Kudos to the expat blogosphere!
From original blogging of the book in question, to reporting on all the major websites on the widespread nature of Korean anti-Semitic attitudes, including my "Korea and the Nazis redux" post, for which I was castigated for not only talking about the Nazis and Koreans in the same breath, but for implying that there was *GASP* anti-Semitism in Korea.
From April last year, which itself was from a string of posts on the subject that runs back to February of that year, but was first really broached in my "Gates of the Minjok" post, which went a little far with the interpretations of the anthems and some of the pageantry (although I don't think the suppositions so far-fetched), but which asked some hard questions about anti-Semitism even then, which were dismissed as mere functions of some reality I was just making up in my head.
Well, vindication's a bitch.
At least if CNN's reporting on it, then I'm not totally crazy, right?
Thanks to the Monnara man, for doing the work and bringing the reality of contemporary Korean anti-Semitic attitudes to light.
Kudos to the Korean blogosphere for whipping things up enough for the Wiesenthal Center to get in on things and demand an apology, which sparked a lame-ass response by the author, which then got Korean Americans up in arms, which got new outlets like CNN to notice:
"The Jews are the invisible force that controls the U.S.," Rhie, a professor of visual arts at Duksung Women's University in Seoul, told The Associated Press. "I wrote the chapter to let people know that you can't understand the U.S. without knowing the Jewish community."
Too bad this professor of visual arts (and not history) isn't knowledgeable enough to realize that this same basic notion lay at the root of much of modern European anti-Semitism, which was worked up into a fever pitch of national scapegoating that was carried out to its deadliest conclusion in National Socialist Germany, manifest in a particular and peculiar kind of ideology that itinerant historian of the Holocaus Daniel Goldhagen calls "eliminationist anti-Semitism."
Basically, if "they" control society, and "they" are the root of all of society's evils (when the economy goes bad, or we lose the big war, etc.), then the logical thing to do is eliminate "them."
And that's a bit of basic history that this visual arts professor, who probably never even took a basic introductory European History course, has likely never heard of.
The real questions: Why is this man making books about history? Why do people accept this man's claims? Why didn't the publisher red-flag these obvious problematic and simplistic stereotypes? What other kinds of distortions and horrible stereotypes are being propagated by his series?
I'd like to read the entries on China and Japan. Anyone up for translating those?
For the full chronology of this whole thing, though, you gotta read The Marmot, of course. The grand mammal of them all.
Dizzam!
Go, Korean expat blogosphere!