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Bruce Cumings

Bruce Cumings teaches in the history department at the University of Chicago, and is the author of North Korea: Another Country.

From the London Review dated 15 December 2005

We look at it and see ourselves

  • Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty by Bradley Martin
  • Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea by Jasper Becker  Buy this book

It isn’t politically correct to say ‘Oriental’ or ‘Asiatic’ anymore, but journalists use the term ‘Stalinist’ time and again to describe North Korea, without any hint of qualifying or questioning their position. The idea that the DPRK is a pure form of ‘Stalinism in the East’ goes back to the 1940s, and was constantly reinforced by Robert Scalapino, a Cold War scholar who came to prominence in the late 1950s. North Korea was indeed Stalinist in its state-run industrialisation drive, and modelled its administration and much of its system on Stalin’s Russia – but so did every other Communist regime in the 1950s. Chinese Communism had greater influence, but the DPRK isn’t often called Maoist. [ read more . . . ]

Selected bibliography

  • Inventing the Axis of Evil (2004)
  • North Korea: Another Country (2003)
  • Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American-East Asian Relations at the End of the Century (1999)
  • Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (1997)
  • War and Television: Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf War (1992)
  • The Origins of the Korean War: The Roaring of the Cataract 1947-1950 (1990)
  • Two Koreas: One Future? (1984)
  • Child of Conflict: The Korean-American Relationship, 1943-1953 (editor) (1983)
  • The Origins of the Korean War: Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes 1945-1947 (1981)

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In the LRB archive

We look at it and see ourselves · 15 December 2005

  • Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty by Bradley Martin
  • Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea by Jasper Becker  Buy this book

Wrong Again · 4 December 2003