[This piece originally appeared in rabble (www.rabble.ca) in February 2003.]
“We don’t want to talk about North Korea,” my students say. “We want to talk about music or movies.”
I’m an ESL instructor at a university in a small city in South Korea. And I’m frequently made painfully aware that most young people today are uninterested in politics. Pop culture is their real passion, and the currency of pop culture is physical attractiveness. When I go to the maze of bars, restaurants and shops that is at the south end of the university campus and pass the bulb-lit merchant wagons that sell pirated cassettes, the music is usually by singers chosen as much for their looks as their talent.
This is so much the way of the world that it feels tendentious to point it out. But, I must; pop culture is like a drug. As the clouds of war gather in the Middle East, not many people in Korea seem especially perturbed. Most are simply happily living their lives. But, underneath, there is pervasive unease in this country over the possibility that unless the regime in North Korea falls of its own volition, there will, at some point, be war in this region of the world as well.
This explains in large measure the antagonism that Koreans often feel toward the U.S. government and “George Bushi.” The relationship between Americans and South Koreans is enormously complex. America — in fact, North America generally — is seen as a kind of utopia. And Americans as individuals are both liked and cherished; Americaphilia runs as strongly here as Americaphobia. But there is a distinction made between the American government and American people. For the most part, current U.S. policy is seen as actually being opposed to the interests of peace. After all, the current U.S. administration has staked its prestige on fighting an “axis of evil,” and needs an enemy in North Korea. This, then, is the theory proffered for why the administration has taken steps to squelch the Sunshine Policy of North/South reconciliation.
While the atmosphere here is at the moment peaceful, there is an awareness that new forces are at work politically. In terms of foreign policy, we’ve entered a new age — an age in which waging punitive war is considered morally acceptable. No matter how the current crises with Iraq and North Korea play out, there will remain the risk that a war will be initiated simply because another country is labelled “bad.”
* * *
North Korea has been so demonized in the press that it almost seems like a nation of aliens. One of the most impenetrable countries on Earth, it — largely as a result of the strident rhetoric produced by its official media — has managed to create the impression that it is populated by robots. (Mainstream news media frequently refer to North Korea as Stalinist, starving, and dictatorial, but leave regular people out of the picture.) But one thing Koreans will repeatedly tell you is that they are one people. Ethnically, the people in the North and South are very homogeneous, as is often the case in older civilizations. To a Westerner, brought up in a culture that emphasizes individuality, this last point might not seem especially relevant — after all, people are people wherever you go, and nations are such large entities that you will find huge amounts of diversity of personality types in any group.
However, there is something “Korean” about Koreans. And it is a highly attractive quality. Koreans are charismatic; they are often gracious and kind. They are also very physically attractive. Of course, physical attractiveness is the quality that is most admired by contemporary culture.
* * *
It’s hard to imagine the death of someone you care about. It’s agonizing to imagine the murder of someone you love. As part of my duties as a teacher, I present a lecture called ABC News. ABC News is standard corporate discourse masquerading as objective truth. And recently, of course, there have been a plethora of stories on Iraq and (note the connection) terrorism.
Often a talking head will appear in these broadcasts, speaking with telegenic pithiness about some aspect of waging war. One expert I recently saw was Michael O’Hanlon, military policy analyst with the Brookings Institute. He talks in dry, impersonal tones about the logistical challenges of waging a war this year against Iraq. But he could be talking about waging war against anyone, anywhere. If the crisis with North Korea heats up, countless Michael O’Hanlons describing countless invasion scenarios will spring up on the television sets of the Western world. And as a viewer, it’s typical to accept these sorts of ideas and this sort of language as perfectly normal. I see this in my students. They accept the subliminal message of these broadcasts — that every now and then a war between a major power and a much weaker country is inevitable.
The visual discourse of TV news only magnifies this phenomenon. With its footage of warplanes performing exercises, tanks and armoured personnel carriers on manoeuvres, the TV news creates a kind of excitement over the prospect of war. Furthermore, it’s worth noting that there is nothing nation-specific about this phenomenon. I was recently talking with a fellow teacher — a Californian — about the nature of the news, and he commented to me with wry understatement that it is almost as if the major news agencies were cheering the war effort on. When I remarked to him that this was equally true of the TV news in Canada, he was momentarily surprised. But not really. TV news has for the most part become internationally uniform in its coded messages. War as thrill, war as diversion, and war as entertainment — all these are possible when the enemy doesn’t exist for you as tangible flesh and blood.
But once you’ve lived in a country, you can’t think of it merely as an abstraction. You care about its people because, for you, they are people. If there was more of a market for English teachers there and I had gone to Iraq and developed personal bonds with some of the people in that country, I would be physically sick upon hearing the kinds of morally corrupt proposals that are being bandied about these days. I’m not talking about moral outrage — that occurs easily enough. I’m talking about a sensation of physical upset, an almost crazed wish that reality be different from what it is. The abstract language of experts, while putatively disinterested, actually excuses hidden forms of brutality. The U.S. government has helped to contaminate Iraq’s water supply by using U.N. sanctions to prevent the delivery of water treatment replacement parts and essential chemicals. In other words, sanctions were exploited in an attempt to cause suffering among Iraqi civilians, and, presumably, destabilize the country.
And now its leaders want to wage a war in the Middle East, a war against terrorism, that, in the long run, it probably cannot win. But tens of thousands more will die before this is realized. In the meantime, invading Iraq and killing its people in order to save them is discussed much as pacification programs were during the early stages of the Vietnam War.
So could it happen here? Could there be another war on the Korean peninsula? According to a recent BBC report, the United States appears to be backing away from a military confrontation with North Korea. Implicit in this report is the suggestion that the White House discussed attacking North Korea as a possible scenario. It’s easy to see why such a scenario would be considered untenable: Seoul is extremely close to the de-militarized zone; too many people would die. It’s well-known (and has been for several years) that the North possesses some nuclear weapons. And because North Korea also possesses large conventional forces, and the capital of South Korea is less than 50 km from the demilitarized zone, civilian casualties would be huge. This doesn’t mean such a war couldn’t be waged. We’ve come to see war as brief and relatively safe. A “bloodless” war against a faceless enemy would be psychologically acceptable to many North Americans.
So yes, the United States government could, if the situation deteriorated enough, sell such a war to its public — especially if it could convince Americans that such a war could be easily won with the assistance of anti-missile defences and a blitzkrieg against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
But such a war would very likely involve bombing Pyongyang. Remember it? It’s the capital of that alien country with the hysterical propaganda. How many would shed a tear for loss of life there?
***
“We are one people,” Koreans will tell you.
The differences between North and South are negligible. But the North is viewed — from the outside — as otherworldly, not part of the modern world, not one of “us.” How can the North be saved from a destructive modern-day, U.S.-led crusade against arbitrarily defined “evil”?
If one of the salient characteristics of contemporary popular culture is the hyper-adulation of good looks and fame, could pop culture have the potential to save us from what we’ve become: a civilization which, while it is in many respects good-natured, has also become callous about waging wars in order to maintain a cheap energy supply or punish “rogue” regimes? We accept war because we don’t think we will lose all that much as a result of it.
Koreans have something special. And that special quality easily translates into mass culture. Call it shallow, but, imagine the world getting to know and love Koreans through the massive, global pop-culture machine — as entertainers, writers, filmmakers or musicians. Wouldn’t it be more difficult to contemplate bombing them … even if they live in the North? Those who we are meant to despise are always presented to us as ugly, repulsive — couldn’t it work the other way around?
Asserting that culture has the power to stop the juggernaut of war is to invite charges of naivete. But consider this, fascism — a political force that has relished in its control of culture — was so enamoured of culture as a socializing tool that even during the 1930s and 40s, a time when mass culture did not exist in its modern, TV-driven form, it was recognized as possessing something potent. We do not sufficiently question the propaganda value of our own culture. We think we’re too smart for that.
Culture convinces. It is masterful at appearing to be a form of evidence (because it presents us with such a convincing facsimile of reality) while not being real at all. So how can we make cultural forces work for good?
Remember that our mass culture is not the only mass culture that could exist. It could place more emphasis on the simple joys of day-to-day life. It could depict with greater sympathy the suffering experienced by the victims of violence. When the gun is fired, when the bomb is dropped, someone is hurt. It could help us remember our history.
Mass culture — with its vivid, supposedly uncompromising images of spilled blood and dismemberment — rarely shows the long-term effects of anything, but particularly not of violence. It creates the illusion that violence happens, then disappears, like a thunderstorm, leaving nothing behind. But, of course, it does leave something behind: the misery of its survivors, who, in some cases, are filled with such a craving for vengeance that they become what we call terrorists.
* * *
Living in South Korea is interesting because it has a very strong national culture. Although it has its fair share of gangland melodramas and heavily choreographed pop, it also possesses a strong sense of identity.
North Korea, alternatively, has no culture to speak of. Or rather, its culture — like its society — is so isolated that all we see of it in the West are stereotypes and second-hand descriptions. However, if we are serious about understanding others, we need to acknowledge how little we know about them.
Locked in upon itself by fear or mistrust or ideological rigidity, North Korea remains a question mark — a blank screen onto which visions of evil are projected. Ironically, the North could do much more to alleviate the anxieties of the West and South Korea if it simply opened up as a culture and showed us something of itself. Like any other country, North Korea is imperfect. But the people who live there possess the perfection of all life — they are, in a sense, perfect strangers.