Free The Korean War: A History by Bruce Cumings Page B

wars.
    The paramount interest of this elite was to have the big army and the full panoply of military equipment that they so sorely lacked in the 1930s. At the founding of the KPA on February 8, 1948 (many years later they changed the founding date to April 25, 1932), the essential features of this garrison state were on full display. Only Kim Il Sung’s portrait was put out, instead of the usual tandem portraits with Stalin. Kim’s speech laid emphasis on the necessity for a self-reliant nation to have its own army: “At all times and in all places our Korean people must take their fate into their own hands and must make all plans and preparations for building a completely self-reliant, independent nation in which they alone arethe masters, and a government unified by their own hands.” The KPA, he said, grew out of the Manchurian guerrilla struggle, with a tradition of “a hundred battles and a hundred victories.” He made no reference to Soviet help in building the KPA. 22 A year later, on the first anniversary of the KPA, Kim was for the first time referred to as
suryong
, an ancient Koguryo term meaning “supreme” or “great leader” that had been reserved for Stalin until then. This was a complete heresy in the Communist world of that time, but it became his title thereafter, down to his death in 1994.

CHAPTER THREE
T HE P ARTY OF F ORGETTING
     
    Man … braces himself against the great and ever greater pressure of what is past; it pushes him down and bends him sideways, it encumbers his steps as a dark, invisible burden.
    —N IETZSCHE
     
    I t is a matter for wonder: a moment, now here and then gone, nonetheless “returns as a ghost”—and then “the man says ‘I remember’ and envies the animal.” Cattle grazing and cavorting in a field live in the present, they cannot dissimulate, they cannot but be honest. The child, playing between the hedges, is likewise oblivious to past and present. But his play, too, will be disturbed and he will come to understand the words “it was.”
It was
—“words that cause a man conflict, suffering, satiety, and fulfillment”—thus “to remind him what his existence fundamentally is—an imperfect tense that can never become a perfect one.” 1
    Gustav Meyrink wrote that “knowledge and memory are one and the same thing.” 2 A soldier has knowledge of a battle at Hill 79, and memory of it. But Meyrink is not quite right. Knowledge is of course about memory, but memories also have histories. They come and go, often without our sensing
where
they come from—or where they go; they are unstable, they change, they evolve, they mutate in ways independent of thought. Temporal and physical dislocation, displacement, oscillation, movement forward and back, confidence, panic, experiences acquired and lost—the human memory recapitulates the lived experience of the refugee. Michel Foucault’s reasoning closely followed Nietzsche’s on the inaccessibility of the origin and the discontinuous development of human consciousness—one that acquires experience, forgets, dissembles, remembers, represses, blots out one memory with another—in an unsteady progress toward a settled mind of integrity, remembrance, and wisdom. Memory comes down to us through “sedimented layers” of previous apprehension and interpretation, as people experience history, lodge it in memory, and then rewrite it to suit theirneeds—particularly where individual complicity in crimes is at stake. This plastic power preserves psychic peace at the cost of repression, but it is also a positive trait—“a testament to the creativity and ingenuity of the species,” as Tina Rosenberg put it. Yet people strive against all odds to preserve “the sovereignty of the subject,” a life narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. 3
    The opposite of remembrance, or of keeping promises, is forgetfulness. It allows us “to close the doors and windows of consciousness for a time,” Nietzsche wrote;