The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History

by Monica Kim

A groundbreaking look at how the interrogation rooms of the Korean War set the stage for a new kind of battle—not over land but over human subjects

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’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 “brainwashing” 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 War delves into an essential yet overlooked aspect of modern warfare in the twentieth century.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, War, Politics, Research

452 pages, Hardcover

First published February 5, 2019

About the author

Monica Kim is assistant professor of history at New York University. She lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Livia · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting look into the intimacies of war, and a cool argument about how war is defined by the individual experience, not the other way around. Talks about how the Korean war moved a lot of political and colonial fears from the theoretical into the realm of actuality. Kim frames it around how interrogation was about the power to redefine the nature of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized: it gave narrative, it was about political recognition, and it was about American selfhood and citizenry. Doesn't fully get into the specifics or follow all the way through with the argument that would have made this 4 or 5 stars for me. This would be a good companion piece to a lot of things: Winter in Sokcho, Cat's Cradle, Pachinko, A Gesture Life.


“War, we assume, is a part of the universal human condition. And when war converges with another age-old human impulse—storytelling—war emerges from the story more akin to a force of nature than a mere man-made event. The horror, the violence, and the rapture of war distill into allegories and meditations on the nature of humankind. To tell a story about war is to tell a story about humanity.”

“It was no longer sufficient to declare war in the patent interests of the state. Now, war would have to be conducted in the name of “humanity,” framed in the terms of a universal conflict rather than a state-specific necessity. War could now only be conducted as a disavowal of war itself.”

[Rebecca Crunden]

RTC.

⤑ research tag: in an effort to organise my shelves, I’m going to be labelling the books I’m using for study purposes as I tend to dip in and out of these. For further reading on the Korean War, check out this (incomplete list) of other reviews I’ve posted to Goodreads: The Korean War: A History, Beyond the Shadow of Camptown: Korean Military Brides in America, Let The Good Times Roll: Prostitution And The U.S. Military In Asia, Women Marines in the Korean War Era, The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War, Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations, Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War, “A Defense Weapon Known to Be of Value”: Servicewomen of the Korean War Era, Name, Rank, and Serial Number: Exploiting Korean War POWs at Home and Abroad, The Korean War at Sixty: New Approaches to the Study of the Korean War, We Will Not Be Strangers: Korean War Letters between a M.A.S.H Surgeon and His Wife and When Hell Froze Over: The Memoir of a Korean War Combat Physician Who Spent 1010 Days in a Communist Prison Camp.

[Rafał Grochala · Rating 4 out of 5]

Disclaimer: large part of this book is not 4/5, many pages are 1/5 with constant repeats, thesaurus vocabulary, and batshit insane opinions... but the rest is perhaps the only place in widely accessible literature where you can get such historical details.

[Jiewei Li · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really interesting history that maps the intimacies of how American interventionism shaped the violence and psychological outcomes of the Korean War and Korean POWs. But the argument was less clear at times.

[Mills College Library]

951.9042 K493 2019