Eum, Yang, and Korean Diplomatic Courtesy

A few days ago, Occidentalism posted this absolutely priceless flowchart that is too telling by half about how some Koreans tend to scapegoat their way through real problems. I suppose the temptation to pin blame on others is human nature; that temptation is at its greatest when a solution to the underlying problem seems beyond reach. Witness the finger-pointing that followed last October’s nuke test (and the notable absence of constructive proposals accompanying it). I shouldn’t miss this opportunity to plug OFK’s own OhMyNews Scale, which is accurate to within one standard deviation in predicting public outrage on the Korean Street. It’s certainly more accurate than the use of logic alone.

(As soon as we have some idea of what actually happened here — a soldier is accused of raping a 67-year-old Korean woman — we’ll be able to test its accuracy again. My gut, working with a few years of experience, tells me that we know very little except that the guy should fire his lawyer, that all American soldiers will end up paying the price for this, that an apology will mean little to anyone — especially the victim — and that this will be an election-year gift to the members of Il Shim Hue who have gone to ground. I’ve seen plenty of cases seem awful when I first saw the charge sheets, and when the trials ended, some of them still did.)

Beneath their satirical thrusts, both devices are efforts to rationalize things that do not seem rational to us: the South Korean street’s recent tendency to be the worst friend and the best enemy, a tendency that extends to the highest levels of its government and its diplomatic manners. These are the contradictions that I’ve struggled with since I started OFK nearly three years ago: Why is Korea so obsequious with North Korea when it’s at its most belligerent and so abusive with the United States and Japan, who are objectively its greatest benefactors and natural allies, and which have generally observed the accepted rules of diplomacy in their public conversation with Korea?

Is it all because of shared ethnicity? Not all of it. Most Koreans have meekly accepted a Chinese veto on Korean speech — as in the Falun Gong, New Tang Dynasty TV, or the Dalai Lama. They meekly accepted China quite literally stringing North Koreans together like fish on a line and sending them back to the gulags, or using them as comfort women this very day (yet Koreans are still much angrier about Japan’s use of Korean comfort women sixty years ago and about Korean women entering consensual relationships with American men). They swirl with neo-colonial conspiracy theories about Taft-Katsura over a century ago, but hardly care that China has just bought a strategic North Korean seaport. This incident didn’t move many people, either.

Eum and Yang, the positive and negative forces depicted on the Korean flag, must remain in balance.

On the other side of the ledger, I’ve documented a long list of senior Korean “statesmen” who went on the record to use language that was calculated to insult America or American officials — at the middle of this post, or at page 66 of the HIRC hearing transcript that contains my testimony. You could dismiss a smaller number of such utterances as blasts from loose canons, but only if someone had bothered to offer “clarifications,” apologies, or retractions of those remarks. There still remains a disparity we haven’t explained.

Is it because of North Korea’s sophisticated influence operations in the South? Again, not all of it. I do think those operations have had a significant effect on some segments of South Korean society, but they don’t explain why Korean conservatives are almost as apathetic about human rights in North Korea, and just as belligerent about the Guano Rocks, as the anarcho-nationalist left (I do think that Korean conservatives are much more alarmist about China).

What else can explain what reason can’t? From time to time, commenters have suggested that something in Korean DNA causes this, but my observation is that Korean-Americans tend to be just as confused about all of this as Americans of any other ethnicity.

This year, courtesy of two American generals, we witnessed an interesting thought experiment. One of them, Garry Trexler, veered wildly off a long, patient diplomatic track intended to secure a new bombing range for his airplanes. Trexler issued an ultimatum: give me that bombing range in thirty days or the planes fly home. Trexler couldn’t have made that decision on his own, of course, but he was picked to be the face of the tougher U.S. position. Not only did this work, but it also drew an anomalous absence of overheated rhetoric from the Korean government. General B.B. Bell seemed to have internalized that by the time the South Koreans floated a trial balloon about delaying USFK’s move to Camp Humphreys (which I firmly believe is all about keeping U.S. troops as hostages to North Korean artillery, and not about money issues, as GI Korea has shown us).

Last week’s broadside by Jay Lefkowitz against the Kaesong Industrial Park — “material support for a rogue government, its nuclear ambitions, and its human rights atrocities” — will be another test, coming in an election year in which anti-Americanism is about all the left has to run on. You would have expected South Korean officials to lose their minds. I did, but I was wrong. Silence. Maybe their internal feuds have temporarily paralyzed them and they’ll react next week. Another possibility is that they’re smart enough to see that the less they say about Kaesong, the better.

One aspect of this that interests me is the highly hierarchical nature of Korean society, and the role of language in shaping that nature. (Disclaimer: of course I’m about to start generalizing here. There is no describing a people or its culture without engaging in some generalization.) But consider — you can’t speak Korean until you master the subtle art of talking down to others. In a meeting between two Koreans, they compare ages, occupations, university backgrounds, “name cards,” and family status before they speak their own names to each other. There are seven levels of speech, each with its own set of conjugations, adding an almost inestimable degree of socio-grammatical complication to the Korean language. Language that would be perfectly acceptable when used with an “inferior” is sure to cause deep offense to a “superior,” and using an excessively deferential style makes the speaker seem awkward and lowers his own social status. One’s tone of voice, eye contact, and body language add even more subtlety to this. What I’m wondering, then, is this whether this deep conditioning in speech and status, the subtle art of talking down, is also a part of what we’re facing here. If so, then our problems are far more complex than perfecting the use of diplomatic deference. It would mean that in Korea, and possibly in other places, too, it’s also a mistake to be too diplomatic, to the extent we seem so subordinate that we invite grievance, or make ourselves the easiest target for inadequate souls looking for someone they can get away with shouting at.

I think there’s also a parapsychology angle to this. Inadeqate souls do not react well to respectful treatment, inherently seeing themselves unworthy of it and are repelled by it. Maybe you’ve had the experience of dating someone you just couldn’t be nice to, but who would follow you around like a homeless dog if you were brusque and nasty with them (hopefully, you’ve moved on to someone else by now). I’d venture to guess that Korea is not different than other places in that its fanatics and radicals are its least adequate and secure people. Indeed, Korean society itself often seems to have an inferiority complex about its own history. Finally, Korean culture does not cultivate or reward compromise, it follows the leader who acts like his head is wired with destiny’s compass, and who delivers its directions with blazing, passionate certainty that’s impervious to reason, argument, and even objective self-interest. That’s part of why Korea’s political parties are inherently unstable, and why groups that should be united will go through an entire election season bitterly split, even knowing that a candidate they agree with even less will be the benefactor. It may also explain why North Korea and its ideologues have so much more appeal to spoiled, rich kids in South Korea than one can explain rationally.

So is pan-mal any way to practice diplomacy? No. I think a tone that is polite, yet direct, firm, and principled is best for defending America’s short-term interests. We can make simple statements of fact and attach them to practical conclusions in a clear and direct way (and Koreans are exceedingly practical people). We should calmly, yet clearly, refuse to be Korea’s doormat by expecting treatment at least as respectful as what we give. But what about articulating our longer-term interests? If we have a vision for Korea that is best for Korea, for America, and for the world, then what we may be missing is a message that’s a tad more charismatic and messianic.