By Donald Kirk
The great divide in the U.S. between far right and far left parallels debates around the world between political and ideological extremes, but there's one big difference. The main provocateur of the most violent protest in the U.S. remains at large if still under fire.
It's disturbing to think that Donald Trump has such leverage over the Republican Party that most of its members were against finding him guilty in the Senate impeachment trial that acquitted him of inciting the assault on the Capitol building in Washington on Jan. 6, as the Congress was about to certify the 2020 election of Joe Biden as president.
Still more disturbing is that Trump may run again for president in 2024. Or, damaged by ongoing charges against him in the courts, he may endorse candidates with like-minded views in congressional elections and in the next presidential election.
It's possible, however, to exaggerate on the "insurrection" at the U.S. capitol. The rioters did not fire on the police. By now scores have been jailed, with many awaiting trials and prison terms. Far from showing repentance, however, some will undoubtedly see themselves as sacrificial lambs and promise to intensify their campaign once they're released.
The American right, resentful of the rising power of minorities, notably Hispanic and Black, faces an equally strong response from radicals and leftists. Both sides are hefting weapons to which they think they're entitled under the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing "the right of the people to keep and bear arms." The mayhem, triggered initially by the brutal police killing of George Floyd, may only be a chapter in a long struggle.
A college classmate of mine, James Ridgeway, foretold the danger of the right in a book published more than 30 years ago, "Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads, and the Rise of a New White Culture."
Ridgeway died last weekend but not before having the chance to update the book with fresh material on the current state of the far right. Rightists, from their end of the spectrum, have their own responses to leftist groups that have defaced monuments, "occupied" portions of cities and called for defunding the police, who they say are really the armed defenders of the right.
The right-left split is hardly an American phenomenon. The United Kingdom faces rising resentment of minorities from India and Pakistan and bitter feuding over Brexit, Britain's exit from the European Union. In Russia, President Vladimir Putin cracks down on angry mobs protesting the arrest of opposition figure Alexei Navalny after he was poisoned. In China, President Xi Jinping and his Communist Party repress all dissent while harshly suppressing the Muslim Uighur people in the north and northwest.
Korea, of course, has its own version of right-left conflict. The Candlelit Revolution of 2016 drew hundreds of thousands to the streets, bringing about the arrest, impeachment and jailing of the conservative Park Geun-hye and the election of the liberal Moon Jae-in as president. That epic sequence provoked counter-protests by flag-waving rightists against Moon's left-of-center government.
COVID-19 stopped the rightist protesters from turning out in central Seoul every Saturday as they were doing for months, but their spirit endures in the struggle of the People Power Party, as the main conservative party was renamed in hopes of restoring the conservatives' lost popularity.
Massive though they were, those protests never devolved into violence as did the movement in the U.S. to overturn election results that Trump persists in saying were fraudulent. Elsewhere, no experience compares with the storming of the U.S. capitol.
That's not necessarily all due to the self-restraint of the leaders of movements in South Korea and other countries. In the case of Korea, the national police, with long experience dealing with demonstrations, had more than 50,000 cops on duty in Seoul holding parades and protests in check, ready to use force against those who seriously defied them
In Washington, the Capitol cops retreated, leaving the rioters to get inside the building before National Guard troops arrived to enforce an uneasy calm. Did that response discourage greater violence ― or was the insurrection a precursor to more bloody civil strife?
In all these protests, the line between legitimate dissent and armed defiance is easily crossed. Americans can pretty much say what they think, but extreme differences risk worse to come ― not right away, perhaps, but in a dimly perceived future.
Donald Kirk, www.donaldkirk.com, writes from Seoul as well as Washington.
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It's disturbing to think that Donald Trump has such leverage over the Republican Party that most of its members were against finding him guilty in the Senate impeachment trial that acquitted him of inciting the assault on the Capitol building in Washington on Jan. 6, as the Congress was about to certify the 2020 election of Joe Biden as president.
Still more disturbing is that Trump may run again for president in 2024. Or, damaged by ongoing charges against him in the courts, he may endorse candidates with like-minded views in congressional elections and in the next presidential election.
It's possible, however, to exaggerate on the "insurrection" at the U.S. capitol. The rioters did not fire on the police. By now scores have been jailed, with many awaiting trials and prison terms. Far from showing repentance, however, some will undoubtedly see themselves as sacrificial lambs and promise to intensify their campaign once they're released.
The American right, resentful of the rising power of minorities, notably Hispanic and Black, faces an equally strong response from radicals and leftists. Both sides are hefting weapons to which they think they're entitled under the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing "the right of the people to keep and bear arms." The mayhem, triggered initially by the brutal police killing of George Floyd, may only be a chapter in a long struggle.
A college classmate of mine, James Ridgeway, foretold the danger of the right in a book published more than 30 years ago, "Blood in the Face: The Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, Nazi Skinheads, and the Rise of a New White Culture."
Ridgeway died last weekend but not before having the chance to update the book with fresh material on the current state of the far right. Rightists, from their end of the spectrum, have their own responses to leftist groups that have defaced monuments, "occupied" portions of cities and called for defunding the police, who they say are really the armed defenders of the right.
The right-left split is hardly an American phenomenon. The United Kingdom faces rising resentment of minorities from India and Pakistan and bitter feuding over Brexit, Britain's exit from the European Union. In Russia, President Vladimir Putin cracks down on angry mobs protesting the arrest of opposition figure Alexei Navalny after he was poisoned. In China, President Xi Jinping and his Communist Party repress all dissent while harshly suppressing the Muslim Uighur people in the north and northwest.
Korea, of course, has its own version of right-left conflict. The Candlelit Revolution of 2016 drew hundreds of thousands to the streets, bringing about the arrest, impeachment and jailing of the conservative Park Geun-hye and the election of the liberal Moon Jae-in as president. That epic sequence provoked counter-protests by flag-waving rightists against Moon's left-of-center government.
COVID-19 stopped the rightist protesters from turning out in central Seoul every Saturday as they were doing for months, but their spirit endures in the struggle of the People Power Party, as the main conservative party was renamed in hopes of restoring the conservatives' lost popularity.
Massive though they were, those protests never devolved into violence as did the movement in the U.S. to overturn election results that Trump persists in saying were fraudulent. Elsewhere, no experience compares with the storming of the U.S. capitol.
That's not necessarily all due to the self-restraint of the leaders of movements in South Korea and other countries. In the case of Korea, the national police, with long experience dealing with demonstrations, had more than 50,000 cops on duty in Seoul holding parades and protests in check, ready to use force against those who seriously defied them
In Washington, the Capitol cops retreated, leaving the rioters to get inside the building before National Guard troops arrived to enforce an uneasy calm. Did that response discourage greater violence ― or was the insurrection a precursor to more bloody civil strife?
In all these protests, the line between legitimate dissent and armed defiance is easily crossed. Americans can pretty much say what they think, but extreme differences risk worse to come ― not right away, perhaps, but in a dimly perceived future.
Donald Kirk, www.donaldkirk.com, writes from Seoul as well as Washington.
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