The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History

Description

Traditional histories of the Korean War have long focused on violations of the thirty-eighth parallel, the line drawn by American and Soviet officials in 1945 dividing the Korean peninsula. But The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War presents an entirely new narrative, shifting the perspective from the boundaries of the battlefield to inside the interrogation room. Upending conventional notions of what we think of as geographies of military conflict, Monica Kim demonstrates how the Korean War evolved from a fight over territory to one over human interiority and the individual human subject, forging the template for the US wars of intervention that would predominate during the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond. Kim looks at how, during the armistice negotiations, the United States and their allies proposed a new kind of interrogation room: one in which POWs could exercise their "free will" and choose which country they would go to after the ceasefire. The global controversy that erupted exposed how interrogation rooms had become a flashpoint for the struggles between the ambitions of empire and the demands for decolonization, as the aim of interrogation was to produce subjects who attested to a nation� (TM)s right to govern. The complex web of interrogators and prisoners� "Japanese-American interrogators, Indian military personnel, Korean POWs and interrogators, and American POWs� "that Kim uncovers contradicts the simple story in US popular memory of � oebrainwashing� � during the Korean War. Bringing together a vast range of sources that track two generations of people moving between three continents,The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean Wardelves into an essential yet overlooked aspect of modern warfare in the twentieth century. Cover......Page 1 Title......Page 4 Copyright......Page 5 Dedication......Page 6 CONTENTS......Page 8 Note on Language......Page 10 Abbreviations......Page 12 Introduction: War and Humanity......Page 16 PART I. THE ELEMENTS OF WAR......Page 46 1 Interrogation......Page 48 2 The Prisoner of War......Page 94 3 The Interrogator......Page 138 PART II. HUMANITY INTERROGATED......Page 184 4 Koje Island: A Mutiny, or Revolution......Page 186 5 Below the 38th Parallel: Between Barbed Wire and Blood......Page 226 6 On the 38th Parallel: The Third Choice......Page 274 7 Above the 38th Parallel: The US Citizen–POW......Page 318 Conclusion: The Diaspora of War......Page 364 Acknowledgments......Page 376 Notes......Page 384 Bibliography......Page 422 Index......Page 438 A NOTE ON THE TYPE......Page 452