By Here is an article in the Korea Times that really bothers me:
Last week, the Association put up a big display in the newly remodeled shopping area across from Central Station. The occasion was the 60th anniversary of independence from Japanese colonial rule, but they were looking back a little farther, all the way back to 1905, in fact, when Japan formally annexed Korea. Each signboard in the display had a little logo commemorating the 100-year anniversary: 40 years under the Japanese, 60 years under the Americans.
The creators of the signboards put them in chronological order, pulling out all the stops to blame the U.S. for just about every evil that has befallen Koreans in the past 100 years.
These sign boards were put up in the blue collar city of Ansan by the People’s Solidarity Association blaming America for everything within the last 100 years of Korean history which coincidentally enough mirrors Unification Minister Chung Dong-young historical allegations against the US last month.
The signs first of all blamed the US for annexing Korea to the Japanese in 1905 As I have stated before, the US was protecting its colonial interests in the Philippines at the time and had no responsibility in defending Korea against Japan. The people that should have been defending Korea at the time, this may shock some of the revisionists, are the Koreans! Koreans have the responsibility of defending their own country. The lack of modernization and internal bickering caused by the ineffective leadership of the king and the corrupt yangban class is what made Korea easy pickings for the Japanese.
Also America in 1905 was not the America of today. We did not have an Army and a Navy that could just pickup and go to Korea and defeat a competent military force such as the Japanese. The US did not even have the ability to defeat the Japanese if they attacked the Philippines much less Korea. This was proven true decades later in World War II.
The US made the right decision for its own national interests at the time. The ultimate responsibility for national defense relies with the nation itself. The Koreans have defeated past Japanese aggression before with competent leadership which is what they lacked in 1905 and that is not America’s fault.
The sign boards were also blaming America for the division of the peninsula. It is true that America divided the peninsula by occupying South Korea, I can’t argue that. I guess the People’s Solidarity Association would have rather had the Russians occupy the whole peninsula so that Korea could be united. How many people are willing to bet the Russians would of packed up and left and that Korea would have the economic might it has today? Eastern Europe should serve as an example of what Korea would have been. It would have been a Soviet client state with an authoritarian government, low living standards, and a stagnant economy. Not the dynamic Korea of today.
An additional sign board of course blamed the US for the Korean War, which once again the United States came back and freed the southern half of the peninsula after the South Koreans could not defend themselves once again in part to poor leadership from the Korean President and internal strife between capitalists and communists in the south. Then of course no anti-American display would be complete without the Nogun-ri incident being brought up, which I have already previously posted about.
The final example from the article I will provide of the historical revisioning going on, is that the US gets blamed for the Gwangju Massacre. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t that tragedy involve Koreans killing Koreans? The US military does not control the ROK Army in peace time only in war time. Plus does Korea really want the US military taking an active role in their internal affairs?
I fully agree with the columnist’s closing points regarding this revisionism going on in Korea:
I saw two problems with the display in Ansan. One is that it was an effort to whitewash history, a subject that Koreans ought to be particularly sensitive to. When I walked by it, the display was crowded with school children who had just gotten out of class. What the Solidarity Association is doing is teaching these impressionable youth to hate America without giving them the full historical picture or the capability to judge for themselves.
The second problem is that _ and you won’t hear me making this argument too often _ the Americans are being mistreated in what should otherwise be a civil democratic debate.
These same groups that accuse the Japanese of whitewashing history are the same people whitewashing Korean history to fit their own distorted political agendas against the United States. Plus they are focusing their propaganda on the Korean youth. Many in the younger generation do not have the life experience to decipher propaganda from fact and take much of the propaganda to be the truth.
Finally this whole topic of the USFK withdrawal from Korea should be a civil debate. The US obviously wants to have a smaller footprint here with the continuing troop withdrawals from the peninsula and the plan to relocate USFK forces away from the DMZ to the Pyongtaek area south of Seoul. If the US forces are not wanted here than Korea should have a national referendum on whether to withdraw USFK forces from the peninsula. The problem is that no ROK political leader wants to put themselves out on a limb pushing for a USFK withdrawal because the economy may suddenly collapses afterwords which they would be blamed for. A strong leader would push for this referendum none the less but the current ROK leadership doesn’t even have the political leadership to get a land deal in Pyeongtaek done right now.
Liberation after World War II, 36,000 lives lost during the Korean War, and over 50 years of stability and economic development on the Korean peninsula provided by the United States should be worth at least a face saving withdrawal off of the Korean peninsula instead of this crap we are going through right now.
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If you haven’t had enough anti-Americanism for one day read this additional article in the Korea Times. I can always count on the Korea Times to provide me the latest in anti-Americanism.
10:04 am on February 18th, 2007 1
Just put the US military presence in Korea to a referendum and let the people decide. If the popular vote is in favor of a withdrawal then we respect their wishes and leave. I am tired of the constant polling of the populace to find out what age groups feel a certain way. One vote will solve the whole debate.
10:05 am on February 18th, 2007 2
Curious how the article only "bothers" GI and USAinKOREA: both who cannot muster a positive value judgement derived from their value-less worldviews– thus, anti-Americanism is merely a bothersome "quirk" to be reasoned with, tolerated, or weeped about in an anger-management support group with reassuring hands patting their backs.
I think Silly Sally is right — these two ARE moral metro-sexuals: hiding behind cheap moral cosmetics to appear "pretty".
You two need to get some balls and stop the moral equivocating.
10:06 am on February 18th, 2007 3
I honestly don't know how you can get "moral equivocating" out of the letter to the editor I posted.
And you must not have read much on my blog or the http://www.usinkorea.org site if you think I advocate "tolerating" South Korea's attitude toward the US, the US military, and the US-SK alliance….
First, I'm called a bleeing heart, and now I'm told I argue for toleration of the anti-US culture in South Korea.
What next????
10:07 am on February 18th, 2007 4
Surely GI knows what sin is. His father and mother knew! His grandparents knew! All his ancestors knew. What happened to his ancestral knowledge? Why doesn't GI know what sin is?
"Quirk" … my ass!
10:08 am on February 18th, 2007 5
It might be hypocritical, as a blogger, to call another person a busy-body, but Ruffin's volume of articles to the Times qualifies him as one.
He's almost a neighbour of mine, but I can't see much else we share besides a coastline.
10:09 am on February 18th, 2007 6
Below is a letter to the editor I wrote in response to the Time's American editorialist's "understanding" of why people around the world want to kill Americans whereever they meet them. It is a little long, so I doubt it will make it into the paper.
Letter to the Editor
I would like to take some time to deal with Rick Ruffin’s claim that his head is out of the sand and he is viewing the United States’ place in the world in a clear light.
Like many of the intellectual bent in Western society, he first takes a poke at the American Bible thumpers who come from “mostly the deep south and Midwest.†You should read that to mean, “Ignorant trailer trash.†He already told us 54% of Americans are stupid for believing the 9/11 hijackers were from Iraq, and he informs us it is utterly ridiculous to imagine Saddam Hussein’s government, the one who openly financed suicide bombers from among the Palestinians, could possibly have ties to Al Qaeda. He tells us confidently no such ties exist — at all. His turning from the 54% ignorant Americans nation wide to an attack on the trailer trash is just narrowing the focus down geographically.
However, though it seems obvious Mr. Ruffin considers himself to be one of the non-ignorant minority, his examples of religion in the US completely fail to support his point. He uses the spread of religion in the US and the belief in creationism as examples to bolster his claim that the dentist defending America is “wrong†in saying that “An American is also free to believe in no religion.â€
I could comment on his idea about creationism being taught “over†Darwinism in public schools, and his other statements about religion in American society, but I will stick with the crucial point: None of his examples prove Americans do not have the freedom to be non-religious. He might not like the fact Americans are not as enlightened as Europeans in believing there is no God, and he might find himself welling up with indignation at the fact many US citizens still choose, of their own free will, to read the Bible, but that does not mean he or anyone else in the United States cannot decide to be an Atheist, or a Buddhist, or a Muslim, or even a Satanist. The freedom is there. Perhaps Mr. Ruffin should allow others to exercise it without provoking his own self-righteous disdain.
In another section, Ruffin argues that the US is not a generous nation and that it gives far less than other nations with much fewer resources. I would advise him to go back and look at the causalities figures for World War II – the war between fascism and democracy – and see whose men died the most. (In case he needs help, that was a war before Vietnam). But, I will also take on his assertion using the focus he chose – the percentage of giving per GNP.
If you examine how many of these numbers are cooked up, you will find a good chunk of the resources America provides are left out. When the United States chooses not to put its troops under UN command, or it chooses to distribute aid directly and bypass well established multinational organizations, those expenses are often dropped from the tally.
Efforts like helping deter North Korea from attacking the South, which is a huge expense each year for American tax payers, is not considered worthy of being added to what the United States as a nation is offering the world. Nobody wants to see North Korean troops marching into Seoul, which would send the very important East Asian tiger economies into a tailspin, thus sending the European and American stock exchanges crashing too, but the US effort in Korea, each year, is not good enough to be considered a humanitarian assistance or an expense by the United States that benefits the Asian region or the world.
Thus, Denmark can keep its troops at home while the US is called upon by Europe to “do something†about the ethnic bloodshed in Kosovo and Bosnia, or to defend South Korea’s #11 ranked economy, but Denmark scores higher than the US in terms of generosity. And if Denmark does send troops in a coalition under the UN command, it does get that counted as a Peace Keeping force, but not only are the US troops sent to keep the peace beside them, but under the American flag, not counted as part of a peace keeping budget, America also wins the scorn of people like Mr. Ruffin who will add Bosnia and Kosovo to the list of reasons someone would obviously want to kill an American.
Nice world.
Mr. Ruffin then goes on to thump the drum of Vietnam. It is a good tool for him, because it is one of the darker moments in American history. But, even here, he has to push it to excess: “Later, as if nothing were really sacred, they bombed the cities, something the Vietnamese people never expected.â€
Let me see if I understand this correctly. The US bombing cities in a war was something the Vietnamese never expected. Do we mean the South Vietnamese, or are we talking about the North Vietnamese too? The North Vietnamese who were fighting a guerilla war, using the neighboring neutral nation of Cambodia as a highway to transport war supplies, supplies they used against the South Vietnamese villagers as well as US soldiers, and used in street to street fighting in the cities of their South Vietnamese brothers and sisters?
It should be simple enough to point out, as he did himself, that the war in Vietnam ran from 1962-1971. Perhaps he should take his own head out of the sands of Vietnam instead of trying to extend Vietnam to cover all of America’s dealings in the world.
Mr. Ruffin might not like the fact the US went to war in Iraq. He might despise the US for Vietnam. He might even hate the fact the United States got involved in Korea. But, it would take a great amount of dishonesty, or burying of one’s head in the sand, to argue that the Iraqi people of today, of post-Saddam controlled Iraq, do not have a far better chance at being free and having “democracy†than they ever would have if the Hussein regime had not being taken down.
The United States is not a perfect nation. Far from it. It is a nation in the world just like the rest. Human society is fallible. But, when trying to decide whether it is right or wrong to kill American citizens wherever they might be found, which is what the Australian dentist was specifically writing against, it is outrageous to decide America has been The Problem in the world. In short, that it, far beyond the other nations of the world, has brought murderous rage down upon its citizens – an “understandable†murderous rage.
Maybe I should not expect a man who could justify killing Americans with a sentence like: “it is also natural that many people throughout the world would hate Americans enough to want to kill them†to take the time to weigh the good and the bad.
10:10 am on February 18th, 2007 7
George Bush cannot do anything that goes against the will of the Reverand Moon of the Washington Times… who has him compromised by the balls… through the Korean CIA.
That is why you will never see a call for a referendum for US withdrawel … Bush will not antagonize his cultic benefactor concerning policies over North Korea … Bush plays South Korea's tune.
When it comes to North East Asian policy — America is a colony of North and South Korea.
10:12 am on February 18th, 2007 8
Amen to what you said at the end of your post.
10:14 am on February 18th, 2007 9
It's also pretty creative. Like I said, I've never been accused of being a bleeding heart before….
10:15 am on February 18th, 2007 10
US, you've got to learn to recognize Axis Sally's unmistakable "fist" (the term that Morse code telegraphers used to use, to refer to a fellow operator's distinctive style — it has the added virtue of allowing me to imagine "her" stating her case with a clenched fist forever upright).
"Jeff", "George", the similarity of the hotmail addresses, the attempt to put you on the defensive by insulting your "manhood", the rather strange admixture of politics and personal morals, the literacy of the language, and the ending –always a one-liner "punch" that is supposed to leave you gasping.
10:15 am on February 18th, 2007 11
Why the Bush administration doesn't publicly call for this immediately is a mystery of the universe to me.
Either way the ROK population votes on such a referendum, it gets the political pressure off the US and onto the backs of the ROK's politicians, where it so. totally. belongs….
10:27 am on February 18th, 2007 12
It wouldn't work.
The vote would be attacked as a ploy, and even if it went through, the vote would be to keep USFK in country, but the spin would be the same as today —
—- the US should work to rectify the inequalities in the relationship, treat Korea like the advanced capitalist democracy it has become rather than the poor nation of the 1950s, change the SOFA so GIs won't get away with crime, add an environmental clause that will keep USFK from continuing to destory the Korean environment, yada yada yada.
As all the experts say, South Korea really doesn't want the US to leave.
Thus, there must be some way to work it out — if both sides just try…..
(Horseshit)
I've been saying for years, this is all about keeping a process of anti-US, US alliance going — not too hot, but not too cold.
And the push to get the GIs out will come —– once North Korea is no longer a threat —- and possibly longer until they believe they no longer need the US consumer market or don't believe they will lose it.
If that time doesn't come for another 50 years — no problem.
They have enough pride stoking and some kind of thrill out of the process itself…..
10:28 am on February 18th, 2007 13
That is exactly why the politicians here won't do it.