Washington Post:
With its brazen daytime artillery barrage of a civilian-inhabited island, North Korea's reclusive leaders might have achieved one thing that had so far eluded South Korea's president, Lee Myung-bak: uniting the South Korean public around a more aggressive policy toward the North.
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After North Korea torpedoed and sank a South Korean naval warship, the Cheonan, in March, killing 46 sailors, South Korean opinion was sharply split, with a large number of young people not believing the official government-led report that found Pyongyang responsible for the attack.
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But North Korea's Nov. 23 attack on Yeonpyeong island, which killed two civilians as well as two soldiers, might be narrowing that divide.
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"The older generation was educated with the anti-Communist focus," Byun said. "But people in their 20s, we've gone to high school and university under the government's sunshine policy. I think the gap was very vivid during the Cheonan sinking. But the country is unified now."
In another part of the city, where a group of octogenarian Korean War veterans gathered Monday for their monthly buffet lunch followed by a chat in the next-door coffee shop, the talk was much the same - about the latest North Korean provocation, the government's response and South Korea's youth.
Lee Chong-sik, 81, a retired lieutenant colonel who still carries shrapnel in his back from the 1950s war, said the policy of outreach to the North "ruined" many of South Korea's youth.
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The older Koreans also spoke in bitter terms about South Korea's education system, which they said failed to inculcate young students in the threat the country faced. Before the end of military rule in South Korea, extreme anti-communism was a staple of classrooms. But conservative critics complain that under South Korea's new democracy, anti-communism has been replaced by "leftist" teaching that plays down the threat from the North.
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One of the evils of liberalism is that it teaches people that a snake may be tamed so that it will not bite if you talk to it nicely. After the strike everyone knows a snake is a snake and North Korea is the enemy that wants to enslave them.
Image via Wikipedia
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