By The Japundit has a good post about this article in the International Herald Tribune.
The article focuses on a historians attempt to recognize Kim Il Sung in the resistance movement against the Japanese colonization.
Kang Man Gil, a renowned historian appointed as head of a prestigious government committee preparing for the 60th anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule, was asked a question by a reporter last week and he said what few historians dispute. When his reply was reported, however, many South Koreans called for Kang’s dismissal.
Kang said last week that Kim Il Sung, the late North Korean president, had fought against colonial Japan.
“It’s a historical fact,” Kang said, adding that “Kim’s anti-Japanese struggle should be considered part of the nation’s independence movement.”
So maybe the Japanese are not the only ones white washing past history?
The controversy over Kang’s comment illustrates how divided South Koreans are, as the government of President Roh Moo Hyun tries to re-examine the nation’s modern history.
It also reminds South Koreans that, a decade after his death, the Communist leader’s specter is still haunting them.
Here are some funny propaganda “facts” put out by the communists up North.
The personality cult in North Korea surrounding “Great Leader” Kim and his son, the current leader, Kim Jong Il, rests on the senior Kim’s mythical role as an anti-Japanese resistance hero.
Monuments, murals, poems and operas celebrate Kim’s rebel days, especially his guerrilla unit’s daring raid on a Japanese police station in 1937, at the height of colonial repression.
Communist propagandists claim that the nation was liberated by Kim himself. They even credit Kim with miracles reminiscent of Biblical stories: Kim turning pine cones into hand grenades, or Kim taking his troops across a river on a tree leaf that he turned into a boat.
After his death in 1994, North Korea embalmed Kim’s body for public display in a mausoleum, gave him the posthumous title of “eternal president” and began marking his birthday as the “Sun’s Day.”
The nation even invented a new calendar, counting the world’s history from Kim’s birthday, April 15, 1912. North Korea once called that the 20th century’s “most turbulent day,” the day when the “Sun of the East” rose and when the British passenger ship Titanic, symbol of “swashbuckling Western imperialism,” sank. In the world according to North Korea, this is the year 94.
Read the rest of the article on your own because it is good reading but it just goes to show every country has skeltons in its closet in regards to history. The fact the Kim Il Sung was an active resistance fighter is definitely a piece of history Korea wants to keep quiet about.
