Last attempt at engaging South Korean Culture - journey of a KFA recruit

Last attempt at engaging South Korean Culture - journey of a KFA recruit

27 May 2014 at 16:43

 As I study about the hypocrisy and hatred in the recent UN Commission of Inquiry Report into human rights in the DPRK, I find myself increasingly cynical of the system in which I live. Illusory and phony freedoms traded in exchange for tolerance of brazen social manipulation and perversion that brainwashes people to blindly accept and reinforce neo-fascist abuse of power.

As social values, welfare, the integrity of the education system, and even the core of what it means to be human are eaten up by the greedy morally unbounded market I realize that the problematic world I find myself in is not simply the product of capitalist ideology. Rather, the problems I see stem from a distinctly fascist, subversive, sabotage campaign to fabricate by force an ‘exceptionalism’ psychotically indoctrinated by religious extremism.

Judeo-Christian morality intrinsically relies on an idea of moral entitlement and reward that is exclusive, inconsistent and incoherent. In short it relies on the idea that some are good some are evil, some go to heaven some go to hell. This is the first premise of the imperialism that threatens us. It sanitizes inequality as those excluded by society are written off as moral failures - ‘you reap what you sow’.

Once people are prepared to ‘not care’ about the misfortune of others by being brainwashed to see inequality as spiritual justice the door to imperialism is firmly wide open. Homelessness, poverty, unemployment and discrimination are not societies' problems but individual stories of moral failure and poor direction, spiritual challenges lost through lack of piety or yet to be won through stronger faith.

With this message in mind walking past someone sleeping on the street or witnessing the trading of women becomes unproblematic – the peril of the Godless which we the faithful have paid our weekly tithes and worn our Sunday suits to protect ourselves from. Capitalism’s gulag is born, unforgiving socio-psychological torture and extreme deprivation in the face of opulence and condemning social consensus that prisoners determine their fate, there are no constraints, the man drowning at sea is as free as the man walking along the shore.

Once capitalism’s gulag is entrenched and accepted, phase two comes into maturity. Rather than rewarding positive social contributions and cooperative management society turns upon itself in a race to the bottom, fear of exclusion takes priority over recognition of success as the key driver of workplace culture and productivity. 'Othering’ a rival by out grouping them is a surer way to resonate acceptance, respect and promotion than selfless or collectively minded achievement. The fear factor of proving oneself over an adversary by excluding them is what proves group membership and competence in socially constructivist neo-liberal dystopia.

The market incestuously reproduces its unfettered logic - economic value delinks from progressive production and instead couples with regressive production: obesity inducing dietary products; sexually immoral media products; destabilizing drug and alcohol culture; anxiety and depression inducing aesthetics; free thought supressing education. Regressive production is the tool par excellence for class separation, for securing the system’s two most essential resources, fear and exploitable labour. Religious fundamentalism increasingly gears towards reassuring the winners that spiritual entitlement, ethnic privilege, and aesthetic advantage afford the neo-colonial rights of the haves over the have nots.

As these thoughts began to weigh me down I found myself increasingly detached from my peers, from the innocent fun and confidence that built my faith in social relations in times gone by. The skeletal cynicism and superficiality of my engagement with society depresses me, I am always too aware of the agendas at play, the brinkmanship beneath the smiles. Learning about the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the politics of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jing Pin has given me faith that there are political actors fighting against regressive culture, social visions capable of dispelling my political malaise.

But when I talk about these hopes I am immediately, silently, bracketed as a nut hung over from the wrong side of the Cold War. Even mentioning sympathy for North Korea immediately elicits ridicule and tacit threats of ‘out-grouping’ and exclusion. I am starting to hate and feel imprisoned by regressive production and the droid like responses of those it seems to have brainwashed into refusing to think freely. I am starting to hate the imperialist neo (fascist) liberal cultures of the US and South Korea in particular. Hold on … does that make me a hypocrite? I am supposed to be approaching my studies from a free and neutral perspective. To insure against hypocrisy I thought of re-engaging South Korean people and culture, innocently and submissively, again I found myself angrily seeking wisdom and camaraderie from the KFA.

When living in South Korea I really knew only one person who wasn’t brainwashed; the majority of people seemed whipped up into a fascist frenzy, deluded by distorted, bogus, exploitative, nationalist propaganda. The ‘economic miracle’ myth that rides off the elite enriching ‘chaebol’ conglomerate domination of society has commoditized the spirit of the people. The mental illness fostered by fundamentalist Christianity forges a population of uncritical worshipers, a people plagued by symbol and iconography psychosis. Distinction between Church and corporate culture has evaporated. Ruthless wielding of power by sexually perverse, greedy elitists serves pursuit of US elite identity signifiers across ‘the board’, without scruple.

Exploiting people they purport to liberate, Church leaders maximize contributions to American Church financial power in return for Ivy League scholarships for their children (‘level-up’ inclusion in the imperialist motherland). Corporate and business leaders aggressively seek to soothe sexual inferiority complexes (stemming from domination by the US military/elite) by re-branding the sex trade ‘US style business clubbing’ and  callously engineering recruitment through disproportionately high youth unemployment (50% of College graduates in South Korea are unable to find work or have given up looking). The stooges of the fascist system camouflage the social trauma and betrayal of the Korean people their business club society spawns with Chaebol funded modern infrastructure, Eur-Asian surgery prostitution packaging and incentives, and ‘one-up-man-ship’ over disenfranchised, culturally alienated, immigrants.

This exploitation leads South Korean men to engage outsiders and each other as tasteless curb crawlers, debasement and emasculation fight each other as cultural norms of male interaction under fascism; slandering and hopelessly delusional one-up-man-ship over foreigners is the only unity recourse for the sexual inferiority complex imperial domination has entrenched. Women bear the worst brunt of the culture of denial however; South Korean men have become the largest consumer group of South East Asian child prostitutes, domestic violence and abuse are on the rise, the population is shrinking and ageing with elderly single women becoming a particularly at risk vulnerable group. Under the cover of propagandized fascist 'sexually superior' K-pop idols, the international trade of Korean women for sex thrives; imperialist culture drives a need to finance Korean migration to the racist and discriminatory white dominant imperialist hinterlands . Christianity and capitalism propagandize these migration pathways as moral and material progress (respectively). In fact, certainly in the case of the American former British empire states, Korean immigration usually represents nothing more than policy packaged wealth appropriation and an onshore colonial rape and exploitation fest.

Anyway depressing as this is as mentioned when in South Korea I was, admittedly rarely, able to culturally interact outside of these dynamics …