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Notes -
Also, wow.
Is there any reasonable, by Western classical-liberalism standards, justification for this? Short of an external military crisis, it’s awfully hard for my American mind to think of a reason.
Yeah, it doesn’t sound like he bothered with an actual excuse. If there was some NK activity or scandal in recent months, it sure didn’t make American news.
More justifiable than Roosevelt's camps. In the past North Korea already managed to conquer all but a tiny sliver of South Korea and there is credible scenario where Seoul is reduced to rubble, with the repeat of the Pusan situation. When Roosevelt carted off every man, woman, and child of the wrong ethnicity into concentration camps, Japan hadn't yet managed to control all the continental US, sans Florida, and only those suffering from war hysteria thought demolition of DC by Japanese forces was within the realm of possibilities.
Yet despite Japan posing a much lesser threat to the US than North Korea does to the South one, enacting policies much more totalitarian than ones enacted by the current South Korean president wasn't enough to make US Americans consider FDR anything but a very examplar of a Western classical-liberal. This is shown by US American experts of US American history (1), holding him in very high regard. Thus not only is FDR loved by experts in the relevent field, he is also loved by the sufficently historically informed supporters of classical-liberalism.
(1) Given that the supporters of the US Democratic Party, the US party of classical-liberalism, are so greatly overrepresented, any ranking by US historians will, unless corrected for as in 1982 Murray–Blessing, inevitably be ranking by classical-liberals, with only token influence of believers in other political ideologies.
Uh…
How does a totalitarian act by an American justify an act by a Korean? They can both be unjustified.
I suppose I’d also expect suspending civilian government to lead to interment, etc., while the converse is less likely.
And “high regard” doesn’t make someone an “exemplar” of something. A lot of those classical liberals probably think Che was pretty cool, too.
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Well remember, South Korea has only been a democracy for like 40 years, they had a military dictatorship until the early 1980s.
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