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I wasn't alive in the 80s, but it blows my mind that South Korea was a military dictatorship. I know this is common news to most people outside the West, but I
by sna1l 11y ago
I wasn't alive in the 80s, but it blows my mind that South Korea was a military dictatorship. I know this is common news to most people outside the West, but I think it is good that in this day of fast communication and very few places to hide, that tough information like this comes out, so we can deal with it and learn from our horrible mistakes. Not all saying I'm glad this happen, but at the very least, I hope we can all learn something from it.
- asdfologist 11y agoIt came out more than 30 years too late. Sadly, I doubt any senior leader responsible will face any repercussions. Either the public will forget or they'll imprison one minor scapegoat and move on.
- walrus01 11y agonot only was it a military dictatorship, it was a military dictatorship with its domestic, foreign and signals intelligence agencies set up by the CIA and NSA. Part of the historical and ongoing extensive cooperation between the US DoD and the South Korean armed forces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Intelligence_Service_(South_Korea)#Korean_Central_Intelligence_Agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Intelligence_Service_...
- drauh 11y agoYes, a good reminder of why the hippie liberals refer to Imperialist America.
- contingencies 11y agoYou don't have to be a hippie liberal to see horrible truths in the history of post-WWII American foreign policy.
- ben_jones 11y agoAnd also the pre-WWII American foreign policy, including but not limited to the Philippines.
- cb18 11y agoI don't think you need to be a 'hippie liberal,' nor is it necessary to make value judgements of the nation's actions. You can simply look around the world and see that the US has hundreds of military bases in other ostensibly sovereign countries. You can just look at the basic facts and see that there is more than a touch of imperialism at play here.
- duncan_bayne 11y agoRemember though that if not for US action, there would be no South Korea; there would just be a larger and more terrible North Korea, and millions more people would live in suffering and bondage. Personally, I don't think the US should have intervened in Korea, for all the very good reasons that your founders cautioned against foreign intervention and entanglements. But the intervention saved millions from enslavement. It was a net benefit to everyone in South Korea, then and now.
- hasenj 11y agoIf we go back even further, Korea as a whole was under Japanese rule. If the US negotiated with Japan instead of going all out, Korea wouldn't have to be split apart to begin with. Also, if there was no South Korea, then who knows, maybe the "larger" North Korea would just be like China today; kind of terrible but not so terrible.
- a_bonobo 11y agoIt wasn't the US alone - it was a UN-mission under the lead of the US, more than twice the South Korean soldiers fought than US soldiers, and don't forget all the other coalition forces who also fought: the British soldiers, the Turkish, the Australians etc.
- vacri 11y ago
- CamperBob2 11y agoNever mind that the Soviet government had entire departments dedicated to developing, spreading, and generally promoting that sort of worldview.
- BurningFrog 11y agoI'm not sure how good an argument/excuse this is, but do remember that the country was technically at war with North Korea all this time, and under very real military threat.
- hasenj 11y agoI think that's never a good excuse. Arab states use Israel's existence as justification to military dictatorship. Saddam also used the threats from Iran (which were very real). Meanwhile, Israel managed to develop into an industrial democracy despite being surrounded by enemies from all directions.
- vkou 11y agoIsrael treats it's Palestinian population as if it were a military dictatorship.
- tamana 11y agoYes, that is occupied enemy territory, not the nation they purportedly serve.
- makomk 11y agoTreating occupied enemy territory the way that Israel has treated Palestine violates international law in so many ways it's frankly ridiculous. They really are acting like a military dictatorship.
- yarou 11y agoWas South Africa really a democracy under apartheid? Or the US under Jim Crow? Or Turkey currently? I don't think you can be considered a democracy if you are at war with half of the people within your borders.
- hasenj 11y agoDemocracies are always local. Was the US a liberal democracy during WWII when it cluster bombed Germany and Japan? Think about the context here: how South Korea in the 80s was treating its own people. Israel is a democracy within its local population despite being surrounded by enemies. Therefore, having an enemy at the border is not a good excuse for a military dictatorship.
- malloryerik 11y agoThere's another way to see this. A question asked in chat just today by a German journalist friend who specialises in Asia and esp the Koreas: "And im seriously wondering: if there were no americans holding back the sk tyrants of that time, would sk be any better than nk in terms of human rights?"
- sho_hn 11y agoHN chat? Sounds like an interesting person... (as a German living in Seoul)
- malloryerik 11y agoKakao...
- sho_hn 11y agohttp://i.imgur.com/4fVqQyB.jpg http://i.imgur.com/4fVqQyB.jpg
- walrus01 11y agoWell, it'd probably be a capitalist randian chaebol clusterfuck of industry and manufacturing, rather than juche.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- nerfhammer 11y agoThe South Korean military was fully under the command of the US military until 1994.
- malloryerik 11y agoThis may not be quite the way it sounds. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/agency/dod/usfk-opcon.htm http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/agency/dod/usfk-opcon...
- contingencies 11y agoit blows my mind that South Korea was a military dictatorship Why? China, Japan, Vietnam, and Taiwan all derive their political cultures primarily from Confucianism, a strongly hierarchical system that modern commentators would probably, if it could be seen undoctored today, describe as a dictatorship. North Korea, a personality cult with similar structure, persists. At the same time, in the 1980s, nearby Taiwan was also a dictatorship of the Nationalist Chinese army and was also supported if not set up by the US. They stopped off in Burma to grow heroin and prop up a military dictatorship there along the way. In the last few years, the US has basically let the dictators out of prosecution to counter growing regional Chinese influence which was formerly set to dominate the country. Singapore is widely accused of setting up its stock market explicitly to launder the drug revenues, and still has - and indeed probably only exists today - because of major US support. Vietnam is the only really strong story of the lot, repulsing an attack from China after kicking out the French and Americans and re-asserting its independence, then removing another dictatorship (Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge) from Cambodia in 1978.
- walrus01 11y agoDon't forget US support for the Greek military junta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_military_junta_of_1967%E2%80%9374 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_military_junta_of_1967%E... And the US military LOVED Saddam Hussein. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Iraq_during_the_Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Iraq...
- harperlee 11y agoUS also loved Franco in Spain, and a bunch of undemocratic latin-american governments.
- tmp23423 11y agoAnd more recently, Egypt http://www.news24.com/Africa/News/kerry-expresses-support-for-egypt-in-brief-visit-20160420-3 http://www.news24.com/Africa/News/kerry-expresses-support-fo...
- mlvljr 11y agoAnd it still is a criminal offense to "praise" NK in SK, so some bits are still there :) https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=south%20korea%20criminal%20offense%20for%20praising%20north%20korea https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...