Will I still have to use proxies to access my site, the “progressive” Hankyoreh Shinmun — founded by journalists tired of press censorship — has come out in favor of banning access to websites showing the Kim Sun-il beheading. I’m left speechless. Anyway, with my site blocked, and the Hani providing such an easy target for my frustrations, I proceed to fisk:
Video of the beheading of Kim Seon Il, who had been held hostage by a resistance group in Iraq, is floating around the internet, and it has gotten to the point where teenagers familiar with the culture of the internet are circulating it around among themselves. The Ministry of Information and Communication defined distribution of the footage as illegal and set out to block it, but has been unable to block access to one site located in the United States. The internet is free territory and completely blocking information is essentially impossible. You can find what you want if you just have the will. Distributing video footage is a personal choice, a question of individual judgment. What is needed is a mature sense of civic awareness and media ethics, before it even becomes something for government intervention and legal sanctions.
I have no real argument so far, except a) under no circumstances should the issue become “something for government intervention and legal sanctions”; and b) the rest of the editorial will prove the Hani’s “mature sense of civic awareness and media ethics” to be quite perverse.
The deceased suffered a brutal death in a foreign land having done nothing to deserve his fate. The whole country had hoped he would return alive, and now mourns his death. The beheading video just kills the deceased one more time. Once you think of what it would be to have the same thing happen to a family member, however, you no longer have the curiosity to see the video. Netizens should block its distribution, therefore, and erase it if they already have it in their possession.
I agree with almost all of this — I will not watch the video, and I think those who uploaded the thing are twisted fucks. But for the Hani to call on netizens to “block distribution” of the video is what Michael Moore would call “censorship.” Mind you, I have no problem with the Hani calling on individual Internet users not to upload or download the thing. In fact, I think that would be quite the proper course of action. But to call on Internet users to “block” others from exercising their right to freely upload and distribute information is, frankly, a shocking development for a paper that claims to stand for freedom of speech and the public’s right to know. I mean, Chosun Ilbo editorials call for Marxist and “anti-state” websites (often run by radical university students) to be shut down all the time, but we expect those sort of things from the Chosun. But the Hani?
There is wide internet penetration in Korea and users have a high level of awareness. Korean internet users can be counted on for lively espousals of opinion and quality alternatives every time there is a political or social issue in the air. This time around again let’s have them block the video and make a demonstration of the strength and good sense of Korean netizens. Fortunately, many are participating in this campaign.
A “demonstration of the strength and good sense of Korean netizens?” By blocking access to information the majority finds offensive? By encouraging organized intellectual intolerance? Just because I’m curious, how would the Hani suggest those netizens go about “blocking” the video and “making a demonstration of the strength” of Korean netizens? By bombarding offending sites with so much traffic that they crash? By organizing hacking attacks? Perhaps the Hani and its intrepid band of progressive journalists should just break out the flamethrowers and torch the hard drives of those who post information that runs counter to the better sense of the Korean netizen community? And while it may or may not be true that “Korean internet users can be counted on for lively espousals of opinion and quality alternatives every time there is a political or social issue in the air,” those lively espousals of opinion are predicated on the capacity of individual citizens to freely express opinions and post information. If Korean Internet culture (or any Internet culture) becomes one of in which unpopular opinions and socially “taboo” information are silenced or blocked through either a) official sanctions; b) organized cyber-warfare; or c) netizen intimidation, mark my words, “lively espousals of opinion” will become a thing of the past. Needless to say, encouraging the mob to silence individual netizens and conduct the online equivalent of a book-burning is not what I’d call a “mature sense of civic awareness.” And it sure as hell ain’t “progressive.”
Elementary, middle, and high schools need to actively encourage youngsters to not access the video. One would hope that instead of just telling them not to watch it, this might be a chance to instill them with some media ethics. They should be reminded that violating the civil rights and honor of someone on the internet is not only problematic legally - it is in itself a gigantic form of violence.
OhMyHani! Look, I hope to hell teachers are telling their kids not to watch the video, and it goes without saying that they’d better not be showing it in class. But given what the Hani just encouraged in the previous paragraph, the reminder it offers here means absolutely nothing. Perhaps I can see how watching Kim get his head cut off is “a gigantic form of violence.” It’s certainly disrespectful to the dead, and not something I would encourage by any means. The Hani, however, just encouraged netizens to band together and silence other netizens and/or block their access to information. Moreover, while the paper hasn’t officially sanctioned “cyber-bombardments” and hacking attacks on other netizens’ intellectual property, the Hani surely could not have been ignorant of the ways in which certain groups of netizens have dealt with dissenting opinion or carried out their “lively espousal of opinions” in the past. Anyway, it makes no sense at all for the Hankyoreh to caution others against one “gigantic form of violence” while encouraging Internet users to commit another.
They say that most young people who have seen the beheading video talk of emotional stress and animosity toward Iraq. Shocking video footage induces irrational judgment. The absolute majority of Iraqis did not want Kim to die. Teachers and parents need to encourage young people to go beyond the shock and exercise discernment.
Again, I agree with the Hani in principle. The problem is, where was this talk from the Hani when members of the Korean Teachers Union were bringing in pictures of Mi-seon’s and Hyo-sun’s shattered bodies into classrooms to show elementary school students? Or when they were conducting “peace education classes” by passing around pictures of mutilated Iraqi corpses? What, those pictures didn’t give young people stress and feeling of animosity? Did those pictures not induce irrational judgment? What about all the anti-war types flashing around photos of Iraqi POWs and dead Iraqis? Should those photos be “blocked” and their distributors silenced, lest they cause The Children ™ emotional stress?
On a related note, the Federation of Korean Trade Unions, doing its best impression of a progressive organization (and mark this moment, as it may be the only time I ever refer to the FKTU in a positive light), issued a statement Wednesday expressing concern that the Ministry of Information and Communication’s blocking of the decapitation video was a serious violation of the people’s right to know, and felt the intention of the move was to block the growth of opinion against the deployment of troops to Iraq (full text [in Korean] of statement here). The FKTU also wondered — quite appropriately — how the hell the government is going to push Korea into becoming a global IT superpower when said government is blocking access to online information (like this blog). Netizen opinion, unfortunately, was not in accordance with the FKTU’s views on this matter — the netizen responses citied by the Hanguk Ilbo were “[the FKTU statement] runs completely counter to public sentiment (or feelings),” “distributing the cruel video violates the human rights of the deceased and kills the family,” “the statement was an indiscreet act lacking consideration of whether young people might see the video,” and “it is irrational to argue that blocking the video was to stop rising anti-troop deployment opinion.” According to an official at the Information and Communications Ethics Committee, they had received “hundreds” of reports — mostly from individual netizens — of sites or users attempting to distribute or upload the video. When the Hanguk Ilbo report was filed, 25 URLs and 31 IPs were blocked in the Republic of Korea.
Progressive papers advocating cyber-book burnings and intimidation while Internet users participate in their own censorship. And my site is still blocked.
Strange day.
PS: Unless someone (like the government or major media company) says or does something incredibly stupid, this will be my last post on this issue. Not that this isn’t an important issue — it most certainly is. There are, however, more important issues the require converage and commentary, and given what has occured in Iraq and what is going on in Beijing, it wouldn’t be appropriate to focus my blogging energy on the assholes over at MIC.
UPDATE: 12 people busted for uploading video onto a P2P service site.
22 Comments
way to go marmot…. on this one, the bee and the marmot are in perfect agreement. this is a dark stain on the korean republic. the chauvinism displayed here is a perfect example of the evil inherent in nationalist thinking, such that even the progressives (FTKU malgo) look like absolute fools (though in your estimation, i suppose that’s nothing new).
as always, thanks for the superlative coverage.
Watch out Marmot, if you say too much more you might get “Peking Ducked” right out of korea. I can almost hear your visa sliding into the shredder right now rrrrrrr….
I guess I’m teaching my grandmother to suck eggs here, but I just wanted to make the point that sites like marmot.blogs.com are inaccessible because they share their IP address with hundreds of unrelated sites.
If you type this:
ping makesomethingup.blogs.com
you still get the same IP address as marmot.blogs.com. It means that any calamity that affects one of the sites on that address — even a link from a very popular site that brings in too many people — will bring down every single site.
My first reaction would be to dump blogs.com and any other service that works the same way.
Note that FKTU (Federation of Korean Trade Unions) stems from the originally state-sanctioned “more temperate” union. If I remember correctly they associated with the Social Democratic Party (there really was one!) in one of the latest election, with no results.
The more radical one, Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (www.nodong.org), with which the Democratic Labor Party has close links, has instead Kim Seon-il as its opening page.
stupid americans
americans in Korea are really stupid
unipeak? fuck you, we’re gonna shut/shoot it down
americans in Korea are really stupid
Perhaps, but to the best of my knowledge, none of those stupid Americans are cooperating with the authorities in shutting down Internet access. Nor do any stupid expat American bloggers — again, to the best of my knowledge — get on Korean blogs and make them themsleves look like complete assholes, as you have done. BTW, how’s the weather in Northern California?
unipeak? fuck you, we’re gonna shut/shoot it down
The only reason I haven’t deleted your comment is because far too many netizens apparently think as you do. Luckily, not all Korean netizens are as dense as you appear to be.
And fuck you, too, you little Brownshirt. Thank you for your comment.
PS — I’d appreciate it if nobody else responded to the above comment.
Well, at least it’s in the wild now. I got a mention of the Korean beheading blog blocking in the SmartMobs blog.
http://www.smartmobs.com/archives/003405.html
Not the NY Times, but its a site a lot of journalists watch.
Breaking News:
Arab TV reporting that Abu Al-Zarqawi’s terrorist cell has taken 3 Turks hostage and is threatening to behead them.
Turkey refused to help the U.S. war in Iraq so I’m wondering if this will effect the thoughts of those Koreans who think that distancing their country from the U.S. is the key to security?
Or will the good folks at Hankyoreh still push for making peace with Al Qaeda? (”It needs to make it understood that Korea has no dispute with any group in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East.”)
It’s been a great week for South Korea’s democratic development. Syngman Rhee and Park Chung-hee would have been proud.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I dont see how the government can honestly claim any sense of moral leadership here of the type they so often seem to running the government on. I understand where they are coming from, but the selective nature of the governments morals leaves everybody hurt.
I’m absolutely on the side of many K-bloggers and commentators here about their rightful anger toward the mindless, bigoted “censorship” actions of the MIC and so the Korean government.
But I wished, you would’ve shown such an outrage about the questionable infringement and violation of human rights and civil rights by the US administration in its war on terror, especially against suspected Al-Quaeda terrorists and juvenile detainees in Guantanamo/ Cuba. The shady and suspicious (des)information policy of the current US government should also lead us to thoughts about the worth of freedom rights in any examplatory democracies in their sometimes “exaggerated” approach to the common threat of political-Islamic terrorism, which led them to become the same arbitrary, ruleless “monster” (according to the agenda of the terrorists) whilst fighting them with dubious, undemocratic methods. And I don’t point my fingers especially at the USA, but to all Western-orientated liberal democracies in Europe and East Asia as well.
If we aren’t careful & reasonable, there’s the danger to degenrate into the hypocritical travesty or caricature, that exactly the fundamentalistic terrorists and their religious/ ideological supporters have made of the Western world and culutre.
I can see this sort of shit happening in Korea, but I can also see this sort of shit happening overseas. And be careful with your “totlaitarian” defense of freedom for information and free access to it in the internet: with your arguments you can also legitimate the circulation of “child pornography” or other disgusting stuff. And the “absolute” freedom of the web has become a idealistic imagination, it already does not exists anymore as it possibly was at the starting point of the anarchic, worldwide web movement and participation, before the commercialization of the web.
That being said, I’m not going to defend anyhow the overzealous and amateurish censorship trial of the MIC, to make it again clear for the densed accusation-idiots, who’ll start to yell at me for this comment (I’ll ignore you, bloody bumpkins!).
Sugar Shin, just to make it clear where I stand on issues like child porn — and I’ll open myself up to criticism for this — I don’t think the distribution of child porn should be illegal, although I think MAKING child porn should be illegal (and punished severely!). Yes, it’s sick, but so are a lot of things on the Internet — including videos of beheadings, snuff videos, suicide sites, etc. — but unlike a lot of “conservatives,” I’m pretty liberatarian when it comes to things like this. The distribution of photos — in and of themselves — should not be Big Brother’s concern, although the taking of those photos may very well constitute a serious offense depending on local laws.
As for U.S. violations of civil rights and the like, I blog mostly on Korea-related issues (with some Asia-related issues thrown in there as well). Yes, I’m well aware that the U.S. violates human rights. I’m also well aware that Uzbekistan violates human rights, as does Botswana. OK, I’m not so sure about Botswana. If I do not post about these those violations, it’s not because I support said violations, but because they generally have nothing to do with this blog. Also keep this in mind — I’ve been back to the United States only once in almost eight years. Hence I am not as knowledgable of contempory U.S. issues, and I leave those to the many outstanding U.S. and U.S.-based bloggers. Of course, you’re right, Mr. Shin, in that if we condemn one, we have to condemn the other. I’m simply pointing out that absence from this blog does not necessarily indicate agreement. Just posting on Korea takes a great deal of time and effort, and even that is good enough only to cover a miniscule fraction of Korea-related issues.
But I wished, you would’ve shown such an outrage about the questionable infringement and violation of human rights and civil rights by the US administration in its war on terror - Sugar Shin
Mr. Marmot, this was not directed at your Korea-themed posts (which I’m quite aware of, that you mostly post about matters linked/ related to the topics of your Korea-centered blog), but I just wanted to address the many visiors from the USA or elsewhere, who comment on your blog. We should also considerate the whole international dimension of this controversial topic.
I’m stemming from a school of thoughts about “freedom of press, speech, information and opinion”, where a “meddling” in or a “clipping” of those constitutional rights by the government in restricting or blocking harmful propaganda/ lies/ agitations (like the public denial of the Holocaust etc.)is not uncommon, if the passed restricting acts and laws don’t violate the basic constitutional principles and articles, which are judged and commentated by an independent, supreme constitutional court. I know, that the US ans Scandinavian attitude towards the freedom of speech is in many ways more lenient, than as an example the attitude/ approach in continental Europe. Different legal philosophies, how the freedom of speech could be regulated and bounded by the executive and judicial branch.
you forgot to talk about how the HANI talks about the banned website being from the US. Its impossible for a Korean to hate anything as much as it hates the USA. So when anything bad happends the USA always has to be tied in. Its funny how that “brown shirt” was from USA. Face it folks all Koreans from any country HATES USA. Just look at the likes of Sugar Shin and Shin Jong il or all the other ones. They hate all crackers. its pretty sad. I only say, watch your back when ever a Korean is around. They will all stab you in the back
Well, first of all I’d have to say to ‘a reader’ that I’ve read tons of Sugar Shin posts, and have never gotten the impression he “hates the usa and crackers”, even when I disagreed with him. I see comments like this now and again on various blogs, but I challenge you to point to a post where he was trashing on the basis of race or nationality, and not making logical arguments for his position.
Let’s look at you, shall we?
“watch your back when ever a Korean is around. They will all stab you in the back” — who is posting racially based generalizations, huh?
In your own words, “it’s pretty sad”
Sugar Shin–
Your comments are ALWAYS on the mark! I come to Marmot’s sometimes to see YOUR take on things. If the anonymous “a reader” is in Korea, perhaps he just got one too many nasty looks over the last few days. I know I have.
That being said, I’m not going to defend anyhow the overzealous and amateurish censorship trial of the MIC, to make it again clear for the densed accusation-idiots, who’ll start to yell at me for this comment. Sugar Shin
Face it folks all Koreans from any country HATES USA. Just look at the likes of Sugar Shin and Shin Jong il or all the other ones. They hate all crackers. its pretty sad. I only say, watch your back when ever a Korean is around. They will all stab you in the back. a reader
Man, man, man, it doesn’t take a prophet or genius to predict the reaction of types like “a reader”.
Sugar Shin–
Your comments are ALWAYS on the mark! I come to Marmot’s sometimes to see YOUR take on things. - aletheia.
Sugar Shin is THE MAN. Anybody who wants to mess with him will have to deal with me first.
Shrieeeeek, Woojay, be careful, we can easily become the “axis of US-haters/ commies/ DPRK lovers”.
I agree with the Marmot that this is a Korea blog and we should focus on Korean issues. Its frustrating for many non-Koreans to see how so many Koreans prefer to attack the US rather than directly answer criticism of Korea because they want to change the subject. Sometimes it does seem that they can’t get over their “gukshin” enough to even put up pertinent arguements. Instead the answer to every criticism of Korea is some version of “america is worse.”
But hey this is the internet and all that is to be expected. But when I see that reaction in real life, read it in Korean newspapers, its disturbing. None of my French, Israeli, Russian, or whatever friends react that way at all… in fact only the Chinese come closest in terms of the the overly emotional, “righteous indignation” response to civil discussion. It’s really quite odd and, I’m sorry to say, it makes Koreans look immature.
No, Fabius, the problem is, that many posters from the US have an attitude of a know-it-better teacher or lecturer. The Koreans are described as childish, incompetent and “evil” or similar generalizations like that, without distinction of the diversity of opinions floating in Korean society. And when someone comes up with this annoying gesture of superiority of the US society, as if there aren’t any indiosyncracies in the US system itself, then I like to take these persons down to earth from their cloudish, rosy perspective of how perfect or superb their own nation in comparison to South Korea is. I want fair treatment and respect and if some guys come here only to display their I-know-it-all, superior disgust about the truely existing ills, failures and shortcomings of Korea or Koreans. I encounter seldomly balanced and fair opinions without a racist, generalizing or disregarding undertone. And I’ve experienced with direct contact with Israelis, that some of them are really quick to accuse critics of Israel’s occupation policy in the Westbank or Gaza of anti-Semitism and hatred of Jews. The same goes with Russians in discussions about the war in Chechnya. Only a few examples of my personal experience with those nationals.
PING:
TITLE: Asia by Blog
BLOG NAME: Simon World
Asia by Blog is now going to be a Monday and Thursday thing to provide a broader spread of stories from around Asian blogging. This week’s main focus is South Korea’s renewed love of censorship. China is well known for it’s censorship of blogging, as R…
PING:
TITLE: Kim video and ethics (Day 8 of the Korean Ministry of of Information and Communications ban)
BLOG NAME: Budaechigae ?¶€?Œ€?°Œ?°œ
Remember the Marmot’s report on the Federation of Korea Trade Unions little ethics debate? The Herald posted this, and I wanted to get it up before it dissapeared into “premium content”-land. Kim video sparks ethics debate Citing the nation’s “right
Volunteer Tailgate Party blocked in China, Korea
Rocky Top Brigade tailgate party is at Big Orange Michael. I had a chance to check it out via a web based proxy yesterday morning, yesterday afternoon the proxy is blocked. Michael has a Blogspot site and as many of…