[KS] Egypt and Gwangju 1980

[Ruediger Frank]

Dear all,
I think the term "frustration" that Roald mentions is important. Having worked a lot on state-socialist societies, I have inevitably stumbled over the issue of political legitimacy and the fact that these societies will sooner or later resort to oppression after they figure that simply convincing everybody to do the "right" thing will not work. This oppression will lead to an accumulation of frustration and pressure, and eventually these systems either collapse or transform themselves. Now, with a society consisting of millions of individuals, frustration is more or less inevitable regardless the actual political system. The question is how they deal with it. Democracies, as imperfect they are, have the great advantage of providing numerous pressure relief valves, including frequent elections, participation, freedom of speech etc. which makes them much more resilient and durable. 
My point is that in most cases where violent uprisings occur, these pressure relief mechanisms are either not installed at all or do not function properly. This is obviously true for Egypt, Tunisia, Libya etc. And we all know that Korean domestic politics, including party politics, is a field that is still under development, to put it nicely. At least we now have political parties that exist for years, not months anymore. But if you look at local networks and grass-roots representation, parties are still quite weak. This is why NGOs are so dominant - because they do the job that parties so far fail to accomplish. Watching parliamentary debates is funny for outsiders but annoying for Korean citizens, and in any case the executive rules, or actually the President and his staff do. This has historical reasons and in many fields works quite well, but it leaves many people with a sense of being relegated to passive observers.
If people do not feel properly represented and if people feel that they don't have enough of a chance to make themselves heard and to achieve their interests, then they might become frustrated and eventually let off steam by rioting in one way or the other. The fact that riots occur in Korea is a sign that democracy there is deficient, and at times also of bad crisis management. 
This is not to say that other places are much "better", although I dislike such normative implications. The world is as it is. Anyhow, at least in theory, democracy (a system of rather flexible ideas and convictions) and religion (a system of mostly dogmatic beliefs) do NOT go together; but then look at the world's biggest democracy. And not everybody who watched a ballot in the German Bundestag and saw that party politics dominate, not the single lawmaker's opinion as the constitution suggests, believes that a representative democracy will ever be perfect. 
Having said that, I think the key issue is whether a society survives such phenomena like riots or not. The Kwangju uprising led to a transformation of Korea a few years later; the beef protests did not and will not. That's why despite all criticism, I have been defending South Korea in discussions about its democratic achievements, and that's where we could indeed find parallels between Kwangju and Egypt. 
Cheers,
Rudiger


on Samstag, 19. Februar 2011 at 00:41 you wrote:


Dear Werner,

Good to read you! I hope you?re enjoying the end of the long cold winter there. I hear it was a particularly mean one. 

Anyway, I am probably misreading something here, but it seems you?re saying Scott is lying about being assaulted by a group of people, and I find that a bit hard to take in. I don?t think he was referring to the entire movement as a mob. Korean protests in the past few decades have shown us that wanton violence does occur. I remember one entire floor at the Lotte Department floor being levelled after the protesters, who started their protests only a week or so earlier, were told their demands would not be met. It?s a common phenomenon this unorganised, uncharacteristic mob violence, as I am sure you know (also coming from a footballing nation). I think it?s important to really consider all the elements (of frustration), and that does mean taking into account the entirety of the movements we study and discuss and not ignore the little group acts of violent indiscretion simply because they do not fit the big picture. Those splinter groups are interesting as well, but their aims may only be loosely connected to the aspirations of the main group. If I were assaulted by a group of people I probably wouldn?t use a three-letter word, to be honest. However, that is not to say, of course, that we must regard all of the protesters as a mob, because I would strongly reject that. 

Just my two cents worth...

Best wishes,

Roald



Op 18/02/11 7:19 PM, Werner Sasse <werner_sasse at hotmail.com> schreef:

Scott, can you, please, stop this!
Your comments are simply disgusting in the way they picture these people. 
I lived within the cordon the riot police had drawn all the time during these demonstrations, and I was unfortunate to see the aggressive behaviour of the riot police once darkness had fallen.  And really, the sheer mass of the police in their war like outfits was a provocation in itself already. It definitely reminded of late Park Chung Hee's times.
The demonstrators were students, middle class mothers with their babes, and men of all ages in dark suits right out of their offices. Their behavior was agitated, showing how upset they were (and not about the Mad cow thing that triggered the demonstrations, but about the way the government behaved), but certainly not  "disorderly and intent on causing trouble or violence".
You may  not have liked the demonstrations. That's o.k. But, please, do not use this kind of language.
Werner Sasse 
 
 
> Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2011 17:55:30 -0800
> From: jsburgeson at yahoo.com
> To: koreanstudies at koreaweb.ws
> Subject: Re: [KS] Egypt and Gwangju 1980
> 
> --- On Wed, 2/16/11, Frank Hoffmann <hoffmann at koreaweb.ws> wrote:
> 
> > The term "mob" has a specifically negative and outdated taste 
> > to it ... being a term for mafia as well as being mafia slang
> > itself on the one hand, and in its older British usage, I
> > think, reflects a rather elitist view, but was then also
> > picked up by late 19th and early 20th century communists to
> > refer to masses in a negative way, masses that are being
> > manipulated, dehumanized -- non-legitimized masses so to
> > say. That is at least my understanding. You used it in that
> > same way, as I read it, and it was irritating to see that in
> > your report dealing with Korean protests against U.S.
> > imports etc.
> 
> I can't speak to earlier protest movements in South Korea, but certainly there were moments during the Mad Cow Protests of 2008 in Seoul when the supposedly peaceful "vigils" degenerated into outright mob-like behavior. Whether the widespread, unprovoked violence displayed by many protesters on many nights was calculated (to provoke reactions from the riot police, and thereby generate propaganda imagery in support of the movement) or "spontaneous" is moot, since to outside observers, the impression was the same, and in line with the following dictionary definition:
> 
> mob |mäb|
> noun
> a large crowd of people, esp. one that is disorderly and intent on causing trouble or violence : a mob of protesters.
> 
> The pattern of reckless violence and provocation continued well into 2009, such as when protesters "celebrating" the one-year anniversary of the Mad Cow Protests stormed the Hi! Seoul Festival performance stage at Seoul Plaza, forcing its cancellation, and continuing to run amok in Myong-dong on many other nights. I was there on most nights and witnessed all of this first-hand myself, and on one occasion when attempting to photograph some of the more egregious transgressions of the protesters, was physically assaulted by no less than half a dozen different protesters at once.
> 
> Surely it is the task of historians to view and write history with eyes wide open, rather than willfully whitewashing it (whether with fancy verbiage and semantics or otherwise), given that the evidence is easily accessible to anyone looking for it?
> 
> --Scott Bug
> 
> 
> 
> 
       

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