hankyoreh

Park No-ja, Professor of Korean Studies at Oslo University

I have various complex feelings about writing what you see here, while watching the hostage situation in Afghanistan and the many turns it has taken. From the very start, was there any need to send Korean troops there as if following the orders of the United States, which occupies Afghanistan without permission under the pretext of waging a war on terrorism? Was there no way for the church to have seen there was no way for Muslims living in the invaded territory to have thought positively about people who went to “serve” in a very religious way, when the country is being occupied by Western forces led by the United States, which presents itself as a Christian nation? What is most shocking, however, is the response of some of Korea’s netizens.

Of course it shows you quite well how intimate with imperialism the Korean church is, in that it goes to “serve” on a battlefield in a way that speaks the same religious language as the invading nation. We have to call on the church to return to the spirit of Jesus, who was killed at the hands of Roman invaders and Jewish collaborators. However, the 23 people who are now being threatened with death are people just like the rest of us. Are they not in the circumstances in which they now find themselves because the government we pay taxes to is a government that sent its troops to that land in the first place? The government has a natural obligation to save them no matter what concessions it makes.

Many of the comments you see on the Internet, however, are as cold as can be towards abductees who hover between life and death. “Weren’t they already giving up on their lives when they went to Afghanistan?” “Lets leave them to be martyrs rather than having Korea let itself be insulted by negotiating with hostage takers.” “Korea shouldn’t be negotiating with terrorists to save people who went there after the government told them not to.” I wonder what you readers would think if you had happened upon comments like those, if members of your family had been kidnapped. To borrow from the title of an old Soviet movie, it feels like we are living in a “Seoul that knows no tears.”

Do we completely lack a spirit of solidarity? When it comes to vertical integration, mobilization from above, we are actually excessive. When the government and the media say the country should pool its gold together to overcome the foreign currency crisis of 1997, some 3 million people respond to the call when it had nothing to do with the essence of the issue at hand, and when the World Cup comes around half the population rises to cheer on the national team - but it will not do anything to improve the lives of the common people. We usually respond quite well when, instead of the state, it is small groups that mean something to our own welfare or eventual old age, like family or groups of alumni, call us as well. When it is about someone who is a complete stranger, however, even if they are a citizen of the Republic of Korea, we are not so good at horizontal solidarity. When some Japanese ultra-rightist utters a single word about Dokdo and thereby attacks the “sanctity of the national territory,” the whole country gets in such a state it is like someone has turned a beehive inside out. But when 23 individual Koreans are overtaken by the shadow of death, a considerable number of netizens unleash cold cynicism. There is little room for the individual in a “Koreanism” controlled by the state.

It is not because of some “defect in the national character” that we have become a “society of others,” in which we are estranged and separated from each other. It was inevitable that things would be like this in a society in which a survival-of-the-fittest mentality makes competitors out of people as early as elementary school, where children compete with their classmates over their grades. Preaching the virtues of civic solidarity will not help anything as long as the country is the prisoner of marauding chaebol that increase stock dividends with the blood and sweat of non-regular workers, and is the battlefield of cliques off all kinds out fighting for their own advantage. Only a socio-economic policy based on the solidarity of its people, which breaks down academic cliques, provides equal and free education, requires the formal hiring of non-regular workers and has workers participating in corporate management, can build a Korea that is a civic republic.