Month: July 2024

Several years ago one of the big Washington think tanks hosted a forum at a hotel in Seoul. The audience consisted mostly of officials from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but I’d had been invited (by one of the co-sponsors, I think) along with about a dozen other foreigners.

The head of the think tank, an elderly American, got things rolling with a long and leisurely speech. In it he informed his elite South Korean listeners that their ancient nation had endured decades of Japanese colonial rule, only to be divided in two when it ended. Then a terrible war had broken out, leaving great destruction in its wake; and although the republic was rescued by its foreign friends, it languished in poverty for years, before going through one of the most remarkable economic transformations in world history… cars, semi-conductors, cellphones; Samsung and Hyundai,  household names… North Korea, meanwhile, famine, nuclear program… but together, an alliance forged in blood, the US and South Korea, etc, etc.

No doubt I’m misremembering some parts, but that was the gist. Having read more Juche texts than the average person I can lay claim to a high boredom threshold, but twenty minutes in I thought I was losing my mind. I’d come up from Busan for this? Yet the South Korean officials in my row, arms folded, eyes half-closed, were letting the speech wash over them with a kind of somnolent approval.

Later I asked a native how South Koreans could possibly look to such people, such institutions, for analysis of this part of the world. He answered that it wasn’t about analysis. It was about giving the Washingtonians face and stature here, in return for their opening doors for ROK officials over there.

True or not, that assertion came back to me the other day upon reading the allegations against Sue Mi Terry, a CFR member and former CIA agent who until a week ago was an even more common fixture at Beltway Korea events than Victor Cha. If the indictment is correct, Terry spent at least 10 years working for South Korea’s intelligence agency: taking requests for op-eds on particular topics, conveying information and documents acquired at meetings with top US officials, and letting into that exalted company the South Korean “wolf” (her choice of words) in diplomat’s clothing. All this without having registered as a foreign agent.

As I’ve said repeatedly on this blog, our foreign policy establishment (henceforth: FPE) generally leans softline on North Korea, while  accommodating a minority of hawks for hedging purposes. Hence the curious note of indulgence that has long characterized Beltway discussion of the dictatorship. While journalists and experts play up the autocratic power that Putin and Xi allegedly enjoy, the North Korea spin goes in the opposite direction: toward downplaying Kim Jong Un’s power, and pretending that this is an actual socialist party-state, with a second and third in command, following set procedures. A somber fuss is made about party conferences, as if we hadn’t learned after the Cold War how unimportant even the Soviet ones had been. It wasn’t long ago that a State Department official assured us in a well-received book that North Korea is a budding pluralist order, its Rodong Sinmun newspaper a lively forum for hawk-dove contention over foreign policy.

Ri Il-gyu, the latest defector from North Korea’s diplomatic corps, tried to set the record straight a few days ago by making clear that Kim’s giant fiefdom is hardly a state at all, but as Ian Robinson said, “it is the nature of fallacies to survive refutation.” Although the tone of our North Korea commentary has hardened since last year’s Putin-Kim summit, it will likely soften again next year. South Korean conservatives who think Trump is their only problem need to understand that Foggy Bottom was as furious with him after the Hanoi summit as the Blue House was.

So I’m not surprised that the first Korea watcher indicted for violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act wasn’t one of the activists in the diaspora “peace movement” who meet with North Korean operatives, or one of the dovish Americans whom the Kim Jong Il regime helped to a lucrative expert status through repeated invitations to special-access tours, but was instead a relative conservative or hardliner. Relative, because no principled conservative would have hosted, as Terry did, that Jeju conference at the Woodrow in 2022, which I suspect had been conceived during the Moon administration. But fear of a wider crackdown seems to have gripped the entire commentariat, judging from the refusal of doves and hawks alike to go on record about this case.

The indictment is interesting. I’m surprised that someone can be virtually forced out of the CIA for excessive coziness with foreign spies and still pass the security clearance needed to work in the White House. Did no one think to ask Terry why she’d left? Even then, ROK intelligence was known to be heavily infiltrated by people working for Pyongyang or Beijing. I also infer that no great urgency attaches to investigations like these, Terry having steadily become more prominent for years after the authorities had amassed quite significant evidence against her.

More nuggets: 1) some think-tank analysts get an unrestricted “gift” account which they can draw from at their discretion, 2) even foreign governments are aware of such accounts, 3) ROK intelligence, despite a famously huge budget, pays a paltry $500 for a bespoke op-ed, and 4) the idea for the Nuclear Consultative Group originated in Seoul and not Washington.

It’s only right that Uncle Sam should care deeply whether a Beltway Korea expert is consciously spreading propaganda on behalf of our FPE or on behalf of a foreign government. From an intellectual or academic standpoint, however, the distinction is trivial. No researcher taking cues from anyone else can be regarded as a disinterested source of information or analysis. This isn’t to say that we can’t derive benefit from such people’s work (which is usually very well funded) if we approach it critically, just as we can learn much of value even from North Korean texts. But nothing they say should be taken on trust.

Unfortunately the tankies aren’t the only ones “in the tank.” Remember that North Korean Studies as an academic field didn’t branch out organically from Korean Studies; it sprang straight out of the FPE, which funded, groomed and promoted our first “academic ward boss.” Not for nothing do invitations to Washington events carry a special cachet for North Korea scholars, including non-American ones. Make that: especially non-American ones. Stature in our field has always derived more from such badges of power-elite approval or patronage than from original insight or research.

Which is why our second “academic ward boss” continued to appear at university and think-tank events for 3 years after being exposed as the most prolific fabricator of sources in US academic history. Only when the FPE university par excellence announced it was forcing him into retirement did the Beltway and academia simultaneously cut him loose. (Terry studied at Columbia’s Weatherhead Institute during Armstrong’s time there.) Although the NYT and Wapo show great interest in academic scandals, they kept deathly quiet about that one, which might otherwise have undermined public faith in the foreign-policy expertocracy.

“Treating former intelligence officers as disinterested sources of news is highly problematic,” as Stephen Marmura has written. Problematic for us, certainly, not least because we know how little weight attaches to former in that context. But the FPE, wanting to keep this discussion “in house” so as to guard against heterodox expression, wants us all to accept a record of CIA, State or NSC service as the mark of a supremely authoritative Korea analyst.

By far the worse problem is that the commentariat’s academic wing, the wing with the better language skills, meekly accepts this hierarchy. When Harvard University hosted a Korean security “summit” in 2022, did it call on any of the young and promising American scholars in the field, of whom even I could name a dozen?

Of course not. It called on Sue Mi Terry.

 

UPDATE: Greenwald on Terry: 28 July 2024:

If you have time, listen to Glenn Greenwald’s podcast about Terry and her husband, Wapo journalist Max Boot. Among other things, it highlights the couple’s recent criticism of Trump’s “obsession” with reducing the cost of stationing US troops in South Korea. Greenwald:

Just to be clear, Trump’s point of view is that South Korea is a booming, thriving economy, and their citizens have a higher standard of living than millions of Americans, and so Trump’s argument is, “Why are we paying to protect you, when you’re not contributing economically at all, and we’re paying for everything,” and he forced them to increase the amount of subsidies like he’s trying to do with NATO, and Max Boot and his spy-wife, his ex-CIA wife…[are] here to say that Trump is evil for even pressuring the South Korean government to do anything.

I’d never heard of Boot before this business, but apparently he was in the vanguard of the Russiagate rumormongers later refuted by the Durham Report. Greenwald makes no secret of his dislike for the fellow, and I think it gets the better of him here. South Korea had hardly been paying nothing, and nowhere in the piece is the former president called evil.

Perhaps more importantly: our very own FPE always opposed Trump on the point in question. Anything smacking of a desire to cut military spending is anathema to those people, because anathema to the capital class they answer to. Throughout Trump’s term, our media and think tanks used the troop-costs issue to misrepresent him, as I noted critically at the time, “as a wanton sower of disunity in the alliance,” with nary a word about Moon’s pursuit of a North-South confederation. (Here, for example, is a Wapo article of Anna Fifield’s  from 2017.)

So Boot and Terry might well have written an op-ed in much the same vein even without prompting from the NIS. But there can be little doubt that South Korean inducements have done much to keep the relevant Beltway consensus firm over the years. (Even conservatives here have had to acknowledge that the Moon government’s lobbying blitz in Washington helped save South Korea billions of dollars.)

Enforcement of FARA won’t do a whole lot for the quality of our Korea reporting and analysis, then, but it’s  a start. I tip my hat to Glenn Greenwald for making clear that the indictment isn’t the puzzling overreaction to “small potatoes” that other news outlets have been presenting it as.

[Below is the text of a presentation I gave at Seoul City Hall on 11 July at the Seoul Forum on North Korean Human Rights 2024. The first session was moderated by Lee Shin-wha, Ambassador for International Cooperation on North Korean Human Rights (ROK). My turn came after presentations by Julie Turner, Special Envoy on North Korean Human Rights (USA); Elizabeth Salmón, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (UN); and James Heenan, head of the OHCHR Seoul Office (UN). Determined to pack 15 minutes of content into 10 minutes, I outraced the interpreter early on, only to find out this morning that both video recordings uploaded to Youtube have the occasionally divergent voiceover built in. The highlight of the event for me was talking afterward with very interesting young people from around the world — including North Korea — and I thank them again for coming up to introduce themselves.]

I’d like to start by thanking the other panelists, and everybody here today who gathers data on these rights abuses, because it helps all of us in North Korean Studies to understand the country better. I teach a course on human rights, to which I invite former North Koreans to speak — although there aren’t very many in Busan — so I’m more a follower of this discussion, and see my role today in humbly suggesting a few ways to popularize it. Now that China and Russia aren’t cooperating with resolutions related to North Korea, I think really the only way we can pressure Kim Jong Un to carry out reforms is to keep up a high and steady level of popular concern, such as was brought to bear on apartheid South Africa when I was a high school student there.

I think there’s hope here, because if you’ve seen the fuss KCNA makes about foreign praise, you know the regime isn’t indifferent to its reputation. One challenge we face is that Western people are increasingly concerned with rights problems closer to home. When I was at university in the 1980s, we all knew the names of Mandela and Sakharov — I knew the name of Kim Dae Jung — but the best known dissident of the past 5 years has been Julian Assange. And everyone’s grown wary of orchestrated bashing of pariah states, because it often heralds military intervention that makes things worse. So complaints about North Korea, I find, are starting to meet with indifference or skepticism. It hasn’t helped that a few defectors have been caught out in biographical inconsistencies, let’s say.

I want to say here what I say to skeptics when I encounter them. I’ve been to North Korea a few times, so I’ve seen what the regime likes to show us, but I’ve also spoken to enough migrants, most of whom hate publicity, to know that all too much of the bad news is true. Taking it seriously doesn’t mean we have to overlook our own governments’ rights abuses. When America condemns Kim Jong Un for surveilling his citizens, I think we Americans should point out that our government surveils us a lot more thoroughly; Kim just doesn’t have the power supply, for one thing. And most developed countries are moving toward more censorship and compelled speech. If this trend continues, the Kim regime’s counter-accusations of hypocrisy will only grow more persuasive.

But although the difference between democracy and dictatorship has become one of degree and not kind, that degree remains too great for moral equivalencies. Every North Korean dissident would find our punishments for saying the wrong thing preferable to the kind meted out in Yodeok, and we owe it to the inmates of those prison camps to keep a sense of perspective. Besides, renewing our horror of totalitarianism, which we felt so much more strongly during the Cold War, may strengthen resistance to the attrition of our own freedoms. South Koreans often respond to assaults on free speech by asking, “Is this North Korea?” I wish more Americans had that attitude.

I have a few reservations about linking rights abuses to the nuclear program, because so far, this linkage has made our side lose interest in the abuses whenever prospects for a nuclear settlement improve. Jimmy Carter came back from Pyongyang 30 years ago looking very impressed with Kim Il Sung, and the famine was then dignified in Western media as an excess of self-reliance, as no African famine has ever been. Only when the Geneva deal fell apart did we make the prison camps a priority. Not long thereafter an American president “fell in love” with Kim Jong Un, and the media establishment in the West cheered a South Korean president’s peace offensive that was equally blind to human rights. We’re now back to angry condemnation of Pyongyang, but everyone knows this has more to do with the Kim-Putin alliance than with changes inside North Korea.

I worry also that if we link prison camps and missiles, so to speak, we’ll only raise suspicion in Pyongyang that we’re highlighting the more emotive issue just to get the world behind our disarmament push. And let’s remember, it was during a supposed break in the nuclear program that the regime’s worst crime against humanity took the lives of almost a million people.

This brings me to the escapee issue. These days talk of the grim punishment awaiting repatriated escapees is often contradicted in the same breath by reference to how so-and-so just saved up enough money for a second escape. The sum needed just before the pandemic – if my sources are correct — was over $5000, and let’s face it, that’s more than the average American has in the bank, so I worry that if we continue to present these people as representative, we’ll be creating confusion about what living standards in North Korea are really like. I’m not downplaying the ordeals that they all go through, especially the women who are trafficked across the river, but it’s time, I believe, that we concentrated on the great mass of people inside North Korea.

That goes also for the issue of North Korean workers in China and Russia. If you spread the blame between three regimes, Kim gets off lightly. Just how bad are conditions at home, that people compete to get treated like slaves in foreign countries? I think that’s what we should focus on.

I agree that UN monitoring and cataloging must be comprehensive, but mass communication should strategically emphasize some abuses more than others. Our criticism must challenge Kim’s socialist pretensions, because unlike our leaders he has no liberal-democratic ones, and it must bear the potential to resonate – or from Kim’s standpoint, the danger of resonating — with average North Koreans, as our advocacy on behalf of nuclear scientists or escapees or abducted Japanese doesn’t. It must also speak to the South Korean public, right and left, because only in that way can we ensure the South Korean government maintains consistency in regard to the rights problem up there.

As the scholar Eric Posner explained years ago, people disagree on human rights, but agree on the need for basic welfare. I find that my international students, having grown up in depluralizing times, are less appalled by the lack of political freedoms in the North than by videos of women carrying buckets of river water up an icy flight of steps because they have no access to running water. That kind of thing hits home. Just two months ago a migrant said to my class, she’d like to make all South Koreans spend just one day up there as average people do. What she meant was: get up at dawn to sweep the street, then work 16 hours in a factory, to midnight or one a.m., and when you look out the factory window at night, you see your kids sleeping on the ground outside the gate, so they can walk you safely home through unlit streets after you finish. If you don’t ask “leading” questions, that’s the kind of thing migrants talk about. They complain about the self-criticism sessions, but I find they do so mainly because these were additional deprivations of rest and family time.

This hardship predates the nukes by decades. Kim Il Sung told his East German counterpart that high living standards make people lazy. Kim Jong Il put almost a billion dollars into monuments and luxury cars during the famine. The more food aid we gave, the less money he put into agriculture; that says it all. And we all remember how the North blocked South Korean efforts to pay North Korean workers directly at the Kaesong Industrial Zone. So let no one blame sanctions for the violations of labor rights.

The good news is that the regime has a bad conscience, though “conscience” may be saying too much; I prefer the Korean expression “찔리는 게 있다.” At the turn of the millennium it began promising prosperity, symbolized by meat and eggs.

Then in 2008 Kim Jong Il rashly promised that this Golden Age would begin in 2012, but as the year drew closer meat and eggs disappeared from the posters.

I’m vegan so I prefer the second poster, but most North Koreans aren’t. Kim Jong-un came to power saying belts could be loosened, but a lot of that propaganda was and still is aimed outward, like the Youtube videos of girls in Pyongyang that I think we’ve all seen. There are other signs that Kim wants to keep up socialist appearances. We’ve seen a revival of the term communism, more simulations of party procedure, and the pretended abandonment of pan-Korean nationalism.

This is why I think a “welfarist” focus will discomfit Kim more than our traditional emphasis on prison camps and migrants. It won’t get as emotional a response from some people as those issues do, but it may speak to a broader, more politically ecumenical audience. If we stress that labor exploitation results directly from one rapacious family’s ownership of the state — a fact we seem reluctant to stress, for some reason — Kim may grow worried enough about losing the residual goodwill of a big part of South Korean public opinion, and may become nervous enough about domestic unrest to ameliorate the worst violations of labor rights. Remember that some North Korean workers rioted recently in China. Other factors may add to the pressure. Kim cannot keep diverting the poor with missile launches, the wealth gap is widening, K-culture keeps coming in, and another hereditary succession needs to be put over on the public.

To sum up, it’s not the 1990s anymore, and this discussion needs to change accordingly, but as the gentleman on my right keeps reminding us, human rights is a long-term project, and I’m optimistic about the prospects for gradual improvement. Thank you all very much.

 

UPDATE: Orwell vs Buchheim: 13 August 2024:

Last month I invited a former North Korean to address the foreign students at my summer course in Busan. I told her what I’d said at the forum in Seoul a week earlier: that Uncle Sam surveils his citizens more thoroughly than Kim Jong Un does. Her face clouded; she was having none of it. “In North Korea, sitting in your house is like sitting outside.” She proceeded to explain how the party-appointed neighborhood snoop would barge into her home after midnight, flashlight in hand — her town had no electricity at night — and sometimes with a policeman in tow. What for? To count the number of occupants, or to ransack the place in another search for USB drives.

I let my guest carry the point. She was near tears at how much of her life had been lived that way, and where there’s sorrow there’s holy ground, as Wilde said. It felt — and still feels — wrong for me to insist on the greater thoroughness of surveillance in our societies, when the humiliation and fear that accompany violations of privacy are so much worse up there, to say nothing of the punishments for deviance. It seems no better to note that although the North Koreans are supposedly the world’s most misinformed people, they at least know who’s running their country. I’d rather remain ignorant about who’s running mine, and not get shouted out of bed at sunrise for “voluntary” street work.

Yet as a North Korea scholar I feel a duty to make clear that our system’s superiority to theirs isn’t what it used to be.

Case in point: The other day I read in the newspaper about how we must all accept as female a very male-looking boxer with a Y chromosome. So far, so 2024. What got my attention was the reason given: It says “female” in the boxer’s passport. A government had spoken, and that was that. It wasn’t even our sort of government.

In a flash I saw a remarkably simple solution to Kim Jong Un’s apparent lack of a male heir. Our journalists would certainly play along. Here’s the thing though: Because that regime is yet to launch an assault on common sense itself, there are limits to what it tries to put over on its people.

In North Korea as in Nazi Germany, one swears loyalty to the leader, not to a theorized worldview with a claim to absolute truth. Even cadres seem at a loss to quote from Juche Thought, a grab-bag of truisms for export use. It’s in our societies today — as in Stalin’s USSR — where any field with objective standards is thought suspect, and the dominant ideology trumps even scientific research. Which may be why North Koreans who have recently abandoned their Leader and escaped the country seem much freer of prejudices and taboos than Western people.

This raises the question of which system is more totalitarian. I’m pretty sure that Orwell, who associated such rule with boots in faces, gross economic inefficiency, and the smell of cabbage in hallways, would pick North Korea if he were alive today. But his view of totalitarianism was too obviously colored by the Soviet variant, just as Hannah Arendt’s was by the German one.

Hans Buchheim’s Totalitarian Rule (Totalitäre Herrschaft, 1962) is in some ways more perceptive. Naturally it’s out of print.

People under totalitarian rule are always on duty, always straining. They are no longer allowed to show themselves for who they really are, but must constantly play prescribed roles in an atmosphere of false pathos….  But the worst thing is that concepts, words and values are robbed of their accustomed validity, and moral standards become confused…. Therefore, although totalitarian rule also includes dictatorial governance, naked violence and the deprivation of freedom, its real characteristic is a creeping rape of the human being through the perversion of thought and social life. (13-14.)

That last sentence is key. Yes, North Korea is much worse when it comes to “dictatorial governance, naked violence and the deprivation of freedom.” For violence read torture, and I don’t want to rush past that; nothing (as Orwell reminds us in 1984) is as bad as physical pain. But those three things are common to authoritarian systems too.

On the other hand, the extent of “perversion of thought and social life” is greater in our societies, because having been nurtured in a pluralist, liberal tradition (such as never existed in the northern half of the Korean peninsula), we have much more that must now be driven out of us, perverted from us. When, in 2020, New Zealand’s prime minister publicly declared her government “your single source of truth,” and this in regard to scientific matters, the violation of accustomed values was much greater than it would have been had Kim Jong Un said it.

I suspect he would have rejected that formulation as too crude, too brazen. This is what surprises me most: our propaganda is losing even its subtlety advantage over the North’s.