Occidentalism

For threatening a white neighbor with a hammer.

A former columnist and self-described Asian supremacist who applauded the Virginia Tech slayings has been sentenced to a year of mental health treatment for waving a hammer at a neighbor’s face and threatening to kill her and her family.

Kenneth Eng, 24, of Bayside, New York, pleaded guilty in Queens County Court on Thursday to an indictment charging him with attempted assault and harassment over the incident last April.

Eng was arrested May 9 for threatening the neighbor, Marissa Addison, 29, and her mother, Jane Rosovich, who were standing with their two dogs on their lawn in front of their Queens home.

Eng is accused of yelling at Addison, saying, “If your dog bites me, I will kill you and your family,” and then swinging a hammer at her.

Last February, Eng was fired from the San Francisco-based weekly newspaper AsianWeek for writing a column titled “Why I Hate Blacks.”

Three months later, in a Village Voice interview, Eng gloried in the slayings of 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech and fancifully speculated that his own writings might have inspired the killer, Seung-Hui Cho.

Eng also told the New York weekly that his own plan for a similar killing spree at New York University was aborted only because he could not afford a weapon.

After his sentencing on Thursday, federal authorities produced an arrest warrant and took Eng into custody. The nature of that case was not immediately known.

His attorney, Joel Dranove, of Manhattan, said he expected Eng to appear in Brooklyn federal court on Friday, but had no further comment.

He is a pretty nutty guy, as this interview on TV reveals.

‘Asiaphiles’ surrounding an Asian girl – picture from Orange County Weekly

This rant by Vickie Chang in the Orange County Weekly is something else. I guess the writer is a Korean American based on her stereotypical transplanted-to-America Korean girls first name (Vicky – how many Korean girls have you met using that name in English?) and the family name Chang, which is a fairly standard Korean family name. She also talks about booking clubs, and the customers of those are usually Korean.

Born and raised in La Habra, Dan* didn’t see many Asian Americans before college. Now 22, he attributes his Asiaphilia to UC Irvine, where he’s a studio art major and an astounding 58 percent of students claim Asian descent.

But his Asian fetish actually originated in high school, in trig class, where he met a Vietnamese American girl named Ann. Although born in the United States, Ann was raised in Indonesia until about a year before Dan met her. She spoke English well, but not perfectly. They shared the standard high school dating experience: dinner-and-movie dates, study dates, boba dates, kung fu lessons, meditation with the girlfriend’s Buddhist monk uncle. The relationship ended in a pretty standard way, too: Dan suggested sex, Ann resisted, things spiraled. There was an ultimatum and then a breakup, and then—classic—threats of suicide.

Later, Dan sought answers on Ann’s blog, where she labeled him a “standard American boy” and called him out for pressuring her into sex. She ended the entry with a note of disgust: “Get over yourself.”

Perhaps it was the pain of that rejection and the desire to overcome it, but Dan says Ann’s rejection changed him. When he began dating again, he found himself looking for Asian girls. He went through a string of them—one-night stands, flings and friends-with-benefits. He frequented places like Club Bang in Hollywood, which attracts a number of Asian patrons—and Asiaphiles like Dan.

Although there was one detour on the road to full-blown Asiaphilia—Desiree, whom he describes as a “white feminist with armpit hair”—Dan openly professed his preference for Asian women by his third year at UCI.

His friends back in La Habra eventually got the idea he had a fetish.

“Date a nice white girl,” they urged him.

“White girls,” he’d reply, “are sluts.”

Yes… this kind of thing never happens to high school couples of the same race, right? That is the start of quite an impressive rant. Lets look at it.

“You know, I just got back from Bangkok,” he went on. “The women in Thailand are all gorgeous. You’re all gorgeous! It’s just that whole area.”

That whole area? Bangkok? Thailand in general? Southeast Asia? The greater Asian continent?

It’s funny: Asia is about 17,212,000 square miles—nearly five times the size of the U.S. About 60 percent of the world’s population lives there. Yet these guys seem to lump all Asians together, not to mention the teeny tiny fact that people such as Christina are Americans.

Would an ‘Asiaphile’ really be so ignorant of Asian geography? The guy she is talking about is probably not an ‘Asiaphile’.

But he wasn’t finished. He inquired about Christina’s nationality and complimented her on her good breeding, background and “blood,” the last of which left her thoroughly creeped out. By the end of the night, the guy had even doted on her “delicate” fingers, and grabbed her arm when she tried to escape to the smoking patio.

Less than a month later, again at Detroit, another forgettable guy with crusty hands sauntered over to our table and said breathily, “I love this table! I just love it!” He stared at Christina, gesturing toward her with one of those crusty hands. “Especially you!”

Crusty hands? I wonder what purpose this kind of description serves. Are the crusty hands a product of his ‘Asiaphilia’? If not, what is the purpose of this kind of description if not for demagoguery?

By the time we’ve reached adulthood, most Asian American women have experienced so many episodes of Asiaphilia that it becomes something we laugh about over dinner. There was the time that one smooth-talking (and way too short—I hope you’re reading this) guy from LA Weekly’s marketing department asked me where I was from.

“Los Angeles,” I said.

“No, really, where are you really from?”

This seems kind of unreasonable. More than 65% of Asian Americans are born overseas. In a city like New York, the percentage rises to 78%. Most of the Asians the average American might meet out in casual social situations are probably not from America. If an Asian American is mistaken for a recent immigrant, then they should consider that the price of their parents having moved to America. That being said, it strikes me as extremely self centered to complain about people making assumptions that are in most cases correct.

There was the 20-year-old UCI economics major who swears that Asian women’s vaginas “feel different somehow—very smooth and naturally lubricated.” Or the guy who sauntered up to me and asked, “You must be great with a chopstick, huh?”

People really come up to you and say these kinds of things, Vicky? I have plenty of Asian female friends. It doesn’t happen to them.

It pisses us off—no, I don’t want to see your killer Chinese-character tat; it probably doesn’t mean what you think it means—but we’re not sure what we can do but laugh.

Now there is some misdirected anger. Who cares!

Asian fetishism has a long history of being brushed off as a compliment, rather than offensive or bigoted. I’ve been told I ought to be flattered that so many non-Asian men “prefer” Asians and Asian American women. But the coalescing of an ethnicity into a whole, whether exotic, erotic, oversexed or virginal, is a real issue, collectively and individually. (I guess when it comes to stereotypes, Asian women have it better than Asian men do. There are two main themes when it comes to Asian male stereotypes: virginal and emasculated. Not to mention that super-fun myth that goes something like this: small stature equals small penis equals small chance of pleasure.)

Asiaphilia brings with it a set of more intimate considerations. I get to wonder if the man chatting me up is genuinely interested in me or interested in the idea of what he supposes me to be: demure and submissive, the forever-faithful geisha girl/bedroom toy.

The overwhelming ratio of males with Asiaphilic attraction to females suggests that this fetishization isn’t based on looks alone. Asiaphiles are looking for authority in their romantic relationships, premeditated or not.

Even if this were true, and that white guys dating Asian girls had these kinds of assumptions about “demure and submissive” Asian “geisha/bedroom toy”, such assumptions would not survive real life contact. Unless she is suggesting there is truth to what she says is a myth.

This issue moved out of the theoretical and into the personal when I dated a white boy I met in college.

“Do you like boba,” he asked me.

“I don’t.”

“Ever visited the Japanese Garden at Huntington Library?”

“I have, but I prefer the Shakespeare Garden.”

“Ever read The Art of War?”

I was devastated. Couldn’t he see I was into the same things he was—Dostoevsky, early ’90s shoegazer music and Indian food?

It hurt. When someone homogenizes an entire race of people—even if that homogenization tends toward desirable—that someone is creating a wall between himself and the person in question. No one likes to be treated as an outsider, especially in the only country she’s ever known as home

People have a tendency to ‘homogenize’ things, and that crosses racial boundaries. It is not something unique to white people. Vicky has been homogenizing people thoughout her article.

Things got worse when I heard the story of my friend Lydia, whose boyfriend’s Asiaphilic tendencies didn’t reveal themselves for months. By the end of the relationship, the guy had become an East Asian Studies/Chinese language double major, and never missed a chance to converse with her family in their native Mandarin. When she wasn’t around, he’d call her father to go out for Chinese food.

He’s gone, but his impact on Lydia remains.

“It always crosses my mind,” she says, “that I’m replaceable.”

It sounds like he is making a big effort to get along with his girlfriends family, especially his girlfriends father. A good friend of mine was dating an Asian girl and was told by her father to “Fuck off… stay away from my daughter… she isn’t allowed to date white guys“. It is good that he is getting along with her family.

As all good Asian-American Studies minors know, the roots of Asiaphilia are planted in the soil of colonialism. Our European forefathers, viewing any foreign culture as backward, erased what they could of indigenous custom and inscribed upon the people their own authority. Thus did bloom the stereotype of Asian docility, submissiveness and lotus blossom beauty.

Considering all the laws forbidding inter-racial sex in America in the past, it is unlikely that the forefathers of America are responsible for ‘Asiaphilia’. If there was a ’stereotype’ of docility of Asian women, the ’stereotype’ came from the extremely male dominated societies of East Asia. From foot binding to Confucian morals delegating women to the status of chattel, none of this has anything to do with any white people at all.

Moving on a bit, its a long rant, I am leaving out the ranting about Nicholas Cage and his Korean wife, and the rant about Gwen Stafani and her ‘Harajuku girls’, and also the rant about homosexual white men dating homosexual Asian men.

Dan says his last girlfriend before undergoing what he calls “The Change” was another Ann. Annie, actually. She was Chinese American, a UCI student and a born-again Christian who claimed a “secondary virginity.”

By the conclusion of their five-month relationship, the secondary virginity had disappeared just as the first one had. Soon afterward, she made Dan disappear, too. Not long after that, Dan went through a tumultuous quarter-life crisis.

He’s now dating Frida, a fourth-year film major of mixed Mexican and European descent he met while working at a local movie theater. He’s glad to have renounced his narrow-minded ways.

“I was going through a lot of changes in my life and rethinking things,” he recalls. “My obsession with Asian women was one of the aspects of myself I found to be not healthy.”

He’s a new man, he says, living by a new philosophy: “Asian women tend to be mean, stingy abusers.”

So what, now Dan is alright? “Asian women tend to be mean, stingy abusers” and “White girls are sluts”. It sounds to me like Dan is a young man with special problems, not representative of ‘Asiaphiles’, whatever they are.

I wonder where I fit in to this pattern that Vicky lays out here. I have dated Asian girls, which is supposed to be an ‘Asiaphile’ trait.. I have lived in Japan. I speak, read and write Japanese, Korean, and to a certain extent, Chinese. Obviously I can tell the difference between various Asian countries, and do not lump them all together, so I do not fit the ‘Asiaphile’ pattern Vicky describes in that respect. I hate tattoos so tattoos with Chinese characters are not an issue for me. Nor am I the kind of moron that approaches strangers and talks about the relative lubricative qualities of different races of womens sexual organs, something that seems to happen to Vicky a lot (wonder why?). I don’t know about submissiveness or anything like that – I just try to get along with any girl I date. It is hard to imagine the situation described by Vicky. So am I a ‘Asiaphile’?

Perhaps this is an ‘issue’ that we need to talk about. But if we are going to talk about nonsense issues, lets start with the issue of the white fetish that is causing Asians leave the land of their ancestors to live among white people, who are obviously the most bigoted and racist people on the planet. Now that is weird! According to Vicky, white men that date Asian women are Asian fetishists that are engaging in “offensive or bigoted” behavior. It looks like by this standard people that hate Asians are racist, and people that are friendly to Asians are also racist. Life must be hard for Asian Americans! We must make a study of this issue, and find out why Asian people continue to emigrate to America despite its insurmountable shortcomings and omnipresent racism. Perhaps Vicky can tell us the reason why?

Kudos to University of Hawaii student ‘John’ for finding this. The mysterious Kushibo was briefly questioned about a transportation issue in Hawaii by a TV station. Fast forward to 1:37 to see Kushibo.

Really good move on the part of the Hawaiian TV station to ask the opinion of a guy that just arrived in Hawaii. Seeing his face, one really has to wonder how much ‘Korean ancestry’ he really has. He also said he was part Japanese.

Kushibo’s lesbian republican sock was nowhere to be seen and is presumably vacationing in a Siberian gulag.

For a background on what this is all about see -

My original post exposing Kushibo and his ‘lesbian republican’ sock puppet

The Party Pooper

BigHominid

Lost Nomad

Seoul Hero

USinKorea and follow up

Migukin

eclexys

The Korea Liberator

Have fun reading, because it is quite an interesting story. The Party Poopers take down of Kushibo is particularly funny.

Korean veterans gathered in front of the MacArthur statue in Incheon to celebrate the Incheon Landing which was a decisive turning point in the Korean war.

Take a look at the picture. Notice any flag missing? I find it hard to believe that the Korean veterans would have forgotten to bring along an American flag with them, so the American flag must have been excluded from the picture.

Update: Looks like the Lost Nomad beat me to it.

Update 2: Thanks to commenter void, we have been able to confirm that the American flag was excluded from the picture.

That is the picture that void took of the Sankei Shinbun. Notice that the American flag is there. How can this be explained as anything but anti-Americanism?

Fundamental disagreement

The New York Times has an article about the visit of President Roh to Washington. I think the article is designed to send a message to the South Korean establishment.

U.S. to Roll Out Tepid Welcome for President of South Korea

WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 — As President Roh Moo-hyun of South Korea prepares to visit President Bush on Thursday morning, the two men have rarely been further apart on the central issue that long ago turned their relationship so frosty.

Mr. Bush is determined to squeeze North Korea with every financial sanction possible until it gives up its nuclear capacity and other illicit activities, or, some believe, until it collapses. Mr. Roh insists the only course is to coax the country out of its isolation.

In the weeks leading to the visit here, Mr. Bush’s aides have been using a new United Nations Security Council resolution, passed after North Korea’s missile tests in July, to prepare a list of banks it can press to cut ties with North Korea.

Mr. Roh has been playing down the missile launching as a meaningless, attention-grabbing temper tantrum by the North Koreans, and he has resumed South Korean aid and investment to the country, in hopes of preventing what his country fears would turn into collapse or confrontation.

This is very plain talking from the New York Times. I am no foreign policy analyst, but this has to be considered an unofficial message to the South Koreans, along with a message to the American people about a possible foreign policy change in regards to South Korea. But what comes next is the sharpest part of the message.

In past meetings, Mr. Bush has done his best to paper over the differences. But his aides acknowledge that the gap has grown so much in recent months — “as wide as the Sea of Japan” one senior official said Wednesday — that it will be almost impossible to hide.

The official quoted by the New York Times surely knows about South Korea’s policy concerning the naming of the Sea of Japan. Using the ‘Sea of Japan’ analogy is a rather blunt way of expressing Washington’s displeasure about President Roh, his government’s policies, and anti-Americanism in South Korea. The ‘Sea of Japan’ barb is followed by a negative comparison to Japan and Prime Minister Koizumi.

Mr. Roh will receive treatment that contrasts sharply with the warm embrace extended in June to Japan’s prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi. Mr. Koizumi got long meetings, a glittering dinner and a trip to Graceland; Mr. Roh, leader of the other major United States ally in Asia, is getting an hour in the Oval Office and a quick lunch.

Foreign policy analysts in South Korea will be spending time today trying to interpret the meaning of this article, but to me the meaning of this message from the American establishment to the South Korean establishment is clear. South Korea must choose sides.

With Hanbando being as successful as it was in the Korean box office, one can only assume that more of it’s type is sure to come.

“The Secrets of Koganeshima” is a military fiction novel about the Japanese (and American!) terrorists trying to take Takeshima Dokdo by force, but face an unexpectedly strong South Korean military, but it is strong enough to save the world from the America and Japanese terrorists before dinner? You’ll have to read part 2!

[Book of Discussion] The Secrets of Koganeshima 1 & 2 — Protect Dokdo’s Underwater Oil!

In the end, the tenacity and courage of our race will be able to fight off the worlds strongest military and economic countries, American and Japan when Japanese extreme right terrorists launch a suprise attack on our territory Dokdo.

This book is a fictional documentary about Korea and Japan waging an armed conflict over Dokdo. The author, a writer of military fiction, assumes that there are already large amounts of oil being taken and sold from the seas around Dokdo, and that it is only a matter of time before a sharp battle develops.

The story begins on the evening of August 15th, 2010, when Japanese Special Defense Air and Navy forces suddenly wage an invasion on Dokdo. Our leaders quickly declare a state of emergency and planes are sent out to defend Dokdo. While it seems that the battle is confined to the seas around Dokdo, the JSDF use their E-767 plane with a frequency blocker to jam our signals, and are able to come away victorious. Japan is strongly criticized around the world for it’s cruelty on the Korean peninsula and it’s taking of Dokdo by force. In the midst of all of this, one young soldier secretly departs with a nuclear weapon and the intentions of returning Dokdo to us, even with all America and Japan do to try and stop him, he is able to win the war and all Koreans rejoice.

Now, it must be noted that I do not speak Korean, so I used a machine translator to translate the article from Korean to Japanese, and then I translated it from Japanese. Generally that would be a big no-no, but Korean and Japanese are two languages that work well through machine translation, unlike Korean/Japanese and English.

So our friend sneaks a nuke out of Korea to use on Japan, does that mean that missile flying at Tokyo on the cover is to be the nuke in question? I can’t shake this feeling, but I think I’ve seen that image used somewhere else in Korean nationalism, but I just can’t put my finger on it..

Yea, that’s the one. I knew I’d seen this before somewhere. So wait, does this mean that the person who made the cover stole it from little children? Perhaps this sort of image of Japan has been painted for many generations so the hate runs deep? Or maybe the little kid is the artist who made the cover? What if the artist who made the cover was these kids’ art teacher?

But since we’re on the topic of these harmless children’s crayon drawings, these types of images appearing in more then one place are just an isolated incident, just a coincidence, there aren’t two people in Korea who repeat the same stupidity and racism over and over again right? Right????

Whoops… Perhaps the author of Hate Japan Wave also went through the same education system…

Yes, we’re going to be seeing a lot more of this type of “logic” I’m afraid… But hey, controversy sells, make no question about that.

Socks, anyone?

What do you do when you think that someone is using a sock?

According to wikipedia a sock is –

an additional account created by an existing member of an Internet community pretending to be a separate person.

Just the other day I banned a troll that had been banned before, and had 4 sock accounts here. Fortunately, I was on to him from the start, and was able to ban him in a couple of days.

OK, so what do you do when you think a blogger fairly well known for making comments on other blogs has a whole other blogging sock? You put what you think out there, and let the people decide! Yes, I am taking on the Nora Challenge.

The subjects in question are Kushibo and Nora Park. Here is my take on it – Kushibo and Nora are exactly the same person.

A background – Kushibo says he is an American of partial Korean ancestry (at various times he has claimed other ancestries as well – see below). He often writes apologist-for-Korea posts on his blog and in the comments section of other blogs. He is the head of the democrats overseas in Korea, and is anti-Bush.
Nora is a self proclaimed “lesbian-republican” American of Korean ancestry that writes apologist-for-Korea posts on ‘her’ blog and in the comments section of other blogs. She is anti-Bush.

Kushibo has been around for a while, so I dont think I need to mention him too much, but I first noticed Nora on the comments section of the Marmots Hole. My initial reaction to her coming on the Marmots and proclaiming that she was a lesbian-republican was, “this is bullsh*t”. Of course, I did not realise that Nora was Kushibo right away – that came later. I found that Nora had exactly the same prejudices as Kushibo, and hammered away at the same issues. On Marmots they wrote almost identically as well, except for one thing, which I will reveal shortly.

Anyway, lets get to it. Read these four quotes and ask yourself who wrote it -

Quote 1

who says the average south korean citizen doesn’t consider a north korean attack a possibility? don’t let the leftist demonstrations delude you into thinking the entire country feels that way.

Quote 2

one disturbing thing i’ve noticed about the discourse many non-koreans make about korea is the tendency to take a minority or partisan opinion and then attribute it to the entire country.

Quote 3

south korea returning to the chinese sphere of influence? i don’t think so. i think korea is jockeying for a better position within the rok-japan-usa triangle, but taking the plunge and joining the china camp is not going to happen.

korea looks down on china, while it feels it gets too little respect from the usa. all things considered, if korea were to ever be under another country (if that’s what it really is), it would rather be under the country from which it’s trying to get respect than the country upon which it looks down it nose.

Quote 4

mizarv, i think what you wrote was quite good. the left-wing agenda-driven media machine in korea has been depicting the 1999 treaty as an unfair agreement japan made while taking advantage of a korea weakened by the economic crisis (the so-called ‘imf crisis,’ as if the imf caused it).

i’m glad that the joongang ilbo (and hopefully others) is pointing that out.

If you thought it was classic Kushibo, you are wrong. It is his alter-ego, Nora. The difference between Kushibo’s and Nora’s writing is that Nora always made a point never to use any capitalization, while Kushibo capitalized normally. This gives a feeling of artificial difference between the writing of the two. Put capital letters there, and it is pure Kushibo. It should be noted that on ‘her’ own blog, Nora does use capitalization. It is only in other blogs where Kushibo is also commenting that we see no capital letters from Nora.

Kushibo and Nora have the same experiences.

Here is Nora commenting on marmot -

i saw the original broadway cast of les miserables here twice. that was nice. also the original cast of cats (which i thought was overrated). they do need to bring better plays here.

Here is Kushibo on his blog -

And everything is so accessible, whether it’s arts, shopping, entertainment, or whatever. I saw the Broadway cast of Les Miserables twice, for example, something I couldn’t have done back in Southern California

Really the only difference here is capitalization. This is the same person describing the same experience. Who among us cannot tell that Clark Kent is Superman?

They even hold the same email address.

Nora gives out her email address, which is taenamu@mac.com.

The address is the same email address as the democrats abroad address (Kushibo’s DA address). What is “lesbian republican” Nora doing with Kushibo’s democrats abroad address? Are we expected to believe that they share mail addresses? Take a look for yourself! http://kr.democratsabroad.org/contacts/.

Kushibo starts off saying that he is of partial Korean ancestry, but then later claims that he is part Japanese as well. Nora starts off saying she is a Korean Kyopo from America (Kyopo = overseas Korean) but also starts claiming Japanese ancestry.

Nora claims she is part Japanese -

kinda funny. some koreans i meet hear the exact same things i say here and think i hate korea and love japan and america because i’m part japanese (which is where sumi comes from) and i was born in california.

Kushibo says he is part Japanese -

For starters, I’ve got Japanese blood.

He mentions it here too –

The fact that I am very cautious about the Japanese right-wing does not make me a Japan basher (I’m part Japanese for criminy sake!).

Both of them describe themselves as being part Japanese when coming under attack for anti-Japanese comments.

In 2001 on Koreaweb, Kushibo signs himself off as T’NP. NP is the initials of Nora Park of course. In studying the mystery that is Kushibo, I have found that he has many names or assumed names. The NP initials are used by Kushibo, as well as Nora. Here Kushibo is called ‘Nate Kushibo’, and he claims that he is part of the Miryang Park clan. That is where the NP comes from. Nate Park = Nora Park. Note, I am not saying his legal name is Nate Park, just that it is at least one of his many assumed names.

Kushibo and Nora also mess up logins at other blogs. On at least one occasion ‘Nora’ logged in as Kushibo on marmots site, posted a comment with all uncapitalized letters. The excuse was that ’she’ did not realize that Kushibo was a commenter on marmot.

whoops… that previous comment was supposed to be from me. i was using bo’s desktop and didn’t realise he was logged in. didn’t realise he ever logged in here.

Well, I guess that is one way of explaining it. Another way is that Kushibo forgot he was signed in as himself when he wanted to post as his sock, Nora.

That is the evidence. Now I will answer why I think he does it.

Coming up with all these various identities, ethnicities and sexual orientations is unfortunately an effective way to deflect criticism. People that are generally poor debaters need to rely on some sort of crutch, especially when they are critical of certain countries to the point of revealing their sense of racial grievance. A case in point – Here is the gravatar that Nora uses at the marmots hole, reproduced below.

This is an old WW2 poster of a Japanese soldier dragging away a woman to be raped. This is the gravatar that Nora uses while harping on about issues like the Yasukuni visits, Japan not apologising or compensating (or not apologising or compensating enough!), and so on. If Nora really had Japanese ancestry, that would be a very unlikey choice of gravatar. No, Nora allows Kushibo the ability to express ideas, like the crude image above, that he does not want to be personally associated with or attacked over. If people object then Nora will say she is part Japanese, and Kushibo will log in to drum up the illusion of support.

Nora is also there to bash President Bush. I demonstrated above that Nora’s email address was that of the Democrats abroad in Korea, of which Kushibo is the head man, and to whom the email address belongs. By creating a “lesbian republican” character that hates President Bush and bashes him continuously, I suppose he thinks he is causing some disruption to the republicans. I think many people will have noted the numerous times that Nora bashed President Bush, and by extension, the republican party, by starting off saying that she is a republican – again, just like the racial stuff, it is purely designed to deflect criticism.

Criticism for anti-American statements by Kushibo or Nora is also adroitly deflected by the same method. If you are able to identify anti-Americanism in what they are writing, then they say you are anti-Kyopo and start claiming that you are saying that only a white person can be an American. If you think that Nora sounds nothing like a republican in her criticism of President Bush, and it sounds like she is criticising from the left, you are anti-lesbian. Most of the people reading or writing these blogs are just average people that dont want to be seen breaking racial or identity politics taboos, and Kushibo/Nora cynically exploit this.

There… the Nora Challenge taken up in its fullness, although that was probably not the kind of challenge Kushibo/Nora expected. So… what did the people decide?

Darin found an interesting Youtube video of a rare interview with former Korean President Kim Young-sam. In it he talks about Roh Moo-hyun and offers some surprising criticism.

“He [Roh Moo-hyun] is an eccentric”

“He hates America and Japan”

“I made a big mistake bringing him into politics”

“I did not think he would become President”

On the issue of Japanese citizens kidnapped by the North Korean regime, Kim Young-sam says that Roh has refused to meet with the families of the victims, and that if the President of South Korea were to meet with them, it would send a big message to the North. He said that he thinks that the order for the kidnapping came straight from Kim Jong Il, considering the power structure in North Korea. He also said it is up to Japan to use its power to force the North Korean regime to return the victims.

“I think Japan should put economic sanctions on North Korea”

“North Korea is relying heavily on Japan [economically]“

“And they have Chosen Soren (General Association of Korean Residents in Japan) and that money goes to the North”

“Its a huge amount of money”

The interview is in Japanese, and Kim Young-sam speaks it quite well. At 4 minutes and 30 seconds into the video, you can see a coherent President Bush talk about the North Korean kidnappings, so just fast forward to that if you cannot understand Japanese.

What former President Kim Young-sam says about Roh is nothing really new to any of us, but having it confirmed by an insider is most instructive.

Korean folk singer of “Fucking USA!”

It seems like the lasting legacy of President Roh of South Korea is to be anti-Americanism. This Asia Times Online article quotes US In Korea site owner and Occidentalism commenter ‘Isaac Roberts’.

SEOUL – As the administration of South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun winds down and assumes its “lame duck” status, the question of its historical legacy is coming to the fore. Of all the issues that Roh has faced as president, two themes have dominated from the very beginning – the Internet and anti-Americanism.

Blogs and Internet chat rooms were the genesis of Roh’s campaign. They brought a virtually unknown candidate to the presidency. With little background in national politics, without an prestigious education and from a less than privileged background, Roh could not have been elected without an overwhelming youth vote and its Internet coordination.

Today, Roh-Sa-Mo (the Korean-language abbreviation for the Roh Lover’s Society) has become an Internet legend. On polling day, bulletin boards, chat rooms and cell-phone text messages urged eligible voters to vote for Roh, boosting the usually complacent youth vote. Perhaps for the first time in the Internet age, a dedicated band of “netizens” had influenced an election result. But four years on, with the US-South Korea relations under constant pressure, blogs and Internet chat rooms may leave Korea’s first “Internet president” with a less favorable legacy.

Parallel to Roh’s Internet-based victory was the growth of a more sinister form of Internet-based political consciousness – anti-Americanism. After a June 2002 accident involving a US military vehicle, which resulted in the deaths of two South Korean middle-school students, Korean-language anti-American websites, chat rooms and blogs flooded the ‘Net.

Despite apologies ranging from those involved in the accident all the way up the chain of command to US President George W Bush, anti-Americanism continued to spread rapidly. With South Koreans spending an average of more than 47 hours online per month, according to Internet monitor ComScore, making the leap from the Web to everyday life was only a matter of time.

Roh has used anti-Americanism and anti-Japanism cynically in his campaigns. Like Kim Jong Il, I think his popularity in South Korea is based on him being so reactionary, because he is seen as defying the US and Japan.

Anti-Americanism during the period had a darker side as well. Residents recollect shopkeepers refusing to serve them, harassment on subways and even physical abuse. In one widely reported and particularly disturbing event, two American servicemen were abducted from a Seoul subway station by a throng of university students, removed to a university campus and forced to admit to “crimes” against Korea. Anti-Americanism particularly affected those there to defend South Korea, the United States Forces in Korea (USFK) and their dependants.

Since that time American expatriate residents have lived with anti-Americanism popping its ugly head up in every issue under the Roh administration, ranging from the esthetic value of a statue of General Douglas MacArthur in a rather remote park to the relocation of US military headquarters away from Yongsan, in downtown Seoul.

Unfortunately for Roh, the Internet continues to promote anti-Americanism as his most enduring legacy. Translated and interpreted, the Korean-language anti-American websites, blogs and chat rooms that were once at the core of his support base are beginning to filter through to the United States. More and more Americans are catching up with the situation in South Korea. In a country that remains far behind South Korea in Internet connectivity, few care about an Internet-based election victory, but many care about anti-Americanism.

Isaac Roberts (not his real name) manages the website USinKorea.org, a site dedicated to exposing what he views as the hypocrisy of South Korean anti-Americanism. The website is replete with images of anti-American demonstrations, translations of anti-American pop songs, and extracts from the South Korean media.

It receives a steady stream of interest from users in both South Korea and the United States. While Internet statistics show that Roberts’ site is not overly popular, with an average of 2,400 views per day, they also show that users look through a considerable amount of the content.

What started out as a personal project to inform Americans unfamiliar with Korea as to how “the commitment they offer to Korea each year is received in that society” is making the jump from the Internet to politics. Sites such as USinKorea.org have become a source of on-the-ground information for campaigners on the other side of the Pacific.

Roberts’ site provides human-rights campaigners and other lobby groups in Washington with an informed on-the-ground source. Targeted mail by these lobby groups give the website even further reach, until ultimately one 15-minute view by a political adviser sets the political dominoes in action. In reference to images on USinKorea.org, an e-mail from a Capitol Hill staffer posted on one of the now many blogs covering events in South Korea noted, “These continuing developments in South Korea worry people in Washington.”

US In Korea is doing good work. I have promised to contribute some translations of articles but I have been unforgivably tardy in doing so (I will get around to it, promise!). The US and Korea relationship will only get better if there is an honest understanding on both sides. On the US side it is time to drop the delusion that Koreans put value on US actions in the Korean War. Removing the US soldiers should help because their presence hurts Korean pride.

In a kind of redux of Michael from Scribblings of the Metropolitician calling Occidentalism ‘racist’, Michael the Metropolitician has struck at Occidentalism again, associating me and this site with everything from slavery, nazism, pedophilia, the KKK, and even going as far as to suggest that I was one of the men that wrote lewd comments on his blog about how “good and tight” Asian womens sexual organs are (See what I actually wrote – no mention of Asian women at all).

The Metropolitician has really lost it on this one, insulting “white bloggers”, and denouncing “American cultural hegemony” as “white privilege” and being “one of the causes of frustration amongst Korean youth”, among many other things.

Apparently Michael the Metropolitician also believes that his post contains valid criticisms of Occidentalism. I trust the readers of Occidentalism and will not insult their intelligence, so I invite every reader here to read what he has written. It is long and much too wordy, but reading it can give insight into an unusual social pathology.

Read the angry tirade here, and feel free to comment here or on his blog.