Sthele Press

[The following is an English translation of remarks I made at a conference held at Korea University yesterday, with former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in attendance. As seems to be the custom here, most journalists returned to their offices right after the ceremonial opening bits, there to infer the content of the ensuing presentations from their titles. I was said to have advised South Korea to do more to get Washington interested in its security. As you can see, my actual points were of a different sort. Afterwards I was thanked by a former diplomat and a few audience members for making points a South Korean might be called anti-American for making: “You can say these things, because you’re an American.” Note: I’ve left out the opening part in which I summed up recent reports on the state of North Korea’s nuclear program.] 

The situation having become very serious, it’s time for us to discuss it frankly. I agree with the Secretary-General that the alliance should be strengthened, but blindly trusting in America is not the way to go about it. For three decades, the US and South Korea have been careful not to offend each other, with each side pretending not to notice the elephants in the other’s room. This excessive politeness has fostered a complacency on both sides that has worked in North Korea’s favor. To make matters worse, the South Korean media seem to have decided to go all in on Kamala Harris [audience laughter], so no one these days is doing a sober analysis of the US-North Korea relationship. But if we want to understand Kim Jong Un’s strategic intentions, we need to be able to discuss those uncomfortable aspects of the alliance of which he cannot possibly be unaware.

To point out the first elephant: America’s reluctance to push North Korea too far goes back a long way. One wouldn’t be far off in describing the modern history of the peninsula as a series of North Korean provocations that the US turned a blind eye to. When I lived with my father on the army base in Yongsan in the 1980s, the half-joke at the Officers’ Club was that US troops were in South Korea not to protect it, but to keep it from starting something. America’s passivity is not the result of North Korea’s nuclear success; rather, that success is the result of America’s passivity. As Joshua Stanton has pointed out, the US never enforced sanctions against North Korea as consistently and firmly as it enforced sanctions against Iran, Belarus, and Zimbabwe. The first and last time it got tough was when it moved to cut Banco Delta Asia off from the financial system, a measure which the State Department strongly objected to.

Keep in mind how afraid of provoking North Korea the Americans were even in the 1990s, when the regime was so much weaker and more isolated, and you can well imagine how afraid they are now. For years US experts have been saying that if hostilities should break out on the peninsula again, the most important thing is to keep them from escalating or spreading. Kim Jong Un is well aware of all this.

Normally we Americans don’t see things from other countries’ perspective. We would never tolerate Russian troops in Mexico, yet we have no qualms about expanding NATO right up to Russia’s doorstep. Nor does China’s historical trauma at the hands of imperialist powers give us any pause about encircling that country. Some in Washington now talk calmly about how it’s only a matter of time before we go to war with Russia or China. It’s appalling. But when it comes to North Korea, we become a very understanding superpower, and blame its insecurities primarily on ourselves. We acknowledge and problematize the possibility of war, but we consider it more likely to come about accidentally, as a result of some misjudgment or overreaction on the North Koreans’ part. Kim knows this too.

Another elephant is the fact that since the US military occupation our State Department has consistently favored South Korea’s left over its right. Not only its mouthpiece media, the New York Times and so on, but also most think tanks under the influence of the Council on Foreign Relations applauded President Moon’s appeasement policy. They refrained from criticism even in September 2018, when Moon signed a military agreement with North Korea detrimental to the alliance, and gave a bizarre speech in Pyongyang praising Kim Jong Un for not yielding to outside pressure.

That’s not all. When the Hankyoreh newspaper and various [ROK] politicians described the opening of the inter-Korean liaison office as the first step on the road to North-South confederation, US media refrained from covering this important news, and our government pretended not to have noticed. The reason was obvious: they feared that the American people would balk at supporting the continued presence of US troops in a country that had joined hands with North Korea. It wasn’t until 2019, in an exchange at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that the topic of North-South confederation finally slipped out, with Victor Cha [of the CSIS] casually describing the plan as entailing an “economic marriage,” and a Republican senator saying in effect, “Ah, I see,” before moving on. Say what? You hear your ally is pursuing an economic marriage with the country you’ve imposed sanctions on…. and you move on to the next topic?

The only explanation, in my judgement, is that for “the Blob,” as the US foreign policy elite is now popularly known, the so-called peace system envisaged by the South Korean left looks like the most viable way to get North Korea to open up so it can be brought down from within. This has to be a very risky strategy from South Korea’s perspective, because the North could exploit a decisive military advantage even in the very early stages of such a system.

Obsessed as they are with the issue of US troop costs, South Korean conservatives and the Cho-Jung-Dong newspapers are wrong in thinking that Trump poses the only real problem for South Korea’s security. In the run-up to the Hanoi summit, Special Envoy Stephen Beguin did what he could to pressure Trump into making concessions to Kim Jong Un, as John Bolton writes in detail in his book. The State Department was as disappointed by the failure of that summit as the Blue House was. It’s true that its influence [on North Korea policy] has been limited to some extent by the Treasury Department, but State has always been more powerful, and Biden’s health problems have made it even more so in the past two years. It has no intention of handing back that power. It’s therefore wrong to assume that Kim is now desperate for a Trump victory. Haven’t both parties removed from their platforms the long-term goal of denuclearizing North Korea? Kim knows that regardless of who wins, he doesn’t need to worry too much about the United States in the near future.

He also knows that whatever the Yoon administration may do to strengthen this country is likely to be undone by the next administration. Most Americans, including many Korea watchers, still mistake South Korea’s left for pro-American, “woke” liberals, which is one reason for their naïve optimism about US-ROK-Japan cooperation. They think that if trilateral exercises take place often enough now, the South Korean people will get used to them, and they’ll continue even under Minjoo Party rule. Kim Jong Un has a much better grasp of South Korean politics.

The bigger delusion in the US — and a more dangerous one for this country — is that the North has long since given up any serious hope of conquering or dominating the South. There are a few hawks in Washington, but to the same extent that they overestimate the risk of all-out war, they underestimate the possibility of the North using the tactics Russia employed when taking Crimea. Kim is well aware of this too.

It’s no secret that the State Department wants to pull North Korea out of the arms of Russia and China and pursue a two Korea policy. Perhaps this is why even Kim’s military co-operation with Russia hasn’t upset the US all that much. It’s odd, really: the Americans compare Putin to Hitler, and rage at people like Orban who don’t side squarely with Ukraine, yet they seem full of understanding for North Korea. The propaganda line on China is that it could attack Taiwan at any moment, but when it comes to North Korea, which has already attacked South Korea several times, the Beltway consensus is that it really just wants to survive.

One reason for this lenient view has been the assumption that nationalist Kim Jong Un wouldn’t go so far as to launch a nuclear attack on [his ethnic brethren in] Seoul. But if North Korea is to be fully safe, the US must be made to worry that it’s capable of anything. This is why Kim made those remarks last January about regarding South Koreans as foreigners. I still doubt that he was sincere. The political scientist Hannah Arendt said that totalitarian systems are more like movements than states: if they don’t keep moving toward a clear goal, they collapse. Is Kim too stupid to see the problem? I don’t think so. Yet the outside world has generally taken that speech at face value.

It was a brilliant move. On the one hand, it conveyed the impression that North Korea is ready to wipe Seoul off the face of the earth if the US attacks. At the same time, the renunciation of pan-Korean nationalism has inspired hope that although North Korea has violated many agreements in the past, it will abide by the next one. It also gives the US the face with which to back down from its denuclearization demands: “Thanks to our resolve, Kim had no choice but to abandon his goal of ‘final victory’.”

I’ve been asked to make a few short-term predictions, so: Neither the US nor North Korea will show interest in negotiating before the November elections. In the meantime, Kim will continue carrying out his five-year plan [for strengthening his military]. The US media will spin each missile launch as a provocation aimed at helping Trump’s chances, but don’t fall for that. Regardless of who becomes president, or how negotiations go, it’s highly unlikely that Kim will agree to anything more than an action for action deal. A more important variable than the outcome of the November election is the progress of the war in Ukraine; as long as it continues, the two countries will find it difficult to enter into negotiations.

In any case, North Korea has no intention of respecting an agreement for the long term, especially now that America has broken all the promises it made to Russia in the 1990s. Recently Professor John Mearsheimer said, “No country should trust the US,” and we can be sure Kim feels the same way. After all, no one in Washington is preaching peaceful coexistence with North Korea. Our doves and hawks may disagree over tactics, but both groups support the ultimate goal of subjugating North Korea to the US-led neoliberal system.

We should therefore discard the optimistic notion that Kim is developing weapons only in order to negotiate from a position of strength. He may want to make a few small deals with the US, and see sanctions temporarily eased as a result, but he has no intention of stopping the development and optimization of his nuclear arsenal, nor will any agreement result in meaningful cooperation between the two countries.

As for South Korea: Six years ago, President Moon’s advisor Paik Nak-chung said that this country’s very existence poses a threat to North Korea, and I agree with him. Unlike Paik, however, I don’t believe that Kim would ever see a solution to this threat in a North-South confederation, which the US would be all too likely to use as a Trojan horse.

For this reason, I believe that the main function of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal remains that of preventing America from intervening in a future effort to take over the South. How South Korea should respond to this difficult situation is a question that South Koreans must answer, but I think that what President Park Chung-hee said after the attack on the Blue House [in 1968] remains valid: “This territory belongs to our citizens, and we are the main agents of its defense.”

Several years ago one of the big Washington think tanks hosted a forum at a hotel in Seoul. The audience consisted mostly of officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but I’d had been invited (by one of the co-sponsors, I think) along with about a dozen other foreigners.

The head of the think tank, an elderly American, got things rolling with a long and leisurely speech. In it he informed his elite South Korean listeners that their ancient nation had endured decades of Japanese colonial rule, only to be divided in two when it ended. Then a terrible war had broken out, leaving great destruction in its wake; and although the republic was rescued by its foreign friends, it languished in poverty for years, before going through one of the most remarkable economic transformations in world history… cars, semi-conductors, cellphones; Samsung and Hyundai,  household names… North Korea, meanwhile, famine, nuclear program… but together, an alliance forged in blood, the US and South Korea, etc, etc.

No doubt I’m misremembering some parts, but that was the gist. Having read more Juche texts than the average person I can lay claim to a high boredom threshold, but twenty minutes in I thought I was losing my mind. I’d come up from Busan for this? Yet the South Korean officials in my row, arms folded, eyes half-closed, were letting the speech wash over them with a kind of somnolent approval.

Later I asked a native how South Koreans could possibly look to such people, such institutions, for analysis of this part of the world. He answered that it wasn’t about analysis. It was about giving the Washingtonians face and stature here, in return for their opening doors for ROK officials over there.

True or not, that assertion came back to me the other day upon reading the allegations against Sue Mi Terry, a CFR member and former CIA agent who until a week ago was an even more common fixture at Beltway Korea events than Victor Cha. If the indictment is correct, Terry spent at least 10 years working for South Korea’s intelligence agency: taking requests for op-eds on particular topics, conveying information and documents acquired at meetings with top US officials, and letting into that exalted company the South Korean “wolf” (her choice of words) in diplomat’s clothing. All this without having registered as a foreign agent.

As I’ve said repeatedly on this blog, our foreign policy establishment (henceforth: FPE) generally leans softline on North Korea, while  accommodating a minority of hawks for hedging purposes. Hence the curious note of indulgence that has long characterized Beltway discussion of the dictatorship. While journalists and experts play up the autocratic power that Putin and Xi allegedly enjoy, the North Korea spin goes in the opposite direction: toward downplaying Kim Jong Un’s power, and pretending that this is an actual socialist party-state, with a second and third in command, following set procedures. A somber fuss is made about party conferences, as if we hadn’t learned after the Cold War how unimportant even the Soviet ones had been. It wasn’t long ago that a State Department official assured us in a well-received book that North Korea is a budding pluralist order, its Rodong Sinmun newspaper a lively forum for hawk-dove contention over foreign policy.

Ri Il-gyu, the latest defector from North Korea’s diplomatic corps, tried to set the record straight a few days ago by making clear that Kim’s giant fiefdom is hardly a state at all, but as Ian Robinson said, “it is the nature of fallacies to survive refutation.” Although the tone of our North Korea commentary has hardened since last year’s Putin-Kim summit, it will likely soften again next year. South Korean conservatives who think Trump is their only problem need to understand that Foggy Bottom was as furious with him after the Hanoi summit as the Blue House was.

So I’m not surprised that the first Korea watcher indicted for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act wasn’t one of the activists in the diaspora “peace movement” who meet with North Korean operatives, or one of the dovish Americans whom the Kim Jong Il regime helped to a lucrative expert status through repeated invitations to special-access tours, but was instead a relative conservative or hardliner. Relative, because no principled conservative would have hosted, as Terry did, that Jeju conference at the Woodrow in 2022, which I suspect had been conceived during the Moon administration. But fear of a wider crackdown seems to have gripped the entire commentariat, judging from the refusal of doves and hawks alike to go on record about this case.

The indictment is interesting. I’m surprised that someone can be virtually forced out of the CIA for excessive coziness with foreign spies and still pass the security clearance needed to work in the White House. Did no one think to ask Terry why she’d left? Even then, ROK intelligence was known to be heavily infiltrated by people working for Pyongyang or Beijing. I also infer that no great urgency attaches to investigations like these, Terry having steadily become more prominent for years after the authorities had amassed quite significant evidence against her.

More nuggets: 1) some think-tank analysts get an unrestricted “gift” account which they can draw from at their discretion, 2) even foreign governments are aware of such accounts, 3) ROK intelligence, despite a famously huge budget, pays a paltry $500 for a bespoke op-ed, and 4) the idea for the Nuclear Consultative Group originated in Seoul and not Washington.

It’s only right that Uncle Sam should care deeply whether a Beltway Korea expert is consciously spreading propaganda on behalf of our FPE or on behalf of a foreign government. From an intellectual or academic standpoint, however, the distinction is trivial. No researcher taking cues from anyone else can be regarded as a disinterested source of information or analysis. This isn’t to say that we can’t derive benefit from such people’s work (which is usually very well funded) if we approach it critically, just as we can learn much of value even from North Korean texts. But nothing they say should be taken on trust.

Unfortunately the tankies aren’t the only ones “in the tank.” Remember that North Korean Studies as an academic field didn’t branch out organically from Korean Studies; it sprang straight out of the FPE, which funded, groomed and promoted our first “academic ward boss.” Not for nothing do invitations to Washington events carry a special cachet for North Korea scholars, including non-American ones. Make that: especially non-American ones. Stature in our field has always derived more from such badges of power-elite approval or patronage than from original insight or research.

Which is why our second “academic ward boss” continued to appear at university and think-tank events for 3 years after being exposed as the most prolific fabricator of sources in US academic history. Only when the FPE university par excellence announced it was forcing him into retirement did the Beltway and academia simultaneously cut him loose. (Terry studied at Columbia’s Weatherhead Institute during Armstrong’s time there.) Although the NYT and Wapo show great interest in academic scandals, they kept deathly quiet about that one, which might otherwise have undermined public faith in the foreign-policy expertocracy.

“Treating former intelligence officers as disinterested sources of news is highly problematic,” as Stephen Marmura has written. Problematic for us, certainly, not least because we know how little weight attaches to former in that context. But the FPE, wanting to keep this discussion “in house” so as to guard against heterodox expression, wants us all to accept a record of CIA, State or NSC service as the mark of a supremely authoritative Korea analyst.

By far the worse problem is that the commentariat’s academic wing, the wing with the better language skills, meekly accepts this hierarchy. When Harvard University hosted a Korean security “summit” in 2022, did it call on any of the young and promising American scholars in the field, of whom even I could name a dozen?

Of course not. It called on Sue Mi Terry.

 

UPDATE: Greenwald on Terry: 28 July 2024:

If you have time, listen to Glenn Greenwald’s podcast about Terry and her husband, Wapo journalist Max Boot. Among other things, it highlights the couple’s recent criticism of Trump’s “obsession” with reducing the cost of stationing US troops in South Korea. Greenwald:

Just to be clear, Trump’s point of view is that South Korea is a booming, thriving economy, and their citizens have a higher standard of living than millions of Americans, and so Trump’s argument is, “Why are we paying to protect you, when you’re not contributing economically at all, and we’re paying for everything,” and he forced them to increase the amount of subsidies like he’s trying to do with NATO, and Max Boot and his spy-wife, his ex-CIA wife…[are] here to say that Trump is evil for even pressuring the South Korean government to do anything.

I’d never heard of Boot before this business, but apparently he was in the vanguard of the Russiagate rumormongers later refuted by the Durham Report. Greenwald makes no secret of his dislike for the fellow, and I think it gets the better of him here. South Korea had hardly been paying nothing, and nowhere in the piece is the former president called evil.

Perhaps more importantly: our very own FPE always opposed Trump on the point in question. Anything smacking of a desire to cut military spending is anathema to those people, because anathema to the capital class they answer to. Throughout Trump’s term, our media and think tanks used the troop-costs issue to misrepresent him, as I noted critically at the time, “as a wanton sower of disunity in the alliance,” with nary a word about Moon’s pursuit of a North-South confederation. (Here, for example, is a Wapo article of Anna Fifield’s  from 2017.)

So Boot and Terry might well have written an op-ed in much the same vein even without prompting from the NIS. But there can be little doubt that South Korean inducements have done much to keep the relevant Beltway consensus firm over the years. (Even conservatives here have had to acknowledge that the Moon government’s lobbying blitz in Washington helped save South Korea billions of dollars.)

Enforcement of FARA won’t do a whole lot for the quality of our Korea reporting and analysis, then, but it’s  a start. I tip my hat to Glenn Greenwald for making clear that the indictment isn’t the puzzling overreaction to “small potatoes” that other news outlets have been presenting it as.

[Below is the text of a presentation I gave at Seoul City Hall on 11 July at the Seoul Forum on North Korean Human Rights 2024. The first session was moderated by Lee Shin-wha, Ambassador for International Cooperation on North Korean Human Rights (ROK). My turn came after presentations by Julie Turner, Special Envoy on North Korean Human Rights (USA); Elizabeth Salmón, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (UN); and James Heenan, head of the OHCHR Seoul Office (UN). Determined to pack 15 minutes of content into 10 minutes, I outraced the interpreter early on, only to find out this morning that both video recordings uploaded to Youtube have the occasionally divergent voiceover built in. The highlight of the event for me was talking afterward with very interesting young people from around the world — including North Korea — and I thank them again for coming up to introduce themselves.]

I’d like to start by thanking the other panelists, and everybody here today who gathers data on these rights abuses, because it helps all of us in North Korean Studies to understand the country better. I teach a course on human rights, to which I invite former North Koreans to speak — although there aren’t very many in Busan — so I’m more a follower of this discussion, and see my role today in humbly suggesting a few ways to popularize it. Now that China and Russia aren’t cooperating with resolutions related to North Korea, I think really the only way we can pressure Kim Jong Un to carry out reforms is to keep up a high and steady level of popular concern, such as was brought to bear on apartheid South Africa when I was a high school student there.

I think there’s hope here, because if you’ve seen the fuss KCNA makes about foreign praise, you know the regime isn’t indifferent to its reputation. One challenge we face is that Western people are increasingly concerned with rights problems closer to home. When I was at university in the 1980s, we all knew the names of Mandela and Sakharov — I knew the name of Kim Dae Jung — but the best known dissident of the past 5 years has been Julian Assange. And everyone’s grown wary of orchestrated bashing of pariah states, because it often heralds military intervention that makes things worse. So complaints about North Korea, I find, are starting to meet with indifference or skepticism. It hasn’t helped that a few defectors have been caught out in biographical inconsistencies, let’s say.

I want to say here what I say to skeptics when I encounter them. I’ve been to North Korea a few times, so I’ve seen what the regime likes to show us, but I’ve also spoken to enough migrants, most of whom hate publicity, to know that all too much of the bad news is true. Taking it seriously doesn’t mean we have to overlook our own governments’ rights abuses. When America condemns Kim Jong Un for surveilling his citizens, I think we Americans should point out that our government surveils us a lot more thoroughly; Kim just doesn’t have the power supply, for one thing. And most developed countries are moving toward more censorship and compelled speech. If this trend continues, the Kim regime’s counter-accusations of hypocrisy will only grow more persuasive.

But although the difference between democracy and dictatorship has become one of degree and not kind, that degree remains too great for moral equivalencies. Every North Korean dissident would find our punishments for saying the wrong thing preferable to the kind meted out in Yodeok, and we owe it to the inmates of those prison camps to keep a sense of perspective. Besides, renewing our horror of totalitarianism, which we felt so much more strongly during the Cold War, may strengthen resistance to the attrition of our own freedoms. South Koreans often respond to assaults on free speech by asking, “Is this North Korea?” I wish more Americans had that attitude.

I have a few reservations about linking rights abuses to the nuclear program, because so far, this linkage has made our side lose interest in the abuses whenever prospects for a nuclear settlement improve. Jimmy Carter came back from Pyongyang 30 years ago looking very impressed with Kim Il Sung, and the famine was then dignified in Western media as an excess of self-reliance, as no African famine has ever been. Only when the Geneva deal fell apart did we make the prison camps a priority. Not long thereafter an American president “fell in love” with Kim Jong Un, and the media establishment in the West cheered a South Korean president’s peace offensive that was equally blind to human rights. We’re now back to angry condemnation of Pyongyang, but everyone knows this has more to do with the Kim-Putin alliance than with changes inside North Korea.

I worry also that if we link prison camps and missiles, so to speak, we’ll only raise suspicion in Pyongyang that we’re highlighting the more emotive issue just to get the world behind our disarmament push. And let’s remember, it was during a supposed break in the nuclear program that the regime’s worst crime against humanity took the lives of almost a million people.

This brings me to the escapee issue. These days talk of the grim punishment awaiting repatriated escapees is often contradicted in the same breath by reference to how so-and-so just saved up enough money for a second escape. The sum needed just before the pandemic – if my sources are correct — was over $5000, and let’s face it, that’s more than the average American has in the bank, so I worry that if we continue to present these people as representative, we’ll be creating confusion about what living standards in North Korea are really like. I’m not downplaying the ordeals that they all go through, especially the women who are trafficked across the river, but it’s time, I believe, that we concentrated on the great mass of people inside North Korea.

That goes also for the issue of North Korean workers in China and Russia. If you spread the blame between three regimes, Kim gets off lightly. Just how bad are conditions at home, that people compete to get treated like slaves in foreign countries? I think that’s what we should focus on.

I agree that UN monitoring and cataloging must be comprehensive, but mass communication should strategically emphasize some abuses more than others. Our criticism must challenge Kim’s socialist pretensions, because unlike our leaders he has no liberal-democratic ones, and it must bear the potential to resonate – or from Kim’s standpoint, the danger of resonating — with average North Koreans, as our advocacy on behalf of nuclear scientists or escapees or abducted Japanese doesn’t. It must also speak to the South Korean public, right and left, because only in that way can we ensure the South Korean government maintains consistency in regard to the rights problem up there.

As the scholar Eric Posner explained years ago, people disagree on human rights, but agree on the need for basic welfare. I find that my international students, having grown up in depluralizing times, are less appalled by the lack of political freedoms in the North than by videos of women carrying buckets of river water up an icy flight of steps because they have no access to running water. That kind of thing hits home. Just two months ago a migrant said to my class, she’d like to make all South Koreans spend just one day up there as average people do. What she meant was: get up at dawn to sweep the street, then work 16 hours in a factory, to midnight or one a.m., and when you look out the factory window at night, you see your kids sleeping on the ground outside the gate, so they can walk you safely home through unlit streets after you finish. If you don’t ask “leading” questions, that’s the kind of thing migrants talk about. They complain about the self-criticism sessions, but I find they do so mainly because these were additional deprivations of rest and family time.

This hardship predates the nukes by decades. Kim Il Sung told his East German counterpart that high living standards make people lazy. Kim Jong Il put almost a billion dollars into monuments and luxury cars during the famine. The more food aid we gave, the less money he put into agriculture; that says it all. And we all remember how the North blocked South Korean efforts to pay North Korean workers directly at the Kaesong Industrial Zone. So let no one blame sanctions for the violations of labor rights.

The good news is that the regime has a bad conscience, though “conscience” may be saying too much; I prefer the Korean expression “찔리는 게 있다.” At the turn of the millennium it began promising prosperity, symbolized by meat and eggs.

Then in 2008 Kim Jong Il rashly promised that this Golden Age would begin in 2012, but as the year drew closer meat and eggs disappeared from the posters.

I’m vegan so I prefer the second poster, but most North Koreans aren’t. Kim Jong-un came to power saying belts could be loosened, but a lot of that propaganda was and still is aimed outward, like the Youtube videos of girls in Pyongyang that I think we’ve all seen. There are other signs that Kim wants to keep up socialist appearances. We’ve seen a revival of the term communism, more simulations of party procedure, and the pretended abandonment of pan-Korean nationalism.

This is why I think a “welfarist” focus will discomfit Kim more than our traditional emphasis on prison camps and migrants. It won’t get as emotional a response from some people as those issues do, but it may speak to a broader, more politically ecumenical audience. If we stress that labor exploitation results directly from one rapacious family’s ownership of the state — a fact we seem reluctant to stress, for some reason — Kim may grow worried enough about losing the residual goodwill of a big part of South Korean public opinion, and may become nervous enough about domestic unrest to ameliorate the worst violations of labor rights. Remember that some North Korean workers rioted recently in China. Other factors may add to the pressure. Kim cannot keep diverting the poor with missile launches, the wealth gap is widening, K-culture keeps coming in, and another hereditary succession needs to be put over on the public.

To sum up, it’s not the 1990s anymore, and this discussion needs to change accordingly, but as the gentleman on my right keeps reminding us, human rights is a long-term project, and I’m optimistic about the prospects for gradual improvement. Thank you all very much.

 

UPDATE: Orwell vs Buchheim: 13 August 2024:

Last month I invited a former North Korean to address the foreign students at my summer course in Busan. I told her what I’d said at the forum in Seoul a week earlier: that Uncle Sam surveils his citizens more thoroughly than Kim Jong Un does. Her face clouded; she was having none of it. “In North Korea, sitting in your house is like sitting outside.” She proceeded to explain how the party-appointed neighborhood snoop would barge into her home after midnight, flashlight in hand — her town had no electricity at night — and sometimes with a policeman in tow. What for? To count the number of occupants, or to ransack the place in another search for USB drives.

I let my guest carry the point. She was near tears at how much of her life had been lived that way, and where there’s sorrow there’s holy ground, as Wilde said. It felt — and still feels — wrong for me to insist on the greater thoroughness of surveillance in our societies, when the humiliation and fear that accompany violations of privacy are so much worse up there, to say nothing of the punishments for deviance. It seems no better to note that although the North Koreans are supposedly the world’s most misinformed people, they at least know who’s running their country. I’d rather remain ignorant about who’s running mine, and not get shouted out of bed at sunrise for “voluntary” street work.

Yet as a North Korea scholar I feel a duty to make clear that our system’s superiority to theirs isn’t what it used to be.

Case in point: The other day I read in the newspaper about how we must all accept as female a very male-looking boxer with a Y chromosome. So far, so 2024. What got my attention was the reason given: It says “female” in the boxer’s passport. A government had spoken, and that was that. It wasn’t even our sort of government.

In a flash I saw a remarkably simple solution to Kim Jong Un’s apparent lack of a male heir. Our journalists would certainly play along. Here’s the thing though: Because that regime is yet to launch an assault on common sense itself, there are limits to what it tries to put over on its people.

In North Korea as in Nazi Germany, one swears loyalty to the leader, not to a theorized worldview with a claim to absolute truth. Even cadres seem at a loss to quote from Juche Thought, a grab-bag of truisms for export use. It’s in our societies today — as in Stalin’s USSR — where any field with objective standards is thought suspect, and the dominant ideology trumps even scientific research. Which may be why North Koreans who have recently abandoned their Leader and escaped the country seem much freer of prejudices and taboos than Western people.

This raises the question of which system is more totalitarian. I’m pretty sure that Orwell, who associated such rule with boots in faces, gross economic inefficiency, and the smell of cabbage in hallways, would pick North Korea if he were alive today. But his view of totalitarianism was too obviously colored by the Soviet variant, just as Hannah Arendt’s was by the German one.

Hans Buchheim’s Totalitarian Rule (Totalitäre Herrschaft, 1962) is in some ways more perceptive. Naturally it’s out of print.

People under totalitarian rule are always on duty, always straining. They are no longer allowed to show themselves for who they really are, but must constantly play prescribed roles in an atmosphere of false pathos….  But the worst thing is that concepts, words and values are robbed of their accustomed validity, and moral standards become confused…. Therefore, although totalitarian rule also includes dictatorial governance, naked violence and the deprivation of freedom, its real characteristic is a creeping rape of the human being through the perversion of thought and social life. (13-14.)

That last sentence is key. Yes, North Korea is much worse when it comes to “dictatorial governance, naked violence and the deprivation of freedom.” For violence read torture, and I don’t want to rush past that; nothing (as Orwell reminds us in 1984) is as bad as physical pain. But those three things are common to authoritarian systems too.

On the other hand, the extent of “perversion of thought and social life” is greater in our societies, because having been nurtured in a pluralist, liberal tradition (such as never existed in the northern half of the Korean peninsula), we have much more that must now be driven out of us, perverted from us. When, in 2020, New Zealand’s prime minister publicly declared her government “your single source of truth,” and this in regard to scientific matters, the violation of accustomed values was much greater than it would have been had Kim Jong Un said it.

I suspect he would have rejected that formulation as too crude, too brazen. This is what surprises me most: our propaganda is losing even its subtlety advantage over the North’s.

Imagine you’re Kim Jong Un. You’ve brought to fruition a nuclear program that your two predecessors developed with a view to “final victory,” meaning the completion of a hybrid unification drive unhindered by American meddling. During your rule, prospects for subjugating or at least dominating the rival state have improved steadily. Granted, the pro-North fanaticism of the 1980s protest movement has cooled into support for “symbolic unification,” but getting the upper hand through the envisioned pan-Korean congress in Kaesong would be child’s play. As became obvious in 2018, when the ROK left touted the first stage of North-South confederation to no complaints from the parliamentary right, the hardline anti-Northers who used to call the shots down there are no longer a political force.

In 2019, bad advice from Seoul made you bungle the Hanoi summit. Sanctions remained in place, thwarting the Moon administration’s plans for a tributary transfer of wealth – for ROK-built airports, power plants, railroads, and pipelines. Nonetheless, the Minjoo’s candidate for the presidency in 2022 (during whose Gyeonggi governorship a few million dollars had been sent your way via China) came within a percentage point of winning. Next time around, he or some equally North-sympathetic figure is likely to return to the Blue House.

In the meantime, you can expect another chance to negotiate with Donald Trump. You’ll be in a much stronger position than before, not just because your weaponry has made great strides over the past 5 years, and the vain fool won’t let another summit fail, but because Foggy Bottom’s old dream of luring you out of the Sino-Russian sphere has taken on an added urgency of late. Yoon? He’ll do what Washington says. Your predecessors would have loved to be in your position now.

Maybe you don’t want the headache of ruling a unified peninsula. Maybe you’re wary even of inter-Korean trade. The cautionary example of East Germany looms large. Fine. You can still keep uniting your citizens around the great racial mission while stringing the ROK left along for no end of financial, diplomatic, and personality-cult capital.

So what do you do? You choose this of all times to publicly renounce unification. You abandon the pan-Korean nationalism that has held your country together through good times and bad, that has fueled the collective sacrifices needed for nuclearization. Just as your arsenal has begun putting the fear of God in the Americans, you back down, albeit gruffly, and accept the division they imposed on the 5000-year-old race. You’re prepared to lose the nationalist-left demographic below the DMZ, which is about the size of your state’s population and which (according to a 2019 poll) would even back the DPRK in a war against Japan. What were once your ethnic brethren are now as monolithically alien as Yankees, only worse. If provoked, you’ll show the Pentagon what a real bombardment of the peninsula looks like.

You feel bad for Grandfather, of course. This isn’t what he wanted. But at least you’re keeping his haircut.

End of experiment.

Now, I’m not implying that if a declared policy appears irrational, we must assume it isn’t being carried out in earnest. When it comes to my country’s government, I’m more inclined to think the opposite. But unlike the elected president of a liberal oligarchy, who must often adopt policies that militate against his interests as well as the public’s (see the border crisis), Kim is his own boss. No one tells him what to do.

When, therefore, he makes a portentous proclamation that appears to make sense only as an export-propaganda stratagem — as a way of both warning Washington against a strike and encouraging hope in the long-term viability of a peace treaty — we’re justified in wondering if this isn’t all we’re dealing with.

[During the run-up to the April 10 elections I will be providing occasional commentary, focusing, as always, on matters relevant to North Korea or to inter-Korean relations.– BRM]

Why the special treatment, Ignorarium?

Of all the left-wing national movements in the OECD, South Korea’s is the least Americanized. I’m not denying that many a Minjoo Party member has studied in the US, or sent his or her children to study there. Every self-respecting family in the Gangnam left includes at least one US passport-holder. A certain pro-Norther is, according to persistent rumor, the only fellow in his immediate family without a US passport. It’s equally true that these people now live, eat and entertain themselves in as American a fashion as everyone else.

But the ROK left never went through the ideological Americanization that the European and to some extent the Japanese left went through in the 1990s. That process was best embodied by the German philosopher Habermas, who went from bewailing the fall of the Berlin Wall to supporting the expansion of American power, which he saw as the perfect way to rid Europe of its nationalisms and strengthen human rights. When I was at German university in the 1980s, the sight of Reagan’s face on the evening news would set off a Two-Minute Hate in the dining room on my dormitory floor. Today it’s Europe’s right that opposes Biden’s goal of expanding NATO ever eastward.

The ROK left has changed some of its positions since the 1980s, particularly regarding the economy, but it’s as hostile as ever to the expansion of American power in the region. Its pro-Chinese and Russia-sympathetic tendencies are as impossible to overlook as its ongoing admiration for the militarist-nationalist monarchy to the north, the world’s most anti-globalist, anti-DEI state. (Iran is diverse in comparison.) Ideologically the Minjoo Party has more in common with Germany’s AfD — which the Western press so reviles — than with the SPD.

Many Westerners are more familiar with ROK-left thinking than they realize, for it’s these people who have dominated the entertainment industry since the 1990s, on both sides of the camera, and who can thus take most of the credit for Hallyu. (Until he became famous in the USA, Psy of “Gangnam Style” fame was anti-American even by Minjoo standards.)

Just how much wokeness do you see on screen in South Korea’s nationalist romances? How much equality of the sexes for that matter? The storylines and tropes on display — the charmingly drunk girl being carried home on the wealthy young hero’s back — take me right back to the KBS of the military-ruled 1980s. This social conservatism is real and not feigned. See Moon Jae-in’s remarks on same-sex marriage.

Which reminds me of another side of him that our media avoided talking about. It was but a few weeks after his inauguration in May 2017 that I went to buy Russian bread in Busan’s Chinatown, and found the shop abuzz with news of the most rigorous round-up of illegal immigrants anyone could remember. A Trumpian move — from a party which, for other reasons of course, would love to see Trump back in the White House next year.

So again, I ask the question: Why the special treatment? Why do Western media not only exempt the ROK left from criticism, but mislabel it as “liberal,” and root consistently for it against the globalist, US-loyal People Power Party? Why was no attention paid in 2016 to the misogynistic overtones of the vilification of Park Geun-hye — the posters of a squawking hen, the calls for her to “just go and get married”? Why did our media misrepresent the last ROK presidential election campaign as an incels vs feminists clash, when opinion polls clearly told otherwise?

Why does the number of “Hell Chosun” stories — the ones about what a joyless and cutthroat society South Korea supposedly is — always seem to increase the moment the globalists return to power? Isn’t it normal US-media practice to bash foreign nationalisms instead? Why are the low birth rate and high suicide rate treated primarily as problems of the (pseudo-)conservatives’ making? Weren’t those rates much higher and lower, respectively, under right-wing dictatorship? In short, what’s going on?

I have no answer yet, or at least, none that I feel confident enough to set down here. Perhaps this will change over the ensuing weeks. In my next entry, I will discuss the scandal now besetting President Yoon’s wife.

UPDATE: The Dior [not Chanel] bag (4 February 2024):

I need to explain my lingo. In a list of fictional Irish tourist sites Flann O’Brien included (without explanation) something called the Ignorarium, a term I first used here in regard to the Seoul Foreign Correspondents’ Club and now apply to Western mainstream media as a whole. As many have already noted, starting with Jacques Ellul at the very latest, media bias manifests more often through omission of context than through outright falsehood.

Which brings me to the bag scandal currently in the news. Western coverage has been more balanced and nuanced than I expected, Choe Sang-hun, for example, making sure to mention the first lady’s efforts to get the sale of dog meat banned. Nevertheless I believe that the most important aspect of the scandal, and the effect it’s most likely to have, are being overlooked.

The facts: In late 2022, a few months into her husband’s presidency, Kim Keon-hee accepted a Dior handbag priced at about $2200 from a Korean-American pastor who secretly filmed their encounter.

Our media try to convey the impression that South Koreans find her behavior shockingly unethical. The following is from Choe Sang-hun’s article in the NYT:

“This is an explosive issue” because it reminds South Koreans of the recurring corruption that has disgraced most of the country’s former presidents, said Ahn Byong-jin, a political scientist at Kyung Hee University in Seoul​.

Actually, most South Koreans (especially on the left) believe that prosecutors were terribly mean for investigating Roh Moo Hyun and his wife in connection with two Piaget watches — combined value: well over $100,000 — gifted them by a businessman during his presidency. During the Moon Jae-in administration the public generally shrugged off various allegations of impropriety on the part of the president’s wife. These included the allegation, which conservatives are now reviving, that she kept a special coat made for her by Chanel.

Then there are the far more serious allegations that Lee Jae-myung, the Minjoo Party chief, has been facing since before the last presidential campaign. If people here were so haunted by memories of corrupt presidencies, Lee wouldn’t have received his party’s nomination in the first place, let alone come within a hair of winning the election. One could buy dozens of Chanel bags with the amount of private expenses Lee and his wife are alleged to have had charged to government offices during his stints as mayor and provincial governor.

No one’s moral outrage rings hollower than that of Choi Jae-young, the Korean-American pastor behind the whole affair. From the description of him in the Guardian – “Choi has a history of engagement with the North and has visited the communist [sic] country several times to conduct prayers” – I can see we’re all meant to imagine a Desmond Tutu or Billy Graham figure. (The NYT says, “Mr. Choi advocates friendly relations between North and South Korea.”)

In fact the pastor is a prominent pro-Norther of many years’ standing and a frequent contributor to the radical website Tongil News. Clearly his actual goal is to return an appeasement- or confederation-minded party to power as soon as possible.

The scandal won’t shift votes from one party to another. It’s more likely to keep some conservatives at home on April 10 who would otherwise have voted (and even then with no great enthusiasm) for the ruling party. The bag itself is not the main problem. For one thing it’s not expensive enough. Last year I was told in class discussions of consumption habits that the average female college senior in Busan possesses at least one imported handbag in the $1000 to $3000 price range. Two? By no means uncommon. (Students chuckled at my incredulity.) So you can imagine what Seoul’s like.

More scandalous to conservatives, as I gather from Youtube and social media, is the fact that a) the first lady chose to have a long and private conversation with a well-known pro-North opponent of the US-ROK alliance, and b) no one in the administration, intelligence agency or bodyguard detail had a problem with this, despite her having said indiscreet things in an earlier conversation with a known leftist that nearly derailed her husband’s campaign. (Keep in mind here that Yoon’s abandonment of the Blue House in 2022, a disastrous blunder in itself, was justified in part with reference to how the North had riddled the place with listening devices.)

I believe that the pastor intended to create the impression that presidential policy is being made behind the scenes by an unelected, unappointed and deeply corrupt woman. A man would be bad enough, but a woman! Which was pretty much the narrative that set off the misogynist impeachment hysteria of 2016, only to fall apart under investigation. I don’t see it working this time. One reason is that the conservative press won’t join in. Another is that Park Geun-hye’s friend was plainly an intelligent woman whom one could imagine pulling the strings, whereas we know from the hidden-camera video that Yoon’s wife, when not hawking and spitting into tissues, speaks like this:

When [public interest] in me dies down to a degree, I think I’ll actively venture a bit into North-South relations. Really… North-South unification must be done, the North Koreans are in too pitiful a situation….They’re our citizens so we must quickly accept them….

These statements aren’t the first indication she’s given that she regards the presidency as a marital joint venture, which is certainly cause for concern, but it’s equally obvious that she hasn’t paid attention to inter-Korean relations for years (if ever) and is unlikely to care enough to meddle in them. If the scandal hurts the ruling party on April 10, it will be because her whole deportment in the video reflects so badly on the president himself. South Korea has never had a first lady like this.

UPDATE: The growth of the Progressive Party (7 February 2024):

As I made clear here in 2019, there are no insuperable ideological animosities on the South Korean left.

What was once the nationalist Left is now the Nationalist left….  Nationalism is about putting the (ethno-)nation above liberal-democratic and leftist values alike. Once one takes that step, one is not separated from other nationalists by anything irreducible. Having sought out the porridge that tastes just right, one rubs shoulders with those eating from hotter or cooler bowls. Because the differences are merely of degree, the various groupings shade almost imperceptibly into one another, with plenty of interlocking personal relationships. And the “radical” knows that the “moderate” has an important role to play.

There is thus a tradition of electoral alliances between the Minjoo and the “far left” or openly pro-North party, which used to be called the United Progressive Party (a grouping forced to disband during the Park Geun-hye era) and is now the Progressive Party. Equally traditional is the Ignorarium’s refusal to cover this fraternity, which in European terms would be like social democrats working together with socialists, the one party or the other agreeing to stay out of certain races to ensure that the common conservative enemy loses.

For example, it was thanks to the UPP candidate’s withdrawal from the Seongnam mayoral race in 2010 that Lee Jae-myung was able to make his start in politics. And it was thanks to the Minjoo’s staying out of a by-election in the southwest last year that the Progressive Party’s Kang Sung-hee won a seat in the National Assembly. (The Minjoo claims to have stood down as a show of contrition, the seat having been vacated due to a Minjoo parliamentarian’s wrongdoing). Kang was the man dragged out of a hall last January after shouting at President Yoon, whose hand he had refused to let go of.

In a recent poll the PP came third in the Busan-Ulsan-South Gyeongsang region. 8% support strikes me as a little too high to be plausible, but then again, Ulsan has long been one of the four strongholds of the nationalist far left (the others being the entire Jeolla region, Incheon, and east Gyeonggi Province). In any case, the PP is clearly much more popular in Busan than it was only a year or two ago. This is partly the result of growing disaffection with the Minjoo Party, which is seen as being too preoccupied with keeping Lee Jae-myung out of prison. He is therefore more worried about these splinter parties than Moon Jae-in ever was; they can be counted on to vote with the Minjoo on most issues, but not to stand by him in his legal battles.

But there are other reasons for the PP’s growth. Under its leader Yoon Hee-suk (not to be confused with her conservative namesake) the party has toned down the pro-Pyongyang stuff, and now makes a more convincing show of commitment to issues of social equality and welfare than the Justice Party. (If you think North Korea couldn’t have advised such a savvy strategy, remember its opposition to extreme rhetoric in the days of the protest movement.) The PP has also benefited from displays of solidarity with the more radical trade unions, like the one for delivery workers. Particularly interesting is how the party has trained its cadres in debt counseling. Banners urge people in difficulty to call the PP’s own debt hotline, or to seek out the party vans that will be traveling the country during campaign season. Something tells me Kang, who is ahead of his Minjoo and People Power rivals in the latest Jeonju polls, won’t be the only PP representative in the National Assembly for long.

UPDATE: President Yoon’s numbers improve (10 February 2024): 

The handbag scandal which, as the Hankyoreh gloated, put the “first lady in the spotlight of the Western press,” which the Guardian claimed had “plunged South Korea’s government into disarray,” and which the NYT said had become “one of the biggest political crises” for President Yoon, turns out to have had no discernible effect on his approval ratings, which in fact improved quite significantly even as the controversy “raged” (NYT).

UPDATE: Korea Pro explains the election system (11 February 2024):

I was dreading having to go into the semi-mixed-member-proportional (semi-MMP) system, but now I see that Jeongmin Park and Lina Park (who understand it better than I do anyway) have explained it very well for Korea Pro readers. They forbear to remark on the strangeness of letting one party’s boss choose a country’s electoral system (and that only weeks before elections take place) but an article can only be so long. An understanding of the system is necessary to grasp the inter-Korean or DPRK-relevant aspects of the upcoming election, which I will be discussing in future entries.

UPDATE: The unlikely turn in the PPP’s fortunes (17 February 2024):

The ruling party’s rise in opinion polls has taken many people by surprise, myself included. Naturally conservative media credit it in large part to Yoon’s supposedly improved performance on the economic and diplomatic fronts. (The reestablishment of diplomatic relations with Cuba was certainly a triumph, and a shock to the opposition.) Much praise is also lavished on Han Dong-hoon, the former prosecutor and Justice Minister, who since becoming the PPP’s interim leader has done much to convey the impression of a party infusing itself with new blood. It seems clear that the PPP will bring plenty of young and female faces into its satellite or puppet party (see my preceding entry on the electoral system).

This as opposed to reserving its puppet party for people too ideologically extreme to win election, as the Minjoo seems set on doing. Evidently the Democratic Reform and Progressive Election Coalition (as it’s called) will include the Progressive Party’s Yoon Hee-suk along with pro-North figures who played a key role in the mass anti-American protests of 2002 and 2008. This seems a more radical bunch than gained seats (without being actually elected of course) on the back of the Minjoo’s last puppet party. It has been suggested that Lee wants to see more of a rabble-rousing element in the Assembly – and thus on the nightly TV news — in order to get an impeachment drive going against Yoon. (Note that about 20 seats are likely to go to each of the big two puppet parties.)

I derive the turn in the PPP’s fortunes less from its own successes than from the failures of the Minjoo, which continues to suffer from the perception that it has been “privatized” by Lee. The unseemly squabble between pro-Moon and pro-Lee factions over nominations to districts (so reminiscent of the conservatives’ disastrous disunity in 2016) has been a further drag on its approval ratings. Its sustained effort to whip up public anger over that Dior bag now seems to have been a waste of time, which isn’t to say that the first lady can’t cause additional problems for the ruling party before April 10.

The anti-Yoon right has raised the valid point that a radically pro-North pastor — radical enough to have got in trouble during the Moon administration — doesn’t get invited to an ostensibly conservative president’s inauguration ceremony, let alone to the exclusive banquet afterwards, and then enjoy opportunities for text exchanges and one-on-one face time with the first lady, simply because his father allegedly used to be acquainted with hers. The speculation is that the frequent Air Koryo flyer may have presented himself to the first couple, or been perceived by it without his prompting, as a potential liaison with the Kim Jong Un regime. Since every conservative president since Chun Doo Hwan has tried to get an inter-Korean summit going, with the possible exception of Park Geun-hye (who had met the Dear Leader before her election anyway), the notion isn’t as far-fetched as all that.

UPDATE: The Minjoo joins hands with the Progressive Party (23 February 2024):

For years there has been speculation as to how Lee Jae-myung is going to pay all of his lawyers. Now we may have an answer: a few are likely to be nominated to run in the April elections, unlike several well-known and popular members of the opposition party whom Lee doesn’t trust to stand by him. This “privatization” of the Minjoo (the local media’s term, not mine) continues to hurt both his and the party’s approval ratings, but as April 10 draws closer, and pro-Moon voters get past their anger about the “nomination massacre,” the gap between the Minjoo and PPP will narrow again.

Meanwhile Lee has forged an electoral alliance with the pro-North and anti-American Progressive Party I discussed above. The Minjoo will stay out of races in certain districts where the PP candidate scores higher in opinion polls, so as not to divide the leftist vote; a race in a district of Ulsan has already been effectively ceded to the PP. The Minjoo will also give 3 prime spots in its satellite or puppet party to PP members, ensuring that they win seats in the Assembly even without running for election. A few more seats will be given to members of comparably radical civic groups.

It’s a shrewd move for various reasons. First, Lee can in this way make up for his lack of a protest-movement background while signalling strong sympathy for North Korea (which everyone understands that a potential future president can’t express directly), thereby finally acquiring a nationalist-moral authority that he has hitherto lacked.

Second, conservatives will express outrage, which Lee, the Hankyoreh and MBC can then use to unite the Minjoo base against a purported relapse into the McCarthyist paranoia of the military dictatorships. (Our Ignorarium will weigh in on the Minjoo’s side, again begging the question I raised at the beginning of this thread.)

Third, Lee can sit back after the elections and watch the largest radical contingent in South Korean parliamentary history become the raucous vanguard of a drive to impeach Yoon. He can also play the disapproving moderate while these people he imported into the Assembly deal weekly blows to the dignity of the administration and ruling party — as when a member of the Democratic Labor Party, an earlier incarnation of the United Progressive Party (which in turn begat the PP), opened a teargas canister at the podium in 2011.

UPDATE: The Birth of Korea (28 February 2024):

Distorting history with tendentious films, launching them in campaign season if possible, and mobilizing sympathetic civic and religious groups to help inflate the box office: this has been a nationalist-left specialty for decades. School classes are regularly taken to watch films that make The Battleship Potemkin look subtle. Now that conservatives are getting into the act with a documentary on Syngman Rhee, the pro-Minjoo press is raising the alarm: Movie theaters, those venerable fonts of truth, are under threat from filmmakers with an agenda. Korea Pro: “the documentary raises critical concerns about the potential distortion of historical facts and its use as a tool for political manipulation.”

Propaganda is what the other camp does; yours would never stoop so low. Type the word into Google News and you’d think it were mainly a Russian thing. At the PIFF ages ago I asked the actor Kang Hye-jung (of Old Boy fame) about the ideological tendency of Welcome to Tongmakkol, and she appeared genuinely unaware of any. Of course the last thing either left or right wants, in any country, are the historical facts in all their moral grayness and complexity. At three of the last four public talks I’ve given in Seoul, I’ve been tetchily asked in the Q & A to explain where I stand, “because you seem critical of both the left and right.” It has become hard for people to understand that this is a stance in itself. Believe it or not, it used to be quite a common one.

Over a million people have seen The Birth of Korea (건국전쟁) since it opened in theaters a month ago. Although the right lacks enough sway over the teachers’ union to mobilize school classes, the film is said to be doing well with the prized “2030” demographic. Then again the right is forever claiming to be turning the corner with young people. When I went to see the film in Busan a little over a week ago, the only person younger than me was a little boy, no doubt somebody’s grandson, who kept sighing and running in and out.

I sighed but stayed put. Historical documentaries need conflict or dialectic just like other movies do, but The Birth of Korea is hagiography from start to finish. Foreign talking heads think Rhee was wonderful; why don’t Koreans themselves? Mistakes were made in the latter part of his rule, but only because the great man’s eyes and ears were blocked by people around him. An intriguing hint that the Americans were behind the 1960 “revolution” goes undeveloped. The director’s main goal, it seems, was to counter the left’s main misrepresentations of Rhee: as pro-Japanese, as sanguinario, as the coward who left Seoul in the lurch in 1950, and so on. Which would be fine if the left got a few minutes to present its case.

Meanwhile the right’s role in retroactively disparaging Rhee is glossed over. It was Park Chung Hee who acted as if Kim Gu would have made a better founding father, and who kept Rhee from returning home, just as dirt was then heaped on Park’s memory by Chun Doo Hwan, who in turn was put in prison by Kim Young Sam, and so on. The left, in contrast, stays so loyal to its past presidents that even the parliamentary right feels compelled to feign respect for them.

The film’s timeline would try Quentin Tarantino’s patience. It starts in 1960, goes up to the exile’s death in Hawaii in 1965, goes back to the land reform — giving Rhee too much credit for it, just as Kim Il Sung gets too much credit for the northern one (see Lankov’s corrective account in From Stalin to Kim Il Sung) — then jumps around in the colonial period before taking a second run at the 1940s, then moves on to the Korean War, and then….  Sorry, the color-footage interludes in modern-day Hawaii made me lose track, but if I remember rightly, the Manhattan ticker-tape parade of 1954 appears at some length at two different points in the film. The muddle precludes any sense of Rhee’s personal or ideological development, which might have been the whole idea; no one (least of all the left) wants to hear about the socialist tendencies he manifested for a while there. David Fields, who has written well on that subject, is repeatedly shown discussing more innocuous matters.

What I found interesting was the implicit message that the left wing’s efforts to “erase” Rhee from history are bad not so much because they do the republic an injustice as because they wrong the poor man himself. Koreans seem much more loyal to individuals alive or dead than to parties, movements, or the state, as witness not only the Kim cult up north, but the Minjoo’s all-too-foreseeable woes under Lee Jae-myung’s leadership.

In the past there has been talk of a “shy conservative” demographic: people who feel so hopelessly outnumbered, so gloomy about political developments, that they avoid watching the news, especially in campaign season, and hide their true allegiance from pollsters. They’re now optimistic enough about the elections to go to “their” movie at the theater. What they fail to realize is that the ruling party is not conservative in any meaningful sense. President Yoon may have recommended the film, but his and his party’s position on the Jeju and Yeosu conflicts of the late 1940s remains squarely anti-Rhee.

UPDATE: PPP nominations disappoint even the Chosun (29 February 2024):

Han Dong-hoon’s rhetoric notwithstanding, the ruling party won’t be fielding many young or female faces after all. As the Chosun disapprovingly reports, 87% of the PPP’s nominees are 50 or older, making this a more senior bunch on average than was fielded in 2020. Women make up less than 10% of the total.

This complacency could end up hurting the PPP if Lee can spin his purge of the aging Moon faction more effectively as a rejuvenation and reform drive. It has also been pointed out that by denying nominations to prominent old Minjoo members who are as hated on the right as they are popular on the left — Lim Jong-seok for example — Lee Jae-myung may make it harder for the PPP to get out the vote on April 10.

UPDATE: The mood in Jeolla (6 March 2024):

According to most opinion polls, Lee’s perceived abuse of the party as a tool with which to stay out of prison has done special harm to his and the Minjoo’s approval ratings in the (southwestern) Jeolla region, perhaps because many of the prominent politicians who have fallen victim to the “nomination massacre” have been Jeollans. Even Lee’s diehard supporters are said to have been taken aback by his decision to nominate his wife’s former aide as the Minjoo candidate in Suncheon-Gwangyang (S. Jeolla). Like most districts in the southwest, that’s one where the Minjoo — as the Korean turn of phrase goes — could plant a stick in the ground and see it elected.

Because Lee’s wife is now being prosecuted for misusing her husband’s official credit card to pay for family expenses, many suspect that the promised nomination was intended to buy the nominee’s silence. At least Kwon Hyang-yeop, the person in question, was born in that very part of the country. If Jeollans are unhappy anyway, it’s because the Minjoo’s habit of replacing familiar with new faces in their districts makes it harder for Jeolla-based lawmakers to build up national stature. Then the party turns around every five years and urges the region to support yet another southeastern presidential candidate, on the grounds that it has failed to produce a politician with the national support that Kim Dae Jung enjoyed.

To quell the outcry, the former aide has agreed to compete with the incumbent (Minjoo) lawmaker in a primary she seems likely to lose, but the damage has been done. Not, of course, to the extent that the southwest might elect a conservative or two. But as the Minjoo found out when Moon Jae-in lost the presidential election to Park Geun-hye in 2012, it can’t hope to get out the crucial Jeolla-diaspora vote in Seoul and Busan unless the southwest itself is properly fired up.

UPDATE: A rara avis on Pennmike (7 March 2024):

I’ve always liked the NFL, but I used to look down on the punditry. All those people dressed to the nines, chewing things over with such ridiculous seriousness! I’ve since realized how wrong I was. Where else in public life do Americans with different opinions still engage in civil, reasoned argument? And if that doesn’t merit coordinating your necktie and pocket square, what does? Granted, it’s of no real importance whether this quarterback should be ranked higher than that one, but the pursuit of common judgment always matters more than the thing being judged. Perhaps the discussion culture that European visitors used to praise America for can be rebuilt on this cornerstone when the plague passes. You know the one I mean.

A political analyst of a kind we need more of — in Korea and the US — is Choe Byeong-cheon, who appeared yesterday on the conservative Youtube channel Pennmike. (The interview is in Korean.) Although a left-leaning voter himself, he’s more interested in getting to the bottom of things than in putting a partisan spin on them, unlike the panelists of both camps whom one sees every day on cable TV.

Choe has many interesting things to say, but his main point is this: so far, only one side has used the campaign period to counter negative perceptions about it. President Yoon, having long been seen as caring only about “his wife, alcohol and dogs,” has bolstered his approval ratings by discussing — in carefully curated, town-hall-type meetings — the economic problems facing average families. Meanwhile the people skills and relative youth of the PPP’s interim leader Han Dong-hoon (50) have diverted public attention from the age and dullness of most of the party’s crop of candidates. In contrast, Lee Jae-myung has done little over the past few weeks but solidify a reputation for amorality. The pro-Moon voter will return to the fold in time to vote blue on April 10; not so the average center-leftist.

Although Choe argues that the characterization of Kwon Hyang-yeop as a mere former aide to Lee’s wife — see my previous entry – does an injustice to a Minjoo member with plenty of political experience, he says it’s a bad sign when a party’s stock response to criticism is to complain of fake news.

On the other hand, Choe points out that general elections in South Korea go the ruling party’s way far more often than not, and that the success he predicts for the PPP in April doesn’t mean it will do well in 2027. One of many reasons is that a good Jeolla turn-out can affect the outcome of a presidential election more than the outcome of general elections (in which Jeolla’s seats are capped at 28 no matter what).

UPDATE: Sure enough, the gap narrows (12 March 2024):

If you’re a Korean voter you get two votes on April 10: one for the candidate you select to represent your district, and one for the minor party whose portion of the total vote you want to add to. This portion (if higher than 3%) will translate into a certain number of seats for people chosen in advance by that party – people, in other words, who never had to run for election.

According to the latest poll, some 33% of voters plan to cast their second, “proportional” vote for either the Minjoo’s satellite party (the one with the pro-Northers) or the minor party founded by former justice minister Cho Kuk, until recently a Minjoo man himself. The same poll indicates that 32% of voters will cast their second vote for the ruling party’s satellite party.

This is a fairly solid indication that the PPP’s lead over the Minjoo, which has narrowed to 3% (35% vs 32%), has more to do with Lee’s party-privatizing “nomination massacre” of popular “non-Lee” politicians than with any popular shift toward the center-right. This is bad news for the ruling party, especially since Cho is urging his party’s supporters to cast their first vote for the Minjoo candidate in their district.

That may seem like a contradictory thing to do, but I expect many nationalist-left voters will like the idea of casting their first vote to beat the ruling party, and their second vote to register disapproval of Lee.

Needless to say, the Minjoo boss is facing trial for allegations of corruption on a massive scale, while Cho Kuk just saw a higher court confirm his two-year sentence for a) academic fraud, and b) illegal interference with a government inspection into a corruption case. Surprisingly, for the American observer at least, Cho has been allowed to remain free while he appeals the conviction again. (Quite the “prosecutors’ dictatorship,” eh?)

Meanwhile Song Young-gil, the former Minjoo party boss now on trial for bribery, has founded the charmingly-named Pine Tree Party, on which ticket he will run from behind bars for election in a district of Gwangju. In one of those examples of weird bedfellowship that every South Korean election season seems to produce, this minor party has just recruited a few prominent (former?) hard-rightists with their own grudge against President Yoon and the PPP’s interim chief Han Dong-hoon.

Keep all this in mind the next time the Ignorarium tells you that some corruption scandal on the ROK right is “roiling” the oh-so-law-and-order-minded electorate. (The man in the street’s complaint with Park Geun-hye in 2016 wasn’t that she was corrupt but that she was inept and out of her depth.)

The fact that right-wing scandals — all things being equal — are more roundly condemned than the left-wing sort is in part because in this country, conservatives have less tolerance for in-camp wrongdoing than progressives do. (See the almost immediate end of Kwak Sang-do’s career over bribery allegations.)

Common on the left is the belief — to quote what I wrote here 4 years ago (with Cho Kuk in mind) — that

[the conservative politician’s] abuse of power reflects his true self, whereas the nationalist leftist, being purely Korean and thus incapable of premeditated evil (see C. Fred Alford), errs only under duress or out of good intentions.

Example: The “accumulated ill” [= the conservative] who games the university admissions system does so to perpetuate the pro-Japanese caste’s hold on power and privilege. The nationalist-left millionaire does so because he loves his children too much — and what could be more Korean?

But this doesn’t mean that the nationalist left wouldn’t prefer a politician less compromised than Cho Kuk, to say nothing of Lee Jae-myung. It will likely get such a candidate in 2027.

UPDATE: The Minjoo takes the lead in Seoul (17 March 2024):

Support for the ruling party in the capital has declined so much over the past week that the Minjoo is now back in front there, which is interesting, considering that it was at about this point in the 2020 election season that it took the lead and stayed there. That was when the Moon administration went from being criticized for its pandemic response to receiving orchestrated foreign praise for handling things especially well — a disastrous turn of events for the PPP, which, having abandoned all talk of conservative values, was campaigning purely on claims to superior technocratic efficiency.

I expect pro-Minjoo Korea watchers will attribute the current shift in public opinion to the government’s lifting of an exit ban on Lee Jong-sup, the former defense minister whom President Yoon rescued from a corruption probe by making him ambassador to Australia. It’s a scandal all right, and a reflection of the hollowness of the PPP’s law-and-order posturing, but horror at corruption is hardly going to make people gravitate to a party led by either Lee Jae-myung or the already-convicted Cho Kuk.

We come closer to the truth by pondering Julian Baggini’s words: “If you think all politicians are crooks, you vote for the most effective crook.” The government’s recent decision to lift greenbelt restrictions shows it to be ineffective at protecting the environment, but few Koreans, young or old, seem to care much about that. Where else do even the salad restaurants lack vegan options? Park Geun-hye was president the last time I ran into a fellow vegan here in Busan — an encounter so improbable it seemed almost a miracle, like Winston meeting Julia in 1984.

No, what’s hurting the PPP more in the capital city, it seems, is the administration’s failure to end the doctors’ strike. Something like that would probably not affect enough voters in the US to change the outcome of an election, unless the strike lasted months, but people here routinely seek medical treatment for minor ailments like head colds. Besides, many rightly reproach the administration for not having decided on a more gradual increase in the number of medical school admissions years ago, instead of waiting until just before elections to announce a drastic one.

UPDATE: The old-school right turns on Han (24 March 2024):

Western media tend to spin every dip in support for South Korea’s conservative party as a matter of people recoiling in a “liberal” direction, usually out of maidenly shock at some corruption scandal or another.

In reality a) the Moon years ruined the Minjoo’s reputation as the cleaner party, b) the public is so inured to elite wrongdoing that 32% of all candidates running this time — including Lee Jae-myung of course — have been convicted at least once, with some boasting a veritable “gift set” of priors, and c) as many people turn away from the PPP in a rightward direction as do so in a leftward one.

Let me enlarge on the last point. Conservatives are now angry at the PPP’s interim boss Han Dong-hoon for cancelling the nominations of two prominent party members, the one for having recommended an investigation into whether North Korea was involved in the Gwangju uprising (1980), and the other, a younger fellow, for various intemperate statements made on Youtube over the years, including one that appeared to sanction orgies and another expressing the wish that all non-food animals disappear from the planet.

It’s odd to see the old-school right defending these two very different people in the same breath as if they were equally representative of conservatism, but never mind that. In both cases one can understand Han’s reasoning. Many Jeollans are disaffected with the Minjoo for reasons I’ve already gone into, and Han wants them to remain that way, especially if they live in districts of Seoul and Busan where the Jeolla diaspora must stay home on April 10 for the PPP to win. As for the other ex-nominee, no party needs a loose cannon in election season.

But Han’s critics are not unjustified in pointing out his double standard: he had no apparent qualms about nominating people with a record of controversial nationalist-left rhetoric and/or service in the Minjoo. The Moon administration’s labor minister Kim Yeong-ju, whom small-business owners still associate with the catastrophically steep minimum-wage increases of those years, is a case in point. No sooner did she join the PPP earlier this month (having been bypassed for a Minjoo nomination) than the party picked her to run in Yeongdeungpo, a district of Seoul.

Remember what I excerpted here 2 years ago about “the formation of opportunistic cliques whose members will ally themselves to anyone willing and able to offer some advantage.” (From The Korean Road to Modernization and Development, Urbana, 1985, p. 26.)

An analogy for American readers: Feeling neglected, AOC defects from the Democratic Party and joins the Republican one, which then nominates her — sans primary — to run in a blue district. To us, this would seem to make no sense, for naturally Democrat voters will come out hugely on election day to punish her treachery, while a lot of Republicans will stay home in disgust.

In this Korean case, Kim Yeong-ju is lagging her Minjoo rival by over 15% in the latest poll. So why on earth…? Han’s supporters answer that such “strategic nominations” serve the greater goal of signaling centrism or even center-leftism to the greater electorate, the better to win over the undecideds (a much larger demographic here than in the US) in swing districts. Whoever is proven right on April 10 — momentum seems to be shifting back to the PPP at present — the political spectrum will have drifted a little further to the nationalist left.

UPDATE: The PPP’s latest pledge (30 March 2024):

Max Weber famously distinguished between three types of authority: traditional, charismatic and legal-rational. We see all three of them at work in Kafka’s The Castle (1926), a book more interesting to discuss than to read.

The South Korean president exerts no charismatic authority, nor does the republic. As for legal-rational authority, just look at how blithely the opposition party chief flouts demands to appear in court, and how little the public minds. Whatever traditional authority has radiated from the South Korean government through the many political changes since 1948 has been, in large part, the result of its location in the ethno-nation’s ancient capital city, and of the continuity of two symbolic and imposing buildings: a) the Blue House, perhaps the only strictly state symbol here which both left and right have fond associations with, and b) the National Assembly.

It was Roh Moo Hyun (2003-2008) who started relocating government offices to what was then the Jochiwon area, in S. Chungcheong province, and which is now Sejong City. This was ostensibly in order to spread the wealth and relieve congestion in the metropolis, but Chungcheong was and still is South Korea’s Ohio, a perennial swing region of great importance to general and presidential elections. Besides, the political elite stood to make — and did make — a killing on the real-estate market by knowing in advance what would be built where.

Yet the proposed move makes ideological sense too, inasmuch as the old “politics of the vortex” (Henderson) must be radically undermined if the republic is to decentralize, something the nationalist left sees — for reasons I explain here — as a way of facilitating inter-Korean confederation. Relinquishing the ancient capital, centrally located on the peninsula as it is, would also reassure the North that the ROK means it no harm, and make Kaesong, the planned location of confederation HQ, a sensible-looking halfway point between the two governments.

Considering how feeble the other types of authority are here, you’d expect a conservative party to want to shore up the traditional sort, but as I keep saying, the PPP is no more conservative than the Minjoo is liberal. The current president, according to his wife, cried for two hours after watching a cinematic hagiography of Roh Moo Hyun. He went his idol one better in 2022 by refusing to live in the Blue House, though that decision apparently had more to do with shamanic or feng shui concerns than political ones. The current tax-wasting plan is to build a new presidential residence in Sejong, though no one expects it to obviate the need for a separate one in Seoul, where many embassies will presumably remain.

Last Wednesday the PPP’s interim boss Han Dong-hoon called for the relocation of the National Assembly to Sejong, so that the iconic domed building on the bank of the Han River, like the Blue House, can be “given back to the people as a new landmark.” Like Yoon he’s obtuse to the implicit Seoul-centricity of such talk; a state symbol belongs to every citizen, while a tourist attraction is for those with the leisure and money to visit it. (I know many Busanites who haven’t been to Seoul in over ten years.)

Not surprisingly, support for the PPP has increased a bit in the Chungcheong provinces, while many conservatives elsewhere are so exasperated with the ideologically-directionless party that they’ve stopped talking to telephone pollsters, a bad sign. For what it’s worth, my impression from traveling around Busan yesterday (which Lee Jae-myung visits today), is that the wavers and hand-shakers in Minjoo-blue jackets look happier than the red-clad lot.

UPDATE: Why the PPP faces a bad Wednesday (7 April 2024):

I see much of the English-language press (foreign and domestic) is still chalking up the PPP’s dismal ratings to public anger over the first lady’s involvement in a pump-and-dump scheme and her acceptance of that Dior clutch-bag. Never mind that a) months of partisan coverage of that alleged financial wrongdoing did not prevent Yoon from winning the presidency in 2022, and b) the PPP was much more popular right after last winter’s media hubbub over the Dior bag than it is now.

Also being systematically glossed over is the fact that quite a few more financial scandals and reports of sexist gaffes now attach to the Minjoo field than to the PPP lot. For reasons I’ve already gone into, the public generally doesn’t care much. Some of the most scandal-ridden Minjoo candidates are now riding high over candidates whom the left-wing press can pin nothing on. It was the PPP, remember, that tried to turn these elections into a referendum on corruption. Needless to say, that effort — which the first lady’s problems undoubtedly undermined — has failed.

In contrast, the Minjoo has sought to frame the upcoming vote as a public reckoning with the “prosecutors’ dictatorship.” I think that strategy has underperformed, for the obvious reason that the president has put very few left-wingers in prison. This in contrast to the 150 or so conservatives he helped Moon whisk behind bars in 2017 and 2018, to say nothing of the 14 judges who were locked up for not getting into the spirit of the purge. (13 of the 14 have since been acquitted.)

Naturally our Ignorarium, like the local nationalist-left press, prefers not to discuss Yoon’s past as a prosecutor chummy with the unions and with Park Jie-won. It’s the right-wing Youtubers who recall, for example, how his threat to put away for life a woman accused of forgery so frightened her that — by her account, written before he became famous — she lost control of her bladder.

But plenty of conservatives and even centrists chose to vote for Yoon in 2022 in the hope, which his campaign had done everything to encourage, that as president he would go after the Moon camp’s abuses of power with the same fervor. Since then he has been so soft on that whole crowd that the pro-Lee left suspects Moon of having colluded with Yoon all along. Lee with his “nomination massacre” has done more to purge the Moon faction from public life than Yoon ever did.

The president has done some things to please the neoliberal rich, but all he’s done to please average conservatives is to strengthen the US-ROK alliance and security cooperation with Japan — both of which will be weakened again by the next Minjoo president. The nationalist left blames the current state of the economy to a large degree on Yoon’s having too squarely aligned this erstwhile middle power with the US. Stumping for the main opposition party last week, the actor Lee Won-jong said that if the country hadn’t picked the wrong president in 2022, “maybe… a gas pipeline would run from Russia through Kaesong.”

The PPP’s boss Han Dong-hoon, who started the campaign with an aura of infallibility, is going to have to bear a good deal of the blame for how badly it has gone. Clearly he erred in believing he could win over progressives by “strategically” cancelling the nominations of popular conservatives like Do Tae-woo and nominating pseudo-converts from the left like Kim Young-joo.

The comedy is complete when one finds this party and president referred to in the Hankyoreh as “hard right.” Much of the actual hard right, as can be seen from the very low turnout of early voters in Daegu, has given up on Yoon and Han, and that — along with the disastrous turn taken by the initially popular effort to increase the number of doctors — will tilt a lot of swing districts the Minjoo’s way on Wednesday.

UPDATE: The worst defeat ever by a ruling party in South Korea (11 April 2024):

Many conservatives breathed a sigh of relief this morning upon seeing that the nationalist-left front had failed to reach 200 (out of 300) seats after all. Nevertheless, Yoon will spend the next three years as the lamest duck in the history of the presidency — if he’s lucky, that is. Vetoes of Minjoo-driven legislation will continue issuing from his drab office in Yongsan, but they in turn will be overridden if only about 10% of ruling-party lawmakers vote with the opposition.

If 10% seems like a lot, note that the PPP contingent is made up largely of non-Yoon if not anti-Yoon types, most Yoon-faction candidates having lost their races. Besides, the Chosun Ilbo, which has always been more like the PPP’s central committee than its mouthpiece, is already turning on the president it created. The tones struck after the 2016 elections (in regard to Park Geun-hye) were very similar.

It seems highly likely, then, that the National Assembly will soon see those special counsels (independent investigations by a so-called special prosecutor) that the Minjoo has been itching to get underway. Everything from the Itaewon disaster to the Dior bag will be dug into, while hostile media coverage primes the public for another impeachment drive — something street banners in downtown Seoul are already calling for.

It will encounter no more serious resistance than the last one did. The strikingly low turnout in Daegu yesterday made clear that Yoon has lost the old-school right, whose support he took for granted for so long. He began disappointing it as soon as he was elected, by pledging not to live in the Blue House, which he called a “symbol of the imperial presidency.” At the time I asked on this blog the rhetorical question: “What demographic does he expect to prop up his poll numbers when the candlelight theatrics take off?”

This isn’t necessarily to say that the PPP would have done better by moving to the right. It was probably shrewd of Han Dong-hoon not to make too much of Lee’s decision to import a few hardcore pro-Northers into the assembly via the Minjoo’s satellite party. The PPP’s error lay in not communicating any vision or set of values, conservative or otherwise.

Western mainstream media coverage of the Minjoo’s crushing victory has generally been in the cheerful tenor I’d expected. It confronts me again with the mystery of why it’s populist for a European party to be nationalist, to oppose mass immigration, to speak of a monolithic public will, to want looser ties to the US, and better relations with the so-called authoritarian bloc, to say unkind things about globalism (to which There Is No Alternative)  — and liberal for a South Korean party to do so. My answer, which I admit is speculative, will have to form the subject of a future blog post. Suffice to say that it touches also on our woke establishment’s curious enthusiasm for the least woke pop culture in the non-Muslim OECD (that “deficit” being an under-discussed reason for its worldwide success).

As most of my readers are no doubt already aware, Kim Jong Un gave a speech at a party meeting last Saturday in which he described the inter-Korean relationship as one of two mutually hostile states, as opposed to two halves of one nation. Contrary to what many observers are now saying, with Fyodor Tertitskiy a notable exception, these remarks do not betoken the abandonment of either a) pan-Korean nationalism, b) the strategy of subjugating South Korea through peaceful means, or c) the end goal of unification.

To ask a question that seems not to have occurred to any of the chroniclers of a fundamental ideological shift: Why should Kim Jong Un choose this of all times to abandon the post-truce line his father and grandfather stood for?

Let’s take stock. I might as well start with the fact that the most popular movie in South Korea this winter is one demonizing Chun Doo Hwan. Hardline anti-Northism such as he stood for in the 1980s is virtually extinct now, the province of a rapidly dwindling group of elderly people with no political representation to speak of. There’s no far-right party here large enough to balance out the openly pro-North Progressive Party on the far left.

The People Power Party currently ruling the country isn’t even center-right by American standards; I’d put it on a par with Labour under Tony Blair. Not to mention that President Yoon, according to his wife, is well to the left of the PPP.

It’s odd that such a docile neoliberal administration should get less sympathetic treatment from our NYT and Wapo than the opposition Minjoo Party, a nationalist, anti-immigration, pro-Chinese, Ukraine-indifferent, none-too-LGBT-friendly party of a sort those papers would rage against if it were in Europe. But the Council on Foreign Relations works in mysterious ways.

It’s true that in his latest speech Kim professed to consider South Korea’s left and right equally devious and hostile. It should nonetheless be obvious that he has every reason to prefer a Minjoo-ruled ROK. During Moon Jae-in’s term (2017-2022), South Korean troops were pulled away from the DMZ, over which a no-fly zone was established; several key military exercises were downsized, postponed, or cancelled altogether; Moon gave a speech at a stadium in Pyongyang expressing his “unsparing praise and applause” for the resolute course Kim was on; the National Assembly passed a law, at Kim Yo Jong’s urging, which criminalized efforts to subvert the North with propaganda balloons; the left-wing press heralded the opening of the North-South liaison office as the first stage of confederation; and the ROK foreign ministry spent most of its time lobbying the US and the world for the relaxation of sanctions on North Korea. All the while the Moon administration stressed its opposition to “unification by absorption,” in contrast to Kim Jong Un’s assertion that support for it extends across the spectrum here.

Much more progress on the road to confederation would have taken place if not for the failed Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi, but that was hardly Moon’s fault or his party’s, as Kim is well aware. He also knows that whereas Moon surrounded himself with veterans of the protest movement of the 1980s, the current Minjoo boss Lee Jae-myung hangs out with veterans of the even more radically pro-North movement of the 1990s. Finally, Kim knows that the Minjoo is likely to do well in the next parliamentary elections, and is equally likely to put Yoon’s successor (whoever it may be) in the Blue House.

So I ask you: Does this sound like a time for Kim — who as a de facto monarch takes, as we know from the public grooming of his daughter for the succession, a multi-generational view of things — to give up on peaceful unification? In favor of a strategy almost certain to result in North Korea’s destruction?

“But these tones are unprecedented….” Are they? Everyone seems to have forgotten the tense spring of 2013, when North Korea threatened to leave no one alive here to sign a surrender. Those words already implied that it had begun looking on southerners, left and right, as foreigners. Five years later Kim Jong Un and Moon were literally walking hand in hand.

“But this time Kim talks of the Republic of Korea, thereby signaling resignation to the permanence of the rival state….” Hold on. Use of the words Daehan minguk or Hanguk has long been common in North Korea in contemptuous contexts. It abounds in anti-ROK novels, e.g. Mannam (2001). The difference now is a mere orthographical one, i.e., no scare quotes, but we’re talking outer-track propaganda here.

Furthermore, Kim Jong Un said, “With the Republic of Korea people  unification cannot succeed.” The sentence should be read with that emphasis, for the relevant words in the Korean original (대한민국 것들과는) imply that there are other people with whom unification can be worked toward. All the more reason, then, to infer that “Republic of Korea people” (“Republic of Korea types” would not be a wrong translation of the dismissive 것들) refers to the power elite and not to the South Korean masses. The latter are thus implicitly encouraged to put their support behind a better force or forces — such as (one presumes) the Progressive Party, already a significant influence on the labor movement. Of course Kim’s remarks were also intended to prod the Minjoo to be even more submissive the next time around.

As I have had to say far too many times already on this blog, North Korea’s safety still derives in large part from the Americans’ belief that an attack on its territory would result in the immediate devastation of Seoul. This belief is naturally undermined by the suspicion that North Korea is too nationalist, too intent on unification, to be serious about wiping out millions of fellow Koreans.

It’s therefore common for the regime in times of tension to make stern statements — in word or deed — of its readiness to stop at nothing. I’ve already mentioned the apocalyptic anti-ROK rhetoric of 2013, which came after the UNSC’s unanimous condemnation of a North Korean missile launch. Another example would be the way in which George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” speech in 2002 resulted in North Korea dramatically distancing itself from South Korea’s Sunshine Policy, most notably through the deadly Yellow Sea incident that June. Until we see evidence of a shift in inner-track propaganda, Kim Jong Un’s speech should be seen in this context.

 

UPDATE: Kim Yo Jong “praises” Moon (3 January 2024):

Kim Jong Un’s sister, who used to deride Moon for his stupidity, is now calling him “cunning” for having wasted the North’s time with his insincere peace initiative, thereby slowing down the nuclearization process; Yoon with his foolhardiness and open hostility is less of a problem for the North. This is another example of why statements like these cannot be taken as reflections of the inner-track line. Average North Koreans are highly unlikely to be hearing that a South Korean president outsmarted the Supreme Dignity for years on end. The real goal here is to revive Moon’s image in Washington (and by extension, the current Minjoo Party’s) as a good ally, and to undermine the PPP’s pose as the better guarantor of the South’s security.

UPDATE: Tongil News weighs in (24 January 2024):

In the following, the openly pro-North outlet Tongil News introduces its readers to the same problem I’ve been discussing here since the destruction of the liaison office in 2020.

The “balance of terror” that the North sought to attain through a nuclear capability had one fatal weakness. The “American empire” and the “Republic of Korea types” could attack at any time, but the North could not as long as the South remained “kin.” […..]

It’s a “tremendous” dilemma. That’s the question that Kim Jong-un answered in the National Assembly and in his state of the republic speech. How?

The answer is that since the North cannot use (nuclear) weapons against the “same” people, it clarifies the South’s nature as a puppet “Republic of Korea” dominated by “U.S. imperialists” and “Republic of Korea types,” and can thus arrive at the conclusion that against such a Republic of Korea, it is all right to carry out the second mission of the North’s nuclear doctrine. As a result, they have filled the “huge” logical hole in their own nuclear doctrine.

Kim Kwang-su, the author of the above piece, is too reverent a Pyongyang watcher to acknowledge that the regime might say one thing in the earshot of outsiders, and another in domestic-only communication. I’m sure he realizes there must be quite a gap anyway. For what shall it profit a state if it gains logical consistency, but loses its legitimatory myths — loses, to put things another way, its collective immortality project?

Since when have states cared about consistency anyway? My own government preaches human rights while disregarding them in foreign practice; it doesn’t renounce its humanism merely in order to look less hypocritical. For one thing, it doesn’t need to; the average American is oblivious to any logical or moral contradictions. For another, our government can’t afford to relinquish its claim to exceptionally high moral values, because it’s on that claim that its legitimacy rests.

Similarly, Kim Jong Un is under no domestic pressure to fill the logical hole referred to above; quite the contrary. The main reason he so noisily fills it at present is to keep the Yankees at bay. A brilliant strategy it is too, for it simultaneously makes North Korea look more dangerous and easier to reach a long-term peace with. What’ll it be, Uncle Sam? A nuclear apocalypse, triggered perhaps by a misfiring cannon at the DMZ? Or the placid peninsular coexistence of two ethnically dissociated states? A compelling choice. No wonder Pyongyang’s familiars are filled with new life.

UPDATE: “Our” North Korea (25 January 2024):

Last week the opposition leader Lee Jae-myung, reading out from a piece of paper, said Kim Jong Un should “see to it that the efforts made by his predecessors, our North Korea’s Kim Jong Il and President Kim Il Sung, are neither disparaged nor undermined.”

The whole gist was a bit much, when you consider what Kim Il Sung’s main effort at unification consisted of, but conservatives zeroed in on Lee’s use of the affectionate possessive, characterizing it as a display of his ideological tendencies. Needless to say, Lee would hardly have read out the statement had he not intended to elicit precisely such a reaction, thereby strengthening his Sunshiny “cred” with the Minjoo Party’s Moon Jae-in faction (which hasn’t forgotten that Lee never showed at student protests in the 1980s).

Now, my impression from attending conferences is that people on the nationalist left use that “our” when publicly chiding the North – a rare occurrence – to make clear that the criticism comes from a good place. After Hanoi, Moon Chung-in suggested that “our chairman Kim Jong Un” might have asked for too much.

Meanwhile, the left has correctly countered that when a conservative politician spoke of “our Japan” a few years ago, her party called this “a meaningless, habitual expression.” Habitual it may be, but meaningless it certainly isn’t.

Lee’s statement being likely to trouble Western observers, the local English-language press obligingly bowdlerized it, so that Lee was quoted as saying: “[Kim Jong Un] should make efforts to avoid undermining the efforts made by his predecessors, Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung.” It’s through little services like this that the West is kept under the illusion of a liberal ROK left.

“Who has the power to mystify … and how does he keep it?” Ernest Becker

It’s Korea’s fate to be always arriving splashily on the world scene, yet never counting as having arrived. Japan needs no introduction; Korea needs another book-length one every year. A “central point” of last year’s — according to a respectful review in the Financial Times — was that Korea is neither China nor Japan, but has its own history, its own traditions. And I thought we’d established that during the Seoul Olympics.

This year’s handbook is Korea: A New History of South and North (Yale University Press, 2023) by Victor Cha (CSIS) and Ramon Pacheco Pardo (CSIS). New does not mean fresh, not when each author has already issued a handbook on North and South Korea respectively, Pacheco Pardo’s being that one from last year.

A few paragraphs in, I realized I was reading an anecdote Cha had related more vividly in 2010, so I jumped ahead a bit. Stale photo of cheering Seoulites, wrongly captioned as having been taken on 15 August 1945? Check. Assertion that the emperor’s surrender “abruptly” ended Japan’s occupation of the peninsula, which in fact continued in the southern part for more than three weeks? Yes, that’s there too.

I turned to the North Korean part. Sure enough: Kim Il Sung launches his Juche concept one fine day in 1955, like a line of perfumes. In fact, as readers of my writing on the subject will know already, the “concept” in question was neither new to North Korea nor unique to it, having long been orthodox across the Soviet sphere of influence: Marxism-Leninism must be creatively adapted to each country’s unique conditions.

To be fair to the authors, you couldn’t write a 250-page history of the peninsula if you kept up with the state of research. You’d go mad. Besides, the law of handbooks dictates a certain shallowing, because an ever-increasing amount of information must be cut down to fit more or less the same length. Not to mention that this one was purportedly written with Hallyu buffs in mind, who are bound to be more interested in 21st-century South Korea.

To be fair to those kids too, though: I doubt they’ll be turning to the arms industry’s favorite think tank for enlightenment. Having been in Busan Station last year when some multi-ethnic BTS Army platoons arrived for the free concert, the language of their idols doing loud service as lingua franca, I can attest that the average K-Pop fan speaks Korean at least as well as Cha or Pacheco Pardo. The very designation implies a greater familiarity with primary sources than these pages reflect. Which may bother that target audience more than it seems to have bothered Yale University Press.

But what’s any reader to make of this?

Throughout the 1960s, Kim sought to develop and clarify the meaning of this concept on which he had staked his leadership. Most notably, Kim gave a speech in Indonesia in April 1965 to lay out the principles behind Juche. The speech was significant because Juche had almost disappeared from public discourse.

So throughout the decade the leader sought … yet by 1965 it had almost disappeared? So he clarified it … overseas?

Too US-centric and IR-“realist” to care what the North Koreans think, the authors fail to see the obvious problems. Like the ship in the Auden poem, they have somewhere to get to, and sail calmly on. One gets ahead in that world not by being right, but by being in with the right people.

Apropos of which point, it was Robert Scalapino (1919-2011), a Korea expert famously close to the CIA, who got the Juche fallacy rolling with a collection of articles he edited and put out in 1963, two of which misrepresented the 1955 speech in passing as a significant deviation from the Soviet line. One of the two articles called it “famous,” which it wasn’t, at least not in North Korea itself. Why this effort to treat the least intellectual leader in the Soviet sphere as an original thinker, while shirking analysis of his thought? Was it honest confusion? Or an effort to sow disunity between Moscow and Pyongyang?

Or was it to prepare American public opinion for a shift in policy toward the two Koreas? Two things should be kept in mind here. First, the US Embassy in Seoul had in April 1960 helped to topple Syngman Rhee. (Notoriously, English-Korean instructions on how to organize street protests turned up shortly thereafter in Indonesia.) Second, a US senator popular with the globalist set had helped destabilize the ensuing Chang Myon premiership (1960-1961) by floating the idea of a neutral peninsula, something Kim Il Sung had proposed at Khrushchev’s urging a few months earlier.

There may be a parallel here to how and why Western experts and media hyped up the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini as a renowned Shī’a theologian before he had attained to any such reputation among the faithful. (Guido Preparata, citing Houchang Nahavandi, has written interestingly on this subject; see page 195 of The Ideology of Tyranny, 2011.)

The supreme mystifier of Juche is Bruce Cumings, who discourages readers from even trying to understand it. I’ve ragged on this aspect of his work too often already, but for those who’ve forgotten, here’s an excerpt from his influential book:

The term is really untranslatable; for a foreigner its meaning
is ever-receding into a pool of everything that makes Koreans Korean, and therefore ultimately inaccessible to the non-Korean. (From Origins of the Korean War, 2:313.)

It’s actually highly translatable and accessible, as I explained in the introduction to my demystification effort. It’s germane to point out that Cumings was never the rebel the South Korean left still takes him for. The parts of Origins that deal with FDR’s bold vision for a new world order under Anglo-American leadership could have been written by David Rockefeller (see 1:102-113). In the acknowledgments, Cumings expressed gratitude to the globalist Henry Luce Foundation and Social Science Research Council for their support.

Do oligarchs fund research in order to get the excerpted sort of mumbo-jumbo in response to their inquiries? No, they fund it so you and I get the mumbo-jumbo. Speaking of Rockefellers, it’s known that while sponsoring universities, scholars and think tanks, Nelson got his own info about world developments from a private intelligence network. Note also that funding for ROK-delegitimizing “revisionism” began at a time when Wall Street’s think tank — as the Marxian scholar Lawrence Shoup calls the CFR — had lost all patience with Park Chung Hee, and not for the human-rights reasons Jimmy Carter trotted out.

The larger point I’m driving at is this, that our foreign policy establishment has an interest in keeping Americans in a state of bewilderment about foreign ideologies, lest they become informed enough to resist Uncle Sam’s compulsive interventionism. Educate them in such matters — which are far easier to grasp than they’re made out to be — and the number of foreign actors they consider deserving of costly support will decline sharply, as will the number of foreign actors they think insane or evil enough to deserve “fire and fury.”

Patronage therefore goes to experts who share, in Robert Jay Lifton’s words, “the American preoccupation with what might be called ‘practical mechanisms’ rather than ideological or theoretical considerations.” (Due in no small part to that patronage, America’s preoccupations are now Europe’s.) I’m not recanting my view that inattention to ideology is connected to the decline of language study, the social sciences’ increasing focus on the quantifiable, and the supplantment of political scientists on conference panels by IR types, but I’m now forced to conclude that to a significant extent, a higher design is at work. The power to mystify lies with the funding class. The instrument of that power is an expertocracy that may not even know it’s mystifying.

North Korea’s straightforward if extreme nationalism was around long before the export construct of Juche Thought (“man is the master of all things”), which had its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s. But I suspect the regime’s worldview will be kept “inaccessible to the non-Korean” until such a time as Uncle Sam decides to go either full dove or full hawk. If it’s the latter, mysterious Juche can always be spun as a genocidal quasi-religion, a suicide cult. If the decision is to appease Kim Jong Un, we may hear calls for Washington and Pyongyang to join as “unlikely partners in the quest for Juche,” to borrow a softline phrase from an AEI conference in 2004.

In the meantime, the handbooks will keep coming — and they’ll only get worse.

The fact that prospects for grants, think-tank jobs, conference invitations,  op-ed slots and CFR membership have always been far better for softline Pyongyang watchers than for hardliners shows you which way our agenda-setting class has leaned so far. I know from my own visits to Washington how passionately the State Department has yearned to — as Jane Austen might have put it — detach Kim Jong Un from his bad acquaintance and introduce him into good society.

But if I’m not mistaken, the center of the discussion has moved distinctly hawkward in the past few years. I’ve already discussed the scenarios of North Korea unleashing an all-out attack on South Korea to achieve things, like confederation, that I believe it can get with much less risk and bloodshed.

And in Foreign Policy last month, Robert Carlin and Siegfried Hecker wrote that

Kim’s move toward Russia is neither tactical nor desperate. Rather, it is the result of a fundamental shift in North Korean policy, finally abandoning a 30-year effort to normalize relations with the United States. Without understanding how persistent Pyongyang was in pursuit of normalization from 1990 through 2019, there is no way of understanding the profundity of the current shift and what it portends.

Non-stop anti-American rhetoric, periodic threats to destroy us all, the dogged acquisition of a nuclear capability in the face of our opposition, and two deadly military attacks on our South Korean ally were compatible with the long effort to make friends with America, but a move toward Russia? It’s over, finally over. They don’t like us anymore.

Elsewhere in the piece, Pyongyang’s expression of support for China in regard to Taiwan is presented as something ominously new. The implication is that North Korea drifted away from its two neighbors prior to this earthshaking “realignment.” In fact it’s America’s attitude to China and Russia that has changed over the past 10 years. Kim is just keeping up his side of a long-existing relationship.

It appears that Pyongyang has concluded that long-term geopolitical trends call for a realignment with Moscow and Beijing…. If that means opening North Korean airspace to Russian reconnaissance overflights, ports to the Russian Navy, and airfields to advanced Russian fighter aircraft—all of which happened before, in the mid-1980s—then Pyongyang will likely agree. If it means enhanced North Korean military support for Russia’s war in Ukraine and enhanced Russian nuclear and missile support to Pyongyang, we should not be surprised.

No, I guess we shouldn’t, but the door never counted as shut for these two Pyongyang watchers before. Why now? Aren’t times of hawk-induced crisis, according to their usual logic, the perfect time for Uncle Sam to bolster the regime’s doves with a show of good will?

And in last week’s New York Times, Choe Sang-hun reported in surprisingly uncharitable tones on North Korea’s decision to deport Travis King. Had such a thing happened 5 years ago, readers would have got soundbites from John Delury and Moon Chung-in touting the gesture as a wonderful olive branch. The world having changed in the interim, Choe quotes not only Prof. Lee Sung-Yoon, perhaps the most conservative Korea scholar in the US, but also two defectors from North Korea, both of whom draw attention to, well, the Cleanest Race aspect of things:

Mr. Kim [Dong-sik] also noted that in North Korea, where the government has long touted a supposed racial “purity,” anti-Black racism is even stronger than anti-white racism.

That might have essentially ruled out the idea of letting Private King settle in the country, said Ahn Chan-il, a North Korean defector ​who runs the World Institute for North Korea Studies​ in Seoul. ​The North arranged marriages for the Cold War defectors — none of whom were Black — but only to North Korean women who were thought to be infertile, or to foreign women whom the government had apparently abducted, according to the memoir of one American defector, Charles Robert Jenkins.

“If they let him stay, they will eventually have to let him have a family,” Mr. Ahn said of Private King. “Given the pure-blood racism of the Kim dynasty, it’s hard to imagine” that being allowed, he added.

I agree of course, but this makes me uneasy anyway, because if Choe didn’t know how evil it would make North Korea sound to the NYT’s woke-interventionist readership, his editor sure did. Either the daily organ of the Council on Foreign Relations is suddenly content to let the chips of coverage fall where they may, or it’s writing the country off at last.

As my readers know already, I support sanctions on North Korea, oppose unilateral concessions, and place no hope in agreements with Kim Jong Un. But for years now I’ve also urged that America compel its ally to publicly disabuse Pyongyang of hopes for unification by confederation. It’s this process — begun by Moon in 2018, as his power base noted with approval, and to be resumed after Yoon — which the North’s nukes were developed to keep us from meddling in the final, probably turbulent stages of. At the very least, America should make clear to the South Korean public that confederation-building must mean the end of the US-ROK alliance. Such a statement alone would do much to keep this country from stumbling unseriously into a mess from which our troops might have to extricate it.

Yet our government shows no interest in the matter. Nor even do the ostensible conservatives in the discussion. When Victor Cha mentioned South Korea’s pursuit of a “confederacy” with the North during Senate hearings in 2019, neither he nor the listening senators registered any concern. You’d almost think the weakening of nation-state borders were an inherently good thing — and that our own endless power-expansion project could benefit from a crisis on the peninsula.

So you see why I fear being overtaken in the hardline lane by Pyongyang watchers who have hitherto preached accommodationism or even appeasement. When Uncle Sam starts beating the war drum against a country, expert discussion of it tends to get monolithic fast. We’re not quite at that stage with North Korea, but it’s not too early to wonder if our field would offer meaningful resistance if it came to that. I’m pessimistic, considering how little nuance Russia scholars have managed to contribute to the Ukraine discussion, and how much more deeply embedded Korean Studies has always been in the corporate-government complex. I suppose we’ll find out whose dovishness is sincere, and who has just been singing for his supper all along.

[In view of recent news developments, I think it’s time to post an excerpt from an off-the-record breakfast talk I gave in Seoul last February. Updates follow. — BRM.] 

When a ruling elite focuses on one issue above all others, as the Moon Jae-in Blue House focused on North Korea, it’s safe to assume that it bears special potential for machine-political exploitation. In this case that potential is obvious. First, construction of the envisioned “New Peninsula” would be the biggest state endeavor since the chemical and heavy industry push of the 1970s. We’re talking hundreds of billions of dollars. The lion’s share would be spent on building airports, infrastructure, power plants and power grids up there, but it would be in Seoul that most of the contracts would be awarded and thousands of plum bureaucratic posts created.

Second, inter-Korean dealings of any substance are always kept secret, allegedly to preserve Pyongyang’s face and keep cooperation running smoothly. They’re managed by the intelligence agency, of which the Unification Ministry is just the front office, the PR arm. The agency gets around half a billion dollars in annual special activity funds that can be spent at its own discretion, no questions asked.

Third, it’s never easy to monitor the value of what is donated to the North: tree saplings, for example, or food commodities. And who’s to say for certain whether they were actually delivered? The chairman of one NGO was recently arrested for pocketing about half of the million or so dollars he’d been given to re-forest the North, but we can be sure that most who embezzle money in this way have gotten away with it.

Long story short, there’s great potential for corruption in the inter-Korean sphere, and everyone knows it. That includes the North, which is why its officials tend to treat South Korean envoys so cavalierly. But just because politicians want to feather their nest through a policy doesn’t mean their ideological commitment to it is fake. Kim Dae Jung was sincerely committed to North-South cooperation and to leaving the Blue House much richer than he was when he went in, two goals that proved very compatible. The slush fund created during his rule has been estimated at well over a billion dollars. Lending weight to that estimate is the fact that a member of his family later attempted to transfer $100 million to Pyongyang. We can’t peer into someone’s mind and distinguish ideology from material interest when the two are working together – and they usually are, as Karl Marx pointed out.

As you know, Trump defied Moon’s expectations by not granting the sanctions exemptions the Sunshine Policy governments had received from Bush and Obama. In late 2018, after the imports of North Korean coal became known, Washington put Moon on a very short leash, better known as the Joint Working Group. I assume that a few hundred million dollars had already made it from Seoul into Kim Jong Un’s pockets by that time, or the Moon-Kim summits wouldn’t have taken place. Some of that money may well have been skimmed here, as in 2000. But the ruling camp certainly couldn’t make as much money as had been made in the Sunshine years – not least because the chaebol are a lot less starry-eyed about North Korean business opportunities than they were then.

Although the White House said no even to paltry forms of cooperation, the Blue House kept talking up the reconnection of the peninsula’s railway network as if the Hanoi summit had never happened. Even in the unlikely event of an American green light, a project on that scale would take close to 20 years and tens of billions of dollars to bear fruit. Why would a South Korean president desperately want to launch a budget-busting endeavor so unlikely ever to get going in earnest, and one which, even if it were completed, a future president would get all the credit for? The answer became clear enough when the government, with opposition-party support, began constructing a high-speed railway line from Gangneung on the east coast up to a tiny station on the eastern edge of the DMZ. This railway, for which no passenger demand exists, will cost well over 2 billion dollars.

To go from pork-barrel spending to activity more easily characterizable as outright corruption, we also know that the intelligence agency paid over a million dollars (in American terms) for a house in Paju near the DMZ, almost 50 grand for a table to go into it, and another half-million for a yacht, just in case Kim Jong Un should want to come and stay a while in a border town, or get on a boat too small for his bodyguards. The key detail is that the house in question was allegedly sold to the agency for twice the market price by a friend of the agency’s director.

Let’s move on now to Lee Jae-myung’s outreach, which is in the headlines. First a little background: In 2010 Lee, a Minjoo man, became mayor of Seongnam, a commuter city to the east of Seoul that had been a center of pro-North radicalism for decades. In 2018 Lee was elected governor of Gyeonggi Province, which of course borders North Korea. But Moon Jae-in dislikes Lee intensely, so when he went to Pyongyang for the September summit in 2018 he left Lee behind, thus forcing the governor to establish his own relationship with the North. To this end his vice-governor went to North Korea and promised that the province would help launch smart agriculture there. When sanctions prevented Lee from carrying through on the $5 million pledged to this end, the vice-governor allegedly asked the CEO of a friendly underwear company to make good on it. The CEO, a former organized crime boss, agreed to do so, in the hope that Kim Jong Un would give one of his subsidiary companies the nod for a rare-earth mining deal in North Korea.

Had the CEO got that nod, he would have received large subsidies from the ROK government as well as from Seoul’s separate inter-Korean fund. This is the beauty of dealing with the North: contracts to handle big subsidized projects don’t have to be competitively awarded here if Kim Jong Un says he wants to work with so-and-so in particular. Which is why big business is still ready to pay for the match-making and North-lobbying services of powerful ROK politicians or officials.

Allegedly the CEO paid another 3 million dollars on behalf of Governor Lee so that Kim Jong Un would invite him to talks in Pyongyang, which would have given his quest for the presidential nomination a big boost. Remember that at that time — before sexual harassment allegations drove Seoul mayor Pak Won-soon to suicide, and before Moon’s crony Kim Kyoung-soo went to prison — Lee was perceived as being third in the running for the Minjoo nomination. Why $3 million? The North Koreans apparently made clear that if Lee wanted to be welcomed in fitting style they’d need a new Mercedes, a new helicopter, etc, which they sure weren’t going to pay for out of their own pockets….

In short, it was 2000 all over again, big business paying for what the South Korean government could not, in the hope of gaining advantages from both governments. Alas, the COVID lockdown prevented Lee from getting the invitation that had been paid for on his behalf. This didn’t stop him from continuing to present himself as someone especially eager to get the New Peninsula going. In addition to having a special “vice-governor for peace,” he sent officials to the Philippines to meet North Koreans, sponsored events urging the reopening of the Kaesong Industrial Zone, and distributed brochures on how to apply for sanctions exemptions. Virtually every city on his turf piped up with some new peace initiative or exploratory committee. All this went down well with the left outside the province, which thought, “Okay, Lee may not have been in the protest movement during the 1980s like we were, but he’ll push harder against the Yankees, and do more to get around sanctions, than Moon dared to do.”

[It has since been reported that a salt shipment which a nationalist-left NGO had received about $400,000 to send to North Korea was never delivered. The NGO had been chaired by Kim Dae Jung’s youngest son, the thwarted donor of slush-fund money to North Korea whom I mention above, though he says the salt affair came after his time there. During his Moon-era stint in the National Assembly, incidentally, he came under fire for sitting on inter-Korean-relevant parliamentary committees while heavily invested in Hyundai Rotem. (Now better known for weapons manufacture, it was then a popular inter-Korean railroad play.) Meanwhile Lee Hwa-young, the detained ex-vice-governor of Gyeonggi Province, has evidently been compelled to admit that at the Philippine conference in 2019 he a) talked to a North Korean representative about a gubernatorial visit to Pyongyang, and b) asked the underwear CEO to help out with this. But he rather implausibly maintains that he said both these things on the spur of the moment, without running them by his boss first — or informing him afterwards. This in contrast to gleeful conservative media claims that the former vice-governor is cooperating with prosecutors.— BRM.]

 

UPDATE: 26 July 2023:

It seems that the ex-vice-governor did indeed tell prosecutors that he had informed Lee Jae-myung about Ssangbangul’s decision to pay the $3 million to North Korea. Unfortunately for the Minjoo Party boss, that testimony carries a lot more weight than the backtracking letter the ex-vice-governor then sent to comrades from behind bars. Worried that he was being poorly served by his legal team, his wife (reputed to be a supporter of Lee Jae-myung) sent in a formal application for its dismissal. On 25 July the ex-vice-governor told the court that he didn’t support this application, whereupon his wife shouted from the gallery, “Pull yourself together!”

The other day I finally watched the video of a Hankyoreh-sponsored symposium on Jeju 1948 that took place at the Woodrow Wilson Center last December. Evidently most of the audience — and much of the panel — consisted of members of victims’ families and the 4.3 Peace Foundation, that litigious stifler of efforts to historicize the conflict. The discussion proceeded accordingly, sans nuance and complexity, sans dissent.

The absence of junior Koreanists came as no surprise to me. Beltway event planners have “high uncertainty avoidance,” and there’s no telling what young people will blurt out. Better to have on the panel a former CIA official, a former State Department official, an ex-ambassador, and a Wilson Center deputy director who know how to behave. Showing lateral mobility in the other direction is a professor sounding every bit the diplomat.

“There’s no evidence, that I’ve ever seen,” Charles Kraus (WWC) says smilingly, “that North Korea had really anything to do with the Jeju uprising, although the South Korean Workers Party would have been favorable to North Korea’s political positions.”

The symposium, jovial and po-faced in turns, was more of a lobbying or PR affair than a factual discussion, but I can’t let that statement stand — except as the speaker’s confession to having read very little on the subject.

The SKWP was a mass version of the Seoul-based Korean Communist Party, which had already infiltrated the leftist parties with which it merged, on Stalin’s orders, in 1946. The leader of the communist movement, thus of the SKWP, was Pak Heon-yeong, who fled that year to Pyongyang, where he guided party activities through an ostensible chairman in Seoul. Like the KCP before it, the SKWP had an underground organization and received Soviet funds. Meanwhile a purportedly moderate-left party was taking guidance and funds from Pak’s rival Kim Il Sung, but that’s another story. Suffice to observe that virtually the entire left of the southern spectrum was facing the nascent system in Pyongyang, which had its channels even into the opportunistic moderate right.

The North didn’t just try to take credit for southern uprisings post facto, as Kraus would have us believe; it encouraged and supported them while they were underway. We know from East Bloc archives in the Wilson Center, as well as from SKWP veteran testimony, that Kim and Pak sent weapons and commandoes southward.

If the party’s Jeju branch had nothing to do with North Korea, despite being (weasel words) “favorable to its positions,” the obvious question is, why? And how then to understand the merger of the SKWP and NKWP into the KWP as the Jeju conflict raged on? There have been half-hearted efforts here to claim that the island rebels were ideologically distinct from the rest of the party, but they would have hardly thought to go it alone against a superpower-backed force from the mainland.

Then again the whole overarching myth of an anti-Rhee yet North-aloof, politically committed yet leaderless working class is implausible in the extreme. Believing it requires ignorance not only of accessible sources, but of human nature. It goes something like this:

The southern masses of the late 1940s yearned only for democracy, human rights, and a unified homeland free of foreign meddling. Although they opposed Rhee, and wanted all-peninsular elections, they supported no alternative figure. It would be “red complex” slander to suggest that they looked up to the handsome young veteran of the anti-Japanese resistance who was then calling for autonomy and social justice. He was in the other Korea you see, and as much as southerners rejected the division of the ancient nation, rules were rules….

I’ll take North Korea’s version of events over that. It’s closer to the truth to say hyperbolically that every southern laborer and peasant loved Kim than to deny the popular support he enjoyed from Seoul down to — yes — Jeju.

The professor and historian Hyeon Kir-eon (1940-2020) wrote often and movingly about his childhood on the island during the unrest, when his family, like so many others, was harassed by both sides. The following is a vivid account of a raid on his house by Rhee forces. (Hyeon omits the given name of the man the police were seeking.)

“Jeong ___, get out here!”

…. My father jumped to his feet and ran pell-mell out the back door. Beyond the back fence was a pine grove.

“He’s running!”

From the direction of the back fence came shouts and whistles, then the bang-bang of a gun. My mother closed her eyes as she hugged my baby sister tightly. Then the door opened and a policeman aimed his gun at my mother.

“Where’s he run to?”

My mother pointed at the back door. Just then a cry of “We got him!” arose from the back yard. The policeman lowered his gun and withdrew. My mother went out onto the wooden porch and I followed…. In the center of the yard my father was kneeling down in his last pair of underwear. My mother went back inside and came out with his clothes. As he stood up to put them on, blood flowed down one leg. I was afraid he had been shot.

One of the police who seemed to be in charge urged him,  “Where is Jeong ____?”

“I don’t know.”

“We heard he came here.”

Father repeated that he didn’t know. The man in charge upbraided him saying …. he wouldn’t have run if he’d had nothing to hide.

“Our son has done nothing wrong,” my grandfather pleaded, “search the whole house.” The police tramped around in their shoes, turning the house upside-down.

“When did you meet him?”

Father said he hadn’t heard from [Jeong] for the past few months. While he spoke, my mother tied a cotton cloth around his right shin. The policeman had struck him with a rifle barrel when apprehending him.

“You’re Workers’ Party too, aren’t you,” the man in charge prodded.

“No, sir. As head of the main family I’m in no position to concern myself with such things.”

“They say you’re friends with the Workers’ Party ringleaders in Namwon?”

“Still, they never asked me to join.”

“That’s a lie. Take this bastard away!”

A policeman tied my father with a red rope. The rest of the family went pale. They knew someone hauled off to the station would have a hard time coming back in one piece.

(현길언, 정치권력과 역사왜곡, Seoul, 2016, pp. 415-416, my translation.)

Recording episodes like that didn’t stop victimhood-nationalist NGOs from trying to “cancel” Hyeon. Why? Because having lived through the time, unlike most of their members, he recalled this sort of thing too: 

There used to be handbills pasted to the boulders and tree-trunks lining the way to school. I could smell the still-wet black ink on the thin white sheets that had been cut in two. Occasionally while reading the handbills I would remember how my father had been taken away during the night, and I would break into a run, giving the place a wide berth. Let’s drive out the US troops…. People, come out with us and fight. Long live Pak Heon-yeong, long live General Kim Il Sung! …. In those days intriguing stories were circulating about General Kim. They said he’d mowed down Japanese soldiers like a demon. (Ibid., 418.)

I could write and quote much more about “4.3,” but I don’t fancy getting sued for libel in a country where prosecutors need only ascertain an impure interest in disparagement, in stirring trouble.

Fortunately it’s still safe to discuss support for Kim Il Sung in the southeast, where many a community was, as the saying went, “the Republic of Korea in the daytime, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea at night.” Read this account of a Gyeongsang village (by a left-leaning memoirist) and feel free to extrapolate commonsensically:

In 1947 and 1948 … when the left-wing camp was wilting under one government crackdown after another, it derived great encouragement from the fact that there was a mighty communist force in “the northern half of the homeland.” For them it was a star of hope. When I went to my home village on school vacations my mischievous friends would secretly teach me the “Song of General Kim Il Sung” and other revolutionary songs. Their adoration of the government in the North was extraordinary…. “Just you wait and see, when the People’s Army comes charging down, it will smash the Rhee clique to pieces in a day, and we’ll be liberated.”

(윤학준, 양반 문화 담방기, Seoul, 1995, 1:231, my translation.)

Now, I agree that the US military shouldn’t have let Rhee’s men run rampant on Jeju, razing villages and killing tens of thousands of men, women and children. But had it been as one-sided a massacre as the symposium makes out, it wouldn’t have taken years to restore order.

Some of us would rather learn more about what went on before apportioning blame to one side only. This means acknowledging the SKWP’s tactic of trying to incite inflammatorily heavy-handed crackdowns. Party veteran Pak Kap-dong tells in his memoirs how, on one occasion on the mainland, street protests encountered a disappointing lenience, whereupon the order went out to attack policemen’s families and houses. It would be naive to think that the cadres on Jeju had no idea how Rhee would respond to an orchestrated assault on police stations, or how many innocent lives would be lost in the carnage.

I also reject Kraus’ assertion that Kim Il Sung laid claim to southern support merely in order to “sell” the idea of invasion to the Russians. Obviously Kim believed in that support strongly enough to let the KPA pause its advance in 1950, instead of having it charge straight down to the harbor town where I now sit. If we swallow the notion of a stand-alone SKWP, this error becomes inexplicable.

The apparent point of the Wilson Center conference was to demand, in chorus, some sort of formal expression of contrition or regret for our military’s failure to stop the killings on Jeju. The idea that this would strengthen the alliance is made much of, and Clinton’s statement on the wartime Nogun-ri killings held up as a proven model to follow, despite the unprecedented surge of anti-Americanism that followed a few years later. I dare say there’s a reason the ROK party, newspaper and “polifessor” most supportive of alliance-loosening push so hard for American shows of contrition. Never for North Korean ones.

Anyway, it would be nice if Uncle Sam had done so few bad things in living memory that an apology for having let Koreans kill each other 70-some years ago could count as an especially urgent priority. If it comes to that, America bears a more direct responsibility for having let South Korean brass divert wartime food and other supplies from the military to the black market, so that 50-90,000 conscripts died in 1951 from starvation, exposure and disease. If the point of admitting our errors really is to strengthen the alliance, why not start there?

 

UPDATE: Tara O on “4.3”: 29 July 2024:

Tara O has kindly alerted me to her lengthy article on the Jeju unrest. It appeared on the Hudson Institute’s website just before I posted the above.