On the Apparent Surge of Anti-Christian Sentiment Among Korean Netizens

Posted on July 27, 2007
Filed Under Korea, pol | 11 Comments

UPDATE: Shin Hye Chul, Korean rock musician and outspoken (though among young people, apparently respected) social commentator, is quoted in the Daily Economist as having argued basically what I said about the way the newspapers are presenting this: in essence, that while newspapers used to play up things, presenting the comments of one netizen in ten as a netizen consensus, he says that now the newspapers are presenting what ten in ten netizens say as a minority opinion. He wonders whether the newspapers have been under pressure from Protestant religious groups. He also said that of course he wants the Korean hostages to come home safe, but he doesn’t want them to return as heroes, smiling and pround, but rather more conscious of the mess they made. (All of the above is a paraphrase based on a paraphrase, so if anyone with better Korean ability than mine cares to critique the quality of the paraphrase, go for it.)

I’ve been working on this post for days, trying to find the best way to explain it, and I have finally figured out that the best way to do it is to tell a story. It’s a story about what’s been happening on the Internet in Korea lately, and how it’s been misrepresented in a few pieces of writing so far — a post by a Catholic expatriate blogger in Korea who goes (somewhat ridiculously) by the handle “The Western Confucian,” and a major and ultra-conservative newspaper called the Chosun Ilbo — as well as how it’s likely to be misrepresented again and again. It looks like a tectonic-scale shift in South Korean culture, which makes it worth paying attention to. It has to do with what looks to them like a sudden surge in anti-Christian sentiment in Korea.But the story doesn’t begin with the writing of either the Chosun Ilbo or The Western Confucian. It begins much more humbly, days ago in one of many cafes on Daum — something like our old-fashioned BBSes, online clubs where people of shared interests join to post, chat, and discuss their mutual interests. On this particular cafe — it could be one of millions — Koreans were discussing the newly breaking Korean hostage situation in Afghanistan.

The discussion raised the question: “Why did they go to Afghanistan, anyway?” and responses from various people suggest that they wished to die as martyrs, that they went as medical volunteers — a claim quickly shot down by evidence that only one nurse was among them, that they gullibly accepted missionary assignment by their church. Each of the claims was analyzed, and links were offered in replies, giving evidence that the hostages indeed did not act as medical volunteers but were primarily preaching religion; that they had gone knowing full well the risks of the trip; that the church was claiming they were medical volunteers; that the affiliated aid organization had deleted a line from its website (which survived in screen-captures) that they had gone to preach about Jesus. Links to the blog of one of the hostages came up, and before it was taken offline (by service outage, perhaps, as millions of Korean internet users visited the site) that they’d behaved in ways which were, if anything, a good way to get oneself killed in Afghanistan.

The discussion continued, as the hostage crisis stretched on for days and rumors of government officials attempting to bribe the Taliban into releasing the hostages began to circulate. This, after a wide-ranging discussion in Korean society had questioned whether churches ought to be tax exempt at all — a reasonable question considering the way some churches are run like businesses, sold like businesses, and profit massively, just like businesses. Suddenly, confronted with their own tax money going to free these zealots who knowingly put themselves in danger, more disgust built up.

This, of course, is what happens on the surface: so-called netizens — the people that The so-called Western Confucian describes as a “cyber-mob” so distasteful he compares them to the “mob” of Jews who — yes, indeed — killed Christ. (And he still seems to see nothing wrong with trotting out the oldest, hoariest of blood libels when confronted with anti-Christian sentiment: he compares those he disagrees with to Jews, as if this is the ultimate evil. Pathetic.) The Chosun Ilbo goes even farther (in this article), painting a picture which, at least from my reading of the article, seems to be one of a small minority of virulently anti-Christian zealots trying to “fan the flames of anti-Christian sentiment” among their fellow Koreans.

The reality is far from this circus scene, of course. The reality — one that is patently obvious from the speed with which the netizens disabled any website remotely connected to the hostages: their church, their blog, their service organization — testifies to the number of people visiting the site. Websites get disabled not when a few malcontents visit and put nasty comments, but when enormous numbers of people visit, or even coordinate DDOS attacks. The amount of criticism on news articles, and in cafes on Daum, too, testifies to the fact that anti-Christian feels reach far and wide in Korea. According to Lime, the topics has come up, and been widely discussed, in cafes she’s a member of that have nothing to do with the topic!

Why that has happened, suddenly, now, isn’t even puzzling, or so it seems to me.
But it turns out that it is puzzling to a lot of people. The question on the lips of Protestant Koreans in the Daum cafe I mentioned quickly became “Why do they suddenly hate us?” Protestants in the habit of greeting people in a religious fashion, or by typing “Shalom,” suddenly became uncomfortable with continuing to do so. Some Protestants burst out with defensive attacks against anyone who seemed even obliquely to discuss Protestant behaviour in Korea — such as, say, one poor pregnant woman who merely complained that she and her Arabic-looking Muslim husband were being turned away from every apartment they tried to rent, and that she was worried about finding a place to live before the baby was born. “Christians AREN’T bad people!” was the characteristically unsympathetic, out-of-left-wing response she got.

Why indeed. The Chosun Ilbo’s depiction of the situation, claiming, “Korean netizens fear that such posts could endanger a peaceful resolution of the crisis,” and depicting the anti-”Christian” comments as those of a few radicals who are trying to stir up anti-Christian sentiment among the masses, is a serious distortion of the situation. The Western Confucian is, at least, correct that this is — superficially — a new phenomenon. However, even he misses the point that the new phenomenon is not the resentment, disgust, and impatience itself: only the expression of it is new. The feelings, on the other hand, are well-rooted, deep, and have been growing for a long time now. Even CHeong Wa Dae, “the Korean White House,” seems to have failed to grasp this, as seems obvious from their attempt to encourage Koreans online to lay off on criticizing the religious aspect of the situation. After all, they’re still denying publicly what every net-aware Korean who’s been online in the last few days knows to be true: that these people were explicitly religious missionaries, and rather tactless ones, at that (1).

The question that Cheong Wa Dae, the Chosun Ilbo, and The Western Confucian all quite predictable either didn’t ask, or failed to seek a real answer for, is the question of why such powerful attitudes of resentment turned from a trickle to a flood. Cheong Wa Dae seems to think the answer to this question is irrelevant, because it’ll just tell people what to talk about and they’ll obey, like in the good old days. The Chosun Ilbo, being in the business of creating spin, has decided it’s the effect of corruption spread by a few bad apples who hate Christians for some inexplicable reason. The Western Confucian thinks it’s because netizens are unwashed hordes of blithering idiots.

The latter attitude is, in fact, one shared by many foreigners in Korea, and which I think is also to some degree promoted by the way discussions about netizen activism are presented on blogs like the famous Korea-issues blog The Marmot’s Last Hole. When netizens (pathetically, yes) “cheat” on international polls to put a mediocre Korean pop star on the international chart of important people, or (foolishly, yes) support censorship as they did a few summers ago, during the blog ban that the Korean government orchestrated in the wake of the last Korean hostage-killing, it gets duly reported and cackled at. When netizen pressure is used to publicly shame embarrassingly nasty politicians like GNP Congresswoman Song Young-sun, whose ridiculously rude and nasty treatment of the Park Myoung Jae was captured on video and uploaded to the net, I hear little mention of it in the Korean blogosphere. When video of a techer slapping a student is uploaded, the foreigner blogs all repost the video and cluck disapprovingly of the state of schools, but say little about netizen pressures on the government and the school for reform eliminating such treatment of students. When netizen pressure forces police to take seriously the kinds of cases they’ve always neglected and dragged their feet on — rapes of middle school girls, for example, or abuse of influence by rich CEOs seeking to avoid being charged for crimes — we hear about the story, but not about the netizen pressure that forced the issue into the limelight and embarrassed the police into action. Netizens are as netizens do: the ones who go around mass spamming sites with nationalist rhetoric, they’re not so respectable, but other segments of the internet user population are actually managing to do remarkable things.

And I think that the dialogue about “Christians” (which is the term Koreans use for Protestants) is another one of those remarkable, fascinating things. It’s a backlash which it seems to me has been a long time in coming, and is likely the outward signal of an important subtyerranean shift in Korean society. After all, anyone who checked into the most recent census in Korea noticed that Protestant Christianity is, in fact, on the decline here. More and more people are leaving their churches, turning their backs in digust. (Interestingly, Catholicism is mildly on the rise, and the backlash has also, in some discussions, suggested a positive reevaluation of Catholicism, as compared tothe more zealot-like forms of Protestantism as they are practiced in Korea.)

A great place to start, in order to understand why I think this backlash is so deeply rooted, widespread, and indicative of a general disgust with Protestantism in general, is by looking at the picture included with the Chosun Ilbo article… which may well end up being taken down, so I’ve copied it and am going to include it here:Arrogant Christian bastard mocks monk

What’s depicted in this image is a monk who is apparently raising money (the newspaper says alms, but in fact I’m told it was for two soup kitchens that the monk collects donations for) while reading what is probably Buddhist scripture. The man touching his head — a bloody disrespectful actfor a stranger to perform anywhere, but moreso in Asia — is basically your stereotypical Korean Protestant street-evangelist.

The Chosun Ilbo article suggested that the image may not be real — it might be a staged shot. (Apparently, it’s not staged: I’m told that a reporter went and interviewed the monk, who rather compassionately explained that the man had been coming and placing his hand on the monk’s head and praying for him for months on end. The monk asked the Christian, “If you’re a virtuous man, why don’t you help, and collect money for one of the soup kitchens? You can take over!” and the Protestant Christian rejected the offer point blank. The monk expressed gratitude towards the very rude man, saying that through enduring the man’s insulting and rude behaviour, he was being helped to overcome some bad karma, perhaps from a past life.)

But even if it was staged, the photo rings very true. This is how a certain number of Protestant Christians — the most visible ones, the ones that most non-Christians will remember encountering — behave in public on a constant basis. This is exactly how distastefully they present themselves, without any manners, respect, or sense of the human dignity of others around them, and unfortunately, the moderates (whom I truly hope outnumber the nutters) tend to ignore them, tolerate them, excuse them, or say nothing, so they also have to live with guilt by association.

Non-Protestants, looking at this picture, will recognize the kind of man this is instantly: just another one of the endless droves of obnoxious Protestants who march about the city, hollering on and chanting and singing on subway trains, accosting people in shopping centers, knocking on doors and trying to force their way into people’s homes, blasting horrible “Christian” music at ear-splitting volumes, informing people that they are bound for hell, and basically being rude, inconsiderate, obnoxious jerks. The digust goes deeper than passing encounters, though: it has built up from years and years of such experiences. People discussed being harassed by Protestant co-workers pushing them to convert; people mentioned being asked at the beginning of a group job interview, “What is your religion?” and non-Christians being thereafter utterly ignored in favour of those who gave the “right answer.” (This rings particularly true in my experience: I have worked for three religious Univerities in Korea: neither the Catholic nor the Buddhist school asked about my religion; only the Protestant one did. Yes, I did get the job, but only after someone who “gave the right answer” passed on the offer, having gotten something better elsewhere.)

Lime related a story to me today over dinner, about a man who was the minister of a church. He decided to sell the church, and in his negotiations, he said, “Well, I have X number of people who attend the church weekly, so you should pay a million won (roughly a thousand dollars) for each consistent congregation member. The buyer agreed and purchased the church, and the ex-minister took his profits and went out and bought himself a PC-Bang (Internet cafe, for those of you not in Korea).

The fact is, anti-Christian sentiment here is already widespread. Christians are not a majority here. They seem like it, sometimes: their political clout made me imagine their numbers were much greater, and I honestly very rarely meet people who aren’t some form of Christian or Catholic. No, actually, the thing is, I very rarely meet people who have anything to say about religion who aren’t Protestant Christians. But the interesting thing, and one often mentioned to me, is how Protestants and Catholics differ. Protestants seem to work religion into the very first conversation they have with you. They either start telling you about their church, or ask you your religion, or quote the Bible, or mention Jesus… they can’t seem to have a conversation that doesn’t focus on religion, and when they sense discomfort at this, some of them push all that much harder to make the conversation all about religion. With Catholics (and, incidentally, Buddhists), on the other hand, you usually find out their religion after some time has passed, weeks or even months of friendship could go by without it ever coming up. The people with no religion tend just never to bring up the issue, but the Protestants seem unable to go a single day without outright forcing the issue. They are often teetotal, and claim that all Christians are supposed to refrain from drink. (They’ve never managed to explain why Jesus would create wine as his first miracle if drinking is so bad, however.)

Yes, these are generalizations. But widespread attitudes form on the basis of just such generalizations, and the generalizations form from common experience. The most memorable experiences derive often from the most negative ones, but in terms of your average person’s experience of Protestant Christians, the most prominent among them are also the rudest, nastiest, and most off-putting.

Protestants have also been tainted by scandal. One of the more amusing ones is Jang Air. Jang Air is the nickname that the Korean public have given to a Protestant Minister who, as it turns out, was apparently having an affair with one of his congregation members, a married woman. When the woman’s husband burst in on them having sex in a hotel, Minister Jang, still naked, attempted to flee out the window. He ended up hanging from the air conditioner outside, and someone took his photo in that compromising (and, let’s admit, amusing) position before he plummeted to his death. The Christian newspaper claimed he had died of a heart attack, while the Joseon Ilbo reported a story much closer to the one I reported. Korean netizens, aware of both reports, were faced with yet another hypocritical lie from a Protestant Church.

Here are a few more impressions that a lot of people seem to share:

And all of this had led to the situation which the Chosun Ilbo so pathetically misrepresented. The fact that netizens have lashed out about the hostage situation so angrily is simply the fact that, in Korean society, public confrontation isn’t kosher. Netizens are posting hateful, angry comments about these people in Afghanistan, mostly not because of anything personal against those idiots, but because it’s a chance to vent about the jerk Protestants that annoy them and bug them on an almost constant basis in public, who ring their doorbells at all hours, who drop by to visit them and inform them that they’re hellbound… Cheong Wa Dae — “the Korean White House” has asked that people quit criticizing the hostages in Afghanistan, but they’ve completely missed the point, which is that this is an expression of a more deeply-rooted rage and disgust at Protestants in general — mostly pent-up since most well-raised, polite Koreans shy away from confrontation and challenging of others in public, regardless of how annoyingly, rudely, or nastily those others behave — for which outpouring the hostage situation has served merely as a catalyst, an opportunity to speak out.

And before someone rushes to the defense and says, “Wait! The criticism of Protestants in Korea is uninformed and unwarranted!” I recommend checking out the biggest message boards online for a while. The new wave of apologies and admissions that, yeah, there’s something rotten in the Protestant Churches of Korea is coming from young Protestant moderates who actually agree with the criticisms and understand why the rest of the country is so fed up. When even some of the people being yelled at are coming forward and saying, “You have a point,” it’s a trend worth paying attention to. If the Netizens are intelligent enough, they could use this as a defining issue of the next Presidential campaign, after all: Lee Myung Bak’s extremely outspoken Protestantism may even turn out to be his biggest liability. I know I’m not alone in hoping so.

As for the way the Western Confucian suggests a parallel between the anti-Christian comments among Korean netizens and the vitriol in the Marmot’s comments section, it’s silly. The comments don’t represent “Christophobic vitriol,” it’s just the same level of vitriol as usual, the same vitriol spewed on everyone and everything discussed there. (Though I do appreciate the Marmot’s hard work keeping all the comment-trolls of the Korean blogosphere busy.) This particular vitriol is nothing special, just more of the same, so don’t let The Western Confucian’s latest fit of moral panic fool you. Far more amusing is his inexplicable espousal of the idea that the use of “parenting” as a verb betrays traces of heretical “gnostic” thinking.

(And that’s to say nothing of his histrionic applause for the Marmot’s deletion of links… anyone who thinks that what gets blogged right now is being read by the Taliban to help them decide what to do with these people is not paying attention to the fact that there’s only one strategy with one minor variant open to the Taliban right now: milk these idiots for all they’re worth, and then release them (if it’ll secure Korean withdrawal) or kill them (if the terrorists are more interested in sending a message to potential evangelists in the future). And if the Taliban is reading Marmot’s, they’ve quite certainly thought to search Youtube, and already run across this (now with subtitles). The Taliban doesn’t need to worry after all: the Koreans were, quite characteristically, teaching the kids Christian propaganda in Korean, which means the kids didn’t understand a damned word of what they were saying anyway!

Indeed, if anyone in this branch of the Taliban is reading any blogs — let alone the Marmot’s Hole, which would indeed surprise me — it’s just to pass the time while waiting for the next deadline and the next delivery of cash from the Korean government, when they’ll defer the deadline again and make some more demands. They must be so happy to have found a government that’s willing to try cut deals with them: they’re going to milk these hostages for as much as they can. Then again, we’ve always known that Roh’s administration is happy to negotiate with terrorists, and quite committed to continuing negotiations, even when the terrorists break their promises: after all, that’s their North Korea policy, too. Sunshine in Seoul, Sunshine in Kaesong, Sunshine in Pyongyang, and now Sunshine in Kabul.

I’m tempted to call this the Mideast Sunshine Policy, actually. The difference, though, is that unlike the North, Islamic militants around the world have nothing to lose by committing more of these kidnappings, and now they have the impression they have everything to gain. So, yeah, it feels like Amateur Week in Kabul. Ah well… in the end, if everything goes wrong, as Marmot reports, they’ll just blame the USA. (As usual.)

Note 1: It is widely known in Korea that the hostages were in Afghanistan on religious, not medical, business. On the (now offline) blog that one of these “volunteers” left behind, there were plenty of accounts of Christian missionizing, but nary a mention of working in any clinics or hospitals. Of course — there was only one nurse in the bunch! No, what those blogs contained accounts of were only discussions of how these people did such brilliant things as visit a beautiful mosque, compliment the security guy on the beauty of the place, ask permission to sing, and then start singing Jesus songs. In a mosque. “It sounded like music out of heaven,” one of them commented, oblivious or unconcerned by how rude this kind of behaviour would appear to even non-militant Muslims. (I have serious trouble imagining a group of Muslim missionaries visiting their church in Bundang and behaving the same way and leaving without a scratch on them.) Or, even better, the account of their visit to the grave of some famous Islamic hero, and how they performed a Christian worship ceremony at his grave. They were so proud to be the first Christians to visit the site, and to worship God there, the blogger (now a hostage, remember) claimed. This is not netizen rumor-mongering: materials screen-captured from one of the missionaries’ blog before it went offline in a blaze of netizen commentspam (of which I have some, here) don’t just “allege” that these people were doing missionary work — according to Lime, who read the blogs while they were online, it’s pretty starkly obvious that at least some of the group were there primarily for the purpose of doing religious evangelizing, as well as traipsing about the country being shockingly ignorant and, more surprisingly, shockingly blasé in their insults to the local dominant culture and religion. Lime’s a Catholic, and she reacted to what she saw the same way I did: with disgust. These people went there and disrespected the local people. I agree that this shouldn’t be a capital offense, but in Afghanistan, it can be, quite easily, and these dolts knew that well enough when they went there… pictures of them posing gleefully in front of warning signs show as much. (One is included in the above archive of blog screencaps, if you doubt my word on that.)

Comments

11 Responses to “On the Apparent Surge of Anti-Christian Sentiment Among Korean Netizens”

  1. Bruce on July 28th, 2007 8:57 am

    Might this surge in “anti-Christian” behavior (quotes included deliberately) be in response to the increasing influence of Yoido Full Gospel Church and Paul/David Yonggi Cho, at least in the Seoul area?

  2. gordsellar on July 28th, 2007 1:07 pm

    You’re Julia’s friend, right? Thanks for the comment!

    Well, as I say, I don’t think it is a surge as much as an explosion of dialogue about long-pent-up “anti-Christian” feeling among the non-”Christian” majority here, which is unfortunately being downplayed by the newspapers as some kind of minority aberration, or nasty troublemaking on the part of a minority.

    Explicitly, the stimulus is the hostage situation in Afghanistan. But yeah, I’d say the Yoido Full Gospel Church might be part of it. That Church has satellite all over the country, and they are richer than sin, and I seem to recall some pretty awful crap being preached there.

    But Cho and his church would only be part of it, and, I suspect, a small part of it… if you look out at the night skyline of any Korean town of city, there are dozens of red neon crosses marking churches, and they are all vying for converts. I think, like I said, a lot of the anger we’re seeing is coming from negative personal experiences… where just the discomfort of knowing your friend is at home praying fervently “against Ramadan,” or whether it’s discovering your pastor sold the church off and started a PC-bang, or you were ignored in a group job interview after answering the question “What’s your religion?” honestly. Whether or not such discimination is illegal here, it is, in business, pretty widely practiced. (As is sexual descrimination, age discrimination, and even nepotism, so you can imagine how little anyone can effectively combat it. Even many laws that do exist don’t get enforced, as it is.)

    In other words, I think it would be a mistake to blame any one factor. I think it’s just a widespread distaste that people had never expressed before, and suddenly discovered others shared when criticisms of the missionaries in Afghanistan began to surface.

    Yoido Full Gospel Church could become a focal symbol for that, though. I know that it is the church that arouses the strongest distaste and fear on my part, and on the part even of some active, church-going foreign Protestants I know. But since their website hasn’t been hammered off the Net by hateful comment spam as of yet, I’d say that no, they aren’t right now a focal point of anger or disgust specifically.

  3. Clay on November 10th, 2008 8:13 am

    I tried to register to read the rest of this post, buy got an IP address banned reply.

    Strange. I live in Seocho.

    Solution?

  4. gordsellar on November 11th, 2008 10:50 am

    Clay,

    I wonder why that IP is banned? Maybe there’s an international spammer in your neighborhood, using your ISP? Hmmm. Anyway, please check your email and you should find the solution there… thanks!

  5. victorhuh on December 11th, 2009 3:16 am

    In my opinion, as a korean, there is a major difference to understand the word ‘christian’ for korean and the rest of. In general, ‘christian’consists of orthodoxy,catholic and protestant.
    When the word ‘christian’ comes up, most koreans do not think of Catholic,orthodox church but usually think Protestant church. As far as I know, Catholic and Orthodox church is not that much criticized in Korea. Surge of anti-christian is for Protestants.

  6. gordsellar on December 11th, 2009 11:15 am

    Victor,

    Yeah, that’s why I wrote this line: “And I think that the dialogue about “Christians” (which is the term Koreans use for Protestants) is another one of those remarkable, fascinating things.”

    You’re half-correct: Koreans don’t “use” the word differently, they misuse it. Christian, if you look at the word itself, obviously means people who follow (and worship) Christ. By definition that includes Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and even any weirdo newbie cults that venerate Jesus. Koreans use it to refer only to Protestants in error, therefore.

    (Though I would wager it is an error that grew up out of the fact that this usage was probably common at one point among arrogant and doctrinaire Protestants of the past (and, indeed, some of the present: I once met a secretary in Montreal who did the same thing: “No, I’m not Catholic, I’m a Christian!”). I’d wager this kind of arrogance and doctrinaire attitude were common among religious missionaries over the last few centuries at least; so it’s likely Korean Protestants got the misuse from Protestant missionaries, and started using the word to refer to themselves, after which everyone else started using the word.

    You wrote that the “surge of anti-christian” feeling “is for Protestants” — which is correct. As I also noted, the Catholic Church was growing at the time I wrote that post. I haven’t kept up: has the trend continued, or collapsed?

  7. VictorHuh on December 11th, 2009 3:56 pm

    My laptop’s IP was denied to read the whole article. I’m now in a public library and this PC doesn’t go through to read the whole thing, either. It is my fault not to read your whole passge.
    But, I had thought there was no specific description for the term ‘christian’ in first part of your article when I read your passge. In so, I thought we could talk other things with one thing.

    My pc’s time is ticking out. I will write my opinion about the trend home…
    P.S Cho-Sun newspaper is not ultra-conservative in general.
    Term ‘conservertive’ is different in Korea. I will write about it. It is all complicated.

  8. VictorHuh on December 11th, 2009 6:26 pm

    Anti-christian trend for protestant is getting severe.
    At least, It is not sutured.
    Some liberal people say missionary from korean protestant church is the rise of imperialism and economical facism of Korea.
    They remind of western imperialism sending missionary to other countries. Economically, Korea needs field to sell products. South Korea is small and its domestic consumption has its boundary line. S.K’s population is too small to independently progress its economy. They do remember of sending Korean army to Afganistan in former president’s era.
    Also, when some people associate present president with protestant church… Many people think present president is reigning above people though president should work for people. They think protestant-church-christians have made their cartel in Korea.
    Many say Korea’s protestant derived from the fundamentalist churches in U.S.
    which do not unifies with other religions.

  9. gordsellar on December 11th, 2009 11:32 pm

    Victor,

    Aha, the reason you cannot read the whole thing is because I marked it to be unreadable to non-members of this site, given the political climate. You should be able to read it now.

    You might want to look around the site a bit more, too. I appreciate you trying to bring me up to speed, and I’m not saying I know everything there is to know, but a lot of the things you’ve written are things I know already (after eight years here, and a fair bit of it paying attention to my surroundings).

    I’m happy to dialog, but I don’t want to be spending a third of each response saying, “Yeah, I know, I know…” so maybe just assume I’m relatively knowledgeable and I’ll clue you in if I am confused by something you write.

    As for people thinking Protestants have a “cartel” in Korea, I certainly do think they have a kind of power-network. Not underground or anything, just enough generalized awareness of politicians’ affiliations, and just enough stupidity ot ignore issues and vote along religious lines.

    (I know a few people who complained that their more ardent Protestant friends all voted for Leea and then were shocked when he started trying to fulfill his absurd campaign promises.)

    As for the rise of theocratic/imperial fascism in Korea, well, there’s also, behind the scenes, quite a bit of very off-putting economic exploitation going on all over the developing world. The last I heard, Korean businesspeople (among others) were eyeing Myanmar as a source of high-quality lumbers, and Koreans are famous in some places as owners of sweatshops.

    (Not that Americans and Canadians aren’t buying some of the stuff produced in those sweatshops. The thing about globalization is that we all get to share in the exploitation!)

    I tend to agree with the misgivings that many people have about President Lee. I tend to agree quite strongly with those who oppose him strongly.

  10. VictorHuh on December 12th, 2009 12:18 pm

    I appreciate for changing your site’s option. I can now read your whole article.
    I was quite impressed you have had such an analysis though you are a foreigner. It seems like you are able to understand korean. Personally, I have seen evengelists only in England and Korea. When I went to a trip to England, I had a chance to have a conversation with a museum’s staff. I was surprised that he knows pastor Cho of Yoiedo. And I thought about not only world’s biggest church of his but also his son who has a sports news paper company. They are different individuals but it is usually not acceptable for koreans emotion that pastor’s son has a sports-news paper company which is like a flyer. URL of the sports news owned by Cho’s son is http://www.stoo.com
    It is a plain and uncomfortable truth in Korea that most powerful newspapers(like choson), news, web potal sites(naver owned by Samsung) are all of theirs.
    For I had mentioned Chosun is not conservertive has reason that they had already sold Korea to Japanese Imperialism. They don’t have a conscience as a newpaper to give people a fair view but they only have interests to defend their vested rights. Chosun’s owner; the ‘Bang’family was, and is friend of dictator Park Jeong Hee and his trencended political party. They somehow brainwash people with their charming article derived from their powerful money. That is why I do not call them ‘conservative.’
    Chosun do not hear proper criticism for them and they temporize people as a left-wing which really works in Korea and automatically make them right-wing.
    I think Korea is losing its momentum to progress democracy. University students who used to fight for freedom have to study to get a job for Korea’s growth can not be sustained 8 to 9 percent.And also, Individualism are wide spread these days.
    I do not like neo-liberalism & globalization. But, I think no one can’t stop runaway Korea-train.
    I also think globalization is unstoppable, sadly.
    Personally, I am skeptic about human’s nature these days.

  11. gordsellar on December 13th, 2009 1:37 pm

    Victor,

    Thanks. I do understand some Korean, though it’s not nearly as good as friends. I was talking a lot with a few people at the time when I wrote that, including some mentioned in the post itself.

    Yeouido’s Full Gospel Church is famous all over the world, especially among those who oppose or dislike megachurches. I’ve had it brought up to me by Texans, for example. It’s nothing new for relatives of clergy, or clergy themselves, to be involved in “dirty business” like a Sports Newspaper: hundreds of years ago, the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer wrote,

    … if gold ruste, what shal iren do?
    For if a preest be foul, on whom we truste,
    No wonder is a lewed man to ruste;
    And shame it is, if a prest take keep,
    A shiten shepherde and a clene sheep.
    Wel oghte a preest ensample for to yive,
    By his clennesse, how that his sheep sholde lyve.

    which translates (here) to:

    … if gold rust, what must iron do?
    For if a priest, on whom we trust, should be foul
    It is no wonder for a layman to go bad;
    And it is a shame, if a priest is concerned:
    A shit-stained shepherd and a clean sheep.
    Well ought a priest to give an example,
    By his purity, how his sheep should live.

    I’m confused, though, about your claim that the newspapers are not “rightwing” — given the huge displeasure with Park last year, I would have imagined the major newspapers, had they been solely profit-driven, would have castigated him publicly, screaming for his immediate dethronement, er, I mean, impeachment, for some random reason. They didn’t.

    To be honest, as a Canadian, the Korean political establishment across the spectrum looks largely right-wing in terms of social policy, and surprisingly left wing in terms of economics, health care, and so on.

    I could be talking about my butt, but the desire to protect the economy, the universality of health care (which even Lee couldn’t dismantle), and the laws regarding employment seem relatively more left-wing to me. But at the same time you have an arch-conservative social policy across both sides of the spectrum, with a real hard-on for online surveillance, braking social and cultural change, and so on.

    I think Korea’s momentum in terms of democracy is complex, and I’d need to know more than I do to talk about it usefully.

    Like you, I distrust and fear neoliberalization. Globalization, well, I think a positive and healthy form could be possible, but since we’re letting fascists and businessmen (the difference is narrow sometimes) run the process, of course we’re ending up with something unhealthy and stupid and dangerous.

    But hey, don’t be so skeptical about human nature. There’s hope. Other people feel the way you do, and far more would if they actually spent time thinking about it. You can find them, and enliven them. Korean society needs that from people like you, as much as the English speaking world needs it from people like me.

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