Lesson From Gwangju Uprising

The following is a summary of a paper written by Bruce Cumings, a historian and professor at the University of Chicago, specializing in modern Korean history and contemporary international relations in East Asia. He presented the paper at a seminar on the 27th commemoration of the May 18 Gwangju Uprising at Chonnam National University in the southwestern city of Gwangju on Friday. -- ED.

By Bruce Cumings

Professor at the University of Chicago

The Gwangju Uprising was South Korea's Tiananmen crisis, deeply shaping the broad resistance to the dictatorship in the 1980s and paving the way for democratization in the 1990s, and the conviction for treason and sedition of the perpetrators who massacred innocent citizens in Gwangju.

The American response to the uprising represented, to me, the most nauseating display of hypocrisy, opportunism, racism, and betrayal of American democratic ideals between the Korean War and the present. Americans, and especially China experts, are capable of going on forever about the perfidy of Beijing's leaders in crushing the Tiananmen demonstrations in June 1989 _ where Americans had no responsibility at all for what happened. But where Americans were directly implicated in the suppression of the rebellion in Gwangju, the response is mostly silence.

Once again U.S.-commanded troops had been released for domestic repression, only this time the bloodletting rivaled Tiananmen in June 1989. The declassified documents that Tim Shorrock, a reporter for the Journal of Commerce, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, make clear that the U.S. as a matter of the highest policy determined to support Chun Doo-hwan and his clique in the interests of ``security and stability’’ on the Korean Peninsula, and to do nothing serious to challenge them on behalf of human rights and democracy.

Indeed, reading through the materials makes it clear that leading liberals _ like Jimmy Carter and his ambassador in Seoul, William Gleysteen, his National Security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, and especially Richard Holbrooke (then under-secretary of state for East Asia) have blood on their hands from 1980: the blood of hundreds of murdered or tortured young people in Gwangju.

Americans are once again mired in a nightmare of their own making, in another country that they neither understand nor care much about.

Every day the newspapers are full of stories about Congress demanding a date to pull American troops out of Iraq, and President Bush going on about ``security’’ and the necessity to ``support our troops.’’ Missing in this endless commentary is anyone who thinks the war in Iraq is going to end well.

In fact this affair is already over; the U.S. cannot defeat its enemies and the only question is whether enough of Iraq can be stabilized to allow the permanent stationing of American troops on the many bases the U.S. has been building over the past four years. If that outcome is possible, then Iraq will be another Korea and Americans will be ensconced on their bases forever, lest some ``instability’’ result or some ``evildoers’’ arise.

The experience of recent years again makes me wonder if Americans can ever transcend their own experience and join a world of profound difference. When you think all your truths are self-evident and when the fondest hope of foreigners from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe is to become a citizen of your country, it is difficult to understand that not everyone in the world wants to be an American.

Our history is one of launching out on missions to transform the world _ in the contemporary case, ``to rid the world of evil’’ _ followed by inevitably chastened returns to a continental homeland that is fundamentally sufficient unto itself. The commanding interpretation of this back-and-forth phenomenon is Louis Hartz's classic, The Liberal Tradition in America; at the end of the book he hoped _ it was only a hope _ that Americans would find that ``spark of philosophy’’ enabling them to live comfortably with a world very different from American imaginings.

The Vietnam War burned the soul of an entire generation (mine) and fostered exactly the kind of ``chastened return’’ that Hartz wrote about. But American military bases remained in place elsewhere, and the hard-won lessons of Vietnam were perverted by Ronald Reagan and both Bushes into a doctrine of using military force to ``put Vietnam behind us.’’

The debacle in Iraq, however, may brand another generation, and with the American military stretched and burdened by trying to hold down security in so much of the globe (we have truly become ``the world's policeman’’), it is possible that a movement will arise in the new century finally to bring our far-flung troops home.

Korea is another country, of course, but the lessons of Gwangju resonated with those of America in the 1960s: if you want your civil and political rights, you have to fight for them or you will never get them. It is a matter of considerable shame to me that another lesson of the Gwangju Uprising was this: you cannot trust American leaders to support democracy in Korea (a belief of the older generation in South Korea), instead you have to build democracy yourself.

Through a long-term struggle, beginning in 1945 and achieving great force in the late 1980s and 1990s, Koreans created an admirable democracy and a strong civil society, moving from the bottom up rather than from the top down. One can only have a deep admiration for the multitude of courageous but ordinary people who took it upon themselves to resist illegitimate power.