The times they are achangin'...

Having lived in Seoul off and since I was a teenager, I remember when studying Marx (except for the Brothers) would have gotten you jail time and therefore was done in secret commie klatches.

Nowadays, though Marxism is widely discredited, I saw this chinboista event advertised openly in public downtown and here at Ewha University.

My own take on Marx (since we necessarily study him in the field of sociology, even if not all of us revere him) is that his diagnosis was largely correct but his prescription was way off base.

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Lost girls, ten years later

The deaths of two middle school girls who were run over by US military vehicles in a rural farming village in 2002 sparked massive protests and became yet another focal point in what had been an orgy of anti-US sentiment.

The parade of catalysts started when South Koreans felt they were dissed when ROK speed skater Kim Dongsung was disqualified at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics when an overacting Apolo Ohno "faked" being fouled and was given the gold instead.

It then went into high gear when then President George W. Bush referred to North Korea as part of the "Axis of Evil" and then proceeded with plans to invade one of them. Prior to that, South Koreans had been lulled into believing that the strong ROK-US alliance was an effective deterrence to a North Korean invasion, meaning there would be no new war on the peninsula, but now the US president had South Koreans sh¡tting their pants that he himself was going to start Korean War II.

It took a break with the 2002 Korea/Japan World Cup, a month-long party that saw the Korea Republic national team go far beyond the country's wildest dreams. But then, in the lead up to the presidential election in December, the pro-Pyongyang leftists sought to find that the issue (or combination of issues) that would resonate with the public and usher an anti-USFK candidate into Seoul's Blue House. [If you haven't read my piece on the pro-Pyongyang nature of South Korea's far left chinboistas, including how they manipulated the Mad Cow Disease issue, please do so.]

Roh Moohyun's presidency was the indirect result of all this, but he turned out to be more pro-American than anyone expected. Still, the angry reaction by much of the citizenry beyond the chinboistas was a turning point in US-Korea relations (in many positive ways).

The ten-year anniversary of the deaths of Shim Misun (Shim Misŏn, 심미선) Shin Hyosun (Shin Hyosūn, 신효순) is the subject of well written posts at Popular Gusts, ROK Drop, and The Marmot's Hole.

As I wrote at Popular Gusts, it's disgusting the way the leftist chinboistas have used the two girls' deaths for their pro-Pyongyang, anti-Seoul, and especially anti-USFK aims. At the same time, however, the reaction on the other side is also very unseemly. Over the years I've seen so many "defenders" of USFK fall over themselves to blame the middle school girls for their own deaths (e.g., they should have been paying attention better, Koreans are always killing each other in traffic accidents, etc., etc.) as if the adults driving the massive military vehicles are blameless.

The USFK convoy was not an "accident" but an accident waiting to happen. They were large vehicles on small roads (if I remember correctly, the girls would have had to jump into a ditch to avoid them) operating with broken radio equipment that made it difficult to impossible to communicate from one vehicle to the other that there were pedestrians in the roadway. The military personnel were operating on so little sleep that they had made complaints to their commanders about it prior to the accident.

Matt at Popular Gusts is correct that the eventual court martial was politically motivated, and the tragedy of that is not that the two men went on trial, but that the wrong men went on trial. There was criminal negligence at work, but probably not by those two.

But neither side really wants to sully their purer-than-thou argument. One side wants to blame evil USFK and the other side wants to blame hysterical Koreans.

At least we are seeing some real improvement that might prevent such things from happening again. The roads have been improved, and according to this article, the convoys have a USFK member sitting on top to watch for pedestrians, but even the ROK military still runs around there recklessly.

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Daily Kor for Tuesday, May 29, 2012

President Lee has grown a pair, openly denouncing those chinboistas who romanticize the North (and make excuses for it) while condemning the South. If you want to know how I feel about the chinboistas and the damage they can cause as dupes doing Pyongyang's bidding, go here.

1. ROK President Lee Myungbak slams pro-Pyongyang groups, urging South Koreans not to fall for North Korean propaganda (UPI, Yonhap, Korea Times, Korea Herald, Joongang Daily)
2. South Korea's state-sponsored National Human Rights Commission publishes extensive report, based on hundreds of defectors' testimony, providing details of North Korea's brutal prisons (UPI, CNN)
3. Associated Press reporters visit drought-stricken areas of P'yŏng-an Province as North Korea says lack of rainfall during planting season threatens food supply (AP via WaPo, Yonhap)
4. Amidst crackdown on "illegal aliens" from North Korea, China will grant 20,000 work visas to North Koreas in three border provinces or Jilin, Liaoning, and Heilongjiang (Chosun Ilbo)
5. Seoul Metropolitan Government to give 1 million won/child in childbirth subsidies to parents with disabilities (Yonhap)
6. Public daycare subsidies to be expanded to part-time workers and stay-at-home parents (Joongang Daily)
7. Nobel laureate in economics to teach at Seoul National University (Korea Times, Korea Herald)
8. ROK Army captain indicted for obscenity-laced denouncement of President Lee (Korea Times, Korea Herald)
9. In move to shore up support for Pyongyang regime, official North Korean hagiography amended to include story that Great Leader Kim Ilsung excreted Mt Paektusan into existence (KCNA)

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Why do South Koreans protest against the US and Japan, but not China and North Korea?

This is a good question, asked recently at One Free Korea and echoed at ROK Drop, in the wake of China sending back nine North Korea defectors to the DPRK, where their fate is almost certainly imprisonment, torture, and even death.

I will polish the following up sometime later, but for now the following is the response I left at ROK Drop.

Anger toward China has been growing as Beijing becomes more brazen against South Korea, to the point where South Koreans no longer feel they have to go along to get along with China because even going along isn't working; China is clearly intent on making South Korea its whipping boy and a proxy for anger against the state. Consequently, there are more and more protests against China, commensurate with the brazenness of the acts and the perception that China is a bad actor.

That said, if the tendency of protesting against the US and Japan but not against China and North Korea holds true, it's for several reasons.

First, it is the North-sympathizing chinboista fringe that is behind many of the protests, which leads to regular protests about anything against the US, as well as a coordinated boots-on-the-ground effort in the case of something big (like killing nine South Koreans) regarding the US, South Korea, the ROK government, or a major corporation (they are also anti-corporate and anti-ROK government, in addition to anti-US and anti-Japan).

Second, for mainstream Koreans, there is a perception that the United States and, to a lesser degree, Japan are "supposed to be on our side" and thus held to a different (usually higher) standard. South Koreans will protest against Japanese textbooks watering down the occupation but not against Chinese textbooks that claim South Korea invaded the North on June 25, 1950.

Finally, there had been a perception, related to the second one, that protesting against China or North Korea was futile. Not so with the US and Japan, since they are ostensibly both allies and the ROK government can be persuaded vis-à-vis its relationship with Washington and Tokyo.

This last point is largely changing, however, as the aforementioned anger toward China grows.

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Oh, those poor misunderstood pro-North Korean activists in South Korea

[source]

The Huffington Post has a piece (via Global Post) about those in South Korea who find themselves under scrutiny or under arrest for publicly mourning Kim Jong-il and/or doing other things sympathetic to the North:

"The main problem is that our country was divided by an outside force. We need American forces to withdraw from this country to gain true autonomy. That is the most important thing, not freedom or democracy. Those are secondary," said Kim, who speaks effusively and uses many old-fashioned Korean honorifics.

On his lapel, he wears a pin of the Korean peninsula shaded entirely in blue, a color associated with integrity.

Kim draws inspiration from the philosophy of North Korea's founding father, Kim Il Sung, who preached the notion of self-reliance and said that Koreans were the masters of their country's development. Much of the North's propaganda is based on the idea that the country must resist the corrupting influence of the outside world and boldly forge an independent path.

To activists like Kim, this is paramount. "North Korea has its own final say. It doesn't have to follow the direction of outsiders. I don't believe freedom exists in this colonized nation," he said, referring to South Korea.

The problem is that such people utterly ignore the unspeakable human rights abuses that go on in North Korea. Well, some don't ignore them so much as deny that they actually happen: it's a fiction of the propaganda forged by the colonizers. The economic dysfunction is real, of course, but that's all because of the United States and its bootlickers with their boycott of DPRK goods.

But North Korea's systemic cruelty doesn't really get covered in the HuffPo article, which wants to make a point about free speech as if there isn't a major military threat from a regime responsible for killing millions of its own people. I guess what the author is calling "pro-North activists" I would call hard-core chinboistas, and we appear to disagree on how much of a danger they are.

I risk invoking argumentum ad hitlerum, but when get into millions killed, the comparison is apt: How are people who praise Hitler treated in, say, Germany?

Anyway, it's not so simple. It certainly seems a bit more complex than the tourist-journalists at the Huffington Post seem able to handle.

Below, by the way, is the comment I left at the Huffington Post site. I'm reproducing it here because, well, about half the comments I leave at HuffPo never make it past the moderators:

The author does address some of North Korea's recent violence, but to a layperson unfamiliar with North Korea, it would be easy to get the impression that North Korea is just another country — a misunderst­ood country at that — and not one that deliberate starves, tortures, and/or murders millions of its citizens and regularly threatens military attack on its neighbors.

This is no mere free speech issue, but one that comes from a context of a real enemy trying to do real harm.

[source]

UPDATE:
Christine Ahn (a favorite Pyongyang parrot) has also penned a Huffington Post piece that echoes similar sentiments, but goes a bit further.
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No beef with Canadians

The big news today may be that Canada will resume exports of under-thirty-month beef to South Korea, something that was stopped in 2003 after a Mad Cow Disease-afflicted bovine from Canada was discovered in the US. Japan also halted such imports, meaning the US and Canada lost two of their top three export markets.

But with Canadian beef returning to Korean supermarkets and restaurants, don't expect major demonstrations and candlelight vigils like we saw in 2008. There will be some handwringing and minor demonstrations, as there were when the FTA with Chile and later with the EU were passed.

That's because, while there will be anger among Hanu Beef producers (there's no frickin' w in 한우!) about further competition from abroad (Australia, the US, and now Canada), the chinboistas do not have much of political value to gain from going after Canada or Canadians. To understand what I'm talking about, read this post from three years ago.

Yup. And that's why no one on the pro-Pyongyang left is really making an attempt to take the murder of a college co-ed by her university lecturer ex-boyfriend from Canada and paint a bigger picture about Canadians in general.

Three things these Canadian cows headed for Korea have in common with Canadian English teachers also headed for Korea: (1) they'll be treated like cattle,  (2) their living arrangements will be about the same size, and (3) they'll have the same number of roommates. 

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(Mostly) free (trade) at last! (Mostly) free (trade) at last!

Well, the way has been cleared for me to vote for President Obama in the 2012 election. Back in 2008, I withheld my vote for him (even though I preferred him over John McCain, who I wish had been the GOP nominee back in 2000) because of how he scapegoated South Korea (and Japan) for part of America's economic woes.

I even vowed that I would end my Democratic Party membership (I'm an Orange Dog Democrat — see sidebar) if Obama and/or any other Democrats were responsible for the Korea-US free-trade agreement (KORUS FTA) failing to be ratified.

He dragged his feet at first, but Obama eventually decided to push the KORUS FTA, but only after insisting on changes (which made everything topsy-turvy and cognitively dissonant for those whose world view was one where it is always the Koreans who can't be trusted to stick to an agreement and it's always the Americans whose word is oak). The SoKos and the Americans finally agreed, and it went to the respective national legislatures. The Republicans, though, were determined to force through less deserving FTAs with Colombia and Panama on the coattails of the FTA with Korea, a move that nearly torpedoed the KORUS FTA.

But it finally passed the US Congress. And then it was the ROK National Assembly's turn to approve it. Numbers-wise, it was a sure thing, but some South Korean parties don't yet understand that democracy means accepting things you don't like when they get passed through a fair and honest vote.

With the "progressives" (a mixture of politicos who genuinely believe the FTA will be bad for Korea and chinboistas who get their marching orders from Pyongyang) threatening to pull out all the stops, things promised to get very ugly before the FTA eventually passed.

But today it all got rammed through, and the FTA has been ratified. However, this is an example of sausage-making that is a downright national embarrassment. From the Marmot's Hole:

The widely expected date of showdown was 24th of this month, when the regular session of the National Assembly was scheduled. (Frankly, I was expecting that the FTA would pass on the 24th as well.) But GNP leadership secretly decided to hold the vote on Nov. 22, at 4 p.m., apparently because GNP received intel that DLP would attempt to occupy the main chamber at the end of the day on the 22nd. Even within GNP, only a select few knew about the d-day.

GNP held an Assemblymen meeting at 2 p.m. regarding the proposed budget, which ended around 3 p.m. Toward the end of the meeting, GNP leadership told its Assemblymen that they would be passing the FTA today. They moved into the main chamber, at which point the vice chairman of the Assembly Jeong Eui-Hwa (to whom chairman Park Hee-Tae delegated his authority while Park was out of town) called for a closed session — which means no one other than Assemblymen (and not journalists, staffers or anyone else) were allowed into the building. There would be no transcript of the proceedings either. The metal gates to the National Assembly building were shuttered, and the police surrounded the building.

Sohn Hak-Gyu, who was notified of the meeting shortly after 3 p.m., arrived at the main chamber around 3:20 p.m., along with 20 Assemblymen from DP, DLP and other minor progressive parties. By 3:50 p.m., there was a quorum of GNP Assemblymen, and the Assembly session began. At this point, DLP’s Kim Seon-Dong made history by detonating a tear gas canister in front of the chairman’s seat. (Photo here.) But after the commotion settled down, the Assembly ratified the FTA and passed the accompanying bills at 4:29 p.m., by the vote of 151 to 7, with 12 abstaining. (There are 299 Assemblymembers.) The abstaining Assemblymen were mostly the GNP members who called for a negotiation with the progressives. No progressive Assemblyman participated in the voting. The entire operation lasted approximately 80 minutes.

They ended up passing the FTA, 151 to 7, with twelve members abstaining. Those 151 are a simple majority of the 299 members of the National Assembly, but it's disturbing that it was handled in such a ham-fisted and heavy-handed way (that's the second time I've gotten to say that today). It stinks of the authoritarianism remarked by Ma Kwangsoo and other critics. A lockout and blackout of media coverage does not inspire confidence or transparency.

But even more disturbing was the wild, wild west tactics of the not-so-loyal opposition. When I said they were ready to pull out all the stops, I meant that they were ready to pull the pin out of a tear gas grenade.

From the New York Times:

Lawmakers of the governing Grand National Party caught the opposition by surprise by calling a snap plenary session. Opposition legislators rushed in but were too late to prevent their rivals from putting the bill to a vote.

In a desperate attempt, one opposition lawmaker detonated a tear gas canister, throwing the National Assembly chamber into chaos. A scuffle erupted, but members of the governing party outnumbered their foes and, while sneezing and wiping tears, passed the deal in a vote of 151 to 7. In the 299-seat National Assembly, 170 members showed up for the vote Tuesday, most of them governing party lawmakers. The opposition members either voted against the bill or abstained.

Glass doors were shattered as legislative aides from the opposition parties tried to barge in, and security guards formed a human barricade.

Un-frickin'-believable. I'd hoped we'd shed that image of Tear Gas City back in the 1990s, but here we have Kim Sŏndong somehow sneaking in such a device and detonating it right in the seat of national power. Really, how utterly lax is security that that kind of thing can happen?!

Were it not for UC Davis campus police spray-painting members of the student body with tear gas just a few days ago, Assemblyman Kim's bonehead move may have left an indelible mark in global news media. Instead, he may be about as memorable as the poo flingers of Kwangju. (They're sorta memorable, but mostly amongst those who follow Korean politics and social issues; the tear gas thing, however, is a much more enduring image, owing to its heavy use during the 1980s and 1990s. If you've never been exposed to it, no words describe its nasty, debilitating effects.)

So, in conclusion, the FTA passed. President Lee is vowing to look into concerns of the opposition (particularly in the agricultural sector), and with any free-trade deal, we must look closely at the results to make sure people on both sides are getting a fair shake and real benefit. There will be some losers in all this, and their respective governments need to make sure they get the help they need, including training and what-not to transition to other jobs.

I'm glad this is all over. It has dragged on for far too long (the FTA was originally signed by former US President George W. Bush and leftist former ROK President Roh Moohyun — with support from his progressives!) and was always the 227-kilogram gorilla in the room, a hurdle that needed to be jumped successfully in order for ROK-US relations to keep growing stronger and stronger. Now we're there, so let's make the most of it.

UPDATE (following day):
The politicians on both sides have apologized for this whole mess, offering deep bows and mian culpas (see how I did that?).

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Free trade at last! Free trade at last! Thank God Almighty, free trade at last!

Well, not so fast.

The Christian Science Monitor notes the very thing I was about to bring up, that ratification of the FTA by the US Congress is only half of the battle that remained. Now we must get the ROK National Assembly to do the same thing. And as they note, even though everybody's favorite leftist president, the surprisingly pragmatic Roh Moohyun, was in favor of the FTA, many in his party are poised to fight against it:

Estimates of the benefits vary widely, but some analysts in Seoul predict Korean exports to the US will go up 5 or 6 percent and two-way trade might increase by $10 billion – though Korea would still have a highly favorable balance.

The fear of a sharp increase in US farm exports, however, was expected to give Korea’s opposition Democratic Party ammunition for protests even though the party supported it while their late leader, Roh Moo-hyun, was president.

The most sensitive issue is the elimination of tariffs on imports of beef and pork. No one forgets the months of rioting in central Seoul in the summer and early fall of 2008 after Lee agreed, at a meeting at Camp David with George W. Bush, to accept American beef imports, banned for the previous five years amid fears of “Mad Cow” disease.

The tariff on beef, now 40 percent, will be lifted by 2026 and the tariff on pork, 25 percent will be eased until it’s lifted in five years.

Nonetheless, the dominant atmosphere in Washington and Seoul was upbeat after all the debate and haggling since the FTA was signed by negotiators from both countries five years ago.

Expect the chinboistas, as usual, to try to whip up anti-Lee and anti-US sentiment in order to torpedo the FTA and cause as much pain and damage to the administration as possible.

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Dropping "Captain America" from Captain America (UPDATED)

source

UPDATE:
Well, it turns out that in Australia they changed one of the taglines in the trailer to make it a little less America-centric.

In the US version, it says, "Heroes are made in America." But in the South Korean trailer, it was changed to, “When evil rises, a hero will stand.”

And since the Korea-bashing kvetchpats — those who saw Paramount's Korea distributors dropping Captain America from the title as a sign that Korea is an underserving, America-hating "ally" and that the US should leave South Korea to be gobbled up by China — are nothing if not fair and balanced, then no doubt we will hear equally loud and angry criticisms of Australia, right? Right?

ORIGINAL POST:
Over at the New York Times, a media reporter tells us that South Korea is one of only three countries (Russia and Ukraine being the other two) where marketers will drop "Captain America" from the title of Captain America: The First Avenger:

South Korea is another story. Although that country is one of Hollywood’s top-performing territories, resentment about the continued presence of the United States military runs deep. Marvel and Paramount worry that those feelings are particularly strong among younger South Koreans, the ones who powered “Iron Man 2” to $27 million in ticket sales in that country last year.

Frankly, this is a journalistically lazy and highly misleading statement. A reader might get the impression that the vast majority of South Koreans feel bitter indignation toward the US military being in their country but perhaps cannot get them to leave. A lingering han moment.

In fact, there is a small segment of South Korean society that feels this way, the chinboistas, and they regularly make their views known through persistent demonstrations that also attack government and corporate policy (with some of them simultaneously overtly or covertly supporting the Pyongyang position). The majority of the population, however, feels something considerably more positive and a bit more complex.

Most South Koreans are appreciative of the US role in helping keep South Korea safe and the region stable. This is sometimes tempered, however, by annoyance when the US military or its personnel are involved in violent crimes or environmental degradation, among other things. And while that sometimes bubbles into angry sentiment amongst the general population, especially if the persistent chinboistas have done their job properly, it is mostly aimed at the individual situation and not USFK presence itself.

Any wisdom to taking "Captain America" off the title of the movie, if in fact that is a wise thing, comes from something else. In fact, there is also a longstanding and persistent impression of American arrogance (which draws resentment when it leads to, say, President Bush pushing its South Korean allies to send troops to Iraq to participate in a war most oppose), even as so many South Koreans see the United States as an ally and a country to aspire to or even stay in for a while (or permanently).

Koreans paying their W10,000 for a movie may get a little tired of seeing America always playing the triumphant victor. Look at how many blockbusters involve some theme like that: Independence Day, Pearl Harbor (though that's sorta unavoidable), even Top Gun. Even The Last Samurai requires an American to come in and tell the 19th century Japanese what's what.

And if you think it's only South Koreans who feel this way, you're sorely mistaken (I can't even count how many times I've had this conversation with my Japanese friends here in Hawaii or Korea).

But so what? South Koreans have just accepted that that's the way Hollywood works. Hollywood also self-corrects, to a degree, with movies like Fahrenheit 911, which did brisk business in Korea in the middle of the last decade. And even the Hollywood films that have an overall positive spin on America, often temper this with the downside of Washington or suburbia or whatever. In fact, that was the theme of another movie with the country's name in the title, American Beauty.

So the NYT columnist has it wrong. Iron Man 2, doesn't have $27 million in South Korean ticket sales despite resentment toward the United States military. Rather, it did well simply because it was good, and because, at heart, South Koreans are generally upbeat on the US (and maybe that's why the response is so harsh when USFK or Washington seems to do them wrong).

And it also helps when South Korea is not depicted by Hollywood as a disease-carrying backwater where Americans should feel free to have sex in Buddhist shrines. If you ever want to lose money on a picture, it's the content, not the title, that you have to worry about. I just hope the Nazi-era Captain America doesn't depict Korea as an ally of Japan. Then we'll all do just fine.

Blogger down and crawling its way back up,More news on Seoul Station attack

I do not know what was up with that, but for most of the day yesterday it was impossible to post anything. Also my user name temporarily changed, as did my location.

Anyway, it appears to be up. While I'm obviously able to post this right now, my most recent posts, including lengthy one I wrote about the explosion of gas bombs that occurred at Seoul Station and Kangnam Express Bus Terminal, has dissipated into the ether (Blogger says they're aware of that and working on it). I guess it could be worse: Brian in Chŏllanam-do appears to have lost all but one post over the last month (I kid! I kid! Enjoy Pennsylvania with your new bride! I have no social life.).

Meanwhile, we're getting police reports that authorities believe the devices were set up by a disgruntled attention-seeker (i.e., the "Namdaemun model"), which was one of three possibilities I'd assumed. (The other two being a hastily planned terror attack in the wake of Osama bin Laden's sudden demise and North Korean fifth columnists; I made a better case for them in the longer post).

From the Joongang Daily:

Seoul police said yesterday that the explosives that went off in Seoul Station and the Express Bus Terminal on Thursday were homemade devices that could be made with a “high-school grasp” of knowledge and that the parts used could easily be bought at large supermarkets.

“Based on our experts’ opinions, we feel that the suspect does not have professional knowledge of explosives and we strongly believe that this was a person who had ill feelings against society or wanted attention,” said Lee Sang-jeong of the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency. “After analyzing the evidence found, the brands of the hiking backpack and timer batteries from the two locations matched.”

The JAD article then goes on to tell you exactly how to make such a device. You know, just in case you are a disgruntled attention-seeker who decides to take it out on my 'hood.

Lie Another Day

Selig Harrison sounds so much like a "Juche apologist" that frequent One Free Korea commenter david woolley wonders aloud if SH is not a pseudonym for KJI:

Why is there no wikipedia entry for Selig Harrison? Is it because the no-vilification rules are unavoidable — or is he, in fact, a figment, a convenient name for an editorial actually penned by Kim Jong Il, much as Stalin wrote for Pravda under a pseudonym? Inquiring minds and all that.

While Mr Harrison is clearly some kind of nom, I don't think he's a nom de plume. If you follow this link to where I've skewered him in the past, you'll find a video of him on PBS's Newshour. There is a real person behind Dr Evil's advocate.

But hold the phone... Wasn't there a James Bond movie where the villain used extensive plastic surgery to change his appearance from Asian to a nordic European? (Indeed, it would appear the streets of Seoul and Tokyo are full of such villains.) And wasn't that villain a... wait for it... North Korean?!

Maybe Mr Woolley and I are onto something. But would this grand ruse require the kidnaping of a Kangnam-area plastic surgeon? No, not with the advent of the hyper-realistic SPFX masks, those that are so convincing that a Polish immigrant had bank employees certain that he was a Black man as he robbed them.

In fact, an "elder" mask was recently used by a Chinese immigrant to get into Canada to seek asylum (it's in the same link above). And that means we must ask the inevitable: Could Selig Harrison be a North Korean operative with good English skills using a specially made "old man mask" to more effectively spread pro-Pyongyang propaganda?

I don't know about you, but now I'm convinced there's no other explanation.

UPDATE:
I forgot, no mention of a James Bond movie is complete unless I include a picture of one of the hotties. And while thoughts of Halle Berry are always enough to warm me up at Christmastime, Die Another Day included one of my all-time favorite Bond girls from the same movie, Miranda Frost (played by Rosamund Pike).

UPDATE 2:
Jack Pritchard, president of the Korea Economic Institute, has an article in the January 5 edition of the Korea Herald which also skewers Mr Harrison's proposal for the US to give South Korean territorial waters to North Korea.

Will plausible deniability mean no reaction to North Korean attack?

The New York Times is also carrying an article on Seoul's response, including President Lee's call for military strikes if there is any further provocation. The NYT also notes what could be called North Korea's deniability factor (which usually revolves around denying they did anything or saying that they did something because they were provoked):

The North blamed the South for starting the exchange; the South acknowledged firing test shots in the area but denied that any had fallen in the North’s territory. It was in the same area that a South Korean naval vessel, the Cheonan, was sunk in March, killing 46 sailors. Seoul blamed a North Korean torpedo attack; the North has denied any role.

The problem with the idea that North Korea was simply responding in kind to a test shot landing in North Korean territorial waters is that means they responded by bombarding civilian positions, not the ships taking part in the exercise who allegedly would have fired the errant test shots. It simply doesn't hold water.

Meanwhile, some in the South may find comfort in thinking North Korea wasn't behind this, because then they would feel better in not taking some of the tougher choices described in many news outlets, including the Christian Science Monitor.

I've already proposed the Kushibo Plan, but if Lee takes too long to respond, I'll have to devise a non-military massive retaliation.

Kachi kajima!

If ever there was a reason to support the KORUS FTA, it's that the KCNA has come out against it:

17 civic and social organizations of south Korea including the South Headquarters of the Pan-national Alliance for Korea's Reunification, the Solidarity for Implementing the South-North Joint Declaration and the (south) Korean Confederation of Trade Unions held the 134th movement for independent reunification and peace in Seoul on Nov. 9 denouncing the U.S. for its outrageous action to force south Korea to yield to it.

The organizations accused the U.S. of pressuring the south Korean authorities to lift the restrictions on the import of beef infected with mad cow disease, ease quarantine regulations, etc. at the additional negotiations for the conclusion of the FTA.

Noting that the south Korean people will no longer tolerate all sorts of humiliation and sacrifices to be imposed by the U.S. upon them, they declared that they would never allow the U.S. hegemonic action to put the south Korean economic arteries under a tighter control through the conclusion of the FTA.

They urged the U.S. to stop its moves to conclude the unequal and humiliating FTA.

Yep, and this is where the chinboista groups get their marching orders.

Some seriously mad cows.
Udderly terrifying.

I love the smell of pepper spray in the morning

Looks like the G20 summit is the place to be if you're a chinboista activist. They're out in force — twenty thousand according to Canadian Press — and the police have been using tear gas to keep them in line, er, in blob:

Thousands of people chanted anti-globalization slogans in South Korea's capital Sunday to protest this week's Group of 20 summit. Part of the crowd attempted to march down nearby streets but were stopped by riot police, who fired pepper spray.

The protesters sang, danced and waved signs reading "We oppose the G-20" at a large plaza near Seoul City Hall. South Korea is hosting a gathering of leaders from the G-20 advanced and developing economies on Thursday and Friday.

Some protesters danced and played traditional Korean drums, while about 9,000 riot police and many police buses encircled the rally site to keep order. Police said about 20,000 people took part in the rally.

The rally was initially peaceful, but some protesters engaged in minor scuffles with riot police who tried to prevent them from marching through downtown streets. Riot police fired pepper spray at some protesters at the front of the crowd, forcing them back.

Some of the protestors have legitimate complaints: the powers-that-be that run the G8 and the G20 do have this uncanny ability to make policy that effects the unG179, often with disastrous results for the working man and woman:

The protesters oppose globalization and say the G-20 is not focusing on creating jobs or protecting social programs.

Labour activist Lee Chang-geun accused the G-20 of failing to formulate meaningful measures to curb speculative financial capital and of pushing cuts in public spending on social welfare.

Actually, South Korea has been trying to push the G20 toward more aid and sustainable assistance in poorer countries, so perhaps they'll get a sympathetic ear. Or not.

Nonetheless, some of this has the potential to get out of hand. Yesterday we had the denied entry of six activists from the Philippines, and now we have news of a South Korean man making terror threats against various embassies of predominantly Muslim nations:

A South Korean man has been arrested for sending a terror threat against this week's G20 summit to embassies of Muslim nations, police said Sunday.

The man, age 46 and identified only by his surname Kim, was arrested Friday after faxing the threat to the Seoul embassies on Thursday, police said.

The message read: "Hello, Allah's warriors? An event Osama bin Laden likes has been prepared at the G20 summit. We wish that your country will be full of Allah's blessings."

The fax in Korean was sent to the embassies of Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Tunisia and Turkey, police said.

"He will be charged with disruption of business," a spokesman for Seoul city police told AFP.

"It looks like he tried to cause a stir among Muslim countries and unnerve the public ahead of the G20 Summit," the Yonhap news agency quoted a police official as saying.

Naisŭ. Given that these protests tend to follow the G8 and G20 wherever they go, I don't think there is too much loss of face with the presence of all these goombahs. In fact, South Korea seems to be gaining a bit of tangible prestige, as its responsibilities in the International Monetary Fund (which many South Koreans referred to as "I.M. F'ed" just a decade ago) have been upped to 1.8 percent.

Chinboistas behind effort to remove MacArthur statue?

UPDATE:
Although I would certainly have found this in my daily news trawl, I did in fact first see it at One Free Korea so I'm going to give a hat tip to Joshua.

ORIGINAL POST:
If you have a moment or two, go read (or re-read) this 2005 post on the chinboista-led effort to rally people around the notion of removing the statue of General Douglas MacArthur in Inchon's Chayu (Freedom) Park.

Now, bask in my awesome prescience and insight as you read this Joongang Daily story from two days ago about the arrest of two Pyongyang operatives who have been arrested for being behind that effort:

According to the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency, two leaders of the Korean Confederation Unification Promotion Council were arrested on charges of receiving directives from a North Korean agent from 2004 to 2005 to stage a series of violent, illegal rallies from May to September 2005, demanding the removal of the MacArthur statue. The North also told them to organize an alliance of progressive civic groups to demand the withdrawal of U.S. forces from South Korea.

Police said 12 additional members of the council are to be investigated in the case.

This is the latest in a series of investigations of national security law violations regarding the statue of the general, who led the United Nations Command in the Korean War from 1950 to 1951.

Bask!

Okay, this isn't the statue, but it's a far more interesting 
picture than any I found of the one in Inchon.

Christine Ahn at TMH and OFK

above: Christine Ahn.
Well, the glasses don't look KJI-like.
I think North Korea sympathizers should
be required to wear Dear Leaderhosen.

Both One Free Korea and The Marmot's Hole have posted about Christine Ahn's piece in the New York Times in which she uncritically parrots Pyongyang's party line on actions taken by Washington and Seoul. Ms Ahn is a favorite target of Joshua at OFK, and one has to stop and wonder at the resilience of her willful ignorance at the nature of the DPRK regime.

In fact, I've been wondering if she is not a bought-and-paid-for chinboista, part of a deliberate campaign by North Korea to soften views in the West and get people to question a hard-line approach to this murderous regime, à la Song Duyul (송두율, Song Tuyul in M-R), who was seen by many progressives as a fair-and-balanced critic of both North and South but who eventually admitted he had received $150,000 from Pyongyang, though he denied the intent of the money.

Of course, that's just speculation. I have no reason to believe that's true except for the uncanny way in which she sounds like she's getting her talking points from the KCNA. Being a Berkeley liberal can lead one to question media sources from one's own country, but geez, it should call for you to do the same with the press elsewhere, no?

A country gone mad? (Or: Arson by candlelight)

A post from 2008 at Brian Deutsch's website that was about commemorating the Kwangju Massacre but delved into last year's mad Mad Cow protests compelled me to respond. This is addressed not necessarily to Brian himself, but to those who so easily conflate the chants and attitudes of anti-US protesters with the opinions and beliefs of the broader Korean public.

In reference to the continued use by chinboistas (chinbo, or progressive groups) of images of Shim Misun (Shim Misŏn, 심미선) Shin Hyosun (Shin Hyosūn, 신효순), two middle school girls tragically killed when they were run over by a US military armored vehicle in June 2002 in an incident that sparked angry anti-US protests later that year, he states:

I have to question the sanity of those who constantly invoke this incident, as it's not used to preserve the memory of those two girls, but rather to encapsulate a victimization complex that is so vital to the national psyche.

Oh, they are not insane whatsoever (and no, it's not part of the national psyche, but a key part of the modus operandi of the pro-Pyongyang left). They know exactly what they are doing.

At the core of many of the chinbo (진보/進步; "progressive") groups are individuals who are directly getting marching orders from Pyongyang. The goal is to whip up so many people against the US that the ROK government will demand the removal of USFK, which dramatically tips the balance of power on the peninsula in the North's favor.

On other fronts, in the things one might not recognize because they are in Korean, they also try to whip up so much anger toward the ROK government that people will topple the government.

[above: Students rushing off to protests aimed at toppling the government of Syngman Rhee during the so-called 4.19 Movement, referred to sometimes as the April Revolution, in 1960.]

This is not some pie-in-the-sky dream. This kind of popular "toppling" has in fact happened twice. But it did not lead to the revolution Pyongyang had wished, nor a weakening of South Korea. It led to another strong dictatorship in the 1960s and it led to a democratically elected government in the late 1980s.

The hoped-for removal of US forces has not happened in South Korea, but it did work in the Philippines and it is starting to work in Okinawa, where forces are moving to Guam, where there are also local agitators against the US military.

Anyway, the goal of the people behind the scenes is to spread disinformation and provide imagery such that the average Korean who does not suspect or does not want to believe in such pro-Pyongyang machinations, demands removal of USFK or takes to the streets to force out whoever's in the Blue House.

This is not to say that the Kwangju Uprising did not have legitimacy. Although I'm sure there were a few Pyongyang operatives within the rank and file, the majority of the people were fighting for a legitimate cause (and the government's side was overreacting on a belief that almost everyone in Kwangju was a pro-Pyongyang enemy of the state).

Anyway, you can see it with the Mad Cow protests. A legitimate beef (one's own government setting aside in-place safety regulations at the behest of their economically dominant ally) which reasonable people can get behind, distorted and manipulated by disinformation (an irrational fear of a rapid spread of Mad Cow Disease) that itself had some basis in reality (documentation of illegal use of downer cows in the United States and the US's own inadequate Mad Cow screening, as well as other health issues), bundled together in order to reach a critical mass.

Now here's the key: What was the goal? If you think it was to spread anti-Americanism then you have missed the point. Anti-Americanism was merely one of many tools to manipulate public sentiment toward the final goal, which was the ousting of President Lee Myungbak.

This same kind of thing plays out again and again. Each potential issue, regardless of its merits, must be pushed as far as it can go to see which has the potential to resonate with the larger public that is not accustomed to going out and protesting or even attending candlelight vigils. Like blasting solid rock with high-pressure water hoses to see where the one fissure is that will — if the pressure remains high and constant — eventually be the crack that splits the rock in half.

They thought they may have found it with the deaths of the two middle school girls — which was not a mere accident because it involved high degrees of negligence on the part of USFK, which was daily creating a deadly hazard where sleep-deprived soldiers were operating unwieldy machines while using faulty or out-of-order equipment including those used for communications (it was literally an accident waiting to happen, but the fault was with the commanders, probably not the two men who went on trial).

They thought they had it with Mad Cow, where legitimate complaints about the president scrapping legitimate health measures in a quid pro quo to get the US-Korean Free Trade Agreement passed were mixed in with (and eventually overshadowed by) frenzied claims about the real dangers posed by BSE (Mad Cow Disease). In time, some other issue will come up in the future, and these old issues will also be rehashed, too, because maybe the magic formula lies not with one issue, but with a critical mass of issues.

But the vast majority of Koreans has no interest in this. The deaths were tragic, and a lot of reasonable people were angry, but most Koreans don't want the USFK to pull out over this. Each and every South Korean president, from both left and right, has insisted that USFK is needed for South Korean security (Roh Moohyun so much so that he nearly committed political suicide to send troops to Iraq, though his slow-motion deployment was very ham-handed).

That's why we see candlelight vigils in favor of the hard-core protests with rock-throwing and tear gas volleys (though violence can still erupt, as well as graffiti). Anyone can grab a cup and a candle and join a peaceful vigil. Public transportation will take you there.

[above: Not far from my house is Kwanghwamun, which was ground zero for the Mad Cow Protests. Throughout the summer, there were nightly confrontations between the protesters and the police, with many police vehicles being vandalized like this one. Typical of the graffiti is what you see at right, "MB OUT," referring to President Lee Myungbak by the initials of the two characters of his given name. Below that is a slightly bewildering one: "MB = Pedophile." I guess they were testing that one to see if it would pick up traction; it didn't. If I hadn't been so busy, I would have stuck around and taken more pictures.]

And those citizens carrying candles may not realize that their participation is a tool for the ultimate goal of the political arsonists behind the scenes. The tens of thousands of candlelight villagers, many portrayed as meek young girls, are meant as cover for the true vigilantes: the hard-core who we saw in 2008 trying to provoke reactions by the staid and stoic riot police who long ago were participants in the tear gas-infused operas of lore, destroying government buses carrying those soldiers, blocking traffic, writing the graffiti that was to whip up the masses to take down Caesar, er... President Lee.

Sigh. The ultimate goal of this post is to provide some perspective and to point out the meaning of the fact that not only did the vast majority of the public not join in, but they condemned the protests and bought up the supposedly Mad Cow-tainted beef in record numbers. That meaning is that these perpetual protesters in Korea, as per usual, do not represent the whole of Korean society.

South Korea is a nation with a still-powerful enemy that works through many ways and many channels — some overt but many clandestine and insidious — to bring about their ultimate goal. I hate that I sound like some paranoid right-winger when I say things like this, but to anyone who chooses to look objectively behind the headlines, this stuff is just plain obvious.

MacArthur

ADDED LINK:
The English-language Chosun Ilbo ran this piece by Myongji University professor Kang Kyu-hyung, which seems to dovetail nicely with some of my points below.


UPDATE (August 2010):
It seems the chinboistas I referred to below may really have been directed by Pyongyang to launch the effort five years ago to remove the MacArthur statue.

ORIGINAL POST:
Today marks the fifty-fifth anniversary of General Douglas MacArthur's brilliantly strategized Inchon landing, which eventually cut the invading North Korean forces in half, opened up a road to Seoul, and turned the tide of the war.

For decades, MacArthur the Savior has been revered as a national hero in the Republic of Korea, a country that, it is no exaggeration, still exists because of his military genius.

To many, he is still a great hero, especially those who were around during the Korean War or who grew up in Korea's ruins during the aftermath. For most of the rest, he is still a great man, some might even say flawed, but still a person who helped save Korea.

Of course, there are others, the chinbo ("progressive") groups, who are now using the MacArthur statue in Inchon's Freedom Park [자유공원] as a focal point of their anti-American protests. If they had their way, the statue would be toppled in the same way that Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled when Baghdad was "liberated."

The conservative opposition Hannara Party (GNP, or Grand National Party) is seething with anger over this effort. They make no bones about labeling the chinbo groups as pro-Pyongyang agitators who must not be allowed to succeed. President Roh Moohyun, who is usually found left of center, has said the statue should not be removed, especially because it would upset the sensibilities of the US government and Americans at a time of already strained relations (he is silent on other reasons).

In contrast, the extreme left-wing Democratic Labor Party [민주노동당], which touts a pro-Pyongyang line to go along with their communist-sounding Korean name, is reportedly in favor of removing the statue.

Most people seem to be in favor of leaving the statue there, and it is under 24-hour guard. But one has to wonder how this became an issue in the first place.

A left-of-center newsradio host I do some work with put it this way: the problem is that there has simply been no debate about MacArthur. He was always a great hero to Korea, a view practically shoved down the throats of every Korean schoolkid throughout the military dictatorship period and beyond. Thus, to the leftists, MacArthur is indelibly associated with military rule at a time when Truth Commission-type groups are trying to shed light on whose forebears gained from collaboration with Japanese military authorities prior to 1945 or were in cahoots with home-grown military regimes after that.

But does MacArthur deserve this treatment? I guess it's wise to call into question a historical assertion that has never been closely analyzed, but this should be done in a fair and honest way. I simply don't believe that the chinbo groups have that in mind. As part of their treatise against MacArthur, some are accusing him of things he had nothing to do with, such as the actual division of the Japan-occupied Korean peninsula (intended to be temporary, though the chinbo groups often don't acknowledge this) at the end of World War II.

My own take on MacArthur has never been a gushing one. I grew up in Orange County, where our airport was named after a movie cowboy/soldier and is located on MacArthur Boulevard, but I quickly learned that even in his own time, he was a controversial man whom President Truman felt he had to remove.

"The Hidden History of the Korean War," by left-wing journalist I.F. Stone, in some way informed my view of MacArthur as a military genius who failed in the end to hold onto the unified Korea he fought for in the autum of 1950 because of his own hubris and passionate despisal of communism, which clouded his otherwise good judgement (Stone made the case that the US-led UN forces unnecessarily retreated in the face of what was, at first, a phantom menace trumped up by MacArthur as a pretext for expanding the war to remove the communists from China as well; I'm not saying I subscribe to that belief, however).

Ultimately, though, he deserved credit for saving South Korea. Then and now, the Chinese, not MacArthur, bear responsibility for the continued existence of the murderous Pyongyang regime.

That's what I told my left-leaning radio journalist friend (along with something about MacArthur being a main figure in defeating the Imperial Japanese during World War II and his efforts to instill modern Japan with democratic institutions helping to keep the Japanese from remilitarizing).

She nodded in agreement. Despite her criticisms of USFK (directed at their behavior here, not their presence) and her disdain toward President George Bush, she agrees that MacArthur deserves a place of honor in Korea.
But therein lies the difference between my left-leaning friend and the true believers on the far left: she values her freedom, and they don't. Or perhaps they have not thought it through: the very freedom to spout an angry opinion about MacArthur that is different from the government's is a freedom they would not possess had MacArthur failed or just never been around.

But many of them don't care. The classical true believer feels that today's South Koreans would have been better off unified but under communist rule than living free but in a divided nation. National unity under communism beats freedom. At least, for those who are thinking about it.

Maybe some of them aren't thinking about it. To me, opposition to MacArthur's actions in Korea is a statement that Korea would be better off red. It's no coincidence that some of the people who say this think that the Great Leader Kim Ilsung or his Dear Leader son Kim Jong-il are heroes. All I can say is "thank goodness that they are a tiny, tiny minority." Loud, well-organized, and somewhat media-savvy, but nonetheless tiny.

The true believers are the people who live to bash the United States, Japan, the government, and corporate Korea. While I don't think that any of those four groups are beyond reproach, the true believers are often driven by a blinding hate that makes them oblivious to anything but the negative.

They go to school and study Marx, Bruce Cumings with his revisionist histories that make them believe that the U.S. and South Korea were the real culprits in the Korean War, and "alternative news" sources that downplay or ignore rampant human rights abuses in North Korea. The only way to ever change their minds would be to send them north to live. But that would be too cruel.

When I worked for a certain Jesuit-run university here in Seoul, I encountered a Catholic monk who was very adamant about how the U.S. was railroading North Korea. Upon questioning him further, I found that he firmly believed that what "we" are told in South Korea about the North is mostly lies, or that the U.S. or South Korea were to blame. I was dumbfounded that anyone could think like that, especially a religious figure.

"You're a Catholic monk," I said to him. "Do you have any idea what they do to people like you up there?" He told me he didn't think those stories were typical of what really happened in North Korea, what the Vatican had to say about it notwithstanding.

I knew students who thought like that, even ten years ago. I became fond of telling them that if they had grown up in North Korea, they would be about fifteen centimeters shorter and have very bad teeth. The famine that killed millions later provided horrific evidence of my point.

I guess it's inevitable that, after years and years of unquestioned fawning over MacArthur, there would be some backlash as the pendulum swings toward greater openness and democratic expression. But we cannot tolerate lies in this discussion.

I am no blindly pro-military cheerleader. But I do see that the role the U.S. military and government have both played in Korea in the post-war period has been overwhelmingly positive (though it can always be improved). MacArthur is front and center where that begins and how it is defined.