Oooooooook, here we go.
Don't blame me, since I'm just the messenger.
We bloggers monitor who links in to our sites and I just found something very, verrrry interesting – kind of ironic, actually.
And yes – I apologize – I'm going to say the word "Nazi" and "Korea" again in the same breath. I know I vowed to leave this subject alone (and I did); I've just got an interesting postscript for ya'll.
The American National Socialist Movement (American Nazi Party) web site has linked to my site.
When I found this new influx of hits in from another site, then found out that it was the site for a bunch of frickin' Nazis, well, one might say that I was a wee bit disturbed at this fact. I'm not on the links page, thank the Lord, but rather am graced a link to the text "Racial purity and Korean society...Some interesting photographs." That link goes right to my post on "The Gates of the Minjok."
I can only assume that they weren't looking for the pictures I found from the Nazi era, since they were nothing special or unique (I snagged them through Google search); the reasonable assumption is that the pictures they found so "interesting" were the truly unique pictures of Nazi-themed drinking halls in Korea.
Since I'm also sure the American Nazis aren't really surprised that someone else in the world is criticizing Nazi (or any other "pure race") ideology as negative, I don't think I would make the front page of their site for simply saying "Nazi=bad." I'm sure they get that all the time. It must go with the territory of being a self-proclaimed Nazi in 21st century America.
No, they simply found Korean claims of being a "pure" race and the Koreans sitting in bars adorned with swastikas and cute cartoon representations of Adolf Hitler, to use their word, "interesting."
Hey – if that sounds weird or disturbing or you don't like seeing "Nazi" or "Korea" in the same sentence, it's not my fault; if the American Nazi Party is interested in "racial purity and Korean society", as well as the pictures of Korean bars with pictures of Hilter and the hakenkreuze, go ask them. I just find it interesting that they find Korea's notions of racial purity "interesting." Hey – it's not every day that one's site gets linked to from the Nazis, so I thought it worth another blog entry.
Membership open to all those Aryans who "really care for our racial heritage."
And I'm sure they'll see this post, since I've linked to them. I'd rather have them reading this than me writing on their web page. I'd like to keep my interaction with Nazis down to a bare minimum, thank you very much.
To the people who think it somehow inappropriate to talk about a possible similarity/link/echo between the fascist culture of Germany in the 1930's and 40's and South Korea now – sorry, I don't think it's a sin to suggest 1) looking into any possible links between fascist Europe and the birth of modern Korean nationalism, when there are some compelling circumstantial and direct leads to follow, and 2) even if some of the similarities are seemingly superficial, it is certainly appropriate to point them out, especially in the spirit of making non-academic, thoughtful observations, which is the mode in which I have been writing.
I know that some people assume that merely bringing in the word "Nazi" automatically defines an extremist, polemical argument, but I don't share that knee-jerk assumption. Nowhere, if you check, do I call Korea or Korean people "Nazi" in any of my posts, nor do I suggest that Korean folks are actually deeply or directly interested in Nazi ideology.
I merely point out some ironies in terms of many Koreans who see the collective Korean self as a meta-victim of WWII, marked by high sensitivity about colonial occupation still sharpened to the point that if a hapless textbook company somewhere in the US uses the moniker "Sea of Japan," they might get emails and phone calls from VANK or worse – yet there can be actually people left in this very country who can party with swastikas and Nazi paraphernalia on the walls while having a cold one.
The irony stems from that fact, people. If such bars are/were in Japan, the reaction and moral indignation would be very different, given that imperial Japan was on the other side of thing vis a vis the Nazis and dubya-dubya-two.
The basic point is that superficially – and quite possibly more substantially – there are some pretty embarrassing legacies of early 20th-century thinking about race, nation, genes, Social Darwinism, and more general terms of national subjectivity that happen to still be quite alive and well in Korea, enabled by a perceived status of victimhood that creates the strangely uncritical mode in which overt expressions of nationalism take place. It also enables, I think, the possibility to not at all see why consuming nostalgia about a country and culture that nearly wiped an entire group of people out of Western Europe wouldn't even cross people's minds as an inappropriate place to kick back and have a few laughs.
And no, I don't think is my mere American ethnocentrism or high-saddle indignation. To postulate another theoretical, if this were a struggling, undeveloped country, no one would be pointing fingers. But Korea is a nation that goes to great lengths to make itself be taken seriously in the rest of the world, consciously and deliberately utilizes the terms "globalization" and "internationalization" to describe national goals, and is very, very sensitive about how it is represented in other countries and culture.
Place on top of this the way that Jewish expressions of historical victimhood have been used by Korean nationalists as an ideological stepstool for establishing Korean victimhood, and this becomes doubly ironic. Take, for example, this quote from Jo Jung-rae, nationalist novelist extraordinaire, translated by Antti over at his site:
How many Jews were killed by the Hitler government of Germany during the Second World War? According to the Jews the number was three or four million. [Try six million Jews, twelve million people in total, actually. - Met]
So how many of us Koreans were massacred and killed by the Japanese during the 36 years of Japanese colonialism? Is it three million? Or four million? Or is it six million? Unfortunately that estimate has not been made public or official. My estimate is between three and four million. With the writing of Arirang, I am going to make that figure concrete.
That task is one of the objectives of writing Arirang. With the fact that three or four million of us Koreans were killed by the Japanese, I'll present a question to the readers and to the whole nation.
A school class of 60 children are getting five lashes on their palms. Which child of the 60 feels the most pain? I have made this question to several people, and all have immediately answered that it's the first child. But it's a wrong answer. The correct answer is the last child. It is because the first child is freed of the fear of lashing after receiving the strokes and can be at peace while the other children are lashed.
However the 60th child has to feel the fear each time the children before him are lashed.
A hint for this answer can be found also in a proverb. "The one who is caned first is the luckiest."
The Jews were killed on for three years, but Koreans were killed during a period of more than ten times of that, 36 years. Which people suffered more?
Even though we suffered horrors ten times more than the Jews, how is it possible that we still don't know many of us Koreans died?
And how do we feel the tragedy of another people, Jews, as if it was our own and detest the German army while wanting to avoid talking about own tragedy, forgetting and avoiding it? Was it because the times were different? Or was it different?
When naked Jewish girls were dying in gas chambers, the girls of our people were getting gang raped in Southeast Asian jungles as troop following corps in a similar manner. So how have we become such ignorant masses?
We have been subjected to two kinds of mass hypnosis. First, we have been hypnotized by the Jews who have made numerous novels, movies and TV dramas to tell about their suffering for the whole world. Second, we have been hypnotized by the pro-Japanese, who seized every sphere of the society after the liberation and with their organized plot have made the talk about Japanese occupation sound ignorant and stupid.
Jews have maximized their suffering and while securing their self-esteem, and have used it as a power to develop their future. In reverse to them, we have been guilty of living in shame. But to know the history correctly, nothing is too quick or too late. Because nation is immortal.
July 1994, Jo Jung-rae.
Well, it seems that this author needs his own history lessons, as well as a closer look at some of the other problematic aspects of the way he looks at the Holocaust and the Jews, but even he would agree that indeed, the Holocaust and the Nazi experience is more than just German history. It is rather a lesson for humanity and is a consistent part of any world history curriculum I've ever seen, so if "Korea" wants to see itself as a major player in the world and receive recognition as such – the 인정 people always talk about in the Korean language – then I'm gonna give Korean people crap for sitting around having a stout under pictures of Hitler.
Perhaps it's because Korea "suffered horrors ten times more than the Jews?" Do Koreans generally think that "Well, even with all that gassing and medical experiments and it only added up to a few million Jews?! Man, we survived our own Korean Holocaust, and we came out ok. So it's ok to have a brewskie in a Nazi theme bar." Obviously, this is a facetious, rhetorical question – but what's the explanation? It's a question worth asking.
This is the true global stance through which my gaze at Korea is presently fixed, and I'd say the same if I were intimately connected to and cared about any other host culture I found myself in, whether it be Peru, France, Malaysia, or Mexico. Overt celebration of Nazi nostalgia and behavior that rings strongly with the original spirit of the how the ancient system of the fasces became modern "fascism" – the bundle of many rods tied together by force to form a single, deadly tool – just isn't cool and shouldn't be considered acceptable.
The way I see it, standing by and saying "Well, it's just Korea – leave it alone. They don't know any better" is the true insult, the ultimate condescension.
Alternatively, a Korean person saying "We're ignorant of the outside world and shouldn't be expected to know any better" is a pretty dishonest copout and lame excuse when considering the fact that many Koreans bristle when they are treated according to that very logic.
And saying "How dare you bring up Nazis? That's beyond the pale!" is simply an intellectually dim and dogmatic question/response.
I say, if done intelligently and with an eye to historical and social context, "Why not?"
Especially if the Nazi Party of America seems to find this talk of Korea's "racial purity" and pictures of Korean Nazi theme bars "interesting," isn't it about time to be a little embarrassed?
