Guhyun Chung
The bane of any tolerant society is tolerance; the bane of any intolerant society is intolerance. Too much of a good thing for both is quite bad, in other words. In an intolerant society, constant intolerance is ultimately going to be met with resistance. Reasonable people will begin to question why there is only one way. And why every other way is wrong. Reasonable people will begin to develop an intolerance for intolerance. For example, when the United States went all in on slavery in the 1800s, abolitionists and religious groups began to cluster together in defiance. By 1860, so much disgust and moral outrage had built up in the United States that it ultimately led to the Civil War between the North and the South.
Conversely, Austria during the 1920s was one of the most tolerant and cosmopolitan cities in the world. Intellectuals, artists, revolutionaries, and emigres all intermingled in the capital of Vienna. Ideas were exchanged, and artistic movements emerged but, eventually, an allergic reaction to all the tolerance was beginning to foment and gain momentum. Soon, anti-Semitism became virulent and one person in particular—a frustrated, failed art student named Adolph Hitler—had imbibed so much of its venom that he was able to found the Nazi Party on the belief that German society had become too impure and corrupt, too relativized by Jews, homosexuals, and other depraved individuals.
So, what should we make of this current situation with Asians in the US being assaulted or killed simply because they were Asian? Is this a sign that another wave of intolerance is coming after decades of tolerance? Has the United States had its fill of tolerance? Perhaps there are some who have become tired of the rising power of Asians, culturally, politically, and economically. Asians were once mocked for being assimilationists who would be fated to always toil and serve, so to speak, “Under Western Eyes,” to use the title of one of Joseph Conrad’s lesser-known works.
The fear of Asians taking over the world has always been a festering sore in the subconscious of the West. Popular entertainments like the Fu Manchu novels by Sax Rohmer tapped into the hysteria of an Asian contagion corrupting the West and usurping its institutions and its women. Even Ian Fleming’s James Bond could not help but feel racist revulsion for Odd Job, Auric Goldfinger’s Korean henchman in the novel Goldfinger. Here is one particularly repellant scene from Fleming’s outdated novel:
“Here”—Goldfinger took the cat from under his arm and tossed it to the Korean who caught it eagerly—“I am tired of seeing this animal around. You may have it for dinner.” The Korean’s eyes gleamed. [...] Bond hid his disgust.
So Koreans ate both dogs and cats, apparently, way back in Fleming’s time. Optimists will claim that we Koreans have come a long way since the 1950s. At least nowadays, we are only accused of eating dogs. Besides, they will claim further, by and large, with the success of Squid Game and Parasite and, of course, BTS, Koreans are not only tolerated but admired. Koreans are even envied and desired. An influencer residing in the UK, for example, has undergone multiple surgeries in order to look like his favorite BTS member, Jimin. All this makes me very worried. This type of tolerance means that something close to a backlash is on its way (it’s already here in fact). Will we retreat all the way back into the late 1800s-early 1900s? I doubt that, but if these violent and random outbursts against Asians are any indication, then a reversion to the mean looks like it’s going to happen a lot sooner than we realize.