Maybe VANKing Really Does Cause Blindness

The gentle, tolerant climate that gave us the English-spectrum lynch mob is at it again. You may have thought that Korea’s “netizens” and Map Police were just a nonspecific group of twitchy nationalist asshats with DSL and too much time on their hands, but they prefer to be called “cyber diplomats.” They also have a great name–VANK. Most recently, these particular VANKers punked the British Museum for failing to completely reflect their own parochial, stilted, and (one suspects) deeply insecure self-image:

“While explaining the history of the Chosun Dynasty, it uses the word ‘Korea’ rather than ‘Chosun,’ making it seem as if the Korean people spent their entire history as a Chinese vassal state,” VANK president Park Ki-tae said Wednesday.

“It leaves a bitter taste in the mouth that this distortion, along with the fact that the Korea gallery is only one-fifth the size of the Chinese or Japanese galleries, is like confirmation that Korea was a vassal state of China,” he said. “We hope the government shows interest in this.” The self-styled “cyber diplomacy” group is also unhappy that a world map in the underground station at Piccadilly Circus, a major London tourist attraction, marks the East Sea as the “Sea of Japan.”

Calling these guys diplomats is like saying that a scoop from the cat box adds needed spice and texture to a punch bowl near you (which might help explain that “bitter taste” the VANKers mentioned). If the object of “diplomacy” is to persuade everyone that you have a roaring inferiority complex and the dogmatic stolidness of a 12th-Century German monk, then well done, I suppose. But if these VANKers want to persuade the curators that the cultural and historical significance of Korea is equal to that of China–a nation with many times the area, population, cultural diversity, and historical record–then please show us your research.

Our world will have reached a sad state if this kind of petty grievance-mongering and doctrinaire spell-checking can alter a historical record. In the spirit of resistance to this officious, perky, and passive-aggressive new tyranny, I offer a statement of solidarity to those defying petty despotism everywhere:

Get a life, you bloody vankers.