Korean Job Discussion Forums

[stevemcgarrett]

Ya gotta love, Jim-Bob. Here's a guy who leaves the office of President in January, 1981 with a gravely faltering economy, a spiralling inflation and jobless rate, having sold the Panama Canal down the river, having orchestrated a disastrous desert rescue in Iran, and having as his sole claim to fame a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel that their leaders had in principle already agreed to before he intervened forever commenting on the State of the Union.

Jimmy, it's high time you retired to Plains, Georgia and rocked on your stoop. You're beginning to sound like one of the Grumpy Old Men from the peanut gallery on The Muppets.

But before you go, toss out a few well-roasted peanuts and give up once and for all any pretense of being a Southern gentleman.

He proclaims that GW Bush is the worst president ever with the worst foreign policy ever, as if he's got special insight into the grand sweep of American history.

What annoys the pi-ss out of me about this most recent declaration is not that he has singled out Bush but that he imagines his judgment carries more weight than either historians of the presidency or the public at large.

And lest anyone think Jimmy is without a huge ego, consider this: he told 60 Minutes a few years before he got the Nobel Prize for Peace that he felt he'd been overlooked by the prize committee and that he heartily deserved it thank you very much.

Gee, Jimmy, American prestige sure was at its zenith under your watch. No one hated us--other than the Iranian zealots who overtook the U.S. Embassy in Tehran--but we sure were the laughing stock of the world. The Kremlin boys really shook in their boots when you protested their invasion of Afghanistan with that Olympics boycott. And how much did you help the Filipinos against the Marcos dictatorship or the Cambodians against the Khmer Rouge? Where was your African initiative?

So I guess that's puts him in a commanding position to adjudicate historical legacies.

He continually harps on this administration's inability to broker a deal with Israel. Well, Clinton tried for years without success. How does he expect that to come about when Hamas openly refuses to acknowledge Israel's right to exist, lobs rockets at whim into its border towns, and stymies every move of the moderate Fatah party members under Abbas? Did he expect Israeli to ignore the Iranian and Syrian-backed Hezbollah terrorists on their northern border? Menachim Begin and Anwar Sadat were statesman who were willing to shake hands. Where are the statesman in the Middle East today? Or is that our fault, too?

Really, Jimmy, please go back to doing promos for Habitat for Humanity.

Your time on the world stage is long since up.

[EFLtrainer]

You roasting Carter? The irony of it all...

Give it up, troll. We know your schtick.

[gypsyfish]

[R. S. Refugee]

You're leaving out some of the best (as in most blood-thirsty and close to home for us waygukkins in Korea) stuff, Stevie boy. Or didn't they mention this in your high school history classes?

Regarding Carter's bloody role in the Gwangju Massacre (somehow they forgot to review this proud moment when they gave him the Nobel Peace Prize) . . .
---------------

Nationwide protests erupted. The greatest and most violent protest took place in Gwangju, in the southwest corner of Korea, which also was the home base of Kim Dae Jung. Protesting crowds were estimated to exceed 300,000; in the melee a few policemen were killed and a broadcasting station burned down. Soldiers of the Korean Special Warfare Command were taken off of the demilitarized zone dividing North and South Korea and deployed to Gwangju. Moving the troops required the approval of the U.N. commander, a U.S. general, who was loath to make such a decision without approval from Washington. Fearing that North Korea would capitalize on the confusion by launching an attack, key Carter administration officials, including then-Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Richard C. Holbrooke, approved the deployment and initial use of force.

A second use of force, on May 22, was authorized after securing assurances that the Chun administration would work for long-term political reform. According to official South Korean statistics, 207 protesters were killed; however, the BBC reported the number was somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000. In large part because of what became known as the Gwangju Massacre, from May 18 to May 27, 1980, America's image in South Korea has greatly suffered, especially with those born after the Korean War. [emphasis added]

http://starbulletin.com/2007/03/11/editorial/special2.html

[Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee]

[thepeel]

In the long tradition of relativistic apologists on this site:

The North Koreans to this day kill political dissenters at a rate far exceeding any little blowup the ROK had.

[On the other hand]

[R. S. Refugee]

[thepeel]

[On the other hand]

[R. S. Refugee]

[R. S. Refugee]

I would put a link to this article from the Korea Times, but unfortunately they don't have individual page addresses for their articles thereby making it impossible to direct one to any particular article. So, because of that limitation on their site, I'm pasting the article here.
--------------------
Lesson From Gwangju Uprising

The following is a summary of a paper written by Bruce Cumings, a historian and professor at the University of Chicago, specializing in modern Korean history and contemporary international relations in East Asia. He presented the paper at a seminar on the 27th commemoration of the May 18 Gwangju Uprising at Chonnam National University in the southwestern city of Gwangju on Friday. -- ED.

By Bruce Cumings
Professor at the University of Chicago

The Gwangju Uprising was South Korea's Tiananmen crisis, deeply shaping the broad resistance to the dictatorship in the 1980s and paving the way for democratization in the 1990s, and the conviction for treason and sedition of the perpetrators who massacred innocent citizens in Gwangju.

The American response to the uprising represented, to me, the most nauseating display of hypocrisy, opportunism, racism, and betrayal of American democratic ideals between the Korean War and the present. Americans, and especially China experts, are capable of going on forever about the perfidy of Beijing's leaders in crushing the Tiananmen demonstrations in June 1989 _ where Americans had no responsibility at all for what happened. But where Americans were directly implicated in the suppression of the rebellion in Gwangju, the response is mostly silence.

Once again U.S.-commanded troops had been released for domestic repression, only this time the bloodletting rivaled Tiananmen in June 1989. The declassified documents that Tim Shorrock, a reporter for the Journal of Commerce, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, make clear that the U.S. as a matter of the highest policy determined to support Chun Doo-hwan and his clique in the interests of ``security and stability�� on the Korean Peninsula, and to do nothing serious to challenge them on behalf of human rights and democracy.

Indeed, reading through the materials makes it clear that leading liberals _ like Jimmy Carter and his ambassador in Seoul, William Gleysteen, his National Security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, and especially Richard Holbrooke (then under-secretary of state for East Asia) have blood on their hands from 1980: the blood of hundreds of murdered or tortured young people in Gwangju.

Americans are once again mired in a nightmare of their own making, in another country that they neither understand nor care much about.

Every day the newspapers are full of stories about Congress demanding a date to pull American troops out of Iraq, and President Bush going on about ``security�� and the necessity to ``support our troops.�� Missing in this endless commentary is anyone who thinks the war in Iraq is going to end well.

In fact this affair is already over; the U.S. cannot defeat its enemies and the only question is whether enough of Iraq can be stabilized to allow the permanent stationing of American troops on the many bases the U.S. has been building over the past four years. If that outcome is possible, then Iraq will be another Korea and Americans will be ensconced on their bases forever, lest some ``instability�� result or some ``evildoers�� arise.

The experience of recent years again makes me wonder if Americans can ever transcend their own experience and join a world of profound difference. When you think all your truths are self-evident and when the fondest hope of foreigners from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe is to become a citizen of your country, it is difficult to understand that not everyone in the world wants to be an American.

Our history is one of launching out on missions to transform the world _ in the contemporary case, ``to rid the world of evil�� _ followed by inevitably chastened returns to a continental homeland that is fundamentally sufficient unto itself. The commanding interpretation of this back-and-forth phenomenon is Louis Hartz's classic, The Liberal Tradition in America; at the end of the book he hoped _ it was only a hope _ that Americans would find that ``spark of philosophy�� enabling them to live comfortably with a world very different from American imaginings.

The Vietnam War burned the soul of an entire generation (mine) and fostered exactly the kind of ``chastened return�� that Hartz wrote about. But American military bases remained in place elsewhere, and the hard-won lessons of Vietnam were perverted by Ronald Reagan and both Bushes into a doctrine of using military force to ``put Vietnam behind us.��

The debacle in Iraq, however, may brand another generation, and with the American military stretched and burdened by trying to hold down security in so much of the globe (we have truly become ``the world's policeman��), it is possible that a movement will arise in the new century finally to bring our far-flung troops home.

Korea is another country, of course, but the lessons of Gwangju resonated with those of America in the 1960s: if you want your civil and political rights, you have to fight for them or you will never get them. It is a matter of considerable shame to me that another lesson of the Gwangju Uprising was this: you cannot trust American leaders to support democracy in Korea (a belief of the older generation in South Korea), instead you have to build democracy yourself.

Through a long-term struggle, beginning in 1945 and achieving great force in the late 1980s and 1990s, Koreans created an admirable democracy and a strong civil society, moving from the bottom up rather than from the top down. One can only have a deep admiration for the multitude of courageous but ordinary people who took it upon themselves to resist illegitimate power.

[Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee]

"HEY R. S. Refugee"

[contrarian]

Cumings again. The same idiot that spent much of his life extolling the virtues of Kim Il Sung and the toxic dwarf her sired.

After all these years he still has his knickers in a knot over Gwangju. It should not have happened. It was wrong. But the real impetus for Korean democracy came from it. It was not the US's fault.

[Alias]