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Once again the opening words of President Park Geun-hye's annual speech on Liberation Day, or Gwangbokjeol, have stirred controversy, even though she merely repeated what she has always said on this occasion: "Today marks the x anniversary of Liberation Day and the y anniversary of the founding of the Republic of Korea." She was referring to both Korea's liberation from Japanese occupation on Aug. 15, 1945, and the formal establishment, very purposefully, of the Republic of Korea on the third anniversary of liberation, Aug. 15, 1948.
The emphatic inclusion of South Korea's "Foundation" in her remarks reflects in many ways the sharp disagreements among professional historians over the past decade or so. This complicated debate boils down to clearly opposing views on the accomplishments, purpose, and legitimacy of South Korean history within modern Korean history as a whole.
I am not sure that President Park fully understands these larger stakes, but it's clear that she is determined, above all, to promote a historical view that protects or enhances the legacy of her father, former President Park Chung-hee. This focus has trapped her, however, in controversy and contradiction, and in considerable discomfort, I would imagine.
Regardless of how one feels about her policies or performance, it is difficult not to feel sympathetic around this time of year, when she has to set aside her pain and put on a brave face in order to deliver the Liberation Day speech. On this day 42 years ago, as her father was making his own Liberation Day speech, a gunman fired several shots at the stage and mortally struck her mother, Yuk Young-soo.
This brings forth, however, one of the main paradoxes that binds the current President: It was the culture of violence cultivated by her father's "Yushin" dictatorship of the 1970s that led to her mother's killing and, indeed, eventually to the assassination of her father as well, in 1979. So while she grew up in utmost privilege as a child of the country's President, President Park also suffered the horrible tragedies of the murder of both her parents.
The military dictatorship that her father headed in the 1970s ultimately resulted from a coup that he engineered in 1961 to overthrow a democratic, civilian government, which in turn had been established following the popular overthrow of Syngman Rhee's authoritarian rule in 1960. Park Chung-hee's own death in 1979, after nearly two decades in power, directly spawned another military dictatorship, that of Chun Doo-hwan, but it also paved the way to formal democratization in 1987, when popular uprisings brought an end, at last, to authoritarian rule.
President Park's speech reflects the conservative backlash against "leftist history" that condemns this long era of dictatorship, from Rhee to Park to Chun. Conservative historians instead interpret this experience as part of an even longer story of success that produced economic development and, yes, democracy itself, in time. The current President, then, can rationalize her claim that the establishment of the Republic of Korea in 1948 should be celebrated for laying the "foundation of liberal democracy," despite the terrible excesses of the ensuing Rhee dictatorship, which mocked the ideals expressed in the founding constitution.
This triumphalist view of South Korean history says, in essence, that the ends (economic development, avoidance of communization and eventual democracy) justified the means (dictatorship), particularly given what North Korea became. On the opposing side is the now more mainstream historical perspective that emphasizes the people's struggle against dictatorship and questions the legitimacy of the 1948 founding of a separate South Korean state. In this prevailing view, which had actually developed in response to the official historical accounts of the dictatorship era, Aug. 15 should firmly commemorate liberation from Japanese rule, not the founding of South Korea.
In some ways this conflict comes down to semantics, which takes us back to the significance of the terms used in the President's Liberation Day speech. Based on selective evidence, some conservative historians insist that when it became a national holiday in 1949, Gwangbokjeol ("restoration of light" or "glorious restoration," depending on interpretation) originally referred to the previous year's foundation day, not the liberation of 1945. President Park does not go that far, but the fact that she adds South Korea's founding, which is not an officially recognized holiday, to her observance of Aug. 15 is enough to offend progressive historians. Also aggrieved are descendants of anti-Japanese independence fighters, who insist that the Republic of Korea's origins date to the March 1st independence movement of 1919, just as the original 1948 constitution itself stated.
All of this has served to further confuse regular citizens, who are left to wonder whether indeed the Aug. 15 holiday refers to both liberation and the nation's foundation, and if so, how the Republic of Korea could have also been founded in 1919, as the constitution still suggests. And how does this square, furthermore, with the mythical but official holiday for the founding of the Korean people, Gaecheonjeol (opening of the heavens)? Such are the paradoxes of the politicization of South Korean history.
Kyung Moon Hwang is a professor in the Department of History and East Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Southern California. He is the author of "A History of Korea ― An Episodic Narrative" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Check this and Prof. Hwang's other columns on http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/category/subsection_633.html.
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