Candlelight Vigil Organizer Convicted

The 2002 candlight vigils were an exploitation of a terrible accident and two deaths for a repulsive political purpose. They harnessed racism, nationalism, hate, and xenophobia, goose-stepped in formation with mendacity, incitement to violence, the celebration of murder, and profaniganda, and were an effort to use the accidental deaths of two to shield the premeditating murderers of two million.

This, the Korean ambassador to the U.S. assures us, was not anti-Americanism. The ambassador is a liar, but that alone doesn’t make him a diplomat. Tell that to those of us whose friends were spat upon by the people we were on call to defend with our lives.

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Those facts aside, the vigils (as distinguished from some of their downstream effects) were also exactly the kind of free speech that 38,000 Americans, hundeds of thousands of Koreans, and soldiers from dozens of nations died to defend. You may say that the Korean War didn’t perfect Korean democracy, and you’d be right (in which case, a fully honest response would require you to credit Philip Habib, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan). Just what, exactly, does the state idiocy of prosecuting this buffoon accomplish? Does bad speech become anything but sanctified when you attempt to censor it two years after the fact? In an allegedly free society, is it the role of government to decide what speech is “bad” at all? It’s especially mystifying given that the government is trying to abolish the National Security Law, is unblocking pro-North Korean Web sites, and yet is increasingly allowing leftist thugs to intimidate North Korean dissidents and shut down their radio broadcasts to their homeland.

It’s reasonable to say that even free speech must be civil and orderly. It’s authoritarian to punish speech because you don’t agree with its content. It’s conniving and deceptive to ban speech only when it creates a national embarrassment. And it’s just plain wierd to allow speech that’s bad, disorderly, and embarrassing while allowing the disorderly and violent censorship of speech that’s good, peaceful, and morally redeeming.