[KS] South Korea's Rollback of Democratic Rights

[Frank Hoffmann]

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
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