(EDITORIAL from the Korea Times on May 4)

One year later: Candles are still burning inside all alienated people

A year ago last Saturday, dozens of schoolgirls gathered at a plaza in downtown
Seoul with candles in their hands.

Three months later, what started as a simple protest against the import of
tainted U.S. beef became the largest anti-government demonstration in two decades
??? or since the birth of the Republic of Korea according to some historians ???
with a million candles marching through the nation's major metropolises.
Disturbingly little has changed since then, however. Cheap U.S. beef is meeting
with ready sales at department stores amid the worst recession in decades, and
the government has arrested TV producers for instigating the protests with a
distorted, exaggerated program on mad cow disease. Was all this just a mid-summer
nights' illusion, as government officials and conservative media contend?
Definitely not, but one cannot completely rule out such a grim possibility,
depending on what its protagonists ??? students, workers, liberal intellectuals
??? do ??? or not do ??? in the future.
Looking back, no social and political event of this magnitude has received
evaluations so poles apart as the candlelit protest of 2008. Critics, mostly
conservatives, belittle it as just a mix of a scared mob stricken by groundless
fear with political oppositionists and anti-American demonstrators riding on the
popular complaints. Some violent protesters toward the end of the three-month
rallies provided additional stuff for attack.
It is not without some room for such interpretation, particularly for those who
tend to look at only a certain aspect ??? and a superficial one at that ??? of
events that actually have wide and deep significance. To sum up, the candlelit
protest was the people's call for the government to practice genuine democracy
??? not just in terms of institutions and procedures but also in culture and
consciousness. In politics, they demanded to replace top-down state governance
with the one more reflecting people's opinions and sentiments. In economy, they
resisted the one-sided and full-fledged enforcement of market-is-everything
neo-liberalism.
In short, it was the people's self-reminder that they are masters of the country,
as the Article 1 of the Constitution clearly stipulates. If some people, Korean
or foreign, regard it as just madness about (non-existent) mad cow disease, it
may be due to the conservatives' propaganda or the watchers' own shallowness in
observation and judgment.
A citizens' revolution sometimes starts with a seemingly trivial thing, as the
May 1968 student protests in France was triggered by university authorities'
undue restrictions on entrance to coed dormitories, but leaves a lasting ??? if
invisible immediately ??? effect on the thinking and behavior of the governed and
eventually on those of the governing, too.
At stake is how to maintain ??? or rather revive ??? the spirit of May 2009. The
Lee Myung-bak administration's surrender to the people has proved to be only
temporary and ostensible. It is pushing ahead with neo-liberalistic ``reforms"
with unrestrained deregulation and privatization, running squarely counter to
global trends, in which even its birthplace, Britain, has been seeking the Third
Way. Under this administration, Korea's democratic clock is ticking backward,
with journalists arrested for criticizing the government and the surveillance of
Internet users making the nation the laughing stock of the world.
There may be several reasons for the waning candlelight; the inherent limitation
of loosely-organized social movements; failure to develop into traditional
systems, such as political parties; and the government's shrewd tactics, a
mixture of partial concession and brutal crackdown under the pretext of the
``rule of law.''
As Antonio Gramsci, an Italian scholar and revolutionist, once said, one can't
help but fall into ``intellectual pessimism but volitional optimism'' for now.
``Little changed in a year, but I have now greater interests in politics and
current affairs than before,'' says a high school senior who initiated the
candlelit vigil a year ago. ``And, I have come to pay attention to how `we ???
and people around us ??? are living.'''
(END)