North and South Unite for the Future!

  waiting - not so patiently -

for the day to kick the US bastards out

Even in the lulls of hate, between the spikes (where common Koreans take to the streets in anger or share solidarity through the media and around the water cooler in the office) - even during the times of advanced turtle mode where the turtle manages to flip himself round and stick his head out his other hole to say a different message -- South Korea still presents us with enough opportunities to see the dominant message in their society ---
 
   


"US, we hate our relationship with you, and we want you to leave us alone and take your soldiers with you...but not right now."


Let's look at two examples of it coming out right now (fall 2003) -- at a time when fear of changes in USFK have brought out real, tangible, positive recognition of wrong elements in the attitude toward the US -- that remind us clearly how deep the hate runs.  One issue is the majority opinion about how the US is a bigger problem for the South than the regime in Pyongyang.  The other is Korea's use of the anniversary of 9/11 to remind itself the United States brought the attacks upon itself and overreacted to the several thousand deaths that day two years ago.

The two elements do mix together.  

Most things in the anti-US process do.  Korea is a very compact society in
many ways, and as this newsletter has shown, whether it is something as serious as the death of two girls or as simple as picking South Korea's next generation of fighter planes, or it is the same trade issues like globalization or the WTO that every nation deals with, they are all used by the same anti-American propagation civic groups and broader Korean society to keep a strong trend of hate very much alive  -- at all times.

I have provided a full article elsewhere (that I will quote some on this page) from a long time Korean resident in the US who shares a basic view found in the majority of Korean society.  

In the 2nd anniversary of 9/11 commemorative, the Chosun Daily writer warned us --

Even though the Americans are the victims, they are making themselves out to be the perpetrators.

In the 1st anniversary piece, the Korea Herald editor didn't hum and haw and pretend she wasn't directly saying the US deserved it.  She said it clearly --  

The U.S. policymakers need to seriously ponder why people not only in Arabic countries but also in a few other regions cheered watching the horrifying TV footage broadcast around the world...  Once again, the fundamental solution lies with eliminating not terrorists but the environment which spawns them.

It really irritates Koreans that the 9/11 terror attacks have put a dent in their ability to feel united with the world in condemning the US.  This is a hard nuance in Korean society to get at for those who haven't lived there and paid attention.  Let me illustrate it this way.


The images so shocking the Korea Herald editor referred to didn't lead to mass cheering

all over the world.  In fact, in Tehran and Beijing - which last time I checked were not bastions of pro-US and "blood allies" -- as South Korea sometimes places lip service to when a US dignitary visits or the New York Times asked them about the level of anti-Americanism there -- citizens of Iran and China on their on held gatherings outside their US
Embassy and placed flowers.  I read this displeased the regime leaders in Iran a good bit.
 
But in South Korea - the day after 9/11 witnessed a small group of anti-US protesters denouncing any potential military retaliation for the terrorist attacks.

Koreans are not heartless, ignorant people.  Not by any means.  As an American in Korea for many years, the vast majority of people I met were nice, many extraordinarily friendly.  They were happy to meet a foreigner and didn't pound their chest with their fists denouncing me when they learned I was American.  (In fact, Koreans assume any white or black face is from the US.

The reason they can produce images like the one above with Bin Laden's face on the Statue of Liberty and promote it on a very popular website - and lead children to sing pro-Bin Laden children's songs - or produce the image on the right that shows Koreans putting together knowledge some Americans in the Towers decided to jump to their deaths rather than burn + their need to strike at the US for Apollo Ohno getting a gold medal when a Korean skater was disqualified in the Olympics - is not a show of solidarity with the terrorists, but rather a knee jerk reaction that recognized much of the world was going to have a cooling off period in dislike of the US because of the sheer shock that the amount of carnage on 9/11 produced and the nature of the attack itself.  

There is a tendency in Korea when people in the world start saying, "Damn.  Look at that pitiful situation over there" to feel bitter that enough of the world hasn't given South Korea its due pity for their "5,000 years of history of oppression and invasion."  

This isn't easy to believe.  I understand.  But it is this kind of phenomenon that allows someone in Korea to open a "Hitler Bar" and not only can't most of the Koreans I talk to about it understand why it is horrible, the Korean government doesn't respond when representatives of Israel got angry.

It is a phenomenon you could have seen when a very intelligent graduate student said off hand in responses to some discussion "When are people going to get over the Holocaust?  Many nations have had a holocaust.  Korea had one when Japan colonized us."  Or you can see it in the Chosun Daily 2nd Anniversary of 9/11 editorial --

This week the (US) goes into a commemorative mode to remember the attacks, which seem destined to be remembered forever.

I offer reminders of these anti-American attacks from the last couple of years so you can understand how easy it is for the Chosun Daily and Korea Herald to use such an outrageous attack on the US to "commemorate" 9/11.

Now, let's couple this understanding of the extreme mainstream Korean society allows to thrive in their need to attack the United States -- that  produces America-bashing 9/11 memorial articles in the media during a period of quiet when Korean society is scared USFK might pull out some troops -- with Korea's feelings toward North Korea ---- with South Korea's current love fest for the North and strong desire to ignore and block recognition of the realities of the regime in Pyongyang.

It might surprise you to read this information --

A recent poll by the Joongang Daily newspaper indicated that only 9 percent of South Koreans believed the North’s nuclear threat should be considered a major government concern, while 61 percent favored continuing the sunshine policy.  (Washington Post 9/8/2003)

The Sunshine policy is one of rapprochement, economic aid, and effort to thaw relations with the North.  It was started in 1998 by the new President Kim Dae Jung.

South Korean society has always been split on the North.  In fact, the world was debating the reality of the use of Communist ideology and the truth of what was going on in nations like the North and the USSR until almost the collapse of the Soviet Union.  

In South Korea, the debate over this was tied to the authoritarian military governments who oppressed South Korean society.  Those regimes in the South promoted very strong anti-North propaganda through all social instructions and brutally suppressed dissent - some of which was directed covertly by Pyongyang -- but --  

To cut this history lesson short, it seems the level of doubt about whether North Korea was really a bad country or not among the opposition in South Korea was in proportion to the level of social oppression their own government in Seoul used.

Since the mid-1990s and the democratization of politics, however, the elements of pro-North Koreanism in the South has become very different.

South Korean society from top to bottom feels very confident in the ability of the US military to defeat the North -- whether it has nuclear weapons or not -- to the point they take the US commitment for granted.  

(Big - huge - mistake)

So they feel more freedom to entertain ideas the North isn't a hellhole on earth. That it has no intention to invade the South again, because they are their brothers -- and besides, they know the US would destroy them.

So they are free to even teach their kids the US is their real enemy, not their "brothers" to the North.

South Korean elementary school students voted President Bush the world’s biggest villain, while North Korea’s Kim Jong Il ranked second, in a recent survey.  
                    (Stars and Stripes 7/18/2003)

In most of the nations surveyed, critics of the United States said their opinions mainly reflect opposition to President Bush. But in South Korea, 72 percent of those who hold unfavorable views of the United States expressed “general hostility,” one of the report’s authors said in a telephone interview.  (S&S 9/5/2003)

Now let's compare this hatred of the nation that gave thousands of American lives to defend them with South Korea's sheer effort to force a belief that the North is their "brother".  The Universidad games held at Taegu for students of the world exposed South Korean society's hypocrisy again for everyone to witness.

Although there are some groups in the South who do collect information about the horrors of the North and help the North Korean refugees in Northeastern China, the majority of South Korean society still produce fantasy land delusions like below ---

South Korean television, including state-owned and semiofficial channels, is portraying North Korea in an increasingly positive light; one recent program, for instance, favorably compared Pyongyang’s state-run day care system with child care in the South.  There has been a rise in the popularity of Internet chat rooms where South Korean youths share warm feelings about their North Korean counterparts on the other side of the most heavily militarized border in the world.  (MSNBC)

The nation that puts tens or hundreds of thousands of its citizens in concentration camps and uses starvation through control of int. food aid as a political tool has its day care system favorably compared to the South's!

Amazing!

Then the South went crazy for the bizarre cheerleaders from the North during the international games held in Taegu.

Since the squad’s arrival here at the 22nd annual Universidad games, an 11-day sports competition that ended Aug. 31, the well-scripted women have become South Korea’s unlikely sweethearts — and a symbol of the South’s recent embrace of its old enemy.

   
   Even as North Korea squared off in a six-nation
   summit over its nuclear weapons program in
   Beijing last month, the cheerleaders,
   gushing with expressions of love for their
  “dear leader,” Kim Jong Il, were winning the
   admiration of millions here through poignant
   TV coverage and adoring newspaper headlines.
   Smitten South Koreans traveled hundreds of
   miles to offer roses and serenades to the
  “Beauties from the North,” as one headline
   called them.  

   During the games, the women were shown on
   television overcome after passing a welcome
   poster hung by local residents that depicted
   the North Korean president shaking hands with
   former South Korean president Kim Dae Jung.

 
The cheerleaders cried hysterically, insisting the poster was haphazardly mounted on street lights and hung too close to the ground. Pouring out of their bus, they ran a quarter of a mile to retrieve it. “How could you treat our dear leader this way?” one sobbed on camera.

Thankfully, the images of the cheerleaders crying over pictures of Kim Jong Il getting wet did cause some in South Korea to admit how bizarre they are and how they are ("might be" for Koreans) a sign of the lunacy that goes on up North.

But this is by far the exception in the South.

Sine 1998, the South Korean government has gone far out of its way to avoid admitting the reality of North Korea.  This pattern has extended into the academic community - even reaching into some of the Korean professors in the US I have listened to at conferences.

   In a speech to the United Nations Human Rights
   Commission here Tuesday, Chung Eui-yong, South
   Korea's permanent representative to the United
   Nations Office in Geneva, discussed human
   rights abuses and defectors but failed to
   directly mention North Korea.
             (Korea Times) 4/2/2003

But a South Korean Human Right's commission connected to the government did strongly condemn the US actions in Iraq and fined the US government for not allowing them to question US MPs who had reportedly "roughed up" two "internet journalists" for the anti-US sites who joined a group of Korean activists who broke into a US base and attacked a few USFK soldiers and workers and damaged property.

Compare this with how South Korea reacted to an attack on South Korean anti-Pyongyang activists (a much smaller civic organization) by North Korean reporters connected with the athletes in Taegu for the games.

At least some Koreans recognized the lunacy of the South's approach.

  “The events of these games show us how much
   South Korea has changed,” said Lee Hoon Koo,
   an expert on propaganda at Seoul’s Yonsei
   University. “These women were clearly meant
   as psychological warfare — Kim Jong Il’s
   happy girls — but we have people in the
   South going crazy over them. Our government
   apologized after North Koreans attacked
   demonstrators on our own soil. We’ve done an
   about-face in this country.”
                 (Washington Post article again)

Yes.  That is right.  The North's reporters stormed out of their building at the games and attacked the South Korean activists who were defaming the North Korean flag, and there was no talk of demanding the North Koreans to be "handed over to South Korean authorities and put before a South Korean court for assault."

Instead, North Korea demanded an apology and threatened to leave the games, and the next day Seoul fell all over itself begging for forgiveness.

Things in South Korea have become so bad for the US, I was even satisfied by seeing that 40% or so of South Korean society complained about the North's attack.  

Some 50 to 60% still found a way to lay "equal blame" on the South Korean activist for -- burning the North Korean flag and insulting Pyongyang --

but at least a significant portion of South Korean society did find they were capable of condemning violence against their own people.

But can you imagine if a group of US soldiers stormed off base and attacked people burning the American flag?

I guess that is all I needed to point out to show you how hopeless the US relationship in South Korea has become.