Scott Burgeson has published his entire essay on the 2008 beef protests at his website.
Follow Us!
Korea News via Yahoo- S. Korea Lawmakers Make First Gaeseong Trip Since Kim Death
- Korea-U.S. trade pact re-emerges as political issue
- South Korea Lawmakers Make First Trip to Gaeseong Complex Since Kim Death
- Korea bans Orioles' scouts after teen inks deal
- Saudi 'pledges secure energy supply' to S. Korea
- The Korea Times gets taken for an intergalactic ride
- South Korea Plans to Buy Chinese Equities to Diversify Reserves
- South Korea’s No. 2 Public Pension Fund to Boost Equities
- South Korea Set to Follow Australia’s Rate Pause as U.S. Revives
- South Korea’s No. 2 Public Pension Fund to Boost Equity Holdings
Buy My Seoul Guidebook!
Books and DVDs on Korea
{ 89 comments… read them below or add one }
동네
An interesting essay, unfortunately marred by its punishing garrulousness and its desperate need to appear ‘intellectual’ by misappropriating terms and concepts from semiotics and psychoanalysis. C+
As usual, it’s a foreigner’s perspective, which cannot get to the bottom of the Korean (left in this case) behaviour. Having lived 10 years one would have hoped to scratch the surface at the very least.
Re: Mr. Burgeson’s essay
Well, I hope he can find some good Korean friends to help spread his ideas to the Korean people who should be the very target audience. After all, it’s about Korea, isn’t it…
As for what the state and the government do at any given time, they are never doing a perfect job. I think that they usually do half good and half bad. Especially given the inter-Korean situation, their blunders will outnumber some good they’ve done.
I think that this absurdity which both Koreans and non-Koreans have been witnessing in Korea today is highly correlated with the North-South standoff. I’ll do what I can to be of help, however little, to overcome it…
Re: #3: That was a strange comment. Usually I like Yuna’s posts, but that was just unconstructive complaining. At least Scott’s essay was full of useful facts and information. If you disagree, tell us how. But he certainly went a lot deeper than just scratching the surface.
Re: #4: The essay was originally published in Korean. Part of a book that sold fairly well, I do believe.
Sir, thanks for the comment.
Didn’t know that.
Oh goodo, the rating system is back, just as I’ve come back from my travelling.
I actually couldn’t read the whole essay because my eyes hurt from too many words. All it seems to do is to highlight is the lack of a reasonable left voice in Korea which is palpable and accessible to your everyday foreigner like Scott Burgesson. They need a better PR team, instead of letting ajossis shove foreigners with cameras around.
About the essay, I don’t think we need to know about where he ate his lunch every day or end with “what happened to me as a foreigner.” to answer the question why Koreans think Chojundong is such and such.
It’s detracting from the question posed.
my proxy server mangles the link to the essay. would someone be so kind as to post the raw URL?
on a similar note, my proxy server prevents me from voting. it’s your lucky day yuna^^
At your service, cmm.
Here you go: http://www.kingbaeksu.com/bbs/view.php?id=bug&page=10&sn1=&divpage=1&sn=off&ss=on&sc=on&select_arrange=headnum&desc=asc&no=1497
BTW, it’s kinda hard to read.
Yeah, when are the foreigners going to stop doing that? It’s annoying as hell.
(I am too much of a caveman to quote somebody’s comment in the internet way)
Yuna said: “All it seems to do is to highlight is the lack of a reasonable left voice in Korea which is palpable and accessible to your everyday foreigner like Scott Burgesson.”
I think you are right, but I think the bigger problem is, as seen by foreigners (well, maybe just me) is that there was not a ‘palpable and accessible’ non-left voice during that point. Nobody was counter-protesting in favor of clear-headedness, articles in the Korean press that were anti-us beef protests were few and far between, and there was a general feeling that nobody opposed the anti-US BSE wave. Entertainers who opposed it were shunned. There was no loud voice of reason. Not even a medium volume one.
I mean, obviously lots of people in the US are pretty fucking gullible. What is it, 30% of people that think Obama is Muslim? But there is a strong voice against these simian sibling fuckers, both in the public discourse and in private conversation. But it was impossible at the time, and even now (not that I bring up the beef protests with Korean friends- it turns my blood into fucking magma) to get anybody to disagree with it. That is the distressing part, not the lack of a level headed left defense of it all. We see the defense…..But where was the questioning?
The article hardly just scratched the surface. It discussed why foreigners can’t seem to fit in here, Anti-American sentiment, the frustration of the 386 generation, the biased media, the origins and propagation of Korean nationalism through history revisionism and romantic manipulation, and much more.
People should read before commenting instead of simply dismissing every opinion piece as just another disgruntled Korea bashing foreigner.
At least Yuna was honest about not reading it.
It was a very long read, but I thought it was pretty well thought out, and it raised some very good points to be discussed.
Is King Baeksu an “everyday” foreigner? That I very much doubt.
Yuna’s pissed because her peaceful, intellectual left is exposed for being the sham that it is.
The Korean left is more fascist than the Korean right.
For the essay, sadly in the first page it succumbs to the American need for a writer to prove how much he likes something that will be criticised in due course. I see this done quite often. I reckon it’s done to establish the writer’s fair mindedness, but it’s a waste of time and space.
The rest of the essay was an interesting read, and it can stand on its own merit w/o the reader knowing of the writer’s housing preference, etc.
Thanks.
There were tons, tons, TONS in Korean newspapers. Why must the voice of reason protest all the time? Do all Americans become suddenly complicit with the Tea Party because the reasonable people don’t hold rallies (or if they do, far less frequently and in smaller numbers?)
Am in the middle of reading Burgeson’s article. Will revert later.
I found the whole article boring.
Some boring foreigner living in Chongo and not wanting to leave.
The fact that the article is written mostly in English with some bits of Korean thrown in annoys me more – and even more so when he adds a glosary at the bottom.
Geez… either write ONLY in one language or the other – writing in two languages in the same article pisses me off.
Then he never showed why he couldn’t “fit” in??
The fact that he loves Chongno and has lived there for so long and has many friends there – I don’t see what he is complaining about???
@6
It was published in Korean a year ago in his book “더 발칙한 한국학” .
It seems to have been reviewed favorably by the Korean media and it’s listed at 교보문고. Haven’t read it myself, so can’t offer any opinion on the book; I found the essay worth reading though.
Just my two cents, but I’d say a foreigner putting that much thought into “한국학” (whatever the content) and making the effort to get it into the Korean language deserves some credit.
TheKorean- Yeah I guess you caught me making an unsupportable claim, that there was no anti-protest talk in the Korean press. There are more than a few posters here who can read a political article in Korean without a dictionary, a grammar book, and 45 minutes to spare- but I am not one of them. I am certainly in no position to judge the general sentiment in all the different papers. But there was an undeniable feeling here that the general public was complicit in this travesty against common sense.
I can’t stand it when people come here and act like Koreans are mystical aliens, the inscrutable Asian, that which can not be understood. But the whole beef thing is the only thing that ever made me feel that same way, which is why I don’t like thinking about it. Shoving it to the back of my mind now, never to bring it out again.
Also,
TheKorean: “Do all Americans become suddenly complicit with the Tea Party because the reasonable people don’t hold rallies (or if they do, far less frequently and in smaller numbers?)”
Well, no. But this reminds me of a question I have always had. I have in my mind a very clear picture of your average tea partier. Now obviously there is a range of people who that ideology appeals to, but there is a general type that goes for that. Is it a stereotype? Sure, but there is a lot of truth in most stereotypes. But I have no damn idea who your average beef protester was. Was it working class joes? College students? Mothers with babies? The odd thing about those protests was that it seemed to me to be made up of a general cross-section of Korean society. I have a simple mind, and I need a type of person to assign this kind of behavior in my head so I can understand the world. Who was the beef protester? Because it seemed like it was everybody.
The reasonable voice is there, it’s just not accessible to those who cannot spell 동네 (if that was published in a book, dear me – why bother write it at all?) who are too busy crying over the bruises one sustained from being shoved in a crowd full of angry ajossis.
Ok, done reading. Here are some dislikes and likes, in that order to end on a positive note.
Dislikes
1. The violence on the part of the protesters is not in a proper perspective. Burgeson makes much of the protesters’ violence, but at the end of the day (remarkably) there was not a single reported death as a result of protests that spanned multiple days and involved thousands. In fact, it was not even that violent compared the protests of the 1980s, since rocks and Molotov Cocktails were conspicuously absent. If such weapons were involved, the protests would not have grown as large as they did, because most protesters truly denounced violence.
Physical display of force (as opposed to true violence) — generally committed on police property and not on people — was targeted, not indiscriminate. One thing I never understood about America’s protest culture is that when there is a display of force, such display has indiscriminate targets. In Berkeley whenever there was a large scale protest (whose sentiment I might agree with) that involved violence, you can bet your ass that the shoe stores of Telegraph Avenue were going to be looted. That never happens in Korean protests.
Burgeson’s photo of his scratch marks were a good reflection of this fact. I am mindful that Burgeson must have experienced a lot of mental stress in the course of getting those marks. But as to the injuries themselves, I have seen worse caused by far harmless activities. As a contrasting data point, the 1992 LA riots claimed 53 lives.
2. Burgeson uses the term “coup d’etat” too lightly. All he provides to support the use of the term are the largely non-violent (but admittedly massive and intense) protests, and the harsh rhetoric of the protest “leaders”.
In fact, this is the biggest problem I have had with the critics of the protest — that they equate the agenda of the “leaders” of the protests and the agenda of the protesters. The “leaders” are put in quotes because while they might physically lead the protests, they hardly represented the true reasons why most of the protesters showed up to protest. Both groups have clear-cut agendas that converge on some points, and diverge on others. The “leaders” of the protest were clearly interested in radical change of Korean society, whose first step necessarily included frustrating the LMB government. But the vast bulk of protesters did not care for those radical changes — they just wanted to send a signal to the LMB government, but not necessarily overthrowing it. So they would go along with the “leaders” to the extent that they wanted to vent their frustration toward LMB government, but would stop if the discourse of the protest went anywhere beyond that.
In fact, I had illustrated this very point at the time of the protests. I had predicted that: “the moment the so-called “leaders” of the protesters in Korea tried to shift the issue away from what Korean people cared about, the protesters will go home.” And lo and behold, when the “leaders” began trying to turn the protest into a more broad-based attack on more LMB policies, the protesters VANISHED. In less than a week since the largest protest, the candlelight protests suddenly could muster only 1/20th of its strength. If this were a coup d’etat, it was a miserable failure.
-continued-
Yep. In the sense that I have yet to come across someone with a foreigner with a different opinion from him (maybe leftflank). They all stop at knowing 하나. Not many go to knowing 둘.
-continued-
Likes
1. The story was well-written. Clear style, clear progression of thought. While this praise is short, its emphasis is not light. Burgeson steered away from the stupid and crude criticisms of the protests, and put forth an intelligent idea. I disagree with many of his points, but I appreciate the clarity.
2. He gives due credit to those who maintained the balance of public discourse. (“the “conservative” media here were able to help safeguard genuine democracy in South Korea, in contrast to the ostensibly “liberal” mainstream media in the U.S., which had failed to do so during the lead-up to the 2003invasion of Iraq.”) I wish he had expanded more on this — because at the end of the day, the democratic process worked. Korean people had a discussion on an issue — albeit loudly, intensely and spectacularly — and eventually, they came to a right conclusion. But just the fact that he gave credit is a huge progress over the stupid critics who think all 48 million Koreans (sans LMB) were united in the Mad Cow delusion. (sulperman, this is not a dig against you.)
3. My personal favorite was the a nice description of the sense of loss, the un-belonging. In fact, it was so well done that it got me a little misty. The last portion of the essay might as well be describing Asian Americans. This is usually the part where I get on the pedestal and tell the expats to suck it up because minorities in their home countries have it worse, but not this time. Burgeson established his “street cred” so convincingly in the beginning of the essay — which, tellingly, expat commenters here seem to think as extraneous — that his sense of loss is real, and personal. Well done.
Indeed, this is just the kind of advice learners, speakers and those foolhardy enough to try and write in a foreign language need to hear more often.
(셋 and match goes to Yuna.)
Was going to comment on the beef thing, but will instead just say that the new rating system sucks. I predict its imminent demise.
And, yes, you can go ahead and give thumbs down to this post and have it hidden away. Robert has misguidedly decided to embrace the “heckler’s veto” blog format.
Just shameful.
DLB
@24 “shameful” seems a bit harsh. i haven’t made my mind up one way or the other, but the system hardly seems like a “veto”. the comments, heckled though they may be, are still there for those want to see them — besides, their “hidden” status adds an air of mystique. who could resist raising the curtain to see what all the fuss is about?
it’s too much of that “golden” glow of praise that would chill my speech. better to be in the hot “pink” of debate . . .
but, who knows, maybe you’re right. time will tell i guess.
I agree with Max @25, but not @23.
Yuna’s a bit off on this thread, and Seouldout@13 nails some it, IMHO.
Seouldout’s been on a really good roll of late.
My take on KB having to set up by establishing how much he likes a place is that it is not an American writing thing, but a writing for Koreans thing.
@26 your disagreement is appreciated, since i mentioned hot pink is cool. but would you have disagreed @23 if you had realized i was being sarcastic? or was it the sarcastic remark you disagreed with?
It was the “set and match” bit I thought was odd.
I am not opposed to this new ratings, but is there at least a way to adjust the love-hate ratio before the thing is taken off the board? Right now #24 is hidden because it’s 5-8, and I think that’s a little harsh. There should probably at least 2 to 1 ratio of “hate” before it gets obscured.
Clicky, clicky, the unpopular opinions will be buried regardless.
tinyflowers under this scheme will sink from view faster than a certain navy ship that 30% of South Koreans believe was taken down by the tooth fairy.
Your lame analogy really demonstrates the wisdom of the crowd.
I am more disappointed with the Koreans he hung around with who proof-read his book because they are not going to be giving any intellectual (let alone leftist) opinions for sure. Having just started a rather mediocre book on Switzerland called “Swiss Watching”, and wishing for Bill Bryson’s smooth-flowing prose on the country instead, I could have been a bit hasty in being weary of a particular style of writing.
By and large, (unlike theKorean in this case) I don’t appreciate the “writer’s self” overtaking an issue being discussed. I would enjoy reading it in a separate section. I appreciate it even less when this is used in a self-aggrandizing manner by those who wear their scars from “Anti-Americanism” when in reality the issue at hand is very little to do with it being Anti-American in reality and if they really genuinely believe so, then they are missing the point.
Enjoyed the essay. In fact, the parallel between Americans’ beliefs about Iraq and Koreans’ beliefs about beef was something I thought of often during the protests. Every time I caught myself looking down on Koreans for going apeshit over fairly ridiculous fabrications, I reminded myself that Americans thought Saddam was part of Al-Queda.
Yuna, I generally like your comments and posts, but what you have written here is absolute anathema. We have a foreigner who has lived in Korea for a long time, learned the language, tried his best to understand the culture, and has written thoughtfully and at length about Korea-related subjects that obviously mean a great deal to him. Then you dismiss him because he’s a foreigner. I think you’ve just proved his point.
“The Korean” makes an excellent point:
“In fact, this is the biggest problem I have had with the critics of the protest — that they equate the agenda of the “leaders” of the protests and the agenda of the protesters. The “leaders” are put in quotes because while they might physically lead the protests, they hardly represented the true reasons why most of the protesters showed up to protest.”
This point is reinforced by Professor Han Hong Koo writing in the pages of 창작과 비평 (Creation and Criticism) in the fall of 2008. Along the lines of what “The Korean” had to say, Professor Han writes that:
“When we look at the 2008 candle light protests from the perspective of the role played by political parties, civic organizations, or activism in the past, it is different from the street politics of the past decades or even that of the “68 Revolution” in Western Europe. While those participating in the candle light vigils to a certain extent embraced the hopes of the often incoherent progressive and democratic reform circles, on the other hand many tasks that were difficult to solve were left.
At demonstration sites, the masses have an unfriendly if not antagonistic attitude toward professional activists (運動圈). Moreover, most express distrust toward professional activists. For the rebelling masses professional activists are dreary and rather boring. To the masses, all professional activists do is repeat slogans on the placards and act in an authoritarian manner. Even if professional activists want to lead as such, the masses usually heckle them by asking “Isn’t that person merely a proxy for another group?”
For the 21st century masses, the mindset of professional activists acts as if it is still the 1980’s or 1990’s. In many ways it’s reminiscent of the movie “Amadeus:” the new and fresh against the stale and faded. The only fortunate thing for these professional activists is that the government of Lee Myung-Bak (李明博) and other conservative forces have themselves not broken out of the delusions of the 1960/70’s.”
(Translation mine)
Let me add, however, that I have yet to read the entirety of Mr. Burgeson’s essay. However, from the bits I’ve skimmed over I’m a little surprised and uncomprehending with regards to the conceptual lenses he chooses to analyze and understand the beef protesters. For example: beef protesters are like Iraq war hawks who believed in the fanciful notion of a Saddam-Al Qaeda connection? Okay…but let’s think about this a bit more: Yes, both believed in a delusion but one belief in a delusion didn’t get hundreds of thousands killed; devastate a country’s social, political, and economic fabric; or for that matter alter a region’s geopolitical landscape. Simply put, this a too facile a point for it to be entirely persuasive.
Second, what’s with calling the protests a “coup d’etat” or an attempted one? Like I said, I haven’t read the whole thing as of yet, but I would’ve been more inclined to go along with his line of reasoning if he had offered up a more theoretical or comparative context to justify this. For instance, my understanding of a coup d’etat is that it is a simple seizure of power as opposed to revolutions that seek to remake an entire society. Sure the protesters demand “이명박 퇴진.” But there is a difference between demanding such and actually doing so. I’ll get back to this point after I’ve finished reading the whole thing. My hunch tells me though that Burgeson’s argument won’t be all that persuasive.
Finally, what’s with citing Roland Barthes? Mind you, I’ve read some Barthes and have learned a great deal. That doesn’t mean, however, that Barthes is appropriate for all occasions. Yes, all societies perpetuate myths so that its power elite can maintain a lock on power. But Burgeson’s projecting of this argument to his analysis of the beef protest strikes me as not all that interesting. Simply put, it’s simply too general of a point to have any specific analytic value to the case he’s analyzing.
Frankly he’d been better off had he utilized these two source:
http://www.amazon.com/Politics-Collective-Violence-Cambridge-Contentious/dp/0521531454/ref=wl_it_dp_o?ie=UTF8&coliid=IIJDB7N4KCW9R&colid=1GQSM1ORQC7IZ
http://www.amazon.com/Crowds-Power-Elias-Canetti/dp/0374518203/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1283475191&sr=1-1
(I’m more partial to the first one mind you.)
Will make the rating system a bit more generous.
Agreed, Mr. Tilly — the entire essay was filled with hyperbolic rhetorical structures. But I am willing to let it go, because it is still a major improvement over vast majority of criticisms against the candlelight protests, which tend to scream as if the candlelight protesters were committing the Rwandan genocide or something.
Concur. The analyses of Beneditct Anderson et al re the general phenomenon of the creation, proliferation and propagation of historical chimera such as ‘the korean people’, ‘minjok’ etc., and the Korea-specific work of Robinson, Em and Schmid on Sin Chae-ho, etc. would have been more apt. But you just can’t stop those comp lit people from trying to be relevant by, in effect, substituting one sort of mythology for another because of their disregard for genuine historical understanding.
Max, thanks a lot for taking the time to provide more info on that book.
I appreciate your two cents as usual, and completely agree with the second part of the comment.
Have a good one.
I just spent a solid hour reading Burgeson’s fascinating analysis. Like Sperwer, I found some of the critical-theory stuff distracting. Enough with Freud already. Barthes may have been more to the point at hand than Freud, but Benedict Anderson would work even better.
I have some disagreements on the analogy to the invasion of Iraq. At the time, I was not in favor of invading to destroy WMD without giving the inspectors more time. Like most people at the time, I felt sure that Saddam had WMD — based on his record and his deceptive actions — but I nevertheless thought more time should be given to the weapons inspectors before making any decision to invade.
I don’t think, by the way, that the Bush administration was lying in its argument that Saddam had WMD, merely that it happened to be factually wrong and was itself misled by faulty intelligence (and when is intelligence ever complete?). As for the link between Saddam and 9/11, that was pure speculation that grew into a fixed idea on the part of the Bush administration. I never seriously considered that fantasy — though I did acknowledge that Saddam would be quick to offer vocal support.
Anyway, what I appreciated most of all in Burgeson’s article was his honesty, his willingness to led the facts, the empirical facts, lead him to break with his original views on the protests and recognize the massive deception, and even self-deception on the part of the protesters.
I’m curious what others think about Burgeson on Korean “pyeon” (편).
Incidentally, Burgeson should correct this:
“Who’s ‘우리편’?” I asked.
Try instead:
“Whose ‘우리편’?” I asked.
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
I concur with Charles Tilly and Sperwer – his completely inappropriate use of Roland Barthes and Freud made the essay seem decidedly ‘undergraduate’. It makes me wonder if he’s even read ‘Mythologies’. Also, the comparison with the US invasion of Iraq was pretty spurious, and the suggestion that the demonstrations were an attempted coup d’etat is quite ludicrous sensationalism. It is as though the author is desperate to be involved in a piece of history.
Oops. Not “his willingness to led the facts,” but rather, “his willingness to let the facts” . . .
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
Robert, sorry to complain and thanks for all your efforts with the site, but is it possible to have a rating system that doesn’t hide minority opinion?
I’ll try to come up with something.
Wow…
@Yuna: Ya know, if you want to sit there and disparage all “foreigners” based on some guys article, you could at least bother to read the damned article. Burgeson was definitely not just “scratching the surface”. If the font was blown up on this essay (and yes, my eyes are friggin bleeding), it’d be at least 10 pages. Certainly not a book, but definitely more than a flippant article in “The Groove” magazine.
Also, to say that his view in this article mimics that of all foreigners just shows your own lack of understanding who Scott Burgeson even is. He’s the type who would be the FIRST to correct another foreigner if they were to bad-mouth Korea for no good reason. The article in question is apt because he’s coming to grips with a very ugly side of Korea, one which is also in America.
I don’t think his comparison to the Iraq war is necessarily bad, but I think a BETTER comparison would be to the Tea Party movement happening right now. He’s dead on when he says that 2MB’s downfall during that summer was for being on the “wrong side of mythology”, and to some extent, not even having a mythology at all, thus allowing the myth of the “evil dictator” to be imposed onto him. The same thing is happening with Obama. Obama is such a milquetoast president that the vision of him as a money-blowing liberal is completely playing up to suburban white people who still think we’re fighting Russia.
It’s always been disgusting to me, to talk to anti-2MB Koreans who would call him a dictator, but have zero reasons as to why. “umm, he’s forcing American beef onto us”, “But he’s just approving a deal Roh Myuh Hyun started!”. “Umm, he’s a dictator”, “Really, why?”. “Ummm”.
I’d imagine the same conversation with some tea partier. It’s all mythology and archetypes and it’s something that’s becoming a propoganda standard throughout the world these days.
Perhaps a tweak of the color scheme is in order as well. Scrolling through a thread feels like an Easter egg hunt.
I second 44.
I don’t like this ability to hide posts according to voting. (…in principle, at least. In practice, I’m happy already to see some peoples’ stuff obscured.) There are several posters who get piled on with the thumbs down. I assume they’ll be even bigger targets since there is now incentive to vote them down (often for good reason, not always). Yes, one can always click the link to show the post that was deemed no good. That feature doesn’t work for me coming in via proxy server (which I am forced to use). But even if it did, what’s the point?
“Scrolling through a thread feels like an Easter egg hunt.”
Especially because of those blue eggs!
Jeffery Hodges
* * *
yuna, I assume we should discount anything you say about old blighty?
Having been castigated by Mr. Barch, I’ve disabled the comment rating system until I can find something a bit better.
Sorry.
The previous one used was good enough, or were there complaints about that one too?
Firefox users can click View and select Zoom In. I recall IE has something similar.
The previous one no longer works with my blog template, unfortunately.
That’s a shame, because I agree with seouldout – the old rating system was perfect. It’s nice to know how people feel about your comments sometimes.
From Scott:
Greetings everyone from Northeast China, where I currently reside.
It’s good to have feedback on one’s writing, both good and bad, just to see what works and doesn’t work for different readers.
A few responses, however, if I may be allowed.
I especially appreciated The Korean’s thoughtful comments, which I think are an honest attempt to be fair-minded, and he is the closest to getting the point of the first section of the essay. However, I feel he misunderstands my intention in discussing the violence of the protesters. Sure, relative to the 1980s in South Korea, the protesters were far less violent, but the key controversy was always “who started the violence — the protesters or the police?” The liberal domestic media, such as The Hankyoreh or Kyunghyang Shinmun, invariably took the side of the protesters in claiming that it was the police who had initiated the violence, while the protesters were generally “peaceful” and innocent victims of “police brutality.” This in turn contributed to the mythic narrative of the protesters, which is really the main subject I try to analyze in the essay. To this end, I had to provide my own experiential evidence about how I saw the protesters and their media sympathizers deliberately constructing a false narrative with regards to “police brutality,” and indeed from June 2008 this was one of the dominant themes of the protests, helping to keep the momentum going for the next two months as the BSE issue became less and less relevant. The fact that The Korean has moved away from the standard view of the protesters and their many anti-LMB sympathizers, even today (i.e., “the protesters were peaceful and the police initiated all the major violence”) and now states, in essence, that “the anti-LMB protesters were far less violent than South Korean protesters of the 1980s” I think is proof that I sufficiently established in my essay that the false narrative that the protesters attempted to construct regarding police violence was a hypocritical sham. This is progress, in my mind.
Moreover, my section on the “attempted coup d’etat” argument (note the word “attempted”) is close to a thousand words alone, and has not been rebutted, but rather dismissed with mere assertions by The Korean and several others. One thing I did not include in the essay for lack of evidence was the possible hand of North Korea during all of this. We know that the DLP has close ties to North Korea and a number of the protest leaders I met were rather suspicious in my mind, and possibly originally from North Korea. For example, one very short, suntanned ajosshi always in the same cheap suit who claimed to be a “businessman,” but who apparently had the free time to spend every day and night for three months protesting in downtown Seoul. In any case, it was certainly the case that the goal of the overwhelming majority of the groups I mention in my coup-attempt section was to deny the legitimacy of the Lee Myung-bak administration, and thereby, ideally, have him removed from power, or crippled beyond repair. This is not just fantasy or “hyperbole” on my part. They said it every day and every night for three straight months themselves, and liberal outlets like The Hankyoreh were often in accord with this message. See, for example, The Hankyoreh editorial on the day of the massive June 10th rally, which specifically and approvingly yoked the beef protests with the June Struggle of 1987, while at the same time the People’s Association for Measures Against Mad Cow Disease declared: “If the government decides to ignore the mandate from the people, who hold the sovereign power in this country, we will not hesitate to launch a campaign to drive President Lee Myung-bak out of office.”
As for my use of “myth,” again, more assertions rather than counterarguments by several commenters here. Steve Bee, please do be so kind as to show me how I have “misunderstood” or “misappropriated” Bathes’ concept of myth. To be sure, I was attempting to write in non-academic language, as the essay is dense enough as it is, and discussing myth as a “second-order signification” and so on would have turned off a great many ordinary readers. I give a summary of Bathes’ concept of myth in my essay, and if I am wrong then show me why and how exactly. (For the record, I must have read “Mythologies” at least five times.) And Spewer, citing Anderson is hardly original or very interesting at this point, and moreover my usage of the concept of myth is far more flexible than merely discussing yet again the concept of “imagined communities,” which really only has application to nationalism, whereas I applied myth to many other phenomena in my essay. And if you read B.R. Myers’ new book on North Korea (“The Cleanest Race”), for instance, he also uses the concept of myth repeatedly and usefully, although unlike in my essay he does not clearly define his conceptual understanding of “myth.” Steve Bee, I have articulated how I think Barthes understands “myth” in general terms, understandable to the general reader. Show me how I have gotten it wrong, since given your own overheated rhetoric you obviously feel very strongly about the subject.
As for claims that I have conflated the aims of the protest organizers and hard-core activists with the broader segments of the public who participated in the protests, I don’t think I have done so, and that was not really my main argument, anyway. My primary argument was how the protesters constructed a two-stage mythic narrative, and how it effectively mobilized the masses for a very long period of time. Certainly there were many different motives and agendas for the many participating groups and individuals, but they were mainly subsumed under the two-stage mythic narrative which I attempt to describe, and dismantle, in my essay.
Finally, Yuna. Dismissing an entire 20,000-word argument on the basis of a single typo does not a counterargument make. It does, however, argue against your own sanity. Try again, my dear.
Cheers,
Scott Bug in China
I’m not a big fan of Scott Burgeson, and Yuna sometimes makes some interesting observations, but her comments don’t really make much sense here.
To start with, the very first Korean term he uses (우리 동네) is spelled correctly. 저는 초보자라도 “우리 동레”라는 옳게 철자돼 보입니다. Am I missing something!? By page 2, he’s writing about “국민 생각” and “이성적, 합리적 판단,” along with recounting much of Korea’s 20th-century history, and throughout the article employing expressions that could only be known to someone who is thoroughly familiar with contemporary Korean history and politics.
It’s a long article, which I’ve admittedly just skimmed over (like Yuna), which I clicked on precisely becuse I was wondering how someone who writes and publishes in Korean could make such a simple spelling error with such a simple word…except that he didn’t make that error, unless in the last 24 hours 그 틀림을 몰래 고쳤다.
(And don’t be fooled: I’m not that fluent myself, but I have been studying intensively because I’m going to be visiting Korea for a few weeks soon. It’s just that Yuna has dismissed all non-Koreans with the same broad brush here that us foreigners sometimes paint Koreans with.)
As if citing Barthes and Freud isn’t and is, eh? LOL.
I assume you mean “flexible” in the sense that it enables you to prattle on about your impressions without having to confront the the wealth of hard information and more revealing interpretations of the the notion of minjok – which is “the” Korean expression of nationalism par excellence – based thereon that can be found in, inter alia, Robinson, Em and Schmid.
< And if you read B.R. Myers’ new book on North Korea (“The Cleanest Race”), for instance, he also uses the concept of myth repeatedly and usefully, although unlike in my essay he does not clearly define his conceptual understanding of “myth.”
Myers’ doesn’t need to dress up his text with bogus “conceptual understandings” of myth. He’s smart enough to know that perfunctory nods in the direction of this or that god of “critical [sic] theory” are nothing more than pretentious attempts to distract readers from evaluating substance – or the lack thereof – with the academic equivalent of bogus celebrity validation of a proposition. His account is, relatively-speaking, so persuasive in its own terms that he can just rely on the common sense meaning of the word.
Scott, while I enjoyed your article (and many of the comments written about it), I do feel your claims of an “attempted coup d’etat” are, to put it politely, overblown. That fact the protestors were trying to “deny the legitimacy of the Lee Myung-bak administration, and thereby, ideally, have him removed from power, or crippled beyond repair” does not make it a coup d’etat, and I am struggling to understand how you can see the protests it in that light.
Had the protestors actually marched on the Blue House or on the National Assembly and taken control of the government, then you could argue a coup d’etat. Ditto had they attempted to take control of the government or install their own government. But they did none of those things, instead they protested. While there were regrettable acts of violence against the police by a minority of the protestors, that no more makes for a coup d’etat than does any act of violence against the police – planned or otherwise (unless said act of violence is followed with or perpetrated with the intention of, an actual attempt to physically remove the government). To say that a protest was an attempted coup d’etat because they wanted to “deny the legitimacy” or “crippled beyond repair” the administration seems incredibly trite.
Right now in the US, many on the right deny the legitimacy of the Obama administration, as did many on the left deny Bush’s legitamcy in 2000. Are they attempting a coup d’etat? Are you also going to condemn Glenn Beck’s merry gathering last weekend as an “attempted coup d’etat”, or any of the recent so-called ‘Tea party’ outbursts where they state they are going to shut down the government? Protest, for better or for worse are an intrinsic aspect of democracy, and it worries me that so many commentators here seem to feel that while their side is allowed to protest, the other side isn’t.
The government certainly took it seriously and foresaw a possible march on the Blue House. I remember that they had the top of Sejong-ro blocked off and each road on either side of Blue House had container boxes and police buses parked askew them, to prevent any possible “direct action” along those lines. I had never seen Seoul so shut down.
I think others have written (Breen, for instance) that the left were shocked when LMB won. They really couldn’t believe that after 10 years of Kim DJ and Roh MH, the voters would vote for Lee. Many of them thought it was illegitimate. And the North was stunned too. It took them a while to formulate a response. LMB’s election win put paid to the myth believed by the North that South Koreans wanted unification and good relations with the North. When Lee won, they realized southerners didn’t give two hoots. And that shocked them.
Perhaps coup is the wrong choice of word, but there were plenty who wanted to see the election result reversed and another progressive politician at Cheong Wa Dae, to continue the Sunshine Policy
of appeasement.The problem is that is was not just one word, but an entire hysterical trope aiming to achieve a heightened sense of drama, that obscures the actual nature of the events that took place.
Sewing, it was fixed from 동내 to 동네 soon after it was pointed out. However, I don’t think he did it “secretly”, just without an accompanying comment.
Having said that a typo usually describes typing something wrong because your finger slips. It wouldn’t have bothered me if the mistake hadn’t been repeated at the bottom in the “mini-dictionary section”. However, nevermind this 동네 business. Had I actually liked the essay it probably would have mattered even less.
I am not dismissing the writer *because* he is a foreigner, but despite. Rather than “Well done Mr.Foreigner – Wow, you wrote about Korea, here’s a gold star for trying.” I guess I was trying to hold him up to the exact same standard of 1. a writer, 2. a liberal(maybe?), 3. a researcher who is trying to understand what goes on in the heads of people in the streets, but I guess this was a bit harsh of me as indeed the interaction stops at the level described by another commenter:
I would be disappointed if this conversation was included to wholly represent the issue in a book written by someone who wants to write a book about Korea, and I don’t think Scott Burgeson’s essay goes much beyond this level of understanding/representation despite his set lunch menu at the same joint for 10 years, and mentioning many grand names – which is precisely why it’s disappointing.
So, how to know 둘? Charles Tilly mentioned 창작과 비평. I also want to draw attention to 조국 – the law professor I might have once mentioned before that most Koreans know about. Yes, ask your Korean friends, you foreigners. He mostly writes for those two papers much maligned here. The sub menu on the left lets you scroll over the topic, but his homepage has a collection of some of his contributions over the years. Korean left is multi-faceted, but it’s silly to dismiss it as “fascists” “unthinking, North-controlled”. For whatever reason it is lying dormant in the political scene (despite a lot of Koreans wanting these people to represent them), but it is still present as a sane critical driving force at the back of everyone’s heads who are protesting. It’s also why Hanara doesn’t want people like him or Son Sukhui to host the pre-election debate.
2MB won because people like 조국 refuse to run, and there is sizeable comfortable and rich population in Korea who like bringing diamond rings on their toes from abroad who don’t really care as long as their children go to the right school and their wives go to the right dermatologists. Indeed, I remember watching the party leader TV broadcast between 박근혜 and 2MB at the time, and thinking that I would vote for him such was the absolute absence from the left, so I don’t think it was the victory was that much of a shock. As for the criticism of 2MB name calling, I agree the whiff of dictator fart is enough to some of the protestors to push the “dictator button”.
However, if one is going to throw terms 쿠데타 around highlighting “attempted” then maybe take it along the same vein ? Does one even know what a coup d’etat attempt involves? It was not even close to a “coup”. (Maybe apart from inside 2MB’s head, over-reaction to public gathering is a typical trait of a dictator though ^^ The invention and highlighting of an “invisible North Korean hand controlling the mass” being the other) Ask ex-Hanahoe generals they’ll tell you what a coup really involves. One usually requires tanks, instead of candles.
It will be a while (maybe a couple more presidencies) before the left-right oscillation to less of a wild chaotic swing for S.Korea, I agree but it’s a wasted opportunity not to present the whole case in a fair and balanced manner as a writer which could have come with only a little more insight.
And it’s finally time to crack open that bottle of champers, I agree with Sperwer @ #60.
Scott: My response is, basically, ‘what Sperwer said’. The only relevance that Barthes has to the matters you discuss is that you both use the word ‘myth’. However, Barthes uses it purely as a designation, as you say, of second-order signification (which does not concern ‘myths’ in the everyday sense of the term), whereas you use it in conjunction with a genuine ‘myth of origin’, which requires none of the additional sense that Barthes gives the concept. And anyways, who but literature undergraduates cites Barthes these days? Introducing Mythologies adds nothing to your essay, and detracts from its focus and credibility. Just saying.
Yuna:
Ah. Well, there you go. That’s what I get for hardly posting a single comment here for, like, 3 years. Maybe he was using the more obscure 동내 (洞內) to provide a more intimate expression of community.
Anyhow, your last comment presents a much more substantive critique, as do Sperwer (et al)’s last few. Regardless, whether one agrees or disagrees with what he wrote, his huge 4-page essay was much more complex than many other writings on Korean subjects that I’ve seen by non-Koreans, and deserved more than a trite dismissal (and consequent extrapolation) based on a typo.
Do I expect that he should get a gold star simply for being a knowledgeable foreigner? No. And as I said, I’m actually not really much of a fan of Mr. Burgeson’s to begin with (mainly for the reasons of style and treatment that some other commentors have raised here in reference to this essay).
Regarding the whole “coup d’état” business, there is one angle that no one here (either Scott himself, or anyone else) has pointed out. Every South Korean protest movement since the ’60s (starting with protests against Korean-Japanese normalization in 1964) has deliberately invoked the memory of the “4.19 운동,” the student movement against Syngman Rhee’s corrupt governmentand the rigged 1960 election.
That protest movement spread (like 1987) beyond the students to the general public, and precipitated Rhee’s resignation, ushering in a brief period of democracy—which was the protestors’ intended outcome: the downfall of the government, if not an actual coup d’état, especially compared to the actual coup d’état that followed a year later, when 방정희 took over the government.
Oh, and I meant to add that the beef protestors as well, also invoked the April 19th movement (meaning there was a verbally expressed invocation of it, that its spirit should live on: through banners and chants).
(For the April 19th history and contemporary angle, there was a very good “KBS Special” documentary on it earlier this year. For a synopsis, see here: http://www.kbs.co.kr/1tv/sisa/kbsspecial/vod/1645522_11686.html.)
Robert,
Upon sober reflection, my use of “shameful” was excessive, exaggerated, and boneheaded. Call it a lapse in judgment in reaction to what I saw as a mistep by someone who usually gets it right. Mea culpa, mea culpa.
Know also that you have — hands down — the best Korea blog around. Why any editor would feel a need to fix what ain’t broken remains, to me, a mystery. But if you have to make changes, I’d say always go with greater access and transparency. (Real names, anyone?) The rough and tumble of this site is what gives it its dynamism. And its appeal.
Fiat lux,
DLB
Dang… some of y’all really don’t see yourselves very well…
Yuna sounds like some stereotypical Georgia redneck (“Demmed Furriners”)…
A few others debating how many angels can dance on how many pins to what tune…
Thanks for the levity!
Love your website, Lirelou.
Yeah, that damned 방정희. I’m glad he’s not from my 동내.
Just wanted to say long-time, no see sewing. Nice to see your avatar up in the comments again.
@28 It was a reference to Yuna saying that most foreigners hardly make it to “하나”, even fewer go on to know “둘”. So I gave her the “셋” . . . and (sarcastically) the “match”. Just a lame pun and yeah, a bit odd.
Thanks, Robert!
Actually, I’ve been reading this blog regularly all along…once I stopped commenting, though, I just never really saw a compelling reason to start again.
But we’re off to the land of pine-clad mountains and multi-billion-dollar engineering megaprojects this September, so I figured it’s time to get back into things, at least temporarily.
It’s been four years…I wonder how much things have changed!
Yuna,
I want to forgive you, but I can’t. Your words are right there in comment #3 (and by your own admission, you hadn’t even read the essay at that point. Why bother? Seems like you’d already made up you mind when you saw the author’s non-Korean name). At first I was offended, but now I just feel sad. I tried putting myself in your shoes, feeling like my country and ideology were under attack by a foreigner. It’s not a pleasant feeling, I admit. But then I thought of all the insightful and intelligent things that have been said about my country by foreigners, and how I would be intellectually poorer if I was dismissive of them. So now I just feel sorry for you.
No reason for you to be upset, though. I’m a foreigner, so you don’t have to take anything I say seriously.
Joel:
D’oh! I didn’t get your comment until now.
박정희, of course.
So that clearly disqualifies me, too, from having anything I say about Korea being taken seriously…which is just as well. After 4 years’ absence, a place that changes as quickly as Korea will probably be unrecognizable.
sewing –
i knew it was just a typo, i was just being an ass. when do you come back?
Oh, just like…yesterday.
Good point!
“rather mediocre book on Switzerland called “Swiss Watching””
surely the title was enough clue not to bother even picking it up….
“Then you dismiss him because he’s a foreigner. I think you’ve just proved his point.”
Given Yuna’s track record your apparent surprise is – well – a surprise….
Everything and nothing.
I must say, for a guy who’s been here 10 years, speaks Korean fairly well, and has written a lot of articles about it, he doesn’t appear to have much of a handle on how Koreans think or act. There’s nothing surprising in the behaviour of the protestors to anyone who’s been around the block in Korea for a bit. And he seems to take both himself and the protestors entirely too seriously, getting all saddened when they throw wildly untrue accusations about, and getting all angsty that he can never truly belong. Oh, boohoohoo. It’s true that a nation is a myth and nationalism is mythology, but that doesn’t make one’s own little social network with Korean friends and acquaintances less real (unless the mob starts marching and chanting ‘Death to America!’ Ooh, scary!).
@34
“Every time I caught myself looking down on Koreans for going apeshit over fairly ridiculous fabrications, I reminded myself that Americans thought Saddam was part of Al-Queda”
I don’t blame Americans who thought Saddam was part of Al-Qaeda. It was the government and media’s prolonged propaganda campaign that made them think so.
I’m with yuna on comment #3, I’m afraid.
Afraid? Well you should be. Are you trying to diminutize anything and everything a foreigner has ever said about Korea, and ever will?
I once had a philosophy professor who was fond of the phrase “sawing off the tree branch that you are sitting on.” Look carefully where you are sitting, brother.
I believed that I argued against it in good faith, but allow me to try it again.
Scott, consider this first — if someone wished to kill me, but all that person did was to purchase a voodoo doll of my likeness and executed the doll, can that person legitimately be considered “attempting” my murder? I think that is analogous to the central point of dispute we have here.
After all, Koreans know what it takes to overthrow a government — they have done it many times over in various different forms. (Student revolution, military takeover, etc.) If the candlelight protesters really wanted to overthrow LMB administration, I’m sure you’d agree that they would do different things such as charging the Blue House, etc. Despite the rhetoric of the protest “leaders” — who, again, had a different agenda from the vast majority of the protesters — the vast bulk of protesters did not truly want to overthrow the government. They just wanted to send a message, and they stopped protesting when that message was sent. Even as the protest was going on, it was contemporaneously clear (and even clearer in hindsight) that LMB’s administration was not truly in danger of disappearing. The protest “leaders” may have been stabbing at the voodoo doll, but the true agents of the potential change — i.e. the vast majority of the candlelight protesters — were not interested in government overthrow. And this is the central flaw in your “coup d’etat” argument — your exclusive focus on what the “leaders” of the protests were saying without focusing on how that message was actually being received by the protesting public themselves. If the public truly wanted to overthrow LMB government, how could the candlelight protest “leaders” only must 1/20th of the strength mere 6 days of the largest protest on June 10?
Your further argumentation toward your theory only highlights its weakness. You admit that there was no evidence that North Korea was involved, so why even bring it up other than to cast unsubstantiated aspersion over the protest? And quoting 광우병 대책회의 representative is only to fall into the same trap of blurring the distinction between the protest “leaders” and the protesters themselves.
The Hankyoreh editorials you mention also say nothing about wanting to overthrow LMB government. Everyone can read for him/herself here. 6/9 Editorial, 6/10 Editorial 1, 6/10 Editorial 2. Because you have to recognize this, you can say no more than that the editorials “specifically and approvingly yoked the beef protests with the June Struggle of 1987.” Even that description is misleading, because Hanky editorial urges people to move BEYOND the June Struggle, noting that: “‘6·10 항쟁’과 이번 촛불집회는 민주주의 회복이라는 측면에서 닮은 점도 있지만 그 양상과 내용 면에서 질적으로 완전히 달라졌다.” (The June Struggle and this candlelight gatherings have similar aspects of restoration of democracy, but they are qualitatively different in their outlay and contents.”) (emphasis mine.) And Hanky editorial adds appropriate caveats: “국민이 직접 길거리에 나서 정치적인 요구를 하는 상황은 정녕 대의 민주주의의 위기다. 기성 정치권은 ‘길거리 정치’가 보내는 경고를 심각히 받아들여야 한다. ‘길거리 정치’가 ‘여의도 정치’를 대신하는 것은 물론 바람직하지 않다.” (The situation in which the people take to the streets to directly make political demands is truly a crisis in representative democracy. The political establishment must take seriously the warnings that the “street politics” is sending. It is of course undesirable that “street politics” replace “Yeouido politics.”) Even when Hanky editorials make a specific demand, they only demanded that LMB change his policies, not resign. (“현시국의 엄중함을 고려하면, 전면적으로 인사 쇄신을 하는 건 당연하다. 그러나 인적 개편만으로 지금의 위기를 벗어날 수 있다고 생각한다면 오산이다. 사람을 바꾸는 것보다 중요한 건 이명박 대통령의 국정운영 기조와 방향을 바꾸는 것이다.”)
If you want to call an action that had little chance of achieving the desired impact an “attempt”, that’s really just a matter of semantics that can neither be proven nor disproven. But attaching that word “attempt” to such an incendiary term like “coup d’etat” is simply to lose all perspective — like the way one might judge a long essay based on a single typo.
“Diminutize”? Very Palinesque.
Don’t refudiate my comments.
LOL
Re TK @ 85: a good, persuasuve rebuttal of Bug’s hysterical coup thesis (although Yuna’s observation about the difference candles and tanks might have been better because pithier), the defense of which it now seems boils down, by the Bug’s own estimation, to a question of comparative loggorrhea.
You must log in to post a comment.