Last autumn I did an interview in my office with a regional Swiss (German) TV station. Having parked too far down Mount Ŏmgwang, the crew had to lug its gear the rest of the way. Seoulite journos who make this mistake need a good sprawl on the couch before they can talk in full sentences, but my Helvetians probably sang all the way up. The first thing they asked as they strode into the lobby was: “Why don’t more Koreans live on top of mountains?”
Anyway, this is what I said (at the 10 minute mark) as part of my response to a question on Methodik.
Like Goethe and Spengler I’m convinced that history has an inner, organic logic which can’t be grasped purely in terms of causality. For me, in other words, the peninsula isn’t a silver ball in a giant, geopolitical pinball machine, the trajectory of which can only be understood in terms of cause and effect. It’s more like a tree which, although influenced by external conditions, and tossed this way and that, still has an organic, inner directedness. Meaning that when you take an old homogeneous nation and cut it in two, as we did in the last century, you can take it for granted that that which belongs together, will grow together again.
In that sense Willy Brandt said something very profound when he made his famous remark [in 1989, that “what belongs together, is growing together”]; he practically expressed a natural law. For every biologist, every gardener — every surgeon even – knows what inosculation means, namely, the growing into each other of closely-related and adjacent organisms. Both Koreas will grow into each other, I’m sure of it, and provided war with the USA doesn’t come first, North Korea will –unfortunately — lead this inosculation process.
It was in the same long-term frame of mind that I followed the Hanoi summit. The US-ROK alliance’s position on North Korea has been inexorably softening, with only minor and temporary reversals, for over half a century now, while North Korea, arming steadily, has always held fast to its commitment to “final victory,” to unification under its own flag. One need only take a few steps back from the daily news to see where this is headed.
Donald Trump did the right thing in Hanoi, in a rare accession of good sense, but only because Kim Jong Un, in an equally rare lapse of it, tried to get too much at once. Conservative South Koreans on Youtube cheered the summit collapse as the end of America’s efforts to appease Pyongyang. They also mocked Moon Jae-in for having announced, on the very next day, that he will continue pushing for what I call the ethnic exemption from sanctions, namely, permission for some degree of inter-Korean economic cooperation.
In fact Moon understands the Americans far better than his opponents do. He knows the softening of our resolve has quite a way to go yet. If talks between Pyongyang and Washington do not resume very soon, we can expect the usual American op-ed writers to back Moon’s call for the ethnic exemption. If Kim is smart he will offer just enough to bring it about, and visit Seoul to help force the Americans’ hand.
But the Koreas do not necessarily have to work together economically to come ever closer together. This was made clear not just by South Korean media’s fawning coverage of Kim during the Hanoi summit, but also by President Moon’s speech on the 100th anniversary of the independence demonstrations of 1 March 1919. The key part:
The Japanese imperialists labeled independence armies as bandits and independence activists as thought offenders … The word “Reds” originated from them….. Hostility between the left and the right and ideological stigmas were tools used by Japanese imperialists to drive a wedge between us. Even after liberation, they served as tools to impede efforts to remove the vestiges of pro-Japanese collaborators. They were also used to brand the public as enemies when it came to massacres of civilians, spurious accusations of spying for North Korea and the student pro-democracy movement….. Still now in our society, the word “Reds” is being used as a tool to vilify and attack political rivals, and a different kind of “Red Scare” is running rampant. These are typical vestiges left by pro-Japanese collaborators, which we should eliminate as soon as possible. The 38th parallel drawn through our minds will disappear all together once the ideological hostility that caused internal rifts are removed.
The view of history informing these words is the mouldy “revisionist” one which the declassification of Soviet archives rendered obsolete a quarter-century ago. We always knew anyway that there was no shortage of former collaborators in the North. The personality cult has long praised the Great Leader for giving them a second chance. In my own research I have shown that former pro-Japanese intellectuals of some notoriety made it with Kim’s blessing to the top of the cultural apparatus, where they exerted a formative influence on the North.
Considering the Soviet complaint that there were almost no workers and no peasants at all in the Korean communist party in North and South in late 1945 (see Tertitskiy’s superb new book), and considering South Korean leftist testimony that in the weeks after the emperor’s surrender the yangban leaned far-left, while entire settlements of the working and peasant classes moved spontaneously to the right (Yun Hakjun, 1994), we can assume that the portion of landed people who had enjoyed Japanese college educations and cushy white-collar jobs under colonial rule was higher on the left. More leftists had done prison time, certainly, but almost all had “converted” by the late 1930s and begun working with the Japanese. The nationalists had a better record of standing firm.
More to the point, we now know that much of the bloody unrest in the South in the late 1940s, which involved orchestrated attacks on policemen and their families – attacks of a cruelty and brutality that even Cumings has felt compelled to comment upon — was indeed planned, funded and guided from above the 38th parallel, as Rhee and the US military claimed at the time. That was no “red scare” but a correct assessment of the reality. We know from Kim Il Sung’s archived account that he was funding the ROK’s “reformist” parties in 1960, and inviting key members to Pyongyang; on that point too the right-wing suspicions of the time proved correct. That many leading members of the ostensibly pro-democracy student movement of the 1980s and 1990s understood that lofty keyword in either the Marxist-Leninist or the North Korean sense is clear enough from their own strident testimony.
Nor can there be any doubt — to mention what the right is currently most worried about — that Moon and his camp are by their own explicit, public account committed to bringing about North-South confederation in the short term. I notice when reading the full spectrum of political commentary that it’s perfectly acceptable to talk approvingly of this matter. Only when the news is imparted in tones of alarm does it suddenly become “fake.”
Now, I have long argued on this blog that the Moon administration is ideologically and emotionally closer to Pyongyang than to Washington. I have predicted that the two Koreas will whip up anti-Japanese sentiment to rally public support around their “new peninsula system,” “peace system,” “peaceful unification plan” — the reassuring euphemisms for confederation are endless. I have been called McCarthyist for this, as if anyone ever saw less trace of communism on the peninsula than I do.
But the March 1 speech proves my point. In it Moon attributes anti-North, anti-left sentiment wholly to the lingering influence of Japanese propaganda. He forbears to mention that what really changed a generally pro-socialist South Korean public in 1950 to a right-leaning one was a brief taste of North Korean rule. (Kim Sŏng-ch’il, for example, writes in his diary of how the KPA occupation made him identify with the ROK for the first time.)
As far as Moon is apparently concerned, the main division on the peninsula today is between the great community of nation-loving North and South Koreans who do not use pejoratives like “commies,” and the minority of South Korean colony-nostalgists who do. Yes, Moon astutely pretended to criticize only language and not the users of it, but the notion that today’s conservatives are descendants of collaborators — that they have bad sŏngbun, to put it in North Korean terms — has been central to leftist myth here for decades. (Jeong Dong-yeong of the pseudo-opposition Peace Party invoked it a few weeks ago; Moon’s speech is uncannily similar to the points Jeong made.) Unlike the trivial differences inside the pan-Korean, trans-DMZ community of good democrats — so trivial that the 38th parallel has no real intellectual or ideological importance — the scare-mongering speech of the South Korean rightists cannot be lived with. It must be eliminated, purged.
I needn’t add that these are the staunchest supporters of the US-ROK alliance whom Moon wants to see muzzled.
Funnily enough, his line of logic could be used a fortiori to stigmatize criticism of the USA. After all, it was the Yankees and not Korean “reds” – a tiny force even in their 1920s heyday — whom the Japanese authorities were most intent on infamizing. After Hirohito’s surrender all the main tropes went straight into the agitprop of the South Korean left. Thus did the Workers’ Party vilify Yankees as “bloodsuckers” when agitating Jeju islanders, who had been subjected to especially intense Japanese propaganda during the war.
The more recent canards according to which US soldiers got out of their armored vehicle to laugh at the schoolgirls they’d run over, that Uncle Sam was out to poison South Korean children with beef unfit for US consumption – this nonsense wouldn’t have gone down such a storm had there not been a colonial tradition behind it, one that informed many an anti-American novel and movie under that former collaborator Park Chung Hee.
But enough of history; as I’ve said before, it’s what’s done with it to contemporary ends that matters. Plenty will be done in the months ahead, to harmonizing North-South effects that the Western commentariat will cheer, and polarizing ROK-internal effects it will continue dozing through. It’s not America’s place to meddle, but we should be aware of what our supposedly liberal-democratic ally is up to.
UPDATE (5 April 2019)
Above I wrote: “If talks between Pyongyang and Washington do not resume very soon, we can expect the usual American op-ed writers to back Moon’s call for the ethnic exemption.” Sure enough:
[Moon] laid out his approach in a speech he gave in Berlin in July 2017: first build a “peace regime” on the Korean Peninsula by improving North Korea’s relationship with South Korea and the United States and then pursue step-by-step denuclearization as trust is cultivated among the parties. Joint inter-Korean economic projects are a key mechanism for the parties to build trust, along with cultural exchanges and regular meetings of separated families.
The inter-Korean projects include the Kaesong Industrial Complex, tourism at Mount Kumgang, and an inter-Korean railway. As the two Koreas form an economic relationship, the repeated interactions arising from such a relationship would gradually lead to a measure of trust between the two countries. […..] Inter-Korean economic projects represent a compromise that both the United States and North Korea can accept [….] The United States need not lift sanctions wholesale to have the inter-Korean projects progress. It merely needs to grant sanctions exemptions to those projects, allowing the sanctions to take effect once again if North Korea does not follow through with its promised denuclearization steps. (S. Nathan Park in Foreign Policy, 4 April 2019)
