People Like You and Me’: The Korean War, Humanitarian Aid, and Constructing Empathy

Abstract

The Korean War led to a humanitarian crisis on the Korean peninsula. A number of aid organizations in the United States mobilized to address this urgent need. However, the existence of need was a necessary but insufficient condition to convince potential American donors to contribute to the aid effort. As scholars of human rights have recently argued, the ability to sympathize or empathize with the suffering of others is crucial in convincing individuals to contribute humanitarian aid. Yet, sympathy and empathy assumes that a potential donor views the sufferer as an equal individual. This work contends that aid organizations needed to create narratives of commonality or equality between Americans and South Koreans in order to produce the sympathy required to convince the former to contribute funds in the amelioration of the suffering of the latter. But, the reliance on images of poverty—which were critical in order to raise money—conflicted with the message that South Koreans were, like Americans, an independent and hardworking people. To mitigate this dissonance, aid groups focused on the supposedly weak: elderly, women, children, and amputees. In the end, however, this strategy cast South Korea as an emasculated nation requiring to be “saved.”