Gyeonggi Province Governor Kim Moon-soo, who stated in a TV program on May 30, "The mad cow disease uproar in the long perspective is not conducive to the public interest," came under heavy attack too. Dozens of articles expressing "despair" and "indignation" were posted on his homepage and many telephone calls were made.

The Chosun Ilbo also suffered due to the beef issue. Thirty-plus corporations advertising in the daily, including the front page, mostly selling domestic consumables, are vexed by demands from "nameless citizens" that they stop advertising in the Chosun Ilbo and threats of a boycott of their products. Hundreds of people post violent and provocative articles on the advertisers' homepages to the point of nearly overloading them and make phone calls that overload the switchboards.

Going a step further, they launched a specific operation by reopening a Daum forum against the Chosun Ilbo. The debate forum Agora and housewives' group 82cook urged a boycott of a list of businesses that advertise in the daily. The DongA Ilbo and JoongAnd Ilbo are subject to similar assaults. Street signs with directions to the Chosun Ilbo have been damaged by protesters.

Apart from the debate on whether we will or will not import U.S. beef, whether there is a BSE risk or not, and whether cattle aged less or more than 30 months should be labeled, our society is sinking into a swamp of serious distrust and distortion. We lack the basic virtue of a civil society of carefully listening to others' views, however right one may be. I'd like to tell those citizens who browbeat the one-man protester that it is they who should protest.

An authoritarian government in the past attempted to kill the DongA Ilbo by threatening its advertisers. Now, 30-odd years later, in a democratic country, the threat is resurfacing not from the state but by what is invariably called "people power." This is anachronistic.

It's a feature of human societies that we can have views on a certain matter that differ from others. In a democratic society, we should be able to express different views. We lived through an era that did not accommodate different views and their expression, and we called it dictatorship. We were proud that, after making great sacrifices, we achieved a society recognizing our mutual differences.

Indeed, that some citizens are able to raise the U.S. beef problem and oppose it and display their opposition in assembly is due to our social maturity. We must therefore respect views different from our own. And we have to learn mechanisms for resolving our differences through debate and compromise. Only then will we be able to become truly democratic citizens.

Some may argue that the beef issue, being directly related to public health and involving our national pride, cannot be approached in a pluralistic way. They may tell the government so. But it is simply another kind of dictatorship to tell a one-man protester, the Chosun Ilbo and its advertisers that they may not hold a different view with threats.

What's more, if the people who lead the protests are a shadowy group hiding their identity under the cloak of civil rights but the names of their enemies are well known, it is cowardly to boycott and damage things. We need to do better than this old game of protestors trying to march on Cheong Wa Dae and police facing them down with truncheons. We will only reach political maturity when we acknowledge our differences, when those who oppose something, others can also oppose them in turn and hold different views. Those who believe they alone are right and bully others who disagree with them are in no position to criticize President Lee Myung-bak.