Possible that we in the US do not learn much about the atrocities of South Korean autocracies because they were largely supported and propped up for decades by the US government.
After nearly 40 years of Japanese rule, Korea formed a unified independent, democratically elected government with representation from right, center, and left political leaders on September 6, 1945. The very next day US forces showed up to dissolve the government and keep power in the hands of the Japanese.
The subsequent election in South Korea was boycotted by nearly every political group.
In the late 1940s, Kim Gu had unification talks with Kim il-Sung but the CIA had him assassinated in 1949.
From there it’s a long chain of military dictatorships, coups, and suppression of democratic uprisings, with US influence and support.
I'm no expert in 1940s Korean history, but I think it was more like Game of Thrones (everyone fighting everyone else while fervently believing they're on the right side), than typical Hollywood (righteous people fighting against a powerful supervillain).
Even Kim Gu himself, giant as he was, is widely believed to be connected to various assassinations (and attempted assassinations) of his political enemies.
* Also I don't think it was ever proven who ordered Kim's assassination - I think most people assume it's President Rhee. (It's no secret that Rhee was very fond of the person who killed Kim.)
> In the late 1940s, Kim Gu had unification talks with Kim il-Sung but the CIA had him assassinated in 1949.
Taking a look at Wikipedia, the assassin seems to have been an US Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC, of "ratlines" fame) asset. Are there indications of him also being employed by OSS or some of its descendants (among which CIA is included), or did you just mistake one part of the US government for another?
It very well could be. A potential CIA tie is speculated on the Wikipedia for Ahn Doo-Hee. I read that he was CIA trained on a Historic.ly thread, which cited “Korea: A History” by Bong-youn Choy.
I’ve been reading The Puzzle Palace recently and it’s interesting to hear how much reorganization and shuffling and sharing of responsibilities happened in the intelligence agencies after Perl Harbor and esp around Korea.
In almost every situation like this, every principal player is an asset of some organization. An intelligence agency would be stupid not to be supporting every side of the conflict.
Honestly, a lot of Americans don't even seem to be aware of massacres committed by former enemies like North Vietnam after they won the Vietnam War. It's not a surprise they're not aware of what a distant ally did outside of the Korean War
American history education focuses very heavily on domestic affairs, and is further segmented by local priorities (e.g. “American Civil War” vs. “War of Northern Aggression”)
At least growing up in NYC, domestic history is really focused on domestic affairs. We barely touched the Mexican-American War and the Spanish-American War was kind of a footnote. The World Wars are discussed in that they set up the US as a superpower but the actual implications of that are more or less glossed over (nothing about South American activities, barely anything about the Korean War; I think we talked for one hour in high school about Mossadegh and that was “world history.”) And that’s probably one of the more progressive curriculums in the country; in the past there has been uproar over textbooks in other states saying that slavery was a consensual migration for economic reasons.
Are you suggesting this is taught as an alternative lens on the American Civil War? I've never heard this name, and went to public school in the South.
I don't see the previous comment making the note around schooling in particular, but rather that what names people use to describe things kind of tell which sides they want you to see as the good one. It's likely that many people who see themselves as "the good people" while being on the side of the confederate would use that naming instead of calling it a "civil war"
See also: "USA bringing democracy to countries that don't have it" VS "USA invading countries to steer their internal/international policies"
The South is by no means a monolith. I don't expect schools in, say, Atlanta, Richmond, and Fayetteville to be teaching the same things. In fact, schools in NYC and Nassau County often don't teach the same things despite being in the same metro area, due to how highly balkanized school districts are.
So it seems like that particular term has fallen out of favor (coming into prominence and usage during the last breaths of segregation) but there are still alternate names like "War Between the States". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_American_Civil_Wa...
I think you mean Japanese collaborators, who were hated by the population, but who also were the only people with any experience in technical and administrative areas.
Politics are dirty especially you fought with a dirty opponent like china supported North Korea. I think the great is so much then we might lost sight why the horrible dictatorship of South Korea and Taiwan in those days. One wonder whether they will fall into communist hand, even today. Korea not sure. Quite sure the nationalist party might even today.
After the Pacific War ended, territories occupied by the Japanese were divided up across the allies for post-war occupation.
Korea was divided into North and South, with the USSR taking the North and the allies taking the South. As an expediency, the Japanese were left to maintain order as the allies didn’t have the troops immediately available.
It's still disingenuous because they are being very selective with their facts. They are trying to imply that the People's Republic was somehow: 1) able to maintain control over the entire country in terms of security, food, governance, 2) actually had broad based support beyond small groups and that support was durable, 3) wasn't just a communist cover (as it was in Eastern Europe).
It's a nice "what if" story, but pretending a fully functional democratic government was overthrown by US and Russia for no reason is disingenuous.
> Dictatorship, form of government in which one person or a small group possesses absolute power without effective constitutional limitations.
No, this isn't what I was describing, and isn't the same thing as a one-party state. There were important limitations on central power that were respected throughout the entire period of PRI rule; notably the restriction that a president couldn't serve for more than one term, which since the Mexican Revolution has never been broken.
"Dictatorship" to "liberal democracy" is a spectrum, and Mexico for most of the 20th century was not at either of the endpoints.
> Critical to this essay is Joseph and Buchenau’s interpretation of the post-1940 period vis-à-vis the other works under review. Using a term coined by Mario Vargas Llosa in 1990, they describe a “perfect dictatorship” between 1940 and 1968: a one-party system with the appearance of democracy that sustained regular elections and avoided military coups and social upheavals. In the reorganization that became the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in 1946, the party removed the army from formal political power. The state/party emphasized securing dominance with loyalty, order, and representation of PRI sectors in local elections. The latter required central government reliance on local strongmen and their minions, effective political and cultural brokers. [0]
> The public split encouraged voices from the right and left. Add to this political contention the increasingly visible contradictions: uneven benefits of economic growth, population explosion creating pressure on the land and migration to cities, growing unemployment and inflation. For Buchenau and Joseph, the students rebelling in Mexico City in 1968 represent a coming-together of these critical contradictions: they demanded the rule of law, freedom from repression, and social justice. [0]
I’m definitely not an expert in Mexican history. But that to me sounds an awful lot like a typical dictatorship, and a bad one at that. Otherwise, people wouldn’t push back.
Women's right to vote in Switzerland is much more recent than you might expect. 1971 for federal elections, 1991 when the last hold-out canton was forced to allow them to vote in local elections.
The way I think of it is that democracy is a very expensive form of governance. Having legal protections and representation for all members of society is great, but it is also a luxury that allows various bad actors and interest groups to clog up the entire system for their personal gain. And the only way to afford this political luxury is to ensure that the economic vibrancy of an open system produces enough wealth to patch up what gets bled away by democracy's inherent costs. And if that is not enough, to have an external source of wealth to subsidize this continuous bleeding. Because if democracy fails to produce enough wealth and distribute it to enough people, then people quickly turn to authoritarians who claim they have all the answers.
Under these assumptions, the burgeoning of democracies in the 1990s might be due to indirect economic subsidies from the US. And the reason why the US could be a democracy is because the American continent, with other resource claimants eliminated by disease and war, could generate enough wealth to subsidize a messy but democratic system of governance that otherwise might have been overrun by more powerful authoritarian neighbors if it had been born on the Eurasian continent.
> it is also a luxury that allows various bad actors and interest groups to clog up the entire system for their personal gain
I don't see how this is something that democracy enables. Self-serving dukes, officials, and autocrats possessing difficult-to-check powers also exist in less democratic regimes.
If you lose to totalitarians, you die. If totalitarians lose to you, they die.
That's kind of a bizarre and exaggerated way to put things. Nominally, what separates dictatorship and democracy is that a democratic regime doesn't wantonly murder it's enemies. Some dictatorial regimes engage in brutal attacks on their enemies but even there, for most people life goes on.
Also, there are a variety of regimes mid-way between democracy and totalitarianism - the current regimes of India and Turkey for example. Which is to say the loss and the gaining of democratic rights is often (though not always) a gradual thing.
And if that military has other plans, well, learn to live under the new regime. I always think how fortunate western Europe was to have the US force them into democracy and freedom for the individual. Many don't agree with that, but if left to either the Nazis or the Soviets, we'd all be living under some sort of authoritarian regimes to this day.
And don’t assume the democracy will stay here. It is in constant threats and can be lost if you don’t fight hard always. Just a few years ago in Korea, the very daughter of the dictator became the president and people had to fight again to expel her. I’m observing similar things happening in the US now…
Yes, it's important to remember that in the modern world, states often transition between a variety of forms. The common forms are representative democracy, military dictatorship, populist/strongman dictatorship (which can be formally democratic to whatever extent) and single-party "totalitarian" dictatorship but there are endless variations.
All these are based on particular power groups and only partially relying on the consent of the governed - while also organizing the governed to give their consent, with represent democracy naturally relying most on the consent of the consent of the governed.
For me, at least from what I remember from school in the 90s/00s in the US, this stuff wasn't taught at all. We just learned a bunch of left-over cold war rhetoric about being "leader of the free world", and little discussion of what actually went on in the "free world" that was being "lead".
Events like this one -- or the Bodo League mass killings [1], or the institution of slavery in Korea [2], etc -- were not covered at all. Even more shocking is how violent and unimaginably cruel so many governments have been, and yet to this day they manage to be fondly remembered by many conservative citizens. For example, President Park Geunhye, daughter and "successor" to the dictator President Park Chung-hee, became president in a (questionable) election in 2012, with mass support from conservative voters. So even if a given dictatorship is gone, it's supporters are still here, and will be voting in as many similar policy as they can.
History in high school used to be my least favorite subject, but as an adult, reading history books is like all I do, and I will use any excuse to go on and on about it (as evidenced by this now very long post lol)
Edit: Not sure why I got so many downvotes so quickly, but just to be clear I'm not trying to pick on Korea or single out Korean conservatives --- this applies to many, many countries [3] --- I'm only using South Korea as what I thought was an interesting example, due to the original post being about Gwangju.
Government says "these people shouldn't get bail as they are insurrectionists" and judges say "if they didn't commit any violence, then no, they aren't a threat and will be released on bail".
The gov't is losing a lot of their arguments in the courtroom trying to paint it as an insurrection versus a protest.
How close were we? Was there a pivotal moment where an individual hero saved the day, or maybe something completely different? Just trying to get a handle on the truth of the matter, I don't seem to know very much about the specific details of that infamous day where our most precious institution hung in the balance (if I'm understanding correctly).
It was a dumb protest. There was absolutely zero threat to the machinery of government in any way shape or form, and anybody claiming otherwise is simply working as part of the machinery desperately trying to rid itself of an outsider.
It recreates some of the original newsreel footage from Gwangju that was smuggled out into the West, embedded into a Hollywood-style narrative based on historical characters. With Song Kang-ho, recently familiar from "Parasite".
There's a lot of Korean cinema that processes Gwangju in one form or another, but this is one of the more accessible entries, especially to an international audience.
I think it was a decent movie, except for that one... Hollywood action scene toward the end, which felt out of place and more like a "fan service."
Not depicting the same event, but if you liked A Taxi Driver, I'd also recommend 1987 - When the Day Comes which depicts people fighting against the same dictator. (Fun fact: in 1987, the role of one major character was kept secret and he's never called by his name until the end of the movie, because otherwise everybody would've recognized who he was.)
Agreed, I think the "car chase" is the part everyone feels was a bit superfluous and much like it had to tick the formulaic boxes toward the end to make box office. But if you make those concessions to form it's a picture with some great moments and definitely a story worth telling. Maybe especially for me as a German citizen, and then watching the original Tagesschau clip (the news hour the footage surfaced in) after getting home from theaters, it really resonated a lot.
1987 - I liked it, but I'd say it was more on the nose and lacks Song Kang-ho's acting chops :). Still, around the time I watched it I often worked from a café across from gates of Yonsei Univ., which figure prominently in this real-world tale so it still had an impact on me.
The other movie I really liked that's loosely connected to the era and the student uprisings was "Sunny". The comedy-drama tone of that one is a super close match to some German films processing the end of the East German regime and I felt really connected to that film.
Do you have a link to the original Tagesschau clip featuring the Gwangju footage? I could only find one from a day or two before, featuring only footage from Seoul.
My girlfriend at the time brought me to see that film, Gwangju was her home city. She was very pleased to show me after how accurate the recreation of some of the scenes were and the locations of the film.
I think that we forget 18 May partly because it succeeded. There is no enormous symbol of the failure and suppression of 18 May in the same way that there is of 4 June. I suppose that another massacre that sticks in my mind is the Kent State Massacre, which also passes unremarked. The lesson I draw from this is people may forget even when the state does not encourage them to do so: it’s much easier to discuss the Kent State Massacre in the US than 4 June on the Mainland, and yet it’s not really very obvious which in the respective area is better known.
May 18 succeeded? It was a beginning of a long dictatorship in Korea. Maybe we can say it was a success because Korean people achieved democracy as a result of a long battle against the dictatorship that shared with May 18 in spirit. But it was a big loss at that time causing huge sorrow in people’s hearts.
I suppose that you are right that it is an infelicitous turn of phrase: I mean what you mean, i.e., that the long battle eventually was won. In China, the vindication of 4 June looks more distant a prospect than ever.
America largely forgot about 5/18 because they never got the chance to know it: on the very same day, Mount St. Helens erupted, killing 57. I can only imagine the media frenzy after that.
Of course, in South Korea, it was never forgotten.
I liked this story. The failure to account for the amount of mindshare Mount St. Helens' eruption consumed is regrettable.
This date, May 18, 1980, is clearly burned in my memory as the day of the eruption. As a youth, I cut out the the headlines and photos from 2 newspapers and saved them for decades.
I was able to discuss Gwangju soon afterwards with Americans who were in Korea at the time. Reports of what happened varied considerably between witnesses. A conservative establishment guy who was in Seoul claimed Chun Doo Hwan intentionally sent troops there with murderous intent. A liberal Peace Corps guy who was down around Gwangju said the locals initiated the violence by raiding the local armory.
The article is good in that it gives more attention to regional animosities than is usually done, but its tone is far too flippant for the subject matter and I think it may be a bit too credulous regarding the local accounts.
There might have been confusion during the time, but now we have hour-by-hour accounts of what Gwangju's citizens were going through. Paratroopers were beating citizens to death starting on 5/18. Protests escalated. On 5/20, all reporters of the regional Jeonnam Maeil Newspaper resigned in protest, leaving this note that later became famous:
We saw, with our two eyes,
people being dragged like dogs and slaughtered.
But we could not write a single line on the paper.
So we put down our pens in shame.
On 5/21, there were thousands of protesters in front of the Jeonnam Provincial Office. On 1 pm, paratroopers started firing indiscriminately into protesters.
The Jeju Uprising is mentioned just shortly, it's even more neglected in the public memory – it's a massacre that happened before the Korean war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeju_uprising
This item is on the front page on the US holiday of Memorial Day, when we remember those who died so others could be free. That count, of course, includes 36,516 Americans who died fighting in the Korean Conflict.
Yeah, what exactly makes the 36k US lives lost more important to focus on during Memorial Day?
The best arguments I can think of:
1. This memorial must be acknowledged or practiced by the Hackernews community, because it's _mostly_ US-based and English speaking. So by association by language, we are expected to talk about a United States federal holiday?
2. All human lives are equal, but there is a day and place for everything. On May 31, the world should practice the Unided States federal holiday. On May 18, well... May 18th is just a Korean holiday. Not everybody needs to be aware of it.
3. US citizens and other English speakers should observe US holidays because that's just the way the world works. Just like how you do more for the funeral of your family, you should discuss US federal holidays more than Korean holidays. Holiday practice is a like zero-sum game, as there isn't that much time to just think about holidays and there are too many holidays. Using the same logic, some people's lives are worth more to you because they affect your life more. Sometimes with this approach, we mess up and overvalue one race more than another...but that's just a side effect of "the way things work".
I can't see the logic. Saying that we should focus on Memorial Day sounds like a talking point that riles up emotions to me.
I appreciate the post, but I don't think it's constructive to argue that the Gwangju Uprising was bloodier than June 4. That's only true if you go by official numbers put out by the CCP.
Your post is less constructive: your only argument is an appeal to the lack of trustworthiness of the Chinese government. Even so, it would have been better if you stated what are your opinions on the number of casualties regarding both events.
To give a starting point to the discussion; the English Wikipedia gives about the same summary for the independent estimates of casualties related to both events: from hundreds to thousands.
Also it doesn't mean anything. If you're saying the numbers we have might be wrong, that is an useless statement for the purpose of comparing the two incidents.
We also have strong reason to believe that south korean figures are a gross underestimate (if you read the linked wikipedia article).
Victims have a hard time coming forward if there is a strong possibility of being victimised again (korea has a long history of blacklisting victims families for generations, it's not just a north korean thing).
I initially understood "bloodier" as in literal blood due to how corpses were handled. In which case I would agree that it was not as bloody. But I do think the term was for body count, in which case they're probably comparable.
My point is that the body count is not an apples to apples comparison, because neither number is precisely known. On the the China side, the information suppression and disinformation campaign started immediately regarding the number of casualties. This is very well documented. I have in my lap the book The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited, by Louisa Lim- this book contains lots of evidenced that the body count was underrepresented. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about the Gwangju Uprising to comment further on it.
After nearly 40 years of Japanese rule, Korea formed a unified independent, democratically elected government with representation from right, center, and left political leaders on September 6, 1945. The very next day US forces showed up to dissolve the government and keep power in the hands of the Japanese.
The subsequent election in South Korea was boycotted by nearly every political group.
In the late 1940s, Kim Gu had unification talks with Kim il-Sung but the CIA had him assassinated in 1949.
From there it’s a long chain of military dictatorships, coups, and suppression of democratic uprisings, with US influence and support.