Roh Legacy Death Watch

There are two entries in this merry vigil:

– Roh’s brother ordered jailed over a bribery scandal.

– A left-wing agitprop history textbook heads off for the ash-heap of …. Still, the counter-revisionism is going a tad too far when episodes like Kwangju are flat-out written out of history. The idea is to put historical events into their proper context. Kwangju no more defines South Korean history or its modern reality than the Pullman Strike defines American history or its modern reality. And as I’ve pointed out, the North Korean famine often killed as as many people as Kwangju in a single day for six-plus years, has immense significance to one’s understanding of modern North Korea, and — I’ll go out on a limb here — probably draws little or no mention in these lefty texts. That doesn’t mean Kwangju isn’t a significant historical event; it means that if your entire view of history is built around the Japanese occupation, No Gun Ri, Kwangju, and a bought summit with Kim Jong Il, you’re not being educated about history, you’re just being indoctrinated with it. And ultimately, isn’t that what many Koreans are complaining about with regard to Japanese textbooks?

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