On Sept. 24, 2012, then-presidential candidate Park Geun-hye walked resolutely onto a podium as the spectators held their breath. The impatient camera shutter sounds added to the eeriness.
It was probably one of the most anticipated press conferences in the year of a fiery presidential campaign, as Park stood in the middle of her party headquarters and apologized for the 18-year dictatorial rule of her late father, former President Park Chung-hee.
It was the first (and possibly only) statement of its kind by Park. And it was barely made by choice. Weeks of aggressive criticism of her “questionable perception” of history had eventually worn her campaigners and support ratings down.
Impressions varied between her loyalists and antagonists. Some felt their empathy grow deeper as Park, their beloved first daughter, was forced against her will to uphold her father’s dignity. Others scoffed at the half-baked apology and feigned sincerity, pointing out that she had danced to Psy’s “Gangnam Style” song with followers just a few hours later.
To Park, the press conference came presumably after fitful sleep, and she chose the words carefully.
“I felt deeply regretful to watch the matter of the past causing social dispute and controversy,” Park said. She apologized for the controversial incidents during her father’s rule but said that for him, the most imminent goal was economic development and national security.
Park has been consistent from the get-go. In her autobiography published in 2007, Park was quite open that her goal in life has been not to let her parents down.
“With a wholehearted determination that I must clear my father’s name and make right what is wrong, I began to take care of what he left behind,” she writes about the first several years after his 1979 assassination. The period was filled with what she called traitorous attacks on her father’s accomplishments.
“I still believe that it is the rightful duty of a daughter to honor her parents in order to set right the evaluations of my father.”
Her entrance to the political world in 1998, in fact, was motivated by the constant thought in her head. “Would I be able to see my parents honorably (after death),” she wrote. It was when South Korea was going through the financial crisis. She called it her “destined duty” to save the country.
And so it seems likely that her opponents, the progressives, would assume that the latest move by the Park government to reinstate state-authored textbook would be aimed at glorifying the senior Park and pro-Japanese figures of the 20th century.
Park seems determined, and it is going as planned. Signaled by increasing discussions about the descriptions in current history textbooks, calls followed from right-wing opinion leaders to rethink the children’s education. The plan climaxed when the government made the final announcement on Tuesday that it will take the wheel and rewrite the “distortions” for a “proper” history.
Her Saenuri Party members, including sore-thumb chairman Rep. Kim Moo-sung, have volunteered to knock down the opponents in the fight. And supporting Park has been proven extremely effective in elections, as they head for the parliamentary race in April.
Park has watched, in all her elegance, some of the most heated verbal fights play out in recent years.
The Saenuri Party claimed the opponents to the state-authored textbook “must have received some sort of orders from North Korea,” and that the current textbooks “teach children that the Koreas will eventually be unified by the North and (90 percent of the leftist scholars) are trying to educate our children in advance.”
The main opposition New Politics Alliance for Democracy has been flustered trying to catch up with the pace of the Saenuri attacks, chanting that the new textbook by the state “will most definitely be glorifying dictatorship. … We don’t need to eat excrement to know what it is.”
The NPAD’s nationwide campaign against the supposedly autarchic textbook has so far only deepened the ideological cleavage, as the administration moved not an inch. Furthermore, its hypothetical attack against what would become a pro-dictatorship textbook was effectively ambushed by the government’s announcement that the new textbook will emphasize on Korea’s ancient history instead of the modern one.
Indeed, the scenario is playing out in favor of Park and her party, as ideological fights accentuated on potential threats from North Korea have seldom failed them.
But while Park may have her way in her pursuit of her personal, political and historical mission, the president may be overlooking the fundamental jeopardy of it all.
In her quest to set right “what’s wrong,” younger and more progressive Koreans were humiliated and their devotion to the state was belittled.
By believing only they knew what is right for the nation, Park’s protagonists created a dangerous divide among voters, the kind of division that is hard to rewind. While the imminent election may bequeath Park another victory, history will remember the cost.
Regardless of how “right” the new history book may turn out to be with the best of their intentions, her administration brazenly brushing off the democratic formula in doing so will ruin the integrity of the final product.
There is little question that the boisterous debate at home over its own history will undercut what Park vowed as efforts to give the next generation a firm view of the state so that they play a leading role in global affairs. Park’s ultimate textbook, which may very well be subject to political scrutiny once more after the presidential election in 2017, will most likely be stigmatized as the “Park Geun-hye textbook.”
During the 2012 press conference, as she spoke with desperate resolve, Park had said, “It has been a value of democracy in the past that the ends cannot justify the means in politics, and must remain that way.”
Indeed it should.
By Lee Joo-hee
Lee Joo-hee is the national desk editor of The Korea Herald. She can be reached at jhl@heraldcorp.com. — Ed.
