I would have expected this to have made it into a separate entry or at least that someone to have flagged this in this week’s Open Thread of The Marmot’s Hole; but since it seems to have been overlooked –
B.R. Myers takes the leftist Korean “intelligentsia”[sic], in the person of novelist Hwang Sok-yong, to the woodshed in his NYT review of Hwang’s “The Old Garden”. Here’s the money stroke of the switch:
The striving for simplicity and emotionality among students bewildered by long reading lists is, as the historian Ernst Nolte once wrote, “almost disgustingly easy to explain.” Harder to understand is why a man of Hwang’s age and experience would want to present this striving as something the world needs more of. … The hunch that we are dealing here with an ideology even sillier than Marxism is confirmed in one of Yoon Hee’s lines: “It’s a fight that has continued for over a hundred years since we opened up the port.” In other words, Korea’s problems began when it ceased to be the Hermit Kingdom. The penny drops: this is how the students could have fought so heroically against a pro-American dictator in Seoul, yet found so little cause to criticize the paranoid nationalist thugs in Pyongyang.
