Archives Historical Memory - Page 12 of 12 - New Eastern Outlook

On September 2018 French President Macron admitted that France had committed war crimes in the Algerian War for Independence that lasted from 1954 to 1962. He acknowledged, as just a single example, the torture of FLN member, Maurice Audin, a communist, who, after being tortured was executed by French military forces, at the age of 25.  Married with three children, he, like many others, disappeared during the Battle of Algiers. A few months earlier, as a presidential candidate, Macron described colonialism as a crime against humanity, but not much later ruled out any chance of reparations…

History is the most interesting subject for many reasons. Not the least of which is the fact it tends to repeat itself. And the fact that some are doomed by ignorance of this is an important lesson for today. Take German tanks, for instance. First, let’s rehash a little history about the steppes of Russia and Eastern Ukraine and unlearned lessons. From the 5th of July 1943 until the 23rd of August 1943, the largest tank battle in history took place in what became known as the “Kursk Salient,” an area that stretched from the tiny town of Kirov on the Bolva River in the north, through Belgorod in…

Review of the book The Koreas: The Birth of Two Nations Divided by Theodore Jun Yoo

In 2023, the book The Koreas: The Birth of Two Nations Divided by South Korean Professor Theodore Jun Yoo was published in Russian. It was praised in the West as “a rare multidisciplinary study of the two Koreas from the division of the peninsula in 1945 to the present time.” There are very few popular science books on Korea, and the application of content analysis to the book already suggests that the author considers the inhabitants of the DPRK and the ROK as belonging to different nations. This is, to put it mildly, a bold assertion, especially if one recalls the definition of a nation in both Soviet and Russian scholarship. Who is Theodore Jun Yoo? He is an associate professor in the Department of Korean Language and Literature at Yonsei University, and this is not his first book…