Defending coup d’état

Does Park still think it revolution to save country?

Barely a day after declaring her candidacy for the Dec. 19 presidential elections, Rep. Park Geun-hye caught her critics off guard. And she did so by pre-empting the debate on her weakest point: the dark legacy of her father and mentor, general-turned-president Park Chung-hee. Offense can be the best defense in politics as well as in sports. Not always, however, we are afraid.

Hong Sa-duk, Park’s joint-chief campaigner, hinted Wednesday that there will be little change in the opinion of the ruling party’s likely candidate that the May 16, 1961 military coup d’etat staged by her father was a “revolution to save the country.”

“To ask Rep. Park what she thinks of her father’s coup is similar to asking King Sejong what he thinks of his grandfather’s toppling of the Goryo Dynasty to set up the Joseon Kingdom,” the six-term lawmaker said. “I wouldn’t advise her to become the president by going as far as to criticize her own forbears.”

We wouldn’t blame him for comparing what’s happening in 21st-century Korea to the 14th-century kingdom if there were parallel lessons to be learned. But he made the grave mistake of degrading an issue of national concern into just another family matter.

What Park’s critics ― and many voters ― want to hear are not a child’s views of her father but a would-be president’s views of a previous president, thus indicating her attitudes and qualifications as a potential leader. It is regrettable that Hong tried to water down, perhaps intentionally, such a need. Was he revealing the subconscious thinking of Park’s campaigners, that she belongs to a modern day Korean dynasty?

Even more worrisome is the atmosphere within the Park camp that trivializes and casts aside attempts to verify her historical consciousness. “This kind of debate cannot produce even a biscuit crumb,” Hong said. It is just amazing how the chief aide of the strongest presidential contender turns everything into a question of money. This is a very grave issue about which voters have the right to ask, and Park has a duty to answer as a candidate.

A successful coup d’état is of course difficult to punish. Yet, that does not necessarily mean it was right. Successful or not, historians, here and abroad, have long concluded that it was just another political revolt led by a military elite common among Third World countries during the 1950s and’60s.

It cannot be regarded as a revolution because no ordinary people and only military officers took part in it. More seriously, its belated political justification could lead people to think that the ends justify the means ― not a few socialists attribute it to rampant corruption and irregularities similarly gripping South Korean society now.

If economic development can be the reason to justify it, then the Dec. 12 coup led by another general-turned-president, Chun Doo-hwan should also be viewed as a “revolution to save the country,” because Korea’s economy enjoyed an unprecedented boom under Chun’s government.

Reps. Park and Hong, both multiple-term lawmakers, are denying themselves by defending the most egregious acts that denied the nation’s parliamentary democracy by overthrowing democratically-elected governments by force.

They must not drive voters ― once again ― into a one-dimensional choice between democracy and the economy. <The Korea Times>

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