The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History by Monica Kim (review)

Those of us engaged in the study of new religious movements have had, until now, few scholarly sources to inform us of the historical roots of brainwashing theories predating the "cult wars" of the 1970s and 1980s. In the present volume, Monica Kim has provided us with a richly textured historical treatment of the Korean conflict and the place of brainwashing in it. The historian at New York University mines archival sources to clarify the issues at stake in that conflict, including the ideological battle between capitalism and communism. In so doing, she contributes to a growing literature on the history of Cold War culture. In the past fifteen years, historians like Susan Carruthers, Matthew Dunne, Timothy Melley and others have greatly contributed to our understanding of how fears about brainwashing erupted in the late 1940s and early 1950s. These anxieties generated the demonization of Soviet society and concern about scientific experiments funded by the Central Intelligence Agency. They also produced widespread panic in the United States based on public perceptions of brainwashing's ability to erase individual autonomy.

When the Second World War ended in 1945, the Cold War began, with the U.S. military occupying the southern portion of the Korean peninsula and the Soviet Union the northern part. The 38^th parallel divided north from south, giving millions of people new identities, depending on where they were living. Communist nations and U.S. allies alike regarded those in the north as Communist, while those in the south were seen as capitalist and pro-Western. The imposition of this binary, Kim argues, revealed attitudes held by military and civilian actors from both Communist bloc nations and the West (principally the United States).

The place where processes of separation and re-identification can be analyzed, according to Kim, were the interrogation rooms for prisoners of war (POWs) on both sides. Here the cultural and political assumptions of the interrogators collided with the complicated, historicallycontingent identities of those being questioned. Kim devotes most of the book to American efforts to cross-examine and re-educate North Korean and Chinese POWs. The Americans perceived Koreans as "Orientals," unequipped to assume the responsibilities of democracy. They saw them as thieves and liars by nature, and considered them to be like children who followed the strongest and loudest leaders. What American prison camp guards and interrogators discovered, however, was that their POWs were far from being a monolithic group. Many were university-educated and familiar with the United States, while others had little knowledge of the world beyond their villages. Some were convinced of the correctness of Communist doctrine, while others had enjoyed elevated social status due to business connections; still others didn't understand the great 'isms' of the day.

Kim includes numerous stories of Korean men whose loyalties were fluid, or rather, were based on pragmatic considerations rather than ideology. If captured by the army of one side, they joined it, or at least labored for it. When they were captured—or re-captured—by an opposing army, they became part of that organization. The POWs reflected these contrasting and confusing experiences, often in well-written essays their interrogators asked them to write. Additionally, their variegated pasts made combatant/civilian distinctions fuzzy at best, and at worst totally useless. Many of the Koreans who were supposed to be on America's side exhibited a fascist rather than capitalist ideology. And though the American military penal system demanded a clear demarcation between military and civilian, that was not possible given the historical context.

Monica Kim devotes the final chapter to the American and other Western POWs held in North Korean and Chinese prison camps. Here the familiar story of the twenty-one Americans who opted to live in China at war's end surfaces. How could America's finest young men, its warriors on the front lines in the worldwide battle against Communism, choose...