Tuesday, July 28, 2009

No Gun Ri (노근리).

I've never found too much interest at what happened at No-Gun-Ri (노근리) when it was all the rage a few years ago in the Korean mainstream. No-Gun-Ri was where Americans allegedly committed genocide against Korean civilians/refugees. There is a counter argument over at rokdrop that actually examines the legitimacy (he goes into some detail) of those claims, but on a personal level I've found No-Gun-Ri to be a non-issue.

I mean the Korean War was a Korean Civil War, so even if everything those Associated Press "investigative reporters" allege to have happened actually did happen, what would that mean? Absolutely nothing. It was a civil war where Koreans on each side committed atrocities regularly and on scales that are unbelievable by today's standards -- Think about what happened in Jeju-do during that time. Nonetheless, I think it's a bit premature to get into discussing what happened fifty or sixty years ago.

Seriously. Until unification occurs, only one part of the story can be told.

On a side note, I wonder what the Vietnamese will say about South Korean soldiers' conduct during the Vietnam War in twenty years. South Korean soldiers had no qualms about clearing out entire Vietnamese villages (some might call this genocide) then just as the Vietnamese have no qualms about accepting South Korean investment today. But Vietnam, unlike Korea is not divided, and looks set to be a rising and regional power. I wonder what the Vietnamese will say in a generation?

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