Responses To Cumings' Work
Cumings has won major awards, including the John King Fairbank Book Award of the American Historical Association, and the second volume of this study won the Quincy Wright Book Award of the International Studies Association."
Socialist Review has also praised Cumings' work in "A Different Hymn Sheet" by saying: "This is a good read for anyone looking for an introduction to this member of 'the axis of evil', especially given the lack of books on the subject which aren't hysterical denunciations from the US right or hymns of praise from Stalinists."
Cumings has been described as "the left's leading scholar of Korean history." Scholars have debated the revisionist conclusions of his major studies. Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies scholar Kathryn Weathersby wrote that the "most important revisionist account, Bruce Cumings’ monumental two-volume study of the origins of the Korean War, concluded that the question remains open whether it was in fact the DPRK or the ROK that initiated the military action on 25 June 1950." University of Georgia historian William W. Stueck agreed that Cumings' work was "revisionist," and did not find it convincing, but said "I do not regard revisionism as a pejorative label... That usage simply has to do with the time frame within which the arguments became prominent among American scholars. It so happens that this was over a generation after the war began and that the arguments challenged the views that the war was largely international in nature and that the American participation in it was - with at least one prominent exception - defensive and wise.” Others who characterized the works as "revisionist" include Francis Marion historian Scott Kaufman, former Bradley historian Lester H. Bradley, Cal State history department chair James Matray, and Douglas Macdonald of the Strategic Studies Institute, Cumings himself has rejected the label.
Paul Hollander has argued that Cumings has a pro-North Korea bias. Hollander cites Cumings' discussion of the North Korean prison system, noting that "in a triumph of selective perception, he manages to interpret the most damning indictment of the North Korean gulag available--The Aquariums of Pyongyang, by Kang Chol-Hwan and Pierre Rigoulot--as providing support for his views of the system. As he sees it, the book is 'interesting and believable' because it is not the 'ghastly tale of totalitarian repression that its original publishers ... meant it to be.' But it is precisely and resoundingly that, as any reader without a soft spot for North Korean tyranny would readily discover. Cumings writes that "conditions were primitive and beatings were frequent but the inmates also were able to improvise much of their upkeep on their own ... small animals could surreptitiously be caught and cooked." He delicately refrains from mentioning that these small animals were mostly rats, and a regular part of the narrator's diet. That book makes abundantly clear that hunger and malnutrition were endemic; inmates stealing food or trying to escape were executed. Cumings also fails to mention these public executions the inmates were obliged to attend, stressing instead that families were commendably kept together and that "death from starvation was rare." In any event, he suggests, these deprivations are put into the proper perspective by our "longstanding, never-ending gulag full of black men in our prisons"--which should disqualify us from "pointing a finger."
Historian Allan Millett has argued that Cumings' "eagerness to cast American officials and policy in the worst possible light, however, often leads him to confuse chronological cause and effect and to leap to judgments that cannot be supported by the documentation he cites or ignores."
Writing in the Atlantic Monthly, professor of North Korean literature B.R. Myers lambasted Cumings arguing that, in North Korea: Another Country, "Cumings likens North Korea to Thomas More's Utopia, and this time the wrongheadedness seems downright willful; it's as if he were so tired of being made to look silly by forces beyond his control that he decided to do the job himself".
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