I was wrong.

I have several posts on here that mention or talk about blood money. The last one saw The Korean from Ask A Korean respond. After reading what he said I had to think about why I call it blood money and just why I blamed the system, in Korea, for the way things are handled.

I could come up with excuses for why I tried to defend calling it blood money and raging against the Korean system. But they would just be excuses. There are reasons, some kind of silly when I look back now, but I am not going to make excuses.

What The Korean said makes sense. I could have tried arguing against it but I would have been doing something I berate others for doing, denying reality. While I had read the post on his site I never really processed it. For whatever reasons I never laid my own bias aside when I read it. Luckily I have never claimed to be infallible and this is a good example of it.

I was blaming instances of people abusing the system or making errors in judgement on the system being wrong, even evil. I was using it as a whipping boy for things that pissed me off. In short, I was putting the blame on the wrong things.

(After posting and re-reading this I came to the conclusion that the title I used sucks. "My blood money argument" is kind of ... bleh. So I changed it to what it now reads. "I was wrong." )

What the ... justice 2?!?!?

I just finished reading an article on Korea Beat. It was an update on a previous story about a bus driver in trouble with the law. His crime, he stopped someone from molesting a student and attacking an older woman on the bus. Oh, and evidently not paying blood money to the boys family.

He was actually sentenced to prison time in the original case. It was a good example of why you don't get involved in anything in Korea.

On appeal the prison time was tossed but the judge still sentenced him to 6 months of prison time and 2 years of probation. The judges reasoning

The trial judge sentenced him to six months in prison and two years of probation, saying that “although there are mitigating circumstances the victim was badly injured and no settlement has been reached with his family.”

Yes, the judge actually said part of the reason for the punishment is that the blood money wasn't paid. What doesn't pay in South Korea is to help others when they are being attacked or raped. Mitigating cirumstances ... the "victim" was sexually assaulting a girl and then attacked a woman who stopped him. Mitigating circumstances ... what the kimchi?!?!?

Blood money and the way the courts and cops try to actually enforce it make South Korea look like a country of fucktards who care more about money than what is right.

What the ... justice?!?!?

Ah the South Korean lack of justice system. Sometimes truth IS stranger than fiction.

A male student on a bus was trying to molest a female student. When another female stopped it he attacked her. The bus driver then got involved and the attacker ended up being injured. Who do you think ended up in trouble?

In the civilized world it would have been the molester. However, this happened in South Korea so of course the Bus Driver who stopped the molester ended up charged and convicted because he injured the molester.

Why did it end up with him being charged? The MOLESTER was injured when the driver intervened AND, according to the court, he didn't come to any settlement with the student. He refused to pay blood money to the rapist piece of shit and THAT gets held against him. What a fucking joke.

THIS is why you don't get involved in anything in South Korea. Let the mooks rape and beat themselves even mroe senseless than they are if it doesn't have something directly to do with you and yours. (Oh and for the KKKunts "yours" means your friends/family. Not your race.) I hate to say it but it just isn't worth it, in South Korea, to be the get involved.

M*A*S*H

I was just watching a M*A*S*H rerun. Radar had hit an adjoshi on a dark road coming back to camp. The adjoshi didn't have any broken bones but you would have thought he was dying in his hospital bed. It turns out he was faking it and had jumped in front of the jeep to scam some money. This wasn't his first accident. I was reminded of how Koreans are today about blood money.

It reminded me of DongChim hamming up his injuries with the complicity of his doctor to get more blood money out of the guy who hit his car.

It reminded me of the asshole who started a fight with one of my friends so he could get blood money. A guy who had a history of doing that with people, the police knew about it, and they still pushed paying him blood money.

Watching it happen on TV brought all these things to mind. I wonder if the storyline was based on an incident from during the Korean War? I wouldn't be surprised if it was.

The more things change the more they stay the same.

Blood Money

The idea of blood money has been around in one form or another for a long time. In the west we know it best as Danegild or Weregild. In Korea today it is called hapuigeum.

In the west it was originally used as a way of preventing blood feuds when someone was killed. Today, in most countries you find it being used, it is still used to compensate for the death of a loved one. However, in Korea it is paid by the offender to the victim (whether real or perceived) of a crime to either prevent charges or have them reduced. It is a common practice in Korea and is often brokered by the police. Often the police will try and cajole people into accepting the blood money.

According to a friend (Korean) blood money is only supposed to be used to handle cases where there are no witnesses. He gave the example of 2 people getting into a fight or 2 cars crashing with no witnesses. Also, he told me the police usually push people to settle this way so they don't have to file the paperwork and see it through.

One of the flaws in this system is that the courts here see the most injured person as the aggrieved party even if it was their fault. Which can lead to sleazy assholes causing trouble to get hurt or faking they were more injured than they are just to get money.

My friend was of the naive view that this is the only way it was used. Fights. Accidents. His shock seemed genuine when I showed him articles about the South African woman who was raped and what happened.

There is not a lot of information about blood money in Korea, in English, on the net. Most of what I learned came from personal experience and talking with Koreans. What is on the net in English mainly concerns the case of a South African woman who was raped last year and the rapist offered her blood money.

Well, there is more to it than just that. The rapist stalked her for a while. Then raped her. Then she was basically raped by the system. I say that because of how blood money affects the sentencing process.

The piece of shit offered her around 5 million won and told her to leave his country. She refused it. Before it went to court he upped the amount to around 18 million won. She still refused it. She wanted him tried, convicted, and punished to the full extent of the law. Which ended up not being very far.

Unfortunately in Korea, even if blood money is offered but not accepted, it affects your sentence. The Korean legal system considers the OFFER of blood money to be a sign of remorse, which will see your sentence lowered. If it is accepted your sentence will be reduced even more.

Then you have some of the cases involving people I know. In one case, which I mentioned in another post, a friend/co-worker was repeatedly attacked by a guy. When the guy finally came at him with a bottle he took the guy down with a kick to the nuts and a pop to the head. The guy was KNOWN by the police to go after blood money from people. Yet they pushed his case for the money and it was paid. When I related this story to my friend (Korean) when we were talking about blood money he seemed to think the guy deserved money because he never hit my friend with the bottle. I guess I looked at him like he was an idiot because he started trying to justify things.

He actually gave me a bit of insight to the stupid amount of posturing Koreans do when they fight. In an interesting twist of reality he actually said the guy MIGHT not have hit my friend/co-worker so he didn't have to defend himself. But I retorted the guy might have swung fully and he would have been hit. To which he replied that then my friend would be the one receiving the blood money. Pretty fucking twisted logic. Let someone smack you upside the head with a bottle instead of defending yourself because he may not swing it fully at you. When Koreans do this posturing they are hoping the other guy will hit first. That way they can sleaze some money out of them.

Then you have Dong-Chim from my assault posts. The MAIN reason he went after the attackers was to save face for losing the fight and get blood money. A year or so after Dong-Chim was in a car accident. He actually got a doctor (maybe through bribery) to keep him in the hospital a week longer to prove how wrong the other guy was ... and get more blood money. What a fucking weasel.

Blood money was a concept that came out of medieval times. From my experience in Korea it is part of what is wrong with the legal system here. It basically institutionalizes bribery and blackmail. It allows the police to not have to do their job. Some of the Koreans I talked to, unless they were lieing, have no clue about how the system really works. It isn't a practice I would expect to see in a modern civillized country.