My immediate, one word reaction to Park’s statement is dismay.
Park followed the formula of her previous year’s address and that of her predecessor by ignoring America’s contributions, only crediting the “selfless struggle” of “the Korean people” who “at last achieved the liberation of their fatherland.” She offered not even a hint that America and 8 million American soldiers actually did the liberating in the Korean people’s selfless struggle for liberation.
(Here’s Park’s sole reference to America, Americans, or the United States: “As the recent normalization of ties between the United States and Cuba and the Iranian nuclear deal attest, the international community is in the midst of a sweeping tide of change and cooperation. But North Korea is treading the opposite path.”)
Park’s speech with it’s overarching emphasis on the economy rather than liberation, freedom, and democracy had the nuts and bolts of a state of the union address. Rather than sing to the lofty aspirations of a maturing democratic republic, Park got weighed down by graven consumer goods and electronic gadgets: “Today, we have become a country producing some of the world’s finest electronic goods, automobiles, steel, ships and petrochemical products, and we stand tall as an economic powerhouse with export figures that are the sixth largest in the world.”
Given that Park had omitted America’s role in Korea’s liberation, she obviously could not articulate the role that America played in the miracle on the Han. Apparently, no thanks is necessary. [Marmot’s Hole]
You can read the whole posting at the link, but yes she should have at least mentioned something about the sacrifice of US servicemembers to defeat Imperial Japan. With all the complaining about revisionist history taught in Japan it is little things like this that cause Koreans to have little credibility when they do the same thing. With that all said I am not in the least surprised by Park’s speech. Like many recent ROK leaders she does not want to appear to be an American lapdog as the North Koreans and the leftists in Korea like to paint conservative ROK politicians. Likewise I believe many South Koreans do not like to be reminded that their liberation from the Japanese was the result of foreigners and not by themselves.
What does everyone else think, should President Park have included the US’s role in Korea’s liberation in her speech?
