Subscribe
E-Paper
.jpg/dims/resize/108/optimize) |
Several years ago, I listened to a well-known Korean expert on foreign policy argue that Korea's history of non-aggression uniquely qualifies the country to be the leading candidate to be a peacemaker in the region. In other words, since Korea has never invaded any of her neighbors throughout history, no country has any historic bad blood with Korea that would predispose them to distrust Korea.
Of course, non-aggression doesn't mean that Korea never wanted to conquer new territories, but that it never had the war-making capacity to invade neighboring countries. Whatever the reason, Korea as a non-aggressor is ingrained into the collective Korean identity. In fact, it goes even deeper than being just a non-aggressor. Korea views itself as the perpetual victim.
In some ways, this is justifiably so. According to some counts, Korea had been invaded close to a thousand times by foreign forces in her recorded 2,000-year history. That's once every two years. Korea's experience in the last century hasn't helped this state of mind either, relegated to being a pawn in a game among great powers. In fact, a divided Korea reminds all Koreans that they have been and continue to be victims of arbitrary injustice perpetrated by others.
In other words, Koreans generally view themselves as a pure and peace-loving people who have been repeatedly victimized by ''unjust, undeserved, and immoral" acts of foreign powers, but managed to survive intact and remain whole through persistence, courage and ingenuity, thereby deserving of both empathy and admiration.
This is important because having a collective self-identity centered around the nobility of victimhood influences how Korea behaves as a people and nation.
One of the key traits of a victim mentality is that you ascribe bad intentions to others which borders on paranoia and refuse to recognize your own responsibilities for a negative situation that you helped created. If this doesn't describe the foreign policy tendencies of North Korea, I don't know what does.
But it's not just North Korea. South Korean reactions to the American pivot to Asia and debates surrounding China's recent overtures all center on how Korea is once again at risk of falling victim to the evil intentions of the great powers as they pull Korea from all sides. In this narrative, Korea is once more the helpless victim with no ability to affect the ultimate outcome that is bound to be negative.
Someone with a victim's mentality also tends to be very black and white in their outlook. In other words, someone else is either good or bad; you are either with us (fellow victims) or against us (victimizers). But if the world is always a battle between good and evil, then no compromise is possible, which is one of the cornerstones of representational democracy. In this world, the political process isn't about governing but about vanquishing the bad. Politics becomes a proxy for a religious struggle.
But the most insidious trait of a victim mentality is the inability to view the world from someone else's shoes. A victim is so self-absorbed with his victimhood that he or she is incapable of moving out of that mental space. This also means that a victim is incapable of recognizing that he may also be a perpetrator. Perhaps this is why Korea tends to be tone-deaf when it comes to many injustices that the Korean society allows and even condones.
For example, how many times do we have to watch ridiculous blackface makeup's on Korean TV shows? But these obviously racist caricatures don't even warrant the slightest bit of self-reflection in mainstream Korean society. Outside observers debate whether this is racism or ignorance. But I believe that it's the inability of Korean society to see itself as the ''bad guy" in anything because it is so attached to its victim mentality.
Another example is how the Korean society systemically discriminates against foreign, migrant workers. Amnesty International says, ''On average, migrant workers are paid less than South Korean workers in similar jobs and are at greater risk of industrial accidents with inadequate medical treatment or compensation."
So, who's the victim and the perpetrator here? It seems fairly obvious, but most mainstream debate centers around how these workers are taking jobs away from native South Korean workers and how they are bringing criminality into Korea. In other words, how they are victimizing Koreans.
I don't even need to mention the legal discrimination against members of the LGBT community, people with certain diseases like AIDS, older workers, etc. And don't forget the open preference for "white" English teachers over other native English speakers.
There seems to be no recognition that such discrimination is akin to perpetrating violence on others. It's almost as if Korea is so invested in seeing a victim when looking into a mirror that it has become blind to its own role as a perpetrator of injustice.
Even worse, victimhood also becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. As Richard Bach said, ''If it's never our fault, we can't take responsibility for it. If we can't take responsibility for it, we will always be its victim."
Jason Lim is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture. He has been writing for The Korea Times since 2006. He can be reached at jasonlim@msn. com, facebook. com/jasonlimkoreatimes and @jasonlim2012.
