UniFiction Ministry Plans ‘Peace Education’ and ‘Unification Education’ in Public Schools
From the Ministry’s own Web site:
Minister Lee said, “The inter-Korean relations have improved from confrontation and tension to reconciliation and cooperation.
In order to match such improvement, peace education needs to be introduced into the curriculum of school and unification education. I want to promote the peace education in a future-oriented way so that the people can foster their ability to keep peace firmly and it can contribute to the peace in Northeast Asia as well as the Korean peninsula. First of all, I plan to cooperate with related groups and devise substantial measures.”
Our new word for today is “Goebbelsian.” I wonder what “related groups” he could be talking about.
Peace education? Do left-wing South Koreans realize that ultimately peace in North-East Asia is pretty much out of South Korean hands? If South Korea was located in South-East Asia, it could flex its military muscle. However, it’s squeezed between China and Japan, both of whom are soon expected to possess navies second and third largest (and capable as well) worldwide, only beind the US.
I see little chance of South Korea starting any conflict in North-East Asia. And, should a conflict actually occur, I highly doubt the fruits of “peace education” will have, say, Beijing and its PLA soldiers thinking twice about what they’re doing.
Anyway, the ideas presented by the current Unification Ministry may come to a deserved heavy revision should South Koreans realize the mistake they had made in 2002, and elect one of the GNP candidates. Otherwise, the Unification Ministry’s announcements will continue to be more difficult to believe than UFO sighting reports.
If a country’s literature is a guide to where its headed and where its been, no one has been a better reader of that than Lee Mun Yeoul who is out with a new book. Lee has always been critical of blowhards like Unification Minister Lee and his predecessors and the nutcase in the BlueHouse. see below the review by Korea Times. Might be a tad odd to quote dylan, but the sentiment is right: “the times they are a changin.”
[Books] New Book Weaves Korean Politics From Jewish History and Christianity
By Seo Dong-shin
Staff Reporter
Author Lee Mun-yeol talks about his new book “Homo Executans†during a recent press conference held in Seoul
Lee Mun-yeol is one of the best-loved and most steady-selling authors on the Korean literature scene.
The 59-year-old however is not new to controversy _ his works have often created a stir. His 1997 novel “Choice” (Sontaek), for example, drew fire from feminists for its apparent defense of the patriarchal and Confucian relationship between men and women.
The veteran novelist is hated by progressives and supporters of President Roh Moo-hyun, whom he labels the “Red Guards.” Lee defines recent years as “the leftists’ coming out period,” during which a “gross Korean-version of a Cultural Revolution has been under way.”
Lee is a self-claimed conservative intellectual. He tried his hand in politics by working on a screening panel of candidates for the conservative Grand National Party (GNP) during the 2004 parliamentary elections.
Now his latest three-volume novel, “Homo Executans,” published late last month, marks a peak in his political statements made through literature. The Latin title places an emphasis on nature of humans as executors, he says.
With its plot and through the characters’ narratives, Lee pours out his remarkably intense distrust and detest for the current government as well as what he views as pro-North Korean, nationalistic sentiments among the public. He believes that there is careful manipulation by behind-the-scenes forces.
The book’s protagonist, Shin Sung-min, is a disillusioned former student activist and a 30-something stockbroker at a securities firm in Seoul. Through Shin, Lee often voices his own opinion on a range of social issues that emerged in Korea during the early 2000s. The massive crowds’ cheering for the national squad during the 2002 World Cup games, for example, seemed like calculated mass manipulation made possible by “combining the war-like nature of sports games and nationalist sentiments, and mobilizing so-called netizens whose brains go on and off just like digital signals.”
The current situation on the Korean Peninsula resembles Jewish history 2,000 years ago, Lee claims through another character. “This era is preparing for the days of unbearable suffering and sadness, and this land has been accumulated with insurmountable hate and contradictions that cannot be endured anymore,” says pseudo-priest Immanuel Park.
It is the story of the “Jewish War” recorded by 1st-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus which the author as well as his characters continuously refer to. Drawing a parallel to the history of disastrous internal struggles of the Jewish communities in Jerusalem, Lee puts the current administration’s ardent supporters in the place of those whom Josephus called “overzealous fanatics.” Swayed by ideology, or sometimes by sheer madness, they bring suffering to their own people.
What fits such an intense agonizing situation is the resurrection of Christ. In Lee’s story, Christ is reincarnated in the body of a boiler mechanic in a run-down slum in Seoul.
His followers face an uphill battle with powerful anti-Christ forces, who in the book are described as activist groups with links to the governing camp. The anti-Christ group has established a solid network in society, with supporters ranging from business firms to civic organizations to underground gangsters. So they are successful in killing the boiler mechanic.
The leader of the “New World Movement,” or the anti-Christ forces, is presented as a semi-satanic figure, who tells the hero of the boiler mechanic: “It’s Him. He once pretended to be a carpenter and savior. But he was the one who set your land on fire and caused you to wander around 2,000 years. Like you did 2,000 years ago, you must once again make him go back to the One who sent him, crying. Be the first to execute him in the name of humanity, to defend this land and this age.”
Marxism is one of the ideological tools adopted by the anti-Christ forces that seek to stoke anti-Americanism in the South, and to reunify with North Korea. For them, the logic of Christ’s sacrifice and redemption of the people only serves to take the belligerent energy away from the oppressed.
Ultimately, the followers of the boiler mechanic also execute the anti-Christs in revenge. The two conflicting forces disappear when the mutual executions are over.
The ending scene and epilogue reveals that the story is less a religious and philosophical saga than a thinly veiled political take Lee serves up on the governing camp. The book closes with the hero sitting in a shabby restaurant, feeling relieved upon hearing the news of the impeachment of the president at the National Assembly and the conversation of other guests who predict the governing camp’s demise.
In the epilogue, however, Shin wanders to regions of conflict around the world, including Iraq and Rwanda, in the hope of finding and bringing back homo executans, because unlike earlier expectations, he feels that the anti-Christ forces did not lose ground on the Korean Peninsula. Here, Lee makes rather crude political accusations against former President Kim Dae-jung and the governing Uri Party members as well as North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, albeit in a roundabout way of naming figures in the “Jewish War.”
In a meeting with reporters earlier this month, Lee stressed that the novel was not created as a political statement. He lamented that “the times have become so ugly that a novelist has to ask his readers to read a novel as a novel.” The book’s plot and obvious analogies, however, make it difficult to not to take it as a political expression.