I have been a little “slow” in creating new articles for this blog lately. My reasons for this are twofold. First of all, my child is just about ready to break out, and so I have been getting her new home ready for her. Expensive little shit! The bed is built, and the wife’s bags are packed, so now we just have to wait.
The second reason is, it seems that there is still only 1 issue dominating Korean news and blogs at the moment, and that is the one of Koreans protesting the resumption of US Beef imports. I had hoped to make a well informed and referenced posting about this some time last week. I had a long list of references at hand, and then was beat to the punch by a user called Howie2424 on Dave’s ESL Cafe, a forum for ex-pat teachers that I like to visit during downtime at work. The forums are not exactly the greatest to visit, and at times are a real freakshow showing off the worst kind of foreigner. That said, they can make an interesting read!
A thread kicked off about the current event: Protests against the import of US beef. It was pretty standard fare for the forums until Howie2424 sprung into action and gave the perfect debunking of the lies surrounding the protests. I have copied the three posts to this site as a backup. You can find them on the original post or my archives here, here, and here).
With these posts in the public domain, I felt that there was little more I could add. That said, people should read them, and they are relevant to this piece!
The lies surrounding the debacle have been clearly highlighted, but nobody has really asked WHY people are lying about this. At first, it was suggested that these protests were really about beef. This then changed to a claim that it was really about the way the President is running the country. (Apparently, 100 days in office is more than enough time for him to deliver on his election pledges!). At all times, people were maintaining that this was not about anti-American sentiment, though I was not so certain, and have expressed this in the past.
It seems I may have been correct.
Last week, the protesters decided to liven things up by linking the resumption of beef imports with the death of 2 schoolgirls that happened 6 years ago. The deaths of these girls were largely ignored at the time, as Koreans were more concerned with how the national team were doing in the World Cup, but 6 months later, the anti-US element decided to manipulate the situation. Armed with an arsenal of lies, they made things very uncomfortable for foreigners in South Korea. Protests against US forces and random attacks on foreigners, soon became the norm in South Korea.
ROKDrop, a great blog for US Forces in Korea, recently did a fantastic job of uncovering the facts of the case. Koreans still believe a lot of the lies surrounding this incident and it is an emotional issue for them. What happened was a tragedy, but (as the ROKDrop article shows), they US did everything right after the incident, and by the time the protests had begun, they had conducted an investigation, charged the soldiers with negligent homicide, paid the family a large sum of money collected by the soldiers, and were arranging a much larger sum of money as compensation. They have been apologised to on numerous occasions, the military had accepted full responsibility, and they had erected a memorial to the girls.
The lies surrounding the case? The soldiers had reversed back over the girls and then celebrated the kill. The Army had not apologised (in fact, the protestors were asking for “just one small apology”), and they claimed that the soldiers were immune from prosecution because the Army was protecting them. Madcowshit!
It now turns out that the people behind the Beef protests have been behind a number of other Anti-US protests. Again, ROKDrop has more information on this. It seems that these people are actually travelling to North Korea and meeting with people there to organise the protests.
These organisations pose a real threat to the freedom of the South Korean people. Whenever they get riled up about something, violence against foreigners increases (read the comments section on this one – it shows just how fucked up the law is in this country). I only hope that the Korean people realise that they are being taken for ride, and stop the insanity before it escalates further.
