(Via Lew Rockwell 2008-05-19: Cold War Murder and Roderick Long 2008-05-25: Anarchocide in South Korea.)

Charles J. Hanley, The Huffington Post (2008-05-18): Mass Killings In South Korea In 1950 Kept Hidden From History:

SEOUL, South Korea — One journalist’s bid to report mass murder in South Korea in 1950 was blocked by his British publisher. Another correspondent was denounced as a possibly treasonous fabricator when he did report it. In South Korea, down the generations, fear silenced those who knew.

Fifty-eight years ago, at the outbreak of the Korean War, South Korean authorities secretively executed, usually without legal process, tens of thousands of southern leftists and others rightly or wrongly identified as sympathizers. Today a government Truth and Reconciliation Commission is working to dig up the facts, and the remains of victims.

How could such a bloodbath have been hidden from history?

Among the Koreans who witnessed, took part in or lost family members to the mass killings, the events were hardly hidden, but they became a public secret, barely whispered about through four decades of right-wing dictatorship here.

The family couldn’t talk about it, or we’d be stigmatized as leftists, said Kim Chong-hyun, 70, leader of an organization of families seeking redress for their loved ones’ deaths in 1950.

Kim, whose father was shot and buried in a mass grave outside the central city of Daejeon, noted that in 1960-61, a one-year democratic interlude in South Korea, family groups began investigating wartime atrocities. But a military coup closed that window, and the leaders of those organizations were arrested and punished.

Then, from 1961 to 1988, nobody could challenge the regime, to try again to reveal these hidden truths, said Park Myung-lim of Seoul’s Yonsei University, a leading Korean War historian. As a doctoral student in the late 1980s, when South Korea was moving toward democracy, Park was among the few scholars to begin researching the mass killings. He was regularly harassed by the police.

Scattered reports of the killings did emerge in 1950 — and some did not.

British journalist James Cameron wrote about mass prisoner shootings in the South Korean port city of Busan — then spelled Pusan — for London’s Picture Post magazine in the fall of 1950, but publisher Edward Hulton ordered the story removed at the last minute.

Earlier, correspondent Alan Winnington reported on the shooting of thousands of prisoners at Daejeon in the British communist newspaper The Daily Worker, only to have his reporting denounced by the U.S. Embassy in London as an atrocity fabrication. The British Cabinet then briefly considered laying treason charges against Winnington, historian Jon Halliday has written.

Associated Press correspondent O.H.P. King reported on the shooting of 60 political prisoners in Suwon, south of Seoul, and wrote in a later memoir he was shocked that American officers were unconcerned by questions he raised about due process for the detainees.

Some U.S. officers — and U.S. diplomats — were among others who reported on the killings. But their classified reports were kept secret for decades.

— Charles J. Hanley, The Huffington Post (2008-05-18): Mass Killings In South Korea In 1950 Kept Hidden From History

William Gillis, Human Iterations (2008-05-22): Mass Graves:

The commission estimates at least 100,000 people were executed, in a South Korean population of 20 million. That estimate is based on projections from local surveys and is very conservative, said Kim. The true toll may be twice that or more, he told The Associated Press.

In 1945, as the Japanese Empire finally went into retreat, the Korean people were left without an occupational authority for the first time in decades. In that brief moment something amazing happened. The Korean Anarchists, long the champions of the resistance struggle, came out of the woodwork and formed a nationwide federation of village and workers councils to oversee a massive project of land reform. Korea graduated from feudalism overnight. Aside from some struggles with the Socialists and Nationalists, the peninsula was at peace.

When WWII concluded, however, the responsibility of securing peace and order in Korea was assigned to the Americans and Soviets. By all accounts in this instance the US actually had no imperialist intentions. While the Soviets moved quickly to deploy their forces and occupy the North, the Americans took their time showing up, and were largely content to let the South Koreans manage themselves.

The Koreans, culturally steeped with anti-authoritarian values, were fond of America and openly despised the Soviets. While a few socialists fled North hoping that the Soviets would give them a hand against the Anarchists, they were overwhelmed in numbers by a mass migration south. Everyone assumed the Americans would assist or at least respect their autonomy.

This did not last.

The Americans Military commanders who eventually arrived had trouble understanding or dealing with the anarchy they found. They had no protocol for dealing with regional federations and autonomous communes. So they helped the dispossessed aristocracy form a military government. In order to make the map simple. In order to get things under hand.

Most importantly they did not understand that the Korean Anarchists and Anti-Authoritarian activists that saturated the countryside were different than–and in fact vehemently opposed to–the Communists, going so far as to organized and launch insurrectionary attacks on the Soviet Occupation before the Americans arrived.

The Americans couldn’t understand anarchists. But leftists, they knew, meant Soviets. And they had the gall to ignore or resist their puppet military government. So they started killing them.

By the start of the Korean War, the slaughter was in full swing. Having arrested every anarchist organizer or sympathetic peasant they could get their hands on, they started executing them en masse.

The Korean Anarchist movement was, historically, one of the strongest in the world. It survived half a century of brutal occupation and economic exploitation. It survived a three way assault by the Chinese, Japanese and Soviets. It has survived many, many massacres and exterminations. It is even still around today. So strong that in the last few years they’ve been known to evict the police from the streets. But the worst injury it ever suffered was initiated and orchestrated by the United States military. In a single campaign so horrific it borders on genocide.

This was truly, objectively, one of the worst things the US has ever done. And there are some big fucking contenders.

Most north american papers ran front-page stories this Monday about the latest mass graves being uncovered while I was riding the Empire Builder from St. Paul to Portland. I found a copy wedged between Amtrak seat cushions. And there was an ancient photo of piled corpses as far as the eye could see. The papers euphemistically used the term leftists. But I know the history, I did the research.

They were almost all anarchists.

However lovely America may be. Remember, the US government is not our friend. It will never be. It can never be.

— William Gillis, Human Iterations (2008-05-22): Mass Graves

… by using the force of law to try to prevent Georgia State University students from accessing works of science and the useful arts unless they pay $50–$100 a pop to go through an academic publishing racket for obscure books with little resale value.

(Via Roderick Long @ Austro-Athenian Empire 2008-05-21.)

Please note that in the real world, outside the fever-dreams of academic publishers, sharing books and articles is an essential part of the life of a research university. Besides lending the book itself, every department has a copy machine, and every professor uses it, quite often, to run off paper copies of articles or chapters that they give away to their students. I have a file box with easily several thousand pages worth of xeroxed articles that I accumulated over the course of my college career. Or, if the professor doesn’t have the book herself, or doesn’t want to put the xeroxes on her tab with the department, every University library has self-serve xerox machines and a book-reserve system, where the professor can ensure that a copy of the book is always available for students to share with each other, and to xerox the relevant sections out of if they want to take it back to read on their own time. And all this is available even though professors could have forced each and every student to go down and pay for the $50-$100 anthology at the University bookstore.

Are these godless commies and lying, thieving mutualists that infest the Academy stealing from poor, innocent academic publishers by passing around xeroxes? No; all it is is that they aren’t insane, and they are aware that supporting some particular academic publisher’s business model is not their students’ responsibility.

Yet as soon as the University eliminates the paper medium, and facilitates exactly the same thing through an non-commercial, internal University course pack website — which does nothing at all more than what the xerox packets did, except that it delivers the information to pixels on a monitor instead of toner on a page — the publishers’ racket can run to court, throw up its arms, and start hollering Computers! Internet!, send their lawyers to try to shake down have a discussion with the University administration for new tribute to their monopoly business model, and then, failing that, utterly uncontroversial decades-old practices of sharing knowledge among colleagues and students suddenly become a legal case raising core issues like the future of the business model for academic publishers, while even the most absurd protectionist arguments are dutifully repeated by legal flacks on behalf of sustaining the racket. (Thus: It's difficult to argue that this is a truly noncommercial use [even though Georgia State receives no money from students for the course packs]. Georgia State may be a nonprofit institution, but its students pay a lot of money for course materials, and would presumably pay money for the materials being provided to them by the university.)

A few years ago, when I was living in Ypsilanti, I sat in on a seminar over at the University of Michigan on Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein. There were a few textbooks to buy at the University bookstore (most of which I already owned), but a lot of the reading consisted of articles collected into a xeroxed course pack of anthologized articles. To get the course pack you went down to this copy shop in downtown Ann Arbor where the professor had left the master copy for the course pack. You paid Excel a fixed fee for the course pack; they took down the folder with the masters from the shelf, and then escorted you to a self-service copy machine where you had to mash the Copy button in order to make the copies yourself. Then you gave the copied sheets back to them at the counter, where they would take the copies you made back and bind them for you.

The reason that you, personally, had to push the copy button is because xeroxing articles out of books for the purposes of a class is legally speaking, completely non-controversial, but if you paid exactly the same amount of money, and the copy shop did exactly the same thing, except that an employee mashed that Copy button at your behest instead of making you do it yourself, the elimination of that minor inconvenience to the student would instantly convert the transaction from non-commercial to commercial copying, and thus expose the copy shop to a crippling lawsuit, as actually happened to Michigan Document Services in Ann Arbor back in 1992.

So, to be fair, I suppose you can credit the Intellectual Protectionists with fostering knowledge and innovation in one respect: by relentlessly attacking any sharing practice that they can get away with attacking, and exploiting any technological change in order to chip away and obliterate as much of traditional fair use protections as they can manage, have produced an absurd dynamic in which basically identical transactions are treated as radically different from one another, in courts of law, such that, in order to avoid lawsuits, academics, libraries, and copy shops have been forced to invent all kinds of creative new ways of splitting hairs and engaging in the most ridiculous sorts of casuistry just to keep on doing what teachers normally do, while covering themselves from the threat of a ruinous lawsuit.

Thanks, Intellectual Protectionism!

Oh, and by the way.

Incidentally, in case you are interested, the academic publishers currently suing Georgia State University to try and force their students back into the academic publishing racket are Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and Sage Publications. The publisher that went after Michigan Document Services in 1992 was Princeton University Press. Wouldn’t it be interesting–a funny sort of coincidence, you know, one of those weird things that just happens in life when you were least expecting it–if bloggers committed to free minds and free culture just happened to start posting large quotes (of about 10-15 pages) from Cambridge, OUP, Princeton, and Sage books on their public, Google-searchable websites, under principles of fair use? All strictly for the non-commercial purpose of educating interested readers, of course. Wouldn’t it be interesting if it turned out that there was so much interest in talking about the topics covered in one of Cambridge’s, OUP’s, Princeton’s or Sage’s books that the whole book ended up getting posted, by a crazy series of coincidences, in protected bits and pieces on different websites, at the same time that those publishers are trying salvage their broken business model by mounting this massive screwjob on identifiable targets like innocent students at Georgia State?

The funny thing is, I was just thinking the other day that my readers here might enjoy learning some ordinary language philosophy, which might be illuminated by appropriate fair-use quotations from Stanley Cavell’s Must we mean what we say? (Cambridge University Press, 1976/2002), and some ancient moral philosophy, for which an absolutely essential source of appropriate fair-use quotations is Terence Irwin’s masterful study on Plato’s Ethics (Oxford University Press, 1995), and also some feminist political theory, which obviously demands taking a look at some key passages from Susan Moller Okin’s Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton, 1979). If you have a blog yourself, maybe you might find that your readers would be interested in discussing other key passages from those same books. Who knows? Or perhaps they’d be interested in discussions that other fine books from Oxford, Cambridge, Princeton and Sage happen to touch on.

I’m just sayin’.

Feel free to let me know what books you’re talking about with your readers about in the comments.

In light of the late unpleasantness in Denver, the pair of ridiculous small-government conservative tools nominated, and the Party bosses running the convention, who saw fit to so transparently stage-manage the process of choosing a contemptible conservative drug prohibitionist and a contemptible conservative warhawk as their party’s mouthpieces, I think that congratulations and thanks are due to Aster for pointing out the perfect reply–and all that really needs to be said, at this point.

Well, it ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe,
If’n you don’t know by now.
And it ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe;
It’ll never do somehow.

When your rooster crows at the break of dawn,
Look out your window and I’ll be gone.
You’re the reason I’ll be travelin’ on;
But don’t think twice, it’s all right.

. . .

So long, honey babe;
Where I’m bound, I can’t tell.
Goodbye’s too good a word, babe;
So I’ll just say fare-thee-well.

I ain’t a-sayin’ you treated me unkind;
You could’a done better, but I don’t mind.
You just kind of wasted my precious time;
But don’t think twice, it’s all right.

See also:

• GT 2008-01-25: Take the A-Train
• GT 2008-01-10: Come out, my people, come out…

(Boing Boing 2008-04-07, via Roderick Long 2008-04-08.)

It’s 1:45 p.m. on a Wednesday in February and a Toyota Camry is driving west on the 91 Express Lanes, for free, for the 470th time.

The electronic transponder on the dashboard – used to bill tollway users – is inactive. The Camry’s owners, airport traffic officer Rudolph Duplessis and his wife, Loretta, have never had a toll road account, officials say.

They’ve never received a violation notice in the mail, either. Their car is registered as part of a state program which hides their home address on Department of Motor Vehicles records. The agency that operates the tollway does not have legal access to their address.

Their Toyota is one of 996,716 vehicles registered to motorists who are affiliated with 1,800 state and local agencies and who are allowed to shield their addresses under the Confidential Records Program.

An Orange County Register investigation has found that the program, designed 30 years ago to protect police from criminals, has been expanded to cover hundreds of thousands of public employees — from police dispatchers to museum guards — who face little threat from the public. Their spouses and children can get the plates, too.

This has happened despite warnings from state officials that the safeguard is no longer needed because updated laws have made all DMV information confidential to the public.

The Register found that the confidential plate program shields these motorists in ways most of us can only dream about:

• Vehicles with protected license plates can run through dozens of intersections controlled by red light cameras and breeze along the 91 toll lanes with impunity.

• Parking citations issued to vehicles with protected plates are often dismissed because the process necessary to pierce the shield is too cumbersome.

• Some patrol officers let drivers with protected plates off with a warning because the plates signal that the drivers are one of their own or related to someone who is.

Exactly how many people are taking advantage of their protected plates is impossible to calculate. Like the Orange County Transportation Authority, which operates the tollway, many agencies have automated processes and have never focused on what happens to confidential plate holders. Sometimes police take note of the plate and don’t write a ticket at all.

…

I would highly doubt that anybody is registering their vehicles on a confidential basis to do anything but protect themselves, Garden Grove Police Capt. Mike Handfield said. I just don’t think people are thinking they’re getting away with anything.... Is the value of having a confidential plate and protecting the law enforcement community from people who might hurt them, is that worth that risk? I believe it is.

The Register asked the DMV for a list of the number of motorists participating in the program and the agencies they claim as an employer. But the DMV refused to provide those records unless The Register paid $8,442, which officials said was the cost of extracting the list from its database.

…

Some police officers confess that when they pull over someone with a confidential license plate they’re more likely to let them off with a warning. In most cases, one said, if an officer realizes a motorist has a confidential plate, the car won’t be pulled over at all.

It’s an unwritten rule that we would extend professional courtesy, said Ron Smith, a retired Los Angeles Police Department officer who worked patrol for 23 years. Nine out of 10 times I would.

California Highway Patrol officer Jennifer Hink put it a little differently. It’s officer discretion ... (But) just because you have confidential plates doesn’t mean you’re going to get out of a citation.

Many police departments that run red light camera programs systematically dismiss citations issued to confidential plates.

It’s a courtesy, law enforcement to law enforcement, San Francisco Police Sgt. Tom Lee said. We let it go.

— Jennifer Muir, Orange County Register (2008-04-04): Special license plates shield officials from traffic tickets

The term professional courtesy comes from the traditions of medicine: many doctors will not charge money when they treat another doctor’s immediate family. When doctors talk about professional courtesy they are talking about a very old system of mutual aid in which one doctor agrees to do a favor for another, at her own expense, for the sake of collegiality, out of concern for professional ethics (to offer doctors an alternative to having their own family as patients), and because she can count on getting similar services in return should she ever need them.

But when the Gangsters in Blue start talking about professional courtesy, they’re talking about something quite different: a favor done for a fellow gang member at no personal expense, with the bill sent to unwilling taxpayers who must pick up the tab for the roads and parking; and a favor done in order insulate the gangsters and their immediate family from any kind of ethical accountability to the unwilling victims that they sanctimoniously insist on serving and protecting. Professional courtesy in medicine means reciprocity in co-operative mutual aid in healing sick people; professional courtesy in government policing means reciprocity in a conspiracy to make sure that any cop can do just about anything she wants by way of free-riding, disruptive, dangerous or criminal treatment of innocent third parties, with complete impunity, and the rest of us will get the bill for it and a fuck you, civilian if we don’t like it.

To be sure, letting a traffic ticket slide is, in the grand scheme of things, a pretty small thing. But it’s a small thing that is intimately connected with bigger things–with a pervasive, institutionalized system with consequences that are as terrible as they are inevitable and predictable.

Last week I wrote about Jamie Kirchick’s latest excursion into truthiness for The New Republic‘s blogs; the comments seem to have lit out on an interesting tangent about language, grammar, and gender-neutral third-person pronouns. It’s all Anon73’s fault:

Continuing the pronoun pondering, I don't really agree with the method of alternating he and she to make language gender-neutral; it provokes too much confusion when one actually does want to specify a person's gender. I think the best method is to switch to new pronouns like ze and use he/she when gender matters to a discussion. But then I favor talking about kibibytes and mebibytes, so what do I know....

— Anon73 @ 24 March 2008 at 11:37 am

I replied:

I don’t actually alternate pronouns very often; with a very few exceptions, I just always use she in preference to he as a gender-indefinite pronoun. But in any case I don’t see either practice as posing much of a stylistic problem when you do want to specify gender: you just do that in the antecedent, rather than in the pronoun. In a language that had no gendered pronouns, that’s what you’d have to do anyway.

Anyone who likes words like ze, hir, ey, xe, thon, etc. should feel free to use them as widely as they can; I’m certainly not going to begrudge them the minimal effort it takes on my part to pick up on new monosyllables. But I generally don’t like them, stylistically speaking, because they usually don’t sound much like English–they don’t fit very well into the phonetic structure of either formal English or dialect. (For example, how is hir even supposed to be pronounced by an English speaker?)

The one big exception to that is the singular they, which comes out of living speech and which flourishes in most dialects because in most of the constructions you might use it in, it sounds pretty natural. But it often gets frowned on and doesn’t have much uptake by self-conscious language reformers, because the kind of people who would actually use a word like ze in writing or speech also tend to be the kind of people who would feel awkward about using an incorrect singular they.

If yo gets some uptake, that would sound fairly natural, too, and would sidestep whatever uneasiness people may feel about the singular they.

— Rad Geek @ 24 March 2008 at 1:21 pm

Laura J., who knows more about language than I could ever hope to, and perhaps more than an entirely sane human being should, adds:

Yo? How curious. I don't think I could easily get used to it – it simultaneously sounds too much like English you and Romance first-person pronouns for my tastes. But then, I don't have a grammatical gap to fill there since I routinely use they as a singular pronoun when there isn't one specific gendered person being referred to.

— Laura J. @ 24 March 2008 2:53pm

Here’s Roderick:

Shakespeare occasionally uses they as a singular pronoun, as I recall.

— Roderick Long @ 27 March 2008 9:30am

Me again, stirring up some controversy:

As do Jane Austen and the King James Version of the Bible. (Cf. 1 for still more examples.) But of course discomfort with the singular they has more or less nothing to do with the norms underlying actually-existing good English, either written or spoken, and everything to do with a fetishized ideal of how a logical language should work, or, more concretely, with participating in a particular culture of correction and officious priggishness, which institutional schooling browbeats most educated professionals into accepting.

— Rad Geek @ 30 March 2008 10:09pm

Anon72 (not to be confused with Anon73, unless they’re actually the same person–I don’t know one way or the other) joins in to reply

Well I think clarity and consistency are always good things to strive for in a language; I just don't see the singular they as satisfying either.

— Anon72 @ 31 March 2008 11:32am

This is pretty much always the first line of defense when challenging an incorrect bit of dialectical grammar. But I don’t buy it; clarity and consistency are certainly things to be desired, but this seems like special pleading. I reply:

I agree with the principle, but not with the application of it.

Can you think of any actual cases in your life where somebody used the singular they and you couldn’t understand what they were saying because of it?

If so, what was the case? If not, then it seems like your worry about clarity is misplaced.

As for consistency, is it a violation of consistency for English to have a single word, you, for the second-person singular and the second-person plural? If not, how is that different from having a singular they? If so, does it rub you the wrong way when someone uses you in the plural (or singular) just as much as when they use they in the singular? If it does, do you fix the problem by introducing dialectical constructions like y’all or youse or yuns in formal contexts? If it doesn’t, what do you suppose accounts for the difference in your reaction?

— Rad Geek @ 31 March 2008 12:16pm

Anon72 answers one of my questions:

As for consistency, is it a violation of consistency for English to have a single word, you, for the second-person singular and the second-person plural?

Yes. I don't like y'all, but it would be nice if the language had separate words for the singular and plural forms. If you want to know my philosophy on language, I think Heinlein was right when he said words should mirror the way we think about reality. Addressing a single person is very different from addressing a crowd, so it's logical to have different words for each. I'd say similar considerations apply to neutral pronouns; sometimes people want to refer to someone of certain but unknown gender, and he/she/it doesn't cut it. However, I don't necessarily agree with Hofstadter that sexism is partly due to gendered pronouns.

Incidentally I was reading an old grammar guide (circa 1961) and when listing the different genders it said something to the effect of he, she, and it are for male living things, female living things, and non-living things (neuter) respectively. It's interesting how the original english speakers decided a fourth category of living-but-necessarily-gendered was unimportant.

— Anon72 @ 1 April 2008 7:34pm

But I’m not especially convinced.

I agree that a proper language needs separate words for addressing a single person and addressing a group of people. But I think that privileged English already has two different words for those two different purposes, even without dialectical constructs like the ones I mentioned. Those two words are you and you.

Those are, to be sure, two words that can’t be distinguished by sound or spelling, but rather are distinguished by the context of their significant use (as expressed in word order, sentence structure, etc.). There are lots of pairs of words like that, sometimes with very different or even opposite meanings — sanction meaning punishment and sanction meaning approval or endorsement, for example — but in real, everyday language, context is often quite enough to distinguish those words from one another. To take another case, suppose that everyone suddenly stopped spelling their, there, and they’re differently in writing, and just used a single spelling for all three words, their. (Lots of people already do this unless a teacher raps them on the knuckles for it.) Would that impair your ability to distinguish the words from each other? Really? Does the fact that they all sound exactly alike impair your ability to distinguish them in speech?

Now, if someone’s depending on context rather than phonetic or graphical features to differentiate different words, then, to be sure, they have to consider how clearly context distinguishes and how often it leaves things ambiguous. In the case of you and you, it turns out there are enough cases with a significant risk of confusion that dialects have repeatedly, spontaneously with alternative second-person plural pronouns to solve the problem. But in the case of they, the situation is quite the reverse: the spontaneous and repeated trend, even among masterful and careful writers of good English — Shakespeare, Chaucer, Austen, the King James Version translators, et al. — has been to spontaneously use the singular they in order to get an epicene pronoun, where the privileged version of the language doesn’t provide it. I think that the dialectical situation is different here because, as a matter of actual fact, the rules for using singular they (which, grammatically, isn’t actually a perfect substitute for he or she; it only works in a subset of cases where he or she works) are such that there’s hardly ever any chance of confusion, given the context of the sentence.

Which brings me back to a couple of my earlier question, which I really would be interested to hear Anon72’s answers to:

Can you think of any actual cases in your life where somebody used the singular “they” and you couldn't understand what they were saying because of it?

And also:

If so, does it rub you the wrong way when someone uses you in the plural (or singular) just as much as when they use they in the singular? … If it doesn’t, what do you suppose accounts for the difference in your reaction?

Incidentally, I should add that I think that y’all is lovely English and I would have no problem introducing it (or you all or whatever) into the context of formal writing, which would (among other things) have the benefit of avoiding certain kinds of ambiguity. There are lots of cases where I prefer an academic she to a singular they, too, but honestly I think any charges of either unclarity or inconsistency against they are surely trumped up, and probably a reflection of just that fetishized ideal of how logical languages are supposed to look (as if the logic were in the signs themselves rather than in their significant use) that I complained about earlier.