Murderous keys to history

The bomb shelter in our village near the DMZ.

Recently (November 14), BBC News on-line ran an article headlined ‘South Korea fears Hamas-style attack from the North’. It began: ‘On Sunday, when South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol hosted US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin at his home for dinner, he urged Mr Austin to be vigilant against any type of North Korean attack, including surprise assaults "resembling Hamas-style tactics".’

We who live near to the DMZ like to joke that people living and working in Seoul are more endangered by North Korea than we are, that we’ll watch the missiles flying high over our heads, aiming at targets in the densely populated metropolis. And anyway, as you can see from the photograph at the start of today’s blog, there’s a handy bomb shelter just one hundred meters from our house.  But this shelter probably wouldn’t be much protection against marauding North Korean soldiers if, for some extraordinary reason, all the many South Korean soldiers garrisoned around here took their time arriving to project us. But in such darkly ‘propitious’ circumstances, would the North Koreans set about wreaking in our village such ghastly vengeance on me, my wife, and all my neighbours – the children, pregnant women, elderly, their pets -  as Hamas did in Israel? This is more than just a macabre thought-experiment, because it helps foreground what is specific about the worldview of Hamas. These North Korean soldiers will certainly have been conditioned to hate South Koreans (and a British citizen whose nation supported the Republic of Korea during the Korean War and has done so ever since),  but will they act with such extreme and calculated savagery as the Hamas militants did in Israel?  Will they record their deeds on social media? Does the ‘alternative’ reality which the North Korean soldiers inhabit also put them beyond the rules of war respected by open societies and inscribed in UN charters?

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Hamas and the North Korean Communist Party are vastly different political organizations, but both are variants of totalizing forms of ideology. Increasingly, however, in Israel/Palestine two rival and implacably hostile totalizing religious ideologies confront each other: Islamic fundamentalism and Zionist settler fundamentalism. These ideologies offer to believers a reality tailored to  achieve the illusion of absolute control of time - the past, present, and future –  and of space - both physical or profane and sacred.  As Hannah Arendt observed in the late 1940s in relation to what she called ‘totalitarianism’, this kind of ideology “differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the ‘riddles of the universe,’ or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws, which are supposed to rule nature and man."  

Absolute faith in possessing the ‘key to history’ is what unites the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas and the Zionist settlers with the so-called ‘communist’ system of North Korea. They all share the belief that they have been empowered to see the inescapable future. They believe they possess the secrets of prophecy. Totalism breeds and sustains a mindset founded on the wilful absence of alternatives, on the compulsory, the single-minded, and on autosuggestion, in that the prophesy is apparently self-fulfilling.

Let’s stop for a moment to consider how we - by which I mean those of us lucky to be able to say in public that we are liberal free-thinkers - differ from these fanatics. What do we take for granted when we reflect on the relationship between the past, present, and future?

Unlike members of Hamas, Zionist settlers, or card-carrying members of the North Korean Communist Party, we assume that life is ambiguous and multi-layered. We accept that any potential actions we take respond to meanings that exist on several historical dimensions.  More or less articulately, we think about the short- middle- and long-term. The short-term involves the succession of the before and after that constrain our everyday actions, which means any prognosis we might make about the world is bound situationally. The middle-term turns our attention to trends deriving from the course of events into which enter many factors beyond our control or that of our group or ‘tribe’ as acting subjects.  This means we take into account transpersonal conditions.  On the long-term plane we factor in ‘metahistorical’ duration, that is, certain anthropological constants that resist or elude the historical pressures of change, and so do not respond to immediate political pressures in the present.

The believer caught in the iron grip of a totalizing system does not see the world like this at all. Emboldened by faith in the capacity to prophetically foretell the future, they willingly accept the absence of alternatives and work to conform events to their prior belief-system. This means they reject any view of their situation based on an understanding of short-term succession that constrains everyday actions. They do not see themselves as bound situationally. They also reject middle-term trends. The only transpersonal conditions they believe in are those that conform to the shape of the prophecy.  This prophecy also determines the structure of the long-term plane of anthropological constants; in a religious ideology, human destiny is uniquely tied to the demands of a deity, or in non-religious ideologies, in deity-like humans, such as the Kim dynasty in the DPRK who rule by a kind of supra-human ‘divine right’.

But, of course, there is a fundamental difference between the ideology of Hamas and Zionism on the one side, and the DPRK on the other: the influence of monotheistic religion.   But while the religiously centered worldviews of Hamas and Zionism share these common roots in religious tradition, Hamas is far more radical. Like other Islamic fundamentalist movements, such as ISIS, Hamas believes in violent jihad – Holy War. Followers consider that the teachings of Islam contained in the sacred texts legitimize, indeed glorify, attacks on non-believers, and that the only just future goal is the global establishment of the Islamic caliphate. As such, all means justify the achievement of this single future. In fact, there is no limit to the actions permissible in the present in order to reach this desired end, which also entails the greatest of rewards for those who take up jihad: a believer who dies during jihad is cast as a martyr who goes directly to paradise – Jannah.  The ‘infidels’ they slay, meanwhile, have been rewarded with what God wants for them:  eternal damnation in Hell - Jahannam.

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As many commentators on the left indicate, the state of Israel is in danger of becoming what they call an ‘apartheid’ nation governed by Zionist totalizing ideology. But for the time being, at least, it remains a democracy within which, during the vengeful assault on Gaza, attempts are credibly (and often futilely) made to act according to the rules of war. In his ‘Making Sense’ podcast Sam Harris proposes we try a sobering thought-experiment.  We know that Islamic fundamentalists are willing to use their own people – other Muslims – as human shields.  In some senses, this is precisely what Hamas is doing now in Gaza. What if Israel tried the same tactic?  What if their soldiers rested their gun barrels on the shoulders of Israeli children or set up a command post under a hospital? What would Hamas fighters do? The answer is as obvious as it is terrifying: all the Israelis would be massacred. However dreadfully compromised Israel’s position is today, it’s leadership – even the extremist Zionists - still find using human shields to be beyond the ethical pale.  Hamas and other Islamic fundamentalist movements do not.  

Back in the late 1940s, Hannah Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism was limited to political ideologies. In that period, religion really did seem to have lost its influence over politics. But since the end of the Cold War it has become obvious that religion definitely remains a significant and divisive force. This is a fact that commentators on the left seem reluctant to acknowledge. But now we are being forced to recognize the limits of the secular mindset in understanding glabal conflicts. Treating the struggle in Israel/Palestine as primarily about  ‘decolonization’, about an ‘apartheid’ behemoth crushing a defenseless and displaced people,   is to apply an optic that is  dangerously narrowly secular and Western. For example, the slur ‘apartheid’, derives from the racist and secular system imposed for a period by whites on blacks in South Africa.  Historically, that system did not entail religiously motivated racism or establish itself on a global and radically exclusionary vision of society.  Its a critical template that seems viable to a secular culture, but it fails to recognize the significance of the religious dimension to the conflict.  

As Sam Harris emphasizes, it is almost impossible for secular Westerners to grasp just how different this worldview of the jihadist or Islamic fundamentalist is, and how totally the true believer embraces its core tenets. Harris notes that especially we liberals on the left often bend over backwards to try to rationally analyze these people’s beliefs and actions according to the narrow humanist criteria bequeathed to us by Western humanist sociology and anthropology. What we fail to understand is how totally their worldview is at odds with and premised on the total rejection of our own worldview.

This is why calling the brutal assault by Israel on Gaza ‘genocide’ fails to describe that is taking place. ‘Genocide’ is defined as the deliberate killing of large numbers of people of an ethic or national group. Israel isn’t deliberately killing Palestinian civilians in Gaza. But there is no doubt that its thirst for revenge has made it insensitive to the costs its revenge entails, and blind to the seemingly obvious fact that violence will always be met by more violence.

The situation in Israel/Palestine is so tragically complex that making any kind of  valid prognosis on the basis of the short-term is almost impossible – for example, a political solution is essential but, right now, it looks impossible. The mass protests against Israel taking place worldwide - including in Seoul - are mired in seeing the crisis only in the short-term view. But things look bleak on the mid-term level; so many interpersonal and impersonal agents are involved – not just the Israelis and Palestinians and their intertwined histories.  And if we attempt to rise above the bloody fray and take in the long-term view, what do we see?  Unfortunately, nothing very encouraging. Just the tragic truth that eventually implacable rivals who are trapped in the spiral of revenge lose the will to fight and learn to co-exist in peace.  

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Which brings me back to the chances of us, here near the DMZ, being gruesomely tortured before being killed, Hamas-style, by marauding North Korean soldiers. One thing for certain, the North Korean invaders wouldn’t be sharing their vile actions on WhatsApp and Facebook using our phones, for the simple reason that they won’t know how to use the technology, and anyway, no one back home could answer their calls.  But to end on a less facetious note;  the ideology within which the North Korean soldiers live and breathe may be repellent to the values of the open society, but it does not glorify sadistic violence against  religious non-believers and those of us who have rejected religion entirely. Jihadist violent antipathy to the world makes the so-called Juche ideology of the DPRK seem relatively – I stress ‘relatively’ - anodyne. It is familiar, and not so hard to encompass within our own Western worldview. Jihadism, by contrast, is wholly other. But more than that: it is a self-consciously adopted position premised on the destruction of its own other, which is not just we liberals but anyone who doesn’t share their extreme interpretation of Islam.  Co-existence is therefore not an option. This is why a ceasefire isn’t a viable option.

North Korean soldiers do not believe that when they commit atrocities and then die fighting that  they will  be rewarded for their crimes by going straight to Paradise. That any children they murder, because they are innocent in Allah’s eyes have been fast-tracked to paradise, and that I and everyone else they get their murderous hands on, will roast for ever in Hell.  This, I suppose, is some kind of cold comfort.

NOTES

The BBC article can be read at: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-67411657

The Hannah Arendt quotation is from The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).

Sam Harris’ excellent Making Sense podcast on this subject can be heard at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFBm8nQ2aBo

I draw for my discussion of short- mid- and long-term thinking about time and history on Reinhart Koselleck’s  The Practice of Conceptual History. Timing History, Spacing Concepts, translated by Todd Samuel Presner and Others (Stanford University Press, 2002) Chapter 8.

Fences

A DMZ fence (actually, two fences).. Photographed from my car while driving along a stretch of the ‘Freedom Highway’ not far from my home where the DMZ’s southern limit borders the South Korean mainland.. Across the Han estuary is North Korea.

I live near a fence - actually, several fences - that have been erected to defend South Korea from North Korean aggression. People have asked if the current terrible escalation in the conflict between Hamas and the state of Israel, which began when Hamas forces breached the fence dividing Gaza from Israel, has provoked in me any specific reactions concerning the wisdom of living near a border separating sworn enemies - in close proximity to what Bill Clinton once called “the most dangerous place on Earth”.

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Obviously, there are major physical, contextual, historical, and ethical differences between the Gaza fence and the DMZ fence. For example, the Gaza fence isn’t a national border. It’s a stop-gap measure first devised by Israel in 1994 to serve as a security barrier, and is one physical dimension of the wider confrontation with Palestinians seeking their own state. Specifically, the 60 kilometer-long fence was erected to protect Israeli citizens from Hamas attacks,  the militant faction of the Palestinian leadership that controls the Gaza Strip and has declared itself willing to do whatever it takes to reclaim all of Palestine from Israel. The Korean Demilitarized Zone was also a stop-gap measure created in 1953 at the cessation of hostilities between the two belligerent versions of modern-day Korea. As a peace treaty wasn’t signed, the DMZ was intended to make a new invasion by either side as difficult as possible, thereby guaranteeing a higher degree of security for the citizens of both Koreas, who belong to states that are rival claimants to the legitimate rule of the entire Korean peninsula.

Physically, there are major differences between the two fences.  The latest and most formidable version of the Gaza fence, the so-called ‘Iron Wall’, was completed in 2021. As the Washington Post wrote on October 10th:

The project was publicly announced in 2016 after Hamas used underground tunnels to attack Israeli forces in the 2014 war. It required more than 140,000 tons of iron and steel, according to Reuters, and the installation of hundreds of cameras, radars and sensors. Access near the fence on the Gaza side was limited to farmers on foot. On the Israeli side, observation towers and sand dunes were put in place to monitor threats and slow intruders.

Disastrously, however, as we now all know, on October 7th this ‘Iron Wall’ was rather easily breached at 29 points, and Hamas fighters encountered little resistance from the IDF once they were through because most of  its units were deployed  to control unrest on the West Bank, and so were able to go on a murderous rampage.  Israel was obviously far too confident that one 20-foot-high fence with a concrete base, observation towers, obstructive sand dunes, and advanced surveillance technology would offer sufficient protection for its citizens. As the Washington Post reported, Matthew Levitt, director of the counter-terrorism program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, remarked sanguinely: “It’s still just a fence. A big fence, but just a fence.” The Israelis were well aware that a proportion of the people on the other side of this fence were committed to extreme violence to achieve their goal, which is nothing less than the annihilation of the state of Israel. Furthermore, the fence effectively turned Gaza into an open-air prison, thereby inevitably stoking the fires of anger, frustration, and resentment. It was clearly wishful thinking on Israel’s part to believe a fence would provide viable security, and a massive strategic blunder that has had tragic consequences.

At 248 kilometers long, the DMZ possesses the world’s longest barbed-wire fence.  But if it was only one tall and long fence – even a fence augmented by watchtowers and surveillance technology -  people in South Korea wouldn’t feel as secure as they do and for so long. In fact, there are multiple fences on both sides of the official border, which is called the Military Demarcation Line (MDL) that runs down the middle of a  wide buffer zone no-man’s-land between the two Koreas. This is four kilometer wide – 2 kilometers on both sides - and neither the North nor the South Korean armies are permitted within this zone, which is patrolled by the UN, who cautiously avoid stepping on or driving over the one million plus landmines buried within.  Sometimes, due to natural topographic barriers, such as bodies of water – for example, on Ganghwa Island, which I mentioned visiting in a recent post, or next to the highway along which I was driving in the photograph illustrating this past - the width of the DMZ narrows. Some areas, like near where we live,  have double or triple fences and layers of concertina wire. But this isn’t all: there’s also the Civilian Control Zone (CCZ), a stretch of land that lies between the DMZ and the Civilian Control Line (CCL) which restricts public access in areas  of South Korea adjacent to the DMZ. In some areas, the CCL stretches 10km south of the MDL. On the other side of the border, North Korea has similar multiple layers of defense.

The DMZ. Note how close Seoul is to the border. The photograph at the beginning of this post was taken in a region to the northwest of Seoul, next to the sea. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Demilitarized_Zone#/media

But even with this impressive barrier in place, intrepid people from both sides have still tried to get through – or under – the DMZ since 1953. There are four incursion tunnels dug by the North which South Korea know about, but it is believed there are as many as twenty more undiscovered ones! The so-called Third Tunnel is quite near us. It was located in 1978 in an incomplete state and is 1,635 meters long. Perhaps because it’s so close, I haven’t visited it, but I have gone down the Second Tunnel, which is  further north-east near the town of Cheorwon. Here, because the tunnel is very cramped, you must wear a protective helmet, and as I’m tall  it was quite a squeeze for me. For North Korean male soldiers, who (as I mentioned in a previous post) now have an average height that is as much as 8cm shorter than their South Korean counterparts, it would  no doubt have been somewhat easier going. This tunnel was revealed in early 1975 by  South Korean guards  who heard the sound of explosions deep underground. The total length is 3.5km. 

But amazingly, people can even successfully cross the DMZ above ground. Not so long ago, a North Korean soldier defected by swimming one stretch. On February 17th 2021 the Korea Herald noted:

The Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) announced, Tuesday, that the North Korean was caught in the Civilian Control Line (CCL) in the eastern border town of Goseong, Gangwon Province, earlier that day…… The JCS added that he likely swam south near the Unification Observatory and passed through a drainage tunnel located at the bottom of an iron fence on the inter-Korean border.

Even though surveillance cameras spotted the North Korean multiple times after he came ashore, the military failed to take appropriate action, while the drainage tunnel was also poorly equipped to prevent infiltrations. The North Korean was taken into custody following a three-hour manhunt after he was first spotted by surveillance cameras at a checkpoint. He is currently being questioned by investigators. The man in his 20s reportedly expressed an intention to defect to the South.

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The DMZ and the Gaza fence are present-day descendants of historical physical obstructions or barriers that were erected in attempts to secure and maintain regions of peace in times of endemic and internecine war. The most famous of all is, of course, the Great Wall of China, which is over 21, 000 kilometers long and was began over 3000 years ago.  Its function was to keep out miscellaneous ‘barbarians.’ In Britain, in the north of the country bordering what is now Scotland, we have the remnants of Hadrian’s Wall, which is approximately 140 kilometers long and was constructed about 2000 years ago to protect the inhabitants of the Roman province of Britannia.

Like these ancient walls (back then, metal fences weren’t an option),  the Gaza fence and the DMZ are ostensibly defensive. They have been built to increase the possibilities of peaceful existence for the builders and the people under their jurisdiction in situations where neighbours are regularly intent on violent incursion or full-scale invasion. The Gaza fence was meant to protect Israel against militant insurgencies from Gaza, while the DMZ defends citizens of both North and South Korea against attack.

But the situations are actually more complex in both instances. As already noted, an additional consequence of the Gaza fence was to turn the Gaza Strip into an open-air prison for those living on the inside. The tragically fatal flaw that led to the  breaching of Israel’s ‘Iron Wall’ was that it is actually also offensive, a weapon of destruction in the form of an obstruction. The DMZ, meanwhile, has permitted the leaders of North Korea to turn their country into an open-air prison for its citizens. In fact, for some time now, the DMZ looks more like a barrier erected to  prevent the free movement of North Koreans -  like the Berlin Wall was for East Germans – rather than one that protects North Korea from invasion.

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Thanks to Hamas barbarism and now Israel’s vengeful response, we’ve all be reminded that given the chance, homo homini lupus est: man is wolf to man. Which is one way of explaining why, unfortunately, we will always need long tall fences.

NOTES

The Washington Post article can be read at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/10/how-hamas-entered-israel/

The Korea Herald article can be read at: https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2023/10/113_304191.html

The map of the DMZ is from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Demilitarized_Zone#/media

For my previous blog post on Ganghwa Island and the DMZ, see: https://www.simonmorley-blog.com/blog-1/a-view-of-the-north

For my previous blog post on the average height of Koreans, see: https://www.simonmorley-blog.com/blog-1/a-nation-of-racist-dwarfs

Honour the dead and protect the living

Spring has arrived here in Korea! One of the loveliest signs of its arrival is the flowering of azalea  or Korean rhododendron blossom on the hillsides. The azalea is a very inconspicuous shrub that merits no attention for all of the year except during a few weeks in March and early April when across the wooded hillsides the deep pink blossoms emerge in scattered profusion.

Here I am with our dog, Bomi, posing with one example:

 And here is a detail. The flower is extraordinarily delicate, and it’s hard not to feel joyful when looking at it.

What you don’t see in the photo of me and Bomi are the nearby pill box and trench. But I can’t show these, because of the security regulations near to the DMZ. Taking photographs of military installations can land one a hefty fine or a stretch in jail, and recently, I’ve noticed more signs have been going up blocking entrances to some of the more ‘scenic’ and accessible places where such installations exist.

As I’ve mentioned on more than one occasion, one of the  unsettling dimensions of living near the border with North Korea is the fact that everywhere around here is defensively fortified. Now this might seem anomalous, a tragic deviation from the norms of civil society, but actually, I think that what the presence of all this overt military infrastructure does is remind one that any place that enjoys peace and is relatively free,  depends on such defenses. It just that you don’t see them so overtly like you do here.  

The distressing truth - painfully obvious in Ukraine nowadays - is that sometimes you have to defend and be ready to fight for freedom. This is for the simple reason that there will always be bad agents seeking to steal or suppress it, a truth that is a major problem for pacifists, who, quite rightly, deplore war.

Another bizarre feature of the environment around here is that one often comes across grave plots right next to military emplacements.

One day, a couple of years back, we happened to be passing these graves when the families of the deceased were paying their annual respects during Chuseok, the mid-autumn harvest festival when families visit their home towns and the graves of ancestors. This particular family’s home town is Kaesong, which lies across the DMZ and was once a major city, and where for a while there was a joint North-South industrial zone. This means these graves are sited as as near as the families can get to where their ancestors come from. In fact, this is why there are so many graves around us on the hillsides. They belong to North Korean families who fled south before or during the Korean War.

As I mentioned in a previous post, the graves are always located in auspicious locations – auspicious in terms of Pungsu-Jiri, the Korean equivalent of the ancient Chinese system of geomancy, Feng-Shui  - which literally means ‘wind-water-earth-principles-theory’, and is all about receiving positive gi - in Chinese, qi (sometimes written ch’i) energy – the vital life force suffusing everything. There are two forms of Feng-Shui – Yin (negative energy) and Yang (positive energy) Feng-Shui. Yin characteristics are the feminine, passivity, negativity, darkness, the earth, the moon, the night, clouds, water, moisture, softness, slowness, and coldness. Geographically, Yin is present in north-facing slopes. Yang is the masculine, activity, positivity, brightness, heaven, the sun, the day, heat, fire, hardness, dryness, restlessness, production. Geographically, it is present in south-facing  slopes. Koreans, like the Chinese and Japanese, depend on Yin Feng-Shui to ensure their ancestors’ tombs are located in auspicious sites. This is important because the location affects the wellbeing not just the dead but also the living descendants – for example, in relation to the wellbeing of offspring. The goal is to balance gi so as to  provide a restful site for one’s ancestors, so it is literally a last resting place.

Ironically, around here, the military is also interested in the kind of sites that have auspicious gi energy, but for very different reasons. These locations are often places with very open and wide prospects, characteristics that are obviously important strategically because they function as points of observation and/or as potential strongholds. They are both prosects and refuges. Evolutionary speaking, the ability to see without being seen was a crucial  intermediate step towards the satisfaction of many basic  biological needs, and such geographical sites remains vital today for the same reasons, only now mediated by complex social conventions that often conceal their origins in deep human history.

It seems to me that when one sees an army pill-box nearby a grave, one is witnessing in very concrete terms the two pillars upon which all human societies are founded: respect for the dead and protection for the living. These values arise from the fact that the living  will always have an overwhelming interest in what happens to their dead bodies. Respecting the dead therefore also entails protecting the living. This is basic anthropology and sociology made manifest here next to the DMZ.

The map and the territory

A trench line near my house.

These days, as I take my morning walk with the dog and traverse hills criss-crossed by trench lines and defended with bunkers and gun emplacements, my thoughts inevitably go to similar but much more deadly defenses that now exist in eastern Ukraine. The ones I pass have never seen active service, unless they have been maintained since the Korean War. 

Along with this sobering thought comes into my mind the Latin maxim I’ve mentioned on more than one occasion: Si vis pacem, para bellum – ‘If you want peace, prepare for war.’ I used to think this argument was too cynical, but now I don’t. Living near the DMZ and reading about Ukraine makes being a pacifist  seem much too dangerous. Then again, I can see we need pacifists to temper the bellicosity of human society, just as long as these pacifists recognize that its the people who are preparing to defend their country against belligerent neighbors who are giving them the peaceful luxury of being pacifists.

I’ve also been thinking about lying. One of the obvious differences between a democracy and a totalitarian regime is the power of the lie. In the latter, lying is perennial and efficacious,, while in the former, it is also perennial but will quite quickly be exposed. This is because in a democracy no one can monopolize the flow of information.

I’m thinking about lying because it seems the Russian people are, on the whole, behind or as least agnostic about the ‘Special Military Operation’. This seems remarkable, doesn’t it?  On the other hand, armed with the intellectual rigour provided by my readings in modern thought, and my copious experiences of mendacity in public and private life, I can counter that, actually, those in support of Ukraine are just as much buying into  propaganda – the stuff spun by the United States. As George Orwell wrote: ‘Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’

In other words, it is tempting to demonstrate one’s intellectual robustness and worldliness by claiming there is basically equivalence between the two sides, that ethical relativism means both sides are constructing narratives.

But this is not at all what Orwell means, and to think it is is a terrible mistake. It is true that the ‘map’ is not the ‘territory’, that the language we use is not a reflection of reality but a sign-system we fabricate in order to make sense of the world. But there is a huge difference between recognizing that the map (language) is not the territory (the world) and claiming there is no access to the latter, which is what some influential contemporary thinkers seem to believe. 

There are objective facts, that is, what can be proved true or false, or can be known to have happened. A fact is the result of consensus, of  cooperation with others. Facts are the hard won consequences of moulding language so it points to  what has been  cooperatively ascertained as constitutive of the world.

This is why, as Sam Harris, perhaps the sanest man on the Internet , in his book Lying writes:, “Unlike statements of fact, which require no further work on our part, lies must be continually protected from collisions with reality.” The act of lying makes it clear that although language does not correlate exactly with what it refers to, that there is a significant bridge between the two, that the map isn’t a complete fabrication but can serve as a workable - that is to say, fulfilling - guide to the world. But that is precisely why lies are necessary.

Harris, again : “People lie so that others will form beliefs that are not true. The more consequential the beliefs—that is, the more a person’s well-being demands a correct understanding of the world or of other people’s opinions—the more consequential the lie.”  

Lying  is official state policy in places like North Korea and China, and, as it now seems obvious, in Russia. These regimes are not interested in cooperation amongst its citizens to create a useable map. Far from it.   Their top-down models of governance require that only a small cadre are involved in making the map, and as a result, what they produce is not factual but blatantly sectarian. You could call a totalitarian regime’s relationship to fact as based on ‘performative truth’, in the sense that any information’s value lies not in being factual but in being useful to the regime.  It is based on the illusion of total control, that the ruling cabal is in charge.

Lying is necessary if a state believes that it can produce a map in which everything  about the territory is knowable, reachable, manageable, and useful. But that’s impossible.  China’s chaotic and dangerous  volte face concerning its  ‘zero-Covid’ policy, in the present context, can be seen as founded on the failure to recognize that uncontrollability is the nature of the ‘territory’, and that therefore, adaptive transformations in relation to these changes while making the ‘map’ are essential. But the Chinese Communist Party’s map to the social control of Covid was laughably at odds with the territory.

A liar believes that they can control the world through their fabrications, manipulating people so they satisfy their own needs and desires. But the desires of those they seek to hoodwink cannot be controlled, and events always run out of control. This is why big lies will always eventually be exposed. Sooner or later, people begin to notice that the diagrammatic  representation of the world they inhabit is misleading, that the wide straight highway they see on the only map they have access to is leading them - or, more likely, has already led them - over a precipice.  

The inevitability of change means a lie has a short shelf life, and once it is exposed, it will quickly undermine the rest of the epistemological edifice within which it has been nested because people will come to suspect more lies everywhere, even where there aren’t any. This is why totalitarian regime  desperately hold onto their big lies. They have to insist that their ‘map is the only map.

Orwell said: ‘If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’ Unfortunately, it is also evident that people often want to hear only what brings comfort and a sense of security, and above all, what does not risk puncturing their convictions about themselves. A friend of mine spent the Christmas/New Year period in Thailand, and for a few days she was staying in a hotel next door to a young Russian woman. When my friend broached the Ukraine crisis, the Russian replied that it wasn’t her ‘fault.’

That’s true. But then, no one would want to claim that she, personally, is in any way directly responsible for the brutal invasion. However, we can justifiably argue that her unwillingness to hear what she doesn’t want to hear, to remain within a bubble of self-esteem, should certainly be criticized. Actually, I suspect she probably doesn’t believe Putin’s lies, but rather easily assimilates this recognition because she believes that the ‘West’ is also lying.

It is. But the lies are of a whole different order of magnitude.

 NOTES

Sam Harris, Lying (Four Elephants Press, 2013)

George Orwell, Orwell on Truth (Penguin Books, 2017)

 

 

Axe Murder at the DMZ!

My growing interest in trees, especially in oak trees, reminded me of something I read a few years back concerning a very dangerous moment at the DMZ.

On August 18, 1976, about a mile from where I live, near the Bridge of No Return – a ruined bridge that became famous during the Korean War because it was a key route south -  the infamous ‘axe murder incident’ occurred. The reason it’s come to mind recently is because it involved a poplar tree.

This tree limited visibility for the United Nations Command checkpoints, and so on that fateful day in mid-August five South Korean civilian workers accompanied by UNC guards were dispatched to prune it.   As they were at work, two North Korean officers and a dozen soldiers suddenly appeared demanding the workers stop. When they ignored the request and continued working, more North Korean soldiers arrived in a truck and set upon the workers and their military escort with clubs and axes.  The JSA Company Commander, an American, Captain Arthur Bonifas, and his First Platoon Leader, First Lieutenant Mark Barrett, were killed. Here’a a photograph:

Immediately after the incident, the United States and South Korea announced ‘DEFCON 3 ’ and the United States dispatched F-4 and F-111 fighter-bomber to South Korea and sent the aircraft carrier ‘Midway’ to the west sea. The act of tree prunning pushed the Korean Peninsula to the brink of war. But the crisis was defused when Kim Il-sung expressed his regret, sending a letter of apology to the UNC. Later, the UNC carried out Operation ‘Paul Bunyan’ – named after the giant lumberjack and folk hero in American and Canadian folklore - and cut the offending  tree down to an ugly stump. That’s what’s happening in the photograph at the top of this post. Here’s what it looked a couple of decades after the Operation:

Later, this stump was cut down and replaced by a plaque where the tree once stood, which is what you can see today:

What was going on in the minds of the North Koreans that day? What made them over-react so violently? Were they especially fond of this particular tree? Perhaps they saw the dismemberment of a tree as subliminally mirroring the dismemberment of Korea, of the Korean people. It’s sad that the UNC decided to take it out on the poor tree. It was of course entirely blameless. It just had the terrible misfortune to be growing in a very dangerous place – well, dangerous for humans. From the look of the photographs, the tree was in its fifties, or thereabouts. It definitely predated the division of the Korean peninsula and the Korean War.

I was at school doing ‘A’ levels in 1976,  and we studied the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins as part of the course. By coincidence, he wrote a moving poem about some beloved poplar trees being cut down next to the River Thames. Here’s the Hopkin’s poem. I suppose it could also serve as a memorial for the DMZ poplar, too:

felled 1879

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled, 

  Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun, 

  All felled, felled, are all felled; 

    Of a fresh and following folded rank 

                Not spared, not one 

                That dandled a sandalled 

         Shadow that swam or sank 

On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank. 

  O if we but knew what we do 

         When we delve or hew — 

     Hack and rack the growing green! 

          Since country is so tender 

     To touch, her being só slender, 

     That, like this sleek and seeing ball 

     But a prick will make no eye at all, 

     Where we, even where we mean 

                 To mend her we end her, 

            When we hew or delve: 

After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. 

  Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve 

     Strokes of havoc unselve 

           The sweet especial scene, 

     Rural scene, a rural scene, 

     Sweet especial rural scene.

But when I was 17-18 years old it never even  occurred to me to find out what a poplar tree actually looks like!  They are indeed lovely-looking trees. They grow very tall and straight, and the leaves are oval to heart shaped. There’s a fine mature specimen standing next to the lake beside the university where I teach, and as I’m just getting started as a tree-lover, it took me a while to identify it.

On re-reading Hopkins’ poem, I’m struck by how it seems to have taken on a renewed poignancy in the light of the potential planetary catastrophe that is looming. Especially the lines: ‘even where we mean / To mend her we end her/ When we hew or delve’.

Image sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_axe_murder_incident

https://twitter.com/korean_dmz_vets/status/1364922717707845635

Slaying Satan near the DMZ

About a week ago, Pope  Francis in an Interview concerning the Ukraine-Russia war said:  “We need to move away from the usual Little Red Riding Hood pattern, in that Little Red Riding Hood was good and the wolf was the bad one. Something global is emerging and the elements are very much entwined.” At first, I was relieved to see the head of the Roman Catholic Church speaking common sense, trying to insert a bit of nuanced reality into the black-and-white narrative. Then I remembered that Pope Francis is head of an institution that is exemplary in peddling one of the most egregious Little Red Riding Hood stories.  After all, it is founded on the assumption of a basic polarity in which the world is divided between God (good) and Satan (bad). 

Reading the Pope’s comments made me think of a sculpture that sits beside a recently built Catholic church not far from where I live, which is located right next to what was once the main highway between Seoul and Pyongyang, but which today is just a minor road. Running parallel to it is a wide dual carriageway that head up towards the DMZ, and, for those with permits, continues onwards to Panmunjom about two  miles away, where not so long ago President Trump met Kim Jung-un.  As you can see from the photograph above, the sculpture, which is actually a plastic cast, is very realistic.

A website called ‘Religious Decor’ says the following in answer to the question why Saint Michael statues are so popular: ‘he is the greatest enemy of Satan and the fallen legions and is specifically named in the Book of Revelation to fight against Satan, descending at the end of the world, and commanding the armies of the Lord in their final struggle.’ Now, in my opinion, a violent (and, it has to be said, homoerotic) representation of a man murdering another man does not seem a very appropriate one for a church  - or indeed any building - especially one located near the DMZ. I am deliberately bracketing out the Catholic iconography, and looking at it for what it actually depicts. 

The statue belongs to a church dedicated to Our Lady of Fatima, which has a small convent attached. It is actually a kind of bunker church, as the space is located  underground. In this picture you can see the steps down to the entrance:

Entrance of Our Lady of Fatima church.

Above ground is an open area where you can do the Stations of the Cross. There are also a shrine to the first apparition, and one to Our Lady.  Here they are:

Fatima, which is in Portugal, is one of the most popular pilgrimage destinations for the faithful. The  first photograph above shows a re-staging of the ‘Angel of Peace’ appearing to  three child-shepherds in spring 1916, and again  in the summer, and a third time in the autumn. The Angel told them that heaven had “designs of mercy” and taught them to offer prayers and sacrifices. In  May 1917 things started hotting up. Our Lady herself appeared to the children, in the end a total of six times, the last in October 1917, by which time a huge crowd had gathered, and weird things were reported to have happened to the sun.  

In passing, I note the association of such apparitions of Our Lady with the rose, my special interest. Witnesses claimed to have seen a shower of rose petals during and after the apparitions.  Annually a group of Catholic faithful in the United States named ‘America Needs Fatima’ makes it a special mission to deliver masses of roses to the site. On his pilgrimage to Fatima in 2017 Pope Francis declared: “Hail Queen. Blessed Virgin of Fatima. I implore to the world the concord between all peoples. I come like prophet and messenger to wash the feet to all, around the same table that unites us. Together with my brothers, for you, I consecrate myself to God, O Virgin of the Rosary of Fatima."

Saint Francis’ word help explain why there is a church dedicated to Our Lady of Fatima near the DMZ: because the “Angel of Peace’ and Our Lady asked the children to pray for peace and for humanity to do penance to help bring it about.  But ‘peace’ can have a strange way of happening. Read this, from ‘The Catholic Thing’ website, discussing the immediate aftermath of the apparitions on events in Portugal and beyond:

Historical changes began almost immediately. Physicist and theologian Fr. Stanley L. Jaki, who traveled to Portugal to undertake a thorough scientific investigation of eyewitness accounts and depositions regarding the “miracle of the sun,” observes in his book, God and the Sun at Fatima:

The day after the miracle of the sun Portugal’s history began to change in the voting booths, though at that time nobody could see the ultimate portent of this.  What, one may ask, if Portugal had fallen the prey of the plans of Lenin who described Lisbon as the most atheistic capital in the world? He would not have watched Lisbon so closely, had he no designs about it. What would have happened to Spain [during the Spanish Civil War], with Portugal already in the Communist camp? And what would have become of France, ruled by a “Popular Front,” if the entire Iberian Peninsula had turned into an outpost of Moscow?

 So, what is this person saying, exactly? That the apparitions at Fatima was God’s way of giving the green light to fascism?  

I assume that within the Little Red Riding Hood world of Catholicism Saint Michael and Fatima converge near the DMZ to signify the destruction of the atheistic  Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.  For part-and-parcel of this kind of  stark dualism are polarizations like this in which opposing communism leads one to embrace fascism. But as the Pope says (but surely must find difficult to enact within the institution he leads) “the elements are very much entwined.”

It is  worth noting that the Russian Orthodox Church has sided with Putin, causing the Ukrainian Orthodox Church to schism. The war, and the role of the Orthodox Church in condoning it, makes the implications of the following lines from the same website I quoted from above seem, to say the least, distressingly ambivalent:

 Signs [of Fatima’s influence on events]  in post-1989 Russia are many: Orthodox Christians number 60 million, including the president and prime minister. According a 2009 National Geographic article: ‘In 1987 there were only three monasteries in Russia; today there are 478. Then there were just two seminaries; now there are 25. Most striking is the explosion of churches, from about 2,000 in Gorbachev’s time to nearly 13,000 today.

Here, to end this post, is the uncompromising atheist Sam Harris writing  in The End of Faith (2005):

Many have observed that religion, by lending meaning to human life, permits communities (at least those united under a single faith) to cohere. Historically this is true, and on this score religion is to be credited as much for wars of conquest as for feast days and brotherly love. But in its effect upon the modern world – a world already united, at least potentially, by economic, environmental, political, and epidemiological necessity – religious ideology is dangerously retrograde.

So, back to the statue of Saint Michael slaying Satan. I think it is shockingly bad taste and should be removed. How about you?

 References:

Angela Giuffrida, ‘Pope Francis says Ukraine war was “perhaps somehow provoked”,’ The Guardian, Tuesday 14 June 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/14/pope-francis-ukraine-war-provoked-russian-troops

https://www.religiousartdecor.com/who-is-like-god-archangel-saint-michael-statues/

https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2013/09/08/fatima-and-world-peace/

Landscape Painting, East and West.

This photograph is of of concrete gun emplacement near my house, part of the extensive fortifications that have been constructed around the DMZ. It seems someone had the bright idea of painting  a view  of what can be seen through the gun port, I suppose in order to aid the gunners during night-time actions.  This painting is crude, but it follows the conventions of Western landscape rather the traditional Korean, in that it is based on fixed-point perspective, that is, it imitates the view as seen from a static single position - in this case, what can be seen when you stand looking out of the rectangular aperture. This got me thinking about the differences between Eastern and Western conventions of depicting landscape, as I was struck by how useless a traditional Korean landscape painting would be if the purpose was to represent a place in order to bombard it accurately with high explosive.

From the Renaissance until the advent of modernism, Western painting was dominated by the conventions of fixed-point perspective, a system which enhanced the ‘objective’ experience of visual mastery. The horizon is usually located low down,  as if the landscape is seen from the ground and from a single, standing, position.   A landscape painting by, say, John Constable  therefore mimics a view seen through a window frame, suggesting that we are looking onto a real or imagined view which is graspable and controllable from the position it is being viewed.. 

‘The Hay-wain’ by John Constable (1821)

Traditionally, Korean landscape painting – like all painting produced under Chinese cultural influence -  depicted very broad views of the scenes they represented, tending to put the horizon high, as if the landscape was perceived from the point of view of a flying bird or of someone perched high on a mountain. Korean artist Ahn Gyeon’s painting, Dream Journey to the Peach-Blossom Paradise (c1447), for example, which was inspired by Chinese Northern Song models, incorporates three kinds of viewpoints into one painting: the left side is drawn with ‘Level distance’, the rugged mountains with ‘High distance’, and the dream-land on the right with a ‘Bird's-eye view’, to which a ‘Deep distance’ viewpoint is also applied. 

‘Dream Journey to the Peach-Blossom Paradise’ by Ahn Gyeon (c.1447).

A work by a later Korean artist, Jeong Seon, like his view of the Geumgang mountains, painted in the mid-eighteenth century, is also an amalgam of different viewpoints, but unlike the Ahn Gyeong it depicts an actual location (a range of mountains that are now within North Korea). However, one would have to be a bird to see it from this elevation, and like the Ahn Gyeonggi-do, it actually incorporates several viewing positions. As a result, the topographical features are not located as they would be if we were viewing the mountains from one fixed location.

‘General View of Inner Geumgang’ by Jeong Seon (c.1740s)

The phenomenal aspect of nature was described in Korean culture by the Chinese characters meaning “mountains-waters” (shanshui), which is usually translated by the English word ‘landscape’. But this coupling of environmental attributes implies a fundamentally different relationship to the depiction of nature to that of the West. In fact, rather than understanding it as an object of perception, the East Asian idea expresses a sense of immersion. For shanshui  painting was as space within which ch’i-yun- ‘vital breath’, ‘breath-resonance’ or ‘breath-energy’ - could circulate. For everything was understood to realize both itself and its relationship with everything else within the unity of ch’i - composed of the non-dualistic intertwining of yinyang – the two defining principles of the East Asian world-view. While it is misleading to set these terms in opposition to each other, broadly speaking we can say that yin is negative, dark, and feminine, while yang is positive, bright, and masculine. The sky is yang and the earth as yin. Water in yang and mountains are yin. Yang is active and yin is restful. Their interaction influences all creatures and things.  Ch’i is therefore an inherent animating energy that continuously circulates and concentrates itself, and by circulating  it connects and brings consistency to reality. “Not only my own being, as I experience it intuitively,” writes the French philosopher and sinologist François Jullien, “but the entire landscape that surrounds me as well, is continuously flooded by this subterranean circulating energy.”

In painting this ‘vital breath’ was also signaled by the energy of the brush, ink, and colours. As a result, what to Western eyes registers as lack of finish or refinement, sketchiness, or a sense of incompletion, was highly valued because ‘breath-energy’ was associated with spontaneity and open-endedness. Sketchiness was meant to put potentiality at the centre of representation. “When you paint”, advised the Chinese scholar-artist Tang Zhiqi (c.1620), “there is no need to paint all the way; if with each brushstroke you paint all the way, it becomes common.”  The aim was not to fix essences but to make a record of a play of energy. Catching the flow of ch’i required that a painting conveyed a stage “when plenitude has not yet broken up and dispersed”, writes Jullien.  As the T’ang Dynasty painter and writer Chang Yen-yüan wrote in his Origin and Development of Painting (c.845AD): “If the spirit-resonance [ch’i-yun] is sought for, the outward likeness will be obtained at the same time.” 

Because of this emphasis, in contrast to the West landscape painting in East Asia held for hundreds of years the preeminent place as the most esteemed subject for artists. But it wasn’t directed at mimesis, or imitation, in the Western sense of replicating nature and achieving a convincing three-dimensional  illusion. Instead, the principal goal for a  painter was to enhance awareness of a reality within which the viewer  actively participated.  But if the goal is to use a picture to help accurately aim at a target within a landscape, then obviously shanshui is  of little help. The Western model, however, seems perfectly suited to the task. The Korean soldier who painted the view on the gun emplacement was also taking a ‘bird’s eye view’, one granted courtesy of the siting of the emplacement, which overlooks the valley below. But because it adopts the Western conception of pictorial space, the image can dominate what it overlooks by setting the viewer clearly apart from what is viewed. In fact, one could even suggest that the origins of the whole Western classical ideal of art as dedicated to the imitation of the visible is fundamentally about capture and control. It implies  the goal of mastery over nature in order to dominate and exploit it,  and thereby reduces the environment to a space for predator and prey.  The East Asian model is more benign by comparison, as it mixes  the viewer up with the viewed, uniting them within the general flow of ch’i, rather than separating them into an active and dominating viewer and a passively viewed.  It is no surprise that photography, which simulates very effectively  the static viewpoint pioneered in painting, is so very appealing.  Here too we have a technology  for grasping and controlling. It is no coincidence that we say – or used to – that we  ‘shoot’ a camera and ‘capture’ an image. In this context, however, digital photography, which is infinitely manipulable and can incorporate multiple viewpoints,  can be seen to offer the possibility of another kind of picturing,  one that is closer to the shanshui model. 

Both the Eastern and Western models are fundamentally technological, in the sense of  functioning as the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes. But they construe their goals very differently. The distinction is also evident in the physical practice of making a painting.  As the art historian John Onians has pointed out, the posture adopted by Western painters mimics that of the warrior holding a shield (palette)and sword (brush or palette knife). Here, for example,  is a self-portrait by William Hogarth from the same period that Jeong Seon was working in Korea:

By contrast, the ideal of the Eastern painter is more analogous to that of a farmer sowing a field, in that he works on a horizontally sited surface rather than a vertical one, crouching over the work in progress, and as a result is more closely, more physically, in solved in what he does as an extension of himself.

What does this tell us about the enduring differences between Western and Eastern culture? Obviously, today the conventions of Western painting are deeply entrenched in East Asia, and anyway it is misleading to talk in terms of hard-and-fast differences. Cultures evolve and inter-blend. But while the idea that a painting should depict a three-dimensional space using fixed-point perspective no longer dominates the West, perhaps we shouldn’t be too quick to assume that as a result underlying assumptions have changed. Isn’t the Western model of the artist (which has been exported globally) still about ‘dominating’ the canvas? About ‘colonizing’ it with our subjectivity? Aren’t we still wedded to the idea of the artist as the exemplary individual whose will triumphs over adversity? Dont we still think in terms of adversaries, competitors, ‘hard-one images’, a whole rhetoric of ‘doing battle’?

New Year’s Eve at the DMZ

Here’s what the view looked like across the Han estuary, looking towards North Korea, as the sun set on New Year’s eve, 2020. Over the other side they claim there is no Covid-19. It seems it takes the most authoritarian regime on the planet to beat this damned virus, and the most individualistic to succumb most abjectly to it.

Weird, eh?

Anyway. Happy New Year!