TWIB-III: 26
Apr. 13th, 2009 09:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akujunkanTWIB-III 24 is coming, just as soon as I figure out how to write an actual review of a book so odious I don't really want to touch it again. In the meantime, here's the review of the heinous book I read this week:
1) 反日・親北韓国の暴走 – 呉 善花
Korea's Anti-Japan, Pro-DPRK Rampage – O Sonfa
O Sonfa, born and raised in Korea for the first two decades of her life, has carved a niche for herself in Japan by denigrating her home country. To hear O explain it, post-dictatorship South Korea is crypto-fascist, crypto-Communist state that's just waiting for its moment to reunify with the North and...well, she leaves the rest to our imaginations, probably because in reality a post-unification Korea is likely to be so crippled by economic and humanitarian crises that it won’t be in any position to do anything to anyone, anywhere.
According to O, Korean nationalism is based on chauvinistic notions of ethnic exclusivity, and this is Bad. (O conveniently ignores the fact that much Japanese nationalism is based on the same.) Korean media gives short shrift to the Japanese abductee issue because Koreans Hate Japan. (Never mind that the Korean abductee issue gets basically zero play in Japan.) The Roh administration (Rampage was published in 2004) wants reunification to increase Korea's influence in East Asia--horrors! (Why this is an inherently Bad thing, while the unspoken corollary that Japan wishes to maintain its influence in East Asia is not a Bad thing, is never examined.) Korea's national origin myth is nothing but lies and historical inaccuracy. To her credit, O does acknowledge that Japan and China's national origin myths are lies and historical inaccuracies, but they're not Bad because they were...written down a few centuries earlier. Literally, that is all the justification O offers. But the best part comes when O devotes a paragraph or two to insisting that Roh Moo-Hyun's Korea is transforming into Hitler's Germany.
That’s right, O boldly proclaims there's little difference between the post-totalitarian, democratic Republic of Korea and Nazi Germany.
Although Rampage's first several chapters find O decrying Korean unification from the rooftops, she paradoxically ends the book with a chapter advocating that Japan trick the United States into toppling the Kim Jong-Il regime and reunifying the Korean peninsula. I'm not quite sure why. She lost me at Hitler.
In other news, I'll be posting TPics again just as soon as my computer decides to recognise my camera.
That will be all.
1) 反日・親北韓国の暴走 – 呉 善花
Korea's Anti-Japan, Pro-DPRK Rampage – O Sonfa
O Sonfa, born and raised in Korea for the first two decades of her life, has carved a niche for herself in Japan by denigrating her home country. To hear O explain it, post-dictatorship South Korea is crypto-fascist, crypto-Communist state that's just waiting for its moment to reunify with the North and...well, she leaves the rest to our imaginations, probably because in reality a post-unification Korea is likely to be so crippled by economic and humanitarian crises that it won’t be in any position to do anything to anyone, anywhere.
According to O, Korean nationalism is based on chauvinistic notions of ethnic exclusivity, and this is Bad. (O conveniently ignores the fact that much Japanese nationalism is based on the same.) Korean media gives short shrift to the Japanese abductee issue because Koreans Hate Japan. (Never mind that the Korean abductee issue gets basically zero play in Japan.) The Roh administration (Rampage was published in 2004) wants reunification to increase Korea's influence in East Asia--horrors! (Why this is an inherently Bad thing, while the unspoken corollary that Japan wishes to maintain its influence in East Asia is not a Bad thing, is never examined.) Korea's national origin myth is nothing but lies and historical inaccuracy. To her credit, O does acknowledge that Japan and China's national origin myths are lies and historical inaccuracies, but they're not Bad because they were...written down a few centuries earlier. Literally, that is all the justification O offers. But the best part comes when O devotes a paragraph or two to insisting that Roh Moo-Hyun's Korea is transforming into Hitler's Germany.
That’s right, O boldly proclaims there's little difference between the post-totalitarian, democratic Republic of Korea and Nazi Germany.
Although Rampage's first several chapters find O decrying Korean unification from the rooftops, she paradoxically ends the book with a chapter advocating that Japan trick the United States into toppling the Kim Jong-Il regime and reunifying the Korean peninsula. I'm not quite sure why. She lost me at Hitler.
In other news, I'll be posting TPics again just as soon as my computer decides to recognise my camera.
That will be all.