Lee Mi-han, an 11th grader at Georgetown Day School in Maryland and great-granddaughter of the Korean language scholar Jung In-seung, was selected to read an essay on freedom at the dedication ceremony for the war criminal Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois. Lee earned the honor by taking first place in C-SPAN’s Lincoln Essay Contest; entrees had to deal with “a new birth of freedom” in the 21st century and be no longer than 272 words, the length of Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburg Address. Anyway, her essay can be read in its entirety over at C-SPAN’s contest page. The Chosun Ilbo piece, meanwhile, talks a little about Lee’s great-grandfather, who put together Korea’s first dictionary and spend three years in jail after the “Korean Language Society Incident” of 1942.
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12 Comments
Mistakenly left out the link for above.
http://victorhanson.com/articl.....l2005.html
anonymous224:
“no reference to Iraq or Afghanistan,”
Whoa, read more carefully. There is an Iraq reference, but it is pretty neutral anyway.
Not that great…call me a Neoconzionistbushitlerflunkie if you will, but Brett Brown’s (1st Prize winner. You might have to scroll down) essay was superior in every way.
This doesn’t count?
http://japanese.chosun.com/sit.....00088.html
Oldest Chosun language dictionary found.
Third edition published Apr. 10, 1930.
Brett Brown’s essay is inferior in every way.
I didn’t like Mihan’s Lee’s at first either, but after reading through the majority of the 1st prize essays, hers definitely stands out. She makes no pretentions to being a great (and brainwashed) citizen of the (American) world who needs to bring the torch of freedom to lesser countries. Read all the essays; the majority of them carry this very banal, pseudo-artistic, and pretentious point depicting America as savior and glorious guardian of Freedom. Hers is cautious, honest, and personal — no reference to Iraq or Afghanistan, no Bush bashing or praising, no red, white, and blue, no bald eagles attached.
The Georgetown Day School is in the District of Columbia (Washington, DC), not Maryland.
Mr. Marmot. I side with Sherman on this one. One of the greatest generals we ever produced. When he said “War is hell”., he did not mean it as a light remark. His march through Georgia probably ended the war two years earlier than it otherwise would have. And if Lincoln had truly been a war criminal, the Army would have been setting up extermination camps for former confederate officers, their families, and other supporters of the southern regime. As it was, his successors allowed them to slip back into the fold with their old attitudes intact, thus setting the stage for disenfanchisement of the newly freed slaves.
p.s. It’s nice to see that a Lee won it. A fine old Virginia name, that.
As a further illustration of my point above, I just came across this historical comment about Sherman. Perhaps an echo of what Sherman would say were he still around to post a comment on this blog.
Q: I greatly enjoyed “The Soul of Battle”. However, I would like you to address Mr. Buchanan?€™s critique (?€œWhere the Right Went Wrong?€?) of Sherman as a ?€œmoral monster?€? who spoke of a ?€œfinal solution to the Indian problem?€?. This is, of course, after Uncle Billy made his trek across the South. How do you reason with American policy towards the Plains Indians? Was Sherman immoral in his muscular approach?
Hanson: What Sherman said and did were often quite different both in Georgia and the frontier; as I recall his remarks about the Indians, he felt assimilation was the only answer and championed it as much as possible, especially education and agriculture on the reservation. Today, of course, his stance is illiberal, but at the time, his notion of paternalism was not as extreme as some since it was based on the idea that the Indian could only survive by emulating his conquerors and becoming one with him, at least in protected enclaves on the reservation.
Only a few hundred died in Georgia and he sought to mitigate the killing at Bentonville, the last battle of the war, so the notion of the ?€œmonster?€? Sherman arose over the hurt of the plantation classes and their fury at seeing stately work of decades put to the torch. Sherman answered that it made no sense to kill young white boys, poor and without slaves, in Virginia while the slaveholding architects of that slaughter remained sacrosanct behind the lines.
Good job, Marmot, exposing the Great Dictator.
More one of America’s most sinister ex-presidents (with Wilson and Carter) can be found at the King Lincoln Archive.
That last sentence should begin “More on one of…” and Truman should be included in the list.
anonymous224: Call me old fashioned, but i prefer essay’s (or speaches) not to be so caught up with personal details, as her’s clearly is. They tend to loose some of the strenght with time. Imo of course.
I agree. Plus, just maybe, for something to do with Lincoln, it would have been nice if there were more to do with Lincoln in the speech and less to do with a Korean figure. Call me old-fashioned.