Books on the Vietnam and Korean Wars

[JimmyJazz]

Are there any good ones?

I've seen lots of good movies and documentaries about Vietnam, and Hearts & Minds is probably my all-time favorite documentary, but I haven't ever read a real history of Vietnam. I did read an extremely good book called Patriots: The Vietnam War Remembered from All Sides (http://www.amazon.com/Patriots-Vietnam-War-Remembered-Sides/dp/0142004499/ref=sr_1_12?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251429045&sr=1-12) by Christian G. Appy, but that's not an actual history, just a bunch of interviews from people on all sides.

The only books I've seen on Vietnam that even appeared to be good were Vietnam: A History (http://www.amazon.com/Vietnam-History-Stanley-Karnow/dp/0140265473/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251429045&sr=1-5) by Stanley Karnow and Vietnam Wars 1945-1990 (http://www.amazon.com/Vietnam-Wars-1945-1990-Marilyn-Young/dp/0060921072/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251429045&sr=1-10) by Marilyn Young. But the former seems like more of a political history than an on-the-ground history of the war, and the latter doesn't seem very in depth at all.

So, is there anything better than these? Or has anyone read these who thinks they are good?

As for Korea, I have never seen any book or movie about it that looked remotely good. Only military histories on "how we could have won it" by West Point grads.

[Random Precision]

Where Korea is concerned, the best out there is The Origins of the Korean War in two volumes by Bruce Cummings. This book really established what role the United States had in provoking the conflict with the Soviets, and goes into a lot of detail about how the US retained a lot of officials in the military, government etc. that had been collaborators with the Japanese. For that among other reasons when it came out in Korean translation it was promptly banned by the South Korean government, and was smuggled around in "unofficial" editions by the revolutionary movement there for years.

As for Vietnam, I think the best work is by Gabriel Kolko, particularly his Anatomy of a War.

[x359594]

I second Random Precision's recommendations.

For Vietnam I'll add A People's History of the Vietnam War by Jonathan Neale (and there are books written contemporay with the war that have much historical value, eg., Winners and Losers by Gloria Emerson, At War With Asia by Noam Chomsky and My Lai 4 by Seymour Hersh.)

I liked Marilyn Young's book but I thought Karnow was presenting the official liberal history of the conflict, and with that caveat it was of interest.

For the Korean War, there's Korea: The Unknown War by Bruce Cummings and Jon Halliday.

[Cymru]

The tunnels of Cu Chi, Tom Mangold and John Penycate is an excellent book on the Vietnam war

also I thought:

+ Lawrence E, Grinter and Peter M. Dunn (eds), ‘The American War in Vietnam – Lessons, legacies and implications for future conflicts’

and

+ Gracy Sevy (ed), ‘The American Experience in Vietnam’

were pretty decent reads.

Zinn also does a good piece on Vietnam in A peoples History....

[chimx]

Korea:

Bruce Cumings
Frank Baldwin
Robert Simmons*
William Stueck

garbage authors:
Martin Hart-Landsberg
Howard Zinn

You'll be dumber when you finish reading Landsberg/Zinn


* A lot of Simmons' stuff was written before the opening of soviet archives, so you have to take his conjecture with a grain of salt. for example, his hypothesis in the strained alliance turned out to be false once documents became available out of the former USSR. Still a good author/historian.

[Random Precision]

garbage authors:
Martin Hart-Landsberg
Howard Zinn

You'll be dumber when you finish reading Landsberg/Zinn

Would you please elaborate?

[chimx]

Would you please elaborate?

There research is subpar to say the least. Zinn will write "history" books without doing new research and uses selective documents. Lambert will just ignore massive amounts of historical data to make an ideological point and is incredibly intellectually dishonest

[Luís Henrique]

There's Michael Herr's Dispatches, which is journalism rather than history. Awful but probably unavoidable.

Luís Henrique

[Random Precision]

Nothing Human is Alien, please don't make posts that consist of nothing but a personal attack.

[chimx]

Nothing Human is Alien, please don't make posts that consist of nothing but a personal attack.

well i want to respond to it regardless as it relates to my comments above anyway. It isn't going to hurt my feelings if NHiA thinks I'm a liberal.


Whereas liberals like chimx simply prefer to pass off bourgeois historians as "neutral" authorities on history.

Unless you are an advocate of post-modern historiography, most historians, whether liberal or conservative strive to produce objective history. At the same time, they are often very aware of the subjective perspective of the individual historian.

But Landsberg isn't interested in creating objective history. He is either extremely ignorant of the subject's he writes on, or more likely, he purposefully ignores massive amounts of primary documents to produce a book to justify his political beliefs. That is not only intellectually dishonest, but it is downright pathetic.

Why do you as a socialist want to defend bad historians, simply because you agree with their ideological perspective? Personally I find it insulting to socialism, to suggest that we need to manipulate historical facts to justify our political programs today. You certainly shouldn't be calling yourself a Marxist -- a scientific socialist -- if you are so set on ignoring the material facts.

Unfortunately, there are no english-speaking communist historians that deal with the Korean War whose works stand up to a peer review. At least none that I know of. I have no idea of Cumings' political beliefs, but I do know that his books are praised by the Socialist Review (SWP-UK).

I.F. Stone, not a historian but a journalist, wrote a book on the Korean War. You can also try to check him out for a different perspective provided you realize that he is writing as a journalist and not a historian and is therefore limited in many ways.

[Random Precision]

I was criticizing another posters politics and choice of sources.

Don't trash my posts.

No, you were disrupting a thread with a personal attack. And since I'm the moderator of this forum, I'll decide what gets trashed. :)

[x359594]

...I have no idea of Cumings' political beliefs, but I do know that his books are praised by the Socialist Review (SWP-UK).

I.F. Stone, not a historian but a journalist, wrote a book on the Korean War. You can also try to check him out for a different perspective provided you realize that he is writing as a journalist and not a historian and is therefore limited in many ways.

As to Bruce Cummings, he's given a fair account of the DPRK in his short book North Korea: Another Country, neither demonizing its leaders nor idolizing them. For this he's been vilified by necon cranks. I don't know what his politics are, but I would guess his not a man of the right.

Stone's book The Hidden History of the Korean War, 1950-1951: A Nonconformist History of Our Times was dismissed as pro-communist for his questioning of the official cause of the war, but Cummings' two volume history has vindicated his admittedly speculative account. More recently Stone has been the object of a neoconservative campaign accusing him of having been a Soviet spy.

[chimx]

For anyone interested in looking up this author, his name is Bruce Cummings (two m's not one).

It's one m. I think you criticized me for writing it with two m's in the past, and are therefore assuming it is the opposite of whatever I write. I had a teacher whose name was Cummings with two m's, thus my constant misspelling of both of them:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Cumings


Korea: Division, Reunification, and U.S. Foreign Policy by Martin Hart-Landsberg

I've read this book by Landsberg, in fact I have it in front of me right now, and I've also talked with historians who had to review the book for different history journals. It is widely accepted as being garbage by every historian, be it left or right.

Want an easy test? Open up the index. Find me all the primary sources. List them. Now open Cumings' book. Find how many primary sources he used. List those. Let's have a comparison between good history and shitty history. Seriously. I dare you.

Other than a sprinkling of newspaper quotes, I don't see a single primary source in all of Landsberg's book. All it is is Choy Bong-youn's book "a history of the korean reunification movement" and Bruce Cumings' book "Origins of the Korean War", following by a lot of ibid.

I've read Choy's book and Cumings book. Landsberg arrives at a radically different position than the position in both Choy's book (which is honestly pretty moderate) and Cumings', but only by using those two books as sources (along with a few other secondary sources)! It's literally laughable, and most certainly not good history.

For example, look at pages 85-87. This deals with UNTCOK and the creation of the ROK. What does Landsberg say? "Only candidates loyal to either Rhee or Kim Sung-su participated [in the elections] and as a result their followers won 190 of the 198 seats." That is certainly true. He then says, "U.S. foreign policy had succeeded in dividing Korea and establish a right-wing government in the South".

This is a total perversion of the truth, and of what his primary sources Choy and Cumings write about. From Choy's book heavily used by Landsberg:


In sum, the American military authorities rejected the south Korean rightist leadership which had led the former Korean Provisional Government, most notably Syngman Rhee and Kim Ku, because they opposed the Moscow trusteeship decision on Korea and demanded withdrawl of all foreign troops from the peninsula so that the korean people could establish their own national government. The American military authorities suppressed the Korean Communists because they launched strikes and riots, and because they opposed the establishmenht of the South Korean Interim Government on the grounds that it would lead to a permanent division of the country and leave south Korea under American domination. Under these circumstances, the American military authorities ha ddecided to support the moderate political force led by Kim Kiusic and Ahn Chae-hong, who gave their lukewarm support to the Moscow decision and were willing to participate in the forthcoming Second Joint U.S.-U.S.S.R. Commission.

Landsberg purposefully leaves this out! It's astonishingly blatant how manipulative he is being. The United States did not like Synman Rhee. They wanted Kim Kiusic to lead the ROK. However, Kim Kiusic ended up refusing to participate in the elections, and thus the US had to settle for Rhee as a candidate since everybody else boycotted the election.

The United States had done plenty of bad things in Korea. There is no reason to pervert history to make a point.


In chimx's world, the capitalist owned press and the petty-bourgeois academic are transformed into producers of objective history while anything favorable to anyone calling themselves a communist is propaganda.

There are plenty of communist historians that strive to produce objective history and not propaganda. There is a pinned thread in this history forum with numerous authors. Eric Hobsbawm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Hobsbawm) for example is amazing. Unfortunately he hasn't written anything on Korea.

[chimx]

To the OP. I just remembered that George Katsiafiacas, a Marxist and student of Herbert Marcuse (is that okay NHiA?), has a book of primary sources relating to Vietnam:

http://www.eroseffect.com/books/vietnam.html

[chimx]

I'm not going to engage in the rest of chimx's crap. His positions on Korea (liberal, pro-imperialist) are well documented on this board; and just in case you needed any more proof, he's now painting the U.S.-backed and educated dictator Yi Seungman as a democratically elected leader.

I don't know where you read that. I said that the US was backing Kim Kiusic, and didn't like Rhee (or Yi, depending of your romanization). Landsberg ignores this to paint a false picture of Korean-American relations.

If you can't refute my post, just admit it. Don't cop out

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

'The American War' by Jonathan Neale:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/American-War-Vietnam-1960-1975/dp/1898876673

The best I have read so far.

This is the review of it at Amazon UK:


Examine every Hollywood film ever released about the American war, every column ever written in every major western newspaper ,every documentary ever composed and see what they all have in common. Some will view the war as right but see it as a mistake, either a poor assessment of the risks by the US government or a failing of the press to fulfill their 'civic duty', usually the latter. The second group is much larger but equally unrepresentative of the markets they claim to serve. They also view the war as a mistake and believe that the motivations for war were honorable but view this instance as being pragmatically unsuitable. What both groups have in common is their depiction of the root causes of the thousands of war crimes committed by US forces in South East Asia as being the fault of 'bad apples,' psychopathic rank and file soldiers who brought out the evil that exists in all of us.
Neill sets out to destroy both politically correct discourses and does so with precise impunity. He first of all points out that before the January68 the entire commercial press reported the Vietnam war exactly as the generals desired. A response to the thuggish brutality of the communist north to destroy the freedoms of the helpless but grateful peasants of the south. January68 was the month of the Tet offensive when the Viet Cong stormed every major city in South Vietnam, shattering the lies of the US army press releases of a Vietcong on the retreat.

This does not mean as would often be assumed that he is uncritical of the Vietcong. He rightly attributes the defeat of the Vietcong as being down to the deeply flawed politics of the leadership. They couldn't organize among the urban working class in the south. All working class organizations had been banned in the USSR backed north. To convince the Vietcong to build working class organizations would have undermined their own dictatorship. So there was no proletarian insurrection to join the peasant guerrillas and the war dragged on for another 7 years with no decisive outcomes.

The atrocities committed by US troops are also put in their right context. Yes there were those among them who enjoyed violence, but he shows why in this situation their behaviour encouraged by such compulsory practices as cutting of the ears of those who had been killed. It was also made clear by the generals that shooting civilians to fulfill body count targets set by the white house would be rewarded.

He also shows that after the Tet Offensive 80% or more of US citizens have consistently viewed the war as 'fundamentally wrong' and not as a mere mistake. The analyses and facts of this book offer an extremely rare insight into the brutal war and put it firmly in its context.

[KC]

I'm not going to engage in the rest of chimx's crap. His positions on Korea (liberal, pro-imperialist) are well documented on this board

Where?


and just in case you needed any more proof, he's now painting the U.S.-backed and educated dictator Yi Seungman as a democratically elected leader.

He said absolutely nothing of the sort, and I don't even see how one could twist what he has said to try to imply that.

Moreover, what he has said is correct: Landsberg's book is generally regarded by historians (from Marxists to "bourgeois" historians) as garbage history, which it is. The only people that would find it good are those that do not have a lot of knowledge of that history (i.e. those that do not know better) or those that are dishonest enough to promote a warped version of history to suit their own interests. Only the ignorant or dishonest promote a book like this.

[Invader Zim]

I'm not going to engage in the rest of chimx's crap. His positions on Korea (liberal, pro-imperialist) are well documented on this board; and just in case you needed any more proof, he's now painting the U.S.-backed and educated dictator Yi Seungman as a democratically elected leader.


Why do you make stuff up when we can all simply read the thread and see, with our own eyes, that Chimx hasn't said anything of the sort?

Also, do you disagree that the primary aim of the historian, regardless of their politics, should be to try to produce as accurate and objective a history as they are able? I would also like you to respond to the primary source issue put to you by Chimx. Is that too much to ask?

[KC]

Here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/s-korea-rebuffs-t63992/index.html?t=63992), h (http://www.revleft.com/vb/s-korea-rebuffs-t63992/index.html?t=63992)ere (http://www.revleft.com/vb/liberty-north-korea-t63904/index.html?t=63904), etc.

How about quotes?




When liberals like you and chimx

Because intellectual integrity is a liberal trait. :rolleyes:


I never made any statements in regard to the the academic value of Hart-Landsberg's book. I simply listed it as something that the OP may be interested in. I don't need to defend it.

So you think it is a good idea to pass along dishonest and incorrect portrayals of historical events? :confused:

[Invader Zim]

There's no such thing as being neutral in a class divided society.

Strawman. I never said there was. I asked you whether you agreed that the historian should aim to be as objective as they are able. Your erronious post-modern platitudes, and banal pronouncements on the state of the world under capitalism don't answer that.


When liberals like you and chimx deny all of this and pretend to be and advocate "neutral" observers history you end up joining with the bourgeoisie in their quest to cover up class divisions and promote the status quo.

Another strawman, this time joined by perjorative. Where have I denied the influence of class upon the world? Naturally I take issue with your two-dimensional view of the influence of class, and would point out the more nuanced issue of the impact of a class society on the very conciousness of the historian, but I don't disagree with the underlying thesis.

[x359594]

'The American War' by Jonathan Neale...

The US title is A People's History of the Vietnam War referenced above.

[KC]

How about digging them up yourself if you're interested?

I asked you where Chimx has displayed liberalism/pro-imperialism and you never showed me where; you simply pointed to a few threads. You might as well have just linked me to his post history.

If you don't want to back up your accusation then that's fine, but don't expect anyone to take it seriously then.


http://www.revleft.com/vb/../revleft/smilies/001_rolleyes.gif No, faux neutralism is.

Then you have made a straw man.


I think it's a good idea to take in as much information as possible on any subject so that you can draw your own conclusions.

So you agree with Chimx's appraisal of Hart-Landsberg's book?

[Invader Zim]

The point is that it doesn't matter what they aim for, there can be no neutrality in a class divided society.

So, basically all history (the product of historians) is unreliable nonsense because you believe that all historians are entirely incapable of objective analysis? Surely this is a wider phenomenon, not limited to printed material but to all recieved knowledge. Indeed we could argue that mindset of individuals living in a class divided society is also influenced and shaped by these factors. To quote Marx, "it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness". This is naturally because we spend our entire lives emmersed in this culture, and even our education is subject to the machinations of capitalist society. So all knowledge that comes our way is either the product of a non-neutral capitalist source. Surely this implies, given that even our powers of analysis are coloured by our non-neutral capitalist society. But consider this if all knowledge is fundermentally not trustworthy because it is the product of a class-divided society, and our own ability to analyse knowledge is a source of bias, how do you know you can trust your conclusion that knowledge isn't trustworthy?

Your position is a paradox, and contrary to what you contend, is an example of post-modernism.

[chimx]

Your position is a paradox, and contrary to what you contend, is an example of post-modernism.

To clarify for NHiA and others, post-modernism for historians has a specific meaning. Generally historians strive for objectivity while acknowledging that it is inevitably impossible to abandon a personal or subjective narrative that underlays the historical work. Good historians acknowledge their perspective and try to create an objective portrayal of past account in spite of this handicap. Post-modern historians* often embrace their personal narrative, saying that since true objectivity is impossible -- or that a scientific truth simply doesn't exist (a rejection of Marx's contributions to history in many ways) -- the emphasis should be the subjective narrative. It's an abandonment of the idea of a higher truth. Still, post-modern historians are not as deceitful as Landsburg.


*Zim is probably much more savvy on historical theory than me. I hope I didn't butcher it too badly.

[chimx]

First, it's Hart-Landsburg.

Actually it's Hart-Landsberg. Plus, hyphens are complicated. I shouldn't be bothered to try to find the hyphen key on my keyboard.


Second, acknowledging that certain sources are bourgeois and should be understood as such has nothing to do with post-modernism.

Some sources certainly are bourgeois in that their underlying narrative tends to defend the status quo, are more conservative, etc. But that doesn't make them bad historians, or what their writing on less true. Don Oberdorfer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Oberdorfer) is a great historian who deals primarily with Korea, but he certainly comes from a "bourgeois perspective".

[JimmyJazz]

Ho Chi Minh: A Life by William J. Duiker

This looks pretty good, can anyone second it or recommend another HCM bio?

Edit: Also, I read recently that Max Shachtman refused to call for a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam (!), so I googled for a long time this morning to find an actual statement he ever made on Vietnam, but couldn't--if anyone knows where to find one online I'd really appreciate it.

[KC]

Edit: Also, I read recently that Max Shachtman refused to call for a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam (!), so I googled for a long time this morning to find an actual statement he ever made on Vietnam, but couldn't--if anyone knows where to find one online I'd really appreciate it.This is true. See the Statement on Vietnam published in the October 9, 1970 issue of Hammer & Tongs. Unfortunately I cannot find it online, but if you're near a university you should be able to retrieve it.