Like many other wars, “the Korean war is multiple wars” (p. ix); it not only involved many participating countries but also encompassed diverse motives and narratives. It started as a civil war between the two Koreas but later developed into an international war. And though the Korean War officially ended in July 1953, the conflict still goes on along the borderline and in the minds of the Korean people. Multiplicity of the war narrative is a natural result of contestations among its participants, especially survivors. As such, the questions of who started the war and how it should be remembered have become fields of another war. The opposing forces in the war, however, try to make its narrative as simple as possible by counterposing the “virtuous us” and the “evil them.” This is exactly what the official state narrative of South Korea (and North Korea) purported: the war started in...
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Book Review|
November 01 2013
Truth and Reconciliation in South Korea: Between the Present and Future of the Korean Wars
Truth and Reconciliation in South Korea: Between the Present and Future of the Korean Wars
. Edited by Jae-Jung Suh. London
: Routledge
, 2013
. xii, 170 pp. $145.00 (cloth).
Dong-No Kim
Dong-No Kim
Yonsei University
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Journal of Asian Studies (2013) 72 (4): 1016–1017.
Citation
Dong-No Kim; Truth and Reconciliation in South Korea: Between the Present and Future of the Korean Wars. Journal of Asian Studies 1 November 2013; 72 (4): 1016–1017. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021911813001484
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