(Download) "Beyond Collective Amnesia: A Korean war Retrospective (1)." by International Social Science Review * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Beyond Collective Amnesia: A Korean war Retrospective (1).
- Author : International Social Science Review
- Release Date : January 22, 2001
- Genre: Social Science,Books,Nonfiction,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 200 KB
Description
For nearly three decades after the end of the Korean War, American veterans of the conflict--along with increasing numbers of historians and other scholars--bemoaned the fact that Korea had become a "forgotten war." In fact, in the United States there were signs that the war was being forgotten even as it was being fought. After fifty years of retrospection, however, it has become readily apparent that the Korean War marked a great watershed in Korean and Cold War history, not to mention a sea change in U.S. history. Why, then, was there this early popular and academic amnesia toward a conflict that killed more than 34,000 Americans and several million Koreans and Chinese? As with all such sweeping historical dilemmas, the explanation of such phenomena is at once complex and multi-faceted. First, it is helpful to view the Korean War as one that was wedged tightly between the "good war" and the "bad war"; that is, between World War II and the Vietnam War. (2) Occurring less than five full years after the end of World War II, the Korean War was often and perhaps unavoidably compared with and subsumed by the myth and memory of the Second World War. On the surface, at least, the Korean Conflict seemed to have emerged like an unwanted mutation from a linear, Darwinian-like process that seamlessly linked World War II with the Cold War and its early evolutionary process. Thus, from the start, the Korean War became a prisoner of the rigid mentality and ideology of the early Cold War and furthermore seemed to have been denied the full internal and external processes of memory and myth that Paul Fussell saw as such an integral part of the history and memory of World War I. Perhaps on the one hand the Korean War "inherited" too much myth from World War II. And on the other hand, perhaps it "generated" too little myth of its own. As a result, the war and its generated--and regenerated--myths never became "part of the fiber of our own lives," as Fussell put it. (3) And if that had not been bad enough, America's growing quagmire in Vietnam began in earnest and in large scale only ten years AFTER the Korean armistice. Vietnam, of course, would quickly overshadow any lingering doubt--not to mention lessons learned or unlearned--from America's first war of communist containment on another artificially-divided Asian peninsula.
 "Beyond Collective Amnesia: A Korean war Retrospective (1)." by International Social Science Review * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free){kind=link}