Search engine for discovering works of Art, research articles, and books related to Art and Culture
ShareThis
Javascript must be enabled to continue!

The Intelligence of Fools: Reading the US Military Archive of the Korean War

View through CrossRef
This article examines the struggle over sovereignty on the Korean peninsula from the US occupation through the Korean War not over the usual stakes of geopolitical territory but, rather, over the politics of recognition surrounding the capacity of the individual postcolonial subject. By beginning with a set of archives that has been foundational for much of the historiography around the Korean War—the documents of US military intelligence—this essay proposes a disruptive reading of the practices, assumptions, and structures of US military interrogation. During the state of emergency declared by US General Douglas MacArthur at the beginning of the occupation in 1945, the Korean person was neither a “citizen,” since Korea was not yet a recognized state, nor a colonized subject, since Korea had been liberated from Japanese colonial rule. This sustained suspension was legitimated by the “rule of law” inscribed by the US Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC). In order to undermine the Koreans' insistent claims to self-governance, the US Counter Intelligence Corps ultimately made “acts of language”—such as slander or rumors—punishable by death by the US military. According to the CIC, the Korean's inability to discern or narrate a coherent truth in the interrogation room proved the Korean's incapacity for self-governance. When the Korean War broke out in 1950, the global war met this continued state of emergency on the ground, where the question of human subjectivity, and not only territorial borders, was at stake in the conflict.
Title: The Intelligence of Fools: Reading the US Military Archive of the Korean War
Description:
This article examines the struggle over sovereignty on the Korean peninsula from the US occupation through the Korean War not over the usual stakes of geopolitical territory but, rather, over the politics of recognition surrounding the capacity of the individual postcolonial subject.
By beginning with a set of archives that has been foundational for much of the historiography around the Korean War—the documents of US military intelligence—this essay proposes a disruptive reading of the practices, assumptions, and structures of US military interrogation.
During the state of emergency declared by US General Douglas MacArthur at the beginning of the occupation in 1945, the Korean person was neither a “citizen,” since Korea was not yet a recognized state, nor a colonized subject, since Korea had been liberated from Japanese colonial rule.
This sustained suspension was legitimated by the “rule of law” inscribed by the US Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC).
In order to undermine the Koreans' insistent claims to self-governance, the US Counter Intelligence Corps ultimately made “acts of language”—such as slander or rumors—punishable by death by the US military.
According to the CIC, the Korean's inability to discern or narrate a coherent truth in the interrogation room proved the Korean's incapacity for self-governance.
When the Korean War broke out in 1950, the global war met this continued state of emergency on the ground, where the question of human subjectivity, and not only territorial borders, was at stake in the conflict.

Related Results

The movement to promote an ethnic language in American schools: The Korean community in the New York–New Jersey area
The movement to promote an ethnic language in American schools: The Korean community in the New York–New Jersey area
This paper examines a New York Korean immigrants’ movement to promote the Korean language in American schools. This movement includes the efforts of Korean community leaders to inc...
Young Australians’ Attitudes to the Military and Military Service
Young Australians’ Attitudes to the Military and Military Service
What are young Australians’ understandings of, and attitudes to, the military and military service? This article describes a pilot study of 320 young Australian university students...
Transpacific Camptowns: Korean Women, US Army Bases, and Military Prostitution in America
Transpacific Camptowns: Korean Women, US Army Bases, and Military Prostitution in America
Abstract Military prostitution has been a staple of US–Korea relations since the 1940s, contained in the so-called camptown communities surrounding US military bases...
The Construction of Korean Female Images in the Korean War Novels From an Orientalist Perspective
The Construction of Korean Female Images in the Korean War Novels From an Orientalist Perspective
Abstract The Korean female images as prostitutes, bar girls, refugees, and victims of sexual violence are often found in both American novels and Korean novels of th...
The Post-World War II World Order and the Unresolved Cultural Legacies of the Korean War
The Post-World War II World Order and the Unresolved Cultural Legacies of the Korean War
The Korean War has never had a notable place in American culture. A crop of recent scholarship by Korean American scholars queries the reasons for this absence of the Korean War's ...
Korean Books in Japan
Korean Books in Japan
This article examines the evidence for the importation of Korean books into Japan, including texts of both Korean authorship and Chinese authorship. Although K...
Philosophic sur ordinateur ou intelligence artificielle
Philosophic sur ordinateur ou intelligence artificielle
L'informatique se définissant comme le traitement rationnel de l'information par machine automatique et l'intelligence se caractérisant par une même capacité de traitement rationne...
Becoming-Flashdrive: The Cinematic Intelligence of Lucy
Becoming-Flashdrive: The Cinematic Intelligence of Lucy
An important but easily forgotten moment in the history of film-philosophy is Jean Epstein's assertion that cinema, more than merely thinking, has a kind of intelligence. If it is ...

Recent Results

Probing the interior of the sun and stars wtth acoustic modes of oscillation
Probing the interior of the sun and stars wtth acoustic modes of oscillation
For reasons which are, at present, poorly understood, the sun and presumably stars like the sun undergo continuous oscillations. The most prominant of these have been identified as...
Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass
Born enslaved on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Frederick Douglass (b. February 1818–d. 20 February 1895) became the most prominent African American of the 19th century. Although he esc...
Pre-Columbian Art and Art History
Pre-Columbian Art and Art History
The acceptance of pre-Columbian art as true and great art did not come speedily. In fact, it has not yet been as generally accepted as has the art of the great civilizations of the...
Problems of the Second Punic War
Problems of the Second Punic War
There has been general agreement both in ancient and in modern times that Hannibal's hope of final victory rested mainly on the chance of arousing widespread disaffection to the ca...

Back to Top