What the U.S. Election Means for Korean Society Amid COVID-19

I remember watching the Fifth Republic hearings on TV when I was young. I was too young then to know who Roh Moo-hyun was—said to have been the star of those hearings—or what kind of people were saying what, and frankly it was none of my business. Naturally, I do not remember the content of the hearings either. I only vaguely remember wondering why they were doing such a thing, and why those people were so enraged and spoke as if they were fighting.

Later, after graduating from dental school, there was a period when I worked as a public health dentist at a health subcenter on an island and avidly read the books in the small library at the village senior center. Perhaps because another public health doctor working there at the time was interested in the bar exam and was reading law books, one small book on the shabby shelf next to “How to Grow Tomatoes” caught my eye. It was a Korean translation of The Struggle for Law by the German jurist Rudolf von Jhering. Having spent all of my twenties immersed in a socialist worldview without ever seriously confronting the concept of rights, I read that book and vaguely recalled the images from my childhood of people in the National Assembly shouting at the top of their lungs, unable to contain their indignation.

But like most hot-blooded young people in their college years, I too at that time was more absorbed in rationalist thinking than in empiricism. I had not yet encountered the British tradition of individualism and private autonomy, especially the liberal thought of John Locke, before discussing natural-law jurisprudence. In other words, although I had formed an abstract image of legal rights in my head, that idea had not yet become connected to my own life experiences or to my personal framework of understanding. Later, as I studied history, I came to think that the spiritual forerunner of that “struggle for rights” existed more clearly in the history of the English people who produced the Magna Carta.

Recently, in relation to the U.S. presidential election, I watched on YouTube hearings held in several states, including Philadelphia, where witnesses appeared and testified about various indications of election fraud. The atmosphere in those hearing rooms broadly reflected the feelings of ordinary citizens who supported Trump. As the mood in Georgia showed, they were pouring out both their deep affection for Trump—who, even from the ruling Republican Party and the bureaucrats in Washington, was unable to secure full support—and their angry passion over the indifference and distorted reporting of the mainstream media.

As a matter of professional conscience, I also looked through articles from the English-speaking mainstream media, which could be called the anti-Trump camp standing in opposition to them, because I felt I should “beware the bias of historical sources.” I wanted to see what common frame they consistently shared regarding this U.S. election. In particular, unlike American media outlets that openly reveal and operate according to their political positions, I took a look for the first time in a long while at what Britain’s BBC—state media that prides itself on pursuing neutrality—was writing.

From my experience studying in the UK, I already roughly knew the political terrain of the British media. This may differ depending on the viewer’s social perspective or philosophical stance, but in my view the BBC, though not as blatant as The Guardian, is staffed largely by reporters with what is commonly called a politically correct, pro-left orientation. At times, when the interview subject is a right-wing figure or intellectual, they even conduct aggressive interviews that betray an emotional investment of which they themselves seem unaware.

The BBC’s attitude toward this U.S. election also revealed a thoroughly anti-Trump line. The consistent tone of its reporting was that Trump and his supporters were claiming election fraud without any evidence and thereby threatening democracy. Yet what Trump and his supporters had consistently protested was that the courts were not allowing them to present their evidence. The issue, of course, is whether that evidence is true and whether it is thoroughly investigated and verified. On this point, the explanations of the election-related authorities and the claims of the Trump camp are now in stark conflict. So far, in most state and federal courts in the United States, the Trump side’s evidence has not even become the subject of proper hearings. Trump’s lawyers currently seem to be pinning their hopes on the Supreme Court, but it appears difficult for the Supreme Court to newly admit evidence that was not heard in the lower courts and then overturn the rulings. Naturally, the mainstream media will not budge unless someone captures the so-called Kraken and puts it on display before the public.

In my personal view, without being emotionally invested enough in American politics to care all that deeply, the mainstream media in the United States and Britain have treated Trump rather harshly. In fact, even supposedly neutral media such as the BBC displayed something in their attitude toward President Trump that went beyond merely emotionally charged attacks in articles and broadcasts. That was already quite apparent in 2016, when he won the previous election and took office, and the term that symbolically showed the hostile framing of such media was “right-wing populist.” The policies for which Trump was criticized during his term—such as establishing the rule of law against illegal immigration and responding firmly to China’s unfair trade practices—could also be understood positively. Yet the mainstream media, almost without exception, ignored the substance of those policies and seemed devoted instead to the political destruction of Trump as an individual. Even while I was in the UK, I remember being puzzled to see the media move beyond ideologically labeling him as, for example, a nationalist and an opponent of free trade, and casually engage in character assassination—calling him a racist, a misogynist, and so on—as though everyone with a conscience must agree. I could not help but wonder how a state broadcaster could so viciously drive a political figure into a corner, especially one who was not even a politician of its own country.

I find myself thinking again about why people spoke so passionately in the Fifth Republic hearings I watched as a child. It overlaps with the sight of Trump’s lawyers now venting their anger in state hearings related to the U.S. presidential election. During the Fifth Republic, the catchphrase “ddangjeon news” was commonly used, reflecting a time when politicians opposed to the ruling forces felt that their voices were not being reflected in the media. Later, when the government changed and their number of seats in the National Assembly increased, they were finally able, through hearings, to raise their voices against the established media that had ignored them.

The same is true of the United States today. I think the essential significance of the recent hearings related to the U.S. presidential election—regardless of the election result—is that they are close to an appeal against the fact that the overwhelming majority of the mainstream media, even across the Atlantic, had pushed Trump’s image in a negative direction and ignored the demands of Trump supporters. But hearings do not guarantee truth. Can we really say with certainty, for example, that the Fifth Republic hearings truly set the historical record straight? That may simply be what we believe—or want to believe—now, a projection of the convictions of our own age.

Yet those American hearings on the presidential election make me see the reality of Korean society more clearly. I mean the condition of Korean society in relation to the COVID crisis. The pathology of Korean society cannot be found only on the political pages of newspapers. Political reporting, by its nature, is mostly based on factional logic created when the idea that “the person I dislike is evil” meets collective emotion. It is better for such biased human logic and blind collectivism to be laid bare in political conflict within the legislature than to be concealed under authority and hypocrisy. Because Korea’s National Assembly and political parties have failed to perform that function properly, the social pathology of collectivism is growing more severe by the day.

Even if one concedes that it is hard to imagine, as in Britain or the United States, scenes of people filling streets and squares to protest COVID lockdowns or mask policies, in Korean society the very idea of a “struggle for rights” has been almost crushed to death within individual consciousness, as though it were a thought that ought not to exist. As far as I can remember, there has not even been an attempt to seek social consensus, let alone hold protests opposing the government’s COVID quarantine policies. Of course, the media have praised Koreans’ sense of community and altruism in connection with so-called “K-quarantine.” But I cannot agree with that claim. To my eyes, Koreans simply do not even conceive that they should be able—and, further, might want—to express their own opinions about the controversy inherent in public health policy, which inevitably carries visible and invisible social costs, and about the more fundamental issue of individual rights. It has become a society in which speaking is far too dangerous. Compared with the period of the Fifth Republic hearings in the late 1980s, Korea has at some point begun to resemble not the United States but China more and more.

I am sorry, but what I see in K-quarantine is simply a vision of turning the whole society into a sterile zone where not even microorganisms should be allowed to live, making the individual citizen’s own immune capacity unnecessary, and transforming Koreans’ souls and bodies into “greenhouse flowers.” By strict standards of medical rationality, the plain reality is that there is not even a clearly agreed basis for comparing the virulence or fatality rate of COVID-19 with influenza. The clinical mechanism also appears to be the same as with influenza: most people infected with COVID, whether they show symptoms or not, seem to recover fully through rest and their own immunity without special treatment. From this perspective, it may one day be recorded in medical history as a massive happening brought about by the social fear created by videos of people collapsing in the streets of China. Seen this way, in the United States the crisis was likely exaggerated by established left-leaning medical institutions and a mainstream media hostile to the government, whereas in Korea the entire society, regardless of left or right, joined in the overproduction of fear. It reminds me of the fundraising campaign to build the Peace Dam during the Fifth Republic. In that sense, responsibility for the so-called totalitarian quarantine response to COVID may become a burden that Korean society as a whole must bear together afterward.

Min Bae, history teacher at Soongeui Girls’ High School

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Original title: 미 대선이 코로나 한국사회에 주는 의미

Author: Bae Min

Date: 2020-12-09

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=free_opinion&pn=12&idx=23343