The Royal Asiatic Society - Korea Branch will bold its semi-monthly lecture-meeting this Tues November 14, at 7:30 pm, in the 2nd-floor Resident’s Lounge of the Somerset Palace Residence (near Anguk Station, downtown). Free and open to all the public, as always; more info: 763-9483 http://www.raskb.com/
This one looks potentially more interesting than most. Prof. Lee In-ho is a senior history specialist now affiliated with Myongji University, and was educated at SNU, Wellesley and Harvard (Ambassador to Finland & Russia in the late 90s).
She will talk for an hour on “Rewriting Korean History” — understanding current SK gov & public attitudes, including the Anti-Americanism and the policy of appeasement toward North Korea — just what we love to yap about here on the M-Hole — in context of the:
“…fierce intra-Korean struggle which has been going on over how to interpret Korea’s modern history. The revisionist attempt to rewrite Korea’s history from the point of view of the “unified Korean nation” has steadily been gaining ground. The speaker will explain how this revisionist movement is, to a certain extent, an unavoidable consequence of and a healthy reaction to the obscurantist manner in which anti-Communist education was conducted in Korea in earlier decades. But North Korea has been extremely adroit in exploiting weaknesses in South Korea’s education system and implanting a deliberately falsified version of history in the minds of nationalistically-inclined young minds. In that regard, the revisionist controversy has a grave political implication. Unless effective measures to counter the propaganda and agitation are found, Korea might have won every single battle only to lose the war itself.”
It should be fascinating for many of us, and contain plenty of controversial ideas and interpretations. See you there….
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And just to add, the RAS has several interesting tours coming up soon, last chance before the weather gets too harsh:
South Cholla Tour: Land of Exile Sat.-Sun. November 18-19
Nagan walled Folk-Village, Boseong Tea Plantation, Taegu-myeon Ceramic Celadon Kilns, Kangjin Town, Dasan Chodang (one of the most scenic and beautiful spots in Korea), the thatched-roof home of the poet Kim Young-Rang, Baeknyeon-sa (White Lotus Temple), and the Pyongyong Fortress & Village (16th-cen site of Hamel and the other exiled Dutch sailors, with an 800-year-old Ginko tree).
Inner and South Seorak-san National Park (rarely-visited sites)
SATURDAY-SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 25-26
BUYEO AND GONGJU TOUR: THE KINGDOM OF PAEKCHE
Sunday, November 26th
Quite reasonable prices for going along, even if you’re not a member.
More info: 763-9483 http://www.raskb.com
Anyway this would be available later online? Or can someone record an mp3 for us?
Well, the RAS doesn’t do such things — we’re always way behind wherever the technological curve is, it’s amazing we have a website
At RAS Council meetings we have talked about making recordings, after securing the speaker’s permission of course; but we haven’t gone ahead to try it yet.
This is still one of those “ya gotta actually be there” gigs…
for now.
It’s times like these when MP3 players with built in recording capability are nice to have. It’s just a shame no one buys non-Apple brand MP3 players..
*Cough*
I emailed the RAS about a year ago, and around the same time, I emailed some groups in Korea and elsewhere working on North Korea and human rights, and I emplored them to get with the internet revolution.
It was around the time of the big NK human rights conference in Seoul that Freedom House helped put together.
Through the comments section of this blog and a couple of others, I was able on my own to put together some coverage of some of the presentations.
I hoped to make it clear to these groups that —-
—— getting this stuff up on the internet — in video form — is about as easy as can be.
All you need is someone with a digital video camera and a tripod who is willing to press “record” and “stop” when the presentations being and end.
Then you need a simple video editing program that any moran can figure out how to use —- I’m speaking from experience as one such novice moran.
Then you just need about $10 to $35 dollars a month to rent storage space and bandwidth on the internet.
I use Yahoo.com’s website service. I pay for the small business rate, and I have put up dozens of short videos covering the anti-US events in Korea.
If I can do it, anybody with a pulse and half a brain can do it.
Groups like RAS and those ngos who want to raise awareness about things like North Korea —– really are missing out BIG TIME on the opportunities the internet has opened up for them.
If they used short videos to inform and entice net surfers — they would get much more traffic - and succeed much more in getting their message out…..
Well, if any of you have the slick tech-skills and the interest / energy to do some voluntary work for the cause of Korean Studies, you are certainly invited to become a member of the RAS-KB, and possibly even its Council, and assist us in getting us a much better presence than we now have in cyberspace….
I’m in the US, but if you have someone who will bring a camcorder to the presentations and a tripod and do a simple recording of the presentation, I can work with that person to upload it, and I’ll do a simple video edit and put it on a webpage and then upload it back to you.
I did something with the human rights conference early this year I hoped would be an example and inspiration to different groups. I wanted to show them how easy it is.
It doesn’t take much to get a C-Span like set of videos on a website.
I took the North Korea Human Rights Conference stuff down recently to reorganize my website.
I’ll put some of it back up so you can have an example of what I can do if you have someone on the Korean-end to just shoot the video.
my email is usinkorea@hotmail.com
I would personally just like to see the presentations the RAS-KB has.
I think it would also be nice to get some video from the tours I think you organize. That would take a little more effort on the part of the guy/girl with the camcorder and more effort editing it , but I would be willing to do it.
I can’t make “kick ass” webpages — professional quality.
But, I can edit the videos and make pages good enough to present the speechs. C-Span doesn’t wow people with its video camera and editing skills. People watch C-Span for what the people are saying.
I’ll let you know when I have some of the North Korea Human Rights Conference pages back up to see as an example….
I believe I got all the North Korea Human Rights Seoul Conference material back on my site.
Here is the main index page:
http://www.usinkorea.org/North.....onference/
Keep in mind, this was all put together on the fly a few days before the conference starting with comments on this blog and a couple of others and eventually by two people (one in Korea and me in the US) who had never met or emailed before.
If Brendan had had a tripod, it would have been better, but it is still the best (read “only”) coverage of the conference like this I’ve seen on the internet.
Which is a shame…
Here is a link to the webpage I made with the video embed of Amb Lefkowitz’s speech.
http://www.usinkorea.org/North.....lefkowitz/
Here is a direct link to the video which is also embedded in the webpage:
http://www.usinkorea.org/North.....l_2005.wmv
I am a novice video editor and webpage maker, but you don’t have to be a professional to get something useful up on the internet to cover this kind of event — or even the tours.
If anybody has any problems navagating the site, email me.
usinkorea@hotmail.com
because I haven’t finished checking yet if all the conference material was restored properly or not.
Thanks, usinkorea… i’ll looking to the possibility of doing this with you… i’ll see if one of the upcoming speakers is willing to be taped, and if someone associated with us has a digital videocam… they are fairly popular these days; i should have one myself…
For sound recording, this little gadget is the best and is available locally but it is about 539,000 Won but it is professional grade gear. It might be cheaper if one buys it in the U.S. and bring it over.
http://www.m-audio.com/product.....-main.html
I can’t say Prof. Lee delivered the most engaging or focused lecture I’ve seen, but she did offer some interesting analytical nuggets. As she stated in her opening remarks, this was not really a scholarly talk (though Lee is certainly a scholar). Still, I would have liked to see her cite more evidence of the links between the Korean Teachers’ Union and subversive North Korean elements. How much support exists for this thesis? Is there anything more than the gobs of circumstantial evidence of teachers pushing a leftist line?
This is a critical component of her main idea, namely that Korean society is due for a “mini cultural revolution” in its approach to America and the North. And yet this idea, as far as I could tell, was based only on her belief that a) infiltrating the ROK’s education system would be simple; b) Kim Jong-Il knows this; thus c) Kim Jong-Il has done it. I don’t doubt that he’s tried, but again, is there any concrete evidence of the extent to which he’s succeeded? This kind of spy stuff is, by definition, hush-hush. But have any professors or teachers been caught red-handed? Or do free speech protections make this kind of ideological infiltration unstoppable?
As for this “cultural revolution,” color me a skeptic. Prof. Lee sees the MacArthur incident as a turning point, a kind of wake up call to wider Korean society about the virulence and extremism of the left. Even if a mildly more hard-line government takes the stage in ‘07, however, I don’t see a major reversal in anti-American trends on the peninsula. Those sentiments are simply too deeply entrenched.
It turns out I was mis-informed about something I posted above. The RAS has actually already started digitally videotaping its lectures; the one tonight was recorded, and it’s the third or fourth of one that has been done so — i just haven’t been paying enough attention
A deal is in place with Korea.com to edit and post them under the RAS brand-name, linked to and from the RAS site, although none have yet been posted. Each speaker is asked to sign a permission-contract for both the recording and the posting; not all do.
Professor Lee was given the contract tonight, but asked for time to review it before accepting or declining. If her talk is eventually posted i will certainly inform the Marmot’s Hole…
Apologies for the mistaken statement above. We are less far behind the technological curve than i had realized…
Professor Lee’s In-ho’s talk tonight was very well-attended, the room was jammed with more than 50 people — i was very glad to see that. She was kind of a dry and slow speaker, with no body-language-usage or visual aids at all, so i’m afraid the videotape might turn out to be less than exciting. At least, she kept good eye-contact with the audience and made her speech from memory, not reading it off papers (which many professors still do, and that’s the dullest thing in the world to have to sit through).
Her speech was less than it could’ve been, as she spent the first half of it on a review of Korean-American history, covering events that everyone who’s been paying attention already knows by heart. She warmed to her actual subject in the second half, explaining the origins and progress of the revisionist history movement. As promised, she explained how it can be seen as “an unavoidable consequence of” and even “a healthy reaction to” the extreme, brutal and “obscurantist manner in which anti-Communist education was conducted in [South] Korea in earlier decades.”
She pretty directly accused some persons in the ROK’s education, media and government institutions as being not only excessively soft towards this revisionism, but actively agents of the Pyeongyang regime, a mixture of unwitting dupes and ill-intentioned saboteurs. She spoke of their origins in bitter endurance of oppression and repression from the 1950s through the 1980s, how they became ideologically blinded by their dramatic experiences, which they blamed not only on the South’s dictators but on the Americans who were perceived as supporting them. She decried how some of the school teachers and professors have been and still are “implanting a deliberately falsified version of history in the minds of nationalistically-inclined young minds.”
She seemed very concerned that this historical revisionism and its associated attitudes are leading the ROK to disaster, ruining the military alliance with the USA and assisting the Pyeongyang regime which still intends to conquer the South by any means possible or necessary. She regards the sunshine policy as a necessary and reasonable thing to try in the mid-1990s, but by now quite obviously mostly a failure, and the fault for that is up North. So far, nothing that the good posters on this blog have not been vociferously saying and fulsomely agreeing with for years.
However, she ended with a plea to the foreign community concerned with Korea, to understand the origins of the reasons for the revisionism and the associated anti-Americanism, and to be patient with Koreans about this. She knows that American feelings are hurt by what has been said and done, but she asks that we not react emotionally, that we maintain understanding and long-range wisdom. She asks that we keep in mind that most Koreans are still quite pro-American, with reasonable and balanced opinions; and although they do not yet stand up publicly against the revisionists and punish the worst of them, they will achieve a better balance of public opinion and government behavior in the future. She hopes that we Westerners will have the patience to see this process through.
I’m glad to hear the RAS-KB has gotten into video - and hope they get some stuff up soon and put stuff up regularly.
I don’t know how much it would cost to do stuff like that through the professionals. Hopefully not too much, because it really shouldn’t. Like I wrote about, it doesn’t take much to do a C-Span type deal. They just stick a professional camera and audio equipment up and press record. Editing takes nothing more than putting on a few titles to show the date the shooting took place and who the speakers are.
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[...] Prof. Lee In-ho’s Royal Asiatic Society lecture on “rewriting Korean history” (mentioned on this blog here) is now available for download at Korea.com—just click on the “Royal Asiatic Society” banner on the top right sidebar. From the “hat-tip email”: This lecture goes almost 72 minutes, but I can assure you that the time you devote watching this straight forward discourse will be highly worth your time. (I am saving the download on CD for future reference.) This is a remarkable tour de force that concisely reviews, analyzes and explains matter of factly why many young Koreans have a very warped and confused understanding of their nation in the world community. [...]