<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div apple-content-edited="true"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-size: medium; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><div style="font-style: normal; word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></span></div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; ">It has been amusing to read the various posts on Kim Jong Un allegedly handing out copies of </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><i>Mein Kampf</i> to aides and associates. First, the explicit or implicit assumption that this is just one more good reason to revile this regime, more evidence of its depravity (even though we have no proof that the story has any basis in fact); then a couple of people point out that this book can also be found fairly easy in South Korea; then the trail of this discussion grows cold, until Frank brought us today's learned post by a Japanese historian--with the tag that I might also have written about this same phenomenon. I appreciate the reference and truly loathe tooting my own horn. But my discussion of these very same things runs through both volumes of my <i>Origins of the Korean War--</i>yet often I was just representing what secret internal American reports in the late 1940s said over and over again: that Yi Pom-sok's "Blue Shirts" were offshoots of Chiang Kai-shek's fascist youth wing by the same name (Chiang, of course, chose blue in the 1930s because black, brown and green were already called for; Yi Pom-sok was just copying Chiang); that the U.S. Occupation tried to clean up his Blue Shirts by officially funding and sponsoring them as the Korean National Youth--yet the KNY was secretly reported over and over again to have been engaged in terrorist activities; that a more virulent "youth group" (many members were in their 40s), the Northwest Youth, was a self-proclaimed terrorist organization, wreaking havoc throughout the South; that An Ho-sang, the first Minister of Education, was a clear fascist who admired Hitler and German philosophy and had a degree from Jena University in Germany (he was no dummy, a very interesting man in many ways, who trumpeted the <i>chuch'e</i> idea--his version--in his books and speeches; but still, a fascist); that the head of the Seoul Metropolitan Police, Chang T'aek-sang, was another admirer of fascism who was still sporting a Hitler/Tojo/Charlie Chaplin-style moustache in 1947, when it had, so to speak, gone quickly out of fashion elsewhere in the world--and on and on. Yi Pom-sok's leadership of the KNY made him very powerful; he was South Korea's first Defense Minister. You find in his writings of the time similar emphases as in Dr. An's, if in short form: admiration for Hitler and fascism, discussion of <i>chuch'e</i>, focus on "one singular, pure ethnic people," namely the Korean <i>minjok</i>--and then of course we had Syngman Rhee's ideology, <i>Ilminjui</i>, which Americans could never understand; this too was a reflection of Chinese influence, but instead of Sun Yat Sen's progressive Three People's Principles, you have Rhee's One People Principle: Koreans first, Koreans always, Koreans forever. But one can understand the popularity of such ideas: 80 years of history had taught Koreans that if they don't look after their own interests and focus on them, they can be sure no one else will.</span></div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><br></span></div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">To study Korea as a foreign scholar is to engage in a profound exercise in <i>difference</i>: in the late 1960s translations of <i>Mein Kampf</i> were available in most book shops in Seoul, and on street book carts; I saw them many times, but I did not know the meaning of what I was seeing--what was the attraction of this book, which is mainly an ignorant stew of racial and ethnic stereotypes? A leader whom I admired from the late 1940s, Yo Un-hyong, like so many other leaders at the time, referred to <i>mein kampf</i>--my struggle, <i>naui t'ujaeng. </i>That doesn't make him a fascist, but it does make him different from liberal imaginings. After he was assassinated in July 1947--with the support and connivance of Chang's police, I am convinced--at his funeral huge, swaying crowds carried signs saying this: Sun of the Nation (<i>minjogui t'aeyang</i>). Need I point out that North Korea was already saying the same thing about Kim Il Sung?</div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br></div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">People like Yo, Kim, An, and indeed both Korean regimes, came out of an interwar milieu that had turned much of the world toward extremes of left and right, with the middle ground falling away; liberalism was barely breathing, except in the US and UK (and in both it was also threatened by extremes of left and right). Yet always, always, I would read internal laments by American officials that these very same folks--Yo, Kim, An, Rhee--were not putting down the roots of liberalism.</div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br></div></span></div></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-size: medium; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Anyone who has read H. D. Harootunian's <i>Overcome by Modernity</i> would not be surprised by Deputy Prime Minister Aso Taro's remark last week about Hitler doing a good job in revising the Weimar Constitution. These are outbursts from the political <i>id</i> of the rightwing of the LDP. They are manifestations of a time when fascist ideology was dominant in Japan, when Prime Minister Abe's grandfather, Kishi Nobosuke, was a rising star in Manchukuo. Both Koreas emerged from a similar interwar milieu. The occasional remnant signs of this past are no more surprising then the continuing reverence among many Lousianans for Huey Long, whose statue stands outside the Capitol Building in Baton Rouge. </div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br></div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; ">Santayana was not quite right when he said that those who cannot remember history are bound to repeat it. It is more a matter of not knowing history, of studying a country and a civilization going back to antiquity without taking upon oneself the necessary labor of trying to exclude one's own dearest beliefs, lest they cloud an apprehension of Korea's very different historical roots.</div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br></div><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><br></div></span></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"> </div><br></body></html>