Etch-a-sketch foreign policy

By Deauwand Myers

Asian countries have long memories, famously attributed to China, for example. Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, India and Japan also have had societies for thousands of years.

Etch-A-sketch, for those who do not know, is a game in which children draw on a board and then shake it, erasing the image to start anew.

Unfortunately, too many nations' foreign policy initiatives are not informed by data or history, but a politically expedient and often counterproductive world view that ― like the game ― can be erased and reimaged depending on what is trendy and who is in charge.

There are plenty of examples.

Japan is a good place to start. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and conservatives in his party would like the public, and more illogically, the world, to misremember much of the 20th century. "Comfort women," many of them Koreans, were not forced sex slaves. Japan wanted to preserve Asia from Anglo-European imperialism. Japanese society should not be apologetic about its World War II atrocities.

China wants Japan to admit to the many horrors it visited upon China during World War II. Even so, China does not want to admit the autonomy of Tibet before 1949 and its forced annexation of that country, or its brutal repression of Islam and Uighurs' culture in the vast northwestern province of Xinjiang. Further, in the Communist Party's fanatical concentration on maintaining power in a one-party autocratic regime, the Chinese government erases the true victors over the Japanese in World War II: Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang (KMT), the Chinese Nationalist Party.

The Chinese Communist Party does the same with its attempts at historical erasure of the bloody crackdown on peaceful, pro-democratic protests of young Chinese in the massacre at Tiananmen Square. No one knows, except the Chinese government, how many people were killed or arrested during this uprising, though most historians estimate hundreds to several thousand were summarily executed.

Korea does not mention much about some of the war crimes its military committed in the Vietnam War, either.

My native country, the United States, has had what former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice calls a "schizophrenic" foreign policy for many decades. Nevertheless, to hear politicians and pundits speak, you would think the U.S. has been a paragon of virtue in world affairs for centuries. The Iran nuclear deal is a perfect place to start.

I am no fan of the Iranian regime. Shod through with misogyny, sexism, homophobia, and anti-semitism, the Islamic Republic of Iran is a brutal theocracy and a state sponsor of terrorism. But how did we get here? Why do Iranians, particularly hardliners, still chant "Death to America" every day?

In 1953, the American CIA, at the behest of British intelligence (MI6), saw fit to unseat the secular, democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, mainly because he nationalized Iran's oil industry, which until then had been under the de facto control of Britain for 40 years. The CIA's "Operation Ajax" resulted in the installation of a corrupt, oppressive, and brutal monarchy under the auspices of the U.S. and its Anglo-European counterparts, principally Britain. This led to the Iranian Revolution and the ascension of the theocracy we know and loathe today.

Imagine, say, if a foreign power did the same thing to the U.S. over its shale oil and the new regime was eventually overthrown. We would not like the country that overthrew our government to install a friendlier regime.

Favoring undemocratic regimes that allow easier exploitation of a nation's natural resources is not new. The U.S. has engaged in the same kind of imperialism in the Congo, and some South American countries, or supported dictators like Saddam Hussein, before the American government decided he was problematic. One of America's chief allies in the Middle East is the very wealthy and theocratic regime of Saudi Arabia, in many ways more repressive than Iran, and further, the epicenter of exporting Islamic jihad and Sharia law. Fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 terrorists were Saudi Arabian citizens, not Iraqi, by the way.

Other examples:

Russia was a major factor in winning World War II, along with American ingenuity and strength and Hitler's lunacy.

The Soviet Union fell for many reasons, one of the most critical is that communism is not a viable form of government. President Ronald Reagan's military buildup was also a key.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was not a conservative by any means. His last days were fighting for the poor and working classes via unions and against the Vietnam War. That conservatives try to co-op his message as being in any way conservative is historically obscene and ridiculous.

We can have our own opinions, but we cannot have our own facts. Korea, like other nations, is concerned about how other nations learn and do not learn and how they understand and misunderstand history. We all should be concerned with it, lest we repeat the same mistakes again and again.

Deauwand Myers holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside Seoul. He can be reached at deauwand@hotmail.co m .