Bruce Cumings Compares Treatment of Blacks in South Side Chicago to 'Gulags'

U. Chicago Professor Bruce Cumings spoke at the Ath tonight. It wasn't heavily attended.

Much of what Cumings said seemed perfectly reasonable and even though I disagree, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but he slipped up in a few places. (I'll save his more egregious statements for the end.)

• He compared the brutal Japanese occupation in which the Japanese essentially terrorized the Korean peninsula to our own "interrogation techniques" used, presumably, in the War on Terror.
  
• I don't exactly buy that the American presence in Seoul directly after the end of World War II brought about the Korean conflict as he suggests. He, of course, denied that the Soviet Union and N. Korea's Kim Il Sung had any connections, even though the Soviet archives have revealed that Sung met with Stalin numerous times to get the green light to invade South Korea.
  
• He had a few slides talking about how N. Korea condemned the attacks on 9-11 and signed several agreements on terrorism -- as if that should somehow preclude us from labeling them a member of the "Axis of Evil"-- and then went on to talk about N. Korea's missile program and how they had developed connections with A. Q. Khan. The disconnect was apparently lost on him. If N. Korea really is a responsible -- or to use his phrase "just another" country, what's it doing hanging out with the likes of Khan?
  
• He says he just didn't understand what happened in February 2007 that brought the N. Koreans back to the bargaining table. Might it be that they wanted that billion dollar aid we promised them and saw the 6-party talks as the only means to get it?
  

All in all, I think he gives the Clinton Administration and Jimmy Carter far too much credit for a supposed nuclear freeze and he showed that he was an Obama supporter several times.
He even erroneously claimed that McCain wanted to be in Iraq for "one hundred years." He conveniently left out that Obama's military advisor, Tony McPeak, said exactly the same thing.

Cumings later called it a "Florida Fluke" that led to the Bush Presidency all but suggesting that the President was selected, not elected. How he reconciles that view with his apologizing for a real and actual dictatorship is anyone's guess.

Cumings, we know, has written favorably of so-called N. Korean "democracy."

As writer Anders Lewis describes one of his passages, he apparently doesn't understand that there are few comparisons between American and N.Korean elections, even though he witnessed an "election" in 1987.

[Cumings] writes that he "watched the hoopla at each polling place" and "was struck by the quaint simplicity of this ritual: a dubious yet effective brass band, old people bent over canes in the polling lines and accorded the greatest respect, young couples in their finest dress dancing in the chaste way I remember from ‘square dances' in the Midwest of the 1950s, and little kids fooling around while their parents waited to vote."

Cumings never explores how much real choice there was in that election, though he seems keen on pointing out how backwards our election was.

Let's turn now to the question and answer period in which I pressed Cumings on his statement about how the U.S. has a "longstanding, never-ending gulag full of black men in our prisons"--which should disqualify us from "pointing a finger," he launched into a discussion comparing the treatment of blacks in the South Side of Chicago, where he works, to the situation in the gulags. Although I have been rather critical of the drug war in the U.S., it seems ridiculous to compare the situation with blacks in the South Side of Chicago, who have albeit imperfect access to the legal system to the gulags of N. Korea, but Cumings does it without even blushing.

The implication of Cumings statement should not be lost on us. Cumings seems to be arguing that the people of the South Side of Chicago have been disadvantaged so badly that they are almost certainly going to end up in jail. I wonder what the response would have been if a right-winger had made that kind of an argument.

(It should be noted that Cumings never mentioned the 100,000 to 200,000 political prisoners in the speech, nor did he mention the atrocious human rights record of N. Korea, where they lock up whole families for the political crimes of their parents.)

"It's another country, not our country," he said. Well Mr Cumings, with all due respect, if Kim Jung Il wants that billion dollar aid and I, one of the 300 million Americans, am going to pay for it. I want some accountability, particularly if I believe that he's going to go to enriching the N. Korean regime.

It might be okay with you that Kim Jung Il's son is an avid NBA player, as you told us, or that Kim Jung Il is a "homebody" who likes "Super Mario" and James Bond movies, but it is unacceptable to me that he lives in that kind of luxury when his people starve and risk their lives crossing into South Korea. Yes I believe in more engagement than the Bush Administration, but no, I do not like the U.S. being extorted. We once said million for defense and not a penny for tribute. We should follow our history.

He conceded that N. Korea has an abysmal human rights record, although not as bad as the "South Korean propaganda" would have you believe, and then asked, "What are you going to do about it?"

That rhetorical question is easy. I'm going to listen to the people who lived it. I'm going to publicize those things you don't want people to know about N. Korea or that you deny exists. You talk about the cars N. Korea's state-owned companies develop. Let's talk about the evil in Camp 22.





















All of the videos are worth watching. How about Claremont McKenna stand on principle and invite this man to come and speak?

Let's oppose the kind of evil that this Guardian article describes

In the remote north-eastern corner of North Korea, close to the border of Russia and China, is Haengyong. Hidden away in the mountains, this remote town is home to Camp 22 - North Korea's largest concentration camp, where thousands of men, women and children accused of political crimes are held.

Now, it is claimed, it is also where thousands die each year and where prison guards stamp on the necks of babies born to prisoners to kill them.

Over the past year harrowing first-hand testimonies from North Korean defectors have detailed execution and torture, and now chilling evidence has emerged that the walls of Camp 22 hide an even more evil secret: gas chambers where horrific chemical experiments are conducted on human beings.

Curiously the Holocaust Center was silent on Cumings' visit, even though the parallels are striking. I guess they have bigger issues right now.

I pray that Cumings, like the Soviet admirers of the 1930s, will one day come to regret his apologies for evil.