I'm through being nice. Time to be direct and not pull punches.
This is in response to the comments of "Keaton" on my blog. More than that, to be fair, it's a response to all those who basically have followed the same line of argument for the sake of a lame sense of wounded national pride. As the character Marsellus Wallace said in Pulp Fiction, "Fuck pride."
Oh, yeah. This is a rant and I want to print it white-hot, without pausing to edit and delete. It's a rant, but a reasoned one. I'm emotional, but only because certain people can't seem to see logic, no matter how obvious and reasonably presented.
So I'm a bit out of character here, but I think it's about time.
And please, please actually read my blog before criticizing it based on a single post.
Required Reading:
"On 'Korean Blood,' Social Policy, and the Dangers of Race-Based Nationalism"
Why the Metropolitician Isn't "Nice"
Why Be Critical?
Reality Check
Supplementary Reading:
Thoughts on Minjok and The Matrix
The Gates of the Minjok
Update to the Minjok Post
Blast from My Past: "Black Culture, Not Black People"
Hines Ward: What If?
Where Do Koreans' Ideas about Race Come From?
Hines Ward – Nail on the Head
Korean Folks Don't Like Black People
And to recap, for the sake of convenience, since some people are simply too lazy to actually read what I write:
Point 1: Read what I said, which was a legitimate argument.
Point 2: Yes, I did clearly present a reasonable case for asking questions about possible Korean links to fascist ideas, in which I quote Yi Pomsok's 1948 work Nation and Youth. Let me present that secondary reference in its entirety, so you can go do the primary research, since you seem to be so concerned about the topic. I simply said it was intriguing and worth looking into, which anyone but an intellectual philistine can see simply is. I quote myself here from an early graduate paper I did that made reference to this work:
According to Bruce Cumings, “in the 1930s, Yi had studied European corporatist and Fascist youth groups,” and upon returning to Korea in 1946, began organizing youth into groups around the slogan “Nation first, state first.” The German pedigree of his extreme ideas about the relationship between race and nation were clearly expressed in his polemical work Nation and Youth, written in 1948. His central organizing principle was that of hyul-tong (“blood”) as the “racial essence” that would be the backbone of Korean identity. Here, it is worth quoting Cumings directly, where he describes Yi’s dogmatic thinking:
"He urged a pan-national Korean solidarity based on racial purity: “the Nation is the race and the race is the nation.”... Talk of “Racial essence” and “blood-lines”... for him was the key characteristic defining Korea, and the essential element in its corporate and organic unity. As for the mind and spirit, he thought only the strongest national consciousness (minjok uisik) could save Korea from predatory great powers. He lived in the era of “the masses,” he said, and therefore leaders must know “understand and love” the masses, always be among them and never separate from them. One race, one blood, one nation, one state, and inseparable unity between leaders and led would create “a great family” that would endure."
From: Bruce Cumings,” The Corporate State in North Korea,” in State and Society in Contemporary Korea, pp. 223-224
Point 3: Arguments aren't "impartial." They are by definition "partial." They are making a point. Your seventh-grade, student newspaper understanding of "objectivity" obviously has been confused in your mind with "having no opinion." One looks at the available facts and constructs an idea of what happened, a theory. One looks at new evidence and changes said theory. Even an "impartial" judge finally has to make a judgement based on the available evidence. What the hell are you talking about?
Point 4: Fuck my "moral standpoint." What the hell does that mean? I look at facts and reasonable theories, not how I "want to feel" or how I want things to be. This is what leads to real academic work being done. If you were so concerned about morality, then you'd actually be interested in knowing when aspects of your own culture are in fact deeply, deeply immoral and possibly dangerous. And you'd know, Mr. Morality, about the fact that yes, Koreans have lined up innocents and taken their lives in cold blood. As an American, I make it my duty to know, as deeply as I am able, about the legacy of slavery, theft of Indian land and associated acts of genocide, the invasion of the Phillipines, the actions of American soldiers at My Lai, or the torture of prisoners at Abu Graib.
You question my sense of historical morality? And you purposely exclude Korea's actions in Vietnam from your affected sense of supreme victimhood? Fuck you – how dare you be so historically ignorant and attempt to castigate me for such in the same breath?
Oh? And you have laid down your supreme judgement that I "have repeatedly shown biased sentiment against Korea?" Are you the supreme arbiter of Korean truth?
Well, I say you "have repeatedly shown the inability to separate reason from emotion" and don't have the academic or intellectual sense God gave a wet-behind-the-ears university freshman.
How dare you say I haven't shown "the minimal respect we deserve as a fellow human race for the people and country whom you are criticizing?"
Goddammit, how much I want to curse and spew expletives all over the page. But I have students I teach and want to hold myself back.
You're obviously an idiot who 1) is illogical, and 2) doesn't know his own country's history – and I quote:
"It is also impartial in that you consider idea of Nazi's "racial purity" and Korean's concept of "단일민족" is the same ideology, But you simply disregard the facts (even though you are already aware of it) that
- Race and Minjok is not the same idea, and it has a very different nuiances although foreigners keep making mistake of using it interchaneablely.
- Historically, there never have been Koreans stood for idea of ruling and killing other races in the name of Mijok ideology.
- Even though Nazi stands for idea of "evil murderer" and Korean's 민족주의 stands for idea of "victim", you are simply implying that you coudn't care less on this perspective."
Let me address this and be done with it.
I'm not an idiot. I speak Korean and have studied the hanmun enough to make the reasonable assertion that yes, the term minjok is indeed often used to mean "race" in context. I understand the nuances enough to know the difference between minjok and injong and inryu. I quote a previous post:
In fact, even the very notion of "minjok" (민족) – which in Korean is used to alternatively mean "people" or "race" or "ethnicity" all at the same time, and is analogous to the German term "Volk" – did not exist before just about 1900 (which you can learn more about from Andre Schmid's amazingly helpful book Korea Between Empires) when the Chinese term "民族" (민족) started being applied to the newly formed Japanese idea of a society-as-extended-family. The Chinese characters as they appeared together had never been used to refer to the Korean people specifically, in the way that it is used today. When you historicize the concept (one which most Korean people extends back to the mythical 5,000 years when bears, caves, and garlic supposedly created the "Korean people"), it usually breaks down under scrutiny, as they do in just about any society that has created such false social constructions. Many Koreans and Japanese think their own countries to be exceptional cases – and many Westerners buy into these countries' self-orientalized myth of their' "true" racial "purity" – but these two countries are no more racially or culturally "pure" than is American culture, which is an amalgam of so many more distinct cultures that came together with the force and violence that characterizes American history.
And on the other idiotic points:
- Koreans have indeed killed for ideology (open a book in Korean, written about Korean war crimes in Vietnam, or these links here and here and here and in Korean here – God – have you ever read anything other than a Ministry of Education-approved textbook?).
- You don't have to be a nation of mass murderers for nationalism to be considered "dangerous." And the definition of "dangerous" doesn't have to be limited to rounding up Jews and gassing them with Zyklon B in fake shower rooms. How about the treatment of foreign workers here in Korea? Or the behavior of Korean companies against domestic workers in the countries they place their factories?
- So kill that bullshit about Korea only being the "victims" and a "defensive" nationalism. If you actually understood the historical lessons of the Nazi era and the Holocaust – historical lessons that the rest of the civilized world at least goes through the motions of "getting" – you'd know that even the Nazi's nationalism was rooted in the idea of being the "victim" of the Treaty of Versailles after WWI. Even the Japanese have constructed a supreme "victim ideology." The Hutu murdered millions of Tutsis in Rwanda because of their victimology-based anger at having been the less favored ethnic group vis a vis the Belgians. Now, before you go jumping the gun and saying I'm comparing Koreans with mass murderers, let me again remind you that I'm giving this examples to shoot down your defense that Korean nationalism is a "defensive" and "victim"-based one. My point is that even the worst cases of nationalism in the world were perceived as "defensive" and coming from an experience of perceived "victimhood." So please – learn some history and think about what you're saying before raising the Great Shield of the Victim. No one's saying that Korea wasn't a victim; I'm just saying that having been a victim doesn't inoculate you against victimizing others. In fact, usually, quite the opposite is true, as we see in the tracking of even say child abuse; most child abusers were once the victims when they were themselves children. And look at the ultimate irony, as we see the state of Israel's treatment of Palestinians. Having been a victim doesn't give you a "get-off-the-hook-free" card in the moral calculus of taking responsibility for one's actions and rationalizing beliefs.
Dammit – I hate talking about this again and again, discussing the same basic points with the intellectually-challenged who don't even bother to read the damn blog before ranting indignantly on and on and on.
I know – I should be more charitable, be polite, and keep my patience as the host of this blog. But I'm sick of repeating myself, so I've said it, with the kid gloves off, since others want to talk about how I lack respect for Korea this and need to bow my head to a bunch of nationalist idiots who, if they loved their country so damned much, would crack a book or two outside of the government's approved curriculum and look the complex reality of a non-perfect society (where is there a perfect one in the world, right?) in the eye, instead of crying foul every time some one points out some uncomfortable or that doesn't jibe with the pre-fab, pre-packaged version of reality they learned in high school textbooks?
God – I think it's time to do my dissertation in peace and non-Internet silence, leaving the blogging to all the people who want Korea to be nothing more to foreigners than the Yongin Folk Village, Kyongbuk Palace, and Insadong.
Pass the insam cha and get me my camera! I think I'd just rather play the tourist and play dumb. All this social commentary and trying to have a reasoned dialogue is for the birds.
Or at least, apparently, a Koreans-only sport.
