My Wife, My Fist, My Business
Owen Rathbone has been on a roll this week, which may explain why he’s been getting hate mail from at least one reader. You couldn’t inspire this kind of blind vitriol without having struck the nerve that only unpleasant truths can reach. The correspondent didn’t identify himself, but you don’t need to go far out on a limb to figure that he’s an angry young Korean, dancing to the nong-ak drums of Roh Moo-Hyun’s Red Guards.
The muddled thought behind the hate letter is that Rathbone’s criticism of the ugliness in Korea today is anti-Korean racism. From this logical depression, it digs ever lower into racial slurs (?!) against Japanese and Filipinos, and against Rathbone himself, for having married a Korean woman. Its bedrock is the idea that “foreigners” have no business talking about Korea policy, which is the best that pro-appeasement Korean opponents of the North Korean Freedom Act and North Korea Human Rights Act can muster in opposition to those bills.
Must one agree with South Korean policies that kill and enslave North Koreans simply by virtue of marriage to a Korean? I speak from personal experience that the truth is the opposite. No one who loves the Korean people enough to have learned so much about them, or to have joined into their family in the most meaningful way possible, can avoid taking the North’s terror or the South’s shame personally. The idea that reserves the right of outrage to racially pure Koreans only is just one step removed from South Korea�s ubiquitous Jim Crow exclusion from jobs, marriages, coffee shops . . . even whorehouses(!).
The writer clearly comes from a mindset that reserves the rights to abuse and exploit (North) Koreans, as both Korean governments are doing today�or to criticize them for doing so, for that matter, though far too few Koreans are doing that today�for Koreans only. Like an abusive husband who arrogantly claims to be above criticism, disapproval, or even the law, some South Koreans react with illogical fury to �foreigners� who point out that it is morally wrong to exclude and betray North Korean refugees, to deny them the right to free speech and travel, to bulk-rent them as slave laborers for $58 a month up at Kaesong, to abstain from U.N. resolutions denouncing their mass murder, or to pay massive bribes to the Caligula of Pyongyang who has killed two million of them in a decade, and who will presumably invest that graft in more luxury cars, plutonium, and barbed wire. To do these things, after all, is to be complicit in their oppression and murder. The serious questions Owen raises does not seem to inspire one moment�s thought about the answers to those questions, or a moment�s compassion for the victims.
The woefully predictable reaction of a (hopefully shrinking) number of South Koreans is more �we are one� bombast and venom that hasn�t the consciousness of facts or logic that a sparrow has for a plate glass window. �We are one� may be a political fantasy today; five more years of Sunshine could yet transform it to a mathematical fact.