Individuals may try to forget personal traumas of the past, but nations must do
their best to remember even the most disturbing national tragedies. The ritual
of remembering shared historical experiences, along with traditional ties like
shared ethnicity, language, religion, and geography, shapes national identity.
And the way a nation remembers the painful past may say more about that
nation's identity and character than the way it celebrates past feats and
conquests.
On America's Memorial Day, May 26 this year, I visited the Rhode Island
Veterans Cemetery and paid my respects at the Korean War Memorial. Among those
in attendance were perhaps a dozen veterans of the Korean War and their
families. Under the clear
blue sky of a sunny spring afternoon, gazing up at the words "Freedom is Not
Free" carved onto the elegant memorial, I reflected on the meaning of over
54,000 American lives lost and some 8,000 American soldiers missing in action
in a war fought once upon a time in an unknown foreign land - the land of my
birth.
Greeting the septuagenarian and octogenarian veterans gathered at the cemetery,
who, more than half a century ago, had saved my nation from falling to
communist totalitarian rule, I tried to imagine what it must have been like
fighting in a distant land away from home and their loved ones.
One gentleman told me that after the war he had done his best to forget
everything about Korea. He had never brought up the war even with his wife and
children for nearly 50 years until his first trip back to South Korea in 2001.
Since then, he has tried his best to remember everything about the war, even as
memory fades with time.
Others, I know, to this day, choose not to go back. Some are still tormented by
their experience. In 2000, when I taught at Bowdoin College in Maine, I met a
veteran who, unprompted, told me that his only positive memory of the war was
firing his machine gun at Chinese soldiers and seeing their red blood spilled
on the white snow. I did not know how to respond to him then, and still, eight
years later, don't have an answer.
The Korean War of 1950-53, now largely forgotten, was an epoch-making event on
a world-historical scale. The war unleashed the Cold War, transformed the
United Nations from a paper organization into a credible multinational body,
propelled the US to a near-permanent state of forward deployment, and taught
the world's superpowers the lessons of fighting a limited war in the nuclear
age.
The war bore profound effects on the nations of the region. America's former
enemy Japan almost overnight was turned into America's key strategic partner.
The war was also an economic bonanza for Japan thanks to the US military's
material and logistical needs in nearby Korea. Communist China, despite
suffering enormous casualties, came out of the war with enhanced international
prestige as a formidable foe of the US.
Amid the ruins, South Korea was saved from the brink of collapse and given the
opportunity to rebuild itself by virtue of America's commitment to come to its
defense in the future, not to mention generous long-term American aid. The
North Korean regime, too, was spared thanks to the Chinese intervention, and
effectively granted the opportunity to continue with its communist experiment -
one that continues to this day.
Since the war, the two Koreas have traveled on very different paths of national
development. The vicissitudes of fortune across the 38th parallel could not be
starker than they are today. For the first time in the history of the Korean
people, South Korea in the 1970s eradicated mass hunger and abject poverty.
Later South Korea became a major trading nation of the world. South Korean
citizens live today in affluence in an open democracy, free to fret about
obesity and protest in public against imports of US beef.
In the meantime, North Korea has attained the status of the most "advanced"
totalitarian state in the world - ever. The communist leadership has
successfully carried out a dynastic succession, a unique feat in the world. All
the while, over a million North Korean people have starved to death and more
continue to die today, as the North Korean famine is now well into its second
decade. The prolonged food catastrophe in North Korea is yet another singular
North Korean achievement. No other industrialized, literate, peacetime economy
in what we know as the modern world has ever experienced such a calamity.
Misery and prosperity continue to co-habit the Korean Peninsula.
Americans and soldiers from 15 other nations that came to defend South Korea
under the banner of the UN may not have sown the seeds of South Korea's
affluence and freedom. But their actions and sacrifices gave South Koreans the
crucial opportunity to make that very future possible. Had it not been for the
US leadership in 1950, South Korea as we know it today, or South Korea in any
other shape or form, simply would not exist.
Unfortunately, the lessons of the past are increasingly lost on the younger
generation of South Koreans. Last June, polls indicated that some 38% of
primary school children in Seoul thought the Korean War a war fought against
Japan sometime during the Chosun dynasty (1392-1910). Of South Koreans in their
twenties 53.2% did not know in which year the war had broken out.
Not so long ago, according to multiple surveys by South Korean newspapers on
the eve of the new millennium, South Koreans uniformly identified the Korean
War as the single most important historical event in all of Korean history. The
horrific magnitude of the war, claiming the lives of more than 10% of the
Korean population, rightfully bears that terrible distinction.
Yet less than seven years later, a new generation of South Koreans oblivious to
such a horrendous national past has emerged. Affluence and freedom may very
well be universal procreators of complacency and historical ignorance. But the
Korean War is still for many Koreans a national trauma lived through and within
memory. And the continuing division of the Korean Peninsula and the military
threat of a nuclear North Korea are more than just remnants of a war once
fought. They are visible and palpable reminders of a great national tragedy
like no other.
The trend of blithely casting the Korean War into the dustbin of history has
been coeval with the growth of South Korean hostility toward the United States
and sympathy for North Korea over the past decade. The combination of
historical dependence on the US and ethnic nationalism has cast over the South
Korean public a fog of indifference toward the past and illusions about the
future. In 2005, Senator Hillary Clinton bitingly called South Koreans' lack of
awareness of the US role in their national development since the Korean War
"historical amnesia".
Amnesia or apathy, such a trend can be reversed through sustained education and
the public ritual of remembrance. As South Korea looks ahead to its own
Memorial Day on June 6 and the anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War on
June 25, the South Korean nation would do well to take a moment to reflect on
the freedom that they have come to take for granted in recent years, and the
compelling need to bring freedom to their long-suffering fellow Koreans north
of the 38th parallel.
For many South Koreans today, the Korean War is little more than a tragedy of
the past or a tale in abstraction. For others, it is a trauma best forgotten.
But on Memorial Day, the South Koreans, as a nation, must not forget the
suffering and sacrifice in their national historical experience. The lessons of
the most traumatic past must be learned and continually relearned, not only to
prevent such a tragedy from repeating itself, but also to honor, as one nation,
those who made our freedom possible, and to remember that freedom is certainly
never free.
Dr Sung-Yoon Lee is adjunct assistant professor of international politics
at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, Boston.
(Published with permission of The Korean American Press.)
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