Cold War Divisions

In December 1955, the US Gallup Poll conducted a survey on the meaning of the Cold War. Their question to Americans was: ‘Will you tell me what the term “COLD WAR” means to you?' The responses to this survey question were diverse and revealing.

The distance between ‘a bloodless diplomatic war' and ‘real war all over the world like a [global] civil war' is huge, and we can infer from the above episode that these radically different understandings of the Cold War coex­isted at the initial stage of the global confrontation. It is interesting to discover that these contrary, nearly mutually incompatible conceptions of the Cold War were expressed in the context of the post-Korean War American society.

These two radically different images, and related unresolved issues relating to the place of violence in Cold War history, persist even now, many years after the end of the Cold War. In March 2015, I had the pleasure of attending the preparatory meeting of the Center for Cold War Studies in Berlin and, shortly before, in February of the same year, the inaugural meeting for the Association for Cold War Studies in Seoul. These two events presented rather different atmospheres. The Berlin meeting was decisively one of historical reflection, consisting primarily of historians of modern Germany and those specialising in the international history of the Cold War. It clearly represented the change in Cold War studies since the 1990s, from the field of social science to that of historical research. In the Seoul meeting, however, it was not clear to me whether the conference was approaching the Cold War as a subject of historical research or as a set of questions concerning contemporary history.

The crisis took myriad forms and continues to affect local lives. In the south-eastern region of the Korean peninsula, for instance, there is a village once known in the environs as a moskoba (Moscow) - the wartime reference for a communist stronghold. Each year, people originally from this village return to their homeland in order to join the ceremony held on behalf of their family and village ancestors, mainly to visit their graves scattered on the hills around the village. On these occasions, the relatives from distant places are pleased to meet each other and exchange news - but not always so. When a man cautiously suggested to his lineage elders recently that the family might consider repairing a neglected ancestral tomb, the harmony of the family meal held after the tomb visit was disrupted. One elder left the room in a fury, and others remained silent throughout the ceremonial meal. The man who proposed the idea was the adopted son of the person buried in the neglected tomb, having been selected for this role by the family elders for a ritual purpose. The elder whom he offended happened to be a close relative of the deceased. The ancestor had been a prominent anti-colonial communist youth activist before he died at a young age in a colonial prison without a descendant.

The morality of ancestral remembrance is as strong in the Vietnamese cultural tradition as it is in the Korean. These two countries also share the common historical experience of being important sites and symbols in Asia for the American leadership in the global struggle against international communism. In recent years, since the Vietnamese political leadership initiated a general economic reform and regulated political liberalisation in the country in the late 1980s, there has been a strong revival of ancestral rituals across Vietnamese villages. Such rituals were previously discouraged by the state hierarchy who regarded them as being incompatible with the modern secular, revolutionary society. In the communities of the southern and central regions (what was South Vietnam during the Vietnam War), a notable aspect of this social development has been the introduction to the ancestral ritual realm of the identities previously excluded from public memory. The memorabilia of the hitherto socially stigmatised historical identities, such as those of former South Vietnamese soldiers, have become increasingly visible in the domestic and communal ritual space.^[795]

In the home of a stonemason south of Danang, a commercial and administrative centre of Vietnam's central region, the family's ancestral altar displayed two framed pictures of young men.

Another family living in the same environs has a similar, yet deeper and broader history of displacement and reconciliation. The family's grandfather was a former labourer soldier of the French colonial army. In 1937-8, the French colonial authority in Indochina conscripted a large number of labourers from the central region of Vietnam and shipped them to the great Mediterranean city of Marseilles. There, in the city's poudrerie, 2,000 Vietnamese conscripts manufactured gunpowder for the French army and, under the Vichy regime, for the German army under French management. Some of these Vietnamese labourer soldiers objected to their situation and joined the French resistance, whereas others continued to endure the appal­ling working conditions in the factory. After sharing the humiliating experi­ence of German occupation with the French citizens, these foreign conscripts found themselves in a highly precarious situation following their return home in 1948: the leaders in the Vietnamese revolutionary movement distrusted them, indeed looked upon them as collaborators with the colonial regime; and the French took no interest in their past service to their national economy or their contribution to the resistance movement against the German occupiers.

The family's grandfather is one of the few returnees who survived the carnage and has an extraordinary story of survival to tell: how he rescued his family in 1953 from the imminent threat of summary execution by pleading to French soldiers in their language. He accomplished this again in 1967 thanks to the presence of an American officer in a pacification team who understood a few words of French as a result of having fought in Europe during World War II. The man's youngest brother died unmarried and without a descendant, so the man's eldest son now performs periodic death-remembrance rites on behalf of the fallen. His brother was killed in action during the Vietnam War as a soldier of the South Vietnamese army, and his eldest son is a decorated former partisan fighter belonging to the National Liberation Front. The eldest son, together with his father, also performs a periodic rite of commemoration for his great-grandmother who died in a tragic incident in 1948 shortly before her only surviving grandchild returned from France.

At that time, the woman was living alone in her bamboo hut. She had lost her husband in 1936 and her children shortly after, and her orphaned grand­children had left the village for an urban ghetto or further away. She survived on a small plot of land where she grew vegetables. The neighbours regularly helped the lonely woman with rice and fish sauce. On the fifth day of the eleventh lunar month of 1948, she spotted a group of French soldiers con­ducting a house-to-house search. Ill at the time, she waved to the soldiers for help. The soldiers came, pushed her back into the house, closed the shutters and set fire to the bamboo house. In the following era, the locals reported seeing apparitions of this woman. The villagers eventually erected a small shrine in her memory on the site of her destroyed home and then started calling her Ba Ba Linh, meaning powerful grandmother. Throughout the chaos of the Vietnam War, her humble shrine attracted regular visits by local women who came to pray to the old woman for their family's safety. During the day, some Saigon soldiers saw the village women kowtowing to the shrine, heard the story and prayed for their own wishes at the site. At night, the peasant militiamen who came to survey the area heard the same story. The village women saw that some of these partisan fighters were praying to the shrine before they hurriedly joined their group to move to the next hamlet. When people returned to the village after an evacuation during the critical period of the Vietnam War in 1967-9, they recalled that there was nothing standing in the hamlet except the humble wooden shrine dedicated to the powerful grandmother.

The precarious condition of life that confronted this family and many other people in this region for many years is often referred to as xoi dau by the locals. Xoi dau refers to a ceremonial Vietnamese delicacy made of white rice flour and black beans. Used also as a metaphor, the term conveys how people of these regions experienced the Vietnam War. As such, xoi dau refers to the turbulent conditions of communal life during the war, when the rural inhabi­tants were confronted with successive occupations by conflicting political and military forces. At night, the village was under the control of the revolutionary forces; during the daytime, the opposing forces took control. Life in these villages oscillated between two different political worlds governed by two mutually hostile military forces. The people had to cope with their separate, yet equally absolute, demands for loyalty and with the world changing politi­cally so frequently that sometimes this anomaly almost appeared normal. Xoi dau conveys the simple truth that, when you eat this food, you must swallow both the white and the black parts. This is how xoi dau is supposed to be eaten, and this is what it was like living a tumultuous life seized by the brutally dynamic reality of Vietnam's civil and international war.

Survival in such a reality often meant accepting both sides of the dual world. One common episode that resulted from coping with such a thundering bipolarity involved family disunity: some siblings joined ‘this side' (ben ta, the revolutionary side) whereas others, especially the younger ones, were dragged to ‘that side' (ben kia, the American side). The situation was tragic and the result often painful: many of them failed to return home alive, and even years later the younger ones cannot return home even in memory. Yet the situation also had a creative side: for instance, the family hoped to have at least one of them survive the war by having them on different sides of the battlefield; or if the family had the extraordinary luck of seeing all of them return home alive, the siblings on the winner's side would be able to help those on the loser's side to rebuild their lives.

The meaning of xoi dau, of course, is not the same as the meaning of the Cold War as we usually understand it; yet the extreme conditions of human life that this Vietnamese idiom refers to are very much part of Cold War history as the latter was experienced by people in central Vietnam and many other communities in the decolonising world. Moreover, the experience of xoi dau is hardly a thing of the past and is very much part of contemporary history, involving vigorous communal efforts to come to terms with the ruins of the past destruction existing in communal life. This is the case with the stonemason's family, and the same is true with the village in South Korea, both mentioned earlier.

The moskoba village's tragedy related to the changing waves of war and occupation. The Korean War was not a single war but rather a combination of several different kinds of war. Above all, it was a civil war waged between two mutually negating postcolonial political forces, each of which, through the negation, aspired to realise the ideal of self-determination by building a common, singular and united modern nation state. It was part of a global war waged between two bifurcating international political, moral and eco­nomic forces having different visions of modernity, which we commonly call the Cold War. The Korean War was also an international conflict fought, among others, between two of the most powerful states of the contemporary world, the United States and China. Hidden beneath the relatively well- known characteristics of the Korean War as a civil, international and global conflict, recent studies show that another kind of war was being waged in postcolonial Korea. Steven Lee characterises the last layer of the Korean War as a war against the civilian population.^[796]

In the very early days of the war, in face of the enemy forces rapidly advancing southward to its territory, the South Korean state committed pre­emptive violence against society on a massive scale. Directed against people whom it considered sympathisers or hypothetical collaborators with the enemy, this state action set in motion a vicious cycle of violence against civilians in the ensuing chaos of war: it radicalised the punitive actions perpetrated under North Korean occupation against the individuals and families who were classified as supporters of the southern regime, which in turn escalated the intensity of retaliatory violence directed against the so- called collaborators with the communist occupiers when the tide of war changed. When the North Korean forces left their briefly occupied territory in the South, they acted in the same way as the South had done before, committing numerous atrocities of pre-emptive violence against people whom they considered to be potential collaborators with the southern regime. The mobile frontier resulted not only in extreme abuse of the civilian population by the coercive powers of the warring states but also in the rise of the phenomenon that Kalyvas calls the privatisation of violence.^[797] Village communities were turned inside out, becoming a crucible of destruction in the image of the wider theatre of war but at the hands of people who were kin and had been neighbours for generations. This chaotic, reciprocal violence against society generated a mass exodus of the terrified population from their places of origin, both southward and northward, and thus was greatly responsible for one of the most critical questions of the human condition in the post-Korean War Korean peninsula, which remains unresolved till today - the plight of families divided between North and South. The general­ised human displacement and family separation had other far-reaching impli­cations. The presence in families of missing persons - those who were suspected to have moved to the enemy territory or those who were killed during the war while being accused of being anti-state elements - became a critical liability for the surviving families after the war was over.

In places that experienced the early Cold War in such a chaotic civil war, therefore, kinship rarely constitutes a politically homogeneous entity. Their genealogical unity is crowded with the remains of wartime political bifurca­tion. In the customary practices of ancestral commemoration, people must deal not only with the memory of meritorious ancestors who contributed to the nation's revolutionary or anti-communist march to independence but also with the stigmatising genealogical background of working against the defined forward march. As in Sophocles' epic tragedy Antigone, which inspired Hegel in his philosophy of the modern state, many individuals and families in these regions were torn between the familial obligation to tend to the memory of the war dead related in kinship and the political obligation not to do so for those who fought against the anti-communist or revolutionary state. It is common in these places for a family to have a few heroic fallen soldiers from the war to commemorate. Siblings and others close to those killed in action on the opposite side of the war's frontier are also somehow accounted for. The memories of the dead in these communities are simulta­neously united in kinship memory and bipolarised in political history. The initiatives taken by people such as the stonemason's family or the man in the Korean village arise out of this long, turbulent political history, and they continue to evolve and expand today.