Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Pyongshin Sangja]

Taste, my good man. Look it up.

[peachlily]

what are Koreans being taught in History class???
Seems that anybody who knows ANYTHING about world history should know that Nazi symbolism is going to offend a whole lot of people...

so dumbb on the advertiser's part.

[komerican]

I just think Deutsh overstates his case. I don't think that a few greedy ad execs or one comic book or a few bars makes for an "immature" society or a society that "approves of Nazi Germany" or that Korea can not be "considered a fully-functioning member of a global society. Deutsh sounds hysterical.

Deutsh himself poses the essential question: "The question here is whether the Simon Wiesenthal Center was wrong to call this ad campaign one born of gross ignorance." My answer to that question is that yes, it's more from ignorance rather than a deliberate attempt by koreans to whitewash the nazi legacy. I don't think I've taken an unreasonble position.

Also, from where does this western moral indignation comes from? Let me repeat, westerners have no crediblity to judge Koreans about whether they are mature or developed in their view of history. The idea is simply absurd.

Here's an article from the NYtimes that talks about how Americans still have not come to terms with slavery and the Jim Crow laws. I just don't find credible any westerner lecturing to koreans about "taste" or how to look at history "maturely". Take that huge log out of your eye first, my friend.

--------------
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/17/opinion/17cohen.html?_r=1&sq=slavery&st=nyt&oref=login&scp=3&pagewanted=print


April 17, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Race and American Memory
By ROGER COHEN
ATLANTA

I was wandering through the King Center here when I stumbled on a movie clip of an indignant African-American woman saying: �If we can�t live in our country and be accepted as free citizens and human beings, then something�s the matter with something � and it isn�t me.�

That seemed a good, plain summation of the central conflict that has roiled American life since the nation�s foundation, through slavery and segregation and their bitter legacies. When this anonymous woman spoke, less than a half-century ago, she was an unfree American. How she was schooled, where she could sit and whom she could marry were matters determined by her race.

This �something�s the matter with something � and it isn�t me� is a big subject, the nation�s �original sin,� in Barack Obama�s words. It�s also a painful one that sees American ideals and practices at some remove from each other in ways of which Abu Ghraib was a reminder.

For nations to confront their failings is arduous. It involves what Germans, experts in this field, call Geschichtspolitik, or �the politics of history.� It demands the passage from the personal to the universal, from individual memory to memorial. Yet there is as yet in the United States no adequate memorial to the ravages of race.

The King Center is a fine institution. But it�s a modest museum, like others scattered through the country that deal with aspects of the nation�s most divisive subject. Why, I wondered as I viewed the exhibit, does the Holocaust, a German crime, hold pride of place over U.S. lynchings in American memorialization?

Let�s be clear: I am not comparing Jim Crow with industrialized mass murder, or suggesting an exact Klan-Nazi moral equivalency. But I do think some psychological displacement is at work when a magnificent Holocaust Memorial Museum, in which the criminals are not Americans, precedes a Washington institution of equivalent stature dedicated to the saga of national violence that is slavery and segregation.

I lived in Berlin for three years, a period spanning the Bundestag�s decision in 1999 to build a Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The debate, 54 years after the collapse of Hitler�s Reich, was fraught. It takes time to traverse the politics of history, confront guilt and arrive at an adequate memorialization of national crimes that also offers a possible path to reconciliation.
Germans have confronted the monstrous in them. In the end, they concluded the taint was so pervasive that Degussa, which was linked to the company that produced Zyklon-B gas, was permitted to provide the anti-graffiti coating for the memorial. The truth can be brutal, but flight from it even more devastating.

America�s heroic narrative of itself is still in flight from race. The decision, approved by Congress in 2003, to build the Smithsonian�s National Museum of African American History and Culture, to open in 2015, reflects a desire to plug this hole in the nation�s memory. But what this $500 million institution will be remains to be invented.

�The Holocaust is a horribly difficult subject, but the bad guys are not Americans,� Lonnie Bunch, the museum�s director, told me. �Race, however, is the quintessential American story and one that calls into question how America defines itself and how we, as Americans, accept our own culpability.�

He continued: �I am confident that the U.S. public can now do that. My challenge is to express not only the lynching, but also the resiliency and spirituality that are part of the core American identity.�

I also think America�s ready, a half-century after the civil rights movement, for this painful memorialization. But it won�t be easy. The aborted International Freedom Center museum at ground zero, conceived to showcase liberty but dismissed by some as camouflage for a liberal agenda, shows how explosive the politics of history are.

�Memory,� the French historian Pierre Nora noted, �is life.� As such, it�s subject to violent swings.

It�s striking how the three contenders for the presidency offer different self-images for America. John McCain comforts the classic heroic narrative. Hillary Clinton breaks the male hold on that narrative and so transforms it. Obama transfigures it in another way by personifying America�s victory over its most visceral blemish.

The world is weary of the narrative of American exceptionalism. Something�s the matter with something. Guns and God, Hillary�s latest mantra, won�t set America right. Nor will 100 years in Iraq.

It�s time for the country to ask itself some hard post-jingoistic questions and allow the memorialization of its darkest chapters. To demand truth commissions of other nations, while evading them at home, is unhelpful.


In committing to a major museum of African American History, and propelling the first serious African-American presidential candidate, the United States is recasting the psychology of its power. That�s scary. It can also be salutary.

-----------------------




This NYtimes article describes how clueless westerners are about history. Your describing Koreans as having "unparralled levels of ignorance" and calling my post rubbish shows how clueless you are about the west:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/opinion/22herbert.html?em&ex=1209096000&en=40029efacbe9c993&ei=5070

Clueless in America

By BOB HERBERT
Published: April 22, 2008
Ignorance in the United States is not just bliss, it�s widespread. A recent survey of teenagers by the education advocacy group Common Core found that a quarter could not identify Adolf Hitler...
----------

And as for what I do on this board I guess I just disagree with most of the posts here. I am a gadfly of sorts. Most of you preach to the choir and many others nod their heads sheepishly.

[TexasPete]

[TexasPete]

[TexasPete]

[Been There, Taught That]

Even though attempted genocide can't be defended, and the leader who deceives his people into going along with it can't either; even though that, there is a marked difference between praising an example based on such a genocidal episode in the history of a nation (which I can't recall the ads doing) and pointing out the ultimate and utter failure of such a campaign and the strategies common to it and other kinds of endeavors that can be used to successful ends in other, more pedestrian (revenue-oriented) ways.

Meaning, I still think they were going after stressing failure of and improvement upon the methods for their own, comparably benign, purposes and choosing a strong, obvious and unignorable example to do it. And, obviously, it wasn't ignored. Maybe they knew just what they were doing; maybe they planned a short-term hard-hitting ad campaign.

[TexasPete]

Ok, there must be crazy in the air. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/7362161.stm Looks like Koreans aren't the only ones doing effed up shiz with nazi stuff. WTF, Ukraine. W.T.F.

[Tiberious aka Sparkles]

@ komerican: I get the feeling you're upset that Smee is trying to further an agenda, but even if he were, can you honestly say that you're against the ads getting pulled? Were it a Korean person or special interest group who called for the ads to be canceled would that have made you feel better? The bottom line is that the ad was, through ignorance or not, Bad Idea Jeans.

I assume you are a Korean American, based on your handle, and, yeah, it may be vexing to read outsiders' viewpoints about your people, but you can only stick up so much for your drunk uncle. We don't hate the player; we hate the game.

If the shoe were on the other foot and I were back home watching a commercial for Cheetos that depicted a comfort woman wiping off the orange fingers of a white, B-grade actor, you can bet your ass I'd contact everyone I know in Korea to bring such insensitivity to light.

Why so upset? Based upon your Magical Negro posts and links, I'm going to take a guess that you have issues vis a vis race relations, even those with the best of intentions.

[The Lemon]

You know that little voice those in the Western media usually have in their heads that warns them when they're approaching subjects that millions of people find sensitive or offensive? That little voice, aka "taste" is a good thing for everyone. It protects Mr. Media from doing something stupid which might cost him his job. And it prevents the needless offense of whole cultural/ethnic groups over something stupid like gum or cosmetics.

It seems like many Korean media people don't have that little voice. How else do we explain Korean sports newspaper commercials spoofing September 11th?

The ad was in terrible taste. Pulling it was good, and those who spoke out against it were in the right. We come from cultures where conservatives have led us to believe that sensitivity to groups other than our own is "political correctness", and therefore bad. Korea demonstrates why they're wrong.

But - and here is the key point of the last two pages - Komerican is spot on.
"Brian Deutsh's article was a self-serving piece of tripe."

[Big_Bird]

[stevieg4ever]

You are intentionally missing the point. These ads are an insult and a disgrace: whatever they are the product of. Your beleaguered attempt to justify them only accentuates your desperation.

By the way, I don't think Korea is a fully functioning member of the global world. And I know many Koreans that would concur.

I am still mystified as to how the makers of this commercial could fail to see some of the surrounding issues using Nazi imagery.