Here we go again with the leftists wanting to tear down the MacArthur Statue in Incheon:
During the Korean War, Ahn Hag-sub was a devoted 22-year-old communist serving in a North Korean militia unit. Seven decades later, he still hates the Americans, and their wartime leader, Gen. Douglas MacArthur.
At age 91, he says his last act of resistance against MacArthur will be lighting on fire a statue of the general that has stood in Incheon since 1957.
“MacArthur is the enemy of our people,” Ahn said in an interview at his home near Incheon, a South Korean port city located an hour’s drive west of Seoul. Ahn has lived there since the late 1990s, when he was released from a South Korean prison on humanitarian grounds, after spending 40 years behind bars. “I will resist for as long as I can,” he added, tightening his lips.
In South Korea, declaring loyalty to North Korea — as Ahn did, something he still refuses to rescind — is a serious national security crime that can land violators in prison for life.
As a free man, Ahn joined a small but dedicated far-left nationalist group calling itself the Peace Treaty Movement. (It’s with several younger colleagues in that group that Ahn said he’d set alight the MacArthur statue.) The movement’s dislike of MacArthur, who died in 1964, reflects a minority opinion in South Korea, but a heated one.
At a time when the statues of historical figures are being reexamined (and in some cases removed) in the United States and Britain, they are trying to bring attention to a debate over this pivotal — and foreign — figure in modern South Korea’s history.
South Koreans with similar views to Ahn’s see MacArthur as a ruthless commander whose forces killed Korean civilians. MacArthur’s statue should be removed, they say, and sent to the war museum in Seoul. Or, better, it should be dismantled.
Stars & Stripes