Masuda Hajimu. Cold War Crucible

Kim Seong-chil was a thirty-seven-year-old history professor at Seoul University when North Korean forces crossed the thirty-eighth parallel in June 1950. However, the North Korean soldiers who soon occupied his town did not frighten him; instead, Kim wrote in his diary, “They don’t look like the enemy. They look more like brothers, who left home and lived somewhere far away, just making a visit” (58). Kim was killed in 1951 but his voice, and the voices of many others who lived through these critical early Cold War years, emerge in Masuda Hajimu’s Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and the Postwar World, which seeks to take the Korean War out of its Cold War context and instead consider how it both shaped and was shaped by the experiences and perceptions of “ordinary people” across the globe. The book’s underlying contention is that the Korean War was the critical moment in the early Cold War, not because (as traditional interpretations hold) it reinforced a defining East/West cleavage that neatly divided the world into two oppositional camps but because it brought to the fore the growing social tensions and frustrations that already existed in nations throughout the world. Thus, the Korean War allowed individuals to interpret the Cold War within their own local frameworks and to use it for different ends, even while they accepted it as a basic and unifying reality. The early Cold War, in other words, was an “imagined reality,” not an empirical fact but a perception of the international world born from a shared mental framework accepted by millions of disparate people even while they forced it to fit within their own local contexts (2). And Korea, Masuda contends, was the critical experience that bound these people and their visions together.

Ancient history · Cold war · Context (archaeology) · Crucible (geodemography) · Economic history · Globe · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Chinese history and philosophy · Demography · History · Law · Psychology · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies