Hong Bum-do, a member of the communist party and a Soviet military officer, who was responsible for the massacre of Korean fighters at the Svobodnyy on 1921-6-27. The Moon Jae-in admin briought him from Kazakhstan to Korea, & is treating him like a national hero. https://t.co/K6mNTHpeiE
This is what the Korean left does, re-write history to fit their political narratives:
Gyeonggi Governor Lee Jae-myung, a frontrunner among candidates for president from the ruling Democratic Party (DP), made bombshell remarks last week. In a trip to Andong, North Gyeongsang, his hometown, Lee said, “Pro-Japanese forces maintained their ruling system in collaboration with the U.S. occupation force in Korea after its liberation from Japanese rule.” His portrayal of South Korea as a country that “could not be founded in a clean way from the start” has stirred much controversy after Kim Won-wung, chairman of the Heritage of Korean Independence, called the American forces an “occupation force” and the Soviet forces a “liberation force” in a virtual speech to high school students earlier. Even after his comment triggered a sensation, Gov. Lee claimed that the U.S. forces defined themselves as an “occupying force,” urging his opponents to first reflect on their “lack of knowledge about history.”
The historical perspectives Lee has demonstrated are very inappropriate — and dangerous — for a presidential hopeful. His distorted view of history seems to have originated from the now-defunct theory widely shared by democracy activists in the past. But Lee’s views are wrong. While the Soviet military government established a Communist regime led by its puppet Kim Il Sung in North Korea, a divergent mix of the anti-Communist faction, the nationalist faction and the socialist faction fiercely competed with one another under the rule of the U.S. military government in South Korea.
Lee’s claim that South Korea was ruled by pro-Japanese forces after liberation is also misleading. The heads of the three branches of the government were all independence fighters. Our founding president Syngman Rhee and Shin Ik-hee, the founding speaker of the National Assembly, both fought against Japanese rule as top officials of the Provisional Government in China. Our first Chief Justice Kim Byung-ro also served as chairman of an influential anti-Japanese group. Ministers of the first government led by Syngman Rhee also were mostly independence fighters.
You can read more at the link, but the term liberation force I think is more appropriate to describe the US forces that moved into South Korea after the defeat of the Imperial Japanese during World War II. However, Korean leftists like the term occupation force that carries negative connotations while using liberation force to describe the Soviets. It is almost like the leftists wish the Soviet Union occupied the entire peninsula after World War II.
As far as the pro-Japanese comments, the US military initially kept Japanese government administrators in place until they could be replaced by a new Korean government. Would Lee Jae-Myung have preferred the disaster that was de-Bathification in Iraq when all the government officials were fired that help lead to the post-war chaos in that country? The keeping of Japanese administrator temporarily ended up being a wise decision that led to a smoother transition of power to the new ROK government.
Historian Robert Neff has an interesting article in the Korea Times about the World War I’s impact on the foreigner community in Korea:
A street in Seoul circa 1910 / Robert Neff Collection
The foreign community as a whole struggled during the war; many of the Western religious organizations and businesses in Korea had to curtail or suspend operations due to manpower shortages. At Unsan, the U.S. gold mining concession in northern Korea, the American miners were exempt from the draft ― the mines were considered essential to the war effort ― but lack of supplies hampered operations.
Although Korea did not actively participate, it did contribute to the war efforts. In 1915, Korean Leather Company in Seoul agreed to provide the Russian government with 150,000 pairs of boots, 520,000 cartridge cases and 280,000 leather belts ― the contract was worth over $1 million.
This seems like an almost impossible task for Korean families members trying to find out what happened to their relatives that were conscripted to work on Sakhalin Island during World War II:
South Korean Shin Yun-sun shows photos of her 92-year-old mother, Baek Bong-rye, during an interview at her house in Seoul, South Korea Wednesday, July 29, 2020. Shin, 75, has spent decades pestering government officials, digging into records and searching burial grounds on Russia’s desolate Sakhalin island, desperately searching for traces of a father she never met. Shin wants to bring back the remains of her presumably dead father for her ailing mother. Japan’s colonial government conscripted Shin’s father for forced labor from their farming village in September 1943, when Baek was pregnant with Shin.
Historians say Japan forcibly mobilized around 30,000 Koreans as workers during the late 1930s and 1940s on what was then called Karafuto, or the Japanese-occupied southern half of Sakhalin, near the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido.
They endured grueling labor in coal mines and logging and construction sites as part of Imperial Japan’s wartime economy, which became heavily dependent on conscripted Korean labor when Japanese men were sent to war fronts.
Families thought their loved ones would return when Japan’s surrender in WWII cemented the Soviet Union’s full control over Sakhalin.
Soviet authorities repatriated thousands of Japanese nationals from Sakhalin. But they refused to send back the Koreans, who had become stateless after the war, apparently to meet labor shortages in the island’s coal mines and elsewhere.
Moscow’s attitude hardened further after Communist ally North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950; most of the Korean laborers in Sakhalin had come from the South.
South Korea and Russia established diplomatic relations in 1990 and about 4,000 Koreans have returned from Sakhalin since. But people like Shin who lost track of their relatives long before then have seen little progress.
You can read more at the link, but there are descendants from these Korean forced laborers that still live on Sakhalin Island that organizations sponsor to visit Korea.
This doesn’t seem to be anything new from this document release that most people didn’t already know:
Citizens stage a massive rally on a street in the southwestern city of Gwangju on May 18, 1980, urging the military junta led by then-Maj. Gen. Chun Doo-hwan, who seized power through an internal coup after the assassination of President Park Chung-hee, to step down.
The martial law commander at the time of South Korea’s 1980 pro-democracy uprising warned the then-U.S. ambassador that the country could end up a communist nation like Vietnam unless the revolt was quelled, declassified U.S. documents showed Friday.
The commander, Gen. Lee Hui-sung, also tried to justify the martial law’s expansion during the meeting with Ambassador William Gleysteen on the day of the revolt, claiming the growing influence of communist thinking spreading amongst young students was posing threats to South Korea’s security, according to the documents.
It was when Gen. Chun Doo-hwan was effectively in control of South Korea after taking power in a military coup following the assassination of strongman President Park Chung-hee the previous year at the hands of his own spy chief.
On May 18, 1980, citizens in the southwestern city of Gwangju rose up against Chun, and his military junta sent paratroopers and ruthlessly cracked down on the nine-day revolt, leaving more than 200 people killed and 1,800 others wounded.
“He justified expanded martial law as necessary to deter a danger which had become an unacceptable threat to the survival of the ROK,” Gleysteen said in a telegram to the State Department, referring to South Korea by its official name, Republic of Korea.
“The rampant growth of communist thinking among students and radical tendencies within the student movement posed the likelihood of massive disorders which the government could not control without undermining the country’s external security,” he said. “If they were not controlled, Lee feared the ROK would be communized in a manner similar to Vietnam.”
You can read more at the link, but this document release just further validates that the Chun Doo-hwan government was trying to make the case to the U.S. that the uprising was a threat to the external security of the government. Whether the uprising really was an external security threat is still hotly debated to this day.
In the black-and-white photo, two men wearing mustaches pose proudly in military uniforms with guns at their waists. The taller man on the left has been confirmed as independence fighter Hong Beom-do. But the identity of the short and stout man standing next to Hong has been shrouded in mystery for decades. Recently the identity of the mam was confirmed to be independence fighter Choi Jin-dong. / Courtesy of Ban Byung-yool
You can read the whole story about how Choi Jin-dong was identified at this link. The picture was taken in Moscow during a communist conference and the guns both are wearing were actually gifts from Lenin.
This newspaper appears to be in remarkably good shape for allegedly being so old. Even if it is a fake the history of the first newspaper printed during the Joseon dynasty is pretty interesting:
A newspaper piece on Nov. 23 of 1577, in the lunar calendar, discovered by monk Ji Bong of Yonghwa Temple in Yeongcheon, North Gyeongsang. Possibly part of the oldest newspaper ever printed, the piece contains records on the weather and the constellation. [KIM JUNG-SEOK]What is possibly the oldest newspaper ever printed has been discovered by a monk of Yonghwa Temple in Yeongcheon, North Gyeongsang. Scholars have yet to verify the authenticity of the newspaper, which is recorded to have been printed in 1577, 83 years ahead of Leipziger Zeitung, the world’s first newspaper, which was printed in 1660 in Germany.“I found it at an auction website that sells old documents and books this month,” said monk Ji Bong on Tuesday. “It was up on the website from January but no one seemed interested. I have been interested in old books and bibliographies for 20 years, so I bought it.”
Ji Bong did not specify how much he paid for it or who he bought it from.
The newspaper is in eight pieces and not all are intact. The dates printed on them are: Nov. 6, 15, 19, 23 and 24, all in 1577, in the lunar year calendar system.
The pieces contain articles about Queen Inseong’s welfare and the fact that the regular discussion of state affairs among the king and the ministers were not held on Nov. 6; that hundreds of cows died of infectious disease on Nov. 15; some records of the weather and the constellation on Nov. 23; and the welfare of ministers, including one by the name of Lee Jung-hyeong, on Nov. 24.
The existence of the oldest newspaper is mentioned in the Annals of the Joseon Dynasty. The Annals of the Joseon Dynasty are the records of the dynasty (1392-1910) from 1392 to 1863, completed in 1,893 chapters in 888 books. Thought to be the longest continual records of a single dynasty in the world, the annals have been registered at the Unesco Memory of the World since 1997.
In the annals for Nov. 28, 1577, in the lunar calendar, King Seonjo (1552-1608) is recorded to have rebuked his ministers for printing newspapers without the king’s permission. Seonjo is recorded to have shut down the publication, rounded up some 30 people who took part in it and sentenced them to a severe punishment.
Historians have said the king was against the publication of a newspaper at the time because he was afraid that state secrets may be leaked to ordinary citizens or foreign powers.
“The publication of the newspaper at the time was a big deal to the royal court,” Ji Bong said. “They say the people who published the newspaper disappeared one morning and the people who possessed any copies had to destroy or hide them.” [Joong Ang Ilbo]
It seems like the only thing controversial about the final version of the state sponsored history textbooks is the fact that it is an initiative from the Park Geun-hye administration:
State sponsored history textbooks [KBS World Radio]The Ministry of Education released Tuesday the final versions of controversial state-authored history textbooks for middle and high school students, which are supposed to go into use from 2018.
The ministry said it made some 760 edits to the textbooks after drafts were revealed to the public in November, using the feedback it received.
The most notable change is the official description of Aug. 15, 1948, as Foundation Day of the Republic of Korea. Some historians have argued that date should be described as the foundation of the government of the Republic of Korea, because the country was founded in 1919, with the founding of the provisional government in Shanghai by independence activists.
While the state-authored textbooks will call Aug. 15, 1948, Foundation Day of the Republic of Korea, the ministry said authorized private history textbooks can describe the date as the foundation date of the country or the government.
The ministry added that schools will still be able to opt between authorized private history textbooks and state-authored history textbooks from 2018, when the state-authored history textbooks will be put to use.
According to the ministry, other notable changes to the final versions of the state-authored textbooks include extended details on pro-Japan forces during the Japanese annexation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. The state-authored history textbooks admit that the government failed to make strong efforts to discover and take disciplinary action against pro-Japan forces.
The ministry also said the new textbooks admit the delay in the government’s efforts to get the facts straight on Jeju Island’s April 3rd Uprising. It is generally understood that the details of the brutal atrocities committed against suspected leftists on the island in 1948 were hushed up by the government until after the democratization movement of the country in the late 1990s.
The previous drafts of the state-authored textbooks were also criticized for overly praising the work of former President Park Chung Hee. The initial draft of the high school textbook spent four pages describing the former president’s positive achievements, while allotting only half a page for the negatives that accompanied them.
The revised and final version of the high school textbook, the ministry said, admits that Park’s Saemaul (New Village) Movement “had its limits.” But the textbook will still allot nine pages to history related to former President Park. [Joong Ang Ilbo]
You can read more at the link, but I don’t see how you can tell the modern history of Korea without a lot of pages on Park Chung-hee considering how long he ruled the country and the sweeping changes he made.
