Revoking a Recommendation
— B.R. Myers

13 September 2016

In a generally mixed review for Acta Koreana, I recommended Charles K. Armstrong’s book Tyranny of the Weak (2013) for college readers new to the subject matter.

No other book deals with so much of Pyongyang’s foreign relations. Armstrong’s prose, for its part, is always concise and jargon-free. The price is right too. Tyranny of the Weak is therefore a good textbook for undergraduate use. I plan to assign it to my own students while urging them to read it critically. (Acta Koreana, December 2013)

In the rest of the review I criticized Armstrong’s adherence to what I call the Juche myth. I did not go into the isolated textual errors of which I was then aware, because they did not seem to me to bear greatly on any big picture. I became aware of more problems later, some minor, some major.

I consider it minor if Armstrong struggles with German dates (4 August 1963 should be 8 April, as I found out when requesting the misdated document from Berlin), or posits the start of DPRK media reference to Kim Jong Il as “party center” not in early 1974 but in late 1975, or misidentifies a Soviet counselor as an ambassador. (See pages 127, 214 and 84.) Whatever those errors may say about the extraordinary language skills Armstrong lays claim to in his introduction, they do not, in the context of Tyranny, mislead the reader to any great degree. Let him who has published an error-free first edition get worked up about them.

One reason I now list the mistakes above is because, to judge from Amazon’s Look Inside function, Cornell University Press carried them and others into the paperback version of the book published earlier this year. Somebody has to say something before Ambassador A. M. Petrov ends up a real historical figure. Even if left uncorrected, of course, these errors would not in themselves pose a big obstacle to using the book in classrooms. Students could be given a list of errata, for example.

What I consider major are Tyranny’s text-citation disconnects. These things can happen, of course. You delete an assertion from your paragraph, then go into your footnote to delete one of the two citations in there, but you take out the wrong one. Or your publisher, new to academic texts, cuts the endnotes from their moorings in the chapter proper, then forgets to match them up after you correct one of the two parts. That last was what happened to me a few times in the hardback edition of The Cleanest Race (2010). Fortunately the discursiveness of my endnotes made obvious what had happened, and Melville House shared my impatience to get a fixed (paperback) edition out in 2011.

What troubles me, therefore, is not so much the existence or quantity of text-citation disconnects in Tyranny as the nature of them. Below are some examples. So that all North Korea scholars can easily check my assertions, I have uploaded a Rodong Sinmun issue, and refrained from citing any example from the citations of GDR sources. On second thought, I think it’s better to add at least one example of citation from East Bloc materials. See Example 4 (added on 16 Sept 2016).

As for Armstrong’s use of Soviet material, there are plenty of Russian-reading Korea scholars out there more qualified to judge it. Had they found anything improper, they would surely have said something by this time. Now ain’t that right, fellas?

Example # 1

Armstrong describes a congress in Pyongyang in 1953 as follows:

Han began his attack at the First Congress of Writers and Artists, held on September 26-27, 1953. By this time Im Hwa had already been arrested and executed, and Han accused Yi T’ae-jun, another KAPF veteran, of having been a follower of Im…. Han also attacked Kim Sŭng-nam, the composer, accusing him of abandoning Korean musical traditions…. Visual artists were similarly accused of neglecting Korean traditions and lacking patriotism. (Tyranny 81)

The footnote number after patriotism leads to the citation: Yang and Chee, “North Korean Education System, 1945 to Present,” 127-135.

My Comment:

Yang and Chee’s article (“Educational,” by the way) appeared in a special issue of The China Quarterly later published in book form as North Korea Today (1963). There is no mention of the writers’ congress in it.

This leaves one wondering what source Armstrong really used.

As it happens, Balázs Szalontai describes the same events in very similar fashion in his book Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era (2005), on the basis of Hungarian documents:

At the First Congress of Writers’ and Artists, held on 26-27 September, Han Sŏl-ya… attacked… a writer named Yi T’ae-jun, accusing him of having been a protégé of Yim Hwa…. Han Sŏl-ya accused Kim Sŭng-nam of having neglected the traditions of classical Korean music…. artists should paint pictures about the Korean War in classical style. (Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era 40-41)

What Szalontai includes that Armstrong doesn’t is a remark about the rise of North Korean nationalism, “a process already reinforced by wartime patriotic propaganda.” This parenthetical aside comes with its very own endnote: Yang and Chee, “North Korean Educational System,” North Korea Today, 127-135 (Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era 276).

Example # 2

Armstrong writes:

In a conversation with a Soviet diplomat in 1960, Pang Hak-se, minister of the interior, referred to some 100,000 ‘reactionaries’ detained… (Tyranny 105)

The source given: Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea (1972), vol. 2, The Society, 833-835.

My Comment:

That information is not in Communism in Korea, either on those pages or anywhere else, because the relevant Soviet archives were not made accessible to American scholars until long after that book was published.

The information can, however, be found in Szalontai’s book (2005):

In 1960, Interior Minister Pang Hak-se told a Soviet diplomat that the security services had “revealed” approximately 100,000 “hostile and reactionary elements”…. I would like to thank Dr. Andrei N. Lankov for this piece of information. Some other authors believe that as many as 2,500 to 6,000 people were imprisoned or executed in 1958-1959. See, for instance, Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea, 833-835. (Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era 297)

Example # 3

Here Armstrong talks about the Kim regime’s response to the crushing of the so-called Prague Spring in 1968:

The Soviet crackdown on the Budapest uprising in 1956 was a cause for concern among the leaders in Beijing and Pyongyang; among other things, the crackdown resulted, as we saw in the previous chapter, in Pyongyang withdrawing North Korean students from Hungary…. North Korean anxiety about Soviet intervention in Eastern Europe was not expressed publicly at the time. The Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia was another matter. Needless to say, neither China nor North Korea was in sympathy with… the Czech dissenters. Their concern was with Moscow’s blatant intervention into the affairs of a fellow socialist state…. Chinese media attacked the Czech [sic] invasion in the most vitriolic of language. North Korea’s response was fairly mild in comparison. The Rodong Sinmun published an article entitled “Historical Lessons We Have Gained from the Study of Affairs in Czechoslovakia.” The most important “lesson” was the one North Korea had long emphasized: the inviolable right of all nations to self-determination. Juche was, as much as anything, a position of independence in the Sino-Soviet Cold War. (Tyranny 156)

The only source cited: “Historical Lessons We Have Gained from the Study of Affairs in Czechoslovakia,” Rodong Sinmun, August 23, 1968, page 3.

My Comment:

Let me isolate each statement. 1) The Soviet crackdown on the uprising in Budapest led the DPRK to withdraw students from Hungary in 1956. 2) Although not sympathetic to the Czech dissenters in 1968, the North Koreans’ main feeling about the events in Prague was indignation at Moscow. 3) Their media’s reaction? Fairly mild in comparison to Beijing’s vitriolic one, yet they did criticize the Soviet intervention. 4) The party organ responded to events in Czechoslovakia by emphasizing the right of all nations to self-determination.

How Juche of the North Koreans! And how groundbreaking of Armstrong to find this out. The consensus in Cold War studies has always been that North Korea joined North Vietnam in supporting the Soviet move. (See for example Richard Wich, Sino-Soviet Crisis Politics, Cambridge, 1980, 50.)

Alas, the claim that the crackdown on Hungary resulted in the withdrawal of North Korean students contradicts the very chapter of which Armstrong reminds the reader. Page 100 makes clear that (as is well-known) those students were withdrawn for fear they might have been contaminated by the counter-revolution the Soviets had crushed.

To back up his quite lengthy account of the North Korean line on Prague, Armstrong cites only that one Rodong Sinmun source. Its actual title is simply “Chesŭkkosŭllobensŭkko sat’ae ŭi ryŏksajŏk kyohun.” This should be translated “The Historical Lesson(s) of the Situation in Czechoslovakia.” The plural is optional, considering the content of the article.

For Korean readers I am attaching a rather large file of the entire relevant issue of the Rodong Sinmun. (I include the whole paper to prove that the article does not start on page 3, but on page 4.)

DPRK RodongSinmun1968

“The Historical Lesson(s) of the Situation in Czechoslovakia” bears no relation to Armstrong’s account.  No criticism of the Soviet intervention is expressed, nor is Juche, autonomy or self-determination so much as mentioned, to say nothing of the “inviolable right of all nations” to the latter. Most of the content consists of fierce condemnation of the Czech dissenters as “revisionists,” counter-revolutionaries, tools of US imperialism, etc, and scare-quote-studded rejection of their talk of “liberalization” and “democratization.”

This was much the same language then used in the USSR, where the pejorative “revisionist” had come back into vogue. I should also mention (as Armstrong does not) the highly significant fact that the Rodong Sinmun had published TASS’ report on Prague only the day before. (See B.C. Koh’s excellent article “North Korea and the Sino-Soviet Schism,” Western Political Quarterly, December 1969, for a closer discussion of all these media developments.)

In the penultimate paragraph of the “Historical Lesson” article, so-called sadaejuŭi or serve-the-great-power-ism appears as the third item in a list of “reactionary” tendencies to be opposed: “revisionism, dogmatism, serve-the-great-power-ism, bourgeois thought, feudal thought, etc.” Naturally this asks to be read in the context of the article’s earlier condemnation of Czech revisionists for waving the Stars and Stripes, falling for Yankee subversion, etc. Much more textual evidence than that is needed if we are to read an emphasis on every nation’s right to self-determination into what is, when you get right down to it, a rejection of Czechoslovakia’s.

Example # 4

Armstrong writes:

North Korean officials told the East European advisers in Pyongyang that they wanted to establish new industrial centers in mountainous areas of the interior, where they would be close to the mines and also less vulnerable to attacks from enemy naval forces, which had caused so much damage during the Korean War. (Tyranny, 63)

Source cited: GDR Embassy in DPRK, Report on Conversation with the Hungarian Ambassador, 29 October 1957. MfAA A 6979.

My Comment:

Here is the file of the document in question.

GDR Dok_29_Okt1957_M1_A6979

As even beginning readers of German can see for themselves, the document in fact records the Hungarian ambassador’s informal remarks about the state of agriculture in his home country.

Szalontai, citing a Hungarian document from 1954 as well as B.C. Koh’s article “The War’s Impact on the Korean Peninsula” (1993), writes the following in his book:

[T]he industrial centers created by the Japanese in Korea … were too close to the sea and too far from the mines. Attacked by air force and naval gunfire, they suffered enormous damage during the Korean War. This is why the KWP leadership decided to construct the new factories in mountainous areas where it was easy to hide the machines in tunnels in event of war. (Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era, 50)

So there you go. Needless to say, we all make mistakes big and small, exposing in turns our ignorance, inattentiveness, laziness, bias, arrogance. Offended? All right: I make such mistakes. The reason I refuse to smile away the inaccuracies and untruths sampled above is because they do not appear to have been set down in good faith. I suppose Example 3 might have resulted from an almost complete lack of understanding of Korean. Anything’s possible, I suppose. Let’s just say: It’s an unlucky polyglot who has trouble with the foreign language he needs most.

I have no idea how many fellow professors or teachers followed my recommendation in Acta Koreana to use Tyranny of the Weak in their classes, or how many other people were encouraged by the review to buy it. None, I now hope. All the same, I hereby apologize for that recommendation, and revoke it.

In that same Acta review in 2013 I wrote the following:

Several pages unfold events and quotations in a sequence so similar to Balázs Szalontai’s Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era (2005) that one either starts or ceases to wonder why Armstrong was so reluctant to cite it.

An acquaintance who knew exactly what I meant said I’d gone too far by saying it in public. I had already been scolded like that for disrespecting another well-connected American scholar who, among other things, had written that lodging in a Korean home comes with a right to bed the mother.

When you speak out against the sort of people Leavis used to call “academic ward bosses,” you implicitly criticize the silence of others, which they must then rationalize by casting you as the bull in the china shop, the grandstander with no sense of decorum. You may even find that your name has become taboo.

On Youtube a while back, I stumbled across a public and of course panegyric discussion of Tyranny of the Weak that took place in Washington DC in October 2013. The venue, grotesquely enough, was the Woodrow Wilson Center, as if to drive home the primacy of coterie over truth. I needn’t explain what country this reminded me of. It was like some elaborate extension of the old joke about German studies being humorless, and Italianist conferences always starting late.

My favorite part of the video is about 55 minutes in, when the WWC’s own James F. Person — his eyes rarely straying from the guest of honor — tells how “sad” it is that an unorthodox view of Juche has been gaining “traction.” Rather than dignify the heretic by identifying him, Person refers only to “a certain scholar of North Korean literature, who shall remain nameless.”

Nameless? Fine by me. But not voiceless.

UPDATE (3 October 2016): From Berlin, News of More Bogus Sources

“Wir werden nicht schimpfen, aber die Erörterung wird rücksichtslos sein.” – Karl Jaspers

On September 21 I sent to the Political Archive in Berlin a list of 17 East German documents cited in Charles Armstrong’s Tyranny of the Weak (2013). My goal was to find out if the external research service that works with the PA would copy the documents for me. I was embarrassed by my inability to provide the proper titles of any of them, but Armstrong tends towards special vagueness in the citation of foreign-language sources.

A week later an archive employee wrote back to tell me that only one of the 17 documents could be tracked down with the dates and file numbers provided. That’s right, 1 out of 17. Under these circumstances, she gently concluded, I might not be needing that research service after all.

No, maybe not.

As a consolation the kind lady attached to her email, gratis, the lone document she had been able to find.

At this point I’m afraid I must “trigger” those scholars who, to judge from the Korean Studies listserv, are more horrified by the discussion of plagiarism, footnote-mining and fantasy citation than by the misdeeds themselves. I understand these people, up to a point. So numerous and grave are the known problems with Tyranny that the publication of additional ones seems gratuitously cruel.

I suspect there’s a good deal of what psychologists call compensation at work here too. Since Tyranny cannot be defended anymore — everyone seems to agree on this point — those who want to preserve a cautious neutrality in the discussion must find fault with the other side. “The stuff in Tyranny is bad, sure, but the uncollegial way it has been exposed is just as bad, if not worse.” Such is the apparent reasoning.

My reasoning is that a plagiarist is not a colleague. He has forfeited the right to be treated as one. And no, we don’t need to wait for some university’s formal investigation to see what is already obvious.

There’s a Four Yorkshiremen kind of vanity in thinking one’s own field uniquely cronyist. I try to guard against it. For the life of me, though, I can’t imagine Sinologists responding to such a scandal with the shoot-the-messenger hysterics and frantic red-herring hunts the Tyranny affair has unleashed on that Korean Studies discussion thread.

Anyway, as long as the book continues to be assigned to university students, the truth about it must be told as fully as possible. No one enjoys telling it. There is always something offensive in the details of cunning, as a very wise Englishwoman once wrote.

Long story short: The East German document to which I have just referred bears no relation to the assertions in Tyranny that it was cited to corroborate.

Armed security forces were sent to guard the East European embassies, a practice which, the East German embassy remarked, exceeded the security presence in East Berlin — a city much deeper in “enemy territory.” (Tyranny, page 121)

The citation in the attendant footnote (129) reads:

GDR Embassy in DPRK, Report, 15 August 1960. MfAA A 7064.

Here is the only document with that date in the relevant file.

mfaa_m1_a7064-15-aug-1960

As readers of German can see for themselves, it is a very brief letter to the GDR embassy in Pyongyang, informing it of the agenda for one day of a ministerial conference involving member states of the East Bloc’s Organization for Cooperation of Railways.

It was while reading this utterly irrelevant document that I began to find the whole Tyranny affair more farcical than upsetting.

The relevant information in (what else?) Szalontai’s book, based, inter alia, on a Hungarian source from (when else?) 15 August 1960:

On 2 August, the Foreign Ministry told the diplomatic corps that henceforth the soldiers guarding the embassies would prevent everybody, Koreans and foreigners alike, from entering an embassy unless the person worked there or had an appointment with the diplomats. In addition, a person might enter if an employee of the embassy, having answered the doorbell, was willing to let him in.

These measures affected primarily the East European embassies, because the Soviet and Chinese embassies had their own gatekeepers, which prevented the North Korean guards from halting visitors. Indeed, Soviet Ambassador Puzanov did not object to the new regulations, whereas the Czechoslovak, Polish, and Mongolian ambassadors often complained of them. The East German chargé d’affaires pointed out that in East Berlin, a city that lay much closer to the “enemy,” only those embassies were guarded by policemen which themselves asked for it. (Szalontai, Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era, 161)

I can think of no other explanation for Armstrong’s “deeper in ‘enemy territory'” except that it was an ill-advised effort to reword Szalontai’s “closer to the ‘enemy’.” It was of course West Berlin, and not the East German capital, that lay in enemy territory.

Another item for the table of “discrepancies” then.

All I’m left wondering at this stage is: Why? Why?

UPDATE (28 November 2016): Apologism vs the AHA

In 2014 I wrote an NK News article arguing that so-called “subversive engagement” ends up subverting us more than the North Koreans. It began like this:

Contrary to a Western canard, the German crowds at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 cheered and applauded Jesse Owens, and went home with their faith in Nazism unshaken. Most of the foreign visitors, on the other hand, returned to their countries with a better view of Hitler than before.

One of those who disagreed with me, James Hoare, countered with an article of his own on the website 38 North. In it he wrote:

[Myers] claims that all the visitors to the 1936 Berlin Olympics went home convinced that Nazi Germany was a great place. Really? All of them?

As you can see, “most of the foreign visitors” has become “all the visitors,” which promptly earns a sneer for its lunatic sweepingness. With an air of triumph Hoare then quotes William Shirer (a foreigner who was not impressed) as a notable counter-example of what he falsely accuses me of asserting.

I am used to being misrepresented, with careful avoidance of direct quotation, as a wildly polemic purveyor of extreme views. What I don’t understand is why people do this sort of thing online, where their readers are just a few mouse-clicks away from the truth.

Hoare goes on to accuse me of implying that not only every last foreigner, but every last German at the Olympics went home thrilled too. Does he really believe — would any child believe — that I implied that? When Hoare reads about the weekly sea of South Koreans calling for Park Geun-hye to step down, does he grumble, “Really? All of them?” Of course not. Such faux-obtuse pedantry is for writers who irk him on more substantial grounds.

It’s fun to see this same fellow presenting himself in a recent NK News article as a paragon of collegiality, a live-and-let-live fellow who would never take a scholar to task for mere errors. Not even for plagiarism or misattribution of sources? Especially not for things like that.

What Hoare cannot excuse is the recent criticism of Tyranny of the Weak and its author, which he professes to find mean-spirited. Here too, natch, he avoids direct quotation, so as to enjoy more freedom to mislead. In its evasive vagueness his piece recalls Rodong Sinmun editorials: the kind that rage at the enemy’s latest “slander” without divulging its content.

At one point Hoare writes of Tyranny’s detractors:

I am sure that as much damage has been done [to Korean Studies] by their ill-tempered comments as by their ostensible cause.

This would be forgivable hyperbole if the man expressed equal or at least serious concern about the issue at hand. He nods in that direction, but his heart just isn’t in it. Not once does he so much as mention Balázs Szalontai, the main injured party. So trivial does the misconduct in question seem to the former British diplomat that he sees nothing untoward, let alone actionable, in suggesting that research assistants might have been to blame. One bungling assistant each, I suppose, for Russian, German, Chinese and Korean sources? Since 2005?

He also suggests that the many unacknowledged liftings in Tyranny are extenuated by the mere inclusion of Szalontai’s book in the 200-title bibliography. How far a graduate student would get with that sort of defense can be imagined.

Special ridicule is heaped on the “high moral indignation” of Tyranny’s critics, and their alleged pretense that the world of scholarship is somehow “pure as the driven snow.” By riding around on the point that everyone makes mistakes, Hoare insinuates that the other side has been too self-righteous to concede it.

Nothing could be further from the truth. As I wrote in September, a few updates ago:

I consider it minor if Armstrong struggles with German dates [or makes other innocent errors]…Let him who has published an error-free first edition get worked up … these errors would not in themselves pose a big obstacle to using the book…

[Text-citation disconnects] can happen, of course…[They] happened to me a few times…

Needless to say, we all make mistakes big and small, exposing in turns our ignorance, inattentiveness, laziness, bias, arrogance. Offended? All right: I make such mistakes.

Comparable remarks can be found in others’ criticism of the book. So yes, we all make mistakes. We get that. The problem — as Hoare knows only too well — is the amount of plagiarism and spurious citation in Tyranny that does not appear to have been accidental.

Contrary to his article, there has been far more nasty and sanctimonious rhetoric on the apologetic side of the discussion. I strongly recommend readers go through the thread on the Korean Studies listserv archive for September 2016 entitled, in reference to my blog post, “Re-Revised Posting: Revoking a Recommendation.” (I did not join the discussion.)

They will see that neither Hoare nor the moderators objected to the claim made early on that I am not to be trusted to judge anyone’s scholarship. Nor did they object when the four Tyranny-critical scholars, who were outnumbered even on the thread, were treated as a cruel “swarm” tormenting the Ivy League professor. How’s this for moralizing:

No balls, no decency, no academic conduct, and swarm mentality? …this is far more than just a shabby and tasteless style. You help changing [sic] essential rules of conduct and guide us into very muddy waters, and that is scary.

For the benefit of the incredulous, let me confirm: What is being described here as frighteningly indecent misconduct is not plagiarism or source fabrication, but the criticism of those things.

Yet in that listserv discussion, on my blog, and in Andrei Lankov’s NK News article, this criticism has consisted for the most part of straightforward constatation of the evidence. What panicked the apologists on the listserv, I think, was the way the items just kept coming.

They were also offended when Szalontai reacted sarcastically to the author’s claim (made in real or pretended incomprehension of the evidence already made public) that his “errors” were confined to a few Russian citations.

In short, this whole argument is a clash between long-codified, internationally accepted standards of academic ethics and a few Korea scholars’ idiosyncratic, newfound standards of proper academic etiquette.

I say newfound, because in the past writings of Tyranny’s apologists, I saw no trace of the almost Christ-like charity they now preach in chorus. Did they all find religion together, in mid-September 2016? Or might there be a more worldly explanation?

The best retort to them, in any case, is simply to invoke the American Historical Association’s Standards of Professional Conduct:

Scholarship flourishes in an atmosphere of openness and candor, which should include the scrutiny and public discussion of academic deception.

In closing I would like to remind everyone that in dozens of instances in Tyranny, a fake or irrelevant source is cited in pseudo-corroboration of information that had hitherto been published only in the secondary literature of other scholars, primarily Balázs Szalontai. In other words, most of the over 70 items in the table Szalontai has compiled (see below) can be broken down into two separate acts, one of plagiarism, one of source fabrication.

Tyranny thus contains over a hundred such acts, or more than one per three pages of the text. How rotten is this book? So rotten, you can’t discuss its source base — in any tone, in any public forum — without being accused of cruelty.

tyranny-of-the-weak_table-of-76-cases

UPDATE (8 January 2017): Cornell University Press Colluding in Whitewash? 

Charles Armstrong has every right to defend himself, and to be given the benefit of the doubt if his defense is at all plausible. As I have said before, neither invalid citation nor plagiarism is an infallible sign of deliberate misconduct. In my very first posting on Tyranny I wrote of the (five or six) text-citation disconnects in the first edition of my own book The Cleanest Race, which came about in the editing stage, when my publisher put the endnotes in a separate file from the chapter proper.

As for plagiarism, let me again speak from embarrassing experience, the better to counter claims that we who criticize Tyranny do so from an arrogated position of scholarly purity. After studying the earliest Korean version of Kim Il Sung’s 1955 speech (1960), and using the English version in some of my classes, I did my own translation, so as to include phrases and paragraphs the North Korean translator had left out.

After publishing it in North Korea’s Juche Myth (2015), I noticed how many times I had lapsed into the formulations I knew so well. All translations are bound to look similar, especially when you’re dealing with an idiom so rich in stock phrases. That several of my short sentences (“What are we doing?”) would match perfectly with the earlier version was to be expected. But scattered among the 500 sentences are 20-some longish ones identical or nearly identical to those in the older version. Unintentional or not, it’s plagiarism; in the next edition I must acknowledge the debt to my anonymous forerunner.

My point (once again) is this: We all make mistakes, big mistakes, and for reasons others would not normally think of. Michael Bellesiles’ claim to have lost all his notes for Arming America (2000), however implausible it seemed, was not to be dismissed out of hand. I’ve yet to lose all my notes, but I wouldn’t put it past me.

Here’s the thing, though. The systematic combination of plagiarized material with spurious citation in Tyranny of the Weak could not possibly have resulted from anything except careful design. I suspect this is why the Columbia professor and his friends are yet to argue against the allegations at all. Instead their apparent strategy, the only one open to them, is to work against the very notion that such behavior is seriously wrong.

Last September, the first 3 “text-citation disconnects” I presented from Tyranny were treated by apologists as beneath notice, despite the apparent premeditation which had gone into them. My judgment, one professor intoned, was not to be trusted — as if the items were not on view for him to judge too.  As the weeks passed, the table of evidence swelled, to zero effect on the apologists. First 10, then 32, then over 60 such items were shrugged off as insignificant.

A new low was reached in November, when James Hoare wrote in NK News that Tyranny’s critics should all just relax, because history is such a fundamentally unreliable business. He even held up Hugh Trevor-Roper as a wise authority on how falsehoods sort themselves out over time — for which reason (so Hoare) we should preserve a collegial silence when we encounter them.

A week or so ago, on his Columbia webpage, Armstrong posted an entry in much the same vein. He would have us believe that a citation failure rate of every twelfth footnote falls within an acceptable margin of error — indeed, that such a history book can still be boasted of as “rich, multi-layered.” What he does not mention is that at least 75% of his many citations of hitherto untranslated Soviet documents (the “layer” that got the most attention from reviewers) are bogus.

Nowhere does Armstrong mention the plagiarism-fabrication couplings, let alone explain them. Instead he writes as if he has been slammed for a few inaccuracies here and there, which he explains away with cant about his challenging methodology. Apparently it involves working backward from secondary literature — no surprise there — and passing notes back and forth to research assistants. Who is meant to be swayed by all this, I cannot imagine. It would have to be someone completely ignorant of Szalontai’s table, which is not linked to.

And once again, the Columbia professor attributes improper academic conduct to Szalontai. That tells you all you need to know. As Fyodor Tertitskiy pointed out last month, no honest scholar who had accidentally lifted dozens of items from a colleague would dream of scolding him for not complaining courteously enough.

Armstrong drops the bombshell that Cornell University Press is rushing out a new edition of the book this spring, with 52 corrections. “Only 52?” might seem an odd retort, but 76 problems have already been itemized, and more are on their way. Can you see 24 things in Szalontai’s table that you wouldn’t want to fix, if it were your book?

But I suppose if Armstrong is to keep that Fairbank Prize, a face-savingly large number of criticized items must go uncorrected into the next edition, and the reader be damned. I marvel at Roger Haydon’s willingness to go along with all this, but then again, he never stopped plugging the original edition for its use of East Bloc sources.

This raises the question of which 24 items will make it into the less-falsified, less-plagiaristic version. The Soviet-constructed nuclear power plant so casually mentioned in the original — will that return? And the report sent from the East German embassy in 1953, some six months before it opened? How about the diplomatic diarist who managed to be in Moscow and Pyongyang at the same time? We’ll just have to wait and see.

How different things would have been had Szalontai’s name been on Tyranny, and Armstrong’s on the earlier book!  The 60 or so liftings would have jumped out at every reviewer right away. And can you imagine the Columbia professor being treated on that Korean Studies listserv the same way the Hungarian was? Accused of indecency for taking his plagiarist to task? Told by colleagues to write a book review if he was so upset — the innuendo being that they didn’t mind in the slightest?

Of course you can’t imagine that. Neither can I. One Koreanist after another would have logged onto Twitter to mock the offender and express support for the injured party. Hashtag TyrannyoftheSneak. A dozen examples of plagiarism-fabrication couplings would have sufficed to make Cornell University Press apologize for its negligence. A new edition? Don’t make me laugh.

Not that I don’t understand what it must be like for Korea scholars in the West. That listserv thread got one point across loud and clear: Those who mess with Tyranny must prepare for every unorthodoxy or oversight in their own writing to be treated as an outrage, a greater one even than the falsification of sources.

I’d be silent now too, if I had to deal with the same old-boy network every time I submitted a manuscript, interviewed for a job, or applied for a conference slot. But if I were over there, I would own up to my fear, or “own it” as the millennials say. I would not pretend that straddling the fence during an assault on basic academic standards is the morally right thing to do.

UPDATE (14 January 2017): HarperCollins Teaches Cornell University Press a Lesson in Publishing Ethics

As the New York Times reported on 10 January, HarperCollins decided to withdraw the digital edition of Monica Crowley’s What the (Bleep) Just Happened? (2012) only 3 days after CNN’s discovery of some 50 instances of plagiarism of passages in the book.

Two days later, as if to dispel hopes that it might follow HarperCollins’ example, Cornell University Press tweeted a link to Charles Armstrong’s blog post of 30 December 2016.

Charles Armstrong responds to critics, issues corrections to Tyranny of the Weak https://t.co/9exo5ebzAx #NorthKorea

— Cornell University Press (@CornellPress) January 11, 2017

In this manner Cornell University Press tacitly confirmed that a) it considers Armstrong’s post an appropriate reply to critics of the plagiarism and source fabrication in Tyranny of the Weak (2013), and b) a new edition is to appear in a few months, with only 52 corrections.

The laconic tweet was the academic publisher’s first public response to the controversy since it broke some 120 days ago.

Until the new version of Tyranny comes out some time this spring, Cornell University Press will apparently continue advertising and selling the original version in all formats, complete with over 60 instances of plagiarism and over 60 attendant instances of citation of non-existent or irrelevant sources.

tyranny-of-the-weak_table-of-76-cases

UPDATE (25 February 2017): A Mystery is Solved 

I used the word farcical too lightly a few updates ago. It wasn’t until I read Armstrong’s “North Korea and the Education of Desire” (2016) a few weeks ago that he literally made me laugh. A moment later I realized I’d found the answer to a question that had been puzzling me for months.

But Nietzsche was right in saying that once you figure things out, they become much less interesting. Barring some direct provocation that calls for my response and no one else’s, what follows will be my last update to this blog post. I would therefore like to offer a final summing-up before moving on to the revelatory article I just mentioned.

All scholars can be roughly divided into research-first types, for whom the networking side of academic life is a chore, and those extroverts who gravitate early towards committees and editorial boards, and soon become fixtures on the conference circuit. Naturally there are gradations between the poles, but it’s always easy to figure out which half of the spectrum someone belongs to. One of my lecturers at university never stopped talking about the AKSE conferences of European Koreanists: who had made what wonderful joke at the last one, which important point of order would be tabled at the next. It was as if the whole point of Korean Studies were to gain entry to this thrilling integration ritual, which I made a mental note to steer clear of.

To each his own. What cannot be denied is that the published output of the one camp is of a higher quality than that of the other. Nor can it be denied that — for equally obvious reasons — the networkers ascribe great value to harmony, and manage their conferences and journals with a view to keeping disputation to a minimum.

This is no big problem so long as the networkers’ influence is kept in check. The key thing is to prevent any one member of their camp from collecting so many editorships, chairmanships, board memberships, and other opportunities to affect careers that he becomes an “academic ward boss,” someone whom all researchers in the field must avoid offending.

Once that happens, he and his coterie will be spared from criticism even as the quality of their work declines. To preserve the status quo, they will favor each newcomer unlikely to throw their mediocrity into relief, while keeping everyone else down. Real research will be pushed to the margins.

I’m not just talking about Korean Studies, of course. To quote from Shirley Strum’s superb book on baboons, which I recommend to all young people contemplating a career in academia:

There are cliques in science as in any other facet of human endeavor. If you are part of the “in group,” even minor findings are discussed and integrated, eventually becoming part of the working knowledge in the field. If you are not part of the clique, you stand a good chance of being ignored. (Almost Human: A Journey Into the World of Baboons, New York, 1990, p. 163.)

Here’s a case in point. At the Woodrow Wilson Center in 2013, Charles K. Armstrong (a board member) heard his book praised as the first to deal with the North Korean famine of 1954-55. Neither he nor anyone else present felt the need to point out that Balázs Szalontai had garnered a fair amount of attention in 2005 for dealing with that famine — in a book published by the Woodrow Wilson Center.

When his panegyrist mentioned having recently referred to the famine in his own PhD thesis, Armstrong joked, “I didn’t steal it from there.” Fun all around; good times. But not so funny when you consider that the jester had lifted part of his discussion of the famine from Szalontai’s book, and pseudo-corroborated it with spurious East Bloc sources.

(Go to 51:45 in the WWC video, then see items 16-18 in Szalontai’s table: tyranny-of-the-weak_table-of-76-cases.)

When the research-first types allow this sort of thing to slide, things naturally get worse. Academic interaction ceases to be about the exchange of ideas and becomes a matter of mutual back-scratching: You invite me to your conference/book/university, and I’ll invite you to mine.

Soon professors who would be horrified to catch their students plagiarizing and inventing sources start to plead for understanding when their ward boss is caught doing it, and close off academic forums to discussion of the problem. I refer the incredulous, for the very last time, to that Korean Studies listserv thread from last September.

Fyodor Tertitskiy has just written a Daily NK article placing Tyranny in the context of a long pattern of misconduct. I can confirm that several of Armstrong’s works since 2005 do indeed contain instances of plagiarism and source fabrication. (Homage citation should thus be done very carefully.)

The Columbia professor still managed to surprise me with his article “North Korea and the Education of Desire,” which appeared last year in Alf Lüdtke’s book Everyday Life in Mass Dictatorship (Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2016).

So uncannily familiar did the very first paragraph seem to me that I typed a random sentence into Google. Then another, and another. Within minutes I found that 90% of the chapter consists of pages mouse-clicked together — verbatim and sans acknowledgment — from Armstrong’s earlier books, primarily The North Korean Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2004), and Tyranny of the Weak (Cornell University Press, 2013).

The side-by-side excerpting below (successive, if you’re reading on your phone) is just long enough to show I’m not making this up. I wouldn’t want to violate Cornell’s copyrights; they’ve been through enough already.

Brown text = duplicated material.

Tyranny is mentioned in the new book (as is the Fairbank Prize) only in Armstrong’s bio. I should add that the text in the Tyranny column above had already appeared in the book Korean Society in 2007, and in the Cold War History journal article “Fraternal Socialism” in 2005, so the new book marks the fourth virtually identical appearance of these pages.   

This stuff has been going on for ten years, in other words, though not always in such in-your-face fashion.

Armstrong’s chapter “US-North Korean Relations,” in The Future of US-Korean Relations: The Imbalance of Power, ed. James Feffer (Routledge, New York, 2006), 9-28, consists to at least 90% of material pasted verbatim and without acknowledgment from “US-North Korean Relations,” Asian Perspective (Vol. 28, No. 4, 2004), 13-37. But considering that the title was not changed, the lack of acknowledgment may well have been an innocent error.

Which reminds me to concede for the umpteenth time that we all make mistakes. I suspect few researchers who have been publishing for ten years have not at some point reused or superficially recycled a passage or two from one of their journal articles in a later book without proper acknowledgment.

But five of Armstrong’s other publications since 2005 consist to 30-40% of material taken verbatim and without acknowledgment from his earlier hard-covered work. We’re talking duplication from book to book, book to journal, even book to “working paper.”

Usually the unacknowledged, pre-published material takes up much or all of the main body. Think of it as the pre-owned wood sandwiched between the shiny new panels of Introduction and Conclusion.

I think we can do without five additional sets of excerpt-pairs, but here is the main bibliographical information, should anyone want to check.

1. “Inter-Korean Relations in Historical Perspective,” International Journal of Unification Studies (Vol. 14, No. 2, 2005), 1-20, consists to at least 33% of material copied verbatim and without acknowledgment from “Inter-Korean Relations: A North Korean Perspective,” in Inter-Korean Relations: Problems and Prospects, ed. Samuel Kim (Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2004), 39-56. Compare 11-15 in the newer work with 46-50 in the older one.
2. “Beyond the DMZ,” in Korean Society, ed. Charles Armstrong (Routledge, NY, 2007), 187-203, consists to at least 33% of material duplicated verbatim and without acknowledgment from The North Korean Revolution (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2004) and “Fraternal Socialism,” Cold War History (Vol. 5, No. 2, 2005), 161-187. Compare 190-197 in BTD with 72-73, 139-140 in NKR,  and 166-168 in FS.
3. “Necessary Enemies,” Working Paper Series, US-Korea Institute at SAIS, September 2008, 3-21, consists to at least 33% of material taken verbatim and without acknowledgment from “US-North Korean Relations,” in The Future of US-Korean Relations: The Imbalance of Power, ed. James Feffer (Routledge, NY, 2006), 9-28, most of which was itself taken from the Asian Perspective article “US-North Korean Relations” (Vol. 28, No. 4, 2004), 13-37. Compare 11-16 of NE with 11-22 of USNKR.
4. “North Korea’s South Korea Policy,” in Engagement with North Korea, ed. Sung Chull Kim, David C. Kang (SUNY Press, Albany, 2009), 226-241, consists to at least 33% of material taken verbatim and without acknowledgment from “Inter-Korean Relations: A North Korean Perspective,” in Inter-Korean Relations, ed. Samuel S. Kim (Palgrave Macmillan, NY, 2004), 39-56. Compare 228-236 of the newer work with 43-50 in the older one.
5. “Ideological Introversion and Regime Survival” in Why Communism Did Not Collapse, ed. Martin Dimitrov (Cambridge University Press, NY, 2013), 99-119, consists to at least 40% of material taken verbatim and without acknowledgment from Armstrong’s chapter “The Role and Influence of Ideology,” in North Korea in Transition, ed. Kyung-Ae Park & Scott Snyder (Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, MD, 2012), 3-18. Compare 99-117 of IIRS with 4-13 of TRII.

Before someone tries to trivialize this record of behavior, let me ask if any editors in Asian studies would knowingly accept a submission in which the middle third or more consisted of pages already published once (let alone twice) in hard covers.

I knew nothing of this aspect of Armstrong’s work until very recently. For years I had turned to him only for representative expressions of Western academia’s Juche myth. His two single-authored books satisfied most of my needs. I have to assume, however, that his penchant for self-plagiarism was an open secret among the many Pyongyang watchers and Koreanists who profess to consider him a must-cite, must-invite scholar of the first rank. Take, for example, those editors of the duplicate material. Had they been following his work when they asked him to contribute to their books? A no seems only slightly better than a yes.

If I’d read “North Korea and the Education of Desire” earlier, I wouldn’t have been so baffled by the apparent recklessness of what went on in Tyranny. Now I get it. An intelligent man doesn’t re-use whole pages from his latest book — a prize-winning book — in the hope that he won’t be found out. He does it in the empirical expectation that he won’t be called out. Evidently this mindset informed Tyranny itself.

CORRECTION (26 February 2017): In the original version of this update I referred to Armstrong as editor of the Journal of Korean Studies. It has since come to my attention that he is no longer an editor-in-chief, nor is he on the journal’s editorial board. I apologize for the error. 

https://web.archive.org/web/20161220163904/http://jks.weai.columbia.edu/editorial-advisory-boards/
>> http://jks.weai.columbia.edu/editorial-advisory-boards/

UPDATE (1 July 2017): Armstrong Returns Fairbank Prize

On June 29, the American Historical Association announced that Charles Armstrong had responded to its questions about the citations in Tyranny of the Weak by deciding to return the Fairbank Prize it had awarded him in 2014.

UPDATE (3 July 2017): Table Goes From 76 to 90 Cases

The new table of “90 Cases of Plagiarism, Source Fabrication and Text-Citation Disconnects in Charles K. Armstrong’s Tyranny of the Weak”:

90 cases Tyranny of the Weak

UPDATE (5 July 2017): Inside Higher Ed Gets It Wrong

Inside Higher Ed has just reported on Armstrong’s return of the Fairbank Prize, as well as on an allegedly corrected edition of Tyranny of the Weak which, according to Armstrong, Cornell University Press will put out later this month.

Scott Jaschik, the editor of IHE, wrote the article himself, evidently with a view to maximum dullness. You’d never know you were reading about the biggest, weirdest case of source fabrication and plagiarism in the history of Asian Studies in the US.

I was particularly annoyed by the part about me. For one thing, it is far too long; more space should have been given to the main injured party, even if  — and this has much to do with how the case has been ignored — he isn’t American, isn’t one of us.

Worse, my position is grossly misrepresented.

B. R. Myers, an associate professor of international studies at Dongseo University, in South Korea, published a detailed analysis of the controversy in which he said some of the errors were indeed minor, adding, “Let him who has published an error-free first edition get worked up about them.” As examples, he cites some incorrect dates (incorrect by days) in some German documents cited.

The dates were incorrect by months, not days, but let that pass. (And I became a full professor last October.) The passage above conveys the completely wrong impression that Szalontai’s table contains several cases of innocent inaccuracies, which in my “analysis” of the “controversy” I have dismissed as minor.

My readers can scroll up and see what I really said in September 2016 — before there was any table or controversy — namely, that there were many apparently innocent errors in Tyranny of the Weak which I considered beneath discussion.

Those errors have never had anything to do with the controversy. Not one has ever been problematized by me, Szalontai or anyone else.

In that same blog post, I made clear that I regarded Armstrong’s every apparent instance of plagiarism, fabrication and source distortion as major. This was why I considered the presentation of only 3 such cases a sufficient explanation for my decision to revoke an earlier recommendation of the book.

Jaschik goes on:

But [Myers] wrote that, in other cases, the citations were for publications that did not relate to the material cited. For instance, he cites a footnote that relates to a reference to a writers’ congress that took place in North Korea. The footnote leads to a publication that makes no reference to this meeting, so a reader has no basis for knowing where the information came from, Myers writes. He cites several other such footnotes that, he says, do not relate to the material covered.

Note how Jaschik mentions the Writers’ Congress example while skipping the crux of it: that the material came from Szalontai. One is left to think that Armstrong merely failed to back up the information.

Note also: Myers writes, Myers cites, Myers says, as if it’s all about my interpretation of things. In fact the relevant textual material has been out there in the public domain for several months, enforcing the same conclusion on every open-minded reader who has gone through it. What does Jaschik think of all that cold, hard evidence? Is it too much to expect an editor of an education journal to exercise his own judgment?

Here’s where the fellow really overplays his hand:

In other cases, Myers argues, the material appears to come from others, who were not properly credited (and he includes Szalontai among them).

Includes Szalontai among them? And that in parentheses, to downplay it even further! As if I had not focused from the start on Armstrong’s extensive plagiarism of Szalontai, which dwarfs his liftings from all other scholars combined. (Of the 90 items in the new table, 79 reflect plagiarism of Szalontai. No one else was plagiarized more than once or twice.)

I am also said to have argued something I have never argued:

Myers repeatedly notes that, as a scholar, he has made mistakes in his own scholarly writing and had to correct them later. But he argues that Armstrong has not acknowledged the significance of some of the errors in his book, or the significance of having so many errors.

This makes it sound like I am faulting Armstrong for not publicly acknowledging the significance of his making the sort of errors I do! If I have linked plagiarized information to a fake source even once, let alone 55 times, it’s news to me.

To be fair, the IHE article links to my blog post as well as to Szalontai’s table. But how many readers will bother to click on them? Most will come away thinking that an especially mistake-prone Ivy Leaguer is in trouble because some of his not-quite-proper citations made a foreign historian feel slighted.

Like the over-diplomatic wording with which the AHA sought to downplay the first return of a Fairbank Prize in its almost 50-year history, Cornell University Press’ decision to rush out a “corrected” edition before all the fabrication-plagiarism couplings have been rooted out, and the continuing deafening silence from Columbia University itself, this Inside Higher Ed piece bolsters my hunch that a whitewash is in the cards.

Let me say it before Madonna Constantine does: What a difference an old-boy network makes!

UPDATE (2 April 2018): Table Goes From 90 to 98 Cases

Here (and here, with remarks from Dr. Szalontai) is the new table of “98 Cases of Plagiarism, Source Fabrication and Text-Citation Disconnects in Charles K. Armstrong’s Tyranny of the Weak”:

Tyranny of the Weak_Table of 98 Cases

UPDATE (18 April 2018): On the Damage-Control Edition of Tyranny

“A commitment to excellence through rigorous evaluation.”- From the Mission Statement of Cornell University Press

Cynic though I already was in 2016, I had a certain respect for Ivy League publishing houses. Not for a moment did I doubt that Cornell University Press would remove Tyranny of the Weak from its catalogue upon learning that the author had committed dozens of acts of plagiarism and source fabrication. No commercial publisher would stand by such an author, so how could an academic one do so? Nor would a newspaper stand by a journalist known to have made up even a dozen sources, let alone over 50.

Koreanists in North America and Western Europe? Well, they might pretend not to know whether those plagiarism-fabrication couplings resulted from straightforward dishonesty or a bafflingly elaborate, never-before-seen type of chronic but harmless ineptitude. They might pretend that only Columbia could possibly get to the truth, until which time we should all keep very, very quiet about the whole affair. Yes, I knew enough to be prepared for anything from the Coterie.

But Cornell? No, Cornell would know that from a publishing  standpoint, the question of how all that plagiarism and source fabrication came about was irrelevant. I knew from the acknowledgments to Tyranny that the author and Roger Haydon went way back. But a man doesn’t become executive editor at our oldest university publishing house by putting personal ties above academic and ethical standards. Or so I thought.

I was astonished enough, therefore, when Cornell University Press neither withdrew Tyranny of the Weak after the scandal broke, nor stopped promoting it for its use of East Bloc sources, nor apologized to Balázs Szalontai for the extensive violation of his copyright, nor, for that matter, made any public statement about the controversy.

But that was nothing compared to what I felt in spring 2017 — by which time 76 cases of plagiarism, fabrication, source distortion, etc, had already been made public — upon reading the author’s assertion (which I discussed in an update at the time; see above) that a new version of his book with 52 corrections was about to come out.

Let me clarify. I was not amazed that the author would want to rush out such a thing despite knowing how much wrong material it still contained. How can I be sure he knew? Because had he somehow innocently bungled his way into the handful of plagiarism-fabrication couplings that were revealed in September 2016, he would have sat down then and there, and checked all the remaining East Bloc citations himself, which would have taken him one or two evenings at most. He would not have left that task for the aggrieved party to perform laboriously and expensively over months and even years. Only someone aware of how much rottenness remained would have opted for such a strategy, knowing that the truth would do less harm to his career if it came out in little installments.

“But why must it come out in installments?” the layman may well retort. Why didn’t Szalontai just unload all the evidence at once, in 2013? The answer is that verifying the non-existence of so many sources is a difficult business. As Ben Jonson put it, in a comparable context: “For what never was, will not easily be found.”

The European collections to which many of Tyranny’s sources ostensibly belonged could only be checked on site. I hope I am not embarrassing Szalontai by saying that his finances have prevented him from taking the sort of trips fondly recalled in the acknowledgments to Tyranny. No foundation provides grants to newly-hired assistant professors with small children so that they can fly to Berlin, Washington DC and Russia in defense of their copyrights. To qualify for that sort of grant money, a scholar must be well-established enough not to actually need it.

Szalontai therefore had to keep asking colleagues (like me) to check on archival collections during their own travels. Had I been in his place, I would have flown everywhere by the end of 2013, and damned the expense, but I don’t have kids. The wrong done him was bad enough without his having to burn through family savings in a struggle for justice — a struggle which, as the Coterie’s first responses must have made clear in September 2016, he was very unlikely to win. An assistant professor in Korea, versus a tenured Ivy Leaguer in New York City, an “academic ward boss”! Had things been more equal, the case against Tyranny could have rested after the revelation of the first ten or so items. No more were needed for any impartial observer to realize what had gone on.

Back to Cornell’s role in all this. Why the great hurry to put out a new version of a book for which, in mid-2017, there was no longer any great demand? It seems obvious in retrospect that both publisher and author desperately wanted the book to retain its Fairbank Prize, and the press to go on ignoring the story. To both of these ends a speedy pseudo-resolution of the problem was vital.

What amazed me was that Cornell would reject Szalontai’s input, instead taking Armstrong’s word for it that no more corrections were needed. (“Szalontai added that he asked the publisher if they intended to involve him in the correction process for Tyranny of the Weak, and was told no.” – Retraction Watch.) I had greatly reduced my expectations for Cornell by that time, but I still assumed it would be image-conscious enough, if nothing else, to require 100% certainty that the corrected version contained no plagiarism-fabrication couplings. At the very least I expected it to request copies of all the East Bloc sources cited in Tyranny. Apparently it didn’t even do that. Worse – far worse — it left in the text a few already-publicized cases in undeniable need of correction.

Nevertheless, I still clung to the hope that the next big jump in the number of revealed cases would bring about a change of heart in Ithaca. “Haydon must have demanded a firm promise that the book only needs 52 corrections,” I reasoned. “Wait until he finds there are even more problems his friend told him nothing about!”

But again I was wrong. Szalontai increased the number of revealed “cases of plagiarism, source fabrication and text-citation disconnects” from 76 to 90 just after the Fairbank Prize was returned, meaning that the so-called reprint of Tyranny  (which has no mention of the Fairbank on the cover) was still in the pipeline then.

A responsible academic publisher would have cut all ties with the author then at the very latest. Even a money-mad commercial publisher would at least have stopped the presses and seen to it that the newly publicized problems were fixed as well. Cornell, however, simply went ahead and violated Szalontai’s copyright once again.

So stealthily was the new version of the book published in 2017 that until a few weeks ago, most people following the scandal assumed it hadn’t come out and never would. The only change to Tyranny’s Amazon page last year was that it dropped mention of the Fairbank Prize. The copyright year given was and still is 2013 for the hardback, 2015 for the paperback. It never occurred to any of us sporadically checking the site that Cornell might make dozens of important changes to the book without creating a new edition or even changing the original ISBN.

It was only at the AAS conference in Washington a few weeks ago that a young American scholar, surprised to find Tyranny on display at the Cornell University Press stall, saw from plentiful citations of Balázs Szalontai that it was a new version. The copyright page: “reprinted with corrections, 2017.”

“Reprinted with corrections” is what a publisher writes when typos or grammatical errors have been fixed, perhaps a few isolated facts here and there. The term is hardly applicable in this case. For one thing, key events in the history of North Korea’s foreign relations, such as the Kim regime’s response to the Prague uprising, are described in the new Tyranny in very different terms.

The source base has been transformed too. Although enough bogus citations remain to make the new version a scandal in its own right, Szalontai has gone from being never cited in Tyranny to being the scholar cited most often. Absurdly enough, however, the introduction preserves the original falsehood – which was clearly aimed at shooing readers away from the real source material — that Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era: Soviet-DPRK Relations and the Roots of North Korean Despotism (2005) is devoted to domestic politics, despite that subtitle.

How does a book on domestic politics become the go-to source for a researcher of foreign relations? Had Cornell University Press so much as skimmed the introduction to Tyranny and flipped through the rest, it would have raised that question at least.

More importantly: the new version changes the very character of Armstrong’s book, its whole claim to our attention. What once presented itself as the ambitious product of original, deep and polyglot research — “archival spelunkings,” one admirer said — now slumps before us as yet another synthesis of English-language secondary literature and already-translated primary sources. Albeit a synthesis still riddled with wrong information.

If all this doesn’t warrant a new edition at the very least, I don’t know what does. It also warrants removal of the blurbs which, like the Fairbank Prize, were bestowed in ignorance of how the original manuscript was cooked up. The cover as it now stands is false advertising, and just as unfair to the blurb-providers as it is to consumers. The very inclusion of the book in the Cornell catalogue is an insult to the other works in it.

By putting out a substantially revised version of Tyranny of the Weak as a mere reprinting Cornell was in effect making this statement: The numerous changes to the original version were a trivial matter even in sum, because the extensive plagiarism and source fabrication on display in it were no big deal to begin with.

And this tells us still more about the peculiar standards of Cornell University Press.

UPDATE (26 October 2018): Rehabilitation by Citation?

Andre Schmid’s “review essay” in the April 2018 issue of American Historical Review offers an interesting indication of how the Korean Studies establishment intends to put this scandal behind it: by mildly downgrading Armstrong to a less-than-central but still legitimate scholar; by continuing to pretend that Tyranny deserves respectful mention for its East Bloc source base; and by making sure that the work of no one in Korean Studies comes in for more brazen misrepresentation than that of the guy who blew the whistle.

Let me start with the last stuff first. I expect virtually everyone who has so much as skimmed The Cleanest Race (2010) to agree with me that it is — apart from an introductory chapter on the development of the official culture — a summary of the main myths of North Korean propaganda. That’s certainly how it was reviewed at the time: as a “cultural survey” (Publisher’s Weekly), a “close reading of domestic propaganda” (Wall Street Journal), etc.

To my knowledge Schmid is the first to consider it “arguably the most widely read history” of the country since Scalapino and Lee’s Communism in Korea (1972). Bruce Cumings’ eyebrows must have shot up even further than mine did. Schmid goes on:

In his narrative of the entirety of North Korean history, the author rarely moves beyond an analysis of the Kims. Indeed, he names virtually no other historical figures in the main text of his work. (p. 454)

So you see, it’s that little game: First you pretend a book is trying to be something it isn’t trying to be, then you find it sorely wanting on those grounds. Schmid can hardly be unaware that my book’s “main text” — which is divided into synchronic chapters on themes — doesn’t even attempt a “narrative of the entirety of North Korean history.”

Nor did I offer any “analysis of the Kims” themselves; I analyzed the depiction of them. I had no reason to deal with anyone/anything extraneous to the myths I had set out to interpret. Schmid faults me for “not escaping the very same historical obsession with the Kims that is evident in his selected sources.” For God’s sake, the book is about those Kim-centric sources.

At one revealing point he snickers parenthetically that “Myers analyzes Kim [Il Sung]’s breasts.” (p.454.) Clearly Schmid has not only a child’s sense of humor, but also a child’s understanding of the word analysis, namely none at all. (And needless to say, I refer to breast / p’um in the singular.)

What follows is much more familiar: a faux-obtuse effort to equate my main thrust with the book’s subtitle, “How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters” (which alone indicates it’s no history book).

[Myers] countenances no issues of mediation, no question of circulation, virtually no change over time, nor even the problem of how these complex representations might be interpreted or used by their consumers….Instruments of indoctrination
are accepted as nothing more than straight-out belief among the populace (p.455).

Anyone who reads the introduction to The Cleanest Race will realize this is not my position: “What the masses are taught … is coming increasingly into conflict with what they know to be true” (p. 11).

This reminds me that I had vainly opposed my publisher’s choice of subtitle. (My own: Understanding North Korea Through Its Propaganda.) But commercial publishers have to market books in commercial ways. This was one of the considerations that induced me to self-publish my follow-up work, North Korea’s Juche Myth, which has no subtitle at all.

My whole aim in The Cleanest Race, as stated in the introduction, was:

to explain North Korea’s dominant ideology or worldview — I use the words interchangeably — and to show how far removed it is from communism, Confucianism, and the show-window doctrine of Juche Thought. (p.9)

Rather than engage with this central thrust of the book, Schmid both sidesteps and trivializes it: “This is not to take issue with the question of whether Stalinism or Confucianism provides the most apt comparison (Myers is a fan of neither)….” (p.454.) A fan of neither!

Never having encountered Schmid or his work before, I was at first puzzled as to what he was playing at. Then I spotted reference in his essay to “archives of North Korea’s former socialist allies” (p.453) and checked the attendant footnote — and the penny dropped:

For work widely using these resources, see in English Andrei Lankov, From Stalin to Kim Il Sung […], Crisis in North Korea […], James Person, “We Need Help from Outside” […], Adam Cathcart and Charles Kraus, “The Bonds of Brotherhood” […], Charles K. Armstrong, Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950–1992 (Ithaca, N.Y., 2013).

2013 even. The first edition! Which brings me to the question: Has there ever been anything like this scandal in US academic history?

Various Ivy League big shots have been accused of plagiarism or fabrication in the past (though none to my knowledge has been accused of systematically linking the two offenses). Each of those controversies — see Laurence Tribe at Harvard, for example — saw a network of academics rounding angrily on their darling’s critics.

But at least they made some effort to refute or extenuate the charges in question.

Unless I’ve missed something, we are yet to see any such effort done in this controversy. Since the week it broke, the establishment’s response to the evidence has been to dismiss it — without going into a single item — as a collection of “errors” too innocent and trivial to merit discussing. (At least no one still says they’re too few to matter.)

I understand the fix the establishment is in. The evidence is just too extensive, too open and shut. What can possibly be said to counter it? Perhaps Schmid would like to try? Surely he must at least acknowledge the controversy before he can refer to Tyranny in an academic paper as a work “widely using” East Bloc archives.

It seems the following truth cannot be stated often enough: Well over half the citations of East Bloc archives in the 2013 edition of Tyranny refer to non-existent or irrelevant sources.

I wonder what American Historical Review was thinking when it let Schmid’s footnote into print. Isn’t this the organ of the very same AHA that took back the Fairbank Prize last year? Would the editors allow Michael Bellesilles’ Arming America (2000) to go on being cited as a work “widely using” colonial probate records?

I might as well ask what the folk at Cold War History were thinking (even more recently) when they allowed James F. Person to cite four pages from Tyranny’s first edition — 83-87, to be precise — which alone contain over a dozen spurious citations and over a dozen instances of plagiarism. 

UPDATE (25 December 2018): Facebook exchange

A few days ago Craig Urquhart, a graduate student at the University of Toronto, was brave enough to write the following on Facebook:

Charles Armstrong has re-posted his blog, with a consciously deceitful, disingenuous, dishonest defence of his obvious plagiarism. I know this has all been said before by a small number of people, but this needs to be said again until there’s some genuine public acknowledgement, because of the contempt being shown to the Korean studies community.…. What strikes me is that Armstrong has apparently committed brazen plagiarism in the full knowledge that it’s totally obvious to everyone….. Armstrong cheated. Repeatedly. And then refused to apologize for it when caught, and then lied again when defending his actions…..

He can cheat and plagiarize and make obviously fraudulent excuses for himself in the full knowledge that few will challenge him, out of fear of social or academic penalty. Graduate students, especially, are in hopelessly weak positions – subject to the arbitrary whims of admissions committees and powerful stakeholders with extended networks. There’s no democracy in academia, just terror and submission.

Sitting comfortably on his perch at Columbia, surveying his domain, he can rest assured that the personal and academic networks that have relied on him in the past will protect him, no matter how bad an actor he is – no matter how much he poisons the field.

What grates even more is the degree to which the scholars in this field abase themselves, writing off his poor behaviour as if it’s just a quirk or quibble. It grates because Armstrong’s behaviour isn’t just repugnant, it’s so very cheap. It’s far beneath anyone carrying a fraction of the respect his position is meant to carry. What would get any graduate student into steaming water is a mere peccadillo to be shrugged off by the semi-terrified ranks of scholars too cowed by his Columbia chair to do anything about it……

With every non-response by others in the field, this man humiliates the scholarly community again and again, because while he laughs at us, he’s showing the ugliness of our own silence – and in the face of such a cheap form of unethical behaviour, at that.

The people, like Szalontai, who have been slighted and plagiarized by this bad actor are being ignored. What does that say about the rest of us?

Urquhart is the first Koreanist to express an understanding of how acquiescence in Armstrong’s misconduct has subverted the standards and values of the entire field.

In response Don Baker of the University of British Columbia tries to trivialize Armstrong’s wrongdoing just as he did in 2016 on the Korean Studies listserv. Perhaps this has to do with his being chief editor of the Cambridge History of Korea due out in 2020. Armstrong must be one of the contributors, considering that Cumings is editing the “modern” volume. (What a cutting-edge tome that promises to be.)

So I can understand Baker’s agitation. Not only is there no sign of the Tyranny scandal abating, but rumor has it — to judge from the same Facebook thread — that the wheels of justice have been grinding away in Manhattan after all. There seems to be at least some chance of Columbia doing the right thing next year, the worst possible time for the Cambridge History of Korea.

This would explain why Baker is much angrier at Armstrong’s main victim now than he was in 2016. He doesn’t even want to concede that 60-plus plagiarism-fabrication couplings indicate staggering incompetence if nothing else. He wants us to believe that citation — the most basic procedure in all academic writing — is a terribly difficult business.

It isn’t. Nor does it magically become one when a book attains to a certain length or complexity. A citation in a term paper is doing the same work as a citation in a philosophical treatise, as Baker knows full well.

He also pretends to think Tyranny’s valuable “arguments” outweigh everything wrong with it. That bullshit again. I don’t remember even the panegyrists making much of the book’s arguments in 2013. That talk came when the scandal broke, with the insinuation that we critics had been maddened to the point of calumny by our inability to hold up the book’s juggernaut thrust.

Sorry, Coterie, but an academic book with fewer original arguments, less sustained argumentation of any sort, would be hard to come by. That title, which one or two reviewers tried to regard as a thesis in its own right, is but an unserious overstatement of a journalistic commonplace: North Korea has always played a weak hand well. Szalontai’s research brought that point home many years before Tyranny did.

So far from thesis-driven is the book that it lacks even a concluding chapter, instead petering out in a little epilogue that updates the jog-through of over-familiar events in the main body. Note that a serviceable timeline for undergrads is all I originally recommended the book be used for. As one Joseph Han wrote more appreciatively on Goodreads:

While each chapter presents a lot of information, Armstrong does not contextualize as much as he constructs a precise timeline that he slowly unfolds, into what amounts to an elaborate literature review of other texts, with each page warranting footnotes that beg more attention.

It wasn’t through arguments that Armstrong intended to shine, but through the claim to have conducted especially broad and deep archival research over ten years. In that sense we are dealing here not simply with plagiarism and source fabrication but with a kind of hoax. Let’s hear no more about Tyranny’s “arguments” unless the apologist would like to specify which ones are actually Armstrong’s.

It isn’t enough for Baker that his friend beat the rap; he must be restored to his old gatekeeper stature. The god-given order of things must be re-sanctified. People outside the hallowed circle must know their place again – know it well enough to be flattered when an Ivy League man loots their work. Don’t like it? Write another book. A better one. (Baker’s students must be so proud to see him standing up for more tolerance of tenured misconduct. Cambridge University Press too.)

Power corrupts and professorial power corrupts professorially, as Ian Robinson once wrote. There’s no point wishing it didn’t. The problem with Korean Studies from Manoa to Leiden isn’t that it has a self-perpetuating power elite but that it has only one, the transatlantic unity of which was demonstrated to such intimidating effect during the Great Wagon Circling of September 2016. I have it on good authority that criticism of Tyranny was even more quickly tamped down in Britain and the Netherlands than in the USA. Graduate students were told to stay out of the “spat,” while professors left no doubt whose side of it they were on.

These people don’t mess around. Get on the wrong side of them, and you can kiss goodbye to any decent university job west of Poland.

Just as a multi-polar geopolitical order allows more freedom for non-aligned states, a multi-clique field gives much more room for debate and non-conformism than a mono-clique one. It also creates an atmosphere in which no big shot would dare engage in systematic plagiarism, source fabrication and duplicate publication for seven or eight years on end. 

I’m still impressed, I have to admit, by the way Armstrong tossed entire prize-winning pages from Tyranny of the Weak (2013) into the recycling machine and pulled “North Korea and the Education of Desire” (2016) out the other end. On a surface level it was a grand gesture of contempt for the Korean Studies community, for the whole idea of academic publication. And yet it showed a touching humility too: the humility of a man who knows none of his flatterers actually reads his output, let alone remembers it from one year to the next. He can put out two articles with 40% verbatim overlap within months of each other without anyone in the world noticing. Except me.

I’d love to see someone on Facebook tell Don Baker that although “North Korea and the Education of Desire” is presented as new scholarship, 90% of it consists of text Armstrong took verbatim from earlier books. We know what Baker’s response would be: “I see no evidence that this was done intentionally.” But wouldn’t it be fun to make him say it?

UPDATE (29 January 2019): Columbia Spectator article

The top story in the Columbia Spectator is an article by Khadija Hussain entitled “Amid public allegations of plagiarism, reputation and academic integrity of Korean studies program face scrutiny.”

Perhaps the most striking part is a quote from an anonymous history professor:

“Until this issue is resolved, one way or the other, it would not be advisable for a graduate student — for a student to come to Columbia to study Korean history…. With this cloud hanging over the professor, it would be imprudent for anyone to come study here.”

Hussain became the first journalist to report a) that Szalontai filed a formal complaint with Columbia in November 2016 and b) that Prof. Sheila Miyoshi Jager resigned from the advisory board at the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Korea center in 2017 (in protest at Armstrong’s continued presence on that board).

Javier Cha, now an assistant professor at Seoul National University, told the Spectator in regard to the case:

“For younger folks, junior scholars, it really makes you lose faith in the field”…. “There is a culture of intimidation.… I work in South Korea now, so one reason I am able to speak up like this is because I don’t intend to look for a job in U.S. academia.”

Armstrong was quoted as saying he deeply regretted the “errors” in Tyranny and would “carry these lessons forward” in his scholarship.

But these days I follow the story more out of fascination with Don Baker, plucky center-forward for the Carolingians since 2016, who in the Spectator article scored two more beautiful goals — for the other side.

Here’s the first one:

“The mistakes did not undermine the basic argument of the book. The basic argument stands. It’s a good argument. We distinguish between the argument and the footnotes used to support it.”

So a historical argument can stand even on irrelevant and non-existent sources? Wonderful. Sign me up right now, Don, for a copy of that Cambridge History of Korea you’re editing.

Even more impressive was this net-busting volley:

According to Baker, the issue comes down to collegiality and respect.

“Younger scholars tend to be much harsher than people like me who recognize that all of us make mistakes.… It’s kind of a closely knit club where people know each other.… It’s not so much that we are protecting each other but that we respect each other.… In our generation, we do not believe in attacking people personally.”

No, we in this old-boy network — oops, closely knit club — cast blame on each other’s female research assistants instead. When will they stop laying fine men low with their “sketchy notes”?

I’m referring to the clumsy-interns theory that the CKC — as I shall start calling it; I’m tired of “the Coterie” — has been promoting in private conversations and emails since the scandal blew up. Baker aired it carefully on Facebook last month. I apologize for drawing attention to it here, but I assure the two women named in the acknowledgments to Tyranny that no one really believes their work was anything less than professional — let alone that it induced Armstrong, from 2005 to 2013, to link 70 items from Szalontai’s work to 70 bogus sources.

You know a ward boss is in deep trouble when his camp’s best line of defense is implicitly to claim that he mismanaged a research factory. An historian whose work rests on sources he has never asked his assistants to show him may not be quite as bad as a deliberate plagiarist-cum-fabricator, but is he any better qualified to teach at university level?

It’s a shame the Spectator was apparently unaware of Baker’s remarks on Facebook last month. This one was relevant:

Columbia University has already investigated this matter and has taken some disciplinary actions. The issue has been settled, and corrective actions have been taken. But that does not satisfy a few who would like to keep it alive until it is resolved to their full satisfaction. 

I don’t know if Baker was bluffing or conveying news heard from the horse’s mouth, but the fact that he considered it helpful to Armstrong’s reputation is revealing.

Someone who genuinely believed the author of Tyranny had made only innocent errors would have considered the school’s decision to take multiple disciplinary actions grossly unfair — but would have been grateful they were kept secret.

Only a crony who a) knew the truth about Tyranny, and b) knew that everyone else knew it, and c) knew what career-ending punishment could well have been enforced, would blurt out such news as if it relativized the gravity of the case.

Thus did Baker effectively if unwittingly assert that Columbia had found Armstrong guilty of some degree of misconduct. If this was fake news it was slanderous, however kindly it might have been meant. Had I been Hussain I would have used it for leverage with which to get a straight answer from her school.

UPDATE (11 September 2019):  Armstrong to retire

Evidently Maya Tolstoy, Columbia University’s Interim Executive Vice President for the Arts and Sciences, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, sent out the following letter to colleagues yesterday:

The integrity of our research is a matter of utmost importance to Columbia. As our Institutional Policy on Misconduct in Research states, “Misconduct in research damages the integrity of the profession and undermines the credibility of scholars. It is also antithetical to the values the University strives to maintain and promote.”

Generally, findings of research misconduct are communicated to the public through retractions or corrections published in the scholarly literature. Where such a retraction is not feasible, the University may choose to notify the relevant community.

It is therefore with regret that I must inform you that Professor Charles K. Armstrong, Professor of History at Columbia, has been found to have committed research misconduct, specifically, plagiarism, in his book, Tyranny of the Weak. These findings were made in accordance with our Policy, which required a confidential preliminary review by an Inquiry Committee, an Investigation by a separate ad hoc faculty committee, oversight and recommendations by the University’s Standing Committee on the Conduct of Research, and final decisions by the Executive Vice President for Research and the Provost.

Professor Armstrong, who is retiring at the end of 2020, will be on sabbatical for the academic year of 2019-2020.

To the very end, it seems, one must avoid public mention of the fact that Armstrong systematically linked over 70 plagiarized items to over 70 fantasy footnotes. This was not a mere plagiarism scandal but a brazen research hoax. The Columbia professor used dozens of items of historical information lifted from Balázs Szalontai’s work as pegs from which to hang impressive-looking citations to foreign-language sources – some of which were irrelevant, but most of which didn’t exist. 

Not that I’m in much of a mood to criticize Columbia University. Had it simply whitewashed Armstrong it could have counted on the tacit support of virtually the entire Korean Studies professoriat in North America and Western Europe, to say nothing of Cornell University Press, which should be  particularly ashamed of itself.

So all in all, I think this is as good a way as any to ring in the third anniversary of my whistle-blowing blog post of 13 September 2016.

Closely Knit Club is over. If you want it.

UPDATE (13 September 2019): Mythmaking already?

In my last update I wrote:

Had [Columbia University] simply whitewashed Armstrong it could have counted on the tacit support of virtually the entire Korean Studies professoriat in North America and Western Europe, to say nothing of Cornell University Press, which should be particularly ashamed of itself.

This was promptly posted on the Koreanists’ Facebook page by Jiyul Kim, whereupon Brendan Wright posted this much-liked remark:

Tacit support of virtually the entire Korean studies community is an unfounded accusation.

So Korean Studies professoriat was switched within hours of my writing it — and directly under my actual words — to Korean Studies community, a far more numerous body. Did anyone deign to correct him? Of course not.

Instead Adam Bohnet wrote:

I mostly agree with Brendan Wright: I also don’t agree with Myers’ description of the Korean Studies community – it misses the fact that many people simply don’t like engaging in social media conflict, but are nevertheless very critical of Armstrong offline. But, much though I may disagree in some respects with Brian Myers, I have trouble dismissing him out of hand, both because it was he who brought the plagiarism to our attention, and also for the very reasons expressed by Balasz in his now deleted post – over and over again, institutions that should have taken a clear stand, didn’t, or even as Kathryn Weathersby has pointed out in the case of the press, seemed to ignore the plagiarism altogether. In my view, rather than complain about the views expressed by Brian Myers, it would be better to disprove him through our actions. Some of you will know that Vladimir Tikhonov and I have been trying to work up a response.

And Bohnet a bit later:

When I discussed this matter at AKSE, I found rather, extremely busy academics, most of whom had a range of other things that they needed to have finished several years before, who were appalled by what they heard, but were only half paying attention.

And:

Far from tacit support, most of the “Korean Studies establishment” who I spoke to thought that social media fights were counterproductive, as both Cornell UP and Columbia University have good programs for dealing with plagiarism. I actually tend to agree that, after the initial stage, the social media fights were not productive. Where they were wrong, of course, was in trusting the process at Columbia and Cornell UP to work well. So, they may have been in error, but that is very different from “tacit support,” and I think you are absolutely right to point that out. 

How gratifying to know that Bohnet still has some “trouble dismissing” me. And how nice to see that an urge to disprove me must belatedly — no, retroactively do the work of the Zivilcourage the field showed so little sign of for three years.

But no actions now that Armstrong is officially doomed — no amount of tweets and Facebook posts that people were too busy to write until their workloads suddenly lightened a few days ago — can change the history of this scandal.

Wright:

I don’t doubt that there has been a troubling level of white washing and complicity. But I fail to see how embellishment and baseless smears advance the conversation and I think it’s entirely appropriate to call the behaviour out (even when it is towards someone who has played a constructive role at times).

And even when, it seems, the charge of “embellishment and baseless smears” rests on a brazen misquotation. Yet Wright had no public objection to baseless smears directed for three years against Armstrong’s interns. 

Let me see if I get this straight: a lot of people were very critical offline, and that’s what counted, even if there was no way Cornell University Press or Columbia University could have picked up on anything except the “social media conflict” most Koreanists found distasteful or were too busy for.

Does Bohnet think we critics of Tyranny enjoyed going up against the Closely Knit Club? That we weren’t busy too? That we wouldn’t have preferred to do other things with our time? And we could have too; if only five or six professors in the West had come out in criticism of Armstrong, everything would have been wrapped up much more quickly, and probably with a different outcome.  

I see where the mythmaking is already going at astonishing speed: the fence-sitters and critics of alleged Tyranny-critical excesses were the ones who did the right thing all along. The irony is that this recalls the tactic, so popular among Western-based scholars (see my last blog post), that Armstrong carried for several years into the realm of outright misconduct. I’m referring to the tactic of insinuating oneself cuckoo-like into the outsider’s nest with the air of being its first truly scholarly occupant.

I will say this as often as I have to: It was the strident apologetics of prominent professors and the almost complete silence of everyone else in Korean Studies that enabled Columbia University and Cornell University Press to postpone until September 2019 announcements that should have been made in September 2017 at the latest. It was college students who paid the price. We must also keep in mind that until mere weeks ago, the media were presenting Armstrong to the greater public as a reliable authority on Korean affairs.

As for that day-late-and-a-dollar-short response Bohnet et al have been “working up” to for months, I’m reminded of Hermann Josef Schmidt’s mockery of academic dithering:

One has so much to think about, one must always wait for something else, usually at least long enough for someone else to pull the chestnuts out of the fire. Afterwards, of course, one plays the know-it-all. (Wider weitere Entnietzschung Nietzsches, p.105.)

But let me make very clear that my lasting memory of graduate school is of my whole future’s depending terrifyingly on the whims of one person. I reproach no scholar without tenure for not wanting to anger the old-boy network in Korean Studies. We all have to choose our battles. I confess I wouldn’t have cared so much myself had Tyranny been a book on say 15th century Korea. We all ascribe more importance to the things that interest us.

This doesn’t mean a free pass should now be granted to those lower on the totem pole who decided to use the Armstrong discussion as an opportunity to score points with the Closely Knit Club, at the expense of the man whose work was pillaged.

Correct me if I’m wrong: I believe that those who call on an outside body to adjudicate a case they are perfectly capable of judging on their own are thereby implying their readiness to support whatever judgment is ultimately made. And when that outside body is the employer of the man to be judged — in this case a famous university with every reason not to draw much attention to a research hoax — they have good reason to expect him to get off lightly.

And indeed, most of the field was, until a few days ago, under the impression — conveyed by a stridently Armstrong-supportive professor among others — that the Columbia professor had beaten the rap, with or without a secret wrist-slap of some sort. A graduate student who boldly spoke out in criticism of the generally perceived whitewash was sharply criticized (by one Brendan Wright among others).

Among professors, meanwhile, there was a move to rehabilitate Armstrong by citation of Tyranny, as I have already discussed. As of a week ago the book was on this semester’s reading lists at quite a few universities, placed there by Korean Studies professors.

This is why I made my hypothetical remark, which I stand by.

[I accept Adam Bohnet’s apology for some of the remarks referred to above and would like to take this opportunity to remind readers that he was one of the very few to criticize Armstrong online in autumn 2016, when it took considerable courage for a junior scholar to do so. 

I must also correct an apparent misconception of a few people that I was the first to spot the problems in Tyranny. When I reviewed it for Acta Koreana in autumn 2013 (published in December) I was still under the impression that Armstrong’s main offense had been to refuse to acknowledge his predecessor’s work on North Korean foreign relations; I had no idea then how bad things really were. Hence my rather mild jab in the review, though by the standards of Korean Studies it was of course wildly polemical. Only in later communication with Szalontai did I finally grasp what he had intuited from the start: that Armstrong’s well-funded, decade-long, “pathbreaking,” and ultimately prize-winning research into East Bloc archives had been largely a matter of linking plagiarized items to phony sources. As I remember, I myself found two or three of the items later listed in Szalontai’s table, but he was the one who said the Rodong Sinmun stuff about Prague looked fishy, and urged me to look into it. I put my head above the parapet first — while making no claim to original detective work — only because I thought I had less to lose. In this way I hoped to force Szalontai to go public fast, instead of continuing his forensics well into 2017, as he seemed intent on doing. I expected most of the field to side with him at once. It turned out Armstrong had assessed it much more astutely. — BRM, 15 September 2019]

[Retraction Watch has uploaded the Columbia investigation committee’s draft report of 17 August 2018. It makes for fascinating reading. — BRM, 20 September 2019]

[Here we go again. First the “extremely busy” souls encountered at a 4-day AKSE conference in springtime Rome (see above), now this, from Adam Cathcart on Twitter:

Why did some people (like myself) not speak out more publicly as soon as Charles Armstrong’s plagiarism was outed? Apart from a desire to savagely protect the already frayed edges of my time and energy, well, what if Armstrong was reviewing one of your papers? Or grant applications? 

I have chatted with many Busanites in ill-paid walks of life, including the elderly woman who scrubs the stairwell of my 15-floor apartment building from top to bottom every day, and I swear, none of them talks as often of how busy they are as Western academics do. In future, though, Cathcart should leave this stuff to people who were not tweeting as prolifically at the height of the controversy as they are now; to people who did not announce in early 2017 that the inaugural issue of the journal they were editing was going to start with an article by Armstrong; to people who did not continue doggedly assigning Tyranny of the Weak to their students; to people who were not going onto Wikipedia earlier this year to insert a contradictory but well-meant bit about how Armstrong, “following in the footsteps of his mentor Bruce Cumings … is considered … a trendsetter in scholarship on North Korea.” Perhaps I should have said something when a comparably self-serving Sino-NK announcement appeared a few months ago, but the frayed edges of my time and energy, etc. I eke out a quarter-hour now because I know the only way to keep the next gatekeeper from cheating or abusing his power is to make clear that siding with the powerful through thick and thin comes with risks as well as benefits. When a bully finally gets fired, his apologists shouldn’t be allowed to pretend they were on the right side all along, refraining from public criticism only because they had more important work to do than his vocal critics did, or a more pressing need for good reviews and grant money. B.R. Myers, 12 December 2019.]

[Cold War History has finally retracted Armstrong’s much-cited article “Fraternal Socialism” (2005): 

Passages in this article were substantially reproduced and reworded without correct and proper attribution … the article includes fabrication and falsification of sources, in direct contravention with academic practice and publication ethics. The Editors of Cold War History strongly disapprove of this conduct.

Most of the passages in question were derived from the following work:

Balázs Szalontai, ‘The Failure of De-Stalinization in North Korea, 1953-1964: The DPRK in a Comparative Perspective’ (PhD dissertation: Central European University, 2003), subsequently published as Kim Il Sung in the Khrushchev Era: Soviet-DPRK Relations and the Roots of North Korean Despotism, 1953-1964 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).

In accordance with our policy on publishing ethics and integrity, and the COPE guidelines on retractions, the retracted article will remain online, but it will be digitally watermarked on each page as ‘RETRACTED’. 

Better late than never. — B.R. Myers, 13 February 2020]

UPDATE (27 November 2021): Controversy?

In his introduction to a special North Korea issue of the Journal of Korean Studies, Andre Schmid deals as follows with the Tyranny affair:

Work in … multinational, multilanguage documents has special temptations and dilemmas, however. As many scholars inside and outside the Korean studies community are aware, some research emerging out of these archives has been subject to serious controversy. Among the lessons learned is that work in these archives will require scholars to meet demanding linguistic standards that abide no shortcuts and a willingness to collaborate openly and honestly with peers around
the world. (Journal of Korean Studies, October 2021, 173.)

If many are aware of the matter in question, it’s no thanks to Schmid, who in 2018, well after the scandal broke, drew approving attention to Armstrong’s alleged use of East Bloc archives, and sat shoulder to shoulder with him on a panel in Toronto. Those of Schmid’s current and future readers who don’t already know what he’s alluding to will be none the wiser after that paragraph.

Just what temptations attendant on foreign-language documents, one wonders, had anything to do with what Armstrong did? Dignifying the Tyranny scandal as a controversy about actual archival research is like calling the Bernie Madoff case a dispute over high-return trading. Equally risible is the implication that the Columbia professor’s plagiarism-fabrication couplings resulted from short cuts, insufficient language skills, or a lack of collaboration with other scholars. 

To state the obvious: The notorious “research” at issue did not “emerge from archives.” That was the crux of the whole matter, about which there was never any controversy. It was precisely because the relevant evidence couldn’t be spun at all that Armstrong’s friends tried to make our publication of it controversial. They accused us of “cyber-bullying,” of lacking collegiality, of violating academic etiquette, of being “mean-spirited” and “holier-than-thou,” of having “no balls, no decency” — but they never accused us of getting the facts wrong.

True, Armstrong himself once essayed a half-hearted challenge to a few items in the online table of evidence. It was quickly squashed by Balazs Szalontai, the main victim of his misconduct, and derided by the famous Columbia statistician Andrew Gelman on his blog. Later, in the Columbia committees, with Russian and German speakers sitting across from him, Armstrong knew better than to “interrogate” the evidence. Nor did even Don Baker, his most tenacious defender, dispute our finding that Tyranny of the Weak contained dozens of linkages of plagiarized information to fabricated or irrelevant archival sources. Instead the field’s line was — but I might as well quote Wellesley professor Kathy Moon’s much-liked remark on Facebook:

Let’s all give scholars the chance to remedy our work in the scholarly way.

And Professor John Treat of Yale, a Japan scholar, felt he had the authority to tell Koreanists:

Armstrong has apologized and said the errors will be corrected in the next printing of the book. Move on, everyone.

The Columbia professor had not apologized, and plagiarized items don’t link themselves to non-existent sources by mistake. More to the point: telling people not to discuss an invalid source base for collegiality’s sake is very different from disagreeing about its invalidity. The injunction to keep quiet about the book was in order to avoid controversy, lest the press take notice.

This was the real scandal of course: not the research hoax itself but the field’s refusal to criticize it. Its strategy was to rehabilitate the embarrassed gatekeeper through invitations to conferences and guest lectures, fulsome praise in the front matter of new books (“special among the giants”), and dogged homage-citation of a tissue of fabrications no one dared actually talk about. If the field of Korean Studies still can’t reflect critically on this, it should at least refrain from reinventing history.

[See also my 2022 post On Academic Ward Bosses.]

[Jutta Seibert at Villanova’s Falvey Memorial Library has an interesting note, dated 27 April 2022, on the problems a retracted monograph poses for libraries. Tyranny of the Weak is the example discussed.]