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Moon Yumi Modern Utopia or ‘Animal Society’?
racial discrimination at a barbershop in Oregon, where
the barber refused to cut an Oriental’s hair. He continues
to question whether countries with a history of slave trading
can truly establish individualism, which cherishes the
value of each human being, or practice liberalism, with its
respect for individual freedom. Chang then tells his audience,
“If you deny the value of the human being, you cannot
create a foundation of morality,” and “Where morality
is destroyed, you cannot build a house for individualism
or liberalism.” Chang thus argues that individualism and
liberalism in the UK and US are none other than “selfishness”
and “self-indulgence.”
Chang also problematizes British and American industrialism,
where workers are seen primarily as the means
of production rather than as human beings, and capitalists
function primarily as businessmen rather than as
citizens. In this circumstance, capitalists and workers
fight each other over their own interests with no sympathy
toward the other side; the stronger survive but the
weaker collapse. Chang asks, in this “animal society of the
survival of the fittest,” how one can discover liberalism or
individualism? He concludes that this “utilitarian civilization”
does not extend virtuous or benevolent hands (to
others), and that its exploitation and violence have dried
the blood of the Eastern nations and bent their bones. 95
There Chang finishes his speech. Regardless of its harsh
rhetoric at the ending, Chang’s speech is nevertheless
moderate and intelligent, expressing his reflections on
British and American society. It is difficult to tell whether
Chang was forced to support the war or whether he had
personally begun to accept the Japanese Pan-Asianist
messages. Be that as it may, this is a speech in which
Chang criticizes the UK and US not because he rejects
their values of Christianity, individualism, and liberalism
but because their own history has betrayed such values.
Another speaker, Sin Hŭngu, also spoke along these
lines, berating the Anglo-Saxons for their racism and
colonialism. Sin argues that “global chaos” has been instigated
by those who have colonized the world over the
past several hundred years. They invaded and exploited
other races and countries with wicked means and brutal
violence, yet fancied they were benefitting others.
Sin depicts Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) and his term
“the White Man’s Burden” as symbolizing Anglo-Saxons’
“delusion” about being “burdened” with “guiding colored
races.” Due to this arrogant perception, Sin argues, the
Anglo-Saxons propagate humanitarianism or democracy
but actually reject racial equality. Sin criticizes that this
hypocrisy endangers not just East Asians but all colored
races. 96
5. Conclusion
John Lewis Gaddis emphasizes “peripheral origins” and
“inadvertence” in the development of the Cold War in
Asia. He argues that the US and USSR had “barely” started
the Cold War in the region before the Chinese Communist
Revolution in 1949. 97 He identifies the Korean War
as a case in which the local civil war, “which would have
existed in any event,” drew the US and USSR into their
“unintended confrontations.” 98 Bruce Cumings, in contrast,
finds an earlier symptom of the Cold War in the
postwar US intervention in the Far East and its reversal of
the “Korean revolution,” which he regards as imminent at
the time of Korea’s liberation in August 1945. The characteristics
of this “civil war” or “revolution” are still unclear
because historians have insufficiently examined the transition
from wartime colonial Korea to this postcolonial
“civil war.” To clarify the nature of this “revolution,” this
article has made an initial attempt to map out the ideological
landscape of late colonial Korea, reviewing the
wartime discourse on America.
Several observations from this investigation modify
the notion of severe ideological splits in colonial Korea
and their extension into the postwar era. The Koreans
who wrote on America during the wartime period maintained
different ideological positions, but their disagreements
were more complicated and ambivalent than the
antagonism of the 1920s between nationalists and socialists.
To my own surprise, the wartime Korean imaginaries
of America strongly countered the Japanese Pan-Asianist
discourse. While the Japanese expressed the urgent need
to overcome modernity and the superficiality of Americanism,
some provocative Korean authors called American
civilization a “barometer of modernity” or the “future
of the human race.” Not all leftists gave up their socialist
criticism of capitalism, but many of them were impressed
by the progress for the working class in Rooseveltian
America.
95 “Taedonga chŏnjaenggwa pandoŭi mujang,” pp. 24-27.
96 “Taedonga chŏnjaenggwa pandoŭi mujang,” pp. 28-29.
97 John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 55.
98 John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know, p. 71.
32 Korean Histories 3.2 2013