[KS] Re: Still Invaded Economically and Culturally

[Vladimir Tikhonov]

Dear Members of the List,
with all due apologies for poking my nose into other's discussion, I would 
like to make several remarks on the very important - and almost always 
misinterpreted - question of the Koreans' collective "victimization" 
complex, on their seemingly strange feeling of collective helplessness in 
the face of the "outer forces". This complex seems to be almost unrelated 
to the collective ego of yangbans' ChosOn Korea, with its "Sojunghwa" 
("Little China") self-esteem and almost complete self-sufficiency, with its 
cultural semantical  field being highly structured, tightly closed and very 
well saturated. It is very obvious that the victimization complex could 
take hold in the collective consciousness only in the late 19th C., when 
all the "barbaric disturbances" began, when the country was thoroughly 
marginalized in the newly-built imperialistic world system, and when 
foreign soldiers came first to Seoul, to stay there until our days, and 
without much prospects to see them going out in the foreseeable future. As 
I remember, this question - the question of Korean peasants being 
constantly, daily and nightly, deafened by the roar of t h e i r jets - 
served as the "starter" for the present discussion, wasn't it? And what 
strikes me, complete non-professional in Korean modernity, is the tenacity 
of the foreign soldiers' hold on Korean soil in modern times. The 
justification can be whatever you like and whatever the circumstances 
permit - "the safeguarding of the mission against native rebellions" (first 
Japanese troops, after 1882), "quenching of Tonghak rebellion" (again 
Japanese, 1894),  "war with Russia, Russian threat" (Japanese, 1904), " 
foreign threats and domestic opposition to reforms and progress" (the 
Annexation, 1910), "Liberation from Japan" (the Americans, 1945), "Soviet 
and North Korean threat" (the Americans, until now), but the result is only 
one - uniformed foreign males, with unrestrained sense of force and 
superiority in their eyes, on the Seoul's streets, and the Koreans, reading 
every year couple of new reports on American rapes of their women and 
feeling the worst humiliation the male can feel in this world  - the 
humiliation of a father/brother unable to save his daughter/sister from the 
violence. I remember the story my Korean wife once told me - the story of 
being chased once in her childhood by a drunken, shouting American 
"warrior" - and every time I remember this, I can very well understand 
Korean students brandishing the wooden cudgels in the clashes with police 
over Maehyang-ri. "Let's trade the sides", as Koreans like to say - what 
would I do in their place to preserve my human dignity? And the worst thing 
- which is very well understood by the protesting Korean students too - is 
that, in fact, it all seems to be done in vain: after the Unification, the 
"Northern threat" can be changed into "Chinese threat" or even "Russian 
question" (if Putin will be successful in his attempts to recover some 
vestiges of Soviet imperial glory), but the perennial result will be the 
same, pending some very radical changes in the world structures of the 
hegemonic power. And the perennial frustration, the drunken threats "to 
beat up one of  t h e m  if I will see him luring a Korean girl" - and the 
sober study of English after the hangover - will persist.
I am very sorry for this too much unacademic letter, but the question of 
the Korean feeling of being invaded - which is often misinterpreted as 
"anti-foreignism"  - is too emotional and important to be treated so 
superficially as it is often treated.


At 00:48 23.07.2000, you wrote:
>Lest we forget, China was invaded by Buddhism, just as "China" had been by
>Confucianism.

Vladimir Tikhonov,
Department of East European and Oriental Studies,
Faculty of Arts,
University of Oslo,
P.b. 1030, Blindern, 0315, Oslo, Norway.
Fax: 47-22854140; Tel: 47-22857118

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