresses America's fundamental nature is all the pretty speeches we gave along the way.

It's unconvincing. Still, it doesn't hurt the book too much. Just be prepared to come away from it with a more systemic critique of American behaviour than Cumings himself has. (less)