Most people are like Proust’s Duc de Guermantes, in that they assume all criticism of someone the critic knows personally must derive from personal resentment. Before I take issue for the second time in two months with something Andrei Lankov has written for NK News, let me make clear that he and I have never had a cross word, despite the fundamental difference in our perceptions of the peninsula.
This is the part of his newer article I want to discuss:
A number of right-leaning conspiracy theorists in South Korea honestly believe that their current President is a crypto-Jucheist of sorts, whose secret dream is to surrender all of South Korea to the North through some unequal “confederation scheme.” This absurd fantasy has a remarkable number of followers on the right-wing flank of South Korean politics.
Conspiracy theories notwithstanding, there is little reason to doubt President Moon’s sincere desire to improve relations with, and resume subsidies — both direct and indirect — to North Korea.
I realize that by the current standards of South Korea’s English-language press the above show of partisanship is nothing excessive. A few weeks ago an article in the Korea Joongang Daily started off with “Conservatives squawked Thursday about….” But the foreign historian writing for an inquiring Western readership has to hold himself to a much higher standard.
Here’s what I find odd. While South Koreans’ anti-Japanese sentiment gets taken at face value as the inevitable result of what happened well before most of them were born, conservatives’ fears for the security of the South, which was last subjected to a deadly military attack in 2010, tend to be treated as laughable delusions. Lankov’s tone is all too representative.
Let’s remember not only how many South Koreans were killed, injured or abducted during a war the North started, but also that one of the most shocking parts of that conflict for people who experienced KPA occupation was seeing neighbors emerge on day one as fully-formed, snitching supporters of the enemy. Many bore titles in the underground organizations to which, it turned out, they had belonged for years. In several recorded cases they denounced people who were shot on the spot. That trauma sits deep. South Koreans still use the term “people’s trial” (inmin chaep’an) in the sense in which we say “kangaroo court.”
Bear in mind also that since the truce it has been the North’s self-declared strategy to conquer the South not by out-and-out warfare but by inducing the southern masses, be it in elections or through an uprising, to effect the withdrawal of US troops and the end of conservative rule. All that time the North has publicly vaunted the enormous size of its underground network in the South. Soviet archives attest to the North’s guidance and funding of the “reformist” parties of 1960-61. The former student leader Kim Young-hwan has spoken of his own close ties to Pyongyang and meetings with Kim Il Sung in the early 1990’s.
For almost 60 years now the North has promoted an inter-Korean confederation with economic cooperation as the way to “peaceful, autonomous unification,” all the while publicly urging South Koreans to carry out a revolution. I can understand why conservatives worry when the same leftists who subscribed to this doctrine in the 1980’s still advocate confederation, economic cooperation and “peaceful, autonomous unification” today. The average foreign observer is blissfully unaware of the associations; someone who doesn’t know a country’s history is bound to chuckle at the things its people worry about. But at least the Beltway “experts” mocking the South Korean opposition on Twitter come by their ignorance honestly. It’s depressing to see the relevant context willfully disregarded by a historian of modern Korea.
Of course history must also be taken into account when discussing left-wing fears of a return to rightist dictatorship. Is it too much to ask that some effort at understanding both sides be made before the mockery starts?
As for “conspiracy theory,” consider the following information, much of which will already be familiar to anyone following this blog:
- On 15 June 2000 Kim Dae Jung and Kim Jong Il publicly pledged that the two Koreas would work together in the direction of the common ground between the South’s concept of a league and the North’s concept of a confederation.
- On 7 April 2007 Kim Dae Jung publicly called for a 3 stage process to end the division of the peninsula: league, confederation and unification.
- On 4 October 2007 Roh Moo Hyun and Kim Jong Il publicly renewed the two Koreas’ commitment to the June 15 2000 agreement.
- On 16 August 2012 Moon Jae-in publicly pledged to bring about an inter-Korean league or confederation during his presidency.
- On 25 April 2017 Moon Jae-in, asked in public by a rival candidate if he supported the North’s proposal for “low-level confederation,” replied, “I think there is not much difference between low-level confederation and the league proposed by the South.”
- On 31 August 2018 Jeong Se-hyon, one of Moon’s mentors, told a journalist that inter-Korean economic cooperation must be raised to the level of a league. (Jeong is now Executive Vice-Chair of the National Unification Advisory Council.)
- In September 2018 the mainstream-left Hankyoreh newspaper welcomed the establishment of a North-South liaison office in Kaesong by referring to it in two articles (here and here) as a first stage in the “systematization of a North-South league.” A Peace Party representative also spoke publicly of the office as opening the way to a league. Paek Nak-cheong, another of Moon’s famous mentors, publicly declared in a respected (offline) journal that the current goal of the two Koreas is a league; his article was approvingly reported on in the press (see here and here). The Blue House saw no need to correct any of these statements.
- On 27 October 2018 the South China Morning Post ran an article by John Power on the South Korean discussion of a “one country, two systems” transition to unification. Power wrote that “voices on the left, including figures close to the president, have been pushing to see such a union finally come to fruition.” Quoted among supporters of the plan was a South Korean professor of political science at Wonkwang University who predicted Moon would establish some form of union by the end of 2022. “Is there any other path to peaceful unification … than federation?”
- In March 2019 the Ministry of Education published elementary school textbooks for “virtue” or civics class presenting North-South league as the second part — after reconciliation — of “the desirable unification process we must strive for.”
Before some skim-reader tries claiming that a league is much looser than a confederation, let me repeat Moon’s statement that there’s no real difference between the two. (The North itself has taken to promoting “league-confederation.”) Needless to say both words denote an alliance of some sort.
The only thing Lankov seems to find more absurd than the notion of a “confederation scheme” is the notion of an “unequal” one, but all partnerships between states are unequal. One of the two Koreas will get the upper hand; the only question is which. Considering that the North has got the better deal in each joint declaration dating back to 1972, and that the South has been the more passive side through the past four or five ROK administrations (including the “hardline” ones), it’s hardly absurd to expect the pattern to persist in a league or confederation. Wrong perhaps, but not absurd.
Note also the overwhelming consensus on the left that a) the center of such a formation should be in Kaesong in the DPRK, and b) that despite the South’s far greater population the two states must have equal votes in a North-South council. Such a body would inevitably consist of DPRK representatives voting en bloc, so that one supportive vote from the pluralist ROK side would suffice to tip things Pyongyang’s way.
In puncto “crypto-Jucheist”: Many right-wing commentators do indeed talk of the president’s having formed a “Juche Group” (chusap’a) government. Nobody, as far as I can gather, genuinely believes people in the Blue House are sitting around cramming Kim Jong Il’s On Juche Thought like they did in the old days. The word refers instead to Moon’s conspicuous habit of appointing veterans of the protest movement who saw prison time between 1985 and 1995. Chusap’a is thus shorthand for a distinct generation of leftists marked generally (not unanimously) by a much higher degree of pro-North, ultra-nationalist sentiment than the old-school Marxist generation directly before it, which the Moon administration is said to have been shunting aside.
From discussions on the street with conservative flag-wavers I can confirm that many of them do believe Moon wants to surrender the South to Kim Jong-un. This is not my assessment but I can see how someone could get this idea. Having repeatedly disavowed any desire for regime change in the North, the president announced last week that unification would take place by 2045, when Kim Jong-un would be in late middle age. The only benign way to interpret that is to assert that Moon didn’t really mean it.
For a long time now there’s been a cheerful debate here as to what a unified peninsula should be called, with some plumping for retention of “Republic of Korea” (Taehan min’guk) but many preferring the North-friendly term “Koryŏ” instead (see here and here). It’s by no means just the right, then, that believes unification-by-confederation would mean the end of the Republic of Korea.
But the hearings undergone by Moon’s cabinet appointees have given everyone quite an education into the extraordinary acquisitiveness and tax-dodging ingenuity of the Gangnam Left. (The manifold scandals now besetting Cho Kuk, Moon’s choice for Justice Minister, are illustrative.) Many conservatives I have spoken to therefore share my belief that most people in the ruling camp don’t want to see the North take over, but are instead pursuing confederation as an instrument with which to hold onto power here indefinitely.
Minjoo members seem adamant that power must not be relinquished for at least 20 years. The party leader has spoken of the urgent need — for democracy’s sake — to keep the Blue House for ten presidents in a row. That’s half a century. I can see why these people fancy their chances of framing each post-confederation election as a choice between maintaining a peace-friendly status quo and risking war by “turning back the clock.” The same threat could conceivably be invoked to criminalize conservatism as a danger to the peace. (Last spring over 1.8 million people petitioned the government to dissolve the main opposition party.)
The problem of course is that the North’s priorities are very different. It hasn’t attained to what it considers superpower status only to disarm itself during — let alone before! — a long period of symbolic parity with the South, a period destined to end at some stage in peninsular free elections. No personality cult can survive having an expiration date placed on it, however vague or far off it may be. And no, I don’t buy the common notion that if the US and South Korea promise convincingly enough never to topple the Kim dictatorship from without, it will let itself be toppled slowly from within. As the current leader’s grandfather said to Zhivkov in 1973, North Korea’s interest in confederation is in first disarming and then eliminating the rival state.
I agree with Lankov that Moon sincerely wants to improve relations with North Korea and pump as much aid northward as possible. But that’s not all he wants. Too many foreign supporters of this president fail to grasp the full implications of his pledge to create a whole new order on the peninsula, a Korea such as no one has experienced before, and so on. This is about much more than better relations and subsidies. It’s about going as far beyond the Sunshine Policy as Kim Dae Jung went beyond Nordpolitik.
I’ve repeatedly used the word “public” in this post for a reason. To count as a conspiracy, a plan involving two or more parties must be covert. Not even Alex Jones would talk of a Democratic Party conspiracy to field a candidate who can beat Trump. The term “conspiracy theory” is to be used and understood accordingly. Had Lee Harvey Oswald spoken just before his death of a second gunman on the grassy knoll, one would not be a conspiracy theorist for taking him seriously. The information could still be wrong, but someone disagreeing with it would have to engage in actual refutation. The same goes for all who seek to dismiss talk of the ROK government’s confederation drive as a conspiracy theory.
UPDATE (28 August 2019): Tread softly, nationalist left, for you tread on their dreams
Chŏng Ch’ang-hyŏn is director of the trendily titled Peace Economy Research Institute, which was established last March by Moon-loyal Money Today Media. It professes to be committed to providing a blueprint for North-South prosperity by analyzing things “from an objective and neutral perspective.”
A few weeks ago, at a venue in Gwanghamun, Chŏng gave the second lecture in a series sponsored by unification-minded Tongil News. The media outlet’s Kim Ch’i-gwan summarizes it in this week’s headline article, which is entitled, “We Have Already Entered the First Stage in the North’s Confederation-League System.”
Now there’s a headline you won’t see in the left’s English-language press anytime soon, eh? It’s a very enjoyable and substantial article, but I will skip the historical bit. Of the Panmunjeom Declaration (27 April 2018) Chŏng is quoted as having said in the lecture:
If you look at the articles in it, most of the systematic apparatus … that conforms to the first stage of the North’s confederation-league system is in there…. Everything is emphasized in the form of peace and prosperity but the icon of unification is hidden here and there…. Through the Panmunjeom Declaration, North-South relations can now be regarded as having entered the first stage of a North-South league.
I like how Chŏng peels away glittering South Korean generalities like “systematization of North-South relations” to point out that things like the Kaesong liaison office, routine meetings of defense ministers, etc, tick boxes traditionally foreseen as belonging to the first part of a league or confederation process. The only step that hasn’t happened yet, he says, is the meeting of the legislative assemblies of the two Koreas.
But for the approving tone this might all have been said by one of those right-wing conspiracy theorists Andrei Lankov finds so ridiculous.
So again: If one wants to claim that the attribution to the Blue House of a confederation drive is fantasy, i.e. has no grounding in reality, one is of course free to do so. But one must first argue that point, a tall order under all these circumstances unless you’re Bishop Berkeley. Nobody who reads Korean should be conveying to Western readers the impression that this issue is only being discussed on the right. If anything, the left is more inclined to claim that confederation is already underway.
