What Are(n’t) We Learning from Kwangju?

Here’s how I’m commemorating Kwangju this week. I’m going to talk about people we can still save, like these people, just to name a few million:

The head of the World Food Programme’s North Korea mission told the BBC that without new contributions famine-like conditions would be likely to reappear.

How dare I? For starters, South Korea is already a democracy, and like every case where the good guys won, there’s seldom anywhere to go from there but down. Not surprisingly then, behind most of Korea’s grievance-peddling over Kwangju is an agenda that’s fundamentally at odds with the agenda of the democracy movement of the 1980’s . . . which was . . . democracy!

A historical anniversary without a greater significance from which a society learns and benefits is nothing more than a milestone in the attenuation of Event X from contemporary relevance. How many of these events, to name a few, had you ever heard of? Historical reexamination is a worthy use of one’s time if it can save more lives tomorrow, but that requires a degree of principled soul-searching and introspection placed into a contemporary context.

Here’s my own modest contribution:

Kwangju–despite the fact that it occurred when I was in elementary school, when Happy Days was still a hit show, and when the all-compassionate and ever-feckless Jimmy Carter was president–was a reprehensible massacre perpretrated by an equally reprehensible thug. We should have been more outspoken when the troops first started moving. I wish the White House had said something. I’m proud that we later helped tip the balance toward democracy before the Seoul Olympics, something many Koreans choose to forget. I’m completely unpersuaded by the “evidence” that the U.S. Army was somehow complicit, but my mind is open to anything credible (a first-hand account here; another chance for me to hawk Gordon’s book!). The lessons of Kwangju can be useful to us today in light of events in, say, Uzbekistan, where Publius usefully reminds us:

Korea’s own contribution to the “principled soul-searching and introspection” is the part where I always get hung up on Kwangju, since so much of it tends to consist mainly of the now-familiar externalizing of blame for past fratricides, or the diversion of attention from present ones. I wonder if ordinary citizens in Kyongsando were as unconcerned about Kwangju in 1980 as citizens in Cholla are about Hoeryong now. I can’t avoid the impression that if you spent the day cruising Kwangju tomorrow, you couldn’t fill a Tico with citizens who’ve bothered to publicly express their desire to bring democracy (or even a fairly distributed meal) to the people of North Korea.

Somewhere, there’s a segue in here for the kind of historical reexamination that might still save a few million lives. No? Then the lacking for one need not stop us. . . .