By Via a reader tip comes this video posted on YouTube recently of South Koreans protesting against the Kim Jong-il regime:
Hundreds of North Korean defectors and civic group members gathered at Seoul Railway Station plaza and denounced North Korea’s “brutal” leadership….
11:01 am on May 1st, 2011 1
They’re just doing it for the free haircut.
This is my ‘hood, and my apartment is close enough that I can hear (and get annoyed by) the noisier demonstrations. Usually it’s leftist groups, like unions and/or chinboistas, so this is a nice change of pace.
Seoul Station actually makes for a good protest venue: you have adequate open space, a somewhat captive audience, and you can’t beat how convenient transport is for getting there.
12:26 pm on May 1st, 2011 2
I just finished reading “the Cleanest Race” by Myers… It was an awesome read and made WAY more sense than Bruce Cummings “the Korean War”… which still made some sense but Myers blew him out of the war. Original source material b~tches! Anyway, a couple of major things.
1: Differentiates between the propaganda NK sends to the outside world and domestic propaganda.
2: Based on the domestic propaganda (you can read NK domestic propaganda at the Unification Ministry’s library/research facility) he comes up with the idea that North Korean ideology is based on the purity of the Korean race and the need for a parent/leader versus the dirty dirty foreigners.
Anyway, yes… I know where I can get some good source material besides Japan/University libraries in the US without breaking the national security law apparently while in South Korea. It’s free too. I also understand why the North Korean sites for tongpo/kyopo consumption are labeled:
uriminjo(kkk)iri (Our race, sticking together)
Also, looking at things from the Myer’s point of view explains why ballon propaganda is REALLY PISSING OFF the regime and why it doesn’t really matter if the white house is nice/mean/does nothing as long as NK can blame America for all of its problems and not admit that South Korea doesn’t really want unification (that fast?).
Anyway, whoever did that post earlier saying to just translate whatever south koreans think and then pointed out myers book – thanks. And which journals are you reading?
5:44 pm on May 29th, 2011 3
Are you joking Kushibo because thats not very nice
2:54 am on May 30th, 2011 4
#1- Yes, Seoul Station is the perfect place to protest. They can chant against chaebols and then go shopping at LotteMart. They can burn the American flag, and then eat at McDonalds or Bennigans and then grab some Dunkin’ Donuts for the ride home.
3:26 am on May 30th, 2011 5
So, archieB, you’ve seen these chinboista protesters at Seoul Station burn an American flag and then head to McDonald’s or Bennigan’s?
Anyway, assuming they’re not strawmen you’ve made up (I’ve watched many of these protests in my ‘hood and what you describe would be a rarity), how is protesting against, say, USFK policy tied in with McDonald’s? Or Doosan’s or LG’s bad acts with Lotte?
10:57 am on May 30th, 2011 6
Not sure the reason for the gratuitous attack, seesaw, but clearly you do not know what you think you know. If you’re going to make gratuitious ad hominem attacks on me, I hope you have more than nora on your infinite playlist.
You might also take note that strawmen and socks are not at all the same thing. I do not use socks and I am not the person who has been writing as nora, but what archieB did was not sockpuppetry either, so the substance of your gratuitous attack is wholly irrelevant.
A strawman is a sham person set up to be rhetorically attacked or knocked down. As much as I loathe the politics and sentiments of the chinboistas (see here), I call foul on making a strawman chinboista who bashes everything American (even burns American flags) and then goes off to eat at Mickey D’s.
As for Seoul Station being “my ‘hood,” I do in fact own an apartment there just a few hundred meters from Seoul Station (maybe I’ll post video taken from my floor of one such protest that was annoyingly loud). And since I rent that one out, I maintain a small panjiha flat a couple hundred meters from there for when I am in Seoul during the summer (I still work for a Korean organization). But even if I had never set foot back in Seoul since I came to Hawaii in 2006, my years of experience living in the Seoul Station area would have been more than sufficient for me to authoritatively comment on the types of large-scale protests there, especially since the new KTX Seoul Station was built.
11:07 am on May 30th, 2011 7
At any rate we’re getting off track here. The video was NOT of leftist chinboista groups, but of anti-DPRK protesters, an entirely different group which in my opinion deserves our support. In my earlier post, however, I spoke a bit glibly about their protest, and John was right to call out on that.
I also talked about the leftists who use that space, and then archieB commented on that, but that just means we are getting further from what this post is about. I’m glad to see that more and more people in South Korea are looking at the North Korean regime for what it is. It’s too bad that it took two vicious attacks for some of them to wake up to this reality.