Author: Josh Philip Ross

The Taewongun (prince regent, seated) and Emperor Kojong.

The closing years of the Joseon Dynasty, Korea’s last, are pretty grim: having maintained its isolation for so long, Korea is totally unprepared for its encounter with an aggressively expanding West, and the country is rapidly infiltrated by a variety of foreign powers before finally falling under the harsh dominion of Japan.

One of the early contacts from outside was a French expedition that sailed to Korea and tried to deliver a letter to the Taewongun, the prince regent and ruler, who refused to receive it. Troops were sent to repel the French, which they did, but not without heavy losses. In the aftermath, the Taewongun determined to strengthen his military. The process is fascinatingly described by Pak Chehyeong, whose essay is included in Sources of Korean Tradition, Vol. 2. Here is a rather lengthy excerpt:

The law of the land had proscribed the occult arts and supernatural means of building up strength. These restrictions were now set aside, and anyone with special skills and talents was encouraged to come forward and render service for enriching the country and strengthening its defense ….

Persons … were recruited or promoted because of their extraordinary strength, as were … others who possessed mechanical skills. Every day, people came to Unhyeon Palace offering novel and strange plans. One claimed that cotton cloth could stop bullets, and tests were conducted. The bullet penetrated two layers of cotton cloth stuffed with cotton, but twelve layers stopped the bullet. Finally, vests made of thirteen layers of stuffed cotton cloth were produced together with helmets made of ivy stems. When riflemen wearing these new devices underwent training in midsummer, they were overcome by heat and suffered nose bleeds. There was also a suggestion that a boat made of crane feathers would be so light that a direct hit by a cannonball would mearely push the vessel backward without destroying it. Accordingly, hunters were sent out to capture cranes whose wings were then glued to a boat. The boat, named a “flying boat,” was found useless, however, because the glue melted suddenly when it was launched in the water.

The essay goes on to describe the encounter with the American steamer the General Sherman, which the Koreans captured, executing its crew. Unfortunately, none of the Koreans could figure out how to operate the unusual craft, and even after making a direct replica, then taking apart the original and rebuilding it at great expense, they couldn’t get the boat to go faster than “a dozen or so paces in one hour,” probably because they were using charcoal rather than coal to fuel it.

The Katrina disaster has exposed so many jaw-dropping failures and wrongs in our government that I don’t see much point in highlighting one or another, but let me direct you to Talking Points Memo, which has been doing an admirable job of keeping up with the revelations. Or, for a snarkier but actually quite informative approach, check out Wonkette.

According to the New York Times, “Hurricane Katrina had exposed a critical flaw in the national disaster response plans created after the Sept. 11 attacks. According to the administration’s senior domestic security officials, the plan failed to recognize that local police, fire and medical personnel might be incapacitated.”

Are they serious? That didn’t occur to them? What is wrong with these people?

Mr Annan said the findings were “deeply embarrassing”.

“The inquiry committee has ripped away the curtain, and shone a harsh light into the most unsightly corners of the organisation.

“None of us – member states, secretariat, agencies, funds and programmes – can be proud of what it has found.”

Annan has also been pushing hard for precisely the kinds of reform that would make another such scandal much less likely.

None of this absolves him of responsibility, of course, but compared to the way certain other world leaders deal with their mistakes — pretending they don’t exist, blaming others, giving medals to those most directly responsible for the biggest disasters, supporting disinformation campaigns — I give Annan high marks.

In reading Ki-baik Lee’s A New History of Korea, I’ve come to the period of Japan’s colonial occupation and annexation of Korea, a topic that exercises Koreans more than any other. Lee makes some effort to keep his anger in check, but as with every other Korean source I’ve seen on the subject, he can’t help but portray the period in black-and-white terms: the Japanese are wholly nefarious in their intentions, the Koreans who hand over the country are “traitors,” and the Korean guerrilla fighters are “righteous armies.”

I suspect that there is truth to all these ideas. Unfortunately, the lack of nuance makes it hard to understand what really took place, and hard to trust the Korean sources. Two key questions that are never asked are how the Japanese justified their actions to themselves and the world, and what motivated their Korean collaborators.

Lee seems to believe that Japan’s annexation and exploitation of Korea was part of an orchestrated long-term plan whose only goals were to enrich the Japanese at the expense of the Koreans and to provide a platform for war against Manchuria and Russia. If this is the case, then Japan exercised considerably more forethought than the colonial powers it was emulating, such as England, France and Russia, who tended to advance willy-nilly in defense of commercial or military interests as they arose, rather than as part of a grand strategy to conquer a vast territory.

Even more difficult for me to believe is that Japan, alone among the colonial powers, felt no need to justify its actions in terms of aiding the people it conquered. England, France, even Russia saw themselves as civilizing forces, bringing economic development and decent standards of behavior to the benighted peoples of the world. In some cases — notably the Belgian Congo — the mad scramble overwhelmed any attendant civilizing mission, but the exploitation of Korea required sustained economic development. Actions that Lee characterizes as wholly aggressive, such as seizing all uncultivated land for distribution to Japanese colonist farmers, encouraging Japan’s vastly more efficient fishing fleet (which in 1912 caught more fish than the Korean fleet with about half as many boats and just 14 percent as many fishermen) to expand into Korea, and greatly expanding Korea’s mining industry, seem like actions that could have been characterized by the Japanese as intended to benefit the Korean people over the long term by bringing this backward, underdeveloped territory into the progressive Japanese fold.

That this was contrary to the wishes of the Koreans themselves, and indeed required harsh repression and an astonishing 140,000 arrests in 1918 alone, is certainly a point that must be emphasized. So is the opportunism of the Japanese who used the undemocratic colonial administration to extract vast profits for themselves, often by cheating and impoverishing Koreans. These tendencies are at the root of the problem of colonialism, and they can be seen today in the no-bid contracts handed out to American companies by the American-run Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. At the time, however, the weight of international opinion still favored the colonial enterprise as the best way to foster economic development, and the Japanese were right to recognize that if they didn’t take administrative control in Korea, some other great power would. Nor can it be questioned that the dithering, helpless Korean monarchy had lost all legitimacy by the time of the Japanese takeover.

As for the Koreans, did those Koreans who signed away sovereignty stand to gain personally by doing so? Were they forced to put their signatures to the traitorous documents? If so, what methods of coercion were used? If not, what could have motivated them? Did some Koreans, recognizing their own government’s weakness, actually welcome the Japanese, hoping that they would modernize Korea as they had modernized their own nation?

Korea has perhaps not come far enough from its difficult period of humiliation to be able to look at it squarely. Certainly it hadn’t by 1967, when Ki-baik Lee published his book, in what was still the hopeful period of Park Chung-hee’s long dictatorship. The Korean War was then still an open wound, while the economic “miracle” was yet to come. But even now, when Korea has much to be proud of, there is still a tendency to portray the Japanese colonization as an evil scheme plotted by terrible men bent on tormenting Korea for their own narrow gain. The reality is perhaps more frightening: Korea’s humiliation, exploitation and suffering were carried out, at least in the early years, by well-meaning officials who believed in the decency and necessity of what they were doing.

“I am absolutely disgusted. After the tsunami our people, even the ones who lost everything, wanted to help the others who were suffering,” Sajeewa Chinthaka, 36, as he watched a cricket match in Colombo, Sri Lanka. “Not a single tourist caught in the tsunami was mugged. Now with all this happening in the U.S. we can easily see where the civilized part of the world’s population is.”

This is from a Reuters article on the international reaction to what has been going on in New Orleans.

Sri Lanka was in the midst of a decades-old, deeply acrimonious civil war between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority when they were hit by the tsunami. In the afternath, Sinhalese rescued Tamils and vice versa, while the Sinhalese government negotiated an agreement with the Tamil Tigers to let relief supplies into Tiger-held areas. Granted, the post-tsunami ceasefire has frayed and the agreement on aid distribution never quite worked how it was supposed to. But we’re talking about an actual war in a third-world country.

Similarly, the disaster in the Aceh province of Indonesia led separatists and government forces to pause in their fighting to deal with the crisis at hand. That sense of cooperation helped to foster a peace agreement there, and the Indonesian government is now using that agreement as a model for trying to solve a similar conflict in Papua New Guinea.

That America and Americans have responded to the Katrina disaster in such an ugly way is deeply saddening. It brings to mind the grim “helpless giant” era of the 1970s, with gas lines, a failed war abroad, anti-Americanism on the rise and a crumbling economy. But this may be worse.

Our reputation in the world was bad enough before. When we say we want to export American values, people pictured Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and the chaos in Baghdad. Now New Orleans can be added to that list. If we can’t manage to instill basic decency in our own people, or protect them in a crisis, what right do we have to preach to others?

The disaster in New Orleans began as an act of nature, but it has by now become a gigantic national failure that raises some very serious and troubling questions about our country and its future.

What is wrong with Homeland Security?

Four years after 9/11, one would have expected that the well-funded Department of Homeland Security would have some plans in place for a disaster like the one we’ve seen. After all, in contemplating what terrorists could do, short of detonating a nuclear device, that would top 9/11 for casualties and visual impact, the simplest thing I could come up with was bursting a dam to flood a populated area. New Orleans, it turns out, would’ve been a perfect target. Yet it took federal emergency managers days to coordinate their response, and lawlessness and chaos reign, while thousands upon thousands of Americans are left without food, water, sanitation, medical care or the most basic requirements for safety and security.

Meanwhile, buses of refugees have nowhere to go. In four years, you would think that Homeland Security would have drawn up contingency plans for waves of refugees from major urban areas. It appears we have no such plans. Instead, there are pleas for more buses and for places to put people. And New Orleans is a small city, with fewer than half a million residents. A similar disaster in New York, Los Angeles or Houston would leave millions wandering aimlessly about the country.

What is wrong with the people of New Orleans?

A question that has so far been skirted is what the hell is wrong with New Orleanians. A corollary question is whether citizens of other American cities would behave as badly under similar circumstances. My guess is that it depends on whether the city has a vast black underclass that is hopelessly poor, uneducated and alienated. The mayor of New Orleans and the governor of Louisiana are publicly furious with the federal government — and rightly so — but the rest of us have a right to be angry with a city and state that have allowed a significant population to become so disaffected that they go Haitian at the first opportunity.

How can armed gangs take over an American city?

One simple answer: guns. There were plenty of gun shops to loot, and the looters are the ones who did so. If a similar disaster were to strike New York, it would be much harder for armed gangs to take over because we don’t have nearly so many gun shops. As in Baghdad, so in New Orleans: unsecured arms depots are a recipe for anarchy.

There may still be some diehard libertarians who believe that the power of lawless armed gangs to prevent federal government action in New Orleans is a sign of the health and vigor of our American freedom. Hopefully, most of the militia nuts will recognize that New Orleans is what their philosophy means in practice. Rule of the strong over the weak is not pleasant.

What is happening to America?

After years of shrinking government and a widening gap between rich and poor, Katrina has revealed deep domestic weaknesses. Neglected infrastructure, federal ineffectuality, poverty, poor education, understaffed police forces and many more problems came together to create the disaster now unfolding. The terrifying question is whether New Orleans is an abberation or a harbinger. I would like to believe the former, but I have few grounds for doing so. Mighty empires do fall, and the complete collapse of a major city is certainly not a good sign.

When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move (mp3).

Best of luck to all the victims, and to the city and the region.

Update: Get the orignial Kansas Joe/Memphis Minnie version of the song here, courtesy of MoistWorks.

The devastating floods in Louisiana and Mississippi are a huge disaster that has caused and will continue to cause enormous human suffering. They are also the biggest breach of homeland security since September 11, 2001. Granted it was nature, not terrorists, that broke our defenses and sent hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing from urban centers. But the chaotic, uncoordinated response to the disaster — which, unlike terrorists, gave ample advance warning — is not encouraging.

Of course, it’s possible that the initial complaints of poor coordination are simply panicked and misplaced. We’ll have to wait some time to find out just how well or badly authorities handled the crisis. Still, the tens of thousands of refugees trapped in the Superdome do not create an impression of competent emergency management.

My friend Daniel and I were recently discussing Douglass Coupland’s 1996 novel Microserfs, and this led to a discussion of the dot-com boom and bust. Like many people who rode the dot-com wave, I felt that the story was ultimately about the crash, and about the combination of naivety and irresponsible greed that led so many of us to spend the money of venture capitalists, and then of ordinary investors, on free sodas, catered Friday beer busts, Razor scooters and overblown interior decor.

Daniel took me to task for overlooking the enormous success of the dot-com era and the accuracy of many of the most extravagant predictions. (He also accused me, unfairly in my opinion, of preferring to sneer rather than think just because I happen to believe that a May 2001 article called Boo! And the 100 Other Dumbest Moments in e-Business History, originally published by Business 2.0, is really funny.) Yes, there were a lot of 24/7s and Boo.coms that spent themselves out of existence without ever coming up with a viable product, but they were just a sideshow. The real story is the way that the Internet has transformed politics, social relations, media access, business operations — our whole society, in other words. Nonsense about new paradigms of social organization, which already sounded silly by 1998, has come true: look at Friendster, Tribe.net, Craig’s List, MoveOn. Grandiose predictions of productivity gains also came true. Blogs have given ordinary people unprecedented media access. And shopping online has become ordinary.

So what happened? Henry Blodget, former stock guru (who makes it into the Business 2.0 article for declaring that “unlike with other famous bubbles … the Internet bubble is riding on rock-solid fundamentals … Just because the Internet stock phenomenon looks like a bubble, it isn’t a given that the bubble will burst”) and now a regular contributor to Slate, argues in an op-ed piece in today’s Times that the bubble phase is actually a natural part of a four-phase cycle of “boom, bust, mature growth and decay” that most industries go through. It’s a smart way of thinking about what went so spectacularly wrong and so spectacularly right during the dot-com era of the late 1990s.