History texts left-wing, says group

The six textbooks to be used in high school history classes this year are so left-wing they could be used in North Korean schools, a conservative civic group said yesterday.

“From next year, Korean history becomes a mandatory subject for high school students but the current textbooks read like brochures by the Kim Jong-il regime,” Suh Jung-kap, leader of the National Action Campaign for Freedom and Democracy in Korea, said in a phone interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily.

“When we took a look at the books over the last month, we asked for advice from North Korean defectors,” Suh said. “They said the books were suitable for North Korean education, not for the South.”

The six textbooks are published by private companies but reviewed by the Korean government.

According to a statement released by the group at a press conference yesterday, two textbooks, published by Mirae N Culture Group and Chunjae Education, refer to South Korean governments from the 1960s to the 1980s as “dictatorships” 21 times. The same books only describe North Korea as a dictatorship five times.

The group said the two textbooks didn’t mention such major attacks by North Korea as the January 1968 North Korean commando raid on the Blue House; the 1974 assassination of First Lady Yuk Young-soo; the 1987 Korean Air bombing or the sinking of the Cheonan warship last year.

According to the group, Chunjae Education’s textbook says that U.S. economic sanctions on North Korea led to people dying of starvation but omitted the fact that those sanctions came after the North’s 2006 nuclear weapon test.

The group said the book also glamorized an October 1946 riot in Daegu, when police fired at hungry local workers who were on a strike led by communists, by calling it the “Uprising in October” or the “Protests of farmers.”

The group said Mirae N Culture’s textbook criticized former president Roh Tae-woo’s punishment of Moon Ik-hwan, a pastor who visited North Korea in 1989 and hugged the country’s founding leader Kim Il Sung. The book also defines Yun I-sang and Lee Ung-no’s involvement in the Dongbaengnim Incident, in which Korean students in East Germany in the 1960s collaborated with North Korea, as a “peace movement,” the group said.

“We will take legal action against the publishing companies of the six textbooks sometime soon,” Kim said.

By Kim Hee-jin [heejin@joongang.co.kr]

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이 단체는 이날 오전 배포한 성명서에서 "내년 고등학교 입학생부터 필수 과목으로 배우게 될 한국사 교과서가 대한민국의 정통성과 정체성을 부정하는 역사 기술로 일관하고 있다"며 이같이 말했다.

이들은 "일부 교과서는 북한 정권보다 대한민국 정부에 대해 네 배나 많이 `독재`라는 표현을 썼고, `청와대 습격 사건` 등 북한의 대표적 도발 사례도 다루지 않았다"고 밝혔다.

이어 "한 교과서는 북핵 문제를 다루면서 북한의 핵실험 사실을 생략하고, 미국의 경제 봉쇄 정책 때문에 북한 주민들이 아사했다는 식으로 왜곡 기술했다"며 "`종북 세력`을 편들고 북한 정권을 감싸고 있다"고 비난했다.

이들은 이날 오후 한국프레스센터에서 강연회를 열어 자체 분석한 한국사 검정 교과서의 문제점을 발표할 예정이다.