Indeed, history can easily turn into a battlefield for ugly ideological fights. The right-wing Park Chung-hee administration (1961-79), for example, ruthlessly persecuted the families and relatives of former Communist collaborators during the Korean War. The left-wing Roh administration (2003-08) did the same thing, only on the opposite side; left-wing politicians used history to condemn and prevail over their political foes. Like a modern-day witch hunt, they hunted down their political opponents’ ancestors and published a huge list of people who were pro-Japanese during Korea’s colonial era.