When a mathematician solves a problem for colleagues on a blackboard, he leaves out the most obvious steps, so as not to insult them. I’ve always taken a comparable approach when discussing the North’s unification drive.
Yes, I could have stated explicitly that if South Koreans wanted to be ruled by the Kim dynasty, or were so untroubled by the prospect that they would willingly dissolve the US-ROK alliance, the North would never have needed to develop nuclear weapons in the first place. I haven’t done so, because I’ve always thought that point too obvious to spell out.
Evidently I was wrong. Quite a few Westerners are now fussing over the latest ROK polls, which bespeak a growing aversion to unification, as if they rendered obsolete the notion of a North Korean commitment to subjugating the South!
We’re dealing here with something Schopenhauer recognized long ago, and Freud confirmed (yet which many ignore in their glib assertions of a rational and therefore peace-minded North): if we don’t hold our reason to high standards, our instincts and interests will have their way with it.
As someone who loves South Korea and wants to stay here, I too want the regime in Pyongyang to be all talk and no action. I too want it to be concerned only for its indefinite survival, yet somehow dumb enough to think peaceful coexistence with the thriving South is the way to go. This is probably why it took me until 2010 to understand what I should have understood much earlier.
Sustaining many Westerners’ wishful thinking is the overestimation of young South Koreans’ hostility to the North, and the conflation of it with liberal-democratic, constitutional patriotism. You’d think the acquiescence in the joint hockey team by the people directly disadvantaged would have spoken for itself. The point holds true even if the players reckon on finding the government not ungrateful later on. (In their place I would expect some lowering of the requirements for an athletic achievement pension.) “There are plenty of North-hating young’uns out there,” I’m told, “but unlike their progressive counterparts in 2016, they have other things to do than stand out in freezing weather and protest.” I would agree with that, but this tells us something about the level of their commitment too.
Let’s assume for a moment that young conservatives now outnumber those fervent Moon supporters whose slogan since early 2017 has been, and I quote, “We will do everything our Inny wants to do” (우리 이니 하고 싶은 거 다 해; forming an affectionate diminutive with the last syllable of someone’s name is especially common here in Gyeongsang, Moon’s home region). This doesn’t change the fact that the administration sees itself as executing only the will of the minsim, a candlelit whole from which anyone right of center is excluded almost by definition, or at best considered deluded, brainwashed.
This is nothing new. The nationalist left’s stock response to poll results it deems unfavorable (especially in regard to inter-Korean affairs) has always been to blame rightist propaganda and education, and to pledge to set the public straight. This is how the Moon administration has responded to these polls, which the North is hardly likely to interpret differently.
In my speech last December I stated clearly that no amount of re-education would diminish South Koreans’ support for the alliance or their aversion to unification fast enough for the North’s liking. The polls of the last few weeks — and developments like the “relayed” burning or tearing of Kim Jong Un photographs — only bear me out.
In that same speech I also warned that the young dictator’s impatience would result in efforts to force the Blue House and White House to disagree ever more fundamentally about the proper way to handle him.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this the stage in which the allies now find themselves?
The signaling of deep research is often the only thing distinguishing allegedly expert analysis of North Korean politics from journalism. It tends to involve the bandying about of words that lay readers find imposing.
Confucianism is one of them. All the man in the street associates with the term is respect for the elderly and an emphasis on education, but he knows there must be more to it than that. Pyongyang watchers who describe North Korea’s hierarchical society, personality cult or hereditary succession as Confucian can therefore appear a cut above the rest.
Chances are slim that anyone will notice their failure to specify anything distinctly Confucian about those things, or to explain away their very un-Confucian aspects. The occasional Koreanist who sees through the sham will likely keep his tongue, knowing that the fallacy in question a) makes the Soviet-installed dictatorship look more like the outgrowth of a respectable tradition and b) conduces to a more benign view of the North, thanks to associations with Singapore and Asian whiz kids. The only people I see complaining are Sinologists.
Another expertise-signaler is the word juche. For decades the field has deferred to the judgment of its most prominent political scientist, which he has repeated almost verbatim in articles and books since the early 1980s.
The term is really untranslatable; the closer one gets to its meaning, the more the meaning slips away. For a foreigner its meaning is ever-receding into a pool of everything that makes Koreans Korean, and therefore ultimately inaccessible. (Bruce Cumings, North Korea: Another Country, 2004.)
And I’m supposed to be the unscholarly one; my approach is too “literary” because I focus on actual texts. Why, one might almost think the respectability of a scholar’s methodology had something to do with his perceived power and influence.
Needless to say, it’s precisely the misperceived opacity of the word juche that makes it a special favorite of Pyongyang watchers; they can use it any way they like.
This brings me to Stalinism, the application of which label to the North Korean system my research has done little to discourage. Ironically enough, one of the ways the Coterie sought to shoo people away from The Cleanest Race (2010) was by claiming there was nothing new in it. North Korea not a Stalinist country?
For most longtime observers of North Korea, this is not news. American journalists may routinely call North Korea Stalinist, but few scholars do so. The influence of Stalin’s Soviet Union … [was] no more important than the influence of the Chinese revolution, not to mention North Korea’s own political culture….(Charles K. Armstrong, “Trends in the Study of North Korea,” The Journal of Asian Studies, 2011.)
This from someone who in an article in 2001 had said we can “call the Stalinist state in North Korea a success” and who in a book in 2004 had called its ideology a “local replication of Stalinism.” The year after the above article appeared, he wrote in an op-ed that Pyongyang
looks more like a tidy Chinese provincial city than the spartan capital of the world’s last Stalinist state. (“The View from Pyongyang,” New York Times, 15 August 2012.)
[Note to learners of English: Every Anglophone would understand the formulation, “Anna looks more like a milkmaid than the world’s highest-paid supermodel” to mean that she is the latter, especially if, rightly or wrongly, she were already known to the public in that way. True, one could always proceed to argue that she was something else entirely. What followed in the above case was reference to the regime’s “classic Stakhanovite labor mobilization.”]
The increase in hardline references to Stalinist North Korea over the past year or two is unfortunate. South Korea was once invaded by a state that really was Stalinist in many ways, not least because the ruling elite abounded in Soviet-Koreans. But the North is a different place today, with a different strategy for taking over the South. The last thing we need is Washington thinking a repeat of 25 June 1950 is in the offing.
I was initially puzzled to see Pyongyang watchers on the other side of the spectrum applying the Stalinist label in these dangerous times. Then I realized they don’t mean much by it. They just need a word more suggestive of expertise than communism, which is all they really mean; it’s East Germany they want you thinking of. They also want you to ignore all assertions that the North is a far-right state. Were they simply to call it communist, the obvious differences to the relatively placid GDR (or today’s China) would embolden lay readers to pipe up. The academic or political-scientific ring of Stalinism keeps them in their place.
No one who has done any reading in North Korean speeches, newspapers or journals published up to about 1962 can fail to notice how different the idiom was from the stuff put out by the KCNA today. Most editorials written then are impossible to understand fully without knowledge of the Soviet trends, key-words and pejoratives of the time: national nihilism, say, or formalism. (I have seen Koreanists marvel at allegedly Moscow-defying parts of Kim Il Sung’s famous speech of 1955 — “Marxism-Leninism is not a dogma,” for example — that were stock formulae in the USSR.) In contrast, I find that young South Koreans have no problem understanding the latest Rodong Sinmun editorials, to say nothing of what Uriminzokkiri produces mainly for their consumption.
I’ve never been one for argumentum ad verecundiam. I wrote an M.A. thesis about the (Russian) Stalin cult, a Ph.D. thesis on North Korean literature’s incompatibility with Stalinist aesthetic theory, and a book devoted to arguing that North Korea is not Stalinist, but that doesn’t mean my assertions should be accepted on faith. All I ask, with dwindling hope of being listened to, is that the other side take into account the arguments I have made, and make some effort at refuting them.
I know I’ll harden my reputation for curmudgeonliness by singling out young scholars, but again: this is a nuclear crisis we’re in. Things are too dangerous for them to enjoy the license to make sweeping, uncorroborated remarks without criticism, especially when they already identify themselves in public as analysts and historians (something I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing as a Doktorand), and presume to set journalists straight on matters of enormous importance.
No single tweet or tweeter is a problem, of course; it’s the daily mass of very confident misinformation I find worrying. The following is one of the milder things I’ve seen in the past few days, but the subject matter is relevant to the issue at hand.
I wonder how many North Korean articles and editorials from the past day or week or month or year or five years Young can find that “speak primarily in a Stalinist lexicon,” a distinctly Stalinist one of course. Whatever time frame he chooses, and however many articles he comes up with, I pledge to find far more that speak in terms incompatible with that label.
UPDATE: 15 February 2018
Adam Cathcart writes in his blog:
… perhaps those of us who regularly read his blog will have to be content with watching Myers shoot unemployed fish in a (Twitter) barrel over issues like Stalinism in North Korea which were already covered in his 2010 book.
“Unemployed fish in a barrel” seems to me more insulting to the graduate student in question than anything I wrote, but perhaps I should better explain to non-academic readers the context of my original post.
A tough job market awaits graduate students in Korean Studies, who have only a few years to draw public attention to the sharpness of their critical faculties. At the same time they must stay on the right side of everyone in a position to affect their careers, which means virtually every professor in the US and Western Europe at the very least. The complete silence with which even the most prolific and judgmental tweeters in the field greeted the biggest scandal in its history spoke and still speaks for itself.
The brunt of their efforts at oneupmanship must be borne by scholars perceived as being too far removed from the Western scene, or too unpopular with the big shots, to cause trouble down the road. Graduate students are thus avid readers of people like Adam Cathcart, who signal through their own writings and silences which academics are fair game, and which ones are to be spared from criticism no matter what.
I understand all this of course.
The problem, as I said in the original post, is that things are getting very dangerous on the peninsula. If I again see someone claiming the view of North Korea as a race-based state is based on “cherry-picking” — on deceptive scholarship, in other words — then I will again call the fellow out, whether he has a job or not. I will do so not only because I am the scholar associated with that view (as the journalist who replied to the tweet recognized at once) but because there can be no understanding the nuclear crisis without a proper grasp of the ideological issues.
UPDATE: 26 May 2019
A young friend has alerted me to a fascinating statistical analysis by Xavier Marquez of KCNA headlines and stories from 1997 to 2014. His findings induce him to conclude inter alia that
Once again B.R. Myers is right; North Korean ideological constructions are not particularly Marxist in orientation, instead focusing on nationalistic themes.
Last December, when the Royal Asiatic Society requested a picture it could use to advertise my talk on the North’s unification drive, I chose the blue-and-white peninsula flag, which had faded from South Korean consciousness since the Sunshine years. A prescient choice, if I say so myself; the flag is now back in a big way.
The remarkable thing is how smoothly the inter-Korean talks of the past few weeks have progressed. As the Unification Ministry’s annual reports attest, reaching North-South agreement even on procedural matters is usually a laborious affair, ridden with setbacks and delays. This is partly because the North refuses to acknowledge the South as its equal, and partly because officials on both sides are unable to decide much on their own initiative.
It seems very likely, then, that the North and South had discussed the Games and agreed on key points well before Kim Jong Un’s “surprising” reference to the event in his New Year’s address. In another sign of close coordination, key phrases from that speech turned up in the joint statement issued after the first talks.
I have seen a few American op-eds warning Moon not to be naive, but I don’t believe he seriously expects the current round of talks to make the North more amenable to discussing disarmament. Regardless of his astute rhetoric to the contrary, which is aimed at Washington, denuclearization is not a priority to him or the left in general, which has long seen the North’s nuclear program as America’s problem, and no serious threat to the South.
The two Korean governments are now getting on so well because they share the short-term objective of making the North look better despite its refusal to disarm — better to the South Korean people above all, but also to the world community, whose support is vital if the South is to regain its ethnic license to bypass UN sanctions on the North. It’s hardly unrealistic for Moon to hope for such a result.
A truly liberal or center-left president would use the Olympics not only to bring citizens together, but also to reconcile the right to inter-Korean rapprochement. Instead Moon has put out a television spot in which a candlelight morphs into the Olympic flame, a visual effect of which the IOC would probably disapprove; to drive the point home, Moon then appears in front of a painting of an impeachment demonstration. Obviously conservatives are not to feel welcome. All who oppose appeasing the North or suspect the government of sympathizing with it are now branded “far right,” whatever their opinions on other issues, and posited outside the hallowed minsim or popular will. Last year a former prime minister said they should be “wiped out” altogether. Although the police’s recent investigation of the bank accounts of 20,000 contributors to conservative organizations turned up nothing untoward, it probably had the intended chilling effect anyway, to borrow that American campus cliché.
It’s no coincidence that the joint hockey team is the first issue on which the Moon administration has stood firm in the face of intense public opposition. (It folded on Bitcoin in a matter of hours.) Contrary to the wishful assertions of those who in May 2017 mocked predictions of trouble in the alliance, Moon is indeed putting his inter-Korean agenda above all else. His commitment should have been clear to everyone from the backgrounds of the people he installed in the Blue House. Their most salient shared credential: some record of strong support, strong to the point of (post-democratization) illegality or imprisonment in several cases, for — I must phrase this carefully — a fundamentally different relationship with the North.
It wouldn’t do, in any case, to make too much of young people’s dissatisfaction about either the hockey team or the planned entrance into the stadium under the peninsula flag. Moon is right in distinguishing it from principled opposition to inter-Korean reconciliation. (Not that he would be put off by that either.) As I have written before, the young here generally shift between nationalism and state spirit depending on which of the two requires less action or sacrifice from them at the time in question. The default mindset is nationalism, the race being an abstract, feel-good thing in no position to levy taxes, enforce laws or send someone into battle. When young people manifest state spirit against nationalism, it is not in defense of the state itself, but of their rights and perks as citizens. The same millennials who deride their republic as “Hell Chosun,” and enjoy thrillers glamorizing North Korean soldiers and security forces, insist that the government take better care of its own citizens before helping anyone above the DMZ. This is why they are angry at the ukaz about a joint women’s hockey team, and at the last-minute dilution of the state-branding and touristic benefits of hosting the Olympics.
Some foreigners appear to think that South Koreans’ loss of Sunshine exuberance gives the lie to any suggestions of a co-ethnic confederation or even a North Korean unification drive. I keep having to repeat that it’s likely to bolster support for confederation, which has long been promoted in academic discussion as a way to enjoy the benefits of unification (London-Busan railroad, etc) while indefinitely postponing the real thing. No doubt that is how the administration will try to sell it — perhaps in genuine unawareness of the attendant risks — when the time comes.
As for the peculiar notion that the fratricidal dictator in Pyongyang will be deterred from his top priority by opinion polls of any sort, I see it tossed out more often than argued; someone re-tweets this or that poll result, with some jibe at the “hawkish” side of the discussion, and moves on to the next tweet. Note that even the South Korean government does not resign itself to the young people’s lack of enthusiasm for the upcoming spectacles; it pledges to “educate” them in time for the Games. The finlandization process now in full swing, which includes government harassment of journalists writing critically about the North, shows how serious it is.
But while we’re talking polls, let’s keep in mind that the only significant South Korean party raising the alarm about either confederation or the unification drive now has (after Moon’s worst week ever) a popularity rating of 9%. Having read up on how these polls are conducted, I think we can safely add at least 5% to that number, but that’s still not much. Supporters under 40 are very few indeed. Last Saturday I walked by a rightist rally at Seoul Station, and saw only two people in their twenties in the whole crowd. So surprising and heartening to the other flag-wavers was the two young ladies’ presence that they found themselves the object of approving grins and raised thumbs. The many high-school and college students I saw rushing past chuckled and shook their heads if they noticed the rally at all.
To repeat what I said so many times last year: There is indeed less pro-North sentiment than ever, but principled, security-minded opponents of appeasement have dwindled down to an elderly and generally lower-class fringe. That is by far the more important political development from Kim Jong Un’s perspective.
I will refrain here from once again setting out all the reasons a) why it is anything but hawkish to acknowledge North Korea’s unification drive; b) why propaganda that accords with a 70-year pattern of behavior and makes sense of the nuclear program must be taken more seriously than the kind that doesn’t; c) why peaceful coexistence would bring about North Korea’s demise faster than it brought about East Germany’s, so that Kim Jong Un must press on to “final victory” if he wants to live out his life in power; d) why the North believes the South can be subjugated without war and e) why a unified peninsula need not look exactly like a dictatorship shaped in its formative years by rivalry with a co-ethnic state.
But I see deniers of the unification drive making no serious effort to counter those reasons; they simply ignore or misrepresent them instead. I understand their horror at seeing the discussion turn inter-Korean, really I do, but turn inter-Korean it must. Perhaps they should spend less time tweeting, soundbiting, drawing attention to their latest article, etc, and more time reading North and South Korean newspapers and modern history books, learning the language first if need be. Simply repeating the old conventional wisdom in the tone of someone pounding on a table, with a telling lack of reference to information not available in English, is not helping anyone. Close followers of the discussion are well aware that only one side takes the trouble to refute the other.
The venom with which so many North Korea scholars, observers and hobbyists now rail against the notion of a unification drive suggests that the issue is a very personal and emotional one for them. Otherwise, if the idea were as preposterous or hopelessly outdated as they claim to think, they would be content to sit back and let the course of events prove it wrong – much as I did in 2011/2012 when everyone else was predicting that Kim Jong Un would break with the military-first policy and reach out to Washington.
At the beginning I derived their anger from the fear that awareness of the North’s unification drive might induce Donald Trump to order a strike on the country. I therefore made clear in my RAS speech that it conduces more to a peaceful resolution of the crisis than the conventional wisdom, and called on the United States to address the ideological problems inside the alliance instead. This only made everyone angrier.
Oddly enough, the most furious people are on the softline or apologetic part of the Pyongyang-watching spectrum. They never get this worked up when North Korea is called a gangster state, a drug-running operation or a giant gulag. Nor do they express such fervent opposition to (say) imperialist proposals for the US and China to get together and decide the fate and political character of the peninsula on their own.
No, it seems that the craziest, most reprehensible thing one can possibly say about North Korea is that it wants to unify the peninsula with as little bloodshed as possible. And apparently the worst thing one can say about the South Koreans — “INSANE” “psychobabble” even – is that the North might have reason to believe they wouldn’t fight to the death against such an effort. (Needless to say, I never said South Koreans are ready to “give away” their republic, as “T.K.” is no doubt well aware.)
I repeat: it is self-styled progressives and liberals who find these ideas so scandalous. True, I have often clashed at conferences with South Korean conservatives who bristle at my emphasis on the North’s nationalism. Being nationalists themselves, albeit of a more moderate sort, they think it makes the regime look too respectable, dignified, legitimate. I am told to chalk up the unification drive to a communizing urge — “it sounds scarier that way,” I was helpfully advised — or to the regime’s evil desire to cause as much suffering as possible. But the other side of the spectrum now seems far more upset.
Particularly striking is the general tendency to identify the idea as my personal thing. “T.K.” has not yet questioned the sanity of South Korea’s Minister of Unification, though he too is alarmed by increasing signals that Pyongyang wants to use its nukes to take over the peninsula. And many quite moderate analysts in South Korea have been saying much the same stuff since the 1990s. But for the Westerners now raging on Twitter, this is my trademarked idea. (As it becomes harder and harder to refute, the tendency will no doubt go in the opposite direction.)
Now, these are very America-centric people, which is one reason why my call for a more inter-Korean understanding of the nuclear crisis bothered them so much in the first place. Even when young Europeans begin to study Korea they first turn West and not East, the better to view the peninsula through the orthodox US-academic prism. (The proud inaugural issue of the new European Journal of Korean Studies was advertised as containing a lead-off article by an Ivy League professor; take a wild guess which one.) No idea merits discussion, it seems, until an American expresses it.
But the more obvious explanation for the pretended assumption of my original and exclusive authorship is that it’s much easier to identify the idea with one person, and then engage in ad hominem attack, than to do the work of refutation.
My natural tendency is simply to ignore this stuff. Show me a persona non grata, and I’ll show you a persona non give a shit — which is to say that I’ve always found my outsider status more of a liberating force on my research than anything else, and don’t want to give it up. I hate to think how I would have prevaricated and fudged things had I been one of the boys. Something else I’ve learned: Arguing with people in an intellectual rut is the quickest way to end up in one yourself.
But unfortunately we aren’t talking Etruscan pottery here. The issue of North Korea’s intentions is one of enormous and immediate importance to the lives of millions of people. I have therefore decided to respond to the ad hominem attacks in order to force the other side to begin taking the effort to refute my arguments. And no, just apodictically stating that North Korea has no interest in unification (as is done en passant in many articles) is not refuting anything. Many people seem to regard their own gut feelings as reliable instruments of political analysis; if they can’t imagine something happening, if they just don’t see it, they rush to Twitter to announce the news. But that’s not refutation either.
Vague and indignant noises have long been made about my allegedly unscholarly approach to North Korea. Apparently I am to be dismissed as a researcher of literature or comparative literature who applies that “incredibly weak methodology” to everything. No textual examples are ever provided of this.
It is of course true that I wrote the first — and for many years only — English-language history of the North Korean cultural scene, in which I focused on the propaganda writings of Kim Il Sung’s chief iconographer: Han Sŏrya and North Korean Literature (Cornell East Asia Series, 1994).
That work is also, as far as I know, the only American book on North Korea published during Kim Il Sung’s lifetime to have remained consistently in print ever since – which isn’t bad for a doctoral thesis. Let this serve as a reminder that my assertions in regard to the country, however much controversy they arouse at the beginning, tend to hold up very well over time. I have made my share of mistakes, but I know of no Pyongyang watcher of comparable seniority with a better track record than mine.
In any case, I haven’t researched literature per se for decades, instead focusing on ideology and propaganda as a whole. My discussion of these subjects is not only much more extensive than that undertaken by any Western political scientist writing on North Korea, but also much more political-scientific in its approach. In addition, I make far heavier use of untranslated primary materials than anyone else I can think of; more North Korean sources are cited in a single chapter of North Korea’s Juche Myth than in entire well-funded tomes on the country.
I hereby challenge anyone to compare the length, content and methodology of my writings on Juche with Bruce Cumings’ or Han S. Park’s and to argue anything different. But of course it’s much easier to dismiss my latest book on the grounds that it was self-published.
Let me digress here to explain why I put North Korea’s Juche Myth out myself. 1) I was aware of how a colleague’s manuscript had been brazenly plagiarized in the pre-publication stage, and by someone I had every reason to expect would be asked to vet my own. 2) I did not want a relatively short book put out at some outrageous library-bilking price by the likes of Routledge. 3) Due to the book’s relevance to the nuclear crisis I wanted it out as fast as possible. 4) Having funded my own research – out of principle I have never applied for or received a grant in my life – I needed to recoup my costs with a greater percentage of the profits than a publisher would have given me. 5) Books count for very little in South Korea’s tenure system, so I had nothing to lose. 6) I believed that the book would be judged on its own merits. Naïve, I know – but this was a year before the non-reaction to the Tyranny of the Weak scandal woke me up to the field’s true priorities.
Speaking of which scandal: None of the people who have long professed to find me unscholarly registered the slightest indignation when the field’s most hyped-up North Koreanist was revealed (by me among others) to have fabricated sources on a scale never before seen in Asian Studies. None of those who find me so arrogant thought it arrogant of him to engage — over several years — in systematic plagiarism of a professor earning a tiny fraction of the money he himself was getting. On the contrary, the victim and I were scolded for drawing attention to the scandal. To this day I remain the only one of the many reviewers of Tyranny of the Weak to have withdrawn his recommendation of it. The blurbs and rave reviews by established scholars are all still there on Amazon.
In closing, then, let me urge everyone who is outraged by the notion of a North Korean unification drive to calm down and engage in the work of argument, of refutation. I dare say there are much better forums for that than Twitter.
For the last time: The issue is not whether the South Koreans really would yield to the North, but whether the North Koreans have sufficient reason to believe they would. In this context I also want to call on journalists to cease filtering out news they perceive as bolstering the case I and others are now making. It was remarkable, for example, how many reporters (and academic analysts on blogs) said nothing about Kim Jong Un’s many references to unification in his New Year’s address.
UPDATE (9 January 2018)
“T.K” (whose real name is apparently Nathan Park) has responded to my post as best he knows how: in a series of tweets, each one throwing out a different point without actually arguing it. Among them, however, is one that says:
As I said before, I think Myers largely gets N. Korea correct.
I take this to mean that he and I are in agreement as to North Korea’s intentions, which, as I have repeatedly said, is the main issue here. What angers him, it seems, is my refusal to rule out the possibility that North Korea could ever succeed in subjugating the South.
This is yet another of the many contradictions I see in softline or progressive discussion of North Korea. On the one hand these people are at great pains to argue that it’s not such a bad place after all, and that it gets better, more South-like, every year: cell phones, pizza shops, gourmet coffee, ski resorts, and so on. They sneer at the old conservative propaganda that showed North Koreans with horns and red skins, and stress that people up there are no different from people down here when you get right down to it. Those who travel there themselves can’t seem to get enough of the place. On the other hand they think it “INSANE” to cast doubt on South Koreans’ readiness to fight the North to the death.
“T.K.” apparently finds it absurd of me even to suggest that South Koreans could assent to North-South confederation. I have written a blog post on the subject, but let me point out again here that Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun both committed themselves to the joint pursuit with Kim Jong Il of some form of league (the South’s weaker term) or confederation (the North’s stronger one) during their visits to Pyongyang in 2000 and 2007. No public outrage ensued. In fact, in 2010 Lee Myung-bak’s refusal to implement the summit agreements was held up by many as a cause of the North’s twin attacks.
In late 2012 Moon Jae-in pledged to implement confederation — note that he insisted on using the North’s term — during his presidency. He went on to win 48% in the election that year. (To hear his own camp tell it, he would have beaten Park Geun-hye if not for NIS meddling.) After reiterating his commitment to confederation in the presidential campaign of 2017, and stating that his concept of it was not significantly different from the North’s, Moon was elected with 41% of the vote. The Justice Party candidate, another supporter of confederation, got just over 6%. I should add that a large part of the People’s Party is known to support confederation too; see for example Pak Chi-won’s avowed, unconstitutional interest in becoming the South’s ambassador in Pyongyang.
As I made clear in my RAS talkand in an ensuing Slate interview — though “T.K.” appears to have missed those parts — the South Korean left has too much to lose to want a North Korean takeover. (Judging from the clothing and coffee cups I see at rival street demonstrations, the left’s rank and file is generally much more affluent than the right’s.) Those who support confederation do so precisely because they see in it the possibility to drag the process of unification out over years and even decades, at the end of which time, so the general hope, the two Koreas would coalesce as equal and like-minded partners. Needless to say, the expectation is that by that time the North would look and think a lot more like the South.
The problem is that North Korea would almost certainly demand (as its own propaganda and statements to diplomats make clear) the pull-out of US troops either before or in the first stages of confederation; and that it would then do what it has always pledged to do.
“T.K.” may well be right in believing that the South Koreans would never agree to the withdrawal of US troops, or that they would fight an aggressing North inside a confederation even after such an event. I have stronger doubts, perhaps because I live in South Korea and talk on these subjects not only with academics (some of whom are now in or connected with the Moon administration) but also with students both at my own and at other universities. But at the risk of repeating myself — and it is not a “dodge” but the very crux of the issue! — the question is what North Korea believes is likely.
At the very least it must be conceded that there is great potential for a disastrous miscalculation down the road — certainly great enough for the issue of the North’s intentions to merit calm and open-minded discussion right now. Again: Twitter is not the place for it.
UPDATE (3 September 2018)
I might as well publish all my responses to online criticism as updates to this Twitterati post, regardless of where they appear, unless they a) seem important enough to merit a new blog post or b) pertain to one of my posts in particular, in which case I will respond in an update underneath it.
Recently I was made aware of a strange Tumblr account devoted to the defense of North Korea against real or perceived criticism from virtually every foreigner in the discussion, including Tim Shorrock.
Anti-DPRK Propagandist B.R. Myers Has a Family History of Oppressing Koreans
The most prominent proponent of the “DPRK is racist” myth is B.R. Myers. His father, Glenn Lynn Myers, helped to enforce the US military colonization of Korea as a US army major, serving in a fairly privileged position as personal chaplain to George Patton II, son of WWII Gen. George S. Patton. In George S. Patton’s grandson’s book Growing Up Patton, Glenn Myers recounts his time in 1960s Korea, taking particular care to whitewash the US military’s sex-slavery program, which was modeled after Japan’s “comfort women” system and even enslaved some former comfort women.
The above even includes a link to a photograph of my father’s grave in Arlington National Cemetery.
The assertion that he was General George Patton II’s “personal chaplain” is of course false. There is no such position in the US Army.
Also false is the assertion that my father claimed there were only “a few prostitutes” catering to all of USFK. This is belied in the very same Tumblr post by his statement that “a few prostitutes” would regularly arrive at the ville in Waegwan from Busan or Seoul.
It goes on:
Ultimately, B.R. Myers’s father did and said nothing to counteract the US military’s rape regime. He just encouraged soldiers to join a photography club instead.
Considering Glenn Lynn Myers’s privileged position in the US colonial apparatus in Korea, it’s fair to ask whether a US military intelligence outfit chose B.R. Myers to continue his father’s work on behalf of empire.
A very tight close-up on a scan of a page is usually a sign that something in the textual vicinity contradicts the excerpter. Is that the case here? Let’s read on in the book in question:
Then, while driving in his jeep one night that winter, he came upon the Waegwan orphanage.
“There were over a hundred children there, and I couldn’t believe how shabby they looked,” [Myers] remembers. “They were barefoot — and it was cold outside. One kid had a belt made out of wire to keep his pants up. They didn’t even have anywhere to take a bath — they just had helmets filled with water occasionally dumped over their heads. And, of course, most of them were GI babies who’d been fathered by soldiers and just left at the police station.”
If was especially bad to be an orphan in Korea. “If you can’t trace your family back five or six generations, you’re nobody,” Myers notes. So he decided to add some theater to his anti-VD campaign: to raise awareness about the orphans’ plight in every crevice of the camp — and, true to his mission — use it as a reminder of sexual consequences.
Myers raised money among the soldiers to buy clothes and shoes for the orphans. He enlisted Army engineers to build them a proper bathhouse. At the end of every month, Myers sat at the head of the pay line with a “For the Orphans of Waegwan” donation can. Some of his in-your-face tactics hit too close. When Myers got permission from the mess sergeants to bring a group of children to the mess for Thanksgiving dinner, for instance, one of his commanders, a lieutenant colonel, lashed out.
“He pulled me aside and said, ‘This is our Thanksgiving, not theirs. What the hell are they doing here? You have no business doing this and you’ll pay for it’ — the implication being that he’d get me,” Myers remembers. “And this is a guy who’d just come from church!” (Growing Up Patton, 236-237)
Of course I heard all this many times growing up. Never did I sense on the part of my father any effort to whitewash the US Army’s connections to the sex trade. On the contrary! Note that while his account draws attention to the most abject victims of that trade, the people behind the Tumblr blog chose to overlook it — as they would not have, had they intended to drive home the negative effects of the US military presence.
Their goal instead is to show that I’m of particularly bad lineage — bad sŏngbun, to put it in North Korean terms.
It makes a change from the sort of ad hominem attacks I usually get. But those who want to defend North Korea against the charge of racism would do well to try a different approach.
My father at the orphanage in Waegwan
UPDATE (17 September 2019):
The American behind the Tumblr account referred to above, whose name rhymes with the title of a famous science fiction movie, is back to harping in classic DPRK-style on my bad sŏngbun or bloodline as the offspring of a military officer. But this time it’s on Twitter, where he also says Myers “distorts the Korean language to weaponize it against Koreans.”
The evidence on display is my “mistranslation” of the Korean word p’um as bosom in The Cleanest Race. Yet he admits that this is one of the words given in the relevant entry of the Korean-English dictionary.
His main line of argument: in North Korea’s official English translations of reports on Kim Il Sung’s or Kim Jong Il’s doings, the noun p’um tends to be left out, leaving only the English equivalent of the attendant Korean verb anda/angida, namely to embrace/to be embraced.
This recalls how a European said years ago I should have translated ŏbŏi as father and not (literally) as parent, and have translated choguk as Fatherland and not Motherland, despite the stock North Korean formula ŏmŏni choguk (Mother Homeland), because the more normal-sounding words are the ones he invariably hears from English-speaking guides and interlocutors on his visits to Pyongyang.
Why should I care about English-language export propaganda? My interest is in North Korean myth as received by North Koreans and not white people. That word p’um is there for a reason and cannot simply be ignored, however ridiculous it may look to some — though not to me — in a faithful English translation.
After all if one wants to say in Korean “The child was held/embraced by its father,” one need write only “Ai ga abŏji ege angyŏtta.” (See the headline “Child embraced/held by father” and the accompanying photograph here.) One cannot change it to “Abŏji ŭi p’um e angyŏtta,” without directing the listener’s attention to some degree to that part of the body.
The question is why p’um appears so often in personality-cult texts when the sense of an embrace or hug can be communicated without it. There are indeed references from colonial Korea to fathers holding children to their p’um, but this hardly disproves my point about the roots of the North’s official culture. Besides, as I make repeatedly clear in the relevant few pages of my book — from which Mr B quotes as selectively and misleadingly as from the book referred to in the last update to this blog post — the leader’s p’um is often praised without the verb in question.
So happy about the warm love he bestowed on us/ We buried our faces in his bosom. (From “The Leader Came to the Sentry Post,” quoted in The Cleanest Race, 106.)
The harder the cold autumn wind blows / the more I yearn for the warm bosom of the General. (From “Where Are You, General I Long For?” quoted in The Cleanest Race, 107.)
There can be no doubt that the Leader’s p’um is intended to function in the personality-cult “Text” primarily as a maternal attribute. A Great Parent who lets grown men and women rest their heads on his chest, as Kim Il Sung does in the picture on the cover of my book, is behaving more like a traditional mother than a traditional father from the North Koreans’ perspective — which is a very different perspective from ours. (The list of South Korean male behaviors North Koreans consider laughably effeminate is a long one, as I know from defectors among my acquaintances.)
What, I wonder, though only with mild curiosity, is Mr B’s point? That Kim Il Sung is not inter alia a mother figure? Does he want to revive the old US-academic orthodoxy of North Korea as one great Confucian family, with Kim Il Sung as old-school patriarch? How then to explain what I call the “pointedly androgynous or — more accurately — hermaphroditic designation” (TCR, 105) of Parent Leader?
Kim Jong Il himself said his father’s motherly qualities of sensitivity and meticulous care were the key to his successful leadership. (See TCR,105.) I hasten to add, before some feminist or masculinist objection is made, that he (or his ghostwriter) considered these to be maternal and thus feminine qualities, not me.
Of course the Dear Leader was often praised on the same grounds, usually more extravagantly so. On at least one occasion he was apostrophized as “Our Great Mother, General Kim Jong Il.” (TCR, 125.)
