A 41-year-old cattle farmer in Hampyeong killed himself after attempting to beat his Filipino wife and three children to death with a farm implement.
And leave it to the Hankyoreh to connect it with US beef imports.
(HT to Western Confucian)
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31 Comments
That’s a tragic story. 14 of his cows died last year to some disease, forcing him to sell the remaining 4.
That also has nothing to do with beef imports.
“Lee was gentle by nature and a sincere man. He might have done this terrible thing after being discouraged by the news of a full reopening of U.S. beef imports.”
The Hankyoreh is shameless and so is the mayor his town. I can understand a farmer’s suicide being attributed to hardships caused by a sudden economic downturn, but not a murder-suicide.
His despair may be economic, but it wasn’t the FTA that infected 14 of his 18 cattle to brucellosis.
There will be other desperate farmers losing their livelihoods, though. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to establish programs to ease them into other products, like organic beef or something.
It doesn’t necessarily take beef imports to get an ajossi to fall off the deep end…
http://www.latimes.com/news/lo.....6394.story
I am confounded as to why economic difficulties would make any man take it on not just himself, but also his family.
The short answer is to subsidize Korean beef farmers and aid them into alternative types of farming and/or beef markets where people are willing to pay a higher price, like organic beef per # 2.
What a pussy.
Seriously, what a psychotic pussy.
wtf did he beat his family for?
And wtf does that have to do with beef imports? It’s not like he had any fracking cows.
And only a cattle rancher for ten years?
The hanky is shit.
Meh. Not as dreadful as some of the stuff Chosun comes up with.
Call me insensitive, but the fewer hanwoo farmers that are around, the better. Just too bad he had to lay into his family too. If we could make them all go away, maybe this whole hubbub would die down.
@4 Instead of subsidizing them, maybe just give them a nice union job at Hyundai when car exports to the USA pick up as a result of the FTA. Synergy.
I don’t see the logic.
Isn’t the real problem about how farmers are being ripped off? The price of Hanwoo at the grocery story has gone up close to 300% since the ban of US beef. How much of that goes to the farmers?
Tragic yes!
Wish guys who want to end it all would stop trying to take their families with them!
However, I agree that it’s time to stop subsisizing the local beef farmers.
50 million are paying for drastically over-priced beef in order to subsidize a few thousand farmers.
#4 has a good idea of instead of the shopping public subsidizing them, the government set up some kind of special program to help them change their farming or tout themselves as a kind of “specialty beef” for those patriots/nationalists who don’t mind paying for it.
It is ironic that the ads to the right of the article are to attract teachers to “Dynamic Korea”.
“We blame you for everything, but please, do yourself a favor and get over here to teach English to our youngsters.”
Luckily he failed at killing his family. (after failing at farming livestock, and probably failed at school… notice a trend here).
Soju… As usual… The guy drinks a lot, wants to prove a point on nationalism, ignores everything else (including the “love” — pause for laughing — for his family), and just does it. Good that the family survived. I hope she is smart and move with the kids to some place else.
I stubbed my toe last weekend. Hadn’t done that for quite some time.
I attribute it to the South Korean government’s decision to fully reopen its market to U.S. beef last month.
Bastards!
Teach these guys to flip burgers if they want to stay in beef.
A mountainous country like Korea simply has no business having a cattle industry. Period.
#14 - I’m sure there are many on ESL forums that can offer their expertise
The saddest part of this story is some people will take the bait.
One difference in Korean suicide ‘culture’ seems to be this practice of the man killing the whole family before killing himself. Last year there was that Korean American guy in LA who killed his wife and kids in his van before killing himself. I’m not Korean, but I guess what goes through these guys heads is something like - ‘my family will be destitute without me as family head to take care of them, therefore I’ll end their suffering by taking them out of their misery now.’ Is this generally right? Of course, the wife and kids probably have a very different idea.
Of course you kill the family before killing yourself. Don’t know any other culture that does it the other way around.
dokdoforever — Killing the family isn’t unique to Korea. It’s a common deranged — usually, but not always, male — behavioral response to hopelessness. Look up “Family Destroyer”.
One wonders whether binge-drinking, gambling, and adultery played a part in this tragedy… because they are more likely relevant than the FTA…
The whole farmer mystique (in Korea, Japan and the US) is interesting. The notion (for which taxpayers are prepared to pay a whole lot of money) that somehow these people’s jobs are more important and sacred than anyone else’s.
Most industrialized countries were once farming based economies — and farming affected society’s family structure, traditions and culture. Farmers can draw on that tradition to win support for trade protection and subsidies. And maybe even more important, in the industrialized world they have advantages of smallness in overcoming the collective action problem, via Mancur Olsen’s logic. Notice that farmers successfully receive protection (in the US, Japan, EU, etc) only when they are a very small minority of the population. Recently, Vietnam and Thailand, where agriculture takes a larger share of GDP, adopted trade policies penalizing their own farmers by halting rice exports, which force farmers to sell at a lower domestic prices. And Robert Bates writes about primarily rural African countries in the 60s and 70s which taxed their own agricultural exports. So, the preferences Korean farmers enjoy are really just a sign that the country has joined the ranks of the world’s advanced economies.
Wow. They mentioned the US beef imports twice before they mention the attacks on the family at all. Twice afterwards, too. I’m no Edward R. Murrow, but this seems like some shoddy journalism.
Or perhaps not. Maybe the Hankyoreh got their intended message through loud and clear. And unencumbered by pesky “facts.”
Well, just talked with a real Korean who explained that this tendency for Korean men committing suicide to try to take the family with them was due to the man’s feeling that he “owned” the other members of the family, that they were a part of him. Women in Korea share similar feelings about ‘owning’ their children and thus may try to kill their kids before committing suicide, but they do not try to kill their husbands before the act. So, looks like it has to do with an authoritarian family structure… which is not confined to Korea, as that sick Austrian guy with the basement dungeon demonstrates.
Although I agree that a frustrated man taking out his family along w/himself is not a uniquely Korean thing I have to say that two of the most shocking incidents two years ago here in Los Angeles did take place in Korean American families. What people were amazed at was that these men didn’t have a history of violence, there wasn’t a home wrecker involved, they seemed upstanding citizens on the surface, etc. I am not Koreanized enough to even begin to understand what’s going on in such an ajossi’s mind.
Speaking of your point about Korean women taking their children w/them. There was this case in upstate NY where a Korean American lady put her two kids in the SUV and drove off a cliff. Something about thinking that her husband was cheating on her. She died, but luckily her kids survived. Can’t find the link to that incident yet…
Found it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06.....mp;emc=rss
It’s hardly a Korean phenomenon.
What is a Korean phenomenon is the instinct to blame it on outside, preferably foreign, forces.
Thats because most of the problems originated from President Roh, except they dont realize it because his fuck ups are usually in the news. Their problems seem to come from nowhere ergo the tendency to put the blame on the outside.
*aren’t*
#24…..You have identified “the bait”
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