Plenty of Room on the Stage

Oranckay has finally done it. In the span of a day, he’s joined the bulk of the IKK into a single, in-bred borg. Today, he goes to The Marmot’s Hole to defend his latest post, which links OFK posts by myself and Andy Jackson, who now co-blogs at the Hole. Someone ought to wake Dr. Hwang from his alcoholic fog to tell him a greater crime has finally been committed against nature.

I make no argument with much of what the Oranckay says about the incompatability of censorship and freedom. I yield to no one when it comes to caustic attacks against scientologists, Muslims, Korean leftists, or Korean rightists who find it easier to censor speech they oppose than do the hard work of discrediting it.

So far, so pretty good, but then things go awry:

Obviously nothing much is going to become of this, except perhaps some photos of Koreans protesting the film, featured in the international media. But if you’ve ever asked yourself why Korea’s traditional “democratic elements” have their doubts about the motives behind the anti-NK protests organized by the country’s conservatives, I submit that it is largely the conservatives’ lack of respect for and understanding of, well, democracy.

The Marmot cites much of that argument with approval. I accept all of Oranckay’s factual assertions as true for the sake of argument, but disagree with the conclusion.

I have two main problems with what Pete and The Marmot are saying.*

The first of these is the simpler one to address: when the Korean Council of Churches (KCC) denounces North Korea for keeping 250,000 people in concentration camps and letting its two million most expendable people starve to death during Kim Jong Il’s nuke binge, the KCC’s stultified model of society, its crappy taste in movies, and its quixotic call to ban “The Da Vinci Code” aren’t really relevant, any more than the ACLU’s past associations with Stalinists were relevant to the righteousness of its opposition to lynchings. This logical fallacy is so well-worn that it even has its own name.

The other problem with this argument is that you can’t pursue it to a logical conclusion, and when people are dying by the millions, a logical conclusion is a matter of some urgency.

There are two alternative conclusions to which this argument leads. The first alternative, deduced by some commenters at The Marmot’s Hole, is that because the KCC is prudish and intolerant, it has no moral authority to advocate freedom in North Korea and should retire quietly from the entire discussion. In part, this results from the common American imprecision of using the terms “freedom” and “democracy” interchangeably. Pete and Robert don’t say this, but it’s the most direct logical extension of “You’re full of shit, too. (I agree that Pete’s Taliban comparison is inapt unless he can cite examples this graphic.)

Others, not including Pete or Robert, have extended the same argument even further. These critics, including some who have had little else to say about North Korea’s human rights abuses discount the entire movement to publicize and end those abuses because anything else might require them to tolerate proximity to conservative Christians. The horror! You could test positive!

The problem with this moral argument and its extension is that both require an inference of approximate moral equivalence to have any traction. Called on this, Pete and Robert both deny they’re arguing moral equivalence between Chun Doo Hwan and Kim Jong Il, conceding that the latter is much worse (an understatement; I actually ran the numbers here). The question, then, is whether a petty evil can denounce a much greater one, to which the answer, I think, is yes, but not as credibly as a consistently courageous democrat could.

Will all who fit the American definition of “consistently courageous democrat” please stand up now? (Smug Americans and Europeans who have never had to actually live under a military dictatorship should remain seated.)

I wish Korea’s newly democratic society, with its deep roots in a stratified and obedient social order, would have developed a mature political culture by now. Even political cultures with long democratic traditions still struggle over such issues as majority rule versus minority rights, and the delicate balance between openness and sensitivity (I’m on the openness pole myself; if you don’t like the movie, don’t buy a ticket.) Of course, Korea has only been democratic since 1992, and expecting Korea to have reached political maturity so soon would be to expect two miracles of one society in a few decades, the other being the economic one.

That said, I’ve been a caustic critic of Korea’s political culture. Above all, I’ve primarily stressed Step One: the fundamental need to scissor violence from the lexicon of discourse and impose — wait for it — the Rule of Law, here most eloquently advocated by my colleague James Na. The current government suffers from disturbingly mixed emotions about that concept.

I mentioned that there is another possible alternative conclusion that flows from Oranckay’s argument, and it is this: that someone other than the KCC ought to be leading the movement for human rights in North Korea. Thus far, there are regrettably few takers among such “traditional democratic elements” as students, union members, academics, or the ex-human rights lawyers now in government. I can’t for the life of me see what’s stopping them from stealing the KCC’s stage. We eagerly await all those who wish to volunteer. I wish someone like Kim Moon Soo were setting the direction of this movement’s Korean counterpart to an even greater extent than is the case now. Ditto the North Korean defectors themselves, who are coming into their own as an independent intellectual force. In the meantime, as the rest of “moderate” society mulls the wrongness of concentration camps, gas chambers, and infanticides for yet another year, I wonder who else will step forward to goad the silent majority (softly, please!) into thinking about the question at all.

* In the interests of time, I ask but do not address several other questions, such as (1) what “traditional ‘democratic elements?'” See “unions, students, academics, etc.” above; (2) where is this great untapped constituency of freedom in South Korea today, given the universality of censorship? As I see it, Korea’s clamor for freedom ends with “Free Speech for Me,” and that goes for pretty much everyone; (3) does one’s failure to protest a military dictatorship under which one is living necessarily make one un-democratic?