President Park Geun-hye and opposition leader Moon Jae-in failed to narrow their differences on most issues of state administration during their two-hour meeting at Cheong Wa Dae Thursday.
That must have surprised few Koreans. The domestic summit, the sixth such meeting since Park took office in March 2013, has been less of a conversation than the continuation of one-sided arguments. People are wondering why such gatherings are necessary and what meaning they have.
When the political impasse lasts this long, it is usually the responsibility of those in power, given that opposition parties exist to oppose anything they can. It’s sad to see President Park’s unilateral communication and poor persuasion have improved little over the past two-and-a-half years.
Nothing showed this better than Park’s adherence to returning to state-authored history textbooks.
The participants at the Blue House meeting, also including the majority leader and the whips of the two major parties, spent no less than 30 minutes, about one-fourth of the total time, arguing whether the nation’s high-school students should continue to use one of the eight government-approved history books or shift to a single state-authored textbook, starting in 2017. All other important topics, diplomatic and economic, were sidelined.
It is no doubt important for young students to have a good and sound understanding of their nation’s history. Yet a country cannot ― and should not ― have one “correct and proud” history, as the President emphasized during the meeting. We do not believe, as German philosopher Nietzsche stated, “There are no facts but only interpretations.” It is true, however, that there can be diverse interpretations of a fact, and they also change ceaselessly. Does Park want all students to know only one of them and then all think the same?
If the conservative leader thinks the history books used now are leaning too left, she can have rightist scholars write their own and let schools and students choose from among competing textbooks with no restrictions. This is how Koreans can have balanced historical viewpoints, not publishing a unified and what the President thinks as balanced textbook. Japanese rightists also maintain they should have “proud” textbooks but their leader, Shinzo Abe, has refrained himself, wisely, from sympathizing with their calls, let alone taking the lead in such attempts.
How will Korean diplomats call for their Japanese counterparts to stop revising textbooks and justifying past misdeeds from now on?
President Park accused her political opponents of prematurely defining the proposed textbook as pro-Japanese and pro-military dictators. How cannot it become so given most renowned and even middle-of-the-road historians and teachers have pledged not to take part in writing the state textbook? The harder President Park and her party strive to justify their ideological endeavor, the more Koreans will be convinced all these are related to justifying her father’s controversial rule in the 1960s and ’70s. The best Park can do is withdraw her idea by just improving guidelines for authors and toughening approval standards, or let the existing textbooks remain and compete with the new textbook.
Wasting another year or more engrossed in an ideological battle is too burdensome for the nation, which is already ridden with tough diplomatic and economic challenges. President Park will suffer the most as the leader and have no one to blame ― but herself.