Thread by @AskAKorean, A thread on Park Won-soon, the deceased Seoul mayor.There are lots of [...]

A thread on Park Won-soon, the deceased Seoul mayor.

There are lots of easy takes available about his death following allegations of sexual harassment, especially in connection with other S Korean politicians like former Chungnam Gov. An Hee-jeong or Busan mayor Oh Geo-don.

Those takes are not good enough, because PWS is not like AHJ or OGD. An and Oh were career politicians. They got to their place simply by sticking with the right crowd long enough. Few shed a tear when they lost their jobs.

Park's case is different, and worse.

I spent all day trying to come up with a good comparison, and this is the best I could do:

Imagine having Thurgood Marshall, the legendary civil rights lawyer. Instead of Supreme Court, he goes into electoral politics. He becomes a governor of California.

He's so popular that he serves three terms. When Nixon unleashes his conservative onslaught, Marshall provides safe haven for liberal politics, which leads to Nixon's ouster.

Then Anita Hill accuses Marshall of sexual harassment. Rather than responding, he commits suicide.

I know this analogy is really contorted. That's because I couldn't think of anyone else who had comparably towering achievement, followed by such abject self-inflicted tarnishing.

This is what separates Park's case from most other harassment scandals.

It's not good enough to see Park Won-soon's case and say, ugh, there goes that sexist Korean politics. Because if that's all you're taking away from this, you won't understand why S Koreans are reacting with such a confusing mixture of rage, sorrow and denial.

This may be ironic, but in order to understand Park's pathetic last moments, we need to recount all of Park's achievements, if only to describe how high he was before he fell. Only then can we understand that his death was not like any other death.

So - a look at all of Park's achievements. He passed the bar in 1982. Back then, the top scorers of the bar exam became judges and prosecutors, so Park became a prosecutor first. He quit after six months, because he objected to overseeing a death penalty.

In private practice, Park would become one of the top civil rights attorneys as S Korea was going through the peak of Chun Doo-hwan's dictatorship. His specialty was vindicating - get this - women's rights. Yes, really.

Park's first big case was representing Kwon In-suk, a woman democracy activist who was subject to sexual torture during her arrest. (Kwon is now an academic and legislator.) Park and his team took the case to the Supreme Court and won. It was a historic victory.

Park Won-soon was also the lead attorney for S Korea's first case alleging sexual harassment. In 1998, after six years of litigation, Park's client who was a graduate student at Seoul Nat'l U won her case against her former professor.

Park Won-soon, as an attorney, literally created S Korea's legal definition of sexual harassment. Yes, really. This is a thing that happened.

For the next decade or so, he was the face of S Korea's civil society, the go-to man for a social movement of any importance, like the way Jesse Jackson might show up to anywhere there is a big social moment.

Then in 2011, he ran as the mayor of Seoul and won.

Here's what made Park Won-soon special. Generally, activists are bad at governing. There are so many instances, in S Korea and elsewhere, where highly effective activists win, get inside the government, and completely screw up because of naivete and inexperience. But not Park.

Park was a rare activist who knew how to operate the levers of power, who knew how to be an idealist and administrator at the same time. When he had to pander to real estate developers, for example, he pandered just as well as any conservative mayor.

But if you are facing persecution, you can count on Park's city hall to give you shelter. It was under Park Won-soon, for example, that Seoul Queer Parade became a big, legit event that it is today - because the city hall would protect the LGBT activists for the event.

This was particularly crucial during the nine years of Lee Myung-bak and Park Geun-hye presidencies, during which S Korea gradually slid back toward authoritarianism. Park's city hall protected the Candlelight Protests, which was thisclose to turning into a Tiananmen redux.

For this, Park Won-soon was deeply, deeply hated by the conservatives. Because he was assumed to be the next liberal president, he and his family received Hillary Clinton-level hatred, slander and personal attacks. Yet among liberals, he was one of the greatest heroes.

Park was so popular that he won an unprecedented third term as the mayor of Seoul. He was set to govern 20% of S Korean population for 12 years. Already, he was at a place where he would be remembered just below the giants like Kim Dae-jung.

Then, as we all now as of yesterday, Park Won-soon pissed it all away. He may or may not be guilty of sexual harassment. The accusation is out there, and by taking his own life, Park made it so that we will never know if it's true or false.

It's an injustice on multiple levels. Injustice to the accuser, certainly, and also betrayal of the millions - no exaggeration, millions - who admired him. And that will be his legacy. /end

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