[SPOILERS] Chevalier Mal Fet and Marcopolothefraud lead a Soviet Down Under

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Well...hm. We could still dump everything I have left on Admirals. If the others misunderstand the resolution the same way, they may panic and dump all their votes into stopping FWHW from sweeping the world.

OR

we anticipate Archduke will vote for doubled Admirals, and I instead deflect the vote onto Scientists instead. That helps me, sub, and roland the most. However, with such a science advantage, I actually don't want more great scientists coming out - the more that appear, the less my edge in raw beakers matters. Roland and sub are very behind in tech, and I'd hate for them to pop Galileo on Steam Power or something.

I could vote for doubled...Great Engineers, that only helps me and Kaiser. Or just try and nerf Admirals as best I can. I think that would be the biggest get, but it's not a big deal since Ljub and I are equal on Admiral points and I can make up the difference iwth faith in an emergency (as I have before).

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

The whining will continue until morale improves.

Seriously, I have had 2 turns in SIX DAYS. No turn Friday, Sunday, or Tuesday, and now it's Wednesday and I STILL don't have the idiotic "let's take 2+ days to nerf Great Admirals or buff someone's attempt at a religious victory" turn, meaning I won't get a real turn today either.

This is getting ouit of hand and I'm contemplating moving my whining from venting about our terrible pace in here to the tech thread. I have a time limit, people.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

I opted to dump my votes into banning Great Admirals. Voting for Great Scientists is a waste since Kaiser and Archduke together outweigh me, but it's possible that the others realized how foolish letting Archduke farm all the Great Admirals was in a naval game and will vote for option B. 

I could have backed up Marco and voted to buff my religion, but, uh, there is literally no reason to have any religious combat whatsoever so that seemed like a waste of votes even in the likely event we did win. 

At least it'll create a fun puzzle for the other teams to overanalyze in their threads whenever the game finally resumes for real. Seriously, 2 turns a week REALLY won't cut it in terms of pace.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

also it would be wrong to backstab and murder Phoenicia at the first opportunity (say, by voting for an emergency when he takes England's capital), purely out of annoyance at the turn pace, right?

It would be. I won't do that.

Probably.

[CFCJesterFool]

I never knew about Gwangju but I will remember the story. The people who died deserve to be remembered. I am not surprised that we (United States) looked the other way. Thanks Chevalier for sharing that bit of history.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Part Two!

To lay the foundation for what led to the uprising in Gwangju, I need to establish the pattern of Korean political history prior to 1980, particularly how the dictatorship came to be in such a precarious position. So, consider this a deep background post, and we'll steadily work ourselves closer to May 18, 1980.

The Wrong Man For the Job

The hardest part of any story is beginning it. This is especially true of history. Did the French Revolution begin with Louis losing his head, or with the storming of the Bastille, or with the oath in the tennis court? Did the Cold War start with the Berlin blockade, with the surrender of Japan, or even earlier with the first Trinity Test? And the Gwangju uprising – do I begin with the students confronting the paratroopers in front of Chonnam University? With the military proclaiming martial law on May 17? With the December coup?

I suppose, if you want to be technical about it, we should start with Mireuk, without whom no one would have separated the earth from the sky by setting the sky on 4 copper pillars at the corners of the earth, and without whom no one would have created mankind (men from 5 golden insects, women from 5 silver), and where would we be then?


Mireuk, creator deity of Korea.

But I will begin, I think, where almost all modern Korean history begins: with the fall of Japan.

Korea in August 1945 was an afterthought to, well, damn near everybody.

In the west, President Harry Truman was winging his way home from Potsdam, his mind full of the problems with the war against Japan, sorting out the defeated Germany, and, more than anything else, the looming threat of the Soviet Union and the implications of the new weapon he had tested out in the New Mexico desert the previous month.

In Europe, the continent was first starting to piece itself back together in the aftermath of the great war just ended. Refugees and displaced people flooded over every nation, everyone seeking loved ones, too few succeeding. Most of the continent lay in ruins, especially Germany, now divided, occupied, and dazedly trying to guess what a post-Nazi future for the country might look like – or maybe people were just trying to survive from one day to the next, like they had every day for most of the previous harrowing decade.

In Burma, Indonesia, and the Philippines, collapsing Japanese army units fought desperate, last-ditch stands against victorious Allied armies. Some men would vanish into the jungle to continue their fight there. Some would not re-emerge for thirty years.

In Manchuria, the Red Army stormed forward in Operation August Storm, brushing aside the Japanese defenders like an NFL linemen rushing a toddler. The IJA was undersupplied, demoralized, and outnumbered – the Red Army was seasoned, well-trained, well-equipped, fresh from victory over the Wehrmacht and at the height of its power and glory. The communists smashed aside the paltry Japanese defenders and stormed south for the Yalu River.

And in the Central Pacific, the 509th Composite Group, operating from the modest North Field on the sunny island of Tinian, sent a small squadron of three B-29 Superfortresses on a strike mission to southern Japan. Their names were The Great Artiste, Necessary Evil, and Enola Gay.

No one was thinking about Korea.

——-



After the destruction of Hiroshima and the surrender of Japan, the State Department in Foggy Bottom suddenly found themselves with a problem. Well, actually, they had many problems – maybe more problems than any State Department before or since has ever had to deal with. What do with defeated Germany? How to rebuild Western Europe? How many US troops shall we keep in uniform? What is our relationship with the Soviet Union? What about with every single “liberated” state in Eastern Europe? What of Greece, Turkey? What of the European empires in Africa and in Asia? What of the Nationalists and Communists in China? What of the former Japanese empire?

It was a rat’s nest of issues, old grudges, new opportunities, rivalries, hatreds, long-standing alliances now outdated, maps made obsolete…the old world had been shattered, and now it was up to Harry S. Truman, of Independence, Missouri, and the Department of State, to try and forge it anew. Letters and contacts poured in from all over the world. Greece, begging for aid in its civil war against Communist rebels. Poland, pleading not to be forgotten. The Soviet Union, wondering about the future of their wartime partnership. Some leftist nutter named Ho Chi Minh, asking for help booting the French out of their Indochinese possessions. Oh, yes, and what the hell do we do with the Empire of Japan and all its possessions?

Amidst this chaos, apparently no one had given forethought to the precise details of the disposition of the Japanese possessions outside the home islands. Korea had been discussed, but only in passing. On August 9, after Hiroshima, after August Storm, suddenly the surrender of Japan – something not previously thought to happen until late 1946, at the earliest – loomed as an imminent possibility. On the night of August 10, Allied military planners hurredly met to convene surrender procedures, to keep Soviets and Americans from accidentally (or not) murdering each other in the confusion.

As the official Army history puts it:

“Under pressure to produce a paper as quickly as possible, members of the Policy Section began work late at night on 10 August. They discussed possible surrender zones, the allocation of American, British, Chinese, and Russian occupation troops to accept the surrender in the zone most convenient to them, the means of actually taking the surrender of the widely scattered Japanese military forces, and the position of Russia in the Far East…

The Chief of the Policy Section, Col. Charles H. Bonesteel, had thirty minutes in which to dictate Paragraph 1 to a secretary, for the Joint Staff Planners and the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee were impatiently awaiting the result of his work. Colonel Bonesteel thus somewhat hastily decided who would accept the Japanese surrender.

…At first Bonesteel had thought of surrender zones conforming to the provincial boundary lines. But the only map he had in his office was hardly adequate for this sort of distinction. The 38th Parallel, he noted, cut Korea approximately through the middle. If this line was agreeable to President Truman and to Generalissimo Stalin, it would place Seoul and a nearby prisoner of war camp in American hands. It would also leave enough land to be apportioned to the Chinese and British if some sort of quadripartite administration became necessary. Thus he decided to use the 38th Parallel as a hypothetical line dividing the zones within which Japanese forces in Korea would surrender to appointed American and Russian authorities.”

– Policy and Direction: The First Year

The 38th parallel, decided upon by Charles Bonesteel, who was up too late on the night of August 10th, with inadequate coffee, a smarmy State Department aide joggling his elbow for him to finish, a rotten map, and only thirty minutes to work, has stood as the boundary between North and South Korea for 75 years.



A second major problem – besides the fact that pretty much no one in the United States had ever heard of “Korea” – was that they had basically no plan in place for how to administer “their” sudden new occupation zone. The Soviets, perhaps cowed and cautious by the threat of the Bomb, placidly accepted the 38th parallel and set about converting their half of the peninsula into a glorious people’s republic. They plucked a suitable anti-Japanese guerrilla from obscurity, gave him a suitably heroic backstory, more or less made up out of whole cloth, and set him up as the Dear Leader of their new pet. Thus did Kim Il-Sung become the founding member of the present ruling house of North Korea.

The United States had no such plan. They had no shadow government in place to assume the reins, they had no Korea desk at the State Department, hell, they didn’t even know how long they’d be in the country, let alone what they wanted to “do” with it. The Navy rapidly ferried a handful of confused soldiers up from the Philippines and flung them into Seoul, where they aimlessly milled around for a few months while the higher-ups tried to figure out what the hell they were doing.

In the end, as is often the case with the United States, they settled on the first convenient man they ran across. And here is where the troubles began.

——



Korea, after quietly whiling away a sleepy couple of centuries under the Joseon dynasty, had fallen victim to early 20th century power politics. Initially a bone in the struggle between Qing China and Meiji Japan, Korea had first become a puppet, then an outright colony, of the island nation since 1910. But the Koreans had not taken the Japanese occupation lying down. Almost from the first, there was resistance, including in the peaceful southwestern city of Gwangju.

Across the country, there were uprisings, protests, strikes, and riots. In the barren and frigid northern hills near the Yalu, bands of rebels roamed around bushwhacking isolated Japanese garrisons. In the cities, Koreans frequently engaged in strikes or other forms of passive resistance to their colonial occupiers. The college students did what college students do best and wrote various Statements and Declarations of Intent, and engaged in protest marches. The Japanese responded with all the grace and nuance Showa-Era Japan is famous for.

While the myriad arrests, beatings, exiles, and outright murders failed to fully pacify the peninsula (to say nothing of apolitical monstrosities like the practice of comfort women, or Unit 731’s horrors), they did serve to more or less keep a lid on things for Japan through 1945. Many groups found it too hot to stay in the peninsula itself, and exiled themselves to surrounding nations, mostly to China, which was merrily engaged in one of its regular periods of outright anarchy and civil war*. One of these groups somewhat self-importantly called itself the Korean Provisional Government in Exile, and their Representative to the United States was one Syngman Rhee.



Rhee was born in 1875 and taught English by Methodist missionaries active in the country. He came of age just as the Japanese involvement in Korea was ramping up, and became strongly anti-Japan. He spent most of his post-graduate career bouncing between the United States, anti-Japanese agitating in Korea, prison, and exile in China. After a few turns of the wheel, in March of 1919, he joined with myriad others to instigate a gathering of students in Seoul, who proclaimed Korea’s independence. The Japanese were less amused by this than the students were, and to escape arrest, torture, and probable death, many fled to Shanghai, Rhee among them. There, his political acumen and intelligence quickly propelled him up the ranks.

Rhee’s English ability got him named Representative to the United States, and he lived there through most of the Thirties. Styling himself the Chairman of the Korean Commission to the United States, Rhee spent his days agitating against the Japanese and lobbying the American State Department for recognition and material support for Korean independence. Consumed with more important matters like the Second World War, the State Department spent most of its time, in turn, ignoring the little man from the backwater peninsula no one had ever heard of.

Until fate intervened, and suddenly the United States found itself in possession of half of that backwater peninsula and not a clue in the world what to do with it.

“The British diplomat Roger Makins later recalled, “the American propensity to go for a man rather than a movement — Giraud among the French in 1942, Chiang Kai-shek in China. Americans have always liked the idea of dealing with a foreign leader who can be identified as ‘their man’. They are much less comfortable with movements.” Makins further added the same was the case with Rhee, as very few Americans were fluent in Korean in the 1940s or knew much about Korea, and it was simply far easier for the American occupation government to deal with Rhee than to try to understand Korea. Rhee was “acerbic, prickly, unpromising” and was regarded by the U.S. State Department, which long had dealings with him as “a dangerous mischief-maker”, but the American General John R. Hodge decided that Rhee was the best man for the Americans to back because of his fluent English and his ability to talk with authority to American officers about American subjects.”

– Max Hastings, The Korean War

In other words, Rhee was an asshole, but he was an asshole who spoke English and, more importantly, he was available. So Syngman Rhee found himself shipped off from Washington and back to his home in Seoul for the first time in 25 years, where he became the primary liaison between the United States occupying authorities and the people of Korea. In essence, Rhee became the Korean government.


August 15, 1948 – Korea’s first “free” elections

The years between 1945 and 1950 were the era of Translator Government in Korea. The Americans, fumbling around hopelessly in the dark, frequently leaned on former Japanese officials, who were after all fluent in the government and language of the peninsula. Understandably, this did not endear them to the people of “south” Korea, as the American half of the peninsula was coming to be known. People who could translate between English and Korean found themselves in positions of inordinate infuence, and Rhee, with his political acumen, quickly consolidated power behind himself, if not with American approval, at least with American indifference. America wanted nothing more than to be done with the funny little peninsula and get their boys back home. Its attention was always elsewhere – mostly on Berlin and Germany and the steadily growing showdown with the Ruskies. They gave half-hearted training to a South Korean “army,” which was mostly a police force meant to keep order in the peninsula and help Rhee hunt down his “Communist” opponents scattered around the South. Of course, Rhee was very generous with the term “communist” and arrests, torture, and imprisonment were par for the course for his government. Rhee also made frequent requests for heavy weapons like tanks, aircraft, and artillery, but the Americans, fearful that this “mischief-maker” would do something crazy like go haring off on an invasion of the Soviet zone to the north, refused. By 1949, all American troops were withdrawn from the peninsula, and the State Department was giving speeches suggesting that the American involvement in the little backwater of Korea was officially at end.

Unfortunately, the North had not been idle during this time. While Rhee had been playing on his position as the middleman between the USA and the people of South Korea, Kim Il-Sung had been happily setting up his own private little kingdom in the North, with the full backing of the Soviet Union. He had built a fully modern and well-trained army, equipped with Soviet weapons, driving Soviet tanks, supported by Soviet planes. When the USA indicated that it was done with South Korea, and with Rhee corrupt, unpopular, and seemingly on shaky ground at home, Kim decideded the time was right, and on June 25, 1950, launched his shiny new army on an invasion of the south.

——–



The Korean War is, of course, far too detailed to get into here. Suffice it to say that the United States hadn’t actually meant it was totally done with Korea, and intervened to save its newfound ally. The fighting raged down the peninsula to Busan, and up all the way to the Yalu River, and back again. Seoul changed hands 6 times. The United States carried out the longest retreat in its history, “attacked in a different direction” out of the Chosin Reservoir, and helped mold the South Korean army into a modern, effective fighting force. By the time the dust settled three years later, the battle lines were more or less right at Bonesteel’s 38th parallel and pretty much the entire peninsula lay in ruins. Oh, and Syngman Rhee now had an ironclad grip on power.

Rhee unabashedly engaged in strong-arm and outright illegal political tactics. While he wasn’t as bad as Kim Il-Sung to the north, “not as bad as a literal Stalinist dictatorship” is a very low bar to clear. Opposition parties were harassed, their leaders frequently arrested, and at times politicians who became too prominent in opposition to Rhee were outright assassinated, such as Kim Gu. Under the pretext of resisting subversion from the north** Rhee severely curtailed political rights and elections, limiting the ability of opposition parties to dissent from his regime. At times, his security forces engaged in outright massacres, including an astonishing reported 14,000 deaths during the Jeju Uprising. (Tirman, John (2011). The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars. Oxford University Press. pp. 93–95. ISBN 978-0-19-538121-4. I have not investigated this claim myself).

Through the 1950s, Rhee amended the Constitution as he willed and more or less ignored South Korea’s National Assembly, getting himself elected President 4 times. The United States grumbled over his strongarm tactics, but any instability in Korea risked opening a way for the North to invade. The threat of the North acts as a constant pressure in Korean politics, forcing unity and enabling strongmen to maintain a tight grip on power. Time and again it will be used to justify all manner of authoritarian actions, including, as we will see, in response to the May 18 Uprising. In so doing, Rhee set the model for a Korean dictator that would persevere for 40 years. South Korea was by no means a free state. It was better than the North, yes, but again – low bar. Opposing parties were allowed to exist, but certainly not to win elections. Writing an opposing newspaper might work for a while, but it would eventually get you arrested (but probably not executed). And as long as you kept your head down and ignored politics, you could live a more or less free life.

Rhee’s ride on the tiger finally came to an end in 1960, in what would become another familiar model in Korean politics. In the spring of that year, Rhee staged yet another fraudulent election, and once again, surprise surprise, he was unexpectedly re-elected because he was so beloved by the Korean people as the father of his nation (in fact, Rhee won 100% of the vote after his main opponent died a few weeks before the election. As far as I can tell, the death was actually legitimate and not a shady assassination, surprisingly enough. Go figure). Yet again, people – mostly college and high school students, took to the streets to protest yet another sham election.***


A friendly difference of political opinion, Masan, March 1960

During the protests, in the southern city of Masan, the corpse of a high school student, Kim Ju-yul, was discovered. The regime announced that the boy had drowned, but autopsies revealed that his skull had been fractured by a tear gas grenade fired at point blank range. While the regime had been authoritarian and oppressive, it had never before stooped to the open murder of citizens in the streets. The Korean press widely publicized the incident, and the protests caught fire and spread through the entire country. Rhee proclaimed that it was all the work of communist agents, but the tired excuse worked no longer. Within a month, there were marches of hundreds of thousands in the streets of downtown Seoul, demanding Rhee’s resignation. Violent clashes were common, and it is estimated that more than 180 protestors died in confrontations with the police.

But the heart of the police forces weren’t really in it, and soon they began refusing orders to fire on the protestors, who no longer numbered just college students and dotty old professors but respectable Korean professionals and businessmen, too. Rhee proclaimed martial law, but the soldiers, too (no doubt noticing how badly they were outnumbered by the protestors) also refused to fire on the crowds. Left with no choice, Syngman Rhee resigned on April 26, 1960, and went into exile in sunny Hawaii. Thus ended the reign of the United States’ handpicked ruler of South Korea.

The road to the May 18 Uprising begins here, I think. Rhee came to power as a result of the inattention and lack of preparation by the United States for the role it found itself thrust into in Korea. He was emphatically the wrong man for the job. Even as Japan and Germany evolved into modern, multiparty parliamentary democracies, the Republic of Korea was a sham, ruled by an authoritarian strongman who had nothing but contempt for elections and the will of the “common people.” Rhee legitimately tried to rule wisely and well for Korea, and was constantly fearful of the threat from the north and from communists within, but his lack of respect for democratic norms and his cheerful disregard for human rights set a pattern for Korea that would persist for 30 years following his fall. It was in protest to a similar dictator that would lead to the bloody confrontation in Gwangju, 20 years after the fall of Syngman Rhee.

*”The Empire, long divided, must unite. Long united, must divide.” – The opening line of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, published centuries ago and describing affairs in the 3rd century, is still true today – this contains everything you need to know about Chinese history.

**To be fair, for a number of years during and after the war, there were literal Communist guerrillas scattered around the mountains to the South. The threat of invasion from within wasn’t entirely made up by Rhee. He did exaggerate it and exploit it for his own purposes, though.

***It is important to note that while South Korea is not a free nation at this time, it is not comparable to the North – imagine these protests in Pyongyang! There are degrees of freedom, and while I’m being hard on Korea here, I am emphatically not saying that North Korea and South Korea were basically interchangeable. One, while flawed, is definitely better than the other.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

No turn today because now the Archduke has held the save for 11 hours ( )))))))) ) so instead more 5.18:

So, we've laid the deep background for Korean politics that lays behind May 18. Now, I need to lay the groundwork for the actual revolution - and the spark that lit the fuse was the sudden end of the 'presidency' of Park Chung-hee, probably the most important Korean statesman this side of the Japanese occupation.

let me introduce...

Part Three: The Korean Napoleon

Happy countries are all alike, but each unhappy country is unhappy in its own way. On the northern half of the Korean peninsula, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Kim Il-Sung’s Stalinist dictatorship, was a cult of personality of mythic proportions. Freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of thought was not just unheard of but unthinkable for most. After all, the leader represented the will of the people – he essentially was the people, and how could the people criticize themselves? (I have actually heard North Koreans say this)

To the south, the Republic of Korea was also unhappy. The essential alliance with the United States required that the leaders of Korea pay lip service to the ideals of freedom and democracy (and most especially anti-communism), but the reality was of course, different. Free elections were nonexistent, and political repression, while not as total as in the North, was a constant fact of life.


The April Revolution, 1960

Still, for a few months in the spring of 1960, that summer of hope when in the United States John Kennedy ushered in a new generation of political leadership, and the civil rights movement promised yet another birth of American freedom, it seemed like the ROK might become a republic in fact, and not just in name. The Second Republic was weak, and unsteady, yes, but it allowed political opposition, failed to murder or even beat protestors in the street – why, it even allowed opposing newspapers to print!

But the most dangerous time for any new government is its first few months of existence, when it is vulnerable to all manner of opportunistic ambush predators. The Second Republic was vigilant and survived all efforts by the North to topple it. It was not so lucky against predation from within. Park Chung-hee saw to that, and in so doing inaugurated a series of military regimes that would remain power until 1993, maintaining themselves in command through increasingly bloody reprisals against the people. The bloodiest of all came in Gwangju, in May, 1980.

Park was born in 1917, in the Japanese-occupied countryside of Korea. I didn’t emphasize last time how thorough and oppressive the Japanese regime was, but it should not be overlooked, either: Korean culture and language was suppressed, while Japanese culture was propped up and Japanese history was glorified. The twisted Bushido warrior code, bearing only the faintest resemblance to the samurai codes that would have been familiar to Miyamoto Musashi, condemned the Koreans for being so weak as to allow themselves to be conquered. A truly worthy people would have resisted to the death. Thus, the fact of the Koreans’ oppression became self-justifying. The Koreans were a despised second-class race of citizens within their own country.

Park grew up in this environment. He was given a Japanese name, as most Korean boys his age were, and was brought up to revere Japan and the Japanese military. Repeatedly, he expressed admiration for Emperor Meiji and the dramatic fashion in which he had modernized Japan. The first emperor to rule with any authority in over a thousand years, Meiji had overthrown the Shogun (the military ruler of Japan for centuries), broken the power of the samurai, and remade the one-backwards island nation into the mirror of Western imperial powers the world over. Japan had become the sole Asian nation to defeat a European nation in open warfare (Russia, in 1905), and had eventually acquired an empire large to challenge the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union simultaneously.* As Park grew up, Japan was undoubtedly the wealthiest, most modern country in Asia, and a model for good governance in his mind.

http://Le Petit Corporal, center, leads his men over the bridge at Arcole

The other model for Park, tellingly, was Napoleon. Napoleon had masterfully unified the military and civil governance of France, bringing a final end to the chaos of the Revolution and rising from obscurity to Emperor within 10 years through his political and military genius. His Napoleonic Code of laws still serves as the basis of law in countries all over Europe, and his soldiers exported the French Revolution to every major state on the Continent, and caused thrones to tremble from Madrid to Moscow. He was, without a doubt, the titan of his age.

Of course, he had also been unable to contain his ambition, and his overreach had eventually culminated in his overthrow by a coalition of every major power in Europe. He had been a despot and an authoritarian at home who betrayed the democratic ideals of the Revolution, one who cruelly used and abused his own loved ones in pursuit of his own ambition for glory. But details like that were irrelevant, in Park’s mind, compared to Napoleon’s masterful command of his time. Park’s only regret was that as a poor boy growing up in rural Korea, a backwater of a backwater, was that there was no outlet for his own genius and ambition.

When Japan’s militarist clique pushed the nation into war with China, Park Chung-hee had his chance. He took his Japanese name, Takagi Masao, and enrolled at Changchun Military Academy. Talented and intelligent, his Japanese masters recommended him for staff training at the Imperial Japanese Army Academy. He graduated as a lieutenant in 1944 and served with the army in Manchuria.

Escaping August Storm, Park returned to Korea, where he again commissioned as an officer in the embyronic ROK Army. A political difference of opinion with Rhee led to him getting the boot in 1948, but the war demanded every single able-bodied Korean and Park at last had a chance to show his quality. He returned to the ranks and quickly began to rise. A major in July 1950, he was a lieutenant colonel by September and a full colonel by April. War tends to sort out the wheat from the chaff, and the rapidly expanding Korean army needed any command talent it could get. By the time the war ended in 1953, Park was a brigadier general commanding artillery corps (his hero, Napoleon, had also got his start in the artillery).

His wartime service had marked him as a man of talent, and he was sent to the United States for further training. He returned, headed up the Artillery School, commanded several divisions, then was made Chief of Staff of First Army, responsible for the defense of Seoul itself. It was up, up, up for General Park. By 1960, he had been made Chief of Staff of Operations for the whole Korean army. It was the perfect place for a man of ambition as Korea’s First Republic drew to an end in the April Revolution, Rhee was ousted, and the Second Republic began.


Park as a general, 1957

If this was to be the dawning of a new age of democracy and freedom for the Republic of Korea, it was, well, a bit disappointing. The liberal Democratic party, in the grand tradition of liberal parties** throughout history, couldn’t find its ass with both hands. The new president and prime minister, mostly non-entities whose names are unimportant, were caught between the conflicting demands of the student protestors who had largely been responsible for driving Rhee out of power, and the economy, which was basically in shambles after a decade of Rhee’s mismanagement and corruption. No liberal politician could truly command a majority of the House, the prime minister was elected by a razor-thin margin of 3 votes, he created his cabinet, then recreated it, then desperately recreated it a THIRD time in the space of a year as he scrambled to piece together some kind of powerbase, and the conservative military was skeptical of them all.

While the government mostly tried to hold itself together, outside in the streets students regularly flooded out, demanding a wide range of social and economic reforms. The tight political controls of the Rhee government had been relaxed, and leftist and reformist groups took full advantage. No one trusted the police after the April Revolution, and public security deteriorated. Popular support for the Second Republic waned.

At the same time, the government’s footing was too shaky to eject the clique of what were called “liberation aristocrats” – Koreans who had ingratiated themselves with the United States military government and made their careers in the early years after independence, of whom Rhee was only the most significant example. They still infested most of the highest reaches of government and were viewed highly skeptically by most of the military. The military, most of whom, like Park, had been trained by the Japanese originally, remembered with fondness Korea’s economic development under Japan, and looked with envy at the “Japanese miracle” developing on the far side of Tsushima Strait. The conservative “liberation aristocrats”, by contrast, had kept the ROK’s economy agrarian and underdeveloped, with roughly the same per capita GDP as the Stalinist North.

With no real legitimacy of its own, no popular support, facing harsh criticism from the conservative ruling elite and no real love from the military, the Second Republic was weak, tottering, and ready to topple at the slightest provocation. Park did not miss his chance.

Park Chung-hee, just outside the topmost echelon of the military, was ideally positioned. The military brass were tainted by their association with Rhee’s long term, and a new cohort of reform-minded junior officers were rising. Park was at the top of this new wave. He shared with them ambiguous politics and a strong admiration for the Japanese model of authoritarian development, inculcated during his time in the Japanese military. While the Second Republic flailed ineffectually at its problems through 1960, Park quietly built a network of like-minded officers, many old friends from Manchuria, and laid the groundwork for his own Thermidor. He named his organization the Military Revolutionary Committee.

After several abortive attempts, on May 16, 1961, the plans were leaked to the central government, and the military moved to arrest the plotters. Park now seized the moment. In an eloquent speech to the 6th District Army headquarters, he persuaded the majority of the capital garrison to defect to his cause, arguing, “We have been waiting for the civilian government to bring back order to the country. The Prime Minister and Ministers, however, are mired in corruption, leading the country to the verge of collapse. We shall rise up against the government to save the country. We can accomplish our goals without bloodshed. Let us join in this Revolutionary Army to save the country.” Such was the force of his rhetoric that even the men sent to arrest the mutineers were swept up in the moment and defected. No doubt a voice from a far distant time and place, another failed arrest of a would-be coup, echoed quietly in the back of Park’s mind as he rode out towards the palace, “Soldiers, if you would shoot your emperor, here I am!”


General Park on May 16, 1961

The army quickly flooded out to occupy Seoul. The non-entity Prime Minister fled the city, while the President quietly accepted the coup and continued to serve as a figurehead. The Korean army initially prepared to respond and put down the uprising, but the threat of a North Korean invasion compelled them to remain in their positions at the DMZ. With the civilian government imploding and the military doing nothing to respond, soon more and more officials and soldiers began to switch sides. Within a week Park had fully twenty divisions backing him. Three days later, the Prime Minister and the entire cabinet emerged from hiding and resigned, ceding power to the Military Revolutionary Committee.

Park moved to consolidate power quickly. He quickly isolated and removed any rivals, establishing himself at the head of the MRC, now renamed the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction. The thirty highest ranking Korean military officers were on the council, which held supreme civil and military power in the country – and Park sat at their head. Recognition from John Kennedy and the United States came within days of the coup. Finally, he formed the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, whose primary purpose would be to prevent any future coups.

Within 2 months of seizing Seoul, Park had firmly established himself as the military dictator of the Republic of Korea. Sygnman Rhee had ruled for 12 years. The Second Republic had lasted less than 12 months. Park Chung-hee, who had risen from a poor boy to general of artillery to master of his nation, like his idol, Napoleon, would rule for 18 years. It was his murder that directly set in motion the chain of events leading to the Gwangju Uprising.


*this was, of course, insane and Japan was in no way powerful enough to do this, as its crushing defeat in the Second World War should have shown.

**Meant here in the classical sense.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Turn 132

Archduke finally played overnight, but because sub can't often play outside his window we're likely to lose today. Nevertheless, I tried to pass the save to him ASAP. 

Quick report since I gotta run to work. 

Religion results are hilarious:




While I won the GA vote in a squeaker: 




Kaiser voted the wrong way, I imagine, and ljubljana/Woden didn't spend any favor on it, or they could have stopped me. Oh, well, sucks to suck. 

Sevastopol finishes university #2 for printing:




however, science is now suffering a massive penalty due to fully 6 cities lacking amenities:




That will make entertainment complexes compete with encampments as the next priority districts, but we'll probably just have to live with this for the foreseeable. Huey Teocalli would replace some of the lost amenities but it's a huge project - 20+ turns at Oryol. Will look at the possibility of chopping and the expected payoffs. 

Sevastopol starts a siege tower since I think I can't buy those and I'll want one for sub's medieval walls on the island. 

We've revealed the whole Renaissance now. NOte that Siege Tactics is out of date, it now takes two trebuchets (which will be purchased):




Skies is flatlined, and the crossbow fled (why upgrade it, then?), but I know he could step back and shoot my chariot if I disembark so I'm still sitting tight and waiting for the knight. Sub shouldn't be able to kill both units on his turn and then the city is doomed. I will keep a frigate here and lob shells into the city every 2-3 turns to keep 'em entertained. 

Kaiser has frigates, but instead of heading to the front where Archduke is getting annihilated (down to 650 points, BELOW ljubljana's 700, although as noted ljubljana's losses are about 1 turn delayed for me due to turn order with him and Archduke). Archduke started with a 200+ point advantage but seems to have gotten his ass kicked - I wonder if he got distracted chasing the useless city state? 

I fiddle with my deployments near Shikishima:




One caravel will go "up the gut" to reach the southeastern tip of the city, 4 frigates will pour in from the north and from the west, with one in reserve, to get in 4 shots on the opening turn. 4 shots stripped Skies' walls, but this has a jong garrison and I don't know if that will change things. I expect to lose at least one ship in this attack, possibly two if it takes two turns to get the walls down. 

Revealing more of Phoenicia's core. Goal is to find every city-center:




My galley skulking in the east is the first of 6, which will go to Mitla and upgrade there before raiding the Chinese coast. 

Fuji Bay:




It's like the AI fucking KNOWS I pinned a city there, and refuses to leave. 

Russia:




Swapped Sebastopol and Oryol to growth now the unis are done, but size 7 is a good bit away. One will get an Encampment -> Armory and the other an ED. 

Svalbard:




No changes. 

Should purchase a builder at Oryol, swap Liang and Magnus, faith purchase a builder at Nakhimov for repairs and miscellaneous projects, and think about chopping some of my forests for Huey. 

Quick math: 

At present, a Magnus Chop yields 138 production. Oryol has 4 available, two on mineable tiles for a smaller long-term production hit. Huey Teocall is 710 production, Oryol makes approximately 25 per turn. Figure the 4 magnus chops combine get you about 600 production, give or take. I would need to invest...about 5 turns in, to chop. In return, I get 4 amenities (perfectly replicating my turtles) and +16 available food/production empire-wide. I sacrifice 2 forests that can't be mined, but this city is running out of useful investments as is. 

I think next turn I should initiate Operation Noche Triste and go for it.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Oh, well, I knew it was a long shot. Because suboptimal is so rigidly locked into his timeslot, and because Kaiser tends to go to bed right at the end of his timeslot, any disruption in the Woden->Archduke area will typically cost a day. I have the second-longest average turn time, yes, but I am consistent (outside a few trips out of town, I do think I travel more than most players here), mostly because I sit right in the transition from the European to North American players. I just wish we'd gotten more than 3 turns in the last 8 days. Oh, well.

Anyway, the war is going pretty disastrously from my perspective. As I read the other two teams, Archduke built a massive financial empire on the back of RND trading, but he and Kaiser have been slow to produce things - Kaiser got a few cheap early districts and led in science thanks to Japanese adjacencies, but then did noooooothing for pretty much the entire classical and medieval eras. He's finally expanded from hsi initial 5 cities to 5 more late plants, but I read that as basically having no native production capacity, and Marco's pretty thoroughly mapped most of Japan so I think that's true. England is harder to map, but Archduke was lagging before he saved up all that gold, and he'll be lagging again - his science is built on RNDs, so he's got almost no districts, and has few cities outside of his I think FOUR city-state conquests.

By contrast, the Raiders have poor internal development - or they had - but they've been working to fix that lately. Woden built districts like a madman while Ljubljana expanded like crazy. That left a window where they were militarily vulnerable before that economic investment paid off, as their large Classical fleets obsoleted. They have the production capacity to beat me if they both build ships like mad, without Australia being able to contribute much to defense at the moment due to our mauling by suboptimal.

So, from my perspective, the greater longterm threat was and is team Raider. I wanted Archduke to blast through ljub's fleet while Woden was backwards, and raze a few cities, without capturing much to strengthen his own team. That would have been the ideal scenario, since Russia can beat even Japan and England combined - my ships woudl be just as good or better than theirs with a Great Admiral and the Great Lighthouse, and Russia is vastly more productive, Australia can counterweight Japan, and Japan is pretty easy to knockout militarily from our east, leaving only England to chew through. Thus a smoking and ruined Phoenicia and increasingly backwards Norway would be ideal.

That...didn't happen. Instead it looks like Archduke somehow blundered badly, Woden pillaged his way to a sizeable caravel fleet, and now I think the two of them are going to bury Archduke. Kaiser didn't bother to contribute militarily - why do teams keep doing that unless they have to? Woden/ljubljana and Marco/me are the two teams who actually fought as unified forces and coincidentially we're winning our wars. Hell, even though Marco got burnt down to 4 cities, he still contributed enough to slow down the jongs long enough for my frigates to catch and sink the entire fleet without loss, while preserving about 80% of our team's capacity, and even with only his 4 cities he's still contributing 2 caravels to the cause in the north. Meanwhile, Kaiser has frigates faffing around Sakhalin - do you think a small Japanese squadron of ~5 frigates with 3-4 caravels would have made a difference in the battle? Kaiser got to the techs before ANYONE else, and ARchduke had the highest income in the game for ages - they couldn't have built a few quads/galleys and upgraded those? Delayed settling those southern colonies for a few turns to do it? That looks like an almost certainly fatal blunder right now - and now Archduke is facing ~1500 combined power from Wodenjana with only ~600 of his own. We know how wars go in Civ VI: once you chew through the units built in peacetime, the entire empire can topple quick. Kaiser should know that especially since it happened to him in PBEM18!

So disastrously, Wodenjana are going to emergeo n top. If they raze instead of capturing, I might be able to compete well - their core is still poor and research will collapse, letting me edge them to ironclads and battleships. Next-gen tech and the GMC's faith-purchasing an army will be my killer apps and my main path to victory. If they manage to take England intact, though, then they'll have doubled their productivity - the Cothon/Norwegian shipbuilding bonus counters Work Ethic pretty handily, especially as the game goes late and lavras drop from +100% city production to something closer to +50%/+33%.

From my perspective, then, I need to have as large a fleet assembled for the knockout blow as I can. I want to win the war with suboptimal quickly - thankfully the main naval confrontation should be over soon. Once I win control of his shores, then I'll just be slowly bleeding frigates in attacks on city walls, with frigates or jongs garrisoned within, but won't suffer tooo many losses, I hope. I can build up a large force more or less continuously from all my shipyards and have that ready to hurl at them, while every scrap of gold i can save between now and then will either go to upgrade galleys or be hoarded to upgrade caravels into ironclads. Meanwhile research will beeline Mass Production (build two Shipyards) -> Steam Power (build two workshops) -> Industrialization (build coal and ironclad) -> Steel to get modern city defenses and next-gen units into the field as rapidly as I can, with the only deviations to necessary techs depending on what the shuffle brings. Then, hopefully my great admiral-great lighthouse boosted ironclads will beat their caravels and I can raze a few key shipyards.

Scouting right now is mainly bent on identifying those key shipyards. Norway's are well fortified, regrettably, but there are some exposed cities.

[Chevalier Mal Fet]

Okay, so yesterday, I introduced Park Chung-hee. The military regime barely clinging to power during the Uprising came about directly because of his administration. Basically, Park made the nation of South Korea as we know it. Today, then, we're going to work through his years of power and bring ourselves right up to his assassination, which is the domino that starts the May 18 uprising.

Part Four: The Winter Republic


The Korean peninsula at night is one of the most powerful images most people have seen.

In the north, from the Yalu all the way to the DMZ there is only blackness. Nearly 50,000 square miles of blackness, in a nation of 25 million people. Pyongyang alone is visible, a tiny point of light hunched defensively in the middle of the sea of dark, a stark illustration of the haves and the have-nots in the DPRK.

But south of the DMZ…to the south, the Republic of Korea blazes forth. The warm glow of lights representing human enterprise and endeavor spread all over every inch of ground from the Imjin all the way to Busan. Even the most distant mountains are illuminated. And Seoul…Seoul is a shining beacon, almost blinding in its brilliance, representing light and life and energy, a chaotic burst of joy in defiance of the hulking monster to its north. There is no image that so profoundly illustrates the different courses the two Koreas have followed; no clearer example of the stark difference that human freedom can make for a people.

One thing that gets forgotten, though, is that it was not always this way. I don’t even mean that the two Koreas used to be similar (although they were). No, what is forgotten is that in the early years, North Korea was the richer of the two brothers.

That’s right.*

In the years following Japan’s occupation, North Korea had the best industry (at Wonsan), a massive, modern hydroelectric infrastructure around its chilly northern reservoirs, some of the best ports in Korea (as at Hamhung), and a higher per capita income. The South was more rural and agrarian, outside of Seoul. Sure, it had a decent port at Busan, but that was about it. This was a result of deliberate Japanese policy - a centrally directed process of industrialization had concentrated heavy industry in the north and agriculture in the south, all serving the glory of the Japanese empire, of course. Following the war, and through Rhee’s years of corruption and mismanagement, the North, not the South, seemed to provide a vision of a future.

It was the presidency of Park Chung-Hee that changed that. Koreans called it the Winter Republic.


President Park in 1963

In many ways, Park’s ‘presidency’ was the most transformative in the history of the nation. He would rule for 18 years and firmly establish his imprint on every facet of Korean life. He would restructure the Korean economy, morals, the government, the military – all of it. When he seized power in 1961, Korea was poor, backwards, and constantly under threat from the north. By the time of his murder in 1979, the nation was wealthy, with a rapidly developing technological industry, and even more rapidly outgrowing any real threat from beyond the 38th parallel.

To analyze Park, you have to always keep in mind his two heroes: the emperors Napoleon and Meiji, of France and Japan, respectively. These two provided the model that Park based his own reign on.

Napoleon, you will recall, was born a poor boy on Elba. He joined the military, and rose through the ranks in the chaos of revolution, making his name as a general of artillery in battles like the siege of Toulon and the attempted royalist coup of 1795 (the “whiff of grapeshot”). Given command of the poorly armed, poorly trained, and poorly supplied Army of Italy in 1796, Napoleon had risen like lightning, rapidly winning battle after battle, then war after war, until he was the master of nearly all Europe, and Emperor of France.

But apart from his military genius, Napoleon was a reformer. It was he who at last broke down the tangled mess of France’s laws, a convoluted rat’s nest of regulations and decrees and ordinances from sources as diverse as the medieval French kings, the personal rule of Louis XIV, the Ancien Regime, and the myriad Revolutionary governments from over 400 years of history. Napoleon swept those aside and created the Napoleonic Code. He rationalized France’s provinces and administration, modernized the French army, and created a new glittering court in Paris to rival the days of the Bourbons. For the ten years of his rule he was the state of France.


Meiji. Note that he appears in adopted European military-style uniform, not traditional Japanese court attire.

Meiji was similar. His reign became known to history as the Meiji Restoration. When Japan, medieval and backwards after years of self-imposed isolation by the Edo shogunate, was threatened by European expansionism, Meiji had become the first emperor in centuries to assert his personal authority, overthrowing the shogun, moving the imperial court and capital from Kyoto to Edo (known forever after as Tokyo), and initiating the most successful program of Westernization in the known world. Meiji’s son and grandson had allowed Japan to be dominated by its military, but the military continued the hard charge of modernization and authoritarian economic development – and it was this same military that had plucked Park from obscurity in the Korean countryside and molded him into a talented and ambitious officer.

It was said of Park:

“In the Imperial Japanese Army, there was the belief that Bushido would give Japanese soldiers enough “spirit” as to make them invincible in battle, as the Japanese regarded war as simply a matter of willpower with the side with the stronger will always prevailing. Reflecting his background as a man trained by Japanese officers, one of Park’s favorite sayings was “we can do anything if we try” as Park argued that all problems could be overcome by sheer willpower."

Eckert, Carter. Park Chung Hee and Modern Korea: The Roots of Militarism, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016

You cannot understand Park without appreciating the impact his training as a Japanese officer had on him. He, and all his clique, had come up through the Japanese war academy in Manchuria. They had imbibed the bushido spirit the Japanese militarists instilled in all their soldiers: problems were all to be overcome with will. The surest path to national success was through the firm and decisive leadership of the military – the people needed to be led to the right way of belief.

The years the Japanese army had ruled Korea were brutal and hard for the Korean people, but they had also been a time of rapid development as the Japanese built railroads, telegraph wires, hydroelectric plants, and factories to fuel their further conquests on the Asian mainland. It had seen more Korean economic growth than any other period in the nation’s history, and Park, a fervent Japanophile (a rarity in Korea), remembered those days with fondness. The militarist system of centrally directed economic development would be the model for the Winter Republic.

Park maintained the veneer of democracy over his regime. Under pressure from the Kennedy administration, he had restored “free elections” in 1962 – only to promptly resign from his post as head of the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction and win election as President in 1963, then re-election in 1967, then an amendment to the Constitution to allow him to run for a third term in 1971, followed by a brand new Constitution in 1972.

Park argued that the Korean people were not ready for democracy. “Democracy cannot be realized without an economic revolution,” he said. With a shaky economy and a dangerous ideological enemy bent on their destruction, a strong hand at the tiller was needed to steer the ship of state. The North Korean threat wasn’t entirely imaginary, either – through the late 1960’s, border raids and skirmishes were common along the DMZ, with the most dramatic incident being a DPRK raid on Seoul itself, with a squad of commandos coming within a few blocks of the Blue House** before being repulsed. Park was a staunch anti-communist and gravely feared the threat of Communist agitation from within.

To be fair, it seems likely that Park believed his own justifications for his dictatorship. Korea had been obviously mismanaged under Rhee and the Second Republic. His heroes, Napoleon and Meiji, had created strong, vibrant states that dominated their places and times.*** Park intended to do the same – and throughout his presidency, he worked hard to create the vision of Korea.


In the later years of the 20th century, it became fashionable to talk about the Four Asian Tigers: Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Korea. These were four previously poor states that experienced some of the most dramatic economic growth of any nation in the world in those days. The Republic of Korea, in particular, exploded past its northern rival for the first time and never looked back.

Park immediately began his presidency in 1962 with the first of many Five Year Plans. Investment from the United States and Japan was ploughed into the economy, as he initiated large-scale infrastructure projects across the country for the first time since the Japanese occupation. Roads, railways, and airports spread across the nation from Seoul. Seoul itself became a boomtown, growing from a provincial, undistinguished city to one of the great metropolises of the world (the Seoul Olympics, in 1988, came less than 10 years after the Park regime). Corporations such as LG, Samsung, and Hyundai were founded in these days, and many began to refer to the “Miracle on the Han River.”

As Korea grew rich on light industry, Park turned his attention to heavy industry, and as the ‘60s rolled into the ‘70s the next series of Five Year Plans attacked that problem. Relations were normalized with Japan, and a massive $800 million settlement from the country was poured into the effort to build Korea’s own industrial capacity. It was necessary to be able to supply their own army to defend from the North, Park argued, and obviously no labor strikes or protests from workers could be tolerated. Such strikes as did happen were ruthlessly broken up, and the Miracle on the Han continued.


Korean per capita GNI more than tripled during Park’s presidency from 1962-1979

The boom was not confined just to the cities. As a boy, Park had despised the thatched roof of his Korean village. To him, the simple peasant homes symbolized his nation’s backwardness and poverty, especially compared with Japanese modernity. Now, he had the power to do something about it. The New Village Movement brought paved roads and running water to every village in the republic. Most especially, it brought electricity. The power lines spread from Seoul to a thousand tiny hamlets scattered around the rice paddies and mountain vailleys, and with the power lines came the lanterns. No longer would night enfold the peninsula, but the city streets would glow as brightly as daytime at all hours. Under President Park Chung-hee, South Korea became the glittering nation of light so starkly visible in those Internet photos.

But this roaring economic growth came at a cost. Park emphasized Korean industry, science, and technology, yes, but he also believed that the Korean family model should extend to all areas of society. Park instituted strict morality laws, and censorship became the order of the day. Korean novels, poetry, TV, and movies were all held to high standards of “public decency.” Attire was tightly controlled, with a selection of approved haircuts available for men and women. Music, naturally, could not be left unregulated – who knows what the kids these days would listen to if left to their own devices? – creating a fussy, conservative operatic style of Korean music that is still popular with the ajummas and ajosshis today.

Korean culture and art stagnated under President Park. Creative expression was discouraged, and what efforts still existed were held to tightly constrained channels. The result was what Korean historians would later call “the Winter Republic” – a nation barren of culture, of life and light and music.


As the years of Park’s presidency dragged on, and the increasingly formal presidential elections rolled by, one after the other, opposition to the Korean Napoleon began to grow. Initially, Park had enjoyed the support of the people for his firm leadership after the corruption of Rhee and the incompetence of the Second Republic. But his heavy-handed tactics, his drive for economic efficiency at the expense of human rights, his constant excuse-making that the people just weren’t ready for democracy yet, were wearing thin. His Korean Central Intelligence Agency, the anti-coup KCIA he had created following his own seizure of power, was given a free hand to arrest anyone suspected of speaking against the government, with the usual beatings and torture to follow. Nevertheless, periodic protests, especially by college students, often unruly, occasionally violent, continued.

Political opposition, never quite outlawed since Korea was a “democracy,” gained in power. After a comfortable Presidential win in 1967, Parks’ 1971 opponent, Kim Dae-jung, had the gall to actually run a semi-competitive race. Troubled by such an unexpected display of spine, Park declared a state of emergency that fall, then, citing the threat from the North, tossed out his own Constitution and created the Yushin constitution instead.

The new Constitution, after Park essentially launched a coup against his own government in October of 1972, centralized even more power in President Park’s hands. It abolished all term limits and extended presidential terms to six years. Further, the public – obviously not to be trusted any longer – no longer voted for the president, but instead for an electoral college, which was granted a slate of candidates to vote for. The maximum number of candidates allowed on the slate was, naturally, one. The old national assembly was dissolved and a new one elected in its place – with the president having the power to appoint ⅓ of the members. The constitution was termed the Yushin Constitution, or “Restoration Constitution” – an obvious allusion to the Meiji Restoration of Japan.

The Yushin system swept away all trappings of democratic government in the Republic of Korea. Freedom of speech, of assembly, of the press, of association, of scholarship, of thought, of conscience, were nonexistent. Arrests and beatings were commonplace to maintain the authority of the regime.


Park, center, and his wife in 1971

The Yushin years, though, were marked by growing instability as Park increasingly teetered on his throne. The economic growth slowed, the arrests and beatings picked up pace, and still he insisted that the Korean people could not handle democracy. Park himself was frequently the target of assassination attempts, most of which he blamed on the North Koreans. The worst moment, perhaps, of his Presidency, before the end, came on August 15, 1974 – the 29th anniversary of the Japanese surrender. Park was in the National Theater in Seoul to give a speech commemorating the occasion. Hundreds of people flooded in, most of the capital’s best and brightest. A dazzling array of dignitaries filled the stage, including, significantly, Yuk Young-soo, the First Lady and the love of Park’s life.

As the President began his speech, a man near the rear abruptly fired a pistol. The would-be assassin realized his cover was blown and charged down the aisle, firing wildly in the President’s direction. One of Park’s bodyguards responded quickly, returning fire. As the bullets flew back and forth, one – fired by the bodyguard – glanced off the wall and struck Jang Bong-hwa, a high school student. He did not survive.

Park ducked, but the assassin’s zeal exceeded his marksmanship and he was unhurt. But as he picked himself up off the floor and looked around, he saw the aftermath: a stray bullet had struck Young-soo. As his injured wife was taken off stage and rushed to a hospital, a shaken Park finished his speech hurriedly, then, grabbing his wife’s shoes and handbag, dashed off after her.

She died early the next morning.


Yuk Young-soo, 1925-1974

A year later, Park wrote in his diary,

I felt as though I had lost everything in the world. All things became a burden and I lost my courage and will. A year has passed since then. And during that year I have cried alone in secret too many times to count.

Don Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas, 1997, p. 56

The assassination attempt was caught on video.Content warning: Yuk Yeong-soo is seated at center and her mortal wounding is in the video.

At the same time, the usual petty rivalries, jealosies, and jockeying for power had increased among the men of Park’s court, and as the Korean Napoleon aged, the second-rankers of his administration began to increasingly think about the issues of succession.

Soap box time. Feel free to skip: It’s difficult to evaluate the legacy of Park Chung-hee. There is, I think, a too-great demand for simple verdicts from the public on historical figures. The French Revolution – good thing or bad thing? Was the New Deal a good idea, or a bad idea? George W. Bush: Good president or bad president? I think the desire to slap a single label “good” or “bad”, to weigh the entire legacy of a person or event and reduce it to a single judgment, is misplaced, especially when it comes to judging human beings. Human beings are not simply good or simply bad. They are a complex knot of emotions, motivations, actions, triumphs, mistakes, moments of heroism and moments of cowardice. A man can be a devoted husband and loving father, and can casually order murder at work. A woman could be a brilliant CEO, guiding her corporation into a wonderful era of prosperity and stability, but have her own home life be a terrific mess.

World leaders do all manner of good things and bad things – they can start wars in the Middle East, but also deliver aid and comfort to millions in Africa. Do you weigh these in the scale, determine which side slightly (or overwhelmingly) outweighs the other, and pronounce “Good President!” or “Bad President!”? Well, maybe, but I never feel comfortable making such judgments.

Park Chung-hee was an authoritarian despot. He seized power illegally and maintained it through steadily increasing brutality and oppression for nearly two decades. He tramped the rights of political opponents, of workers, of students, and of artists, and cared little for the human costs of his policies. But he also created modern Korea. He took an agrarian, impoverished country and set it on the road to being one of the wealthiest nations in the world by the turn of the millennium. Koreans have enough to eat, have roofs over the heads, and have the best utilities, Internet, and technological toys in the world due in no small part to President Park.

Even today, he is a controversial figure. Many Koreans remember his time with fondness – “Ah, those were the days!” His daughter, Park Guen-hye, whose mother was murdered that day in August 1974, rose to become President herself one day – and also fell from power in the largest political scandal in modern Korean history.

Was Park a loving family man, a strong leader doing what was best for his country, a petty tyrant clinging to his own power, or a brutal thug willing to do anything in pursuit of his own ends? All of these at once? Feel free to make your own judgment, but for my part, I will simply let my words here, uh, speak for themselves, if I can be permitted to mix a metaphor.

– Chevalier's thoughts on historical judgment

As the ‘70s entered their final year. Park was slouching towards retirement, perhaps – since the murder of his wife 5 years before he no longer had the same fire, the same drive that had animated him through the early years of his dictatorship. He still continued to issue “emergency decrees,” still had his opposition leaders arrested and tortured regularly, but his heart no longer seemed to be in it.

Still, his regime was increasingly unstable. In the parliamentary elections, despite all that bribery and threats could achieve, his own party won 31% of the vote. All well and good- except Those Bastards in the opposition New Democratic Party won 32%.  In September of that year, as part of the ongoing political spat, he had his old opponent, Kim Dae-jung, chairman of the NDP, who had nearly beaten him in the last sort-of free election of 1971****, thrown out of Kim’s own political party. All 66 NDP members of parliament resigned in protest…and soon the protests became nationwide. Park didn’t know it, but he had inadvertently set in motion the chain of events that would lead to his own downfall, and, 9 months later, the bloody showdown in Gwangju. After 18 years, the end of the Winter Republic was at hand.

Next time: the President’s Last Bang!


*It’s another example of a strange phenomenon I’ve noticed the world over: Generally, the northern half of a country is more industrious and prosperous than the southern half. Compare northern Italy with southern Italy. One is the thriving industrial cities of the Po valley, the other is Naples and Sicily and the slow life of the countryside (and the Mafia. Lots and lots of Mafia). Northern Germany: Berlin, Hamburg, the hustle and bustle of modern commerce. Southern Germany: Bavaria, beer gardens, and the Alps. Northern Spain: Busy, thriving Catalonia and Barcelona. Southern Spain: Slower paced, calmer Andalucia. The pattern is true the world over: Northern Europe vs. Southern Europe. The Northern United States vs. the South. Northern China vs. Southern China. And, for a while, North Korea vs. South Korea. I don’t know why this pattern exists – if it’s related to the climate, the work of a strange wizard, or what. But it does seem real.

**The official residence of the President of Korea

***admittedly both states also wound up in disastrous expansionist wars against coalitions of all their neighbors that ultimately resulted in their own ruin and occupation. It is unknown what Park thought of those particular details.

**** Kim had bounced in and out of exile, house arrest, and outright imprisonment in the intervening decade, but he stubbornly insisted on continuing his opposition to Park’s regime. Park apparently felt that the murder of such a prominent public figure would cost him too heavily in the public eye, so he contented himself with this (relatively) low-level harassment of Kim. He did take a shot at him once, in 1973, when he had the KCIA kidnap Kim, but the USA (and, according to Kim, a devout Christian, the Good Lord Himself) intervened and Kim fled to Japan for a few years instead.