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thoreau
Joined: 21 Jun 2009
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 Posted: Tue Aug 04, 2009 3:20 am Post subject: NYTimes on North Korea, South Korea, and the U.S. |
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/world/asia/04iht-letter.html
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...emotionally charged friction between Seoul and Washington has subsided in recent years, as the governments of President Lee Myung-bak in Seoul and President Barack Obama in Washington conclude that they can prevail against the North only if they forge a united approach.
Still, the South Korean outlook � distrusting the North, but wary of U.S. intervention against the North � remains fundamentally unchanged.
In 1994, as the United States prepared to evacuate American civilians and beefed up forces here, the South Korean stock market plummeted. Citizens stockpiled instant noodles and candles.
This spring, when North Korea conducted a nuclear test and launched a long-range rocket, the local markets and the public hardly blinked, confident the United States would not take military action.
U.S. officials tend to view the North�s nuclear program within the global framework of combating proliferation. But to ordinary South Koreans, it is just a latest episode in the decades-old hostilities from the Korean War, which halted with a cease-fire in 1953 and has yet to end with a formal peace.
Opinions among South Koreans on how to resolve the nuclear crisis depend on how they see the North Korean government. Is it an evil regime bent on keeping its dictatorial grip on a starving people and building nuclear bombs to deter meddling from the outside? Or is it a cornered beast whose threats are a desperate cry for a way out?
Whichever side they take, ordinary South Koreans hardly see the nuclear crisis in global terms, but rather within the highly local context of how to end the war and possibly reunify the peninsula. |
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Ya-ta Boy
Joined: 16 Jan 2003
Location: Established in 1994
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| Posted: Tue Aug 04, 2009 4:11 am Post subject: |
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Interesting post. Thanks.
I arrived in March '94 and within just a few weeks the first nuke crisis broke out. I can't tell you how relieved I was when my students said not to worry, that if the Norks did something, the guys in my classes (adults) said they would get their guns out of the armories and guard my apt building. 
I soon learned that Kim Young-Sam was not at all popular. In fact, ever since then, I have used him as the example to teach the difference between 'popular' and 'famous'. Kim Young-Sam is famous, but he is not popular. The students get it.
Not too long after that kind of died down, and after I ran into someone on the street who said he was a US gov't agent (do they really admit that to total strangers on the street?) Kim Il-Sung dropped dead just before the planned summit...in the middle of the worst Korean summer in 100 years in terms of heat/humidity--even old men were wearing shorts in public for the first time in the entire history of the country by the time it was over--I always wondered what if...
What if a conservative had had a meeting with Kim Il-Sung? Would things have gone differently? The Marxist sorts say it's all about social movements and the trends of the times, impersonal forces... I'm not so sure.
It will always be one of those What if's... |
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