Korean Kids Face Twin Perils: Poisoned Chinese Milk, Moms Who Use them as Human Riot Shields

Update, 12/08: Here’s how history will record this whole ridiculous episode.

BY NOW, WE KNOW THAT THERE WAS NEVER ANY SCIENTIFIC SUBSTANCE BEHIND all of those “Mad Cow” protests in Korea over the imports of U.S. beef.  So why so little protest over melamine contamination in food imported from China poses an actual, no-sh*t health risk to Korean kids who drink powdered milk?   It might even be a greater risk to the health of Korean kids than strapping them into strollers to serve as human shields at a riot over a non-existent health risk.

The “human shield” moms are now under criminal investigation, and if this world is as just as I know it not to be, their kids will be taken away and redistributed to sane, loving, childless couples from Singapore to Fire Island.

Americans can’t help but wonder at the absence of such exploitive panic over tainted Chinese food products.  Chinese fisherman have just killed a South Korean Coast Guardsman, and an expression of “deep regret” suffices (contrast this to North Korea’s no-nonsense method of dealing with illegal fishing).

Then there were the Chinese thugs who ran riot in Seoul.  Korean authorities didn’t charge them.

Chinese farmers and pimps see North Korea as one big comfort woman reserve, string North Korean refugees together like fish on a line with wires through their noses, and lead them back to the firing squad.  No outrage.

So the sensible question Robert beats me to asking is, “Where are the candle zombies?”  Clearly, part of the answer has to do with which “usual suspects” have the resources and skill to mobilize the mobs, and where their sympathies and hostilities lay.  It had also occurred to me that Robert’s own gravatar goes far to explain why the mobs show up to hate America and not China, but then again, there’s always Japan as an example of Koreans nursing irrational hatred of other Asians, too.  So, a related reason may be that the great majority of Korea’s most emotional, least rational people are in the sway of people who hate America and sympathize with China.

Then there’s the fact that China is big, menacing, and seldom seems to care what Koreans think.  Americans think in terms of apologies in the same way that senior North Korean officials think of hundred-dollar bills.  For Asians, promiscuous apology is a mark of low status, even inferiority.  I have often wondered:  if America treated Korea with courtesy, but with a little less excessive, obsequious, endlessly apologetic courtesy, would we be such inviting targets for every inferiority complex within the outer boundary of Kyonggi Province?

Is the problem that we’re too damn nice?  Or is it just that as long as they sleep under Uncle Sam’s blanket, Koreans will never see their interests and the dangers beyond with anything resembling rational clarity?  Of course, the threats of which we speak are much more threats to South Korea than to America, so we have only ourselves to blame if we’re being used.  I doubt that most Americans even know we still have troops in Korea, so it’s little wonder they’re not questioning the reason for that increasingly anachronistic presence.