Dear Ambassador Kathleen Stephens, A leader gives a vision to his people. I
often think about the history you and I share together, the history your country
and my country share together. If you follow the link http://study21.org/library/defence_treaty.htm
, you can watch the video that shows a defense treaty signed between your
country and my country in 1953, in the year when you were born. You were born
when Dwight David Eisenhower is the President of U.S.A. He came to the White
House with his pledge that he would accomplish cease-fire in the Korean
Peninsula. And he did it. Thus, Eisenhower is remembered in U.S. as the leader
who accomplished the vision he shared with his people. Indeed, he made a
history. But that was not the end of the Cold War.
In fact, the Cold War
was a deepening dilemma which brought the fear of Russian Atomic Bombs. You
stayed in Korea in 1976, just when President Jimmy Carter attempted to solve the
problem by decreasing the U.S. atomic bombs. But his successor President Ronald
Wilson Reagan saw that Jimmy Carter's peace project did not work at all. By
early 1980's Russia had more than three times of atomic missiles than America
had. That was the deepening dilemma, the deepening crisis of the Cold War in
those years. It was also the time when it appeared that the territories of the
Soviet Empire were ever expanding?
But this problem of the Cold War was
solved by the way one could hardly expect. The success of Seoul Olympics in 1988
triggered the collapse of the great Soviet Union. When people from the Soviet
Union and the Eastern Europe watched the Seoul Olympics along with the splendid
miracle of the Han River, the rational for the Communist system was destroyed.
And where the rational for the Communist system was destroyed, the Communist
regimes could no longer stand. The great Soviet Empire with its threat of the
atomic bomb war suddenly disappeared. Thus, the age of the Cold War came to the
end by the way no one could expect. Just like President Eisenhower made a
history, President Chun Doo Whan made a history.
We still vividly
remember how we began the year of 1981, as President Chun Doo Whan shared his
vision for Seoul Olympics'88 in his pledge for Presidential election. Indeed,
his vision and his effort made a history. For the success of Seoul Olympics was
the victory of the Free World. But Kim Dae Jung's group did not celebrate this
victory. When they record history, they do not record this victory. Instead,
they create a logic that denies this victory. Just when the success of the Seoul
Olympics boomed economy, they sent ex-President Chun Doo Whan into exile.
Ex-President Chun was punished not by objective facts, but by the subjective
feeling--the subjective reason that he was not popular among Kim Dae Jung's
group. The two Kim's group did so because they wanted to go back to their old
bad practices in the nineteenth century. But was there anything pro-democratic
in regressing to most undemocratic habits of older days?
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