My name is Daniel. I was an English teacher in Seoul, South Korea, and am now a writer who has

published three books including South Korea: Our Story by Daniel Nardini.

                   A good part of what we are seeing now in this election in South Korea, where the political

left holds the advantage, has been in part influenced by a well known American scholar named Bruce Cumings.

When I was in Seoul, I could find his books in a number of bookstores. Among his best known books are

The Origins of the Korean War and North Korea: Another Country. He is the winner of the Kim

Dae-jung Award and is revered by the American political left as he is by the Korean political left. But, in my

view, he is wrong on just about every count. The problem with the first book I mention is that we now have

evidence from the Moscow Kremlin archives that show then Russian leader Joseph Stalin approved the

planned invasion of South Korea and had told Russian advisers working in the North Korean Army to

prepare for war. The second book is equally wrong because we have learned that North Korea had cheated

on all treaty obligations to build nuclear weapons and not keep its promises of getting rid of its nuclear

weapons. Despite all of this, Cumings and many other left wing scholars such as himself have a great

deal of influence to this day on the Korean as well as American political left. It is sad because the arguments

being used to this day by the Korean political left have come out in this presidential election to try and 

justify that if we "try to be nice" to North Korea and "blame" the Americans for the situation on the Korean

peninsula that everything will get better and that Korea can become a unified country again. This illusion

that calls itself historical truth is truly illusion.