Anarchy in the ROK

In an earlier post, I quoted a Korea Herald writer who used the words "chaos" and "anarchy" to describe the state of Korea since the current wave of candlelight vigils began. Today I decided to visit the area near City Hall, where the vigils take place, and see how things looked. Here are some concerned citizens dangling their feet in the water of the river leading up to the square, pondering whether democracy has a future in Korea:

This river is part of a massive public-works project from Lee Myeong-bak's term as Mayor of Seoul, before he became president. It helps to explain, I think, why people voted him into the Blue House: maybe they thought he'd do more things like this, that benefit everybody, not just the conglomerates.

Geez, they'll let anybody into Korea these days:

Here's a dangerous leftist student activist, stirring up the people:

Protesters and police alike were preparing for tonight's show:

Hmm ... well, maybe this is anarchy and chaos. If you give women equal rights, the next thing you know, everybody will want them.

Of course, these pictures don't prove anything. Even in a genuinely riot-torn country, there are pockets of peace and quiet. You'll have to take my word for it that I didn't ignore North Korean commandos torturing innocent citizens in the streets; I promise you I didn't. Nor did I feel any unease walking through this business and municipal-government neighborhood. (The American embassy, by the way, is just a few blocks north of that statue.) It was a day like any other, much like other days I've walked around this area since 2001.

The candlelight vigils haven't brought either anarchy or chaos to Korea as far as I can tell. The participants know what they're doing; they don't want Korea to descend into either chaos or, more pertinently, a corporate / right-wing dictatorship. They're just assembling peaceably to let their government know they don't like some of the things it's doing.

Mu

There was more violence last night in Seoul as police tried to control and disperse the protests against US beef imports. I don't have much information yet, but from the pictures I've seen it appears that the fighting has ramped up a step, with protesters attacking the police transports. I'll post again when I know more. There's a good article describing the genesis and progress of the protests at English OhMyNews and another on why ordinary Korean citizens oppose Lee's program of privatization. The latter also contains this chilling bit:

On June 6 President Lee Myung-bak had a breakfast meeting with religious leaders at Chung Hwa Dae. They discussed various issues, including the FTA, beef imports and the privatization of public sectors, such as water and health care. During his conversation, Lee mentioned that the recent candle light demonstrations seemed to have been backed by North Korean Communist supporters who had been inactive during the previous president's regime.

It's possible that Lee believes this paranoid nonsense. The sympathetic Korea Herald had already indicated that Lee's first reaction to the protests was that they were manipulated from behind the scenes by murky "leftists." But although many Korean Christians are involved in the vigils, the Korean Christian leadership includes a lot of batshit-crazy reactionaries who'd get along well with John Hagee. I don't think that Lee was simply making a 'wild guess,' as the OhMyNews writer calls it: I think he was trying to incite anti-Communist Christians to attack the protestors, much as the Korea Herald editorialist I quoted a couple of days ago was disappointed that the ex-military men hadn't interrupted their Memorial Day remembrances to beat up grandmas and high-school kids while the riot police looked on. Then Lee could deplore the excesses of patriotic Koreans, without having to take responsibility for them.

This sort of thing is a familiar tactic of the Right everywhere. When Rome's first gay pride celebration was being planned a few years ago, for example, the Vatican warned that decent people might react to this disgusting display with violence, hint hint nudge nudge. As things turned out, there wasn't much violence: even the neo-Fascists didn't have much stomach for queer-bashing that year, merely issuing a few threats that fortunately were not carried out. John Paul II must have been so disappointed.

On Tuesday there will be another big rally to commemorate the overturning of South Korea's dictatorship twenty-one years ago. This would have taken place even if the anti-import vigils had never occurred, but now it will be in continuity and solidarity with the vigils.

Images above from OhMyNews, as usual; click on the link and scroll around to see more. I've tried to avoid posting many of the more inflammatory photos, because I'd rather people focused on the predominantly nonviolent mass-based approach of the vigils. But as Lee continues his crackdown on dissent, trying to save his staggering administration, I know it's necessary to make people aware of everything that's happening. Is the whole world watching?

Update: According to Monday's Korea Herald, the conflict broke out when the demonstrators began to move to Cheong Wa Dae, the President's mansion ("Beef Protesters Scuffle With Police").

Some demonstrators smashed a police bus with steel pipes and hammers. Riot police were seen hitting protesters on the ground with their shields.

About 20 protesters and 30 policemen were hurt, according to both sides. No serious injuries were reported.

Again, despite the size of the crowd (40,000 or so) and the high emotions involved, the violence was relatively mild. I could wish for even milder.

I've seen a photo of Lee Myeong-bak's meeting with the religious leaders. Several of the leaders, as I should have guessed, were Buddhists, so it wasn't just Christians he was talking to. Buddhism has long been embattled in Korea, from severe persecution under some of the Confucianist kings to attacks on temples by Christians in the 20th century. I'm not sure, but I kind of doubt that Buddhist leaders would be all that receptive to Lee's attempted Red scare.

Do It Your Way

By an interesting coincidence, May 31 was not just a night of police violence against Korean anti-beef demonstrators, it also marked the beginning of the 9th Annual Korean Queer Culture Festival (KQCF), and saw Korea’s ninth gay pride parade.

Unfortunately, the article at English OhMyNews doesn’t provide an estimate for the parade turnout, though it does mention that attendance has grown over the years. And maybe even more unfortunate, all the photographs of the parade show only the foreign contingent (except for one photo of Korean onlookers), because so few gay Koreans are willing to be photographed in that context. You’d think, looking at these pictures, that only foreigners participated, though the text makes it clear that this isn’t so. Yet the author, Martin Solis, calls the event “one fiery pride parade.”

In earlier years, we’re told, many of the Koreans in the parade wore paper bags over their heads to avoid being photographed; this year, those who didn’t want their pictures taken wore red ribbons instead, “including musical performers, dancers on the floats, and a group of ajjumas who proudly identified themselves as ‘The Lesbos’”. By time I read that, I had had enough of this being called a “pride” parade. I understand and support fully the desire and need of gay Koreans (along with gay people anywhere) to protect themselves. No one should come out publicly until he or she is ready. But until you do that, you aren’t openly gay, or lesbian, or bisexual. Wearing a paper bag over your head, or even just a red ribbon to ward off the evil eye of the camera, is not a declaration of pride: it’s a declaration of shame and fear. Korean gays, like gays in other countries, including the United States, have good reason to be afraid and ashamed; but that means they aren’t proud.

I stressed “including the United States” because I’ve talked to so many gay people from other countries who believe that all gay Americans are openly gay, dance nekkid on Pride parade floats, and have expensive condos in San Francisco or Manhattan. Others I talked to before 2003 were amazed to learn that sex between men in private was illegal in half the states of the Union in those days. Many prefer to ignore the widespread and quite powerful movement against gay people in the US, the high levels of violence against us, the official government discrimination, in order to pretend that the US is totally gay-friendly and that all gay people have it easy here.

Besides, even in a city as large as Seoul there is always the chance that someone you know will happen to be in the area during the parade, and see you there. I’ve often had to warn people who joined our Speakers Bureau here in Bloomington that if there was anyone they didn’t want to know they were gay, that person would turn up in an audience they were speaking to. This caused some people to change their minds about speaking. Does Speakers Bureau discriminate against the closeted? Maybe so. I don’t think we’d allow someone to speak with a paper bag over his or her head.

Also raised by the Korean march is the question of American or Western influence on the Korean or other Asian gay scenes. Much nonsense has been written about this. Solis’s article takes for granted that a Korean pride parade will be modeled after parades elsewhere, especially the United States where they originated.

Korean men and women mounted the five floats and danced to pop and hip-hop music as the parade circulated a small area of the Cheonggye cheon.

For those who have experienced other pride parades in certain North American, Latin American, and European cities, the Korean Pride Parade may have appeared a bit tame in comparison. The Korean Pride Parade was smaller and shorter in duration, and it lacked common elements of more developed pride parades such as oiled and nearly-naked dancers, an abundance of drag kings and queens, and feathery displays that put peacocks to shame.

"Seoul's pride festival is like a cute little puppy," said a woman from Canada, commenting on the far from ostentatious floats. "I just want to pet it on the head."

Gee, I just want to slap that woman on the face. (Yes, I'm a bitch; bitch is the new black.) Solis puts the relative inhibition of the parade down to the institution’s “youthfulness.” Nope: the first parade in New York in 1970 had plenty of outrageousness, and I never heard of anyone participating in it with their head covered by a paper bag. (An extravagant costume with face-painting, though, can be just as effective a disguise.) There’s no reason why Korean pride should mimic American or other models, though equally there’s no reason why it shouldn’t. Gay Koreans should think for themselves about what they want to take from other movements; it sounds like the parade was adopted not so much because it was something they wanted to do, but because it was what everyone else was doing. And also, maybe, because it was relatively easy to do – I was about to add “fun” there, but it sounds like many of the Korean participants were too afraid of being discovered to enjoy themselves much. I can’t help wondering why they attended at all; the article quotes their reasons for hiding, but not why they were there.

For the record, I’ve never participated in a pride parade myself; it’s not something that’s important or interesting to me. There are other things I did want to do, and I’ve done them, including public speaking through Speakers Bureau and involvement in other kinds of gay organizations. But I don’t deny that parades have contributed to our movement, and have given space to many people who might never do any other kind of activism. They remain controversial even in among US queers. (Again, the divisions among American gays are often overlooked by outsiders; it’s so much easier to think of us as a monolithic bunch of monsters in feather boas and leather.)

Asia has its own tradition of carnivalesque parades, as exemplified by Lunar New Year celebrations. It also has a long tradition of organized political activism against the “conservatism” of the mainstream culture, including Korea’s own tradition of student activism which is now flowering again in the streets of every city in Korea. I get impatient when Asians (or Western apologists for gay quietism) tell me that their country just isn’t ready for a gay movement like the US. First, of course, they should build their own gay movement in a way that is meaningful for them, not just imitate other countries’. More important, the US wasn’t ready for a gay movement either. Solis writes, “Unlike cities such as New York, San Francisco, and Ottawa, which have been celebrating pride parades since the late 1960s or early 1970s, the Korean Pride Parade is not yet a ‘given’ in Korean society.” Pride parades weren’t a ‘given’ in American society in 1970, either; it was gay people, possessed of tremendous courage, who made them so.

It has always been a sore point with me that so many people seem to want to make hiding and lying into heroic virtues while derogating those who refuse to hide and lie; while hiding is sometimes necessary, it’s nothing to be proud of. (This extends beyond sexual politics; collaborators with every repressive regime have tried to justify themselves while attacking those who resisted.) For me the heroes are the people who overcame their fear. So I salute those gay Koreans who dared to organize events like the Queer Film and Video Festival, originally against the very real threat of government repression, and those who marched last weekend without red ribbons. I’m proud of them. Meanwhile, it might have better honored the fears of the closeted if the OhMyNews article had included no photos at all.

(P.S. May 14, 2009: I found Cajuboy's video of the 2008 Pride Parade on Youtube and embedded it here because it gives a better picture of the Korean participation in the parade [see, it can be done]. I hope to see this year's parade in person.)

Students and Grannies and Monks -- Oh, My!

The Korean police have been playing rough again, trying to disperse some of the crowds that are settled in for a 72-hour marathon vigil to complete their month of protests against President Lee Myeong-bak’s trade policies. (Photo, again, from OhMyNews.) This seems stupid to me. The vigils are going to end in a day or two – why would the police want to make more trouble for themselves?

Thursday evening, says an editorial in the Korea Herald, titled “Protests or Anarchy?”,

former members of Army counter-intelligence units and other "conservative" groups occupied Seoul Plaza before the hordes of demonstrators arrived. The "ex-HID" men are holding 72-hour memorial services for their "fallen comrades sacrificed in the performance of patriotic missions," on the lawn in front of City Hall, while groups supporting the Korea-U.S. free trade agreement and "law and order" movements are chanting their slogans nearby. But the anti-Lee Myung-bak crowd virtually surrounded the plaza and overwhelmed the opposing group due to their great number and thunderous loudspeaker chants. Tens of thousands of policemen in heavy riot-control gear just looked on.

Even this overtly propagandistic writer doesn’t claim that “the anti-Lee Myung-bak crowd” attacked, overtly interfered with, or threatened the pro-FTA and “law and order” groups, let alone the ex-Army men. It seems they simply outnumbered them. That can be an uncomfortable position in which to find oneself, as I know from experience, but it’s not a danger to democracy. Despite the editorialist’s prattling about “democracy”, it seems he doesn’t understand what the word means. Judging by the last sentence of that paragraph, the writer wishes the police had attacked the “anti-Lee Myung-bak crowd” right then and there, just for having turned out in numbers. Usually, policemen in riot gear “just look on” while right-wing thugs are attacking peaceful demonstrators, and it’s that scenario the writer seeks to invoke.

The editorialist claims to be concerned that the public has turned against Lee’s administration so quickly, within a few months after it came to power. The writers I’ve read who take this tack conveniently forget the failed impeachment proceedings brought by Korean rightists against Lee’s prececessor, Noh Mu-hyeon. All my Korean friends were furious at having to defend Noh, who had disappointed them seriously after he took office, but they knew that the right-wingers were worse. If memory serves, the Herald didn’t wring its hands over the unfairness of that affair. The situation reminded me a lot of the impeachment of Bill Clinton, another case of an attempted coup on trumped-up charges by right-wing politicians and corporate media.

As far as I can tell from my Korean friends and the English-language Korean news I’ve read, Koreans were tired of the malfeasance of Lee’s predecessors: they didn’t so much vote for Lee and his policies as against the other guys. The fact that Americans have more experience with democracy than Koreans hasn’t kept us from making the same mistake many times. So the editorialist blames the protests for swaying, even misleading decent people. It doesn’t occur to him that these huge demonstrations might be an expression of the Korean public’s will, which is what they seem to be.

Nor did it occur to the three young Korean writers for English OhMyNews, all of whom criticize the protesters for disobedience and disrespect to elders; they also forget that a good many Korean elders have joined the vigils. These young writers are showing disrespect to their peers as well as their elders when they accuse them of being sheep led by anarchists. One even seems to equate today’s protests with the mass popular movement that overthrew Cheon Doo-hwan’s dictatorship in 1987; I think her analogy backfires – does she wish she still lived under a military regime? Still, one can find the same phenomenon in the US, with young conservatives joining older ones in denouncing those who fail to obey slavishly their elected officials.

The good citizens are in despair [concludes the Herald’s editorialist]. They ask themselves if 21 years is still not enough to create a stable democracy here. Many people are just praying that the anniversary of the June 10, 1987 pro-democracy movement next week will remind everyone of the precious thing they struggled to achieve throughout the dark 80s. It was definitely not this chaos.

Again, which “good citizens” does he have in mind? Presumably he means the upper levels of Lee’s administration, and the corporate interests on both sides of the Pacific who may not get their way now. The protesters are also good citizens, trying to use peaceful means to turn around an administration that most Koreans do not support. In general, reactionary regimes depend on the passivity of most citizens to push their destructive policies: that gave Korea its economic crisis, the US and Britain the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Democracy in 1987 was achieved on the streets, not by waiting passively until the next election came along (which would have meant “never”), so it is not clear that the heirs of the earlier movement object to this year’s vigils – indeed, many are participating in them. Besides, as the editorialist also complains, voters showed their lack of support for the ruling party in last week’s by-elections.

As for “this chaos,” it’s a lie. The country is not in chaos. I’ve been all over Seoul in the past two weeks, and life is mostly going on as usual. The editorialist, like other remaining Lee Myeong-bak’s supporters (Lee’s approval ratings are down to 20 percent, near those of his buddy Bush), is simply trembling at the power of free speech and the peaceful assembly of citizens.

Boy Culture Club

Thanks be to the Internet! Though I am far from the Fatherland, I can still follow events that trouble the patriarchy (and just about everything troubles the patriarchy).

Currently it appears that scrota are shrinking defensively from sea to shining sea because of the release of Sex and the City, now the top grossing film in the country. I mean, it beat out Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull at the box office – that’s unnatural and blasphemous. Here’s what Wajahat Ali wrote about it for Counterpunch:

Driving to the “Sex and the City: The Movie” premiere, I felt like Morgan Spurlock, the director of “Super Size Me” who foolishly consumed fast food for 30 days; a man voluntarily condemning himself to masochistic pain for sake of a cultural experiment. Even before entering, the publicity coordinator, who knows me and the other frequent movie critics, said, “Dude, you’re like one of 6 guys in the entire movie theatre.”

“Fantastic,” I replied sarcastically. Upon entering the theatre and surveying the audience, I realized he was incorrect. I was one of the 21 men out of the 250 highly giddy and anxious women. The air brimmed with suffocating excitable estrogen. As a heterosexual dude, I felt outnumbered, outgunned, and – like a midget on a NBA basketball court – displaced.

Strange, isn’t it? If I hadn’t learned better by now, I would expect that a straight man would be in hog heaven to find himself surrounded by 250 estrogen-crazed women, and almost no other males present. (Actually, women’s sexual desire is related to testosterone, just like men’s. Maybe that’s the problem?) I also would think that a straight man who professed to be mystified by women would be interested to know what women like, how they think, how they fantasize. But no. I think the key word for Mr. Ali is “displaced”: that is, what bothers him is that those 250 women weren’t paying attention to him, but to the movie up there on the screen.

Worse yet, they were really really rilly excited about that movie, even though no one’s head exploded, nobody got gutted with a chainsaw, there were no car chases, no sounds of weapons being prepped for firing (shik-SHIK-shik), no torture of the hero, no geysers of blood or any of the other essential components of a good movie. Instead the audience got excited about shoes, about outfits that probably cost more than the budget of your average Third World Nation, and “a gratuitous 4 minutes sequence where Carrie tries on designer wedding dresses … while naming their designers ultimately culminating with ‘Vivian Westwood,’ which I assumed from the audience reaction is ‘kind of a big deal.’” If the ladies had been salivating over, say, Q showing 007 all the kewl gadgets in his Aston Martin, or Ahnold hefting numerous pieces of lethal hardware, that would be totally normal. But wedding dresses? That is soooo gay. What will happen to America’s special effects prosthetics artists, the masters of exploding heads and blood geysers, if such movies take over?

Notice that Mr. Ali’s article appeared on Counterpunch, a left-wing website. The site’s co-editor Alexander Cockburn, like many Left men of his generation, never seems to have quite figured out feminism. I still remember his prolonged squabble with Lydia Sargent, one of the founders of Z magazine, during the first few years of its publication, over something I can no longer recall. What I do recall is that Cockburn showed his deep sensitivity to women by being photographed in bad drag, which is like showing your solidarity with African-Americans by being photographed in blackface. Which may explain why Mr. Ali’s very routine college-humor-mag piece turned up on a site that usually concentrates on weightier issues, like what a bitch Hillary Clinton is.*

If you want full-blown straight-boy hysteria, though, read the comments under Genevieve Koski’s Onion AV Club review of SATC. Not all of them qualify – in fact, quite a number of women weigh in on the film, which given its demographic is to be expected -- but the boys dominate, like:

RE: 2.5 Hours?

by Jeremy H

How much of that 2.5 hours features Cattrall's snatch?

7:31 AM Fri May 30, 2008

or

RE: These broads

by Neighbor no log

they're old. but to quote another avc commenter whose name escapes me, look at the get-away sticks on that dame!

1:51 PM Sat May 31, 2008

or

Ah ok great

by Conor

But we could please have a review by a male now and get over this nonsense?

4:55 PM Fri May 30, 2008

-- and there are even a couple of good snappy comebacks, like:

RE: Well-

by Michelle Foucault

Boo hoo! I was mistreated on an internet messageboard by strangers who likely are too lazy to wipe the cheeto dust from their Pavement t-shirts! Boo-hoo!

1:12 PM Fri May 30, 2008

But I digress. Most indicative is this exchange:

Why so much hate?

by SATC fan

Is the talkback dominated by 20-year-old boys? If so, that makes sense. Older women are probably frightening to them. I am a 37-year-old straight man, married for 11 years, and I enjoyed the movie, and thought it was on par with the show; that is, fun and froth, and nothing more. This movie isn't a realistic portrayal of anyone; it's an escape, people. Let's not compare this to your mumblecore or whatever the fuck entertains you.

6:43 AM Sat May 31, 2008

RE: Why so much hate?

by Current

It's too late, Jim. The testicles are gone, only to have been replaced by a woeful, meaningless existence.

7:54 AM Sat May 31, 2008

… and so, predictably, on. I think SATC fan is probably right, except that it isn’t just older women who are frightening to these boys – all women are. As an evolutionist, I know that their fear is biologically based, but that doesn’t make it any less tiresome. Is it really comforting to believe that straight men are biologically programmed both to pursue sex with women and not to like them very much? Nervous joking about the fundamental incompatibility between men and women didn’t originate with second-wave feminism, they were a staple of the 1950s comedy I grew up on, and it’s much older than that.

It occurred to me years ago that if women did have radically different interests and aesthetics than males, that wouldn’t mean women’s interests deserved less respect than men’s. (Probably more, I’d say, since wardrobes are less destructive than high-tech weaponry.) Men would simply be disqualified from pronouncing any judgment on women’s culture (and vice versa, to be fair). It would be legitimate – necessary, in fact – to have women’s studies classes that were closed to men, since through no fault of their own, men couldn’t understand or appreciate women’s concerns. Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Sex and the City simply couldn’t be judged by the standards used for Thackeray, Lawrence, Rambo. People would have to learn to treat what they couldn’t understand with respect.

I don’t believe that this is true, of course. Human beings are fascinated by what’s different as often as they’re repulsed by it. It’s possible to go from hearing a foreign language as meaningless gibberish to understanding and speaking it. There’s no particular reason why a person must try to learn about and understand a culture from the other side of the world, about the Masai or the Japanese, but women aren’t an exotic and distant tribe that men will never meet – they live wherever men live, and straight men claim to love them and even to be fascinated by them.

Not that all men are phobic about women. For every man who decried Thelma and Louise as man-hating ultraviolence, there was another who liked it and understood it. The guys who freak out over chick flicks, who proudly flaunt their incomprehension of Sex and the City as Wajahat Ali did, are really revealing that they’re stupid and limited. They consider women’s interests to be trivial and incomprehensible in absolute terms, and believe (as that last comment from the Onion shows) that even to expose themselves to women’s culture is terminally emasculating. Even its presence on multiplex screens across the nation is a threat to their masculinity. It isn’t that they don’t know, it’s that they don’t want to know, and this is a point of pride with them, a demonstration of manhood in itself.

Does this mean that Sex and the City is really, somehow, good art after all? I don’t know, I haven’t seen the series or the movie and have little interest in seeing them. They just don’t seem to be the kind of mindless fluff I like. But who cares? The point is that Boy Culture hits don’t get publicized – and come to think of it, these professions of male cluelessness are part of the publicity machine – as manifestations of the inscrutable masculine mind. Nor do women go around claiming that their wombs will dry up because Transformers is showing at the multiplex. … But none of this is new, it’s just one more episode in the endless soap opera of male anxiety and insecurity. Manhood is in crisis; manhood has always been in crisis. Get over it.

*I do jest here. Counterpunch offers a lot of excellent journalism and commentary, and editors Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair are very good journalists. Like anyone,† Cockburn has some crucial blind spots, and I’m always interested in his work, even though he sometimes makes me cringe.

†Including me? Sure. What are my crucial blind spots? If I knew, they wouldn’t be blind spots.

Candles And Cell Phones

Some more information about the organization of the candlelight vigils. There is a committee called Against the Importing of Mad Cow Disease Beef, formed after the vigils began, that meets each morning to discuss what’s going on. They attend the vigils, and may make suggestions or offer advice, but the committee doesn’t direct the protests, and has no authority to tell the participants what to do. They can’t cancel the vigils unilaterally, for example.

The vigils began as a festive affair. People came and went, talking to friends, listening to the music, most concerned with showing their numbers. Even after the police violence, playfulness remained. Police transports like the one shown above are doubleparked around the perimeter of a demonstration as part of the crowd control; the protesters plastered them with stickers notifying the owner that his vehicle was illegally parked.

This was what confused the Lee administration. They supposed they were dealing with forms of activism familiar to them from the Eighties and before – well-organized groups locked in solidarity, ready to face the police and die if necessary. (This was not bravado; many of them did die.) Perhaps Lee’s men were looking for someone to negotiate with, who could call off the demonstrations if their demands were met; perhaps they were looking for someone to arrest, which they would expect to stop the demonstrations – cut off the head, and the body will die.

But they were not dealing with that kind of activism: the movement against American beef imports is a genuine grassroots movement, like the American Civil Rights movement or AIDS activism, with almost no structure and no leaders. That makes its achievement all the more remarkable. It wouldn’t have been surprising (and Lee probably expected) if, after the police violence of last Saturday night, the high school kids had decided that things were getting too heavy, and it was time to stay at home in the evenings. No one would have blamed them. Instead they were back in the streets the next night, despite the rain, knowing that the water cannons and clubs might be waiting for them. They made it clear that they would keep on coming, night after night.

One Korean friend told me that if any protesters had been seriously hurt, let alone killed, that would have been the end of Lee Myeong-bak’s administration. Fortunately, thankfully, no one was seriously hurt or killed. Just the video clip of cops kicking the head of a woman they’d knocked down was enough to enrage the whole country, costing Lee support even in his own party. It may be the end of Lee’s administration anyway, but even if it survives, it will be in a severely chastened version. Lee has already backed off from his canal project; the Free Trade Agreement may be blocked indefinitely; his neo-liberal programs are going to be a lot harder, maybe impossible to implement. All because of some high school kids with candles and cell-phone cameras.

The Family That Protests Together

(Photo from OhMyNews.)

The 28^th candlelight vigil took place last night; organizers plan a 72-hour vigil starting tonight, to last through Saturday. Next Tuesday, June 10, will be the 21^st anniversary of the 1987 uprising that ended the dictatorship in Korea, and a huge rally is planned to commemorate that. Seoul National University students voted overwhelmingly to join the vigils, along with other college students around the country.

Still, for now, things have apparently calmed down, and the vigils have gone back to their nonviolent status quo ante. According to the Korea Herald (“College Students Gather For Beef Protests”),

Following escalating criticism about "high-handed" crackdowns on protesters, police have been acting in a cautious manner since Tuesday night, refusing to aggressively respond to the demonstrations. They previously used water cannons, fire extinguishers and metal shields to disperse increasingly violent demonstrators.

As far as I can tell, the demonstrators only became “increasingly violent” after the police brought out clubs and water cannons to disperse the crowds. Probably, like many Americans, the Herald writer considers any demonstration “violent” by default.

President Lee’s government is trying to save the situation by proposing that US meat suppliers voluntarily refrain from exporting “older” American beef, and Korean importers would refrain from importing it. “On Monday, several U.S. beef producers said they would label the age of meat exported to Korea to help Korean customers decide whether to buy the American beef or not.” This indicates how pressed US producers feel; corporations hate labeling products; they managed to block labeling of genetically modified foods in the US, for instance. The alternative would be renegotiation of the import terms, “which policymakers regard as almost impossible” (“Lee’s beef option faces uphill battle”). But there would be no formal, legal oversight to make sure the voluntary measures were carried through, and Korean opponents are not likely to accept this strategy.

Opposition parties called it a "mean trick" to patch things up temporarily. Experts are skeptical of its efficacy in curbing trade. There are no signs of letup in street protests.

Opposition parties yesterday intensified pressure for the ruling Grand National Party to join their initiative to completely ban imports of beef from U.S. cattle aged more than 30 months at the time of slaughter.

The GNP on Tuesday accepted the main opposition United Democratic Party's proposal to adopt a parliamentary resolution to force the government to renegotiate the import terms.

Yesterday, it also proposed a parliamentary delegation visit the United States to deliver Koreans' safety concerns and discuss solutions with U.S. officials, politicians and businesses.

But the UDP said it will not accept the governing party's call for convening the National Assembly unless it agrees to sign up with the beef embargo bill.

Ambassador Vershbow’s snide recommendation that Koreans “learn the science and the facts about American beef” didn’t win the US any friends either.

I’m going to try to learn more about the organization of the vigils. The Korean TV news coverage shows individual protesters as talking heads; I haven’t seen any “leaders,” which I consider a positive thing – in the US the media aren’t happy unless they’ve got One Man to talk to. The vigils began more or less spontaneously, and I’ve heard that originally the high school students who started them had other issues on their minds, but as they grew there had to be coordination, to set up stages for the speakers and musicians. I’ve also seen clips of people stacking up huge piles of bottled water and other supplies for the crowds, so someone is obviously doing the scutwork. One of my friends told me there’s a committee that does this work, so I’ll be talking to more people about it when I can, and report here. I wish I spoke more Korean! The mere fact of people taking an unexpected protest and turning it into a month of huge daily rallies boggles my mind. Could such a thing happen in the US?