“I have been wallowing in the bog of politics for a long time, and I have in fact come to be quite fond of it. In it, corruption cleanses people…. It makes you forget what should be forgotten, and overlook what should be overlooked.” – A character in Yukio Mishima’s After the Banquet (1960; transl. by Donald Keene)
Druking, Burning Sun, Mokpo real estate, SillaJen, the Ulsan mayoral race, Pak Won-soon, Optimus, Yun Mi-hyang, Lime, Cho Kuk — Justice Minister Cho Kuk: More interesting than any of the recent scandals these keywords stand for has been the nationalist left’s unyielding defense of the pols and officials involved. We even saw self-described feminists jeer the frightened woman who had complained of the Seoul mayor’s sexual advances. Whistle-blowers and investigators are denounced as “pro-Japanese” elements working for the opposition, which is in fact the most docile and insignificant one this country has seen since the early 1980s.
The temptation now, to which my conservative acquaintances have succumbed with a certain relief, is to write off South Korea’s ruling camp as a network of insider traders and real-estate speculators: old-school pols who rig elections, demote prosecutors, and imprison journalists for no other reason than to keep outsiders from the trough. But corruption and conviction are not the antitheses they are made out to be. One can hardly expect people who question the very legitimacy of the state to fret overmuch about breaking its laws. This is not to imply that the parliamentary right is more honest.
Granted, the cascade of scandals has given the lie to the ruling camp’s vaunted commitment to reform. The general non-response, meanwhile, has belied the public’s commitment to it, something the foreign press corps — “big-mouthed and clueless,” to borrow what Peter Handke once said of the Spiegel — took at face value in 2016. None of the alleged misconduct, which uncannily replicates or amplifies that for which Park and her people were convicted, has aroused much indignation from the man in the street. Even considering that voters are more tolerant of abuses of power when public expenditures are rising sharply (Melo and Pereira, 2015), as they have been here since 2017, we must acknowledge that the so-called Candlelight Revolution was a more top-down affair than we were led to believe.
This should have been obvious to us from the demonstrators’ struggle to give coherent reasons for their festive-seeming “outrage” on the nightly news. They weren’t really mad as hell, but they believed they should be, thanks to an intense propaganda campaign orchestrated by the politico-media complex. As the left and right today are equally loath to recall, this last included Park’s own party and the conservative media (which broke the Ch’oi Sun-sil scandal). I’m coming around to Emerson’s way of thinking:
The sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs.
By “cleansing” away the cant, however, — to borrow Mishima’s figure of speech — the recent scandals have brought into sharper relief the one cause to which the nationalist left remains loyal. Particularly noteworthy was the effort to discredit the former “comfort woman” who had asked why she and other survivors had received but a tiny fraction of the money donated for their welfare. Although the nonagenarian is as sharp as a tack, Moon loyalists responded much as Japanese rightists respond to such people’s testimony: with imputations of dementia.
You see, those donations had been managed by a prominent member of the ruling camp, who for added “cred” is the wife of an avowedly North-sympathetic intellectual. The couple is alleged to have used a house ostensibly built for aging sex-slavery survivors as a venue at which to harangue North Korean defectors into returning home. The lesson here is that not all nationalist causes are equal. There is a central one to which the whole anti-Japanese Themenkomplex is auxiliary.
The Minjoo Party must keep the myth of its democratic holiness shining not for immediate purposes, for which its huge majority in the National Assembly is sufficient, but because that myth — and the corollary localization of “accumulated evils” in the anti-North right — are vital for what it has planned. This shared objective is why, for the first time in history, Pyongyang now shrilly defends a sitting South Korean government against charges of corruption and abuse of power.
The other day on Youtube I watched Jeong Se-hyeon, Executive Vice-Chair of the National Unification Advisory Council and a well-known friend and mentor to the president, inform a group of approving educators in N. Jeolla Province that the planned inter-Korean league will be “like the European Union,” and should be pitched to schoolchildren accordingly.
Now, most Korea watchers are firm believers in what C.S. Lewis dryly called “the beneficence of commerce,” the amity-inducing effects of which on US-China and ROK-Japan relations are so well-known, to say nothing of the inter-Korean barter trade that continued from 1945 through the late 1950s, or the economic cooperation underway from 2002 to 2010, when only 57 South Koreans were killed by the North. I therefore expect the EU analogy, which is already standard here, to work a treat in Washington when the time comes. Approval may be enhanced by visions of the rich South playing the German Oberherr to the North’s Greece.
But first of all, the EU is nothing if not an alliance. (There has even been debate as to whether it’s a de facto military one.) Remember this the next time some Blue House envoy waffles on about the fine distinction between confederation and league, two concepts which seem very grandiose to Americans, thus equally unlikely to be realized. The undeniable fact of the matter is that our ally wants an alliance with our adversary. No, not after denuclearization but before it, to bring that goal about, or so it says. And an alliance is not difficult to get started. Nor must it start in the public eye.
Second, South Korea will carry its current subservience into the next stage, whatever that may be. Even foreigners who refuse to acknowledge the nationalism informing the relationship must at least admit that the South is the only state holding itself to inter-Korean agreements. If I may mention something that never gets enough attention: they’re only ROK-DPRK agreements after all. Like East Berlin before it, Pyongyang sees no problem in signing benign inter-state deals while pursuing the incompatible goal avowed by the ruling party, which is above the state.
Recently we saw yet another demonstration of the Koreas’ unequal relationship. Although the Kim regime must have ordered the shooting of a middle-aged South Korean who floated across the NLL, the incident resulted — after the Blue House’s undignifiedly brief show of disapproval — in renewed calls for an end-of-war agreement. The more flagrantly the North violates deals already signed, the more confidently the South asserts that a bigger one will tame it forever. Note also that President Moon wants a new constitution to bind his successors to these agreements, regardless of what the North does. The South’s subordination is to be enforced by the South itself.
Unlike me, most American observers seem to believe that the US-ROK alliance should be strengthened. Why aren’t they troubled by Seoul’s pursuit of a parallel or countervailing alliance with our nuclear enemy? Because the media are yet to declare this issue important, or even real.
Every morning and every evening the web of news is inescapably lowered upon earth, determining what has been and what one must be aware of. — Niklas Luhmann
And what has not been. Among Moon-critical Americans I encounter the chuckling assumption that the North “isn’t answering the South’s phone calls.” Whatever gave you that idea? I ask. “Because no railroad is being built, and neither the Kaesong Industrial Zone nor the Kumgang Resort has reopened.” In other words: because there hasn’t been enough televised hullabaloo to make inter-Korean dialogue a “thing” again.
It doesn’t help, I find, to remind people that the last time the two sides were thought to be not talking, they were hammering out details of the North’s participation in the 2018 Winter Olympics. Haven’t most inter-Korean dealings since 1945 taken place well outside the public eye? That includes the negotiations of joint declarations that were wrapped up before the stagy summits began. Why should this tradition change under the most tight-lipped president in ROK history, a man who reads even the shortest statements off a sheet of paper? He has a much greater incentive to keep inter-Korean dealings from Washington than Kim Dae Jung or Roh Moo Hyun had.
I refuse to moralize. Deception and secrecy are integral to politics and inter-state relations. And surely it’s as true of governments as of individual human beings that their real character comes out behind closed doors. Nowadays, however, the attribution of more importance to the covert than the overt will get you dismissed as a conspiracy theorist. Americans will look at you skeptically enough, I find, if you discuss overt peninsular developments that are yet to be mediatized in English. Our academics used to pride themselves on not letting the press set their agenda; now they join journalists in exchanging endless particulars about the latest or most imminent spectacle. Premium subscribers will enjoy access to a very special round-table on the military parade.
The advantages for Seoul and Pyongyang are obvious. As the Marxist theorist Guy Debord argued (to whom the title of this post is an homage), the chief function of the spectacle is to “bury historical memory.” And there’s a lot there to be buried, if the Americans are to revert to the Clinton-era mindset now required of them.
Perhaps the more important advantage is this, that the Koreas’ cooperation on the political-ideological front can unfold in plain sight and still escape Washington’s critical attention. The unflagging promotion of league-confederation, the two governments’ joint vilification of the ROK prosecutors’ office, the coalescence of pro-North groups in the US with the South Korea lobby: none of these historic developments is splashy enough to generate Western media interest. Until our journalists care, our experts will go on ignoring them too.
UPDATE: 3 December 2020
It’s so rare to see governments do any job well that the Blue House’s management of the foreign press corps gives me an almost aesthetic pleasure, especially now. I hope it isn’t just a matter of spoiling the relevant people rotten. A young German man did marvel to me once about how the Moon government had laid on a driver and translator for him, despite the relative obscurity of the news outlet he worked for, just so he could go to the countryside to research a story that reflected badly on an earlier administration. He also raved about the facilities set up in Seoul so that people like him did not have to work out of coffee shops. “There’s only one place they treat foreign journalists better,” he told me with a grin, “and that’s Pyongyang.”
But carrots are dealt out to the local press too, along with sticks or threats of sticks the foreigner needn’t worry about. Yet these days even left-of-center South Koreans are publicly criticizing the government’s frantic effort to shut down investigations into various scandals, particularly the nuclear-related one in regard to which there is apparent evidence of the president’s involvement. (The timing of the suspension of the Prosecutor General speaks for itself.)
To judge from recent articles, however, and I admit I couldn’t stomach more than five or six, the foreign press still thinks it’s 2017. I don’t believe they’re writing in conscious service to the Blue House à la Choe Sang-hun. So unguarded is their work as to indicate both a good-faith attempt at objectivity and genuine ignorance of the talk raging around them in the Press Center. This is where my aesthetic pleasure comes in. Anyone can keep someone in Pyongyang in the dark for a week or two, but in Seoul? For years on end?
Case in point: an article in the Economist (28 November) bearing the title, “South Korea’s president wants to take politics out of prosecutions.” Yes, and Mark Zuckerberg wants to take the surveillance capitalism out of social media. I’m not sure if all art is propaganda, as Orwell claimed, but I know presidents can do nothing of importance that is not eo ipso political. Whatever they do is going to reflect their beliefs, and benefit their side more than the other.
Journalists should not be blamed for what their headliners come up with, but the article is in much the same vein. “A central aim of Mr Moon’s reform of the prosecution service … was to put an end to such abuses [as those committed under previous administrations] by limiting prosecutors’ investigative powers.” So the regaling word reform is dished out and as it were endorsed in the writer’s own voice: Moon wants reform, wants to de-politicize prosecutions. I can only marvel at the mindset needed to write that after all that has gone on here — and not gone on here — since May 2017.
Thumb on scale, the (unidentified) writer then hides behind a string of “critics say” and “supporters say” sentences. The former group, which for months now has included left-of-center intellectuals and NGOs, is implicitly reduced to the right, some of whose members’ foul language and death threats the article leads off with. Perhaps the writer doesn’t know that many “supporters” deal in the same kind of verbal abuse, which sounds a lot more frightening when coming from the side in power. In the unlikely event that the writer should ever offend the ruling camp, as a South Korean working for Bloomberg did not long ago, he or she will find out.
The following is untrue and almost comically off the mark (as any politically minded journalist should have intuited even without the relevant language skills):
So far, not even his fiercest critics have accused the president of crimes that could match theirs [= those of Lee and Park].
My admiration for the official press liaison aside, articles like these make me nostalgic for the days when our correspondents used to cover South Korean developments, exercising personal judgment in the process, instead of pseudo-disinterestedly summarizing what they think is the local debate about developments. What do they do in countries where there is no debate? Ah, that’s right: they do what the AP’s “bureau” in Pyongyang does.
I refrained from posting this South Korean video last time, because it shows a kind of approving contempt for friendly foreign journalism that reminds me unpleasantly of North Korean writing on the subject, but perhaps it makes my point better than I can.
