[KS] Re: Naksan Temple (Lauren W. Deutsch)

[Jung Won SONN]

Dear Lauren W. Deutsch

That malicious rumour originated from Ji Man-Won, an extreme right-wing,
anti-North Korea columnist. This type of irresponsible journalist exist in
any society. It is not surprising at all a few crazy people write like that.
I would laugh at this kind of stupidity if that happened in another country.

But I am not laughing at his remarks because, I think, this maliciousness
represent a serious distortion of ideology in Korea. Authoritarian regimes
themselves often produced this kind of condemnation to North Korea without
any evidence. Recall the Peace Dam under Cheon Administration. The
administration condemned Kum Kang San Dam in North Korea as a mass
destructive weapon and argued we had to build a huge dam to protect North
Korea's water attack. This type of incidents happened quite often under Park
and Cheon administrations. Those administration attempted to legitimize
their authoritarian ruling by exaggerating threats from North Korea.

But the saddest part is that there are people who are so willing to believe
any condemnation about North Korea. They are usually the ones who feel
threatened by democratization since 1988 (or 1997). Psychologically, when a
person feel threatened, he or she look for a cause (By the way, it is the
same psychological reason why many Americans still believe there were mass
destructive warheads in Iraq even after president Bush himself denied it.
When a person feels fear, he or she is destined to find the cause even if it
is a wrong one). Those who feel threatened by democracy want to explain the
nature of their fear. North Koreans and communists are easy answers. And
irresponsible journalists like Ji Man-Won and Jo Kap-Jae survive by
providing answers to them.

Luckily, decreasing number of Koreans believe this kind of stupidity. I bet
almost nobody believed Ji Man-Won this time.

Jung Won Sonn



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Sent: Thursday, April 07, 2005 5:08 PM
Subject: Koreanstudies Digest, Vol 22, Issue 4


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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: Naksan Temple (Lauren W. Deutsch)
   2. Re: Naksan Temple (ken.kaliher at us.army.mil)
   3. Fulbright Forum, Friday, April 22--6:30 p.m. (Dylan Davis)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Wed, 6 Apr 2005 12:13:57 -0700 (GMT-07:00)
From: "Lauren W. Deutsch" <lwdeutsch at earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: [KS] Naksan Temple
To: Korean Studies Discussion List <Koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws>
Message-ID:
<16455275.1112814837940.JavaMail.root at dewey.psp.pas.earthlink.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

In an interesting exchange about this, a Korean friend said "they" think it
was North Koreans ... is this type of maliciousness ... or the rumour of
such ... regular hearsy, or is the incident more a factor of the lack of
awareness that smoking and careless campfire building can cause forest
fires?
-----Original Message-----
From: Brother Anthony <ansonjae at ccs.sogang.ac.kr>
Sent: Apr 5, 2005 6:19 PM
To: Korean Studies Discussion List <Koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws>
Subject: [KS] Naksan Temple

Members of this list might like to spare a moment to grieve for the almost
total destruction of Naksan
Temple yesterday in one of the many forest fires that are always a major
feature of each year's
Tree-Planting Day. Months of drought and a gale-force wind, plus the absence
of any kind of fire-breaks
between forest and temple or between sections of forest helped of course.
Two of the 20 or so halls are
reported to have survived.

Brother Anthony
Sogang University, Seoul
http://www.sogang.ac.kr/~anthony



Lauren W. Deutsch
835 S. Lucerne Blvd., #103
Los Angeles CA 90005
Phone: 323 930-2587
e mail: lwdeutsch at earthlink.net



------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Thu, 07 Apr 2005 07:34:22 +0900
From: <ken.kaliher at us.army.mil>
Subject: Re: [KS] Naksan Temple
To: "Lauren W. Deutsch" <lwdeutsch at earthlink.net>,Korean Studies
Discussion List <Koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws>
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Message: 3
Date: Thu, 7 Apr 2005 13:09:12 +0900
From: Dylan Davis <dylandavis1 at gmail.com>
Subject: [KS] Fulbright Forum, Friday, April 22--6:30 p.m.
To: Koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws
Message-ID: <16443f630504062109dbdb57d at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

Fulbright Forum!!

Fulbright in Seoul (the Korean American Educational Commission) is
pleased to invite you to attend the Fulbright Forum for April, which
will be held on Friday, April 22, 2005, at 6:30 p.m. at the Commission
offices in Mapo.

The speaker this month is Seungsook Moon, Fulbright Senior Research
Scholar and Associate Professor of Sociology at Vassar College. Her
talk, "Making Citizens, Practicing Citizenship: Gender, Class, &
Membership in South Korea" explores the ways in which women and men
define and contest the specific content of citizenship in their daily
lives in the process of their involvement in two grassroots
organizations: Minwuhoe (Democratic Friends Society), a major women's
association, and Ch'amyoyondae (People's Solidarity for Participatory
Democracy), a major civic association whose membership is formally
gender neutral, but actual membership tends to be numerically
dominated by (middle-class) men.  These two organizations are selected
from an array of grassroots associations that came to exist in revived
and expanded civil society in post-1987 Korea for the following
reasons:  First, they are two associations with comparable membership
size of roughly ten to thirteen thousand that would allows her to
study the role of gender and class, in shaping the meanings and
practices of citizenship.  Second, as their names suggest, both
associations have maintained substantive democratization of Korea as
one of their underlying goals.  This self-identification is important
because not all grassroots organizations aim at the democratic
transformation of society.  Established in 1987, Minwuhoe is one of
oldest women's associations with a feminist orientation that has
reached out to working women and housewives.  Formed in 1994,
Ch'amyoyondae has promoted grassroots participation in monitoring the
working of such powerful social institutions as the state, business
corporations, and the mass media, and the building of solidarity among
social minorities.

Focusing on the substantive content of citizenship, her research
examines the construction of the category of citizen rather than to
take it for granted as a formal status conferred to members of a
modern nation state.  This approach allows one to explore citizenship
as an expression of human agency embedded in a specific cultural
context.  This recognition of culture, tied to history and social
practices, in the making of citizenship can contribute to the
decolonization of the global production of knowledge concerning
democracy and thereby facilitate genuinely mutual understanding
between peoples across national and cultural boundaries.  Popular and
academic debates on democracy have been often dominated by the
culturalist argument that democracy is a Western concept and peoples
elsewhere lack cultural underpinnings for the development and
practices of democracy. A current example of this type of argument is
frequently seen in the public discourse on democracy in Iraq and in
the Middle East in general.  The problem with this culturalist
argument is that it assumes the fixed cultural boundaries of the West
and the rest of the world and at the same time overlooks historical
and contemporary exchanges of ideas and practices among peoples across
cultural and power differences.  To the extent that we are able to
restore buried or discredited knowledge about numerous cultural
encounters and diffusions, we can appreciate the hybrid nature of any
given culture and a collective identity.

The presentation will be followed by a buffet reception.  If you plan
to attend the lecture and buffet, please R.S.V.P. to Dylan Davis at
executive.assistant at fulbright.or.kr so we can plan accordingly.  We
hope many friends will come to enjoy the lecture, the discussion, and
the food.

Place: Fulbright Building
168-15 Yomni-dong, Mapo-gu
see maps on our website: www.fulbright.or.kr
Date: Friday, April 22, 2005
Time: 6:30 p.m.

Sincerely,

Jai Ok Shim
Executive Director
Korean American Educational Commission (Fulbright)



End of Koreanstudies Digest, Vol 22, Issue 4
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