SINS OF THE FATHER

Shin Ki-nam has resigned as head of South Korea's majority Uri Party because of charges that his father collaborated with the Japanese during the colonial occupation.

Shin has admitted that his father served the Japanese occupiers, and a couple Koreans have come forth to testify that Shin the elder was a nasty piece of work:

Compounding the blow of his belated acknowledgment that his father, Shin Sang-muk, served Japan, two men came forward yesterday to say they were tortured in 1944 by Mr. Shin's father for forming a group and discussing anti-Japanese struggles. They identified Shin Sang-muk as Sergeant Kunio Shigemitsu in the Japanese military police as the official who interrogated and tortured them.

While no one should be held accountable for the sins or crimes of their parents, there's a bit more to this.

I mentioned Shin last week after he made a creepy Orwellian speech about the need to rewrite Korean history to clarify the “dark legacies from the periods of Japanese colonial period and past military rule.”

The call to rewrite history was a rather blatant attempt to force the resignation of opposition leader Park Geun-hye, daughter of the late military dictator Park Chung-hee.

Shin certainly shouldn't have resigned for anything that his father did. But, considering that he was a hypocrite who had lost all credibility, he did the right thing by quitting.