One of the many Korean phrases I feel would enrich our language, and which deserve a place in it much more than je ne sais quoi and mi casa es su casa, is the wonderfully pithy almyŏn mwŏ hae? Usually a reply to another question, it means, “What’ll you do if you know?” I feel the urge to say it whenever I encounter Westerners intensely interested in the rise of North Korean Big Shot A or the decline of Big Shot B who cannot explain why it matters. At most I hear something like, “The guy spent time overseas, so he’s more likely to be a reformer,” a line of reasoning that should have been laid to rest in 2012.
It has therefore been exasperating over the past week to read so much speculation about the perceived change in Kim Yo-jong’s stature. Something tells me this could be the cue for the Washington branch of the Air Koryo Mileage Club to dust off its hawks-doves myth again. Or maybe not? One good thing to have come out of the Trump-Kim summits has been the weakening of that set’s claim to authority, i.e., that it understands the dictatorship uniquely well because it has engaged in talks with a few officials.
But I started this post in response to something I have been asked several times since the demolition of the liaison office in Kaesong. I might as well reproduce, with one or two minor changes, the relevant page from a long, off-the-record talk I gave at a hotel in Seoul on Thursday (18 June 2020):
….. All of this raises the question, an especially topical one, of why the Kim regime is so abusive toward the friendliest, most nationalist South Korean government in history. Now, there has long been in the North a very real contempt for the South Korean left, the kind that radicals always feel for moderates no matter how obsequious the latter might be. Believe it or not, there were always more South Koreans willing to work with the North than it was willing to work with. The history of the underground in the 1960s and 1970s is replete with tales of how this or that Kim disciple got cold-shouldered by the DPRK embassy in East Berlin and had to go begging for funds in Japan instead.
The North Korean regime, which forgets nothing, is also cynically aware of how the South’s ruling elite stands to benefit from the grand inter-Korean projects it likes to posit in the center of the relationship. That whole side of the Sunshine Policy years is of course a taboo topic here, but it’s hard to understand the North’s cavalier treatment of so-called progressive governments unless one knows that history.
We can certainly infer a certain contempt and mistrust from the way Kim Jong Il talks to Roh Moo Hyun in the transcripts of the 2007 summit. It also appears that when Moon Jae-in was in Pyongyang in September 2018 he promised Kim Jong-un certain things, probably in regard to the US, that he has so far been unable to deliver.
But let’s also keep in mind a fact that never receives enough attention, namely, that the North owes its security not to nuclear weapons, but to American fears that even a minor strike on the North would result in devastating retaliation against Seoul. Any consistent outward improvement of inter-Korean relations naturally casts doubt on the automaticity of such retaliation and therefore undermines the North’s security. The consequence is that the Kim regime must walk a tightrope. On the one hand it must project reasonableness and an openness to negotiations, while on the other it has to project great volatility and excitability, a readiness to stop at nothing.
Whatever goes on between the two Koreas behind the scenes, therefore, their outward relationship is never allowed to get too far ahead of the relationship between Pyongyang and Washington. This is why there was a sudden ostentatious freeze-over of inter-Korean relations after the “axis of evil” speech in 2002. On the face of it this made no sense, the 2000 summit declaration having made clear that the two Koreas would work together regardless of what outside powers said or did. But the perceived increase in the danger of an American attack forced Kim Jong Il to deny that the North-South relationship had improved at all.
Something comparable has happened since the failure of the Hanoi summit. The liaison office was an embryonic version of confederation HQ, as the left-wing press said publicly when it opened 2 years ago. Back then, the show of inter-Korean partnership was expected to create momentum that would bowl over Donald Trump. That strategy having since failed, it made more security sense to get rid of the building. The North will not want another ostentatious monument to inter-Korean cooperation until the Americans lift sanctions at the very least.
The Moon government understands all this, which is why it stays on course. These outwardly bad periods in the relationship have the added advantage of reassuring the Americans and the South Korean mainstream that Moon is not too close to Pyongyang after all. The insults heaped on him do not hurt his popularity that much here, because he has not been spending significant sums of money on unilateral aid. The average South Korean does not even see a problem in his own government binding itself to agreements that North Korea is flagrantly violating. If you don’t believe me, wait until the relevant laws are passed in the National Assembly in the coming months, to the general indifference of the public. South Koreans do not identify enough with their “unloved republic” to feel anger when the North humiliates it, and they are reassured enough by the military alliance with the United States not to worry about where all this appeasement will lead.
Note: Asia Times reprinted this blog post (under a different title) on 24 June 2020.
UPDATE: 3 July 2020
Tolstoy says of an intellectual discussion in Anna Karenina: “Every time they got close to what seemed to [Levin] the most important point, they promptly beat a hasty retreat.” The other day I listened Levin-like to a 50-minute podcast discussion in which four Pyongyang watchers, all clearly intelligent and articulate, able to read Korean, very up on the relevant details, and keen to establish the exact order of the dramatic events of the preceding two weeks, seemed always on the verge of digging deeper — only to agree in the end that inter-Korean relations had come back to square one. Since 2017, NK News’ Oliver Hotham said,
it seems like not much has really changed. We had an inter-Korean liaison office, but now we don’t. [Laughter.] I think, you know, anyone who speaks to people who have followed this topic for decades, like Jacco [Zwetsloot] here and Andrei [Lankov], they’ll tell you that often it feels like these things go in circles.
This is indeed the consensus, so Zwetsloot saw no reason not to sign off on that note.
But I too have followed this topic for decades. I needn’t repeat my interpretation (above) of last month’s leaflet brouhaha. My conviction is that inter-Korean relations have suffered no serious setback and are still moving ahead, albeit in political-cultural areas that the commentariat, consciously or not, keeps diverting the world’s attention from. These things go in circles? So too, seen from only one angle, does a screw when tightened. It’s a slow tightening in this case but all the more effective for that; even the biggest changes go unnoticed if they take place gradually enough.
How many foreigners are aware, for example, that harsh criticism of the South Korean government has become a surefire way to enrage the North Korean one? Yes, you read that correctly. Of course it’s all right to fault Moon — as many “civic groups” do — on North Korea’s own grounds, complaining of his insufficient autonomy from the US, his reluctance to defy UN sanctions, etc, but allegations of corruption or abuse of power will bring the North’s propaganda apparatus down on the offending South Korean like a ton of bricks.
So it came to pass that on 30 June 2020, Jin Jung-gwon found himself excoriated by Meari, one of the North’s South-oriented propaganda outlets. To those in need of background: Jin left the pseudo-opposition Justice Party not long ago due mainly to its support for Cho Guk, President Moon’s scandal-ridden choice for Justice Minister. Since then he has written many Facebook posts assailing the ruling camp for what he perceives as its hypocrisy, corruption and authoritarianism.
Meari was not pleased:
[Jin Jung-gwon] may have looked like a scholar when he was satirizing the lackeyist Yushin dictator Park Chung Hee, but now that he has become a schemer like Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello, citizens spit on him. Is this perverted temperament, which takes pleasure in whipping up animosity between the ruling camp and the opposition, not a forte exclusive to Jin Jung-gwon? …. Snakes and serpents bursting forth whenever he opens his mouth, he’s a present-day Iago!
If the North thinks that sort of agitprop will work here, it must be more isolated than I thought. Then again, perhaps the folk responsible were content with knowing that Jin, a former professor of aesthetics, would grasp the Iago reference if no one else. The use of serpent imagery, common to the tragedy itself, indicates they weren’t just tossing out the name of any old stage villain. This makes the analogy all the more intriguing, and not only in view of the regime’s attitude toward miscegenation (on which more below).
Before I go further, let’s just ponder for a moment the strangeness of the North Korean regime’s raging at a South Korean intellectual for sowing discord between his government and the opposition. Stranger still is what the Iago analogy implies, namely, that what should rightly be a loving relationship of two decent entities is being kept apart by a trouble-maker. (It’s not impossible that the North takes the minority or Leavisite view of Othello as a self-regarding blowhard undone by his own flaws, but the whole focus on Iago suggests the conventional view of the Moor as a noble yet perfidiously misled innocent.) Now, although the United Future Party has ceased to be conservative in any meaningful sense, it remains anathema to Pyongyang. Meaning that the discord Meari laments must be that between the ruling camp and the pseudo-opposition Justice Party. To my knowledge, however, no one in Jin’s former party is still paying attention to him.
Meari again:
Showing contempt even for the bloodline of the Dangun Nation, and having gone so far as to produce, with a Japanese female, a child of mixed blood, he now seems to have completely lost his mind.
Ah yes, the “communist” North. Or the “post-ideological” North. Take your pick.
Jin’s response a day later was to address the Kim regime in a witheringly ironic Facebook post. An excerpt:
Leave the South Korean revolution to me who was born and raised here. That’s Juche Thought…. Comrade Kim Yo-jong’s line on Moon Jae-in, “Worse than the bastard who does a bad thing is the one who pretends not to see it,” is my line. Only, it must be applied subjectively, in accordance with South Korea’s situation and conditions.
The man knows his stuff. It was indeed Kim Il Sung’s post-war view that the South Koreans had to get a revolution started on their own; the North would intervene only in the “decisive period.” The need for revolutionary practice to fit a country’s unique conditions is another of the Great Leader’s central and purportedly original brainstorms, though of course Lenin was riding around on this very point well before the Korean’s birth. Jin Jung-gwon’s informedness will make his banter all the more offensive to the regime up north as well as to the Moon camp. I just hope the fellow knows what he’s in for.
You see, in South Korea, where support for social welfare and public health care is virtually universal, as is opposition to mass immigration, it’s largely one’s attitude to North Korea that decides whether one counts as “progressive” or “conservative.” The consequence is that there’s no room on the left for opposition to the Kim Jong Un regime. Even token criticism is thought acceptable only a) when it centers on some recent action or statement relevant to inter-Korean affairs, and even then only b) when refraining from criticism altogether would seem downright odd. The recent tut-tutting consensus, for example, was that by blowing up the North-South liaison office the Kim regime did not help its own cause — which continues to be regarded with sympathy and even admiration.
Back to square one? Far from it.
