The Keck Center is "Honored" to Sponsor a North Korea Apologist

Carol Reed of the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies recently sent an email to all of Claremont McKenna's government majors.

It read that the center is "honored to sponsor a lecture by Bruce Cumings" of the University of Chicago. Why are they "honored" to have him come and speak? Should they be?

I've read a bunch of articles that Mr. Cumings has written. To put it bluntly, he's a North Korean apologist. That's a strong charge. Let's see if I can back it up.

Let's look at some of the more egregious things he's said over the years. Some of them are from this website.

• America's leading leftist historian on Korean history
• Blames mostly the U.S. for starting the Korean War
• Wrongly denied that the Soviet Union sponsored North Korea's invasion of South Korea
• Minimized the horrors of North Korea's famine of the 1990s
• Refuses to acknowledge that communism has been the cause of North Korea's economic catastrophes
• Blames the U.S. for its current political tensions with North Korea
• Says that 9/11 "bears comparison to the sick individuals with some sort of grievance who have shot up schools, malls or the Capitol Building in the U.S., and who are later shown not to have taken their daily dose of thorazine"
• Says that the Bush administration overreacted to 9/11 by pouring "billions into 'Homeland Defense' while showing a callous disregard for civil liberties, the rights of the accused, and the views of America's traditional allies
  

Top dumbest things that Cumings has said:

• Cumings compared the North Korean gulags to "longstanding, never-ending gulag full of black men in our [U.S.] prisons" -- which ought to preclude Americans from "pointing a finger" of condemnation at North Korea.
  

Top criticisms of his scholarship

• B.R. Myers, a Korean scholar, has pointed out many of Cumings' egregious scholarly errors in The Atlantic. These include
• Saying the Soviet Union did not support the North Korean invasion, even though Myers points out that since-declassified Russian documents "revealed that [North Korean President] Kim Il Sung had sent dozens of telegrams begging Stalin for a green light to invade, and that the two met in Moscow repeatedly to plan the event."
• Extoling the North Korean economy by praising its "miracle rice," "autarkic' economy, and prescient energy policy. The book, Myers notes, "went on sale just as the world was learning of a devastating famine wrought by [North Korean capital] Pyongyang's misrule."
• Declaring that the North Koreans are "an incredibly simple and hardworking life but also [had] a secure and happy existence, and the comradeship between these highly collectivized people [was] moving to behold" -- even though millions of North Koreans vote with their feet by escaping into China or through minefields into the South.
  
• Anders Lewis has more on Bruce Cumings, including Cumings's glorification of Kim Jung Il and Kim's love of Super Mario. (It's worth reading in its entirety, but I'm trying to make this blog post short.)
• Paul Hollander, a Harvard professor and escapee from communism in Hungary, has laid bare Cumings overly sympathetic treatment of N. Koreans political system in his review of Cumings' North Korea: Another Country.
• I recently emailed Professor Hollander for a statement on Cumings and his scholarship. Professor Hollander pointed me to the National Review review, but he also talked about scholarship generally. Here's what he said.

"Scholarship is influenced by emotional-psychological predispositions. Cumings, for reasons not known to me, is sympathetic towards N .Korea, including its
political system."

Cumings started his drift towards apologizing for evil. At Columbia, where Cumings got his dissertation, Cumings belonged to the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, a group which Tibetan political dissident and activist Jamyang Norbu calls,

"a now discredited organization of left-wing Mao-worshipping American sinologists who subscribed unquestioningly to the belief that Mao and the Communist Party of China had not only solved the problems of China but that of humankind as well; and that Communist China should be regarded as a model not just for developing nations, but also the United States."

I wonder if they would like to withhold that invitation. I doubt they will, but they ought to.

Jewish Chronicle on Petropoulous Scandal

It was only a matter of time before the national media picked this story up.

Now the international press, The Jewish Chronicle's Rachel Fletcher writes on it. She sums up Fischer's beef pretty neatly.

Her case was initially taken on pro bono by the London branch of the Art Loss Register (ALR) in 2001. But in January 2007, it requested a fee after locating the painting in Switzerland. The painting is reportedly worth between $5m and $7m; the ALR proposed a complex compensation scheme asking for 20 per cent of the first $1 million, 15 per cent of the second million and 10 per cent of any additional value.

Jonathan Petropoulos, a history professor at the Claremont McKenna College in California, was hired as a consultant. Later, working with Munich art dealer Peter Griebert, he tried to charge Mrs Fischer a fee in meetings held without the ALR officials, before establishing contact between her and the painter’s owners. The action was described as a “threat” by Mrs Fischer.

Yes, a Holocaust survivor is alleging that a professor who studies the Holocaust tried to extort her. Ouch.

Well, at least the Claremont Independent gets its just mention.

Emails sent in 2007 by Prof Petropoulos to Mr Griebert have been published in his university’s student magazine, Claremont Independent (CI).

In them, Prof Petropoulos, who is also director of the college’s Centre for the Study of Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights, states: “She [Mrs Fischer] simply cannot recover the painting without us. At least, I don’t know if she would discover on her own the identity of the holders and their current location.”

In another email he writes: “It would be difficult to give her the names and locations without any compensation. That just won’t happen.”

The professor, who has been cleared of legal wrongdoing in an internal inquiry by the university, told CI: “I always endeavoured to return the painting in question by Camille Pissarro to the person whom I believed to be the rightful heir.”

One of the guys that Petropoulous used to hang out with, Bruno Lohse, is further described by Sarah Jackson of the Art Loss Register, the same firm that hired Petropoulous.

“We understand that the revelations of this case — particularly the activity of Peter Griebert, the discovery of the Schonart Trust in Lichtenstein and the role of Bruno Lohse, an unrepentant Nazi who profited for decades from the sale of Nazi looted art stolen from persecuted families — have caused great distress to Frau Fischer and her family.

Yes, that unrepentant Nazi is the same one that Petropoulous was going to profile in his new book, Bruno and Me.

But not all is lost. The article ends with a conversation with David Lewis, co-chair of the Commission for Looted Art in Europe.

“No-one involved in this story seems to come out of it well. But it would be regrettable were there to be damage to the reputation and credibility of Professor Petropoulos and his work.

“Serious and important questions have been raised about how claimants are charged and treated. Transparency is essential.

“All those who are engaged in this field have a duty to treat ethically information derived from a relationship with a former Nazi.

“If it is correct that such information is being exploited for financial benefit and that victims of the Nazis are told it will be withheld from them unless they pay considerable sums of money, this would be deeply unacceptable.”

Well said.