[KS] Official end of WWII in Asia

[Kent Allen Davy]

This discussion seems like an object lesson designed to illustrate
Oakeshott's distinction between the "practical past", i.e., the past
hijacked by the present for instrumental purposes and, hence, understood
only from the perspective of the present viewers' competing self-interests,
and the genuine "historical past", understood strictly in respect of that
which preceded it - although in this case, even the ostensible spokesmen for
the historical past seem only inadvertently to defend it, apparently being
less inclined to appreciate it for its own sake than as a foil for the
expression of their own moralism(s).
____________________________________________________________
"The purpose of today's training is to defeat yesterday's understanding."




On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 9:05 PM, <dmccann at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:

> With regard to the nonviolent nature of the demonstrations, it might be
> remembered that it was Manhae, Han Youngun, the Buddhist leader, poet and
> also
> participant in pre-1910 resistance, who wrote the three codicils to the
> March 1
> Declaration calling for nonviolence.
>
> He was jailed for participating, as were a number of the other 32.
>
> There is a very small park across the back alley from Chogye Temple, where
> the
> copies of the Declaration were printed the night before.
>
> Note also in this connection Todd Henry's chapter on "Respatializing
> Chosôn's
> Royal Capital, The Politics of Japanese Urban REforms in Early Colonia
> Korean
> 1905-1919," in Tangherlini and Yea, Sitings.  Critical Approaches to Korean
> Geography.  Henry notes that it was down the thoroughfares the Japanese
> Government-General had reconstructed, and from one significant public
> space--
> Pagoda Park-- to another-- the Taehan Mun-- that the demonstrators moved,
> giving their own meaning to those spaces.
>
> In my sense of it, they were text-messaging.  The system required news
> coverage
> to complete the links, rather than massive radio towers, which is why that
> line
> of communication was blocked by Japanese press censorship.
>
> A chillingly deliberate repeat of that message-blocking occurred in 1980,
> when
> the ROK government cut communication lines to Kwangju prior to the military
> entry into the city and violent suppression of the demonstrations there.
>
> David McCann
>
>
>
>
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