Author: ahasuerus

The other day I finally watched the video of a Hankyoreh-sponsored symposium on Jeju 1948 that took place at the Woodrow Wilson Center last December. Evidently most of the audience — and much of the panel — consisted of members of victims’ families and the 4.3 Peace Foundation, that litigious stifler of efforts to historicize the conflict. The discussion proceeded accordingly, sans nuance and complexity, sans dissent.

The absence of junior Koreanists came as no surprise to me. Beltway event planners have “high uncertainty avoidance,” and there’s no telling what young people will blurt out. Better to have on the panel a former CIA official, a former State Department official, an ex-ambassador, and a Wilson Center deputy director who know how to behave. Showing lateral mobility in the other direction is a professor sounding every bit the diplomat.

“There’s no evidence, that I’ve ever seen,” Charles Kraus (WWC) says smilingly, “that North Korea had really anything to do with the Jeju uprising, although the South Korean Workers Party would have been favorable to North Korea’s political positions.”

The symposium, jovial and po-faced in turns, was more of a lobbying or PR affair than a factual discussion, but I can’t let that statement stand — except as the speaker’s confession to having read very little on the subject.

The SKWP was a mass version of the Seoul-based Korean Communist Party, which had already infiltrated the leftist parties with which it merged, on Stalin’s orders, in 1946. The leader of the communist movement, thus of the SKWP, was Pak Heon-yeong, who fled that year to Pyongyang, where he guided party activities through an ostensible chairman in Seoul. Like the KCP before it, the SKWP had an underground organization and received Soviet funds. Meanwhile a purportedly moderate-left party was taking guidance and funds from Pak’s rival Kim Il Sung, but that’s another story. Suffice to observe that virtually the entire left of the southern spectrum was facing the nascent system in Pyongyang, which had its channels even into the opportunistic moderate right.

The North didn’t just try to take credit for southern uprisings post facto, as Kraus would have us believe; it encouraged and supported them while they were underway. We know from East Bloc archives in the Wilson Center, as well as from SKWP veteran testimony, that Kim and Pak sent weapons and commandoes southward.

If the party’s Jeju branch had nothing to do with North Korea, despite being (weasel words) “favorable to its positions,” the obvious question is, why? And how then to understand the merger of the SKWP and NKWP into the KWP as the Jeju conflict raged on? There have been half-hearted efforts here to claim that the island rebels were ideologically distinct from the rest of the party, but they would have hardly thought to go it alone against a superpower-backed force from the mainland.

Then again the whole overarching myth of an anti-Rhee yet North-aloof, politically committed yet leaderless working class is implausible in the extreme. Believing it requires ignorance not only of accessible sources, but of human nature. It goes something like this:

The southern masses of the late 1940s yearned only for democracy, human rights, and a unified homeland free of foreign meddling. Although they opposed Rhee, and wanted all-peninsular elections, they supported no alternative figure. It would be “red complex” slander to suggest that they looked up to the handsome young veteran of the anti-Japanese resistance who was then calling for autonomy and social justice. He was in the other Korea you see, and as much as southerners rejected the division of the ancient nation, rules were rules….

I’ll take North Korea’s version of events over that. It’s closer to the truth to say hyperbolically that every southern laborer and peasant loved Kim than to deny the popular support he enjoyed from Seoul down to — yes — Jeju.

The professor and historian Hyeon Kir-eon (1940-2020) wrote often and movingly about his childhood on the island during the unrest, when his family, like so many others, was harassed by both sides. The following is a vivid account of a raid on his house by Rhee forces. (Hyeon omits the given name of the man the police were seeking.)

“Jeong ___, get out here!”

…. My father jumped to his feet and ran pell-mell out the back door. Beyond the back fence was a pine grove.

“He’s running!”

From the direction of the back fence came shouts and whistles, then the bang-bang of a gun. My mother closed her eyes as she hugged my baby sister tightly. Then the door opened and a policeman aimed his gun at my mother.

“Where’s he run to?”

My mother pointed at the back door. Just then a cry of “We got him!” arose from the back yard. The policeman lowered his gun and withdrew. My mother went out onto the wooden porch and I followed…. In the center of the yard my father was kneeling down in his last pair of underwear. My mother went back inside and came out with his clothes. As he stood up to put them on, blood flowed down one leg. I was afraid he had been shot.

One of the police who seemed to be in charge urged him,  “Where is Jeong ____?”

“I don’t know.”

“We heard he came here.”

Father repeated that he didn’t know. The man in charge upbraided him saying …. he wouldn’t have run if he’d had nothing to hide.

“Our son has done nothing wrong,” my grandfather pleaded, “search the whole house.” The police tramped around in their shoes, turning the house upside-down.

“When did you meet him?”

Father said he hadn’t heard from [Jeong] for the past few months. While he spoke, my mother tied a cotton cloth around his right shin. The policeman had struck him with a rifle barrel when apprehending him.

“You’re Workers’ Party too, aren’t you,” the man in charge prodded.

“No, sir. As head of the main family I’m in no position to concern myself with such things.”

“They say you’re friends with the Workers’ Party ringleaders in Namwon?”

“Still, they never asked me to join.”

“That’s a lie. Take this bastard away!”

A policeman tied my father with a red rope. The rest of the family went pale. They knew someone hauled off to the station would have a hard time coming back in one piece.

(현길언, 정치권력과 역사왜곡, Seoul, 2016, pp. 415-416, my translation.)

Recording episodes like that didn’t stop victimhood-nationalist NGOs from trying to “cancel” Hyeon. Why? Because having lived through the time, unlike most of their members, he recalled this sort of thing too: 

There used to be handbills pasted to the boulders and tree-trunks lining the way to school. I could smell the still-wet black ink on the thin white sheets that had been cut in two. Occasionally while reading the handbills I would remember how my father had been taken away during the night, and I would break into a run, giving the place a wide berth. Let’s drive out the US troops…. People, come out with us and fight. Long live Pak Heon-yeong, long live General Kim Il Sung! …. In those days intriguing stories were circulating about General Kim. They said he’d mowed down Japanese soldiers like a demon. (Ibid., 418.)

I could write and quote much more about “4.3,” but I don’t fancy getting sued for libel in a country where prosecutors need only ascertain an impure interest in disparagement, in stirring trouble.

Fortunately it’s still safe to discuss support for Kim Il Sung in the southeast, where many a community was, as the saying went, “the Republic of Korea in the daytime, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea at night.” Read this account of a Gyeongsang village (by a left-leaning memoirist) and feel free to extrapolate commonsensically:

In 1947 and 1948 … when the left-wing camp was wilting under one government crackdown after another, it derived great encouragement from the fact that there was a mighty communist force in “the northern half of the homeland.” For them it was a star of hope. When I went to my home village on school vacations my mischievous friends would secretly teach me the “Song of General Kim Il Sung” and other revolutionary songs. Their adoration of the government in the North was extraordinary…. “Just you wait and see, when the People’s Army comes charging down, it will smash the Rhee clique to pieces in a day, and we’ll be liberated.”

(윤학준, 양반 문화 담방기, Seoul, 1995, 1:231, my translation.)

Now, I agree that the US military shouldn’t have let Rhee’s men run rampant on Jeju, razing villages and killing tens of thousands of men, women and children. But had it been as one-sided a massacre as the symposium makes out, it wouldn’t have taken years to restore order.

Some of us would rather learn more about what went on before apportioning blame to one side only. This means acknowledging the SKWP’s tactic of trying to incite inflammatorily heavy-handed crackdowns. Party veteran Pak Kap-dong tells in his memoirs how, on one occasion on the mainland, street protests encountered a disappointing lenience, whereupon the order went out to attack policemen’s families and houses. It would be naive to think that the cadres on Jeju had no idea how Rhee would respond to an orchestrated assault on police stations, or how many innocent lives would be lost in the carnage.

I also reject Kraus’ assertion that Kim Il Sung laid claim to southern support merely in order to “sell” the idea of invasion to the Russians. Obviously Kim believed in that support strongly enough to let the KPA pause its advance in 1950, instead of having it charge straight down to the harbor town where I now sit. If we swallow the notion of a stand-alone SKWP, this error becomes inexplicable.

The apparent point of the Wilson Center conference was to demand, in chorus, some sort of formal expression of contrition or regret for our military’s failure to stop the killings on Jeju. The idea that this would strengthen the alliance is made much of, and Clinton’s statement on the wartime Nogun-ri killings held up as a proven model to follow, despite the unprecedented surge of anti-Americanism that followed a few years later. I dare say there’s a reason the ROK party, newspaper and “polifessor” most supportive of alliance-loosening push so hard for American shows of contrition. Never for North Korean ones.

Anyway, it would be nice if Uncle Sam had done so few bad things in living memory that an apology for having let Koreans kill each other 70-some years ago could count as an especially urgent priority. If it comes to that, America bears a more direct responsibility for having let South Korean brass divert wartime food and other supplies from the military to the black market, so that 50-90,000 conscripts died in 1951 from starvation, exposure and disease. If the point of admitting our errors really is to strengthen the alliance, why not start there?

 

UPDATE: Tara O on “4.3”: 29 July 2024:

Tara O has kindly alerted me to her lengthy article on the Jeju unrest. It appeared on the Hudson Institute’s website just before I posted the above.

“Only countries with a fairly liberal government can be repeatedly visited as well as criticized.” — Stanislav Andreski, The African Predicament (1968)

I used to talk of the “Air Koryo Mileage Club” when discussing Pyongyang watchers who claim expertise on the basis of their visits to North Korea. Now that they’re going through a rough period, for reasons I’ll explain, the moniker seems a bit strong. I need a concise term all the same. In the following I’ll stick to the acronym AKMC, much as Honecker used to say DDR while avoiding the word deutsch.

First, some exposition, from a chapter of mine on the late Kim Jong Il era:

For decades, selected Westerners had been invited to Pyongyang for status-enhancing tours and meetings with officials…. In this way [North Korea] had helped school the people to whom governments and media outlets now turned for information…. By 2010 they were setting the tone even of academic discussion of the DPRK. They sat on conference panels, and on the editorial boards of journals; they wrote op-ed pieces for the Washington Post and New York Times…. Almost to a man, they preached the fine-line message Kim Jong Il wanted preached: The DPRK was now too dangerous not to be talked to on its own terms, yet not so dangerous as to merit anyone’s hostility. (North Korea’s Juche Myth, 2015.)

Siegfried Hecker carries on this tradition in the new book Hinge Points (Stanford University Press, 2023). A 7-time visitor to the DPRK between 2004 and 2010, he’s director emeritus of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. My readers may know him better as the man to whom the North Koreans showed a half-pound of plutonium in January 2004.

I should make clear from the outset that I learned a lot from Hecker’s account of his Yongbyon experiences. I’d read about the big events before, but there’s nothing like a front-row account to fix the sequence and logic of them in your mind. Hinge Points was co-written by Elliot Serbin, who may have helped Hecker break down the technical stuff for people like me, no easy task. I also enjoyed the scientist’s recent podcast interview with NK News. But a blog post can only be so long. I’d rather not shorten my criticisms to make room for compliments others have already made.

The book’s title reflects Hecker’s belief that the course of things could have been changed at various key junctures — that if America had met its Agreed Framework obligations in a timely manner, and been more accommodating of the North’s violations of the deal, Kim Jong Il wouldn’t have developed nuclear weapons. The scientist considers their side more to blame than ours, but for the most part his view of things is the AKMC’s. So is his canon: Wapo reporter Don Oberdorfer’s The Two Koreas, CNN reporter Mike Chinoy’s Meltdown, the usual titles. What I expected to find here was some engagement with the defense of US policy laid out at length in Victor Cha’s The Impossible State (2010). Hecker mentions it only once, when citing a piece of information that serves his own view. As a result, the older book works all too well as a rejoinder to the brand-new one.

If anything, Cha understated the case when saying, inter alia, that we’ll never know if a different American approach would have changed matters. Either we attribute state-suicidal tendencies to North Korea, or we assume that it never intended to keep its word; one or the other. The definition of the enemy is the definition of the political (Schmitt), and never more so than when two half-nation states are contending for legitimacy. A friendly relationship with South Korea’s ally would have deprived the North of all reason to exist. We do Kim Jong Il an injustice if we think he was as blind to this towering problem as Foggy Bottom was.

By the DPRK’s own account, the military-first policy was proclaimed domestically in January 1995, less than 3 months after the signing of the Agreed Framework. The rest of that decade saw the regime crow domestically that its “diplomatic warriors” had outsmarted the Yankees, that they’d signed the deal only for tactical reasons, and that the nuclear weapons program was unstoppable. It thus seems highly likely that the years of quiet on that front had more to do with the famine — with which the lull largely coincided — than with a commitment to abiding by the Agreed Framework.

In none of this does Hecker show interest. We get the usual I.R.- minded, America-centric, patronizing view of a reactive state.  “Accommodation with Washington was in [Kim Il Sung’s] view the best path to survival” at a time when “North Korea felt abandoned.” The source for this confident assertion? Here’s the citation in full:

Mike Chinoy, Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2009), 3. (Chinoy’s assessment of what Kim Il Sung said at a Pyongyang meeting he attended with evangelist Billy Graham).

I’m afraid that’s the level the political parts of the book are on.

I recall comparable discussants of comparable governments. Long before the AKMC came into being, Guy Debord had the relevant human type figured out:

[The] scraps of information offered to the familiars of a lying tyranny are normally infected with lies, manipulated and uncheckable. They are, however, pleased to get these scraps, for they feel themselves superior to those who know nothing…. They constitute the privilege of first-class spectators: those who … believe they can understand something not by making use of what is hidden from them, but by believing what is revealed to them! — (Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, 1967.)

Why, you may ask, does our country produce so many of these “familiars”?As I said in 2017, “We Americans have such boundless faith in our likeability as a people, in the power of our cheerful presence to break down barriers, that we expect to get honest answers even from foreigners who have every reason to hate us.” When Trump fell for Kim Jong Un in Singapore in 2018, he was, as I explained, thinking just like an AKMC man — thinking “that the presence of a sufficiently wonderful American works on North Koreans like a truth serum.”

Not that Hecker, who comes across as a very likable person in that podcast, attributes any wonderfulness to himself. It’s his friends whom he presents as supreme authorities. These sentences appear, sans irony, with only a paragraph break between them:

I found [Professor John] Lewis and his colleagues to be indispensable tutors on politics and diplomacy. I learned quickly that Lewis and his team were highly respected in Pyongyang and had access to key government officials.

The following is an account of a meeting in California between DPRK Vice Minister Kim Gye Gwan and the Stanford team to which Hecker then belonged:

At one point when discussing the motivations of the different players on the Korean Peninsula, [Vice Minister] Kim [Gye Gwan] lauded the Washington Post op-ed piece that [Robert] Carlin and Lewis had recently written in which they stated that what Pyongyang really wanted was a long-term, strategic relationship with the United States to buffer the heavy influence their neighbors already had, or would soon gain, over their small, weak country. Kim said that was “exactly right.” I thought this was more than just a nice gesture to Carlin and Lewis —it sounded genuine.

I don’t doubt it. What had the two gentlemen done, except deliver the shrewd appeal to American wishful thinking with which they’d been entrusted? These excerpts make clear what kind of analysis Hecker considers authoritative: the kind that opens doors, leads to exclusive get-togethers, and wins praise from the North Koreans themselves.

This in turn goes to confirm that a nuclear scientist’s judgment of political matters isn’t necessarily superior to anyone else’s. Notoriously, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the genius who first headed Los Alamos National Laboratory, had all the political acumen and moral consistency of a ten-year-old. It’s plain from Hinge Points that Hecker’s own brilliance makes him no  savvier about North Korea — no better able to distinguish the real from the sham — than the novelist Luise Rinser was. In his case as in hers, it was because insight wasn’t gained that the welcome mat stayed out. That may seem unfair, to the New Mexican if not to the German, so let’s briefly consider the travelogue aspect of the book.

By the way, I used to live in New Mexico too, in the small town of Los Lunas, which is now less famous for having had Bo Diddley as deputy sheriff than for being the site of the hardware store in Breaking Bad. I took the 2-hour drive up to Los Alamos circa 2000, when I delivered an abandoned husky to the state’s only husky rescue service. My memory of that very highly-educated community made me more than usually skeptical upon encountering, at the start of Hinge Points, the requisite “I went to North Korea expecting to find automatons” bit. (Our well-traveled American-Polish-Austrian was 60 at the time of this first trip.) He also gives us the “Everybody warned me against So-and-so, but I had no problem with him” bit, like all those saintly travelers who respond to complaints about French rudeness, Death Valley heat, etc, by professing not to know what you’re talking about.

As is par for the course, Hecker gets taken to the Mangyongdae Children’s Palace, where heavily drilled and rouged kids play music for a stream of tourists. Dickens would have satirized it in a fury. My little delegation in 2011 was in and out in about two minutes, hard on the heels of some equally appalled Africans. Hecker? Deeply impressed. When he goes to another show-school, he thinks he’s walked in on an average class. Beaming, he crouches down next to some girls for a photo included in the book. It reminded me of that Yeats poem in which the children “In momentary wonder/Stare upon a sixty-year old smiling public man,” only these ones, being all too accustomed to visitors, look stiffly and incuriously in the other direction. Not even the “beautiful calligraphy” of one girl’s English notes (on Edison) can arouse Hecker’s suspicion. Can anything? I see no ideological blindness here. Some people are just the trusting sort. But I’d prefer assessors of nuclear sites — everywhere in the world — to know a dog-and-pony show when they see one.

Hecker seems at times to be under the mistaken impression that his tutors rang the alarm bell for decades, urging Uncle Sam to get serious about negotiating, pronto, or face the inevitable prospect of ICBM’s aimed at California. “While North Korea’s leadership remained focused as it transitioned from one Kim to another, Washington vacillated.” In fact, the AKMC bears a lot of blame for that vacillation, and for the general failure to grasp the consistency of the North’s focus. It sure hasn’t been our hardliners who’ve dominated op-ed pages, academic discussion, and Beltway conferences up to now.

For several years after the turn of the millennium, Leon Sigal and others angrily dismissed the Bush administration’s suppositions that uranium was being enriched. (Hecker’s claim that the North’s display of a modern centrifuge facility in 2010 “surprised us and the rest of the world” is therefore misleading.) I also remember widespread American agreement with Kim Dae Jung’s assurances — which continued right up to the first underground test in 2006 — that the dictatorship had no serious intent to develop nuclear weapons. At two State-sponsored Beltway conferences (2008 and 2010), I contradicted the trendy view that Kim Jong Il was hoping to exchange his nuclear program for a big aid deal, economic package and/or US embassy. All I got from the Air Koryo flyers with whom State had stuffed the place was a “who invited this guy” look.

From 2010 (before the succession) to the end of 2012, there was a widespread consensus that “Swiss-educated” Kim Jong Un would embark on Deng-like reforms, which would compel economic cooperation with the US. At the height of the regime’s saber-rattling in 2013, Carlin and others talked up the possibility of imminent reforms courtesy of the North’s new premier. (This PBS interview is classic.) The hawks-doves fallacy? We’ve been hearing it since Selig Harrison’s heyday in the 1990s.

To be fair, the same people always urged our government to keep North Korea on the front burner. That was good counsel. Ineffective too, for the obvious reason; Paul Revere wouldn’t have got many people out of bed by crying, “The unfairly maligned British are coming!” Had the AKMC been less afraid of offending the North and losing access, it might have imparted more of a sense of urgency.

In the end the invitations stopped anyway. Hecker hasn’t been back since 2010, though not for want of trying. The North has became strong enough to dispense with smiling American downplayers of its unity and resolve; it wants to be feared. We probably haven’t seen the end of mysteriously funded Track 2 meetings in Europe, but good luck claiming authority on that basis, now that various hardliners — John Bolton included — have met with Kim Jong Un himself. Thank God the AKMC didn’t get there first. We’d never have heard the end of it.

 

UPDATE: 10 April 2023:

A reader has helpfully suggested that I make the nature of my position clearer to those who’ve only recently begun following this blog, not least because my Revere remark (above) seems at odds with the title and gist of the preceding post. Simply put, I’m as critical of a) the notion that the North Koreans develop nukes with a view to an all-out, possibly even nuclear attack on the South as I am of b) the notion that they merely want to guarantee the security of the half of the peninsula our troops forced them back up on. As I see it, the program is, as the North’s ROK-oriented propaganda explicitly stated in 2017, “a means for securing peaceful unification.” (See the relevant NK News report.) Note that the line the South Koreans get — not in summits, of course, but in “underground” propaganda the ROK used to try to block the consumption of — has always been closer to the North’s inner-track line than the pap spooned to visiting Americans. In other words, the nukes are a means to ensuring that the US stays out of the final and probably rocky stages of a North-dominated unification-by-confederation. To be perfectly clear: “peaceful unification” must be understood in the traditional inner-track sense in which, for example, Kim Il Sung used it in the so-called Juche speech of 1955: a process likely to entail mass violence in the South, not excluding what we would now call “hybrid” North Korean aggression.

UPDATE: 20 April 2023:

Another reader has kindly written to alert me to what he considers an error: In contrast to my reference to the North’s announcement of a “military-first policy,” the North has itself never spoken of 선군정책, only of 선군정치, 선군사상, etc.

My response: 1) although the Korean word 정치 is usually translated as politics, it can be used to mean policy, if the policy in question is far-reaching enough (see the not uncommon formulation 햇볕정치), and 2) our word policy is much closer to the North Koreans’ understanding of 선군정치than is our word politics, which implies power relations, debate, group decisionmaking, and other things the dictatorship has no interest in implying. (As for Military-First 사상 or Ideology, this is now alleged in North Korea to go back to Kim Il Sung’s guerrilla activities in the colonial period.)

I keep coming across scenarios of North Korean aggression that take no account of the political realities here, so I’m going to complain again. This time I’ll heed Ecclesiastes and let my words be few. First, this is the sort of thing I mean:

One analysis previously published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists estimates that up to 25% of the population of Seoul could be killed if the North launched a “sea of sarin” artillery attack using 240 tons of the gas….“[I]t will have an effect on the population and it will terrorize them,” said Col. Maxwell. “It goes to the brutality and the nature of the Kim family regime.”  (From “The Continuing Threat of North Korea’s Chemical Weapons,” The Peninsula, 7 March 2022).

Let’s prepare for the worst by all means, but without dehumanizing the North Koreans by saying in effect, “and it would be just like the bastards to do this.” Because in fact it would be quite unlike them. Most of the wartime massacres carried out by the People’s Army against South Koreans took place (as we know from eye-witness accounts) after some effort to separate left-wingers from “reactionary elements.” The indiscriminate mass killing of civilians in the Korean War was done largely from the air. And which side controlled the skies?

We waged our civil war more brutally too. The KPA had no general like Sherman, who (with Lincoln’s approval) kept his pledge to “make Georgia howl” through the “utter destruction of its roads, houses and people.” No South Korean town of any size met the fate of Meridian, Mississippi. Why the difference? The Union generally saw itself as fighting and punishing a monolithically hostile populace, from which it often had a hard time distinguishing even the slaves. The DPRK saw itself as liberating the southern masses from landowners and traitors.

Its domestic propaganda still depicts average South Koreans as wonderful people yearning to live under Kim Jong Un. That’s not how you get your military in the mood to kill millions with sarin gas or nuclear weapons. (The killing of two South Korean workers in the Yeonpyeong Island artillery attack of 2010 is known to have compelled the propaganda apparatus to account for it.)

Without neglecting to prepare for an all-out attack, we should consider a hybrid war more likely. And just as someone trying to predict Russian tactics in Ukraine must know the ethno-linguistic territory, we need to face up to South Korea’s ideological terrain. It may be scandalous to identify the region best suited for a little-green-men incursion à la Crimea 2014, but is it better to act as if the North Koreans couldn’t take over a port without WMD?

North Korea recently tested a route to “final victory” that need not entail even conventional warfare. I’m referring to the confederation process that got underway during the Moon administration. It will resume when the left returns to power, by which time the distance between the two main parties will be even narrower than it is now. (The current front-runner to become chairman of the pseudo-right party is Ahn Cheol-soo, until recently a confederation supporter and ally of arch-pro-Norther Park Jie-won.) The incremental subjugation of the South will take time, sure. But if you were Kim Jong Un, a de facto monarch with children to leave the family-owned state to, would you risk an apocalypse just to speed up things?

Our Korea watchers do the cause of peace no favors by continuing to ignore the ideological affinity between Pyongyang and South Korea’s nationalist left. Already the danger of a nuclear strike on Seoul — half the population of which supports pro-confederation parties — is being treated as urgent and serious enough to merit a significant ramping up of our side’s weaponry and rhetoric. This is what comes of putting taboos above frank discussion.

Much has been written about the West’s failure to anticipate the demise of the East Bloc. In his introduction to Rethinking the Soviet Collapse (London, 1998), the book’s editor Michael Cox says that like academics in general, Sovietologists were too reluctant to ask big questions. Other shortcomings, as Peter Rutland explains in his contribution, were more specific to the field: political bias from left and right, the diversion of scholars into media punditry, isolation from core social sciences, a lack of relevant language skills, the difficulty of conducting research in country, and dependence on funding from external agenda-setters. North Korean studies manifests the same compound of problems — and many of the same errors.

The central blunder, according to various contributors to Cox’s book, was the misperception of the USSR as a budding pluralist or institutionally pluralist order, in which diverse groups were lobbying behind the facade of a one-party state. Such talk is said to have confounded Soviet intellectuals when they heard about it. When I was doing Slavic Studies in West Germany, however, the “pluralist” scholars had the upper hand over the “totalitarians.” I too used to imagine Gorbachev locked in fierce struggle with old-school communists and hawkish generals. We now know that he experienced no challenge to his one-man rule until 1990. Of the two academic camps the “totalitarians” were closer to the mark, although only a few ideology-centric ones like Alexander Shtromas saw the end coming.

In view of this history, you’d think Washington would have reacted skeptically to 21st-century claims that North Korea is a pluralist country, in other words, a less tight ship than the USSR turned out to have been in the 1980s. But “a pleasing error is not willingly detected,” as Samuel Johnson said. Patrick McEachern’s assertion of North Korea’s robust institutional pluralism was found very compelling when Inside the Red Box appeared in 2010.

Not long afterwards Kim Jong Un took over, squashed Pyongyang watchers’ prediction of sweeping reforms, executed a bloody purge, ramped up the nuclearization drive, tightened the country’s borders — and the Western model of a pluralist state gained ground. This suggests that just as in détente-era Sovietology, it hasn’t thrived purely on its merits, but has been promoted in order to encourage public and elite support for arms talks. (It’s perhaps relevant that McEachern is a State Department employee.)

Although I haven’t read every contribution to this school of thought, I’m confident of having addressed the basic arguments in my Acta Koreana review of Inside the Red Box. An excerpt:

Much is made [in the book] of apparent policy shifts on various fronts under Kim Jong Il’s rule, the idea being that these reflect a leader trying to drive the coach of state while his horses strain in different directions. KPA statements are held up here and there as evidence of serious military opposition to the foreign ministry’s professed readiness to compromise, despite the fact that our source for most of these statements is the Korean Central News Agency, that rigorously party-censored government mouthpiece. McEachern will need much stronger evidence than that if he is to get away with startling assertions that Kim Jong Il “cannot rule by fiat,” and that in North Korea, “Bureaucratic losers … continue to voice opposition publicly to the chosen policy direction.” Yet again, it seems, we are dealing with a North Korea watcher who refuses to take the personality cult seriously. I defy McEachern to find a single example of public bureaucratic opposition to any genuine regime policy…. Statements made during negotiations purely for the benefit of Americans do not constitute a “chosen policy direction.”

Please don’t take this to mean that I want more attention paid to the ruling family. (I wrote the first English-language book on a North Korean not named Kim.) We should keep in mind, however, that study of the second echelon of power is less useful when no distinct views can be attributed to anyone in it. As for the resurgent “Kremlinogical” preoccupation with podium line-ups and the like, even in the Cold War it yielded remarkably little fruit. The study of event photographs is especially perilous when a leader has good reason to conceal the real power structure from a drone-equipped enemy.

Like the “pluralist” Sovietologists before them, their Pyongyang-watching counterparts seem to have over-reacted against the totalitarian model. In my experience they’re often economically-minded people, thus perhaps more alive to the black-market, back-alley, freewheeling side of dictatorships than to the state of political-scientific discussion. (Remember Rutland’s point about isolation from the social sciences.)

In an article entitled “The Myth of Kim Jong Un’s Absolute Power,” Peter Ward, who along with Andrei Lankov and Rüdiger Frank is one of my three go-to authorities on North Korea’s economy, writes:

No political leader, however powerful, is completely in charge of their country. When Kim Jong Un is declared an ‘autocrat’ and the country over which he presides a ‘one-man dictatorship’, remember that this is a moral, not a factual statement….[for] one man cannot govern alone.

There may be some innocents out there who still imagine a singlehandedly micro-managed DPRK running like a Swiss watch. I’m all for enlightening them, as Ward does in his article, about the ramshackleness of the place. Perhaps some also need to be told that even in the most repressive country, “an administrative apparatus… makes most of the decisions,” including some “the top leader might not be all that pleased about.” My problem is with the assumption that these truths belie the designation of North Korea as a one-man dictatorship.

Mindful of the kind of stuff I’d probably write if I were to venture into economic matters, and of how gentlemanly Peter would be about it, I refrained from commenting on the piece when it appeared. I didn’t expect NK News to keep recurring to this theme, albeit behind a paywall which the headlines don’t quite entice me to sneak around. So I’d like to get a few things straight right now, for the record.

As defined on Wikipedia, autocracy is

a system of government in which absolute power over a state is concentrated in the hands of one person, whose decisions are subject neither to external legal restraints nor to regularized mechanisms of popular control (except perhaps for the implicit threat of a coup d’état or other forms of rebellion).

I like that. It can do service for “one-man dictatorship” too. Keep in mind that absolute power has never meant omnipotence; it means power “unrestrained by institutions.” The application of this label to North Korea is therefore perfectly apt. Surely no one’s going to try telling me the state is run by committee, with Kim functioning as a mere primus inter pares. Or that it shouldn’t be called a dictatorship at all.

We who apply terms like autocracy, absolute rule, one-man dictatorship or totalitarianism to North Korea have always been aware that no leader dictates everything. We’re no less conscious of the enormous gap between intention and execution. My first encounter with the political sense of absolute was in my early teens, when I learned what a mess France was under Louis XVI.

Here’s Vladimir Shlapentokh:

Those who advocated the totalitarian model of Soviet society understood that inefficiency loomed decisively over many sectors of the country, particularly the economy. Elements of disorganization were, in fact, “normal” aspects of the system. This is not to say, however, that inefficiency undermined the totalitarian nature of the society. The Kremlin’s monopoly on power persisted throughout the course of Soviet history, and no other center of power imposed its will on it. (A Normal Totalitarian Society, 2001, page 71.)

The key question, then, isn’t “How efficiently is the state operating?” but rather: “Does the leader face domestic opposition?” And: “Is the length of his rule, the exercise of his will, his choice of a successor curtailed by the state, by government or party procedures, by domestic laws and regulations?” If not, it’s an autocracy or one-man dictatorship; it’s absolute rule. That North Korea fits this bill more than the USSR at any time after 1953 goes without saying. Certainly Brezhnev could neither execute people on a whim nor claim whatever real estate struck his fancy, as Kim Jong Un so pre-Magna-Carta-ishly can.

One reason the pluralism myth thrived in late-period Soviet studies (1970-90) was because it appealed to hardliners and apologists alike. The former rubbed their hands at the thought of elite disunity, and the latter pleaded for American concessions to help Soviet “reformers” palliate the “hawks.” No doubt comparable conditions in our field (and the Beltway) will nurture this sort of talk for as long as the Kim regime survives. When the next autocracy points a missile at us, in whatever part of the world, the fallacy will spring to life again.

In the meantime I’ll keep saying “one-man dictatorship,” just as I’ll keep saying “a corporation run by an individual” to distinguish Samsung from companies whose CEO is at the mercy of a board of directors. Such terms may mislead the literal-minded, but that’s life. As Borges makes clear in his wonderful tale of the 1:1 scale map, some measure of simplification is needed if we’re to communicate at all.

“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.

Even before his inauguration in May 2022 it became clear that Yoon Seok-yeol isn’t simply bad at politics; he lacks all interest in it. The former prosecutor gives every appearance of being mainly out to enjoy the perks of the presidency — from the freedom to leave work “like a knife” every evening, as Koreans say, to the privilege of dispensing key posts to people he met in the sauna.

Was the ruling party unaware of this side of Yoon when it nominated him? And could it really not keep him from abandoning the Blue House in order to work out of an office building? I doubt it. This is precisely the sort of self-diminishing, depoliticizing president the party hoped he would become, so as to smooth the way to a semi-parliamentary system.

Having made vote-getting noises to the contrary last year, Yoon now expresses support for such a transition (as I predicted he would). Last week, according to the Korea Times, he delighted the National Assembly Speaker — a Minjoo man who has long opposed the “royal presidency” — by stressing

the need for the Assembly to play a central role in managing state affairs even though the country has a presidential system.

Which is a remarkable thing for a newly-elected leader to say about a body in opposition hands. I feel like asking local conservatives what Johnny Rotten famously asked an American audience: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” But that’s not all:

Sound vague, opaque, boring? It’s meant to, those “reforms” being of the sort that only the 1% wants. (If you’re new to this issue, which my readers can hardly say I’ve neglected, see here among other posts).

Presidents tend to oppose the weakening of the office the moment they move in, naturally, but it’s easy to see why an apolitical one like Yoon might like the idea of becoming an integrative figurehead like Germany’s Bundespräsident, cutting ribbons and flying around the world while the Assembly takes the blame for a tanking economy.

The public, however, voted last March for a strong president and a weak assembly. Too fundamental and abrupt a change to the current system would require not only constitutional revision, but also new presidential and parliamentary elections, perhaps as early as next year — with Yoon likely to lose the former (unless a tomato can is winkingly chosen to run against him) and the Minjoo likely to lose seats in the latter.

The above-mentioned consultative body can thus be expected to focus on “underwater” ways of strengthening the assembly while the media spend a year or two softening the public up for formal change. Journalists are already po-facedly touting the advantages of a new system as if the main force behind it were disinterested social scientists. For a while there I hoped the Hankook Ilbo was becoming a world-class newspaper I could cling to, like Thomas Bernhard to the NZZ, but now I see it’s just like all the rest.

The foreign media have been ignoring this issue, as they ignore everything under the surface. When things go fully public, we’ll be getting their reactions — which, judging from Youtube thumbnails, are all people want from the media anymore. What position Western journos then take will depend on the one taken by their man Lee Jae-myung, whose legal woes they continue tiptoeing around. The Minjoo chairman, who has made conflicting statements over the past few months, is going to have to decide soon whether a) to go with the flow in the hope of favorable treatment from prosecutors, or b) to launch an impeachment push against Yoon on a crowd-pleasing, anti-naegakche platform.

If he takes the latter route his party may see pro-naegakche members defect to the PPP. On the other hand he can expect support even from some “asphalt” or extra-parliamentary conservatives, who argue that while a President Lee could usher in a kleptocracy, there’d at least be a chance to repair things afterward. Whereas the only way out of a naegakche would be a military coup. As happened the last time.

It’s to keep South Koreans from recalling the paralysis, president-PM tussles and runaway corruption of 1960-61 that the media try to associate the semi-parliamentary model with today’s Germany. The consultative body mentioned above is already being pitched as a counterpart to the Bundestag’s Council of Elders. But as economic historians know already, Koreans like to talk Germany while thinking Japan. Deep down each big party wants to become like the perma-ruling LDP.

Considering that the bedrock left comprises a third of the electorate, and the bedrock right only about a quarter, the Minjoo seems more likely to make that dream a reality. (I’d expect a President Lee to turn pro-naegakche himself near the end of a very “royal” term.) Unlike the Park-impeachers and Park-loyalists of the right, who still loathe each other, the “moderate” and “radical” left have been discreetly engineering electoral alliances for the past 20 years. A ruling coalition of the two forces — which blend into each other anyway — would be almost certain, with the smaller partner demanding and getting the North-relevant posts of intelligence agency boss and Unification Minister. If that sounds far-fetched, consider that Moon, unforced, appointed both Park Jie-won and Lee In-young.

A semi-parliamentary system would not only grease the rails to “North-South cooperation,” but make it far easier for Kim Jong Un, who would then be the only authoritative leader on the peninsula (if he isn’t already), to keep the ROK under his heel. All this is another reason why Pyongyang watchers, the circularity of whose commentary has become so apparent since the North closed its borders, should take a more inter-Korean view of things.

I was dining at a European ambassador’s house in 2017 when — ever the life of the party — I raised the possibility that President Moon might someday be prosecuted for abusing power. A younger diplomat there took stiff umbrage at the notion that such a fine man could end up like Park Geunhye. Not long afterward, at a reception on a naval vessel docked in Busan, I encountered another European envoy, NATO country of course, whose lapel button bore the blue peninsula flag beloved of North Korean poster artists and the nationalist left.

I wonder what those diplomats have made of Moon’s extradition of two fishermen back to North Korea, there to face certain execution on murder charges. I hope their reaction was of a higher order than that of local Moon supporters and an NK News contributor, which boiled down to the lynch-mob logic that people plausibly accused of a serious crime have no right to a fair trial.

Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the rush to extradition in November 2019 was the apparent motivation for it: to encourage Kim Jong Un, by this grotesque show of servility and shared values, to appear at an ASEAN conference in Busan later that month.

Now, I too expected Kim to carry out the promise to visit South Korea “in the near future” that he made in September 2018. I still think it would have been a smart move, provided he and Moon had met someplace suitably sequestered — on Jeju perhaps. What I don’t get is how anyone could have expected the Supreme Dignity to make his first appearance here in connection with an ASEAN conference. He was as likely to crash on my sofa.

A failure of nunchi, that unique ethnic gift for mutual mind-reading? Perhaps. Also a failure to grasp the chasm between the South’s victimhood nationalism, the main symbol of which is a statue of a little girl, and the North’s forward-looking, militaristic nationalism, the main symbol of which is Kim Jong Un.

In related news, the Monthly Chosun reports that the Moon government allegedly paid over a million dollars (in American terms) for a house in Paju, near the DMZ, and another half-million for a yacht now docked in Incheon, both being intended for Kim Jong Un’s use should he opt for that sort of visit. Allegedly some $50,000 was spent on a table for the house, chairs for which were presumably not picked up at IKEA. Almost 2o million dollars were earmarked for constructing facilities at which to host Kim on Jeju Island. (East Asia Research has the story in English.)

The source of this information is a former high-ranking NIS official, but it’s in keeping with a Moon aide’s cheerful statement to the press in 2019 that various possibilities of hosting Kim had been well prepared for.

Imagine, if you will, an American president promising to make his first visit to South Korea very soon, hinting that Air Force One could touch down at short notice, yet imparting neither a ballpark time frame nor a preferred itinerary. Now ponder the even greater unlikelihood of the ROK responding with the sort of scattershot buying spree described above. And now try telling me that the Moon government was not already — from its own perspective, never mind Kim’s — the happily subservient partner in a nascent confederation.

This becomes all the more obvious when one considers that Moon’s desperation to lure Kim here was primarily informed — as Nam Seong-uk explained in a recent article — by the desire to persuade America to relax sanctions. Moon was abasing himself before Kim Jong Un in order to help him. I suspect the outlays may also have been internally justified with a view to a more publicly confederated Korea, one better purged of southern troublemakers, in which Kim would be welcome to stay in his accustomed style at any of several properties.

Of course there’s more to the story than that. The other day, reading from my cell phone, I recited the above shopping list to a few Koreans. When I got to the $50,000 table they started nodding disgustedly, having already intuited the angle, the shot. And sure enough, it’s reported that about twice the market price of the Paju house was paid to the owner, an alleged associate of the very NIS chief who ordered the purchase. The chance that a harder bargain was driven for the yacht, or that no one in the Minjoo stood to gain from the planned Jeju construction, seems remote in the extreme. In this context I recommend another former NIS official’s book on the Sunshine era, the gist of which is that the vaunted southward benefits of northward aid came much earlier for some than others.

I suppose we mustn’t be too judgmental. Access to the intelligence agency’s enormous slush fund, plus the veil of secrecy thrown over all North-related expenditures and transactions — for “security reasons,” you understand — are bound to tempt people in a position to exploit them. Especially if they expect their party to stay in power for another ten or twenty years.

But it would be wrong to think merely in terms of an ad hoc skim here and there. The only reason the Moon-era takings seem to have been relatively small was because sanctions precluded the billion-dollar infrastructural projects the government couldn’t wait to get underway. In every oligarchy’s planning, pecuniary motives are just as constitutive as ideology, and contribute far more to the urgency with which plans are implemented, whether it’s environmental and energy policy in the US or North Korea policy here.

Those who think me too cynical should consider how many of Moon’s top officials spent the 1980s denying the legitimacy of the state, or cozying up (as many a former revolutionary has recalled) to gangsters in prison. Is it far-fetched to see a connection between this history and the conspicuous decline in prosecutions of organized crime under President Moon?

Not for nothing does the city of Seongnam have equally strong traditions of radicalism and gangsterism –and ever the twain shall meet, as witness the Eun Soo-mi saga. Besides, there’s only one plausible reason why the pro-North left now pins its hopes on scandal-ridden Lee Jae-myung, another former Seongnam mayor, who only narrowly lost to Yoon last March. If ideology alone can’t motivate a president to defy Washington, so the obvious logic, perhaps an insatiable — how to put it? — entrepreneurial spirit will.

To make myself perfectly clear: We mustn’t divide these people into well-meaning, true nationalists on one hand and cynical crooks on the other. The general state-disparaging nationalism encourages the general greed and vice versa; the two forces are as inextricable as the greed and ideological directionlessness — the keeping-open of all options — of the South Korean right.

Apropos of the latter: I remember well the Park administration’s impatience to do something about all that unsightly nature and wildlife along the DMZ. Proposals for peace parks and monuments abounded, complete with computerized images of northerners and southerners building trust on expanses of chaebol concrete.

But surely it’s harder, you think, for Gangnam leftists to square corruption with their principles? No. As I pointed out in another post, they have long touted a convenient pseudo-Gramscian line according to which they must thoroughly infiltrate the upper class, displacing all “accumulated evils” from it, for the revolution to succeed. You can’t serve God and Mammon, but serving the minjok and Mammon is the height of synergy.

This whole side of things is what Western pooh-poohers of the confederation drive never grasp. For all their economy-centricity they fail to see what could be in it for the South. Especially touching is their belief that no ROK government would dare implement such a set-up, because it would require too great a sacrifice from the middle class. Have these experts forgotten Obama’s bailout of the banking industry, or Merkel’s great migrant welcome? Perhaps they now overlook the inflation raging everywhere. Extracting involuntary sacrifices from the middle class is what liberal democracy does best.

The bigger and not unrelated story here involves the unaccounted-for flow of some 7 billion dollars out of the country during Moon’s presidency. How seriously prosecutors will investigate either that matter or the Kim-welcoming expenditures remains to be seen. As I predicted last November (countering warnings to the contrary), this administration hasn’t yet diverged greatly from the previous one’s policy toward North Korea. Some may think prosecutors’ new interest in North-related offenses a sign of hardline spirit, but it was softline Roh Moo Hyun who initiated an investigation into the illicit transfer of half a billion dollars to Kim Jong Il.

For their own reasons both left and right-wing media have misrepresented Yoon’s August 15 speech as a fairly uncompromising offer of aid for denuclearization. In fact (as the Joongang rightly reported) he offered to reward any early progress at the negotiating table. The ROK’s long tradition of conservatives striking stern notes on the campaign trail and softline ones in office continues. Some voters never learn.

The other day the Unification Minister suggested, in an obviously prearranged exchange with a ruling-party lawmaker (the North Korean defector Thae Yong-ho of all people), that America establish diplomatic relations with the Kim regime as an inducement to denuclearization. I interpret this proposal — which was surely run by Washington first? — as an implicit recognition of the problem of the Fraternization Trap that I’ve harped on here since the demolition of the liaison office in 2020. So far, then, the administration’s apparent position seems closer to Park Geun-hye’s Trustpolitik than to Lee Myung Bak’s stricter approach.

In The Communist Postscript (2010), Boris Groys writes:

Modem capitalist society is defined by the fact that the things in it are as they are because there is not enough money to fashion them differently. And indeed, if today one visits the home of an acquaintance, or a school, a church, or a bar, and asks why it is that what one sees is the way it is and not otherwise, one invariably receives the answer that it has long been planned to arrange things completely differently … but that unfortunately the money for this is still lacking.

I thought of this the other day while reading in the Korea Times that despite the Hallyu wave, Korean studies is still an “underdog and straggler” on the academic front. According to Professor Ross King at the University of British Columbia,

 “The Korean government and companies should make long-term investments in the infrastructure for Korean studies…. We need more endowed teaching positions, scholarships and bursaries for students and programs.”

Whereas I believe that Korean studies (like most fields) is big enough already, and should think more about consolidation than expansion. If it must keep up with the Joneses, it should first close the gap in academic standards that became so apparent — speaking of endowed teaching positions — during the Armstrong affair. I’m not implying that Prof. King cares less about standards than I do, only that he seems more optimistic about the prospect of simultaneously increasing size and quality. But I agree with him when he says:

 “A lot of people seem to believe that foreigners will happily pay their own money to learn about Korea because they enjoy its cultural content, but this is not true, especially for those hailing from the countries that have a higher gross national product (GNP) than Korea.”

Many a university here has learned this the hard way. I assume that a higher proportion of Westerners are willing to pay their own money to learn about China or Japan, because such a degree promises enhanced access to a much bigger economy, therefore better job prospects. I doubt if Hallyu fandom and demand for Korea-related courses are even a reliable indicator of an all-surpassing interest in this country. One can be crazy about BTS, and even crazier about Japanese anime.

The question is whether the measures Prof. King proposes will help incentivize young Westerners to pursue a Korean studies degree. Although not in a Korean studies department I have some relevant experience. About a third of my students are from foreign countries. Some stay in Korea for one semester, some for four years, and some settle down here, usually in an enclave of their countryfolk. Most seem to lose interest in studying the host language and culture within a year or two.

Funding is not a factor. Virtually all of my foreign students get at least half their tuition paid for; some are on full scholarships. They tend to become disaffected with the study of Korea because they become disaffected with Korea itself, and its perceived nationalism or xenophobia in particular. To give just one anecdote: recently some of my best foreign students, including one in an advanced stage of pregnancy, were asked to leave a coffee shop lest their alienness unsettle local patrons worried about COVID.

I must emphasize that my Korean students, the women in particular, tend to return from exchange semesters in Western countries with at least one story worse than that. Worse as in frightening.

The difference is that foreigners here tend to treat such occasional incidents (as the Korean kid in Finland, say, does not) as reflections of a generally unwelcoming or hostile culture. One reason they do so — and wrongly, in my opinion — is because the very interlocutors to whom they turn for reassurance and insight often espouse ethnocentric views. For example, many language instructors still teach that the Sino-Korean word jeong refers to a distinctly Korean sort of altruistic loving kindness, or to a loving kindness Koreans possess in unique abundance.

I remember this myth encountering the raucous skepticism of my zainichi Korean classmates at Yonsei’s language institute in 1986. German friends at the Ruhr Uni were equally critical of the notion of a special ethnic bitterness or han when it was asserted by Korean exchange students, along with claims to a racial homogeneity stretching back five thousand years. Minoring in Koreanistik for the easy credits, those grim, thirtyish exiles from the protest movement comprised half the students in some of our classes. Of the very small number of young Germans who bothered to dip a toe in the field, about half seemed to end up down the hall in Sinology or Japanese studies.

Was it just a coincidence that Hallyu began to take off circa 1999 (with the movie Shiri) only a year or so after the campus protest movement breathed its last, and Korean youth culture stopped being presented overseas as a matter of faux-proletarian woodcuts, shamanist rites for dead martyrs, and sloganizing poetry? The unfortunate result, however, is that foreigners now arrive with much higher expectations than I did. The more intense the newcomer’s K-fandom, I find, the greater the disillusionment with Korea after a few months.

Many other countries disillusion foreigners in similar ways, yet the fields devoted to studying them thrive. I think this is partly because they maintain enough critical distance to the relevant culture, as Korean studies has never done. In the introduction to my first book (1994), which I must quote from memory, not having it at hand, I complained about the prevalence of an “advocatorial tendency, usually expressed in terms of a desire to help Korean culture get the attention it deserves.” One reason I focused on North Korean literature was because it promised an escape from the pressure to over-praise that I saw reflected in papers on South Korean fiction.

Not that the North Korea discussion has been free of the apologetics and ethno-mysticism pervading the field as a whole.

The term [Juche] is really untranslatable; the closer one gets to its meaning, the more the meaning slips away. For the foreigner its meaning recedes into a pool of everything that makes Koreans Korean, and therefore it is ultimately inaccessible to the non-Korean. (Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, 2005, p. 414.)

I doubt if that sort of thing (mutatis mutandis) has passed inspection in the American reaches of Chinese or Japanese studies since about 1960, but the book from which it’s taken remains on KS reading lists. It’s hardly the only one in the field’s canon drenched in “revisionism,” meaning Korean nationalism. What other post-colonial state do Western historians take to task for not “purging” itself of colonial “collaborators”? (But note that it’s often a white man’s Korean nationalism; the above declaration of reverent helplessness in the face of a perfectly straightforward word, one imported from the Japanese no less, would baffle most South Koreans.)

Before anyone tries telling me how much things have changed in recent years, this is from the Korea Times article quoted above:

“Interest in Korean popular culture is also generating an interest in ‘high culture’ ― from Korean language to gestures to semiotics to culture customs,” Jieun Kiaer, a professor of Korean linguistics at the University of Oxford, told The Korea Times. “Even ‘Korean common sense’ in the form of concepts like ‘nunchi’ ― which can be compared to emotional intelligence in the West ― is a hot talking point across the globe.”

Just as han must be dissociatively presented as Korean bitterness, and jeong as Korean kindness, nunchi can only be Korean common sense, as opposed to a wonderful word for an intuitive skill common to all socialized humans. I realize that some members of the Korean diaspora have been trying to make this a “thing,” just as some like to tout the unique profundity of a Korean mother’s love, but must Korean studies join in? Would any Germanist define Gemütlichkeit as German conviviality?

Far more visitors find Koreans conspicuously lacking in sensitivity to each other’s unverbalized feelings than find them abounding in it. Take for example the custom of pointing out to a young woman in mixed company the pimple she has piled concealer on; or of cheerfully interrogating an older, obviously crestfallen woman as to why she doesn’t have kids. But the diaspora is well known for preserving the guk-ppong myths that they or their parents emigrated with.

Meanwhile most of the homeland has moved on. My foreign students’ unpleasant experiences here (like my own) usually involve Koreans of a certain age. After the Seoul Olympics in 1988 children stopped getting that frog-in-the-well stuff dinned into them. I just asked a young acquaintance over Katalk (not in a leading way) if she considers nunchi a Korean thing. Her surprised response: Who says it is? She’d always assumed there was an English word for it. People planning to marry foreigners no longer have to hear warnings, as my wife did in 1987, that most international marriages end in divorce, a fake fact chalked up to the Other’s lack of that “Korean common sense.”

So I’m afraid visitors who still want to hear an old-school ethnocentric fuss made about han, jeong, nunchi, etc, will have to buttonhole someone over 50 — or fly home and take Korean studies. But how many want to hear it? If the field’s popularity isn’t growing in proportion to the popular culture’s, it’s in large part because the one thing seems so much more inclusive than the other.

“Does one every really want to hear any lecture?” asks a character in a Barbara Pym novel. “One just submits, as it were.” But my students submit more readily when I let someone from North Korea do the talking, as I did a few weeks ago. A former factory worker now in her thirties, Haewon (as I’ll call her) escaped in mid-2019, arriving at Incheon airport a few months later, after journeying through China and Vietnam to the ROK embassy in Bangkok.

“I wasn’t assigned to Busan,” she said, “I chose it; I didn’t want to live in Seoul.” Why, we asked, eager to hear our city praised. “I wanted to get as far away from North Korea as possible.” In her home town she’d had to work from seven to eleven every night — in the Led Zeppelin sense: 16 hours, not four — with a preliminary hour or two cleaning up around the neighborhood pair of leader statues. Having decided to escape after her father died, she needed a year of preparation just to get to the China border without exciting suspicion. The last thing she heard before almost drowning in the Tumen was the broker at her back whispering: Don’t worry, the river’s shallow here. She laughed as she described the water closing over her head, her fear of dying. (And I see aspiring K-Pop singers crying on TV because they have to rehearse a lot. But they say northern Koreans were a tougher bunch even in the Chosun Dynasty.)

With Q & A came the inevitable question: Difficulties adjusting? While Haewon pondered, I urged her psychically from across the room: anything but the usual remarks about Busan dialect and how querulous it sounds, which everyone here is tired of… “Busan dialect,” she said. “At first I thought everyone was fighting.” Okay, but how about North-South differences, culture shock? After a moment’s reflection she laughed again: Ignorance of the word “OPEN” had kept her dawdling outside a shop one morning, yet when she ventured into a bank, they gave her English-language forms to fill out, thinking she sounded foreign.

Afterwards, outside the classroom, Haewon wanted a photograph with me, never having met an American before. I told her I had the impression, from things like the North’s birth rate and the relatively unfortified state of the border to China, that the Kim regime still enjoys a good deal of popular support. She agreed. “The nuclear program in particular makes people proud. A big fuss is made about each step forward.”

Which brings me back to what I asked on this blog four years ago: How could Kim Jong Un hope to abandon military-firstism and still stay in power? This central question should be the subject of entire conferences and think-tank papers, but it’s rarely even raised. In a WebEx gathering a few weeks ago I asked it of some Pyongyang watchers of an optimistic bent. As expected, I got back some talk about how the lifting of sanctions and the improvement of living standards would probably suffice to keep Kim’s subjects happy.

I’ve argued against that assumption too often to want to do so at length here. Let me just say about North Korea what Kingsley Amis once said about the Soviet Union: things could get a lot better there and still be bloody awful. Being essentially a family-owned state, it would be particularly slow to narrow the inter-Korean gap in the “progressive” areas of health care, workers’ rights and social welfare. In contrast East Germany ranked higher among the world’s economies than South Korea does today, and was able to make some claim to superiority over the Federal Republic on socialist grounds. The Wall came down anyway.

So I’ll keep asking the question: how’s a denuclearized, economy-first North Korea to survive for more than a few years at the outside? While that’s as far ahead as our elected leaders tend to think, the de facto monarch in Pyongyang takes a long-term view — or has “low time preference,” as the economists say. Perhaps our hardliners and softliners should try jointly working out a credible political plan for the fellow to mull over. If we don’t know ourselves how he could survive as the leader of a poor man’s version of South Korea, we can hardly hope to persuade him, through carrots or sticks, to leave the road he’s on.

The general realization that no such plan is devisable would mark a step forward in itself. We could then all agree that the unification drive is dictated not only by nationalism, something Americans always have a hard time taking seriously, but also by the regime’s correct assessment of objective conditions. It must subjugate the South at some point or go under.

South Korean news outlets have finally had to admit that their reports of weird cultic rites in Park Geun-hye’s Blue House had no basis in fact. Her former confidante, then accused of being a shaman herself, is suing various media companies and politicians for defamation. But will the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, Financial Times, etc, which passed on the fake news under lurid headlines, ever set their readership straight? I doubt it.

Nor is the bad news about Moon Jae-in that Western journalists swept under the rug likely to come to light either. Should he escape punishment for his abuses of power — as the new law hamstringing prosecutors was created to help him do — the Western news consumer will have no cause ever to hear about them. And Reuters may never have to admit that Lee Jae-myung, another beneficiary of the new law, wasn’t so much “Korea’s Bernie Sanders” as its Rod Blagojevitch. (Before that, mirror-imaging buffs, he was Seongnam’s Saul Goodman.)

I realize that if the folks back home are to show any interest in ROK politics, they need a team to cheer for and a team to boo, but correspondents wanting to frame Yoon Seok-yeol as Korea’s Trump are going to have their work cut out for them. He’s no conservative even by South Korean standards, let alone ours. Any local person who (waking from a long coma, say) knew only that Yoon helped imprison Park Geun-hye, that he plans to enshrine the spirit of the Gwangju uprising in the constitution, and that his political idols are Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun, would naturally take him for a leftist.

That assumption wouldn’t necessarily change upon hearing news — well-founded this time — of the incoming First Couple’s interest in shamanism, fortune-telling and feng shui. The left was always more into that sort of thing. (The main objective of the propaganda about Park was to turn her Christian-heavy base against her.) To this day shamans perform ceremonies for “democratization martyrs,” and Japan-bashers recall colonial attacks on the nation’s feng shui, such as metal spikes driven into mountainsides. Certainly no conservative president-elect would let a “spiritual advisor” talk him into abandoning the Blue House, one of very few bona fide state symbols in this shamefaced republic, in order to work out of a so-called People’s House instead.

I’m not saying Yoon is on the nationalist left. Even his projected center-leftism seems more a matter of conformism and class-envy deflecting than conviction; in America he’d be moderately woke. No wonder the People Power Party was so quick to latch onto him.

Depoliticization is underway here all right, but not as something new to South Korea. One could well argue that since Park’s impeachment in 2016, the country has reverted from an aberrational period of ideological conflict — which was never as sharp as foreigners thought anyway — to an old patrimonial tradition of fighting over everything except ideology. The following is from a book by Norman Jacobs for which I paid a fortune at Kyobo during the Chun Doo Hwan era (only to find, to my annoyance, that every mention of “DPRK” had been blacked out with a felt pen).

Inter-party contention over issues [in the ROK] is shallow and superficial, being but a vehicle to denounce opponents as inept and hence unworthy to exercise power, or a bargaining device to obtain a share of the available power and prebends. Indifference to ideology … encourages raiding and the formation of opportunistic cliques whose members will ally themselves to anyone willing and able to offer some advantage. (From The Korean Road to Modernization and Development, Urbana, 1985, p. 26.)

That seems even truer today, except for “indifference to ideology,” which remains wrong; “acquiescence in the hegemonic ideology” makes more sense. When Jacobs was researching his book, that ideology was anti-North conservatism. Today it’s nationalist leftism, and the new ruling party has no will to change that. Last month the PPP refused to allow Kim Jin-tae to run for governor of Gangwon province until he made a groveling apology for questioning the orthodox narrative of the Gwangju Democratization Movement.

Softline Korea watchers are already wringing their hands about Yoon’s pledges to strengthen the alliance and take no nonsense from North Korea, but even Moon said that sort of thing. As yet there are no indications that Yoon will break sharply with his predecessor’s policy toward Pyongyang — unless, that is, he’s forced to do so by acts of aggression, as happened to Lee Myung Bak after a few “underwater” overtures to Kim Jong Il.

It has been announced, for example, that Yoon will abide by the inter-Korean military agreement of September 2018. Like all agreements since 2000 this is a far better deal for the North than the South. (Just compare the relative proximity of Seoul and Pyongyang to the DMZ, and ponder the obvious implications of demilitarizing it in earnest.)

Yoon even appears ready to leave Park Jie-won in charge of the intelligence agency for a while yet. Like a good patrimonial official — and a few precision-centrists in the Korea-watching community — Park has moved rightward since the election. The other day he contradicted Moon by saying the North will never denuclearize. Let’s not forget, however, that the main reason the old man got the job was because the regime in Pyongyang is known to trust him.

Meanwhile Park Jin, Yoon’s nominee for foreign minister, has signaled that the administration may continue Moon’s policy of the “Three No’s”: no additional THAAD deployment, no participation in America’s missile defense system, and no formation of a trilateral military alliance with America and Japan.

The White House can’t very well demand more loyalty. A day after meeting Yoon in Seoul on May 21, our president is scheduled to meet with Moon — the same Moon who told a stadium in Pyongyang that the North does all Koreans proud by going its own way.

Of course this breach of diplomatic protocol needn’t have the same effect as Carter’s meeting with Kim Young Sam in July 1979, a show of “dropping” Park Chung Hee t0 which many historians attribute the dramatic events of the following October. Still, Biden’s gesture (which was probably much lobbied for) will eliminate the pseudo-conservatives’ only remaining selling point: their claim to get along better with the US ally than the left does. And this only a few weeks before local elections! Why go out on a limb for the Americans, Yoon may well be thinking, if they’re nicer when you don’t?

But he has much bigger problems than Biden. Depoliticization always helps the side that avows the hegemonic ideology more convincingly. It also makes voters less interested in the daily news. This may help explain why Lee Jae-myung, whom no self-respecting voter in the Philippines would look at twice, remains so popular here. The better part of a billion dollars is estimated to have gone missing on his mayoral-gubernatorial watch over the Seongnam area, yet he came within a hair’s breadth of winning the presidency, and is now expected to win a parliamentary seat in Incheon (as he must do to stay out of prison).

Perhaps I should add that many on the ROK left subscribe to a convenient Gramscian logic according to which their kind must ascend to the upper class by any means necessary, so as to rout the pro-Japanese “accumulated evils” there and take back the country. Also, as I’ve written a few times before, nationalist politicians count as more truly Korean and therefore incapable of premeditated evil; their transgressions are but errors, etc.

On the other hand, it was only thanks to the Minjoo’s nomination of Lee that the less-left candidate could plausibly present himself as the cleaner of the two, perhaps a first in the history of ROK presidential races. Had Yoon behaved accordingly after his victory, the Minjoo majority in the National Assembly wouldn’t have dared ram through the law I mentioned above. Fortunately for Moon and Lee, the president-elect squandered his moral authority within days, first by selfishly insisting on the costly abandonment of the Blue House complex, and then by appointing several people with records of the usual Gangnam sleaze.

The latter blunder did more damage, throwing as it did a harsh retrospective light on Yoon’s crusades against Park Geun-hye and Moon’s darling Cho Kuk, neither of whom did anything much more serious than what some of these cabinet picks appear to have got up to. Was Yoon in cahoots with the pseudo-right all along? Or did “spiritual advisors” on a stormy heath send him on his winding road to kingship?

As my readers must know already, Yoon Seok-yeol’s approval ratings are at record lows for a president-elect. I expect them to continue falling after a post-inaugural jump, if he gets even that. This is the danger of standing for competence and honesty instead of political values; one’s missteps and scandals are naturally judged more harshly than the other side’s.

Inter-party talks on constitutional revision are expected by many to begin later this year. They will bring more disappointment for conservative citizens without winning Yoon any support from the left. What demographic does he expect to prop up his poll numbers when the candlelight theatrics take off? I once asked a Munhwa Ilbo journalist to explain the absence of a big paper in the dead center of the ideological spectrum, and she said, “Because there’s no place to stand there.” That goes for governments too.

 

UPDATE: 19 May 2022: No Biden-Moon Meeting

After two weeks of South Korean media reports of a 21 May meeting between Joe Biden and Moon Jae-in, the White House has denied that any such event is planned.