Relax, Afghanistan is nothing like South Korea — or so the media have been telling everyone here over the past few weeks. An esteemed Dongseo colleague from the neighboring office just wrote an article for the Korea Times in this vein. Me, I have a hard time overlooking one parallel in particular. I’m generalizing of course, but not overmuch, when I say that in the one country our troops defended moderate Muslims from fundamentalists, and in the other they defend moderate nationalists from fundamentalists.
By moderateness in each case I mean not a principled, liberal-democratic opposition to the fundamentalism in question, but rather an untheorized, unreflecting preference for life under a less rigorous dispensation. America’s ally and its adversary thus form one ideological community in which real hostility is felt only by the fundamentalists toward the moderates, who in return feel a sneaking admiration for their antagonists’ superior resolve and purity.
(Granted, it’s much less sneaking in the South Korean case; North Korean soldiers and spies have been glamorized in hit movies and serial dramas for twenty years, and especially frequently since 2017.)
Is fundamentalist aggression lamented, bewailed, disapproved of? Certainly. But the indignation is missing — that concerted, angry sense of offended constitutional values which alone indicates a state ready to defend itself unaided. Such are the unwinnable conflicts America likes to send its young people into.
Not only America of course. In a Guardian article the other day a former British soldier recalled
the simplistic assumption that everyone in Afghanistan could fall into two categories, enlightened liberal reformers who would welcome a western presence, and conservative folk susceptible to the Taliban. Needless to say, things were more complicated than that….
One morning, an interpreter who had worked with the British for decades sidled up to me at breakfast and pointed at a young Afghan woman who also worked as an interpreter. In a voice loud enough for her to hear everything, he declared her a “filthy whore”. His reason? She was wearing a pair of jeans and a bright pink headscarf.
I just hope the dear man got on a rescue flight out, don’t you?
That anecdote reminded me of Kim Seong-chil’s brief diary of life in wartime Seoul under North Korean rule. Like most South Koreans then as now, the young and married academic belonged to no political camp in particular. This makes his record all the more fascinating and (I believe) representative.
Between late June and mid-September 1950, Kim went from joy at the sight of the conquering North Korean troops to a desperate hope — as the US Army drew nearer — that they would be driven back out of Seoul. But here’s the thing: Even while yearning for an American victory, he recorded his great pride at how many US soldiers the North Koreans were killing.
Clearly the ostensibly anti-Taliban mainstream in Afghanistan thought along similarly blurred lines; the rapidity of its capitulation speaks for itself. I dare say that the majority of foreigners on whose behalf so many young Americans have fought and died since 1950 — majority does not mean entirety — have been people like Kim Seong-chil and that Afghani interpreter.
In my experience, our young soldiers are more clear-eyed about this than their superiors. When I lecture on North Korean ideology to military audiences here, it’s usually the enlisted who say, “But this sounds a lot like how South Koreans see things.” The top officers on the other hand trust, or pretend to trust, the line put out by the host government at grip-and-grin events. (So I’m less surprised than Lawrence Peck at the news that Christine Ahn, formerly of the North Korea lobby, now of the North-South Korea lobby, has been invited to address the US Indo-Pacific Command.)
Our commentariat is no more inclined to question South Korea’s commitment to liberal democracy than our government is. Not even the ruling party’s attempt in 2018 to alter constitutional mention of “liberal democracy” to “democracy” has deterred our experts and journalists from talking of the liberals in power here. (That attempt failed, by the way; not so the attempt to make the same alteration to history textbooks.)
The refusal to face facts is such that a recent article in the Diplomat on South Korea’s Media Punishment / Muzzling Law (as the new version of the Press Arbitration Act is informally called) bears the self-contradictory subtitle:
South Korea may be the only liberal democracy using a “fake news” law to target large traditional media companies.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m pleasantly surprised when the Western press covers things like this at all. Certainly the writer James Constant, a former editor at the Joongang Daily, offers a solid introduction to the law in question. The whole tone of his article, entitled “The Trouble With South Korea’s ‘Fake News’ Law,” is one of concern and disapproval.
Unfortunately, Constant forbears to mention a very relevant fact: that Moon Jae-in and his party were themselves helped into power by an unprecedented tsunami of fake news. There would have been no “candlelight revolution” in 2016 had it not been for the groundless media assertions that — where to begin? — Park Geun-hye belonged to a bizarre religious cult; was addicted to plastic surgery and drugs; had entrusted her secret love-child to a billionaire gal-pal, who in return was shaping foreign policy; that when a ship carrying hundreds of schoolchildren sank off the coast in 2014 — sank either because Park had ordered its sinking, or because an American submarine had hit it — she was cavorting with a secret lover in the Blue House, the Viagra budget of which…. but you get the idea.
There has been no shortage of fake news from the ruling camp since 2017 either, with TBS radio’s News Factory (sic!) leading the way. Let me mention here only a) the allegations about the wife of the leading conservative contender for the presidency, and b) accusations of sinister ties between the prosecutors’ office and a conservative cable channel. This doesn’t get mentioned in the Diplomat either. Nor does the massive astro-turfing generation of fake internet comments and “likes” that one of Moon’s right-hand men is now in prison for his role in.
Instead we get:
Conservative papers’ articles make up the bulk of content on portal site Naver, where most Koreans get their news. Only 32 percent of South Koreans trust the media…. It’s tempting to link conservative dominance of the press to this low trust, as the Democratic Party is doing.
No qualifying or contradictory statement follows. It’s tempting, and we too should be tempted.
First of all: Conservative dominance? What, no mention of the government’s union-enforced grip on the main television and radio broadcasters? I just looked at Naver’s political news section, by the way, and it bears no relation to the above assertion.
As the supposedly corroborative South Korean article linked to by the Diplomat makes clear, the reason two conservative newspapers enjoy a tiny combined edge in the top four sources to which Naver news users are exposed (21% versus 20.4%) — presuming they still have that edge now, which I doubt — is because they churn out a greater number of daily articles. Many of these are about celebrities, not politics. (The Chosun Ilbo leads an increasingly schizophrenic existence, with the click-baiting side of it in frequent conflict with the print version — as was seen recently when the newspaper argued ludicrously with itself over a female Olympic archer’s short haircut.)
The gist of the Diplomat article seems to be: These South Korean liberals face a real conservative threat to truth and objectivity in media, and mean well in trying to combat it, but alas, they fail to see where things could lead:
This year’s “fake news” bill could redefine the future of the press in South Korea in ways that both opponents and proponents would find hard to predict…. By taking this step to correct what they see as a hopelessly biased media landscape, the Democratic Party could be setting the stage for a severely weakened press.
If any ruling party in the West were to introduce such a bill, would we be hearing that the effect of it was “hard to predict,” or that it “could be setting the stage” for a weakened press? Would the relative popularity of three opposition-minded newspapers be taken at the ruling party’s assessment as top-down dominance the public doesn’t want — and as the main cause of fake news? And all this without a single example of fake news?
The Media Muzzling Law isn’t a Korean quirk unique among the world’s liberal-democratic states. It’s the manifestation of a commitment to a very different sort of political system, all impediments to which (“accumulated ills,” in official invective) are being purged or at least neutralized, one after the other.
Let’s not act like we don’t know what constitutes “fake news” for these people. Just last year it was helpfully defined by a raft of pro-government academics as anything that undermines the peace process or destabilizes the North. The notion that all this is about protecting official corruption from scrutiny is therefore too cynical and too charitable at the same time. The ruling camp must be left alone, however it chooses to reward itself on the side, so it can carry out “the people’s will” or minshim.
The Minjoo Party’s readiness to pass such a law six months before the presidential election, despite the sword’s potential to be turned against it, should in itself give outsiders pause. It reflects great confidence that neither the prosecutors’ office nor the higher courts are going to be giving the construction of a “peace system” much trouble down the road.
Nor does the ruling camp yet see much reason to worry about the conservative party, whose chairman has publicly expressed a reluctance to criticize President Moon. For in this great nationalist community, which knows gradations but no insuperable, unnegotiable divides, the right’s approach to the left is a lot like the left’s approach to the North. But katchi kapshida and all that.
UPDATE: 8 September 2021: Youtube journalists arrested
South Korea has become a country where someone accused of defamation by another citizen, even by a third party, can expect to have several policemen turn up at his door – provided the alleged libel was of someone in or close to the government. I always thought it was naive of the Youtube journalists arrested yesterday to think that the News Factory business model of tossing out new aspersions and insinuations every week could work for opposition media too. Or that they could emulate the other side’s custom of ignoring requests to come down to the station for questioning. It was only last December that one of them was hauled away from his apartment, mid-breakfast, because months earlier he had falsely identified a man shaking hands with President Moon in a photograph as cult leader Yi Man-hee. That he had already publicly apologized for the error was thought beside the point.
The video of one of the arrests yesterday is thumbnailed with the word “Shock!” As an American I’m equally shocked at the idea of simply refusing to open up when the police come knocking, as Kim Se-eui did. He’s lucky that door is still usable.
UPDATE: 9 September 2021:
I see the video posted by the offending Youtube channel has been taken down from Youtube by court order, so here is the YTN report of the arrests:
