The controversy over the MacArthur statue located in Jayu Park in Inchon first raised it’s ugly head last December.
This Kim Su-nam character appeared last week promoting last weekends protest at Jayu Park:
The group’s chairman Kim Su-nam said rectifying “the vestiges of colonialism and our distorted history must begin with removing the MacArthur statue, which is a symbol of imperialism.” He said the group would form a coalition with other groups from Inchon to bring down the statue.
So originally he says that removing the statue is an effort to correct distorted history. I don’t know what is so distorted about MacArthur saving the Korean nation twice, once from the Japanese and once from the North Koreans. Heck you could even say he helped save them from the Chinese too. Anyway this guy had a different story to say during last weekend’s protest:
“The statue is part of our humiliating history,” said Kim Su-Nam, a 65-year-old activist wearing a yellow jacket inscribed with anti-US slogans.
“By dismantling the statue, we want to stoke an anti-US movement aimed at expelling US troops from the peninsula,” Kim said.
Using a loudspeaker, he rebuked the pro-US demonstrators as “followers of the US colonial master”.
Well at least Kim is now showing his true motives. He could care less about whatever history MacArthur has in regards to Korea. His real motive is to create images on American TV screens of the MacArthur statue being toppled ala Saddam Hussein, to create a strong anti-Korean backlash in the United States. He is absolutely right. If that statue gets torn down and that is broadcast across America, the US-ROK alliance is over and South Korea might as well put up this statue in MacArthur’s place:
The pro-US protesters that Mr. Kim spoke of actually greatly outnumbered his small 50 person protest group:
“We will never forget what he did for us. He is a hero who stopped the communization of the Korean peninsula,” said Lee Jin-Ho, a 74-year-old veteran who fought alongside US soldiers during the war.
But forget is exactly what some South Koreans want to do.
After laying a wreath at the memorial, Lee joined hundreds of other pro-US demonstrators, including war veterans in their 60s and 70s, who gathered in the park on Sunday to block about 50 anti-US activists intent on pulling down the statue.
Here is the money quote of the protest here:
“Instead of quibbling, they should pay attention to North Korea’s human rights situation and the dictatorship of its Kim Jong-Il regime,” Lee Phil-Han, a 56-year-old businessman in Incheon, said.
“We owe a lot to the United States which played a key role in our economic development. My notion is being supported by a silent majority of South Koreans.”
I cannot imagine the people of Inchon tearing down that statue. I have spent a lot of time in Inchon which is evident by my Focus on Inchon series of articles, and feel pretty confident when I say that Inchon is not a center of anti-US sentiment in Korea. If anything the city has always felt pro-US to me maybe due to the city’s connection with the Inchon landing and it’s long history of trade with the US and this feeling is supported by the strong counter-protest against Kim Su-Nam and his other pro-North Korean lackeys at Jayu Park last weekend. I would like to thank the people who showed up at the park and supported keeping the MacArthur statue.
Now my next question is, where is the Korean media on this? I’m getting the majority of the information on this event from Yahoo. We get wall to wall coverage of an idiot jumping on a taxi cab but very little coverage of this protest. In fact the only analysis I have seen of this protest was in the Korea Times of all places, which supported keeping the statue. Maybe the media just couldn’t bring themselves to run images like these I pulled off the Katolic Shinja site:
These pictures run counter to the anti-USFK tone the media likes to trump into the collective Korean consciousness here. Feel free to comment with links to any other Korean news analyis of this event I may have missed because I would like to read it.
Anyway, I tend to agree with the Katolic Shinja on this final quote here:
The best quote from the article above comes from former South Korean U.N. Ambassador Park Keun: “Not even dogs forget their benefactors.”