Ideological Brawl Cannot Save Nation From Economic Crisis
Watching desolate auto plants and a chaotic National Assembly, Koreans are hoping the economy will get better through bipartisan cooperation next year.
Unfortunately, the economy is feared to remain in the doldrums even if the global situation improves, as the fight between liberals and conservatives may even leave parliament and spread to the rest of society.
More frustratingly for the people, at the forefront of the expanded ideological battle is President Lee Myung-bak, who recently cited the establishment of the ``legitimacy of the Republic of Korea'' as one of his three major policy goals for 2009, along with economic recovery and reforms.
In response, a coalition of about 400 civic groups called ``National Congress for Public Livelihood and Democracy'' vowed Tuesday to launch an all-out struggle against the Lee administration's attempts to railroad what oppositionists named the ``MB bad laws'' after Lee's initials. Rep. Kang Ki-kab, leader of the leftist Democratic Labor Party, also called for a ``grand alliance of progressives'' to fight against the governing camp's attempts to ``restore dictatorship.''
If Kang's appeals for reviving the June 1987 democratization movement wins popular support, Korea will be retrogressing 22 years.
When President Lee presented ``pragmatism'' as his governing ideology about a year ago, many Koreans doubted whether that could be a philosophy. Now, they are just hoping Lee will stick to his avowed principle in whatever name it may be called, instead of throwing the country into a ruinous brawl between the rightists and leftists, particularly at a time when most other countries are joining forces to get out of the global economic crisis by transcending political beliefs and other differences.
The President's intention to remove the leftist footprints left over the past decade is shown in the government's attempts to rewrite history textbooks as well as Lee's move to reshuffle assistant ministerial-level officials at key ministries. Lee said, ``There are very deep and wide situations destroying the legitimacy of our state.'' Cheong Wa Dae officials explained Lee's words, by reconfirming the government's three main principles are free democracy, pro-market economic policy and rule of law.
Major legal revisions sought by the Lee administration, however, have room for seriously violating people's democratic rights by, for instance, trying to limit assembly and demonstration as a part of the freedom of speech and infringing on free exchange of views in cyber space.
His pro-market policy often leads people to confuse it with pro-big business policy at the expense of smaller companies and self-employed. No less doubtful is what the government means by its rule of law, when various government ministries are all but violating the spirit of the Constitution by ignoring the legitimacy of the government-in-exile in Shanghai during colonial days and making light of the April 19 Student Uprising, which put an end to the dictatorship of former President Syngman Rhee.
Conservatives say leftist history books are ``too masochistic,'' but excessively self-rationalizing ― or sadistic ― historical views are no less damaging than excessively self-degrading ones. People just hope politicians and bureaucrats will leave the history to historians, and mind their own business; improve economy and reform the Stone Age politics.
President Lee seems set to spend his second year in office on putting Korea back to two decades ago. Most Koreans will be spending this year-end praying he will change his mind.
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