Korean Job Discussion Forums

[chris_J2]

I am not sure how to more eloquently or concisely describe the concept, but here goes:

The Germans targetted the Jews, Gypsies, Gays etc in WW2 as 'sub-human'. In their misguided zeal to portray the "enemy" as lesser mortals, the Nazis & their supporters themselves lost their own humanity, & became even more subhuman than their hated target group(s). (Auschwitz, Warsaw Ghetto etc).

Similarly, the Japanese viewed themselves as superior to all other races, but their treatment of the Chinese ("small stones for kicking"), at Nanking, & others, (death camps at Changi, Kwai etc) again destroyed their own credibility, as a superior race, & just dragged them down to a subhuman level much lower than their perception of the Chinese & others.

And more recently, the Hutus & Tutsis in Rwanda, again displayed the folly of any one race thinking it is superior to another, by needing to decimate it or commit inhumane acts of genocide. Same story in the former republic of Yugoslavia.

My conclusion? Anyone who acts on misconconceived notions that they are racially superior to other human beings, immediately forfeits their own humanity (whether they realise it or not), and start to sink down the ladder to a level much lower than the people they seek to denigrate.

Does this make sense? Can it be expressed better?

[Guri Guy]

I think that the idea of racial superiority can be found in many cultures unfortunately. German, Japanese, Chinese and yes, Korean too.


So prominent economists assert such things, or even go on to predict (during the early 1990's), as Song Byeong Nak of Seoul National University did, that Korea was destined to overtake Japan as an economic competitor because the dictates of Koreans' greater amount of racial purity made this an inevitability. Don't believe he said it? Check out his book (in Korean) The Economy and Mythology of the Korean People. I have a copy of that book (경제와 한국인의 신화), but the only thing I could find online for you to peruse is "한국인의 신화 일본을 앞선다," which seems to be an excerpt from the book dealing with the Japan argument. Koreans, being as they are decended from superior, northern Asian racial stock, are essentially better anyway, than the 왜놈 (wae-barbarians) that became the shorter, stubbier, savage Japanese people.

Or you could check out Yi O-Ryeong's wildly racist and Korean supremacist chapter from a children's book � ahem � Mommy, I'm Korean, Aren't I? In this whopper, the author argues that humanity's origins are indeed found in Africa, but that some of the smarter, better people left the inferior ones to "live in mud huts" in the "jungle" and started on the "Great Migration" north; these people became lighter in complexion as they went "up," and became the more advanced Europeans. But there were some who wanted more, so they packed their bags and went to the East, where they became even greater, and even extended over to the Americas, as recent research has borne out. But Yi goes on to assert that "everyone, from the tip of South America to East Asia" is part of the superior Asian race, and he links the facts of negative racial traits to the present conditions of Africa and the poorer countries in the Americas, as strongly as he links the successes of Koreans getting perfect scores on the SAT's to their inherent, pure, superiority.

And these are best-sellers, people. One � Song Byeong Nak � is a recognized academic, the other � Yi O-Ryoeng � is taken less seriously outside of the world of literature, but is fairly characterized as Korea's most famous and prolific public intellectual. In other words, a lot of everyday people buy their many books and nod "mmm hmm's" and "ahhhh, that makes sense" while reading their words on the subway, lunch break at work, or before going to bed.

And that's before even getting to the architect of Korean historiography and arguably, the shape of modern Korean identity itself � Shin Chae Ho. The first to really link nation, history, and race together to write a truly Korean history, he was also an arch-racist in that he believed the assumptions of Social Darwinism and other race-based notions of nation to be as true as Darwin's explanation of the differentiation of finches, and built a competitive, proud nationalism to get Korea to the top (quoting from Michael Robinson quoting Shin):

"The nation is an organic body formed out of the spirit of the people. If we disregard nations which have descended through a pure blood line and consider only those which have brought together various tribes in a complex mixture, still there must be always at their center a particular privileged tribe which dominates them. Such a people can be called a nation. If, like sand scattered about on a plate, one people from the west, and still others gather from the north and south and the viewpoints of these people's leaders differ from those of our own, then there cannot be firm government under one chief and a single community cannot be fully established. Under there conditions how can we discuss the question of building a nation?"

Shin, like many Chinese and Japanese intellectuals channeling Western racist sociology, history, and anthropology around the turn of the past century, assumed the fact of the inferiority of certain races in the world, the need to dominate them and not be in turn dominated, and that this is all inherent in the genes � which Asia sort of molded into a more blood-based model. Whichever � in the end, Shin fully supported and gave endless accolades to the Japanese for taking Taiwan from the Chinese and then colonizing it. Most of the Korean Enlightenment intellectuals were fully aboard the Japanese imperial project before the hungry, colonizing eye started looking at Korea as a target, instead of a potential junior partner.

With the latent � and overt � assumptions about race extant in Korean national culture from the beginning, which is then topped with racist American media images from the 1950's, combined with the bitter cocktail of sour grape and envy that is created from having been a potential willing partner cum colonized victim of the Japanese, combined with being essentially indebted to an all-new colonial "master" � is it any wonder that Korean notions of nation, race, and identity itself are notoriously fractured and conflicted?

http://metropolitician.blogs.com/scribblings_of_the_metrop/2006/02/on_korean_blood.html

[Guri Guy]

The Nazi Roots of Korean Racism

It wasn't so long ago that I said that while Korea's economy might finally have caught up with that of the Western world, its societal attitudes towards foreigners and those of less than "pure" blood seemed stuck emulating 1930s Germany; what I didn't know at the time was just how accurate the analogy I made was: the Korean obsession with "pure bloodlines" [sic] is in fact a direct product of Nazi ideology.

Korean society is in drastic need of change if the country's newfound prominence in the world's eye isn't to acquire a deeply unflattering cast; Koreans must come to understand that it's not just their cars, their DVDs and their TV dramas which get to register on the consciousness of foreigners, but also the fact that Korea is one of the few countries in the world in which Nazi-derived xenophobia and racism remain mainstream, respectable attitudes, and as I've said before, the very reason why so few foreigners seem inclined to get behind Korean claims about Dokdo, Yasukuni and the like isn't because of a disease called "Japanophilia", but because all those foreigners understand that what motivates the absurd Korean tantrums is the hurt pride of a people which wishes to see itself as superior to all others, and therefore considers its own claims and sufferings as uniquely tragic and in need of addressing. Truth be told, Koreans have suffered fewer invasions than most other long-established peoples, and their colonial experience was far milder than visited upon the majority of nations which have suffered conquest, yet to hear them whine you'd think they'd experienced the slave trade and the Holocaust combined in the space of 40 years.

On a related note, I'd love to say that I think attitudes in Korea are changing amongst the young, but this comment on the Marmot's Hole illustrates why I don't believe any such thing:

I was speaking to a Korean-Korean friend of mine who was amazed that Diana Kim experienced racism and prejudice in this, the 21st century. In the same same breath, she said she probably wouldn�t date a black guy but would love to date a white one.

Those government-issued textbooks served their purpose well: the Great Racial Chain of Being is still alive and thriving in the minds of young Koreans. It'll take a lot more than initiatives like this one to do away with decades of indoctrination in such thinking.

PS: More Dokdo foolishness. See, this is what I'm talking about - it takes real narcissism not to be aware of how such harebrained behavior plays out in foreign eyes, to the extent it draws any attention whatsoever. Why on Earth should Americans give a damn about a bunch of uninhabitable rocks?

April 10, 2006 in History, International Affairs, Kultur | Permalink

http://foreigndispatches.typepad.com/dispatches/2006/04/the_nazi_roots_.html

Also read up on an interesting article here on all things Hitler related in Korea:

http://metropolitician.blogs.com/scribblings_of_the_metrop/2006/04/the_gates_of_th.html

[valkyrian2]

This post is NOT appropriate to the "GENERAL" forum - Forum for general discussion on issues related to *living* in South Korea.

and has been moved to the

"OFF-TOPIC" forum - Forum for *off- topics* that do not fit in the other forums.

[chris_J2]

I never even mentioned Korea, GG, but if there are elements of ultra-nationalism by Koreans, based on race, as you appear to claim, then they, too, are sadly headed down the same path as the pre WW2 Japanese, & their illusions will also be shattered just as violently. It's just a matter of time.

[lastat06513]

But Korea was created as a "home for the Koreans", much like many homogenious countries in the world.

A good example of infighting that originated from status is Sri Lanka; There the minority Tamils got preferential treatment from the British that the majority Sinhalese hated and became one of the factors of the civil war there now.

Even in Iraq, where Sunni muslims bitterly held power for alittle more than thirty years until the US toppled the Ba'athist regime there.

Now, in both accounts, instead of trying to work out their differences, they just want to live apart from one another, just like the former Yugoslavia

And alot of people didn't know this, but Korea expelled, some rather forcibly, approximately 25,000 ethnic Chinese from Korea under "a policy of racial purity" during the Park Chung Hee era.

[RACETRAITOR]

I think the danger of that armchair theory (and don't get me wrong--I have great respect for armchair theories) is that it implicitly suggests that the racists were right in the first place.

[ChuckECheese]

I thought this was about your motorcycle or car backfiring.

[jinju]

Right on cue:

Guri Sock.... cut and paste...."Korea is bad"

[Guri Guy]

[jvalmer]