Sunday, December 6, 2009

Do you like shooting Yourself in the foot Korea?

So there is a well-known group in Korea, called the anti-English spectrum which does such honorable things as making up complete lies in the form of crazy stats about how many foreigners in Korea have aids and are take drugs, stalking random foreigners, and sending death threats to the president of ATEK. More on the whole thing from Brian. Quite a nice friendly group of people, it seems. Despite numerous complaints from human rights organizations and the like, to both the government and Naver, who hosts the site, no action is being taken against this outright racist ( almost to the level of Klu-Klux-Klan-ish) and xenophobic group.

Anyway, their activities seem to have made news back in my motherland, Canada, in the well-respected National Post.

Now, all I have to say about this whole fiasco is well done Korea. Do you want to have a worse reputation overseas than you already do? Yes, it seems you do. Do you want the foreigners who get screwed over at hagwons to tell their friends back home all the shit they had to put up with in Korea and now the people they tell back home will have a newspaper article to put to the stories they hear? Yes, it seems you want that to. Do you want to prevent any quality teachers coming from overseas to teach a language, that despite all the money you throw at it, seems to be beyond your grasp. Yes, it seems that you do want the bottom of the barrel since a just qualified Masters in TESOL/TEFL/English grad, when reading that article is probably going to look elsewhere. Anti-English spectrum:you want quality teachers...except your blatantly racist hate campaign may actually prevent them from coming here.

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