<!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD W3 HTML//EN">
<html><head><style type="text/css"><!--
blockquote, dl, ul, ol, li { padding-top: 0 ; padding-bottom: 0 }
--></style><title>Re: [KS] South Korea's Rollback of Democratic
Rights</title></head><body>
<div>Dear All:<br>
</div>
<div>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,<i> The Subversion
of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the
Decolonization of Everyday Life</i>. 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,<i> differences in communicating differences</i>.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>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.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>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?</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Below attached PHOTO: </div>
<div>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<i> Konkret</i> 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.
</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Have a nice weekend!</div>
<div><br>
Frank</div>
<div><br></div>
<div><img src="cid:p06240600c6295a225984@[192.168.0.2].1.0"></div>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<div><br></div>
<x-sigsep><pre>--
</pre></x-sigsep>
<div>--------------------------------------<br>
Frank Hoffmann<br>
http://koreaweb.ws</div>
</body>
</html>