The Role Of Media In A Multicultural Society

2 Pages 528 Words

The Role of the Media In A Multicultural Society

All of the world knows about the Jewish Holocaust, where millions of Jews were persecuted and put to death in concentration camps. All of the world knows about Nazification, in which Hitler attempted to wipe out the entire Jewish history by attempting to burn the books, ban the langauge, and stifle the Jewish community. The world does not know about the "Han" of the Korean people. History can have 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 bee n a past laced with hardship, meekness, subjugation, and servility, no empowerment can be derived from it. This history of hardship has been to today the version being transmitted to the Korean people: a nation of meek farmers, always stuck in a peninsula, that they have so much han built up in their psyche, invaded a total of 966 times but somehow survived, never chose to invade others' domain, a people who have survived many a hardship and subjugation to build a viable nation-state that Korea is today.

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 (History of Chosen). Chosen-sai essentially has never been discarded, owing to the fact that the founder of the modern South Korean historical academic field, Yi Byong-do, 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 wa...