Kim Dae-jung

August 8th, 1963, a group of 15 robbers boarded a British mail train and stole 2.6 million pounds in used bank notes.

August 8th, 1973, future South Korean President Kim Dae-jung is kidnapped from his hotel room in Tokyo.

August 8th, 2010, mudslides hit Zhouqu County in China's Gansu Province, causing loss of life and relocation in the area.

See how easy it is? You can even try this at home.

Slowly over time, testimonies of South Korean soldiers admitting to committing crimes or being the witness to them or hearing people talk about them began to trickle out, especially to non-Korean researchers who were free to look into them.

But really, in Korea, they only began to enter the public consciousness in 1999, leading to a very soft acknowledgement of Korean war crimes by the head of state at the time in 2001, Kim Dae-jung.

But his statement, as backpedaled and soft as it was, and he was not admitting to war crimes, let's be clear here.

He just said, like, it's regrettable what happened here, that kind of thing.

And labeling the government's opponents as communists was the MO for the Jeon Do-hwan administration.

The list of victims include a very prominent liberal figure, Kim Dae-jung, who later became the country's president and won a Nobel Peace Prize.

Yeah, they did everything they could to keep him away from the presidency, and ultimately he prevailed.

Even influential figures like that couldn't escape the crackdown of the military government.

The ultimate final test of civilian control has to be when the military is forced to obey someone they actively despise, someone telling them to implement a policy that goes against their fundamental worldview.

And South Korea faced exactly that test in 1998 with the inauguration of President Kim Dae-jung.

Kim Dae-jung wasn't just another civilian politician.

He was the dissident.

I mean, this is a guy the military regimes had kidnapped, imprisoned, and literally sentenced to death at one point.

[laughs]

But beyond the incredibly fraught personal history, it was his geopolitical strategy that really tested the military's obedience.

Kim Dae-jung implemented what became known as the Sunshine Policy.