Future Research and Plans

Last years symposium on the Daejeon Massacre.

Over the next couple of years I will be working for the local government in Daejeon in order to research the Daejeon Massacre before the building of a Peace Park here in 2024. Given the current state of the global pandemic this is proving more difficult than expected, but the goal is to have an International Conference in Daejeon at the end of this year, as well as a variety of other events that I aim to remind people of sporadically. Please get in touch if you would like to contact me about Winnington or the site in Daejeon where new information is emerging on an almost daily basis.

But what is desperately needed before any of this can happen is a clear sense of what actually happened here in the Korean War. We have very little information, and some of the sources that we do have are a little bit wanting. This is why Shim Kyu Sang and myself have dedicated the next few years to subjecting this matter to as much public scrutiny as possible. Mr Shim with the documents that exist in South Korea, and myself with neglected accounts like Winnington's that have recently come to light. Last month the Korean government passed a bill that called for the investigation of historical crimes on this peninsula, which should hopefully make our work a little easier.

The previous post was meant to be the first step towards a reappraisal and contextualization of Alan Winnington's 70 year old text "I Saw the Truth in Korea". It will hopefully be one of many. In this post i have included the pamphlet itself. Further posts will give information on the history of its production, as well as how things will be progressing on site in the future. Given that most people in England and America seem completely unaware of these events, I hope that they can be a primer for those who have yet to appreciate how significant this history - and its exclusion from most people's thinking - still remains.

The provisional title for these posts is "What is News", because this was the title of Alan's lectures on journalism in Maoist China. Actually, it was these lectures that saw him fall foul of the Chinese authorities, and led to his eventual move to East Berlin. This is part of a much-needed context I am aiming to build around Winnington's journalism, and will be the focus of later study.

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