Dear Family, Friends and eavesdropping aliens:
We've moved. It wasn't fun, but it's done. And in the words of the theme song from TV's "The Jeffersons," we have moved "up to a deluxe apartment in the [north-]east side [of Busan]."
For the first time in either of our lives, Horyon and I are living in a brand new apartment! So new that it still smells like paint. So new that there was still plastic wrap on the doorknobs when we moved in and the windows have numbers painted on them so the construction guys wouldn't put them in the wrong apartment.
Let me tell you, this is a nice apartment. The doorbell has a video camera in it, so we can see what kind of idiots have come to visit us without opening the door to give them access to our home! The bedroom light has a remote control so you can turn out the lights without getting out of bed! There is a water filter under the sink so that we can drink the tap water without mutating into giant rat-creatures! There are phone jacks in every room, and internet jacks in all the bedrooms! (Of course there are no jacks in the kitchen, because I'm supposed to stay there barefoot and looking pregnant.) There is a new refrigerator! It doesn't have ice or water in the door, but it's new, so it doesn't smell like whatever food the previous owners kept until it went bad! It even has a dishwasher! The kind you put dirty dishes and soap in and press some buttons and wait an hour and your dishes come out clean!
This was, in many ways, the least painful move I've ever been involved with. We actually started to prepare last May. I was told by Kosin University that we would be moving in the fall, despite the fact that we had just moved that April. However, the move never materialized. Instead, many books, videos, clothes and some cooking supplies were put in boxes. Over the following months, many things came out of the boxes, but a lot of it just got moved as it was. In addition, thanks to the foresight of my lovely and intelligent wife, we did some packing up to two months before leaving. Our last 24 hours were still pretty intense, but we paid a little bit extra for the movers, and they packed a lot of stuff for us. Especially the kitchen. They put away all the dishes, and a lot of the foodstuffs. When we arrived at the new apartment, they pulled it all out of the boxes and put it in the cabinets. Of course, I wasn't happy with their choice of which cabinets to put which stuff in, but that is a minor problem.
The Sack household (Korean branch) has experienced a sort of twist with this recent move. Before the move, Horyon was always tired and frequently sick. Spending a total of more than two hours a day riding busses took a serious toll on her. I had to be Mr. Cheerful far more than comes naturally to me. However, I was in a good job, close enough to walk to work in 20 minutes, and only teaching four days a week.
Now things are different. Horyon has regained about eight hours a week a time that she can use to live. She wakes up later in the morning, doesn't get sick so much, and has moved nicely into the role of Mrs. Super-Cheerful. Which is good, because I need some cheering up. My teaching load went up from 14 to 20 hours a week. Gasp. It is divided into 10 classes of two hours each. My total number of students is 350, for an average of 35 students per class. One class has 50 students! And I'm supposed to teach conversation! My percentage of lecture/activity time has gone way up, I'm afraid. To make things even more interesting, around 90% of the students are freshmen. The 10% who are upperclassmen are a mix of students who really want to learn English and students who couldn't quite break the D+ line the first time around. Teaching the same lesson ten times is enough to fry my brain. It is in my nature to modify lectures as I repeat them, but I want to keep these classes as similar as possible, so that I can compare grades between different classes easily and write one test for all of them.
Now it takes me longer to get to work, too. I used to be able to do the front door to classroom run in under 15 minutes, now it is 25 minutes on a good day. On a bad day–rain, long wait for a taxi–it takes 40 minutes. Not bad for living in a big city, but pretty rough for someone who is not at his best in the morning. Like me. I have 9:00 classes four days a week, and at least once a week I have to skip breakfast to be on time for class.
In addition, I am required to have 10 office hours per week, double what I had at Kosin. So I have jumped from 19 hours required at work to 30.
Don't get me wrong. I know that I won't be able to find a job like this in America. At least not one that provides a spacious new apartment and a salary that lets me live well, save money, and continually expand my CD collection.
I would like to take this opportunity to reassure all of you that we are okay here in South Korea. South Korea, like many countries around the world, is going through some anti-American sentiment. However, as in those other countries, people here know the difference between Americans and the U.S. government. The U.S. military is a slightly different matter.
There is no doubt on the part of the older generation that the American military presence here is needed. People who can actually remember the Korean war, and the Japanese occupation before it, are still thankful to the countries that liberated Korea, especially the U.S.A. Younger people, however, see American military bases squatting on prime real estate. They see a few U.S. soldiers occasionally acting in a very disgraceful manner and not (in their opinion) being sufficiently punished for it. They see a predator. And our international politics do little to dissuade that notion.
With regards to the newly begun war with Iraq, I must say that I am deeply disturbed. I have a lot of respect for those in our society who serve in the military. I grieve for those lost and killed in action. But I do not respect our President's decision to go to war. To me, it seems that the U.S. is like a lynch mob hanging a child molester. No one argues that the child molester should be allowed to continue his activities, but in a civilized country he is tried in a court. Evidence is studied, a jury of peers is consulted, and rules that have been previously agreed on are followed. The U.N. is exactly that, and it has been completely ignored.
President Bush has not convinced me, or practically anyone else outside of the U.S., that Iraq was directly connected to the events of September 11th. Frankly, I foresee serious consequences to this war, regardless of whether we win quickly, slowly, or in a Vietnam-like manner.
It is unusual for me to enclose pieces written by other people, but I found this article to be some serious (and seriously disturbing) food for thought. A good friend of mine sent it to me, and I feel it to be my duty to share it with you. This is certainly not intended to suggest that you-know-who is exactly the same as the-guy-in-charge. (As one critic pointed out, the inference is that Bavaria=Texas! Good luck assessing the accuracy of *that*!) However, the parallels are interesting to note.
As always, I wish you all peace. I am more afraid for those of you living in the United States than I am for myself.
Rob
When Democracy Failed: The warnings of history
by Thom Hartmann (at http://www.thomhartmann.com/articles/2003/03/when-democracy-failed-warnings-history )
[I have decided now, June 2nd 2006, to not paste the entire article here. After all, this is Roblog, and while I may agree with many things said in the article, I did not write it. However, I encourage you to go to the website above and look at it. When I originally emailed this out, it started a couple of heated discussions. I have no wish to revive them, but I will still post any comments you care to make. Incidentally, I have just finished reading _Modern Times_, a history book covering most of the 20th century. I still think that the Hartmann article linked above has some valid points, but like any essay that can be read in one sitting, it has some simplifications. Nevertheless, the point about us having to choose democracy is still valid. Enough said.]
[Now it is 2016, and I have updated the link and decided to include the text here. It hadn't even occurred to me that the link could change over time, but now I know that not only do links change, but entire swaths of the internet can just disappear. Text takes up very little space, so I'm throwing it in. The following is not written by me.]
When Democracy Failed: The Warnings of History
The 70th anniversary wasn't noticed in the United States, and was barely reported in the corporate media. But the Germans remembered well that fateful day seventy years ago - February 27, 1933. They commemorated the anniversary by joining in demonstrations for peace that mobilized citizens all across the world. It started when the government, in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack.
The 70th anniversary wasn't noticed in the United States, and was barely reported in the corporate media. But the Germans remembered well that fateful day seventy years ago - February 27, 1933. They commemorated the anniversary by joining in demonstrations for peace that mobilized citizens all across the world.
It started when the government, in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack. A foreign ideologue had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings, but the media largely ignored his relatively small efforts. The intelligence services knew, however, that the odds were he would eventually succeed. (Historians are still arguing whether or not rogue elements in the intelligence service helped the terrorist; the most recent research implies they did not.)
But the warnings of investigators were ignored at the highest levels, in part because the government was distracted; the man who claimed to be the nation's leader had not been elected by a majority vote and the majority of citizens claimed he had no right to the powers he coveted. He was a simpleton, some said, a cartoon character of a man who saw things in black-and-white terms and didn't have the intellect to understand the subtleties of running a nation in a complex and internationalist world. His coarse use of language - reflecting his political roots in a southernmost state - and his simplistic and often-inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended the aristocrats, foreign leaders, and the well-educated elite in the government and media. And, as a young man, he'd joined a secret society with an occult-sounding name and bizarre initiation rituals that involved skulls and human bones.
Nonetheless, he knew the terrorist was going to strike (although he didn't know where or when), and he had already considered his response. When an aide brought him word that the nation's most prestigious building was ablaze, he verified it was the terrorist who had struck and then rushed to the scene and called a press conference.
"You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history," he proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out building, surrounded by national media. "This fire," he said, his voice trembling with emotion, "is the beginning." He used the occasion - "a sign from God," he called it - to declare an all-out war on terrorism and its ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their origins to the Middle East and found motivation for their evil deeds in their religion.
Two weeks later, the first detention center for terrorists was built in Oranianberg to hold the first suspected allies of the infamous terrorist. In a national outburst of patriotism, the leader's flag was everywhere, even printed large in newspapers suitable for window display.
Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, the nation's now-popular leader had pushed through legislation - in the name of combating terrorism and fighting the philosophy he said spawned it - that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus. Police could now intercept mail and wiretap phones; suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges and without access to their lawyers; police could sneak into people's homes without warrants if the cases involved terrorism.
To get his patriotic "Decree on the Protection of People and State" passed over the objections of concerned legislators and civil libertarians, he agreed to put a 4-year sunset provision on it: if the national emergency provoked by the terrorist attack was over by then, the freedoms and rights would be returned to the people, and the police agencies would be re-restrained. Legislators would later say they hadn't had time to read the bill before voting on it.
Immediately after passage of the anti-terrorism act, his federal police agencies stepped up their program of arresting suspicious persons and holding them without access to lawyers or courts. In the first year only a few hundred were interred, and those who objected were largely ignored by the mainstream press, which was afraid to offend and thus lose access to a leader with such high popularity ratings. Citizens who protested the leader in public - and there were many - quickly found themselves confronting the newly empowered police's batons, gas, and jail cells, or fenced off in protest zones safely out of earshot of the leader's public speeches. (In the meantime, he was taking almost daily lessons in public speaking, learning to control his tonality, gestures, and facial expressions. He became a very competent orator.)
Within the first months after that terrorist attack, at the suggestion of a political advisor, he brought a formerly obscure word into common usage. He wanted to stir a "racial pride" among his countrymen, so, instead of referring to the nation by its name, he began to refer to it as "The Homeland," a phrase publicly promoted in the introduction to a 1934 speech recorded in Leni Riefenstahl's famous propaganda movie "Triumph Of The Will." As hoped, people's hearts swelled with pride, and the beginning of an us-versus-them mentality was sewn. Our land was "the" homeland, citizens thought: all others were simply foreign lands. We are the "true people," he suggested, the only ones worthy of our nation's concern; if bombs fall on others, or human rights are violated in other nations and it makes our lives better, it's of little concern to us.
Playing on this new nationalism, and exploiting a disagreement with the French over his increasing militarism, he argued that any international body that didn't act first and foremost in the best interest of his own nation was neither relevant nor useful. He thus withdrew his country from the League Of Nations in October, 1933, and then negotiated a separate naval armaments agreement with Anthony Eden of The United Kingdom to create a worldwide military ruling elite.
His propaganda minister orchestrated a campaign to ensure the people that he was a deeply religious man and that his motivations were rooted in Christianity. He even proclaimed the need for a revival of the Christian faith across his nation, what he called a "New Christianity." Every man in his rapidly growing army wore a belt buckle that declared "Gott Mit Uns" - God Is With Us - and most of them fervently believed it was true.
Within a year of the terrorist attack, the nation's leader determined that the various local police and federal agencies around the nation were lacking the clear communication and overall coordinated administration necessary to deal with the terrorist threat facing the nation, particularly those citizens who were of Middle Eastern ancestry and thus probably terrorist and communist sympathizers, and various troublesome "intellectuals" and "liberals." He proposed a single new national agency to protect the security of the homeland, consolidating the actions of dozens of previously independent police, border, and investigative agencies under a single leader.
He appointed one of his most trusted associates to be leader of this new agency, the Central Security Office for the homeland, and gave it a role in the government equal to the other major departments.
His assistant who dealt with the press noted that, since the terrorist attack, "Radio and press are at out disposal." Those voices questioning the legitimacy of their nation's leader, or raising questions about his checkered past, had by now faded from the public's recollection as his central security office began advertising a program encouraging people to phone in tips about suspicious neighbors. This program was so successful that the names of some of the people "denounced" were soon being broadcast on radio stations. Those denounced often included opposition politicians and celebrities who dared speak out - a favorite target of his regime and the media he now controlled through intimidation and ownership by corporate allies.
To consolidate his power, he concluded that government alone wasn't enough. He reached out to industry and forged an alliance, bringing former executives of the nation's largest corporations into high government positions. A flood of government money poured into corporate coffers to fight the war against the Middle Eastern ancestry terrorists lurking within the homeland, and to prepare for wars overseas. He encouraged large corporations friendly to him to acquire media outlets and other industrial concerns across the nation, particularly those previously owned by suspicious people of Middle Eastern ancestry. He built powerful alliances with industry; one corporate ally got the lucrative contract worth millions to build the first large-scale detention center for enemies of the state. Soon more would follow. Industry flourished.
But after an interval of peace following the terrorist attack, voices of dissent again arose within and without the government. Students had started an active program opposing him (later known as the White Rose Society), and leaders of nearby nations were speaking out against his bellicose rhetoric. He needed a diversion, something to direct people away from the corporate cronyism being exposed in his own government, questions of his possibly illegitimate rise to power, and the oft-voiced concerns of civil libertarians about the people being held in detention without due process or access to attorneys or family.
With his number two man - a master at manipulating the media - he began a campaign to convince the people of the nation that a small, limited war was necessary. Another nation was harboring many of the suspicious Middle Eastern people, and even though its connection with the terrorist who had set afire the nation's most important building was tenuous at best, it held resources their nation badly needed if they were to have room to live and maintain their prosperity. He called a press conference and publicly delivered an ultimatum to the leader of the other nation, provoking an international uproar. He claimed the right to strike preemptively in self-defense, and nations across Europe - at first - denounced him for it, pointing out that it was a doctrine only claimed in the past by nations seeking worldwide empire, like Caesar's Rome or Alexander's Greece.
It took a few months, and intense international debate and lobbying with European nations, but, after he personally met with the leader of the United Kingdom, finally a deal was struck. After the military action began, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain told the nervous British people that giving in to this leader's new first-strike doctrine would bring "peace for our time." Thus Hitler annexed Austria in a lightning move, riding a wave of popular support as leaders so often do in times of war. The Austrian government was unseated and replaced by a new leadership friendly to Germany, and German corporations began to take over Austrian resources.
In a speech responding to critics of the invasion, Hitler said, "Certain foreign newspapers have said that we fell on Austria with brutal methods. I can only say; even in death they cannot stop lying. I have in the course of my political struggle won much love from my people, but when I crossed the former frontier [into Austria] there met me such a stream of love as I have never experienced. Not as tyrants have we come, but as liberators."
To deal with those who dissented from his policies, at the advice of his politically savvy advisors, he and his handmaidens in the press began a campaign to equate him and his policies with patriotism and the nation itself. National unity was essential, they said, to ensure that the terrorists or their sponsors didn't think they'd succeeded in splitting the nation or weakening its will. In times of war, they said, there could be only "one people, one nation, and one commander-in-chief" ("Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer"), and so his advocates in the media began a nationwide campaign charging that critics of his policies were attacking the nation itself. Those questioning him were labeled "anti-German" or "not good Germans," and it was suggested they were aiding the enemies of the state by failing in the patriotic necessity of supporting the nation's valiant men in uniform. It was one of his most effective ways to stifle dissent and pit wage-earning people (from whom most of the army came) against the "intellectuals and liberals" who were critical of his policies.
Nonetheless, once the "small war" annexation of Austria was successfully and quickly completed, and peace returned, voices of opposition were again raised in the Homeland. The almost-daily release of news bulletins about the dangers of terrorist communist cells wasn't enough to rouse the populace and totally suppress dissent. A full-out war was necessary to divert public attention from the growing rumbles within the country about disappearing dissidents; violence against liberals, Jews, and union leaders; and the epidemic of crony capitalism that was producing empires of wealth in the corporate sector but threatening the middle class's way of life.
A year later, to the week, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia; the nation was now fully at war, and all internal dissent was suppressed in the name of national security. It was the end of Germany's first experiment with democracy.
As we conclude this review of history, there are a few milestones worth remembering.
February 27, 2003, was the 70th anniversary of Dutch terrorist Marinus van der Lubbe's successful firebombing of the German Parliament (Reichstag) building, the terrorist act that catapulted Hitler to legitimacy and reshaped the German constitution. By the time of his successful and brief action to seize Austria, in which almost no German blood was shed, Hitler was the most beloved and popular leader in the history of his nation. Hailed around the world, he was later Time magazine's "Man Of The Year."
Most Americans remember his office for the security of the homeland, known as the Reichssicherheitshauptamt and its SchutzStaffel, simply by its most famous agency's initials: the SS.
We also remember that the Germans developed a new form of highly violent warfare they named "lightning war" or blitzkrieg, which, while generating devastating civilian losses, also produced a highly desirable "shock and awe" among the nation's leadership according to the authors of the 1996 book "Shock And Awe" published by the National Defense University Press.
Reflecting on that time, The American Heritage Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983) left us this definition of the form of government the German democracy had become through Hitler's close alliance with the largest German corporations and his policy of using war as a tool to keep power: "fas-cism (fbsh'iz'em) n. A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."
Today, as we face financial and political crises, it's useful to remember that the ravages of the Great Depression hit Germany and the United States alike. Through the 1930s, however, Hitler and Roosevelt chose very different courses to bring their nations back to power and prosperity.
Germany's response was to use government to empower corporations and reward the society's richest individuals, privatize much of the commons, stifle dissent, strip people of constitutional rights, and create an illusion of prosperity through continual and ever-expanding war. America passed minimum wage laws to raise the middle class, enforced anti-trust laws to diminish the power of corporations, increased taxes on corporations and the wealthiest individuals, created Social Security, and became the employer of last resort through programs to build national infrastructure, promote the arts, and replant forests.
To the extent that our Constitution is still intact, the choice is again ours.
[Once again, the last half of this post is not my writing, but my attempt to comunicate the circumstances of my writing. It is not my intention to break copyright law, but to preserve history.]
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