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Comment on Epic Rap Battles Of History 1-9 by TheSamotron23

TheSamotron23 — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 19:55:48 +0000

zues vs hades
peter griffin vs american dad
hulk vs. the thing
captin america vs. obama

Comment on Epic Rap Battles Of History 1-9 by 858855

858855 — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 19:40:29 +0000

” u wanna be a little whit usher here show them to their seats ! ”
he killed em’ right there ! [:

Comment on Epic Rap Battles Of History 1-9 by ImTakoda1

ImTakoda1 — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 19:00:51 +0000

omg dynamight one that shit

Comment on Epic Rap Battles Of History 1-9 by solid8ball

solid8ball — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:17:53 +0000

Eminem vs lil wayne

Comment on Epic Rap Battles Of History 1-9 by raprod23

raprod23 — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 17:39:52 +0000

“Im as dope as 2 rappers you better be scared so that means albert E=(MC)^2″

Comment on Epic Rap Battles Of History 1-9 by ghettomane1

ghettomane1 — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 16:41:33 +0000

captain ron vs captain america

Comment on Epic Rap Battles Of History 1-9 by rabidmonster

rabidmonster — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 16:11:53 +0000

I’ll give you a breaf history of pain with the back of my hand. in the best I’m the snoop dogg of of science. suck my robot balls now take a step and let me freeze yours off watch me rub my foot for luck and stick it right up your vagina

Comment on The Korean War: A History (Modern Library Chronicles) by Aloysius Oneill

Aloysius Oneill — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 15:36:22 +0000

27 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

History as Polemic or Polemical History?, October 16, 2010

Aloysius Oneill (Vienna, VA) -

This review is from: The Korean War: A History (Modern Library Chronicles) (Hardcover)

It is only fair to start by saying that this book was not as bad as I expected, despite its serious shortcomings. On the positive side, it seems that Professor Cumings has largely, though belatedly and grudgingly, come to terms with the appalling nature of the North Korean regime. Also, there are certainly things that I agree with that may surprise many Americans for whom the Korean War came out of the blue on June 25, 1950. I made many of the same points in a lecture on the Korean War's role in US foreign policy at the Citadel in Charleston in 2008. They include:

o The war had its distant origins in the 1930's in the political struggle among Koreans, mostly in exile in Manchuria, China and the US, to determine the shape of a future independent Korea. (But it is inaccurate to say that the Korean War started then.)

o The US occupation (1945-48) was headed by John Hodge, an honest and brave general who was completely unprepared for the political complexities of southern Korea. Hodge gravitated toward the most conservative Koreans and seemed to believe that all the rest were communists, when the actual situation was far more complicated. (After I gave my lecture, I learned from the Russian scholar Andrei Lankov that the Soviet occupation of the North was every bit as unplanned and ad hoc as ours was.)

o The conflict began in earnest from 1948 with the formation of the ROK in the South and the DPRK in the North. There followed many North-South military clashes along the 38th Parallel, then just a line on the map, totally unlike the present Demilitarized Zone. Some were battalion-sized battles.

o Before the North Korean invasion of June 25, 1950, there was horrendous violence in Korea, mainly in the South, with bloody guerrilla fighting that may have cost up to 100,000 Korean lives. Most, but not all, of the Southern guerrilla operations were supported by North Korea. The Rhee regime's successful suppression of these uprisings was extremely brutal, but its very success probably was the chief impetus for Kim's 1950 invasion. (Cumings makes the amazing assertion - on no apparent evidence - that Kim Il Sung's primary motivation in invading the South was to "settle the hash" of South Korean officers who had served the Japanese. Certainly, the Soviet officers who planned his invasion believed the objective was to ensure that Kim could rule an undivided Korea.)

o For the US, the Korean War, as a hot war within the Cold War, helped trigger the heavily militarized "national security state," that we still live in today. It also made inevitable our involvement in the Viet Nam War (the Second Indochina War), in which I served as a soldier for two and a half years between 1968 and 1972. But looking at the world of June 1950 through contemporary American eyes, it is no surprise that Truman and Acheson made the decisions that they did.

Cumings renders harsh judgments on the US conduct of the war, some of which are arguable. He sees the air war from a very different perspective than most American writers. While they tend to focus on US fighter pilots in MiG Alley, Cumings emphasizes the devastating bombing campaign, which obliterated North Korea many times over. The US planners applied the tactics they had just perfected against Japan and Germany in the much more confined space of North Korea. The result was horrifying and in the calm light of academic hindsight, more than was militarily necessary. In this and other books and documentaries, Cumings has complained about the "Hudson Harbor" campaign flown by lone B-29s to make North Korean leaders think we would use atomic bombs against them. I'm not sure why he objects to psychological warfare against Kim Il-Sung, unless he just doesn't like the idea of disconcerting one's foes in wartime.

Because Professor Cumings's government experience was limited to just six months in the Peace Corps (out of a two-year commitment) in Korea in the late 1960's, he seems to believe that the US Government is able to make detailed and Machiavellian plans and execute them flawlessly. Those of us with much more experience in government only wish that were true. The reality is that US officials make decisions in crises with imperfect knowledge of the situation. Cumings sees Acheson as a spider at the center of his web, making key initial war decisions without reference to Truman. Almost all sources say that Acheson was in close touch with Truman that June weekend while Truman was in Missouri. Besides, Acheson was following the Truman Doctrine the President had enunciated in 1947: "I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." He knew Truman's mind.

For decades, Cumings has been obsessive about the point that North Korea's legitimacy derives... Read more

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Comments (7)

Comment on Epic Rap Battles Of History 1-9 by DOCKSDOX21

DOCKSDOX21 — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 15:21:49 +0000

Lindsey Lohan vs. Barack Obama

Comment on The Korean War: A History (Modern Library Chronicles) by R. Albin

R. Albin — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 15:13:22 +0000

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

Useful with Defects, September 11, 2010

R. Albin (Ann Arbor, Michigan United States) -

This review is from: The Korean War: A History (Modern Library Chronicles) (Hardcover)

This is a useful introduction to the Korean War. This is not a conventional military history and anyone looking for a conventional military history will be disappointed. Cumings, a leading expert on modern Korean history, is primarily interested in debunking common American myths about the Korean war. The book is organized as a series of essays on aspects of the Korean war. Topics covered include the ultimate genesis of the war as a civil conflict between Korean clients of the Japanese imperium and anti-colonial insurgents, the essentially arbitrary post-WWII division of Korea, the nature of the American occupation and direct rule of Korea, the efforts of the US to rollback Communism in the Korean peninsula, the remarkably brutal nature of the conflict - including our use of saturation bombing, and the last consequences of the war for both Korea and the USA.

Cuming's analysis is that the War was an essentially unavoidable civil conflict between Koreans who has been Japanese clients, and who became our clients, and anti-Japanese Korean insurgents allied with the Chinese Communists. Like many local-regional conflicts of the Cold War, the local issues became entangled in the East-West rivalry, greatly exacerbating the conflict. As Cumings points out, the war was started by the North Koreans led by Kim Il Sung but against the background of constant conflict between the Northern and Southern regimes, and given the resources (approval of the US), the Rhee regime in the South would have happily struck first. Cumings devotes quite a few pages to the many, many crimes of the Korean war. As is typical of civil wars, there were enormous atrocities committed by both sides. Partly because of the debunking intent of this book, and partly, I suspect, because documentation is better, there is more discussion of the crimes committed by the South Korean regime. Cumings also discusses US atrocities, and probably more important, the remarkably intense bombing campaign conducted by the US. Cumings emphasizes the centrality of Korea to this phase of Cold War diplomacy. This includes the American tendency to see Korea as an economic adjunct of Japan, a point appreciated quite well by many nationalist Koreans, and the way in which the Korean conflict contributed to the formation of the national security state we still live with. The consequences for Korea were just as great, including the establishment of the authoritarian South Korean state and what Cumings describes nicely as the nationalist monarchy of the North, a garrison state with few peers in recent history.

While there is a lot of useful information and analysis in this book, the format and manner of presentation are less than optimal. The individual chapters are somewhat overlapping essays. Cumings has written each of these sections in a somewhat self-consciously literary style which sometimes impairs readability. In addition, Cumings presents some important arguments in pieces in different chapters, which degrades the quality of his analysis. The discussion of the American tendency to see Korea as a economic adjunct of Japan is an example. Some of the writing has an almost angry tone; Cumings is clearly frustrated by American ignorance of Korea and its history. I think Cumings would have done better to use a more conventional narrative structure and adopt a more neutral voice in this book. There are also, I think, a few errors of interpretation. Cumings, for example, contrasts the limited containment policy advocated by George Kennan with the rollback advocated by Dean Acheson. Kennan, however, was an advocate of rollback at one point in his career.

I have to comment on some of the more negative reviews of this book. This is not a "far-left" view of the war. The civil nature of the Korean conflict, the authoritarian nature and brutal behavior of our Korean clients, the excessive nature of the American bombing campaign, and our primary interest in securing Japanese security, are not arguable points. Nor is Cumings an apologist for North Korea. Cumings own ideological orientation is probably revealed best by the fact that this book is dedicated to the late Kim Dae Jung, the courageous pro-democracy politician who was nearly killed by the authoritarian South Korean regime we supported.

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