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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kid Rock who wrote (75097)	2/23/2000 4:08:00 PM
From: nihil	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Sen. McCain calling his captors "gooks"... I wonder what I would have called them myself in similar circumstances. I think it is a political mistake, but venial. The term itself was originally not insulting. If you asked a Korean bearer in the frontlines what he was he would call himself "Hankuk" meaning "Korean person." Marines (and maybe doggies too) started referring to Koreans as "Gooks" with no racial animus -- simply easier and perhaps less insulting than referring to them as bearers. Soon the term referred to the North Koreans on the other side and started to gather pejoratives connotations. When the Chinese entered the war, the marines started referring to them as "Goonies," perhaps to distinquish them from "Gooks" whom in their Southern mode the Marines had no disrespect for. The First Marine Division reinforced had a regiment of Korean Marines attached (making it "quadrangular") in the later stages of the war which modeled itself on the IstMarDiv and was a brave and able fighting unit. I never heard a marine criticize the gooks in this regiment or Koreans in particular. I knew several Koreans who were "adopted" by Marines and brought to the US and educated, including my quondam best fried in graduate school. I never heard of the Army using "goonies" but I think they referred to the enemy indistinguishably as "gooks." I never heard a marine refer to Vietnamese as "gooks" but I didn't monitor all of them. Of course, many white marines referred to blacks as "spooks" or "nightfighters." They often referred to each other as "bastards," "cocksuckers," "SOB's" and many more insulting terms. " I think it is a shame for any person to use an insulting term for any nationality. I refer to my own people as "hillbillies", "haoles", "poor white trash","sandlappers", "crackers," "rednecks" or "rebels" but I think I have the right. If I were beaten, imprisoned (however justly), starved, tortured and humiliated by enemies of a single nationality, I would curse them with every epithet I could recall and never hide or regret it. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.