Embattled Memories: Contested Meanings in Korean War Memorials

Chapter 5: “Shattering” Memories: The Statue of MacArthur in South Korea

95 c h a p t e r 5 “Shattering” Memories The Statue of MacArthur in South Korea Perhaps it was the end of the Cold War era that opened up the most intensive discussions about the iconic status that statues hold in our symbolic world. The news about the demise of communism in the former Soviet bloc often was conveyed via compelling images in which the statues of Lenin and Stalin were either destroyed by crowds or pulled down by new authorities. Occasionally , we were told about where these removed statues ended up: some, as commodities of nostalgia, were relocated to Soviet theme parks in former Communist countries; many others were recycled by monument factories in order to cast new ones for the new era; and still others were bought by travelers and displayed on the streets of America—sites devoid of context.1 Such drastic transformations of Soviet statues seem to have inspired many scholars to ponder the ironic notion that a statue not only represents our efforts to perpetuate historical accounts, but also simultaneously reveals how transient those accounts are.2 More intriguing, there is strong evidence that mnemonic objects in public places can trigger contested meanings even without undergoing 96 e m b at t l e d m e m o r i e s any physical alteration or displacement. Many studies on post-socialist change in Russia as well as in Eastern and Central Europe have illuminated how certain memorials and monuments survived the change of politics throughout history and how they have taken on new meanings that complicate, contest, or even reverse the originally intended meanings .3 As the most striking example, Nina Tumarkin, in her book The Living and the Dead, introduced how the dissolution of the Soviet Union has transformed heroic statues of World War II—without any alteration— from symbolic icons of patriotic war to evokers of contested memories.4 The insights of these scholars suggest that memorials and monuments are not mere signifiers of the status quo. As much as they have the capacity to crystallize narratives in hegemony within a current political context, memorials and monuments also have the unique rhetorical potency to trigger contested meanings in an era of political turbulence. Supported by such scholarship, in this chapter I will elaborate upon the rhetoric of a statue through a case study of the MacArthur statue in South Korea. General Douglas MacArthur was the Supreme Commander of the United Nations forces during the Korean War. Since the war ended with an armistice in 1953, the iconicity of MacArthur has been a robust signifier that has communicated the dominant narrative of the Korean War: America rescued South Korea from malicious North Korean Communists . He has been remembered in particular as a hero in the saga of the amphibious Incheon Landing Operation on September 15, 1950, by which UN troops recaptured the capital of South Korea, cut off the North Korean troops’ supply lines, and changed the course of the war that was nearly subject to a Communist victory. Commemorating this heroic saga, the South Korean government erected a statue of MacArthur in 1957 at Jayu (Freedom) Park in Incheon City. As a symbolic icon of both American benevolence and Korean veneration, this sacred image of MacArthur in Jayu Park has been revered in postwar South Korean society. Yet memories, regardless of their forms, are subject to the ongoing reconstruction of historical narratives within a continuously evolving present context. In 2005, the statue of MacArthur at Incheon City was targeted frequently by iconoclastic actions. Reflecting the recent liberalized political atmosphere in South Korea that began to surface in the 1990s, many social activists and progressive historians have raised their voices to “ s h at t e r i n g ” m e m o r i e s 97 criticize both MacArthur’s indiscriminate military actions and Koreans’ uncritical perceptions of the U.S. role in the war. Given this context, these activists began to claim that the statue, an official codification that had been generating misunderstandings of the war, had to be either demolished or moved to a less prominent location. During the summer of 2005, leading up to September 15, which was the fifty-fifth anniversary of the Incheon Landing, tension around the statue had been intensifying: activists (unions, student organizations, dissident groups) frequently gathered to show their willingness to tear down the statue, while conservative...