History is power

5 Pages 1189 Words

National Pride
When trying to analyze another’s being one must first consider the past experiences and influences that have help to shape them. Another important idea about History, is how it can serve a dual role: The one of destroyer or the other of savior. The message a people's history transmits from the past can either kill a people's spirit or empower and magnify. If a people's history has been a past laced with hardship, meekness, subjugation, and servility, no empowerment can be derived from it. This history of hardship had been the version being transmitted to the Korean people by the Japanese: a nation of meek farmers, always stuck in a peninsula, with no strength to become anything. However, instead of causing the Korean’s to be come weak, this only built up in their psyche, having been invaded a total of 966 times from outsiders the Koreans have survived and have never been seen as power hungry people.
The most visible cause of this historical view lies in the Japanese colonial era. Every colonial power does its best to instill a sense of inferiority, defeat, and hopelessness into the psyche of the subjugated. The Japanese did everything their power allowed to do to achieve this end; that included a massive sixteen-year compiling of their version of Korean history, The Chosen-sai. Chosen-sai essentially has never been discarded Yi Byong-do, who was an active participant in the compiling of the Chosen-sai. But Yi not withstanding, the Japanese didn't get their idea just out of the blue, but rather exploited centuries of sadaejui practiced by the Yi Dynasty. Since sadaejui itself was a self-derogatory ideology that whole-heartedly embraced Sino centrism and the "dominant sinic culture", the foundation for the distortion of Korean history had already been laid, the Japanese just simply built on their version of Korean inferiority on top of another that was already there.
But there is another historical view of Korean h...