President Roh Moo-hyun expressed his condolences abruptly in an unlikely location. The Korean ambassador to the United States made the unusual suggestion of a 32-day fast as an opportunity for self-examination. Another Korean said simply, "We're really sorry," and the message was carried as a front-page post on the BBC News' website. The Korean-American community is fearful of persecution in America just because of their ethnicity. Many foreign journalists may have found it difficult to understand all this.

This is all the more noteworthy when compared with our relative indifference to a horrible accident at a blast furnace in China that happened at almost the same time as the Virginia Tech massacre and killed 32 people, and to the genocide in Darfur that has killed 400,000 and forced another 2.5 million to flee. How can we explain the difference in our reactions? Why do we select to respond to one but not the other?

The answer is simple. The perpetrator of the shooting at Virginia Tech was a Korean named Seung-hui Cho. The crime was committed by one angry introvert with an abnormal character, and yet somehow we feel as if it had been done by the entire Korean race. We're feeling a collective sense of guilt -- or at least we're forcing ourselves to feel it.

In contrast, American and British news outlets such as the New York Times, the LA Times, the Guardian, and the BBC, have reported on Cho not as a Korean but as an individual. Much of the focus of the news in the West is on the interpretation of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that allows the possession of guns. There has been a lot of discussion on regulating firearms and improving security at college campuses.

A similar response can be found in the hundreds of messages posted on American websites. Some Internet users have tried to placate the Korean community, calling the shooting a personal crime, never a crime committed by Koreans. One American student expressed his regret that he had failed to understand and accept Cho's pain and frustration. At this point, we all feel miserable.

Ironically, a collective sense of guilt is in fact what Korea has tried to inflict on Japan with respect to its colonial past. This is a nationalistic tool that allows judgment of people and history based not on the actions of individuals but through grossly simplistic characterizations of entire ethnic groups. And now this method of judgment has boomeranged on us.

Even worse, the logic by which all Japanese people can be held responsible for Japan's past -- regardless of anything an individual may have done or felt -- has served Japan's rightwingers in their goal to make the Japanese people feel more united, bringing the people together a solid front. This logic is at the center of two contrasting equations. The first goes like this: Japanese people = perpetrators of colonialism = collectively guilty. And the second: Korean people = victims of colonialism = collectively innocent. As vividly illustrated by our society's temperamental reaction to the book "So Far From the Bamboo Grove," this false dichotomy denies the possibility that Koreans, as the victims of colonialism, could ever be aggressors.

Over the past week, our collective sense of guilt has reached extreme levels. It is the result of the panic Korean society felt when it discovered its myth of eternal victimhood had collapsed. Since the liberation, this sense of victimhood has justified the logic of nationalistic power used in both Koreas that states that in order to overcome our suffering at having lost our nation we the people must blindly follow our nations' leaders.

The latest commotion vividly depicts how compliant the Korean collective mind has become under the mass dictatorship. We have eagerly responded to the state mobilization system, willingly answered its call and donned the uniform of nationalism. In this regard, there may still be a long way to go to achieve true democracy in Korea.

This column was contributed by Lim Jie-hyun, a professor of history at Hanyang University.