“Then Chung began arguing with Lee, insisting that his own health could be hurt by eating American beef. Lee explained to the student that the chances of catching the human form of mad cow disease by consuming American beef were one in four billion. But Chung shot back, saying he could be that one in four billion who gets infected.”

http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200807/200807070023.html

I find it noteworthy that in a discussion on misappropriation of symbols you pick one that has been misappropriated from India. I have seen plenty of swastikas in Korean monasteries and temples, and they not only predate the theft by Hitler but are also properly drawn/painted/carved.

I know what I am about to say will annoy you, but what the swastika means in the west *is* irrelevant to plenty of people - I’d say to roughly 1/6th of the world’s population. And that is not because we think Hitler was a swell chap with great ideas, but because the Swastika is ours, has been ours for many a millennia, and the holiness of the symbol enjoys a history that spans over thousands of years. What that Austrian psychopath did to our symbol is neither remembered, nor worthy of comment. I guess if you were in my shoes, you’d dismiss any Westerner who raises a hue and cry over the symbol as a ‘retard’ who is guilty of ‘ethnocentric cultural misappropriation’….

A general sense of mistrust, and supressed anger, will lead to another rally, sometime this summer, this time another subject will serve as a release mechanism. The candles, kids, fringe groups will appear in order,with the standard issue tag alongs, dances, mis-information, and emotional outpouring.

Expect more as other interest groups see the huge opportunity to cash in on this wave.

What is most amazing to the writer, is how efficiently the beef lobby has managed to fuel this fire, primarily for self interest, while keeping on the sidelines. My Hat is off to them. But winning a battle is not winning a war, the money and the hand of the market, will prevail, and 20 years from now, they will look back, with zero cases of human “mad cow disease”, and reflect, on the nonsense of it all.

But it did serve a purpose. It brought them together.
Strength together.
Maybe someday it will be brought to focus on a matter for the society that really has some importance.

Well, this is another thing we’ll just have to disagree about. I think there are plenty of things worth criticizing, but this isn’t one. But I appreciate you’re not the one who wrote about it, and I shouldn’t have implied you did.

It’s unfortunate they were unwilling to talk with you, were more interested in photo-ops, and I’m sorry I underestimated your willingness to engage. That is sad, really, and I agree it’s not cool.

That said, I think I’m not really bending over backwards to “justify” this: if you can show me where there’s a shred of anarchist thought presented as such (and not just as vehement liberalism) in the film, I might change my mind, but I’ve watched it a few times and taught it to a large class and I’m telling you — it’s not present enough for people to get, not even my students who are generally pretty aware of Western culture compared to your average kid their age. But the anarchism theme is relatively absent, especially here in Korea, where for most “normal” people the political spectrum is “democracy” vs. “communist.” I mean, what are you gonna do?

In fact, when the V-related buzz started — well more than a month ago, because I discussed this with someone about a month ago this Friday — I immediately thought, “Aha, they’re riffing on the protest scene,” which, at least on the Korean 2-disc edition, is right on the front cover. It was a given for me that the anarchist element wasn’t even a consideration here. Maybe that comes from having taught it and knowing how unlikely people were to know that the theme existed in the book (but not the movie).

So, I think you’ve overestimated how your chat with these people has colored my understanding: I wouldn’t have “totally misunderstood their message” because, frankly, I’d figured out their intended message and their apparent reasoning with the choice of character long before you talked to them, when this trope emerged online back in mid-May, and the discussion focused on the huge citizen uprising that is portrayed in the film, and not on the violence of the titular character or his (original) politics.

And no, it’s not — ever — cool for Koreans to misappropriate Nazi imagery, any more than it is for us to slap the Japanese empire’s symbol on our stuff… which we still sometimes do. But no, it’s not cool, of course not. But if you don’t see that this is apples and oranges…

Frankly, lots of Americans took the film as intended that way, too. Cuccu, the poster after you [on my site], is an American who hasn’t read the book — and an intelligent one — and she didn’t know that V originally was about anarchism vs. fascism.

I don’t think scattered mentions of anarchism in blogs and film reviews is going to trump the reading the film itself elicits, which is a fantasy-narrative about how the liberal masses have sat around at home too long and let the conservatives take over, and now it’s time to take the nation back. With no translation of the book, what else do you expect people to take the movie as?

Maybe Japanese pidgin English is cooler, though I’m not sure how this contributes to the discussion. Maybe Japanese youth are more hip in the way they appropriate Western culture. (Though, I’ll note, that some very popular Japanese SF film (of the live-action sort) is a lot less sophisticated than one might imagine. How they took the superhero trope and got Ultraman — and kept making Ultraman the same way up to now — is beyond me.)

I find Korean ethnocentrism repugnant too, but I hardly think this is a case of it.

I do think it’s useful to set aside the postcolonial literary theory lingo and talk about the difference between “misappropriation” and reception.

Like, for example, how Western critics of Godzilla have routinely argued that it’s all about fears of nuclear power, nuclear weapons, and the like. Only recently, I ran across a paper published not long ago that said, essentially, “Er, guys… there’s a little survivor’s guilt mixed in there too, how could we have missed this?” But this is something that was largely missed by Western viewers, who went on to create movies like Them.

So things that might be obvious to one set of viewers are not obvious to other ones. When they take up those symbols for their own use, we can expect some disconnect.

I’d wager when Koreans watched the original TV miniseries V, which was aired during earlier protests a couple of decades ago, I doubt that the whole Nazi-Jew allegory resonated as strongly for them as did the whole “colonized by aliens” thing. I’d like to look into how much people received it as a story about Japanese (or ostensible American) colonization, but I haven’t found any resources on that yet.

One last thing: I thought the Summer of Love was full of hippies — in October of that year they even held a funeral for the Death of the Hippies, so they referred to it that way themselves. Now I’m less sure I understand your esteem of the Summer of Love, since it essentially mainstreamed the bohemian culture that by the end of that summer was known as hippiedom; and anyway, my point was that cosplay was a part of the Summer of Love.

Last thing: the anarchism symbol usually has a cross-bar, like an A. The V sign doesn’t, although the graphic designer of the title in Korean cleverly made the ? on the phrase ?? ? ??? look like an inverted A. So while the graphic designer was probably familiar with the symbol — and it would be unfair to claim Koreans don’t know the Anarchy sign, therefore — I do think it’s understandable that someone would read the V sign as the film presents it — V symbolizing all kinds of things (violence, vigilatism, vision, the number 5, as well as Evey), but most prominently Victory. Maybe Korea’s a backwater and the kids don’t read enough English comic books (or well-translated ones) like in Japan. I don’t see how that’s an excuse to start throwing around words like “ethnocentric cultural misappropriation” unless we’re to dilute that word to the point where it means nothing but “misunderstanding” something.

But it does suck that they were such lamers and not interested in talking with you.

*****

Addition: at least we agree that hippies suck!

“Did you ask them why on earth they decided to use the symbol and mask? Or did you just decide they’d misunderstood everything and were idiots, and walk away?”

No, I tried to have a dialogue and they told me to fuck off. That’s really when I decided that they were posers. I took a picture of a girl in a mask and she was the third person I spoke with asking if she was an anarchist and she said no, and then before I could say anything else, the guy next to her, also in a mask, told me to leave because I was “interfering” with their photo opportunities. The other two people I spoke with, including their leader holding the giant inverted anarchy flag in the air that you could see from 100 meters away, were not interested in having a dialogue either.

Just to be clear, I am not the person who initially wrote about this or brought it up to put the protesters in their place, but it seems you are bending over backwards to justify this, and that is where I draw the line. I have spent a lot of time trying to understand what the protesters mean when they say what they say, so I am not going to just selectively decide that it doesn’t matter what they are trying to say when it is inconvenient for me to do so, and indeed one key thing that turned me off the protesters in general was their ability to justify anything and everything in the name of their cause, even in the face of the facts and the truth. I mean, are you now going to tell me that it’s cool for Koreans to adopt Nazi and Hitler symbology because they represent andmirable “volk power,” and what they mean in the West is irrelevant?

I’ve been in Korea long enough to understand how signs and symbols from other cultures are often misappropriated here, and in most cases it is done because of ethnocentrism, which is really a form of extreme cultural nationalism and which I often find repugnant. If they do it knowingly, that’s cool and I’ve seen spoofs of a number of Western movies at the protests that were hilarious, including many references to Sicko. I have also lived in Japan and I can assure you that you would never see Japanese at a protest making the same mistakes about V for Vendetta. The Japanese also appropriate signs and symbols from the West pellmell, but they are very sophisticated about it in general and that’s what sets them apart. Japlish, for example, is often quite cool and hilarious, but I rarely if ever find Konglish cool or hilarious. It’s usually just gibberish, and often rather embarrassing. “Saladent,” anyone?

In any case, I have seen photos of the V for Vendetta protesters all over the Internet, including on many expat blogs such as this one, and the ironic thing is that if I had not spoken with them myself and gotten the real backstory, the message that would have been taken away by most of the Westerners who saw the photos is that they were anarchists. Which would have been wrong and in a way also self-selectively ethnocentric. So I find it funny that you are so apparently upset about my reaction here when you would have totally misunderstood their message yourself if I had not spoken with them and gotten the scoop.

BTW, I don’t like hippies at all, because in my experience a lot of them are posers as well!

The discussion seems to have continued here, though Rob also had a reply on his site. Heavily distributed thread!

As I noted, I don’t think the popular reception of the film in the anglophone world imputes much anarchist thought in the movie, either. There are discussions of whether the movie was anti-American, anti-Christian, pro-terrorism, and so on. But as I noted, only 2.5% of discussions in English even mention anarchism.

I agree that the average person was ready to move on once the beef issue was renegotiated, and I think the people who pushed the protests for longer miscalculated how long the interest in just protesting everyday would hold out. I talked to people on Saturday who claimed that the masses would keep coming out till 2MB was impeached, though others were quick to contradict them.

The real problem, which Scott pointed out, is that the left had no agenda (at least after the renegotiation occurred) and that they need to articulate one.

And while I agree it’d be nice if people could just write to their CongressCritters here, as they can in the US, but I think we both know that Korean CongressCritters aren’t as likely to respond to letters. It’s how longstanding, established democracies work, yes, but I doubt American democracy worked that way 21 years in, either. And that’s a nuance I think the Obama comparison misses, though I would agree that Christian conservatives shutting down the government would probably be a bad thing.

Then again, I imagine Obama would actually manage things better early on, instead of relying on spin and other aggravating retorts like, “I’m the most powerful man in the country!”

As for the beef, well, as I’ve said, it’s become obvious the protests are also about more than that… except for those for whom it’s all beef and nothing else. In other words, it’s a jumbled bloody mess. But they’re planning for it to cool off into weekends only, which will be a boon to many of the businesses in the Gwanghwamun area. My favorite sushi joint was, I’m pretty sure, locked out of customers (who didn’t want to walk an extra mile to get to the restaurant for dinner) for weeks!