A Country They Never Knew and a People They Never Met: the Korean War Memorial, Washington D.C.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This article on the Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington DC considers what that monument reveals about American foreign policy of recent decades. It suggests how monuments simplify the past, in ways that Nietzsche well understood when he wrote about ‘monumental history’. Simplification is particularly in evidence in one of the memorial’s key inscriptions, “Freedom is not free”. The play on words seems an attempt to justify the scale of sacrifice exacted by the struggle; namely the huge numbers of war dead on all sides, whether military or civilian, and the ravages of land, villages, towns and cities alike. It is as though the memorial is conceding that the freedom of which it speaks came at a very high price indeed in carnage and destruction. The memorial’s main other inscription, “Our nation honors her sons and daughters who answered the call to defend a country they never knew and a people they never met”, while ostensibly a claim about the selflessness of the Americans who were involved, also implies (possibly unconsciously on the part of those who erected it) that the country over which the war was fought never did come to be known, nor its people to be met, in all the months and years in which American servicemen and women fought there. There are lessons to be learned about the foreign policy revealed by such inscriptions. Indeed, their simplifications and obfuscations, when further unravelled, can become a key to understanding much about the Korean and other modern wars in which the USA has been involved. Above all, there are shocking degrees of historia abscondita (Nietzsche again) in question, which the article seeks to recover and dwell upon.