Perhaps one has to feel it in one's skin, deep within, what extreme rulers and totalitarian regimes do to a human being. It's not a matter of good or bad, it goes beyond that, as I who have lived half of my life in a ruthless dictatorship cannot possibly begin to describe what one feels and what damages this kind of system brings about in the long-run. It's not merely total lack of freedom, where one can end up in prison and tortured for twenty years, but whole generations are marked by it, as it warps the character of many social groups which in turn results in a dysfunctional society for so many years to come and that cannot simply be forgotten, no matter how hard you try.

Ines

Nor am I saying that we shouldn't live the present; it's just that having the past always with oneself helps prevent mistakes in the history of every country from happening over and over again. And any progress or scientific discovery that comes with such high a cost is not worth it.

I can speak only for my own experience and I can positively say that one ends up only with human beings devoid of any true values and this is the bottom line; life in the present is very hard because of what these human beings, if they can be still called such, have become.

You can't imagine what lack of democracy can do.

Ines     

South Korea used to teach its teenagers with a single government-issued modern history textbook. But in 2003, to encourage diversity in historical views, the government approved six privately published history textbooks for high school use.

Ever since, the textbooks have drawn criticism from conservatives, sharpening the larger debate in South Korea over how to appraise past leaders....

The facts no one disputes are that, at the end of World War II, the Soviet military swept into northern Korea and installed a friendly Communist government while a U.S. military administration assumed control in the south.

But then the high school textbook takes a direction that is raising hackles among conservatives. It argues that the Japanese occupation was followed not by a free, self-determining Korea, but by a divided peninsula dominated once again by foreign powers.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/17/asia/textbook.php