A Complex National Mind, Contested National Justices:
A Frame Analysis of the Koreans' Vietnam War Debate In Cyberspace
A paper submitted to International Communication Division at the 2003 AEJMC
Convention
By
Nam-Doo Kim (Doctoral Student)
University of Texas at Austin
School of Journalism
Mailing Address: 918, E. 40th ST. #116, Austin, TX 78751
Phone Number: (512) 459-4634
Email address: [log in to unmask]
- Abstract -
South Korean weekly Hankyoreh21 ran an apology campaign after it uncovered
the Korean army's alleged civilian killings in the Vietnam War. This paper
examines Korean netizens' Vietnam War online debate during the campaign
period. Through a two-level frame analysis, the researcher analyzes how a
diverse of pros and cons over the apology campaign were linked to various
applications of socio-political values and national identities.
Furthermore, based on a literature review on ethnocentrism, I argue that
the ethnocentric attitudes of the anti-campaign side can be explained by
the concept of relative deprivation. Finally, this paper discusses how a
humanitarian remedy of ethnocentrism could be effectively developed by
taking advantage of, rather than by throwing out, cultural resources that
are tied with national identities.
A Complex National Mind, Contested National Justices
A Complex National Mind, Contested National Justices: A Frame Analysis of
the Korean Vietnam War Debate in Cyberspace
In late summer of 2001, Vietnamese head of state Tran Duc Luong visited
South Korea and met the then-President Dae-jung Kim. In the first summit
between leaders of the two countries, Kim expressed his regret for Korea
having inflicted pain on the Vietnamese people during the Vietnam War.1
Many Korean critics viewed Kim's expression as rather unexpected, and some
of his political opponents said that the president sullied the honor of
Korean veterans who had tours of duty in the war . In contrast, several
civic groups concerned with the Korean army's alleged war crimes during the
Vietnam War saw Kim's comment as affected by their humanitarian efforts,
which had been initiated by Korean news magazine Hankyoreh21.
In 1999, Hankyoreh21 published stories of Koreans' alleged civilian
killings in the Vietnam War. Based on a Vietnamese government report on the
Korean troops' war brutality, writer Su-jeong Ku collected harrowing
accounts of Vietnamese survivors and argued that Korean combatants
massacred thousands of civilians including women, children and the elderly
during military operations to wipe out dens of Viet Cong guerillas . In
September, the news weekly launched a fundraising campaign Donate to Repent
to build medical facilities in a Vietnamese rural province as an expression
of Koreans' apology for past wrongdoings. The campaign lasted a year and
Hankyoreh21 ran a series of news reports that included veterans'
confessions to their past perpetrations and civic groups' supporting
activities.
Although part of the response was positive, there also emerged strongly
negative public sentiment. On June 27, 2000, as many as 2,400 Korean
veterans raided the Seoul office of Hankyoreh21, destroying the company's
facilities. This event served as a moment to draw heavier attention to the
news weekly's campaign activities. Markedly, as Internet access expanded in
the late 1990s, South Koreans concerned with the apology campaign were able
to use the technology to create spaces for public discussion. In fact,
although the mainstream Korean news remained silent about the Korean
soldiers' alleged war crimes during the Vietnam War, this issue was one of
the most hotly debated topics on Korean electronic bulletin boards during
the year's summer . This phenomenon, as a vivid indicator of the Korean
public's interest on the topic, provided an opportunity for the researcher
to observe how ordinary people make sense of an issue and develop their
views through interactions with each other.
Despite the diversity of grassroots expression, the inflammable topic often
polarized the public--one side criticizing campaigners and the other
championing them. From the campaign advocates' perspective, the hostile
responses reflected Koreans' nationalistic ethnocentrism, a phobia of
admitting the wrongdoings of other Koreans . Yet, it is noteworthy that the
ethnocentrism for this case, though not a misnomer, was not as simplistic
as it might seem. Although anti-campaign online posts often discredited the
alleged Koreans' war brutality, mistrust for the Vietnamese testimonies was
not the sole reason for hostility toward the call for repentance Indeed,
many of those who admitted Korean veterans' past wrongdoings blamed
campaigners for other reasons. To many Koreans, the issue was not simply a
matter of whether or not the Vietnamese allegations were true. Rather, it
was a question of how to accept a very probable fact that the appalling
event had really happened. Accordingly, Korean participants' varying views
were derived from complex interactions between their moral values and their
interpretations of national identity.
The online controversy surrounding the alleged war crimes serves as a
noteworthy study topic for examining the complexity of ethnocentrism in
ordinary citizens' discursive practices and how a more fair-minded
countermove may arise in a country in which most of its citizens possess a
strong ethno-national consciousness. Given this, the study has three
purposes. The first is to map the issues as pros and cons in the online
debate. Rather than simply sorting out key assertions in the online debate,
this research analyzes, using the concept of frame, how the pro and con
arguments are linked to various applications of moral values and national
identities. The second is to suggest an explanation for how the Korean
discussants formed their conflicting views on the alleged massacre and the
ongoing campaign activities. Lastly, I will discuss how a humanitarian
remedy of ethnocentrism could be effectively developed by taking advantage
of, rather than by throwing out, cultural resources that are tied with
national identities.
On Ethnocentrism
William Sumner, who coined the word ethnocentrism, defined it as "the view
of things in which one's own group is the center of everything, and all
others are scaled with references to it" , p.18). Social scientists have
since wrestled with the problem of ethnocentrism on a variety of social and
political dimensions. Nationalism is another relevant phenomenon, which has
been alternatively thought of as a communal spirit that brings individuals
together or as an unrestrained passion that seeks the aggrandizement of
power superior to others. Nationalism and ethnocentrism are similar in
their abilities to involve in-group loyalty and antipathy toward
out-groups, although nationalism tends to accompany more intense mood and
rituals of allegiance as well .
From a social psychology perspective, both nationalism and ethnocentrism
are socio-political extensions of in-group bias, a widespread phenomenon
observable across all levels of human communities . Popular theories of
in-group bias such as Tajfel's social identity theory generally presume
that the very cognition of in-group and out-group inevitably leads to
ethnocentrism and discrimination . Yet the assumption of reciprocity
between in-group attachment and out-group denigration has been called into
question by many counterevidences (Hinkle & Brown, 1990;Brewer, 1999).
Although factors for in-group attachment also provide a fertile ground for
out-group hostility (Brewer, 1999), the relationships between in-group
identification, in-group favoritism, and out-group prejudice are often
complex and multifaceted.
In regard to the hotly debated war crimes issue under study, in dispute
were not only Vietnamese allegations of massacre occurrences, but also
other Koreans' call for apology. Accordingly, anti-campaigners'
"ethnocentric" attitudes can be viewed two-fold: the one toward the
Vietnamese people, who were contrasted to Koreans based on nationality, and
the other toward campaigners, who were pitted against veterans in the South
Korean community. It is necessary to consider the convoluted nature of the
two-fold inter-group conflict, in which those under direct, intense attack
were more likely Korean campaigners than the largely unknown Vietnamese.
Anthropologist Swartz early observed that the core of ethnocentrism
concerns less a group's belief of its own superiority than a group's
holding values as the standard by which all groups are judged.
Psychological scholarship has explained ethnocentric attitudes in several
ways other than in-group superiority (see Druckman, 1994;Brewer, 1999). For
this study's purpose, worthy of note is a view that in-group identification
is transformed into out-group hostility by relative deprivation. Defined as
a group's perception of a gap between its value expectations and value
capabilities (Gurr, ), relative deprivation is fundamentally a matter of
subjective equity rather than of objective equality, and may involve an
ethical judgment (). ) experimental study found that a group's failed
expectation of fair treatment generated an intense animosity toward
successfully targeted out-group members. Their findings establish a view
that ethnocentrism may be the result of a projection cast upon those
perceived to be responsible for violation of expected justice.
It is also noteworthy that in-group favoritism even without overt out-group
prejudice cannot escape the suspicion of ethnocentrism. Indeed, many forms
of inter-group discrimination are a result of, not the presence of
out-group hostility, but the absence of positive sentiment toward those
groups (Brewer, 1999). In Brewer's view, as long as positive emotions such
as compassion are only reserved for the in-group and withheld from
out-groups, the possibility of "concentric loyalty" (Allport, 1954) to an
in-group at one level and to a more inclusive group that spans out-groups
in poor situation at another level remains unlikely.
Most interestingly, pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty ; presents an
outstandingly radical view of ethnocentrism in his explorations of viable
forms of human solidarity. Mindful of the postmodern thinking critical of
universal notions such as objective truth, Rorty opposes the tendency to
assume that ethnocentrism is a "particularistic" obstacle in the way for
cosmopolitan causes. Instead, he bases senses of moral obligation on
historical communities and re-defines the concept of ethnocentrism as a
"benign" vehicle for inspiring measures of generosity that are potentially
greater than previously called for by appeals to abstract "common humanity."
While Rorty's choice of the term ethnocentrism is open to criticism2, his
vision of concrete, particular communities as a means of broadening the
circle of "us" is highly instructive . Hollinger, in his "post-ethnic"
perspective, suggests that the problem of ethnocentric circle be
counteracted by "a willingness to engage that problem while remaining
suspicious of the will to enclose" (p.328). Although this study does not
dramatically change the meaning of ethnocentrism as Rorty suggests, I will
argue later that a self-reflexive, inclusive application of national
consciousness was a crucial discourse strategy for the Korean campaign
supporters who engaged in the Vietnam War crimes debate.
Frame Analysis of Discursive Community
The dynamics of in-group positivity and out-group negativity within a
flexible boundary of "us" is compatible with the discursive nature of
community. Inspired by Benedict Anderson's idea of a nation as an
"imagined political community," some communication scholars subscribe to a
view that communities are defined and established by rhetorical discourse
(; . Communities are then understood in terms of "shared beliefs, values,
distinctive patterns of metaphor, common experiences or collective
memories, technical vocabularies, and a host of other communal bonds
manifested in their discourse" (Hogan, 1998, p.292).
This discursive process involves contestations of competing claims over
specific concerns. Several studies of public memory share a view that the
symbolic language of national community is subject to competing
interpretations of the past and the present (e.g. ; . Markedly, Bodnar
(1992) sees the construction of public memory as an intersection of
official culture and vernacular culture. Official culture, sponsored by the
nation-state, presents interpretations of the sacred past and accentuates
national loyalty to the status quo. Vernacular culture, in contrast,
presents the complexities of personal experiences and represents various
grassroots interests. As a result, ordinary citizens generally agree to
defend national symbols, but often privilege vernacular dimensions of
patriotism over official expressions. The U.S. Vietnam Veterans Memorial,
for example, serves as a national symbol that shows the continuing tension
between official expressions of patriotism within the power structure of a
nation-state and citizen comradeship and sorrow for the dead (Bodar, 1992; .
To examine vernacular-based cultural expressions associated with national
consciousness in the Vietnam War crimes cyber-debate, this study employs a
concept of frame. Frame is a flexible concept that functions as a root
metaphor for the symbolic representation of reality . Recent frame studies
have been largely the confluence of the constructivist approach (e.g.
; and the cognitive psychological approach (e.g. ; . Of the numerous
definitions of frame, Reese's definition generally suits this study's
position. According to Reese, "frames are organizing principles, that are
socially shared and persistent over time, that work symbolically to
meaningfully structure the social world" (p.11).
When presented in a compelling light, the meaning-organizing frame plays a
crucial role in establishing a range of criteria for public discussion
(Reese, 2001). This role can be likened to Stuart Hall's () idea of a
situation-defining power that "provides the criteria by which all
subsequent contributions are labeled as relevant or irrelevant--besides the
point" (p.59). In cognitive psychological tradition, frames are often
viewed as consisting of symbolically organized devices for "causal
reasoning," whereby causality, responsibility, and treatment of public
issues are addressed . Frames also help citizens manage value-conflict
through "value-framing" ); a majority of individuals are internally
conflicted with multiple, and often opposing, socio-political values for
many public issues ). An individual's value hierarchy is thus susceptible
to outer forces like frames that privilege certain high principles .
Issue framing studies in media context typically pose a question of how
media frames guide the audience member's thinking (e.g. ; . Moving beyond
this "audience as receiver" view, some researchers see the audience as
participants who engage in interpretative processes, in which part of media
discourse is fused into "common knowledge" and becomes available for
personal framing of public issues (e.g. Neuman, Just, and Crigler, 1992;
Iorio and Huxman, 1996). In particular, Gamson (1992) makes a linkage of
individual expressions to larger social constructs of collective action
frames, by identifying three thematic components: injustice, agency, and
identity. According to Gamson, the injustice component refers to moral or
political indignation; the agency component refers to consciousness that
collective action is necessary to alter undesirable conditions; and the
identity component indicates the process of defining "us," typically in
opposition to a "them" holding different interests or values.
Among these three components, the injustice and identity components seem
useful for this study's purpose--analyzing different senses of injustice
and interpretations of national identity among the campaign supporters and
opponents. However, the agency component does not perform in this way, for
it would be rather hard to expect ordinary online users to have expressed
their concerns in an activist manner.
Gamson also states that individuals can integrate in their framing various
symbolic resources such as media discourse, personal knowledge, and popular
wisdom. Again, in relation to the Korean case concerned, many participants
were informed by varying degrees of Hankyoreh21's war crimes stories and
campaign efforts. Many Korean males who had finished their civic duty of
military service utilized their experiential knowledge to make sense of the
issue. Contested public memories of the Vietnam War and other historical
events of Korea also appeared. The examination of symbolic resources in the
online debate is thus helpful to understand how participants engaged
themselves in various interpretative practices related to Korean national
consciousness.
Drawing on the framing literature reviewed so far, this study adopts three
frame analysis strategies: (1) frame analysis can describe a diversity of
pros and cons on a multifaceted issue in public discussion in terms of a
set of contested frames governed by value-associated criteria. Each of
those criteria provides a rhetorical battleground possibly beneficial to
one of the two parties in dispute; (2) frame analysis can also show how
each pro- and anti- campaign side integrated various types of symbolic
resources and developed its own sense of injustice and interpretation of
national identity; and (3) frame analysis allows us to speculate about, on
the one hand, the psychological mechanism of campaign opponents'
"ethnocentric" attitudes, and, on the other hand, campaign supporters'
counterdiscourse strategy.
Data Gathering and Analysis Procedure
The Internet continues to increase its presence in the daily lives of South
Koreans, creating the "Net craze" syndrome . South Korea's recent Internet
penetration rate, including high-speed broadband access, is one of the
highest in the world, and Korean Internet users spend their time online far
longer than any others . By mid 1990s, commercial closed network-based
online services such as Hitel, Chollian, and Nownuri had been providing
subscribers with numerous information databases. The boom of the Internet
that began in 1996 has led to the success of purely Web-based new
competitors, and traditional online service companies have been gradually
transforming themselves into community sites with huge subscriber bases.
For this study, two different types of electronic bulletin boards were
chosen: the Plaza offered by Nownuri (www.nownuri.net) and a special
discussion board titled "The Vietnam War: were we offenders or victims?" at
Hitel (www. hitel.net). Of many Nownuri bulletin boards, Plaza is a general
public forum that allows posting of any opinion on a public topic. In
contrast, the Hitel bulletin board was assigned for a specific period to an
applicant who hosted the board and invited others to post their opinions on
the designated topic of discussion.3 The Hitel's discussion board began
shortly after the Korean veterans' raid into Hankyoreh21's office--the
height of the public's interest in the issue. Specifically, the debate
continued from July 3, 2000 through July 23, 2000. In the case of Plaza, I
focused on data from May 16, 1999, the publication date of Ku's first
massacre story, to September 6, 2000, Hankyerh21's announcement of the
campaign's conclusion. Then ten sessions of Korean keyword searches were
conducted for the posts listed on the general forum board.4 After I
excluded messages that had no comment on the Vietnam War crimes issue, the
final number of messages used in analysis was 495 (306 for Hitel, 189 for
Nownuri's Plaza).
Although the sample is not representative of the Korean public in
demographic terms, the online material gathered was expected to show
typical argument patterns generated by those most attentive to the issue in
cyberspace. However, two sample characteristics should be noted. First,
youth is one characteristic of the Internet population; as of the end of
2001, 44 percent of Korean online users are between 20 and 30 . It is thus
reasonable to assume that most message posters were in their late teens,
twenties, or early thirties. Secondly, despite the rapidly diminishing gap
between male and female Internet users in South Korea, the Vietnam War
crimes debate was likely a male-dominant phenomenon. Indeed, as I will
detail later, many Korean participants completed their civic duty of
military service, and their service-related concerns crucially affected the
debate.
To distill diverse online expressions into a set of frames, a preliminary
content analysis was performed. Two Korean graduate students classified all
messages into pro-campaign, anti-campaign, and unclear ones. This decision
was made through an interpretation of the writers' "intention." When a
message apparently acknowledged the campaign efforts but placed weight on
blaming campaigners, it was coded as anti-campaign. The opposite case was
coded as pro-campaign. Also coded was the presence or absence of any
comment on each of following subtopics: (1) credibility of massacre
occurrences, (2) justifiability of was misconduct, (3) assessment of Korean
veterans' service, (4) political backdrop of the Vietnam War, and (5)
comparison between Vietnamese tragedies and Korean tragedies. The average
percentage of agreement was .85, varying between .78 and .90.
Guided by the result of this procedure, I proceeded to a two-level frame
analysis in qualitative style, based on a distinction between assertion
frames and consensus frames. Assertion frames concern specific argument
types of pros and cons in an argumentative context, facilitating reasoning
by relating assertions to certain criteria with the help of symbolic
resources. Consensus frames refer to overarching ideas that span a range of
assertion frames sharing an issue position (for this case, the pro- or
anti-campaign position). Accordingly, an individual online message can
include multiple assertion frames, while a volume of messages holding the
same issue position may share a consensus frame. To identify assertion
frames, I determined subtopics-related criteria, each of which provided a
rhetorical battleground for campaign advocates and their rivals to present
their assertion frames. I then sought for a sense of injustice and an
interpretation of national identity shared by each of the two sides to
reconstruct a consensus frame. Notably, individuals posting on Hitel's
special discussion board were more responsive to one another than were
Nownuri posters. Despite this difference, the discourse patterns of the two
bulletin boards were generally similar.
Result of Frame Analysis
_______________________________
TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE
_______________________________
Table 1 shows cross-matched percentages of multiple-coded five subtopics by
general issue position in the content analysis data. Three points can be
made here: (1) the most frequent subtopic throughout all issue position is
justifiability of Koreans' war misbehavior, whereas trustworthiness of
massacre occurrences is relatively infrequent; (2) assessment of Korean
veteran's service is favored slightly more by anti-campaigners, while
historical backdrop of the Vietnam War shows a parallel for supporters, (3)
most noticeably, comparison of national tragedies, one in Vietnamese
history and the other in Korean history, is overwhelmingly campaign
advocates' favorite.
This result gives a hint at how each of the subtopics, by inducing a
certain mode of reasoning within a constrained context of debate, provided
an uneven rhetorical ground on which one party engaged uphill fights and
the other downhill fights. Frame analysis gives a clearer picture of this
discursive struggle by identifying a range of criteria for discussion as
well as various patterns of metaphors, personal experiences, and collective
memory. Followed are, at first, a set of assertion frames and then two
overarching consensus frames, one for campaign supporters and the other for
their rivals. All Korean citations are translated by the researcher into
English.
Credibility Criterion
Some anti-campaign messages on the two bulletin boards expressed a strong
doubt about the credibility of Hankyoreh21's war crime stories. Critics
viewed Ku's initial and follow-up news articles as work far short of
journalistic standards, generally basing their judgment on three grounds:
(1) the failure of balancing Vietnamese claims with Korean veterans'
counterclaims, (2) the use of emotional and biased language implying the
brutality of Korean soldiers, and (3) the possibility of some factual
errors in description of Korean soldiers' alleged war crimes.
In their untrustworthy Vietnamese fiction frame, antagonists complained
that Ku did not deliver the voice of Korean veterans, which should be
included to make a story complete. Campaign opponents also criticized the
general descriptions in her stories, citing them as too emotional and
sensational to be deemed good journalistic work and thus giving a
misguiding picture of the Vietnam War. A person at Plaza wrote,
Hankyoreh21, going far beyond raising an issue,…has been saying something
like terrifying atrocities, apology, compensation, and restoration of
conscientiousness, basing its argument only on one-sided testimonies given
by Vietnamese locals.…It's nothing but amateurism and sensationalism.
These responses usually accompanied a feeling of distrust for Vietnamese
testimonies, often raising the possibilities of exaggeration,
misunderstanding, and even lying for money. Several messages asserted that
many alleged Korean War crimes were indeed committed by U.S. troops or
Vietnamese communists. A few messages pointed to the possibility that
Vietnamese officials confused South Koreans with American GIs in amassing
reports of foreign forces inflicting civilian damages. Furthermore, these
posts raised the possibility that the Vietnamese government created Korean
massacre stories to cover up its own civilian killings during the North
Communist regime's takeover of South Vietnamese territories.
In contrast, the supporters expressed their essential trust of
Hankryoreh21's war crime stories despite some problematic details. Some
supporters responded that opponents were finding fault with Ku's stories in
the small details so they could deny her stories altogether. Others, facing
the criticism of the Vietnamese allegations, suggested that Korea support a
joint probe in the alleged war crimes rather than simply dismissing
Vietnamese statements as untrustworthy. Yet the most powerful claim came
from the confirmation of several Korean veterans to accusations of alleged
Korean War crimes. In their established fact frame, several message posters
pointed out that few anti-campaigners indeed knew of Hanyoreh21's continued
follow-up coverage, which included a number of confessions from Korean
veterans to their perpetrations in the war. (e.g., . On Hitel's and
Nownuri's bulletin boards, several supporters posted electronic copies of
the news magazine's articles to voice their case. In this regard, campaign
supporters played a crucial role in spreading the newsmagazine's campaign
agenda.
War Conduct Criterion
At heart of the dispute, however, lay not a question of whether Korean
soldiers truly killed Vietnamese civilians, but a question of how to define
the nature of the tragic deaths. Similar to the general plea of Korean
veterans for the mistrust of any genuine civilian presence in guerilla
warfare , most anti-campaign posts asserted that there was indeed no clear
boundary between enemies and civilians in the Vietnam War, and that some
"unnecessary" deaths were unavoidable. The anti-campaign side noted that
Viet Cong guerillas did not wear standard military uniforms, that many
Vietnamese peasants actually collaborated with their enemies, and, still
worse, that these "civilians" sometimes attacked Korean soldiers. A person
at Plaza wrote,
In a guerrilla warfare where a baby-carrying mother or a seven year-old kid
on a road is throwing a grenade, who is an enemy and who is a civilian?
Have you ever fought in the battlefield at that time? Imagine that's your
life at stake in the risky business.
To increase the potency of their war-driven killing frame, opponents often
raised rhetorical questions such as "what if you had been there?" and "do
you really know the nature of war?" These questions encouraged their
audience to identify with Korean soldiers forced to fight in a desperate
situation on foreign soil. This "in-Korean-soldiers-shoes" rhetoric was
powerful, especially among young Korean males who had finished civic duties
of military service. Koreans who have experienced military training are apt
to make sense of the "war reality" through the recall of "barrack life." A
number of message posters shared the point that the Korean army's killing
of the Vietnamese occurred as a result of self-defense or
reflex-retaliation as part of an irresistible war psychology. These posters
further stated that, had they themselves been in the Vietnamese jungle,
they could not have behaved differently.
On the other hand, responses from campaign supporters on the two bulletin
boards were complex within the boundary of the undeniable killing frame.
Several supporters maintained that many reported cases of civilian killings
were not accidental deaths of countrymen, but rather, intentional mass
killings of unarmed villagers including seniors, pregnant women, and young
children. To prove this point, a few of supporters included in their
messages electronic copies of Hankyoreh21's war crime stories. But the
remainder of supporters agreed with their opponents that it would have been
difficult for Korean solders sent to the Vietnamese jungle to behave in a
completely reasonable manner, given the nature of guerilla warfare and
human fragility in the situation.
Although a majority of campaign supporters acknowledged that Korean
veterans were not to blame for their actions in this particular situation,
there was often a subtle but significant difference between the two sides
in applying this non-blameability to their assertion frames. The implicit
message behind the war-driven killing frame was the denial of the Korean
army's wrongdoing in Vietnam: since there is an imperative for self-defense
in wartime life-or-death situations, and since no one escapes enemy
suspicion in the Vietnamese jungle, every war conduct, even an inordinate
retaliation, was justifiable because of its situational need. The
undeniable killing frame, on the other hand, separated the non-blameability
consideration from its acknowledgment of past Korean wrongdoing.
Sophisticated supporters observed that, while agreeing that calling
veterans war criminals would be inappropriate, the war principle of
civilian protection still served to prevent the already horrible state of
warfare from becoming worse. A Hitel message stated,
An attack on civilians is often understandable, but that doesn't mean
responsibility simply goes away. Guerilla warfare cannot be an exception.
If we accepted a war without any protection of civilians, what would be its
consequences? Think about how horrible a war could be.
Generally speaking, however, the debate over appropriate war conduct was
not advantageous to campaign advocates. Some remained rather ambivalent
about the personal accountability of Korean servicemen involved in war
crimes, while others attempted to base their opinions on a historical
judgment of the Korean intervention in the Vietnam War as unjustifiable,
rather than on war code observance. Supporters held the burden of an
argument requiring a more complex reasoning than did their counterpart.
Debtor's Obligation Criterion
One of the most frequent comments in the debate was that of Korean veterans
as victims of the Vietnam War. Both campaign supporters and opponents felt
little disagreement on this point. Yet the substantial meanings that they
attributed to the term were not always in agreement. Opponents often
portrayed Korean veterans in terms of their self-sacrifice for the nation
without due reward. In this view, Korean veterans were often named "our
fathers" and "elderly brothers," an expression suggesting a national bond
between veterans and other Koreans. In fact, most campaign supporters did
not raise a serious objection to these terms. However, while accepting this
depiction of past veteran service, many supporters viewed veterans as
innocent participants involved in perpetrations caused by Korean political
leaders' inappropriate decision to send a detachment to Vietnam.
The opponent side was aggressive in demonstrating how Korean veterans had
been "victimized" despite their self-sacrifice for the nation. Opponents
argued this point in roughly three terms: (1) personal damage, (2) little
reward, and (3) national contribution. A number of critics employed their
Vietnam-War-related knowledge to paint a compassionate and favorable
picture of veterans. This narrative recalled many dead Korean servicemen,
far more disabled veterans, and, especially, nearly 30,000 patients of
various defoliant-related diseases, some of which are genetically passed
down to their children. Sympathetic comments on the veterans' defoliant
damage were frequent, perhaps because it served as a concrete mark
suggesting that Korean ex-servicemen were also victims of the Vietnam War
due to the dissemination of defoliants such as Agent Orange by the U.S.
military forces. Additionally, opponents faulted the Korean government for
not substantially compensating injured veterans during their service.
Anti-campaign critics also mentioned the national contributions of Korean
veterans, tapping into two lay versions of Korean history during the
Vietnam War period. One version holds a theme of national security,
narrating that Korean servicemen were sent to Vietnam to prevent the United
States from withdrawing their troops stationed in South Korea. If the
withdrawal had happened, the story goes, North Korea would have threatened
South Korea's national security. Although critics now seriously challenge
the credibility of this view, it remains a popular memory in South Korean
history . Another popular tale is an economic one. It presents the Korean
government receiving large financial assistance from the United States in
return for military participation. This narrative also claims that major
Korean businesses enjoying the wartime boom and the sacrifice from Korean
veterans offered a cornerstone for Korea's rapid economic growth throughout
the 1970s.
Given this background, it is of little surprise that many Koreans were
enraged at writer Ku because of her apparent "ungrateful" attitude toward
"our fathers." By defining Vietnam-returnees as national benefactors, the
unrewarded self-sacrifice frame invokes a sense of a debtor's duty for
Koreans to pay homage to and, if necessary, to protect veterans on the
basis of national spirit, as is shown by a following Plaza message:
Has Su-jeong Ku fought in the Vietnam War? Isn't she enjoying the fruit of
a common wealth awarded in return for veterans' fighting and for the blood
they shed in the past? Has she ever tried to understand their pain when
they are called criminals not by foreigners but by Koreans? Has she ever
tried to share their suffering from defoliant-related diseases? And saying
Vietnam-returnees are killers? Our fathers are criminals?…A family member
shouldn't say, "my dad is a murderer."
Similar to the war conduct criterion, the debtor's obligation criterion
served as a rhetorical vantage ground for the opponent side. It would be
misguided to say that campaign supporters were against claims from their
rivals that Koreans should be respectful of veterans' service to the
nation. To the contrary, supporters struggled to clarify that the
repentance movement had no intention of dishonoring Vietnam-returnees, and
several of them urged Korean government to take appropriate measures for
both Vietnamese victims and Korean ex-servicemen damaged from defoliants.
Rather than glorifying veterans' self-sacrifice, however, supporters placed
weight on the view that Korean servicemen were innocent wrongdoers who had
been forced to fight in a morally questionable war.
Some campaign advocates aggressively presented the unresolved dark legacy
frame. This frame was often mixed with a radical understanding of the
Vietnam War in terms of a fight between Vietnamese nationalist forces and
Western foreign forces rather than between the communist world and the free
world. Because this frame implied a radical view of the Vietnam War as a
"dirty war" caused by the "immoral" U.S. government, South Korea's
participation was downplayed as well. By placing the Korean troop's
atrocities in a broader historical context, supporters suggested that South
Koreans inherited a moral debt to the Vietnamese by making a sincere
apology for their past wrongdoings. A Hitel user wrote,
It's true that Korean servicemen were also victims of the wrong war. But
it's true only to us. Whatever excuse we're making to the Vietnamese, we're
still offenders.…Maybe it makes sense to say that we actually had few
choices other than to participate in the Vietnam War. Maybe at that time we
were forced to make a choice, good or bad whichever. Nevertheless, once we
made a choice and took an action, we are bearers of the responsibility for
what's left.
It is noteworthy, however, that the distinction between the two frames was
often complicated. Indeed, the unresolved dark legacy frame has two
implications. The first implication holds that the real locus of
responsibility for the war crimes lies in the U.S. and Korean governments.
The second one holds that Korea owes the Vietnamese an apology for her past
wrongdoings. Some anti-campaigners adopted the first point in their
complaints that campaigners were unfairly calling senior ex-servicemen
cruel murderers despite the presence of other larger wrongdoers. With a
premise that campaigners are trying to place veterans in pillory for their
past human fragility, the unrewarded self-sacrifice frame was able to
incorporate the radical version of the Vietnam War story into its
definition of Korean veterans as victims in need of protection from
campaigners' accusations.
Fair Comparison Criterion
Unlike the war conduct and the debtor's obligation criterion, the fair
comparison criterion was the favorite of campaign advocates. One typical
strategy from the supporter side was to shift the debate's primary focus
from the disheartened Korean ex-servicemen to the bereaved Vietnamese
through a slogan of "let's see our wrongdoings from the eyes of victims
that we once were." By finding affinity between the tragedies of the
Vietnamese and sufferings of Koreans throughout history, campaign
supporters presented the parallel to our tragedies frame, which mixed a
humanitarian message of "they are us" with a nationalist mood. Supporters
took various examples of Korean tragedies, a majority of which are
categorized into two terms: (1) mass sufferings under Japanese colonial
rule from 1910 to 1945,5 and (2) national tragedies of the Korean War from
1950 to 1953, in particular, the No-geun-ri massacre in 1950.6
These forms of public suffering taken from Korean history were the key
symbolic resources that campaign supporters used to penetrate the firewall
of Koreans' national-bond-based in-group favoritism. Supporters highlighted
the wounds of Korean victims involved in national tragedies and accentuated
the essential similarity between Korean cases and Vietnamese cases--the
great pain to innocent civilians inflicted by foreign military forces. The
main thrust in the parallel to our tragedies frame lies in delivering a
message that the actions of Korean soldiers are parallel to those of
Japanese imperialists or U.S. troops toward Koreans. In particular,
supporters took advantage of Koreans' animosity against Japan to contend
that Koreans, unless sincerely acknowledging their own wrongdoings, are not
entitled to blame the Japanese for not admitting their past perpetrations.
A Nownuri user noted,
How much have we been blaming Japan and demanding compensation from Japan
for what she had done to us? We also did something terrible to the
Vietnamese. But there is no consensus for regret and repentance. Your wound
hurts the same way my wound does. Take a look back on the Vietnam issue and
check our morality.
As far as the fair comparison criterion is concerned, campaign opponents
found themselves on the defensive. They responded with the no parallel in
our history frame, mentioning every point of difference between Koreans'
war misconduct in Vietnam and the Japanese past perpetrations in Korea.
Several individuals argued that no comparison existed between South Korea's
participation in the Vietnam War and Japan's imperialist rule during the
colonial period. For example, a Hitel user wrote,
Koreans were killed just as Viet Congs were killed in the Vietnam War.
[When comparing what Koreans did to the Vietnamese to what the Japanese did
to Koreans,] did we have comfort women? Did we take over the Vietnamese
land? Did we conscript their workers for the war? Did we ban the use of
their language and force Korean language on them? There's no comparison
between the two.
In a similar fashion, a few others asserted that there was a crucial
difference in terms of guerilla warfare between civilian killings in the
Vietnam War and the No-geun-ri tragedy in the Korean War, as is illustrated
by a following Plaza message:
Some say No-geun-ri equals the Vietnam War case. I can't understand where
they got the equation. There's a huge difference between the Korean War and
the Vietnam War in terms of guerilla warfare….Did a Korean girl point a gun
at the U.S. platoon personnel? Did a Korean kid throw a grenade at U.S.
GIs? Did a Korean villager make friends with Americans in day and attack
them at night? Nothing like that happened in the Korean War.
Since no two historical events are identical, the opponent side was able to
specify differences between the Vietnamese case and Korean cases.
Responding to this criticism, several pro-campaigners presented a broader
historical view of the Vietnamese as a people who had been affected by
French colonialism and the subsequent civil war, a comparison to the
history of modern Korea. They observed that many of the excuses made to
justify the Vietnam War misbehavior--especially, the difficulty faced by
Korean soldiers to distinguish civilians from enemies in civilian
outfit--could be applied to the U.S. personnel involved in the No-geun-ri
massacre. In this manner, the parallel to our tragedies frame presented the
underlying similarity between "our wounds" and "their wounds" in history
from the perspective of victims, a perspective grounded in Korea's
historical experiences but also made universal regardless of the victims'
specific nationality. In this context, a Hitel discussant responded,
I have nothing but just one comment. What if it happened to you? What if
your family members or someone you loved were slaughtered, raped and killed
for fun by foreign military forces? Can you say still the same thing,
that's what happens in a war? Take just a minute to think about the issue
from the position of the Vietnamese people.
Synthesis: "Korean Victims First" versus "No Double Standard"
On the whole, each of the anti- and pro-campaign side was easily able to
manage various elements of their assertion frames into one overarching
consensus frame, namely, the Korean victims first frame for the opponent
side and the no double standard frame for the supporting side. Each of the
two consensus frames contains its own injustice and identity components.
The allied anti-campaigners shared an understanding of the campaigners--the
campaign was intended to dishonor and dishearten Korean veterans, by
establishing the charge of war crimes. This key definition of the situation
served as a gateway by which the opponent side found injustice. In their
view, calling Korean veterans cruel war criminals was a shortsighted
judgment void of any understanding of specific issues such as the peculiar
nature of guerilla warfare in the Vietnam War and the "victimized" state of
Vietnam-returnees without receiving due compensation.
The Korean victims first frame also privileged the position of the agonized
Korean servicemen. The common question of "what if you had been there?" and
its many responses indicate how frequently participants identified
themselves with their senior soldiers. The identity component in this
consensus frame established a Korean national bond between the "victimized"
Korean veterans and other Koreans who share a debtor's sentiment. Despite
campaign supporters' statements of having no intention to insult
Vietnam-returnees, anti-campaigners were skeptical of acknowledging Korean
soldiers' past wrongdoings without questioning their honor.
Given these circumstances, campaign supporters had to make a dramatic
change in the primary definition of the real problem to succeed in their
case. In the no double standard frame, supporters understood the animosity
against the repentance movement primarily in terms of Korean in-group
favoritism, that is, the attitude of only caring about Korean wounds caused
by foreign forces, without paying attention to others' pain inflicted by
Koreans. The injustice component in this frame was therefore the failure to
see moral "correctness" in applying the same standards to the Vietnamese
tragedy as the Koreans-involved tragedies. From the supporters'
perspective, turning a deaf ear to the call of repentance was a symptom of
Korean hypocrisy and cause for a bad reputation that "Koreans are no better
than those who previously offended them."
In a compelling effort to prove this point, the supporter side utilized a
variety of public memories based on historical wounds in modern Korea to
find affinities between the Vietnamese sufferings and the Korean tragedies.
In this way, the identity component in the consensus frame transformed
Korean national consciousness into a broadened vision of "us," which
combined humanitarian empathies for neighboring victims with nationalist
memories of a wounded history. Supporters attempted to separate the issue
of personal accountability from the acknowledgment of Korean soldiers' past
wrongdoings and set a priority to the latter over the former in their no
double standard frame.
Concluding Remarks: Whose Suffering Comes First?
The Vietnam War remains a difficult past in memory, not only to the United
States but also to South Korea. The Korean Vietnam War online debate began
with the topic of alleged civilian killings by Korean soldiers. Yet, the
thrust and parry of the two sides covered far more--competing
interpretations regarding the war misconduct, the Vietnam War, and even the
modern history of Korea. Despite their differing views, participants in the
debate largely agreed that Korean servicemen involved in war atrocities
were not only offenders but also victims of the Vietnam War. Given this,
one question lay at the heart of the dispute: whose suffering comes first?
The agonized Korean wrongdoers nearby or the unknown Vietnamese victims,
who are not part of us?
As I have already noted, anti-campaigners suspected the apology campaigners
to place the blame on Korean veterans involved in the alleged war
atrocities. Part of this understanding comes from the nature of a crime
issue as a solution that is typically narrated in an individualistic way of
putting suspects on their trials. This individualistic solution, similar to
picking "rotten apples out of a crate," lacks serious inquiries into
historical and institutional settings in which individuals have little
control. Campaign opponents were well aware of the problem of this
approach--shifting all historical "baggage" to individuals who had been
forced to be at the crime scene. Anti-campaigners, however, anchored their
judgment solely in a personal-attribution-based reasoning process and, as a
consequence, failed to distinguish their imagined war crimes tribunal from
the humanitarian campaign efforts.
Campaign opponents, including young Korean males, viewed the entire issue
from the position of Korean servicemen. Sympathetic comments on Korean
veterans were often mixed grievances against mandatory military service,
implying that Vietnam-returnees were victims of a conscription system, not
only of the Vietnam War. Many young Koreans believe that members of the
upper class exempt themselves from the draft through bribery or acquisition
of foreign citizenship (Lee, August 16, 2002). Draft evasion has become a
serious issue since the mid-1990s, and the public's discontent with the
practice of the draft system has also increased. Given this, it is of
little surprise that most discussants, regardless of their differing views
on the campaign, saw the Vietnam-returnees as a relatively deprived segment
of Korean society.
Returning to the topic of ethnocentrism discussed earlier in this article,
the in-group-favoring judgment, that is, "ethnocentric bias," of the
campaign opponents merits a re-evaluation. The in-group favoritism of
anti-campaigners toward Korean veterans did not come much from a naïve,
prejudiced belief in ethno-national superiority. Although
anti-communism-based negative attitudes toward the Vietnamese appeared on
occasion, an unmet expectation of social justice within Korean community
played a more significant role in the opponents' reasoning. Favoritism
toward Korean ex-servicemen was derived from an imagined identification
with them, who were perceived as a relatively deprived group in Korean
society. The criticism of campaigners was the result of a misguided
projection of the responsibility for Korean veterans' sufferings toward
apology campaigners, instead of toward those responsible for Korea's
participation in the Vietnam War.
As far as the supporter side is concerned, it should be noted that campaign
supporters attempted to present the humanitarian cause of the repentance
movement by suggesting an inclusive, self-reflexive, but still historically
particular national identity of "us." Supporters utilized the symbolic
resources derived from Korean historical experiences and located the
Vietnamese sufferings in the public memory of South Korea's wounded
history. To evoke sympathy for the bereaved Vietnamese, supporters found
concrete historical affinities between Korean sufferings and Vietnamese
sufferings, rather than simply relying on an abstract appeal to common
humanity. Furthermore, supporters transformed the competitive worldview
among nations, one characteristic of a nationalist ideology, into a moral
version to spell out the need for a Korean apology to the Vietnamese. For
example, supporters presented an imagined picture of "moral competition"
between South Korea and Japan, underlining the need for Koreans to "make
themselves better than their prior enemy." In general, campaign advocates
presented Korean moral superiority as a quality to be pursued, not as an
attribute currently held, and suggested the need for achieving "moral
progress" as a national goal.
Although campaign advocates were strongly against the narrowly defined
national-bond-based sentiment, they used cultural resources tied with
Korean national consciousness in constructing their frames to compellingly
present the cosmopolitan campaign cause from the historical standpoint of
victims. The frame analysis of the campaign supporters' discourse points to
Rorty's claim that "feelings of solidarity are necessarily a matter of
which similarities and dissimilarities strike us as salient, and that such
salience is a function of a historically contingent final vocabulary"
(1989, p.192).
Finally, if an ethnocentric tendency is so endemic to human species as some
social psychologists claim, it may be useful to re-evaluate underlying
notions of both ethnocentrism, which bases political judgments and moral
obligations to historically contingent communities, and its cosmopolitan
counterpart, some of whose rhetoric are appeals to common humanity,
arguably inherent in all human beings. To extend our sense of "we" for
greater human solidarity, we need to know how to use our language and
symbolic resources as critical tools to call into question the
establishment of beliefs, assumptions, and motives that underlie cultural
identities. Part of the cultural legacy, at hand because of our inescapable
condition of belonging to particular communities, may enrich awareness of
the need to overcome traditional differences of nation, race, religion, and
customs and to empathize with others' pain and suffering as well. This is
perhaps one of the greatest hopes that we seek in practices of human and
mass communication.
References
Footnotes
1According to the official Vietnam War record, South Korea dispatched a
total of 312,853 combat personnel to Vietnam from 1964 through 1971. By the
end of the war in January 1973, 4,960 Korean soldiers had been killed and
roughly 100,000 combatants were injured (Ku, 1999, September 2).
2According to Forster (1998), many critics attack Rorty's pragmatism as a
form of cultural relativism that reduces knowledge into a matter of shared
beliefs in a particular community. Rorty, in his rejection of any general
theory of truth and knowledge, argues that the term relativism itself
reflects a lingering epistemological framework. Forster likens Rorty's use
of "ethnocentrism" to "forming a ladder that is to be kicked away once the
pragmatist turn is taken" (p.59). For Rorty to effectively defend himself
from the charge of relativism, in Forster's view, Rorty's use of
"ethnocentrism" and "solidarity" should be restricted to cases in which
those terms open concrete and critical investigations into the
establishment of particular beliefs and practices.
3In fact, Hitel had a general forum board parallel to Plaza, but many Hitel
users concerned with the issue moved to the special discussion board for a
stable debate. This resulted in rather spotty and unfocused posts on the
forum board. Nownuri also had a special discussion board on the war crimes
issue. However, the host of the discussion attempted to limit the debate to
legal issues concerning alleged war misconduct. This topic was perhaps too
demanding for the general audience, since many Nownuri users posted their
concerns to Plaza.
4Ten Korean keywords are as follows: bet-nam and wol-nam (Vietnam), hak-sal
(massacre), yang-min (civilian), han-guk-gun and kuk-gun (Korean army),
chon-jaeng (war), yong-byong (mercenary), ko-yop-je (defoliant), and
han-kyo-reh (a part of Hankyoreh21).
5Japanese atrocities during this colonial period include constant
suppression of Korean independence struggles, massacres of Korean
civilians, the conscription of Korean youths during the Pacific War, and
the use of Korean "comfort women" as prostitutes for Japanese military
personnel. Despite the establishment of diplomatic relations between Japan
and South Korea in 1965, Many Koreans still have a deep-felt animosity
toward Japan .
6On September 29, 1999, the Associated Press released a news article
concerning some American veterans, who confirmed that a group of US
soldiers gunned down hundreds of South Korean refuges in rural countryside
No-geun-ri during the Korean War . Although there have been other folk
tales of war brutality involving foreign and even Korean military forces,
the No-geun-ri case was the favorite of campaign supporters, because of its
instant dissemination to the Korean public during the onset of the apology
campaign, and because of the tragedy's characteristic similarity to
atrocities committed by Korean troops during the Vietnam War.
Table 1. The Percentage of Subtopics by Issue Position and by Message Board
Issue position
Subtopic
Pro-campaign
Anti-campaign
Unclear
Total
Credibility of massacre occurrences
Hitel
18.3%
21.8%
9.0%
17.3%
Nownuri
18.8
24.6
11.9
18.5
Average
18.5
22.8
10.2
17.8
Justifiability of war misconduct
Hitel
56.0
50.4
35.9
48.7
Nownuri
52.2
57.4
42.4
50.8
Average
54.5
52.8
38.7
49.5
Assessment of Korean veterans' service
Hitel
30.3
43.7
25.6
34.3
Nownuri
43.4
54.1
37.3
45.0
Average
35.4.
47.2
30.7
38.4
Historical backdrop of the Vietnam War
Hitel
37.6
30.3
21.8
30.7
Nownuri
33.3
21.3
28.8
28.0
Average
35.6
27.2
24.8
29.7
Comparison of national tragedies
Hitel
62.4
32.7
37.2
44.4
Nownuri
63.8
24.6
28.8
40.2
Average
62.9
30.3
33.6
42.8
N of messages
Hitel
(109)
(119)
(78)
(306)
Nownuri
(69)
(61)
(59)
(189)
Combined
(178)
(180)
(137)
(495)
Note: Each percentage is based on a proportion of the number of messages
that mentioned each subtopic to the total number of messages, which was
calculated by issue position and by message board. For example, the first
entry (18.3%) was obtained by dividing the number of pro-campaign Hitel
messages that addressed credibility of massacre occurrences (20, which was
omitted for convenience) by the total number of pro-campaign Hitel messages
(109), and then multiplying the result by 100. In addition, because a
message possibly includes more than one subtopic, the cumulated percentage
for each message board exceeds 100 percent.
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