“We would like to restore ethnic homogeneity by progressively making available North Korea’s press, publications, broadcasting and other means of communication and thereby expanding mutual understanding and common ground,” [Unification Minister] Kwon Young-se reportedly said in a briefing on the ministry’s future plans. (Kyung-Sin Park, NK News, 26 August 2022.)
The above will surprise nobody who’s been following my blog for the past year. On the contrary, you may well feel the “euphoria” at seeing a prophecy fulfilled that Moon Jae-in says he felt when South Vietnam fell to the Vietcong.
But if you rely on other foreign sources of Korea news, which did their usual election-season shtick of warning that a conservative president would turn the clock back to the Cold War, you’re likely wondering what’s going on. Now, we at Sthele Press demand no fees from readers, nor even registration, but if we’d misread developments that grossly, perhaps to the undoing of a stock portfolio or two, our snake-haired editor wouldn’t leave readers to figure out the blunder we’d made. No, she’d make us address it in a contrite new post, explaining what kind of government this has turned out to be, and why.
Such articles must be lurking behind all the paywalls I can’t get past, because I see nothing of the sort in what I can read for free, least of all in coverage of the above statement. For example, the gist of NK News articles by Jeongmin Kim, Kyung-Sin Park, and Andrei Lankov, which range from the merely uncritical to the enthusiastically supportive, can be synthesized as follows: the danger posed to the South by the Kim regime’s unappealing propaganda has been vastly overestimated, so it’s high time the restrictions on it were lifted. Good idea, Yoon government; don’t let the McCarthyists talk you out of it.
If few will pay attention to North Korean propaganda anyway, why does an ostensibly conservative administration want to out-Moon Moon in this fashion now, when the public wants a hundred other things addressed first? Western readers aren’t to wonder about such matters; they’re to infer that Yoon & Co. just want to improve inter-Korean relations and make the South a true liberal democracy.
I see more to the story than that. Let me start by repeating that the personality cult isn’t half as absurd as it’s made out to be. Spare me the bit about Kim Jong Il’s eighteen holes-in-one, and all the other tales foreigners laugh at, yet provide no primary sources for. “They say Kim Il Sung could move through mountains, be in two places at once…” No; the cult twinklingly relates how his guerrilla victories made peasants believe he could. There’s a difference.
The central myth, as I wrote in The Cleanest Race (2010): The Korean people are too pure-blooded, and therefore too virtuous, to survive in this evil world without a great parental leader — the leader they’ve been blessed with.
Debatable, sure. So obviously nutty that only a few South Korean kooks would swallow it? I can think of weirder things that half the world believes, but let’s stay on point: when I was in Seoul in the mid-1980s, the best and brightest college students fell en masse for the North’s official culture. Ancient history? Try finding even one member of the largest contingent in the National Assembly who has publicly renounced his or her youthful radicalism. Or travel to A Certain Region (as it’s tactfully called in negative contexts) and strike up some conversations.
Or open a South Korean history textbook, and see that while it talks of “Dictator Park Chung Hee” and “Dictator Syngman Rhee,” it never neglects to put “Chairman” before any of the Paektu Kims; see that Kim Il Sung’s raid on a Japanese border outpost (1937) gets more space than the Battle of Midway. The North’s line is already much closer to the one taught in ROK schools than the latter is to the conservative line.
Have you ever met a dumb North Korean? I haven’t. Yet NK News seems to believe that legalization of their propaganda would result in no great refinement or improvement of the thing itself. I’m sure Thae Yong-ho knows better, having long dished out legal propaganda to Londoners. And Uriminzokkiri is already much slicker than those who’ve never read it assume.
It’s interesting how Thae, Kwon, and the rest of the ruling party appear much more bothered by restrictions on North Korean propaganda than by the memory laws recently imposed by the nationalist left. In fact, President Yoon wants to go the Minjoo Party one better by enshrining the “spirit of the Gwangju Democratization Movement” in the preamble to the constitution.
[Let me haul you between brackets for greater privacy, as Flann O’Brien used to do. I feel about the above term the way I’d feel if someone were to talk of the Watts Civil Rights Movement of August 1965. First, the word movement or undong is normally used in political discussion for causes of longer duration than a week or two. Second, the formulation Gwangju Democratization Movement implies a local cause ideologically distinct from the one struggled for on the national level. Yet you must never speak of a Kim Dae Jung Movement aimed at outdoing the Kim Young Sam Movement of October 1979. Third, it implies a unity attributable to no violent protests in history. However thoroughly provoked or mistreated protesters may be, there’ll always be disagreement between supporters and opponents of violent retaliation, and boy was it pronounced in the city in question. But if you now apply to May 1980 Badiou’s insights (“a riot cannot really purify itself,” etc), or Manzoni’s brilliant description of bread riots in The Betrothed (1827), which makes the same points in better prose, literature anticipating social science as always; or if you so much as talk of riots having taken place in Gwangju, you can get in serious legal trouble here. Which is fine by the PPP. It has no apparent problem with the restrictions on Japanese pop culture either — are they not outdated?]
The upshot is that while South Koreans should be free to access North Korean propaganda, they should not be free to disparage, or read the disparagement of, historical events or icons revered by the nationalist left. Is this because right-wing talk is less obviously foolish, therefore more likely to mislead people? What, the closer something is to the truth, the greater the need to ban it?
No; the reasoning (which informed a March First speech of Moon Jae-in’s) is that while the relatively minor ideological differences separating the North from enlightened South Koreans can and indeed must be lived with for the sake of ethnic harmony, the divisive, peace-endangering polemics of the old-school right cannot.
If I seem to be overstating the case, note that the Unification Ministry — presuming local press coverage is correct — doesn’t just want to lift restrictions, but to make the North’s broadcasts available, to open up (kaebang) the ROK to them. To prove to Kim Jong Un the superiority of liberal democracy, as Thae — with one eye on Washington — says is the goal? No; to “restore ethnic homogeneity” and “expand mutual understanding and common ground.” Pure Moonspeak. Considering the technological problems that would complicate any such kaebang, it’s hardly unreasonable for critics to assume that the government wants to play an active role in making those broadcasts widely accessible. Or that taxpayers would effectively start paying Kim for them as soon as Uncle Sam permits.
As I see it, this story must be grasped in the context of three things: 1) the Yoon government’s effort to divide the opposition’s Moon faction from the Lee loyalists, 2) its desire to lure the North Koreans back to talks, and 3) the depoliticization process aimed at creating a naegakche or parliamentary system. You know what the step after that would be.
I understand the conditions every foreigner here must write under. There are many things I too refrain from writing about. But if we aren’t going to delve any deeper than the Korea Herald, there seems little point in discussing local politics at all.
UPDATE: 13 October 2022:
Sure enough. This is from the Korea Times of 11 October:
An official told The Korea Times Tuesday that the Ministry of Unification has been stepping up its efforts over the past three months to give the public access to North Korean television and, in the long run, other media outlets such as Rodong Sinmun….
During a parliamentary audit session, Friday, Unification Minister Kwon Young-se said that the first phase of the plan is to enable ordinary South Koreans to watch content from North Korean broadcasters, such as the Korean Central News Agency, in their living rooms if they choose to….
The ministry hopes that such efforts will help the isolated North gradually open up to the outside world.
If that hope is sincere, the ministry wins this year’s Luise Rinser Award for North Korea Naivety.
