History wars: Park's conservative wedge politics

On 5 December, some 14,000 protesters, including unionised workers, who detest the Park Administrations renationalisation of history textbooks, and its labour reforms, rallied in Seoul. This followed an initial protest on 14 November, which drew some 130,000 peoplethe largest antigovernment protest in several yearsand saw violent clashes between protesters and police. Protesters and other critics, who are mostly seen as progressives, argue that the renationalisation of the history textbook system is an attempt to whitewash the legacy of South Koreas conservative elites, including that of Parks own father, former President Park Chung-hee (196379). In the case of Park Chung-hee, two key accounts are at issue: his collaboration with the Japanese colonial forces as an Imperial Japanese officer during the colonial era, and his dictatorship after he seized power in a military coup in 1961, especially under his Restoration (Yushin) system from October 1972 until his assassination in 1979