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Related: About this forumWar and forgetting on Jeju Island
http://atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-03-130214.htmlWar and forgetting on Jeju Island
By John Pilger
Feb 13, '14
Fifty years ago, E P Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class rescued the study of history from the powerful. Kings and queens, landowners, industrialists, politicians and imperialists had owned much of the public memory. In 1980, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States also demonstrated that the freedoms and rights we enjoy precariously - free expression, free association, the jury system, the rights of minorities - were the achievements of ordinary people, not the gift of elites.
Historians, like journalists, play their most honorable role when they myth-bust. Eduardo Galeano's The Open Veins of Latin America (1971) achieved this for the people of a continent whose historical memory was colonized and mutated by the dominance of the United States.
The "good" world war of 1939-45 provides a bottomless ethical bath in which the west's "peacetime" conquests are cleansed. De-mystifying historical investigation stands in the way. Richard Overy's 1939: the countdown to war (2009) is a devastating explanation of why that cataclysm was not inevitable.
We need such smokescreen-clearing now more than ever. The powerful would like us to believe that the likes of Thompson, Zinn and Galeano are no longer necessary: that we live, as Time magazine put it, "in an eternal present", in which reflection is limited to Facebook and historical narrative is the preserve of Hollywood. This is a confidence trick. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell wrote: "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
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War and forgetting on Jeju Island (Original Post)
unhappycamper
Feb 2014
OP
SamKnause
(13,114 posts)1. Thanks for posting.
Love John Pilger.
MisterP
(23,730 posts)2. we've been quite consistent in how the US treated "Asiatics" we fought
Japan, then Korea, then Vietnam (and a little Philippines sprinkled in now and then)--they're always "sneaky" and themselves reckless of life, so why not burn them by the millions?
that's actually where the phrase "good German" came from--to remind people Germans had diversity among them; not so for the alien insects of East Asia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeju_Uprising
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jirisan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeosu-Suncheon_Rebellion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Gun_Ri_Massacre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Corps_Incident
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodo_League_massacre