The Dictator on My Bar Napkin

Two recent news stories again raise the one of the most difficult questions free societies face: what role should governments play in limiting the expression of views that are tasteless, offensive, or which might even be lies designed to strip that society of its freedom?

Let’s begin with some context. If the first casualty of prosperity is taste, a corollary to this rule is that the depth of affliction is proportional to the speed with which a society achieves prosperity. No society has achieved prosperity as quickly as South Korea, with one exception we’ll get to later. Let’s begin our exploration of this principle in application with Korea, which ended 40 years of brutal Fascist occupation in 1945, stripped of its little innate wealth. Fifty years later, having achieved full employment, advanced industrialization, and a powerful consumer economy, it had not forgotten the agonies of its own past. This was no impediment to its sudden discovery of the marketing appeal of a different group of Fascists.

The “Hitler Techno Bar and Cocktail Show,” located in a main shopping and entertainment area in the southern port city of Pusan, displays photographs of Adolf Hitler as well as a flag, napkins and matchboxes with the swastika symbol.

The “Gestapo” pool hall is in a suburb of Taegu, southeast of Seoul and has similar decor, the Simon Wiesenthal center said. It demanded “intervention by the (South Korean) government in this matter.”

There were also the Hitler bakery ads and the bar in Jeonju called “Nazi,” complete with polished-steel swastika emblem, which I personally saw near the city’s train station. This was in the spring of 2002, just before throngs of Poles arrived in that city to watch their team play in the World Cup. One Korean proprietor was more a victim of ignorance and tastelessness than malice, at least to hear his apologia after the fact. Customers’ ideas about the Nazis were even more superficial: “I don’t hate them, I don’t like them, [b]ut at least they dressed well.” Let’s give him that one. They had good designers.

Inevitably, this ill-considered fad drew unpleasant reactions from abroad. The initial response to it was a typically, and sadly, Korean one:

The owner admitted that some customers, especially Western students from nearby universities, occasionally come to protest. “They’ve sometimes made scenes. So, I decided not to take foreign customers anymore,” he said.

Only in Korea would the owner of a business bar all non-members of his non-white race to silence their denunciation of his trading on the symbols of a reviled white supremacist ideology. Still, the word eventually got out that the neighbors would complain about “Nazi chic,” and the government forced those establishments to either redecorate or close down. Whether the word got out about the historical basis for those complaints remains an open question, and this is the first occasion for us to ask whether that chance was lost to the easy answer of the state stepping in to enforce standards of taste. I submit that a society where mass murderers have mass appeal has failed to teach its citizens the objective facts of history, or how to think about those facts critically. That’s not a criticism Americans should fail to be sufficiently introspective about.

This brings us to the first present-day permutation of this debate, the sentencing of Professor Kang Jeong-Koo, who is a lying Stalinist media whore and failed petty tyrant:

In a lecture in Incheon last year, Kang said, “Had the United States not intervened, the Korean War would have ended in a month with the death toll in both South and North less than 10,000. But 3.99 million more people died additionally because of the American intervention. The U.S. is the main culprit in the war and Douglas MacArthur its advance guard.” Kang’s regret that a North Korea-led communist unification failed is evident in every line of his remarks. At the time, he was already being tried for groveling in the visitor’s book at Kim Il-sung’s birthplace of Mansudae, “Let’s achieve unification by succeeding to the spirit” of the great leader’s hometown.

Happy Memorial Day to you, too, Professor Kang.

First, let’s begin with how many people died in the war that Professor Kang’s idol launched on June 25, 1950. The actual figure is much closer to 2.5. million. We can only speculate about the millions of South Koreans whom Kim Il Sung’s regime and its successor might have starved/frozen/tortured/shot to death. Its modus operandi was to liquidate those associated with past regimes, but its occupation of the South was cut short when General MacArthur, whom Kang called a “war criminal,” landed at Incheon (you take the good with the not-as-good; the Incheon landing saved the lives of both Kim Dae Jung and the “Reverend” Sung Myung Moon). Estimates of the number of North Koreans killed this way vary anywhere from 700,000 to 3.5 million, not including victims of the engineered famine of the 90’s. These, Kang conveniently excludes from his numerator, even as he leaves the civilians massacred by the North’s forces — around 130,000 — in his denominator. Kang’s prescription would have plunged Korea into a dark age that would have made Pol Pot’s Year Zero look like an episode of “Survivor: Peoples’ Kampuchea!” Instead, South Korea has gigantic digital TV screens mounted on skyscrapers that overlook gridlocked rivers of shiny, domestically built sedans, and Prof. Kang has tenure.

See how easy that was? The logical flaws are fairly obvious. Yet after 40 years of state control over historical debate, far too many South Koreans seem to think that Nogun Ri was the only massacre of the whole Korean War, with Kwangju and Cheju being the only others of recent historical significance. It’s a conversation South Korea needs to have, but won’t:

The Seoul Central District Court on Friday handed down a suspended two-year jail term to Prof. Kang Jeong-koo of Dongguk University, who famously asserted the Korean War was North Korea’s “war of unification. Kang was found guilty of
violating the national security law with remarks that, the court said, are capable of substantively harming the existence and safety of the Republic of Korea and its liberal democracy.

When a war of ideas becomes one of state vs. dissident, the dissident always emerges as a martyr with a gathering of followers. In other words, the “dissident” wins, regardless of how wrong he may be. Kang, intoxicated with undeserved fame, will assuredly spout more of this blather, and his sentence will be swiftly unsuspended, meaning he will become even more famous. If the world were just, his instant of fame would consist of a New York Times story about his “Juche Noraebang.” Instead, that honor goes to a member of the only group to have achieved prosperity faster than the South Koreans — North Korean defectors. One of them, incredibly, has opened a bar in Seoul that seems to glorify the very system he risked his life to flee. And the South Koreans can’t get enough of it.

At the Pyongyang Moran Bar on a recent Friday evening, a large video screen showed uplifting images of rocky mountains and an open blue sky. A slogan appeared at the bottom: “Kim Jong Il, a man who comes along only once in a thousand years.”
….

The North Korean waitresses wore traditional dresses in the bright colors that were fashionable in the South some years back. The singer’s interpretation of “Whistle,” a North Korean standard of the 1980’s, was shaky and off-key. Service was bad and included at least one mild threat. Drinks were spilled, beer bottles left unopened and unpoured.

But the South Korean customers could not get enough of the Pyongyang Moran Bar.

“Encore!” cried Bae Seong Wan, 44, at the end of “Whistle.”

I’ve archived this story for the day, twenty years from now, when a bar in Hanoi draws protests from the government of a free and united Korea over its Kim Il Sung-themed full-touch massage parlor. Incidentally, I believe Mr. Jung, the owner, when he says he’s apolitical about it all:

Everything has fallen into place now for Mr. Jong, who came to South Korea in 2000 and earned a living writing pornography before plunging into food. He has even secured a supply of the North’s coveted Taedong River beer.

Like I say: the first casualty. One thing Mr. Jung did get right is that the government won’t be pressing him to redecorate any time soon. And in Jung’s defense, it’s not as if the money is going to Kim Jong Il, and at least the workers can quit when the fad passes. That’s the free market for you. You don’t always have to love it, but just try to do better.