The May 18 Gwangju Uprising
datasecretslox.com
datasecretslox.com
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 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.
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?
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.
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.)
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.
See also: "USA bringing democracy to countries that don't have it" VS "USA invading countries to steer their internal/international policies"
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...
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 a nice "what if" story, but pretending a fully functional democratic government was overthrown by US and Russia for no reason is disingenuous.
Within the lifetime of my parents, Portugal, Greece, Spain were dictatorships. Apparently South Korea is one of these as well.
Two days ago I posted an article on just how rapid was the downfall of democracies in the last decade: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27320565
There are less functioning democracies today than in 1991.
The truth of life is simple. There is no deep, philosophical argument to it. Who wins, rules, be it a democracy, or totalitarianism.
If you lose to totalitarians, you die. If totalitarians lose to you, they die.
Do not discount military action as sometimes the only option on the table to defend, and solidify a democracy.
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.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_law_in_Taiwan
Brazil
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_dictatorship_in_Brazi...
Argentina
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_Argentine_coup_d%27%C3%A9...
Chile
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
Paraguay
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Stronato
Well, I guess I'm just missing about 40 others...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_dictatorship#Former_c...
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.
> 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.
https://planetrulers.com/current-dictators/
January 6th was close to creating another dictatorship here.
Very few “dumb protests” involve beating police officers to unconsciousness to get past them into a federal building.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/26/capitol-riot-defend...
The gov't is losing a lot of their arguments in the courtroom trying to paint it as an insurrection versus a protest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_Switzerl...
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.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodo_League_massacre
[2] Slavery is now illegal, but for a modern horrific example in 2014: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_on_salt_farms_in_Sinan...
[3] Brazil is one I know well, but for a European example, the Mussolini Family continues to be elected by Italy's conservatives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini#Legacy
And half the people in the US apparently do not believe in Democracy.
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.
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.)
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.
Of course, in South Korea, it was never forgotten.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_eruption_of_Mount_St._Hel...
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.
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.
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.
Citizens began raiding armories that afternoon.
Which then reminds me of how neglected the Indonesian mass killings of Communists, trade unionists, and minority groups in 1965-66 is in the west - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_19...
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.
Do you want to rethink the question?
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwangju_Uprising
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests
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).
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.