[KS] South Korea's Rollback of Democratic Rights
Frank Hoffmann
hoffmann at koreaweb.ws
Fri May 8 16:09:20 EDT 2009
Dear All:
Allow me to start this by saying that Professor
Katsiaficas' works have over the years been both
enlightening and delightful reading to me. ... I
especially enjoyed your book, The Subversion of
Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements
and the Decolonization of Everyday Life. I did
not know you are now teaching in Korea and
writing about Korean politics, not until seeing
these posts on the list. In 1986 my hasukchip
ajumma, watching me doing my weekly ppallae,
exclaimed, completely taken by what she saw:
"Boy, your underwear looks just like our's in
Korea, you are not American!" (How fortunate I
was, she did not know anything about the place I
came from.) Ever since I am aware that there are
not only differences in identities, and not only
differences in the perception of identities,
cultural ones as well as political ones, but more
importantly, differences in communicating
differences.
Communicating differences (political culture):
Many years ago Jim Thomas and I -- he was working
on Korean squatters then -- had a good talk that
was a kind of eye-opener for me. Not sure what
term he used then, but Jim pointed out, from an
anthropological and sociological point of view,
that Korea has, compared to the U.S., a very
different "culture of conflict." That is,
conflicts get worked out in different ways. As a
case in point, if some friends go out for a drink
and two of them get into a fight, then one might
well get physically aggressive, one guy may at
least threaten to hit the other guy -- WHILE
being perfectly well aware and expecting that his
other friends in that gathering will be holding
him back from actually doing it, or will at least
interfere in various ways to calm the situation.
Next morning both guys may have a breakfast
together. Now imagine such conflict happening in
the U.S. or in a European country or the Middle
East. The whole conflict as well as the
consequences will very likely look completely
different, depending on the country and area this
happens and what set of rules applies for
conflict situations in each culture.
Some parts of this discussion reads, to me at
least, somewhat semi-colonial in approach --
there are many implications that protest,
conflict solving, and political culture as such
has to follow some middle-class white American
rule set of political correctness. Outside the
U.S. politics gets in general a little "louder,"
especially if there is really something at stake
that might get moved, if "you have the choice"
between more than just getting twinkies with or
without sparkles, if there is a wider political
spectrum than one finds in the United States (and
it is wider everywhere else). If we look at
modern Korean history we see that Koreans and
Europeans have indeed the same undergarment
(although sometimes worn reverse): colonialism,
anarchism, Marxism, various revolutions, Social
Democracy, Fascism, racism in all facets, colors,
and odors, and everything nicely rotates every 30
or 40 or 50 years. The kind of political actions,
the ways of communicating politics that Scott was
criticizing, seems rather "normal" for most
Europeans (and probably to South Americans as
well). A right or wrong, legitimate-or-not
discussion only seems to mirror one's own value
system. I wish there were more of a discussion on
this LIST that would give some sociological
interpretation of what is happening -- anything
that goes beyond the usual journalistic
day-to-day political info and commentary. What,
for example, is happening to the new
Cyberdog-POP-culture generation in Korea, how are
they involved, if at all, and how do they
organize and communicate politics?
Below attached PHOTO:
Former Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor of
the Federal Republic of Germany, Joschka Fischer,
attacking police officers -- then a leading
member of the group 'Proletarian Union for Terror
and Destruction.' (After lecturing at Stanford U
for some time he now seems to work for Madeleine
Albright's firm Albright Group in Washington,
D.C.) Interestingly enough, the photos were first
"unearthed" by politically conservative Bettina
Röhl, daughter of RAF terrorist Ulrike Meinhof,
who many of my generation grew up with, first
listening to her children's and youth broadcasts
in radio and TV and then reading her political
commentary in the magazine Konkret that was very
popular in the 1970s. Political correctness has
many variations, and the post-Kwangju
pro-democracy movement of the 1980s did not
exactly move anything because anyone followed
American middle-class ideas of political
engagement either.
Have a nice weekend!
Frank
--
--------------------------------------
Frank Hoffmann
http://koreaweb.ws
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://koreanstudies.com/pipermail/koreanstudies_koreanstudies.com/attachments/20090508/427905f3/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: JFischer.gif
Type: image/gif
Size: 135358 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://koreanstudies.com/pipermail/koreanstudies_koreanstudies.com/attachments/20090508/427905f3/attachment.gif>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: JFischer.gif
Type: image/gif
Size: 135358 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://koreanstudies.com/pipermail/koreanstudies_koreanstudies.com/attachments/20090508/427905f3/attachment-0001.gif>
More information about the Koreanstudies
mailing list