It was a wise move for the opposition NPAD to decide to take part in the National Assembly’s 2016 budget deliberations, ending a weekslong legislative boycott in protest against the government’s project to rewrite secondary school history textbooks. Both party chair Moon Jae-in and floor leader Lee Jong-gul exhibited a degree of political maturity as they vowed to continue their struggle while taking care of the people’s livelihoods. 

“We will fight with long breaths,” Lee told the party caucus. President Park will have to take even longer breaths to push through her history project, which is going to be the top task for the second half of her five-year term after promoting a “creative economy” during the first half, to a still unclear outcome.

The president had her first taste of bitterness in the program when one of her first commissioned historians quit after the media exposed allegations that he had harassed a female reporter who was interviewing him at his home. The pool of willing history scholars to take up the job is now feared to shrink further as groups of history professors and those of related fields announced that they would refuse to cooperate.

As the controversy raged on, I picked up E.H. Carr’s “What is History?” which was gathering dust in my bookshelf, to better understand what historians do. This little book by a diplomat-turned-journalist-turned historian was banned by the authorities during the military rule when it was required reading among student activists here.

His positive views on the role of Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong and prophesy of the rise of the third world and decline of the West must have annoyed the security officials of the Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan administrations. Yet, he convincingly argues that the facts of history cannot be purely objective, since they become facts of history only in virtue of the significance attached to them by the historian.

“The historian selects and interprets facts of the past; or you write propaganda or historical fiction which has nothing to do with history.”

In this age of communication, we tend to believe that more than enough facts of the past have been dug out mostly by the work of the media to facilitate the compilation of history textbooks to be used by high-school students. But, in the 21st century Republic of Korea, the great volume of information makes the job of historians truly tough. If Carr was still alive and witnessed the current noisy developments here over history, he might be surprised by the depth and width of differences regarding historical “facts.”

I hate to recall it, yet the sinking of the Navy corvette Cheonan alone provides a host of disturbing examples of truth mixed with half-truth and outright falsity. On the night of March 26, 2010, this Navy vessel with 104 personnel aboard broke in half after an explosion and the damaged ship sank within minutes, killing 46 seamen. This much is the hard, undisputed fact. The rest of “facts” about the Cheonan are all in dispute.

While a multinational investigation team conducted a probe into the cause of the sinking, the Ministry of National Defense moved with great caution in determining what happened and who did it. It took 55 days until experts from South Korea, the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, and Sweden concluded that the Cheonan had been sunk by a North Korean torpedo attack from a small submarine.

Pyongyang denied responsibility for the incident and Russia, China and some overseas research groups which had conducted their own investigation with the help of Korean authorities expressed skepticism. Negative reactions were also shown from leftist organizations in this country, which produced various theories on possible causes of the undersea explosion that caused the destruction of the ship. We have “facts” pointing in different directions and the historians have to work out of this jumble.

We do not know how the Ministry of Education would ask the state-commissioned scholars to allot the pages of the new textbook to each stage of national history from the ancient Gojoseon era to the 21st century and how much emphasis would be given to the contemporary events. The new textbook will have to touch on the armed confrontation across the South-North border, leading up to the mayhem of the Cheonan. Then how will the narrative go?

Some revisionist views about the origins of the Korean War, attributing it to the South as much as to the North, have all but disappeared since declassified Soviet documents revealed the tete-a-tete between Kim Il-sung and Stalin in March 1950. Still several existing textbooks make only obscure references to the North Korean attack on June 25, 1950. The new textbook will most clearly define who started the war, and it will also attempt to condemn the North for all its anti-South atrocities, including the Cheonan incident.

The historians will write facts and conclusions, which will inevitably reflect the position of the Ministry of National Defense. The question is whether the authors of state-published textbooks should also mention the negative reactions from home and abroad toward the Seoul governments’ announcement based on the result of the multinational team’s investigation. I believe that the attack was the work of the North Korean military because I can imagine no other possible perpetrator of such an outrage. However, surveys produced differing figures with one-third to two-thirds of South Koreans expressing doubts about the result of the South Korea-led investigation.

I am of the opinion that the new history textbook needs to include the Russian, Chinese and Korean leftist attitudes toward the Cheonan incident if it is to assert credibility on truthfulness. Historians have the right to ignore unworthy “facts” but they are not supposed to write propaganda. Our students should also be able to select and interpret facts and form their own views of history with a clear understanding of the world they live in. In order to eliminate biased and prejudiced textbooks, we need scholars who can process facts of the past into history education with profound and balanced knowledge and open mind. 

Google served me with this aphorism of Samuel Butler: “God cannot alter the past, but historians can.” E.H. Carr must concur, but historians here are advised to be more modest than creative while the storm of history debate is sweeping the nation.

By Kim Myong-sik

Kim Myong-sik is a former editorial writer for The Korea Herald. – Ed.