Continuation from previous thread before it got trashed. Respect the thread topic. If you want to defend the Japanese Empire, talk about Korean food, or Lee Hyori start your own thread please.
ROK military about to stage another artillery exercise. DPRK military threatens "retaliation." Hope nothing stupid happens.
And don't forget telling others you hope women in their family don't get raped, mr. Christian.... Jesus did say, "but I tell you that everyone will have to give account on the day of judgment for every empty word they have spoken." Perhaps this explains your yellow card. As for the thread getting trashed, it was "trashed" in part because of your filthy posts... Mr. Christian. As for North Korea, they won't do anything that will trigger a war - so I hope, anyway.
The only scenario I see North Korea really launching a war is if the people in power feel that their position is untenable and so they might try their luck with war. They may think that perhaps even a stalemate somehow salvaged could save them. North Korea knows that if a real war to break out, it's almost certainly over for them. As for Han Pride's posts, I don't understand why people here consider that trolling. I find it a legitimate argument. Pre-colonization era Korea was a backward impoverished country. Post-colonization Korea is an amazing success story. You cannot dismiss the fact that colonization had an impact on Korean development. I would not go so far as to say that Japan deserves full credit. After all, many countries actually ended up being worse off after liberation and the credit of MAKING IT COUNT belong to Koreans. We should be able to take this lesson where our previous generations were able to turn the darkest chapters in Korean history as a spring board to one of the biggest success stories in the world. However, to say that Japan had no impact, or only a negative impact and that Koreans were simply inherently awesome from the start is a big lie. Being patriotic doesn't mean you need to be all jingoistic about things. I think it's our patriotic duty to remain humble, to recognize that we are but one of hundreds of countries on the face of the planet and that we are not special and neither are anyone else.
For my own amusement I'm going to share a meaningless analogy. A sweet girl, let's call her Aerok, was poor and wanted a baby. Obviously with her being poor and the ugly duckling she was, she could never find a suitable loving husband to start a family with. Seeing her predicament, an affluent man, let's call him Napaj, breaks into her house and rapes her, impregnating her in the process. While putting his clothes back on, Napaj gives Aero an envelope of cash and cheerfully walks out onto the street, whistling to the tune of the Oyagimik. Now, Aerok arguably got her wish and bore herself a baby because of Napaj, and he himself thinks he was just doing Aerok a favor. But was he acting with morals and integrity? ... No need to reply to this, carry on ...
That's actually a pretty bad analogy. It would go more like this: Let's say this girl's life was going nowhere. She didn't know that there was life outside of her tiny little village. One day she did suffer the tragedy of being raped. It was the worst experience ever. But the perpetrator was caught and eventually she ended up going to town for the trial. It was her first time in town. She saw all these things that she never knew existed. She realized that she was pissing her life away when she could be doing so much more. She managed to sue the rapist and use the money to fund her education. Through hard work and determination she became a huge success story and eventually had a wonderful life. Who said anything about Japan acting with morals or integrity? Really where did THAT come from?
Japan? Where did Japan enter this analogy? We're talking about Napaj the rapist here man, and it's mentioned in the story he (in his own opinion) thinks he was acting with integrity and morals. EDIT: and you didn't change the story, you just added another chapter. Oh and Aerok has split personality disorder. Her other personality is some crazy bitch called Nusohc, who has a tendency to feast on cognac and Chinese food.
I do think melonbar have a point about having a separate thread about Korea-Japan relations unless it is relevant to the discussion of NK relations. i.e. Japan is starting to point her guns towards the Chinese in response to their sponsorship of DPRK. Moreover, they are starting to talk about sending soldiers to aid South Korea even though this is a political hot potato due to Japan's past. In anycase, I'm pretty sure DPRK will increase tension even further. Just don't know how far they are willing to go and how far Lee Myung Bak is willing to go with it. Personally, I think Kim Jong Il wants war less than Lee Myung Bak, but that doesn't mean that Kim Jong Il will back down. At first they sunk the Cheonan secretively so as to give themselves some air of innoncence while increasing tension at the same time. When that didn't work, they fired artillery, the one thing that puts fear in South Korean hearts. Where he miscalculated on is that it puts both fear and rage in South Korean hearts. By looking at Kim Jong Il's long track record of incompetence, we can fully expect him to miscalculate on the brinkmanship game. but then again.. what can South Korea do? If she does nothing, we embolden him further... a line must be drawn somewhere. South Korean public has to really think long and hard about what that means.
North Korea has dug a tunnel, 500m deep, in Northern Hamgyong. A possible site for a future nuclear test? And you are one of the few, apparently, who gets what I'm saying. I never said Japan should get full credit, but neither do I believe that Koreans strictly suffered during the occupation. Many Koreans experienced nothing but bad things at the hands of the Japanese, but this doesn't apply to all Koreans then. Many Koreans, though (including a few on this site) appear to think that to even ask whether any Korean during the occupation received any benefits is tantamount to treason.
I'd be cool with it as well, if only those who enter were able to refrain from personal attacks. The very reason, however, that this thread's original thread was "trashed" (and the fact that the moderators changed Korea NSR so that we are no longer able to have political discussions here with the exception of NK-related issues due to the Yeonpyong attack given its urgency) is this pattern of crude behavior here. Many people just can't refrain from getting personal. The ROK has to strike back hard sooner or later.
We would be foolish not to accept medical help from the Japanese if a war does indeed happen. There are going to be massive civilian and military casualties that the medical infrastructure of the entire Republic of Korea and the United States military will be stretched beyond limit. A side note... remember those idiots in South Korea who tried to claim that North Korea didn't sink the Cheonan-ham? Han Pride, it is true what you say about people taking any "positives" from the occupation as some form of treason. The reason is this: the number of people who were actively against the occupation was small. As a result, we have a large collective guilt about the whole thing. It is a matter of insecurity. For the VAST majority of Koreans, living under the rule of Japan was simply living under the rule of Japan. They not only learned skills that would later prove crucial in Korea's development later on, they were living as people of those professions. Sorry guys, but this really is the only explanation as to how all of a sudden Koreans knew how to run modern government institutions and businesses after liberation. If anyone has an alternate theory, I am all ears. If we had our heads screwed on straight the first time around, we could have known how to do all these things without suffering 35 years of brutal oppression. Unfortunately, we sucked, lost the country without hardly a fight (in general) and this is how we learned our lesson about the world and how Korea isn't remote enough to be a successful Hermit Kingdom. We must remember our history with brutal honesty, or we will again drop the ball, beliving in our own legend... that someway, somehow we are special, that the rules don't apply to us somehow... I think one lesson is enough.
I've become more pragmatic with age and this is a reason I agree with you. I reckon many Koreans would refuse Japanese assistance out of pride, history, etc., but as long as combat troops stayed out and as long as doctors, nurses, medics, and supplies were offered and readily available for shipping, why not. These Fifth Columnists should live ONE DAY in North Korea and see what it's really like up there. Years ago a college student who was then the president of HanChongRyun gave an interview and when questioned about starvation, human rights abuses, the camps, he said, "where's the evidence? I went to North Korea and they all looked well fed." At last someone who gets it! Indeed, 14th. I don't doubt that the vast majority of Koreans deeply resented Japanese rule, even if they were ultimately powerless to end it on their own. But people like Yoon Bong-Kil or Ahn Jang-Koon were the minority. It's more than understandable that the Japanese are so resented to this day. But we need to remember that a major reason there is so much angst is that we are taught to mostly remember the extreme measures Japan took in the final years of the occupation - the time that coincided with the Japanese mobilization for war against the United States. And while I'm not necessarily targeting anybody here with the following statement, I've often found that amongst both Korean-Americans and expatriates, those who are quickest to launch accusations of "treason" are precisely those who have only a basic or superficial familiarity with that history of Korea. This isn't to say there isn't more I can or should learn - I love studying and reading up on this stuff.
"The only scenario I see North Korea really launching a war is if the people in power feel that their position is untenable and so they might try their luck with war. They may think that perhaps even a stalemate somehow salvaged could save them. North Korea knows that if a real war to break out, it's almost certainly over for them." a war can occur due to a series of miscalculations on both parts. Kim Jong Il may not want a war, but he evidently feels that he can get what he wants when he ups the brinkmanship. That is the lesson he learned in the past 10 years. That reason alone is enough to start war. Kim Jong Il managed to incur the wrath of South Korean people with artillery attack. Prior to this attack, South Korean public was willing to forgive, forget, and appease. After this attack, even the Korean opposition are splitting up on how to respond. Kim Jong Il probably wasn't expecting this response from South Korea given how the South has responded in the past. And, we can't forget, the man is sick.
Yeah, I'm sure most of us wish that our ancestors were like Yoon or Ahn (myself included) but I strongly suspect I'm more connected to the quislings Oh well, you can't choose your family.
Moderators, can this thread be merged intothis one? The original thread was not even 26 pages long - plenty of space for us to go back there and to resume our discussions. It never got "trashed" - it was only soiled by posters who are unable to stick by the website's terms of service.
I want as many people to survive as possible. If you love your country you will choose this well over some silly pride issue. North Korea will rain down what could possibly be the heaviest artillery bombardment in history, probably with chemical agents. There is no shame in not having the capacity to handle this on your own. In fact, that would be an impossibility. These guys are the biggest traitors of all. The fact that they do this appealing to some twisted idea of patriotism and nationalism sickens me. If they like North Korea so much they can feel free to piss off and never come back. If reunification should ever come, I would love to see these guys "tried" in front of actual North Koreans. There won't be enough of them left for any sort of proper burial.
Agreed. This is why, again, I've moved towards pragmatism in my older age. Results - and if the crap hit the fan, with the Korean People's Army's estimated 10,000 Soviet-era artillery pieces, all trained on Seoul, firing at once, we would see dozens of thousands of casualties even if the North Koreans had less than a couple of hours to fire them (given the USAF would bombard them mercilessly). North Korea's leaders are Machiavellian. They have no qualms about sending hundreds of thousands of their own to concentration camps whose cruelty challenges the inhumanity witnessed at Dachau, Treblinka, Auschwitz, and at the Soviet gulags. They will have absolutely no hesitation when it comes to terminating the lives of hundreds of thousands of South Korean civilians. To them, 정, 단일민족, all this is meaningless. As I've written before, these leftists target defectors as traitors to some greater pan-Korean ideal. This is why I for one think that the people in 민주노동당, 한총련, 민주노총, etc., along with Party members in the North, should be made to bury the freshly discovered dead bodies in the camps. And I agree with you about revenge. There is so much pent-up anger and bitterness right now that when the Northern system finally collapses, South Korean/US/UN peacekeeping troops may have their hands more than full preventing widespread lynchings of the Northern police/secret police/보위부/party members.
I don't think we should be so generous. They will start discovering "evidence" that American troops somehow magically killed and tortured a record number of people in a record short time... even sped up their decomposition with strange chemical agents in an attempt to cover up their "atrocities." I think North Korea is lacking fertilizer.
this sort of sh1t makes me angry. http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/national/2010/12/19/91/0302000000AEN20101219000700315F.HTML it's time for dishonorable discharge.
It's funny that the media outlets actually believed the picture. It's friggin' Yeonpyeong-do. Not Australia.
War games and soccer games canceled this weekend. What a snoozer of a weekend! /seriously, glad this stuff didn't kick off this weekend. Hopefully, not anytime at all.