Today is Liberation Day in South Korea. It’s the day that Japan surrendered to the Allies, and 35 years of subjugation to Japanese colonialism were brought to a close. What followed was the division of the peninsula by the victorious powers, and a bifurcated, two-sided neocolonial regime (Soviet and American) that, arguably, persists even today, 20 years after the end of the Cold War.
The North is the world’s only surviving even vaguely Stalinist regime, and the South, despite having shifted to a sort of neolibral democracy (such as it is, and, erm, perhaps not coincidental to the moment in history when the Soviet Union fell), remains the largest “peacetime” host of American troops on foreign soil (i.e. discounting the active war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq).
Despite my cynicism, I continue to believe that South Korea may be the sole genuine success story in America’s highly questionable exercises in “nation building.” I think that this is true, in part, because of the unique geopolitical moment that followed World War II and that the Korean War consolidated – a moment when “democracy” was happily represented around the world by repressive neo-fascist regimes (such as Syngman Rhee and subsequently Park Chung-Hee) – true – but where the lip-service concepts such as freedom were paid would eventually result in an evolution toward more inclusive (if never perfect) political systems.
I think that one reason why the current neoconservative efforts at nation-building (in e.g. Iraq) have been such utter failures is because of the historical myopia that is unable to recognize that “nation building” is, in fact, almost never a democratic enterprise. Democracy can take root in nations, undeniably, but nations are rarely constructed as a result of truly democratic impulses – because true democracies are full of people who are not, in fact, interested in being part of this or that nation.
And don’t try to sell me on some kind of American exceptionalism in this matter – the “American” nation was built by a very narrow demographic of middle-aged and elderly white, male landowners, over and against the objections of all kinds of embedded subjugated peoples (Native Americans, women, Catholic immigrant-laborers, Jewish small-scale merchants, etc.), who were only subsequently, through several centuries of struggle and brutal war (e.g. the Civil War), ideologically homogenized into some degree of inclusion. Never forget: even now, Obama talks white – and that’s how he got elected.
Nationalism is – as movements such as Nazism (not to mention Teapartism) should make obvious – all about the imposition of some totalizing ideological regime across an inevitably heterogeneous population. It’s only as a retroactive construct that such homogeneous nation-peoples (such as Koreans or Mexicans or even Americans) choose to perceive themselves as such.
All of which is my way of saying that I have, in fact, come to believe in a certain strain of South Korean exceptionalism, if only in that its relationship to the United States is utterly unique in the history of neocolonialism. There are lots of caveats attached to that, too.
There’s a perhaps-relevant quote, frequently misattributed to Sinclair Lewis (similar to something said by Halford E. Luccock, but probably invented in its misattributed form by journalist Harrison Salisbury). The recent proto-primarial antics of Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry set me to thinking about it: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”
To which I will add: Yay, nationalism! Oh, and maybe, as a dash of seasoning, the old Samuel Johnson line: “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
Speaking of freedom… What I’m listening to right now.
Kris Kristofferson, “Me and Bobby McGee.”
Kris Kristofferson wrote the song, and this is an early demo version that is currently one of my favorite renditions. There’s a Willie Nelson cover I like, too. I never actually cared for the famous Janis Joplin version that topped the charts in the early 70’s, for example, and I suspect the version that I grew up on was probably one of the Greatful Dead’s covers of it – I couldn’t find anything that sounded exactly right in surfing around youtube, though.
Here is a view of Ilsan’s Jungang-no [Central Avenue], a block from my apartment at the Juyeop subway entrance. I took the photo earlier, shrouded in drizzle – there are a few limp South Korean flags hanging from light poles. I took a long walk today, but didn’t really do a lot. Trying to find inner peace.
