Name, Rank, and Serial Number: Exploiting Korean War POWs at Home and Abroad

ISBN-13: 9780195183481 / Angielski / Twarda / 2014 / 256 str.

Charles S. Young

Opis

Vietnam POWs came home heroes, but twenty years earlier their predecessors returned from Korea to shame and suspicion. In the Korean War American prisoners were used in propaganda twice, first during the conflict, then at home. While in Chinese custody in North Korea, they were pressured to praise their treatment and criticize the war. When they came back, the Department of the Army and cooperative pundits said too many were weaklings who did not resist communist indoctrination or "brainwashing." Ex-prisoners were featured in a publicity campaign scolding the nation to raise tougher sons for the Cold War. This propaganda was based on feverish exaggerations that ignored the convoluted circumstances POWs were put in, which decisions in Washington helped create.

Recenzje

Charles Young has written a sensitive, riveting, balanced, well-researched, and highly readable book that has a surprising contemporary relevance, given the Bush administration's torture of POWs. Young examines how all sides dealt with POWs in Korea, especially the treatment of POWs by the US and South Korea (something usually overlooked in such accounts), and knocks down any number of myths about 'brainwashing.' This is a well-informed, critical and truly important addition to a literature that is surprisingly small, but intensely pertinent.

O autorze

Charles S. Young is Associate Professor of HIstory, Southern Arkansas University