The ‘Memory of War’ and the ‘War of Memory’

Abstract

War change most of human beings, destroying existence of human beings, devastating dignity of human beings. Ironically, war is the result of the conflict among political ideologies that these sets of things lead human beings to the better world. Considering that war is politics which lasts by other means, The Korean War represents Cold War, and people in south and north korea experienced the most extreme and violent scene. While “memory of war” only belongs to the people who experienced war, “war of memory” can be shared by the generations who had not experienced war. “War of memory” is a structured discourse which descended or related to war. Both “memory of war” and “war of memory” affect each other, forming a set of discourse. While “memory of war” is based on the storytelling of war veterans, the storytelling forms “war of memory”, which, as time goes by, makes itself more ardent war discourse than “memory of war”. Furthermore, even people who experienced war seems to structurize his experience as “War of memory” in his brain. In other words, his experience of war slides into the common discourse, “War of memory”. Because memory is not an identification device, which, regardless of social context, interprets or cognizes facts of the past by itself. It is always problematic that how positive and reasonable this common ownership of war is. Thereby problem is that “War of memory” is a consensus decision ; common memory which are socially stalled memory. So experience of an individual is memorized not by himself but by the tendency. The storytelling of war experiencing, not “War of memory” but “memory of war”, is on the core of a problem posing.