Author: ahasuerus

The one resolved only to do what they believed the people would like and approve; and the other that the people should like and approve what they had resolved. And this difference in the measures they took was the true cause of the so different success in all they undertook. — Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion (1702)

A few days before the legislative elections on April 15 a banner went up near my house in Sasang District urging all local residents to claim their roughly $40 coronavirus benefit. The Sri Lankan factory-workers I see sitting glumly in front of E-Mart are no doubt in greater need of this money than, say, the local Benz-driving restaurateur who has been “temporarily” accepting cash only for as long as I can remember.

But a telephone call to the number on the banner confirmed what I had instantly assumed: foreign residents need not apply. No, the lady said, it makes no difference if the foreigner has lived and paid taxes in Sasang-gu for 13 years. No, not even if he has the right to vote in municipal elections. It turned out that the only Sasang residents qualified to get the money were those entitled to vote on April 15. Honi soit qui mal y pense.

The day after the election, the city of Ansan announced with some fanfare that its foreign residents would be getting 70% of what the Koreans get. The prevailing ideology that makes such discrimination possible, even respectable, is not progressivism or liberalism but nationalist leftism.

Not that the Western media will ever say so; the “counter-intuitive” combination of nationalist and left is already more than they think the reader can handle. In coverage of foreign developments, they favor explanations that can be understood without entering into unfamiliar cultures and mindsets. There are always academics eager to provide that sort of soundbite. The result is what experts on the media call “the illusion of transparency”: that reassuring feeling given (or sold) to the average Joe that nothing in the world, nothing that really matters, surpasses his immediate understanding.

Having overlooked the public anger at the Moon government’s initial mishandling of the coronavirus, outsiders find it all the easier to attribute the ruling party’s victory to public gratitude for an impeccable response. Although ideology played an especially strong role in this election, as was reflected in the high turn-out, the foreign press acts as if South Korean voters were admirably free of it, choosing the ruling party out of pragmatism or common sense.

In the same spirit we are told that the conservatives did badly because of their inability to abandon an anachronistic anti-communist ideology and get with the times. The English-only observers may honestly see things this way. I suspect the Korean-reading ones only pretend to; they want the world to root for Moon, and figure that exaggerating the South Korean opposition’s conservatism is the best way to do that. They also want to present the vote to the US government as a mandate for North-South cooperation, therefore as a call for an ethnic exemption from sanctions.

But there are no grounds for the claim that the United Future Party (UFP) failed because it stuck to a right-wing tradition extending back to the days of dictatorship. Most of the candidates in those hideous pink jackets were Park-impeachers, center-rightists, and centrists. Only an outcry from the rank and file prevented the party from nominating a young woman who until recently had been supporting Moon on social media. I spotted at least one candidate who surely still counts as center-left: the Pyongyang watcher Kim Geun-sik. It was just four years ago, I think, that he and I debated the Kaesong issue at a breakfast event in Seoul.

The only candidate whose name made one instantly think “anti-Pyongyang” was the defector Thae Yong-ho, who won by a landslide in Gangnam of all places. That fact alone makes one wonder if the UFP might have done better with a more classic campaign.

From the start of things in March the party put its eggs in the corona basket, riding around on the government’s purely technical errors in the hope that public anger would continue up to April 15. In effect the UFP was joining the fight with the left on the latter’s social-welfare turf. Isn’t that all an opposition party can do, if fundamental ideological argument is out?

But from mid-March to mid-April, South Korea went from the second-worst-hit country to a perceived model for the world, forcing the UFP’s charisma-free leader to resort to petty carping about the government’s latest measures. One UFP pol even complained about all the time President Moon was spending on the phone, fielding foreign leaders’ calls for help.

Throughout the campaign the party seemed determined to persuade the street right to stay home on the big day. Having already locked horns with the popular mega-church preacher who led the flag-waving demonstrations last autumn, it dropped heavy hints of a readiness to go along with constitutional revision. In response a few Youtubers called for the boycott of all candidates who didn’t vow to protect the constitution. And in the crucial final stretch of the campaign, the UFP tried vainly to expel from the party a candidate who had brought up the so-called “Sewol tent threesome” scandal.

This last was a classic example of the parliamentary right’s effort to woo the mainstream by respecting all the velvet ropes the left-wing strings up around events, reputations and myths from which it derives a perceived moral capital. Like most appeasement policies this has the opposite effect to the one intended, as witness the flying water bottles, threats and insults that greet even center-right figures who “have the effrontery” to turn up at memorial services for Gwangju 1980. The right seems not to grasp that one cannot respect the orthodox version of history without perpetuating the ideology behind it.

That ideology rejects the right as an inherently immoral, genealogically tainted, pro-Japanese hereditary caste. The word “accumulated ill,” originally first applied to bad practices, institutions, etc, is now — along with “pro-Japanese faction” — the main epithet for a conservative of any prominence or wealth. Let me be perfectly clear: The individual person is a walking ill or evil, the embodiment of all that is wrong with Korean society. It follows that his corruption, his abuse of power reflects his true self, whereas the nationalist leftist, being purely Korean and thus incapable of premeditated evil (see C. Fred Alford), errs only under duress or out of good intentions.

Example: The “accumulated ill” who games the university admissions system does so to perpetuate the pro-Japanese caste’s hold on power and privilege. The nationalist-left millionaire does so because he loves his children too much — and what could be more Korean? The same logic is applied to insider trading and real-estate speculation. It’s not a double standard when you think about it.

So it is that even the many young people who were furious at the ruling party during the first months of the Cho Kuk scandal or the first few weeks of corona did not — as the polls showed clearly at the time — warm to the right as a result. Nor did they stay angry for long. In this sense the ruling party is not wrong in interpreting its victory as a mandate for the “peace system,” even though it avoided that topic during the campaign just as Moon did in 2017. The win was certainly a mandate for nationalist leftism. If the masses still don’t know what that movement’s main goal is, after all it has said publicly on the subject since 2000, they have only themselves to blame.

UPDATE: 3 May 2020: Anti-Communism?

A recent article by Jean Do in the National Interest starts as follows:

On April 15, the constituents of Seoul’s most affluent district in Gangnam elected a North Korean defector as their parliamentary representative in a general election held at the height of the global COVID-19 pandemic. This attested to the Korean people’s unswerving commitment to democracy but underscored the persistent weight of Cold War ideology on the country’s politics which deters inclusion and diversity. A highly visible figure in the campaign for North Korean regime change (regime collapse), Thae Yong-ho served as Pyongyang’s deputy ambassador to the United Kingdom before he defected in 2016 and ran on the ticket of the opposition United Future Party (UFP). The UFP represents the most critical view of the current South Korean President Moon Jae In’s reconciliation policy, charging the government for being soft on “communism (which means the Kim family rule).” The people’s response to Thae Yong-ho’s election has ranged from amusing, unexpected, puzzling, to outright shocking.

[Read: “amusement, surprise, puzzlement, to outright shock.”] Now, I found Thae’s election surprising myself, having thought him too obviously lacking in relevant know-how to win by such a wide margin. But I have to assume that the 58% of Gangnam voters who chose him and the 41% who voted conservative across the country welcomed his election. No doubt many also saw it (as the Western press did) as a step towards “inclusion and diversity.” Which is to say that when Jean Do speaks of “the people,” she means what the ruling party does.

But none of these responses are warranted given the fact that his constituents in the upscale Gangnam district cast the exact ideological vote they would have cast, and have always casted, in any case, based on an anti-communism.

So the main reason upscale voters went for the United Future Party was not their opposition to higher taxes and restrictions on business; it was because their Cold War ideology made them angry at Moon Jae-in for being soft on Kim Jong Un? Maybe it’s my class envy talking, but I refuse to believe that Gangnamites worry more about the future of the peninsula than about their bank accounts — especially considering how little opportunity Washington has given Moon to be soft on Kim since 2018.

True, Thae was the most obviously anti-Pyongyang candidate on the UFP ticket. At the very least, his victory showed that criticism of the Kim regime did not go down as badly with voters as some in the UFP feared it would. Maybe he brought out some elderly street-right voters who might otherwise have stayed home, though I doubt there are many in that part of the country.

After all, an opinion poll taken in Gangnam before the voting revealed no significant interest in inter-Korean issues. People said they supported Thae a) for the party he belonged to, and b) for his campaign pledges, which prioritized economic matters. He also did well with female voters, who don’t usually warm to anti-North types. I therefore posit that National Interest article in the tired academic tradition of ascribing all right-wing election victories here to irrational, propaganda-heightened fears of the North.

What bothers me more is the familiar assumption that opposition to “Kim family rule” equals “anti-communism.” I don’t deny that when the average South Korean conservative describes someone as a communist or a “red,” he or she means nothing more by it than “a supporter of the Kim regime.” But this is no reason why the rest of us should misuse the words communism and anti-communism in the same way. In my circle of acquaintances at university was a communist fiercely opposed to North Korea. Was he communist and anti-communist at the same time?

It’s odd enough to call a military-first, blood-nationalist monarchy a left-wing state, but communist is just not on. I use the M-word advisedly, since it denotes any system in which a ruler can choose his successor, whether he calls himself King, Lord Protector, the Great Lion, or National Defense Council Chairman. North Korea is not like a monarchy; it is a monarchy. Of the absolute sort. And as I have said numerous times before, what still attracts its own citizens, South Korean nationalists, Western neo-Nazis and perhaps Donald Trump to the state are its right-wing aspects: its perceived autonomy, its strong, no-nonsense leader, its mighty military and unified, racially homogeneous citizenry, its splendid isolation from harmful foreign influences.

I also take issue (once again) with the long-obsolete notion that South Korean parliamentary conservatism is largely a matter of Cold-War-type, hardline opposition to Pyongyang. The ruling party’s alleged mishandling of the corona crisis, its alleged corruption, abuses of power, economic incompetence, etc: these were the things the UFP made much of during the campaign. More importantly, as I have pointed out repeatedly on this blog, it has been at least thirty-two years, probably longer, since any significant conservative force on the peninsula took a consistently hardline approach to the North (by Western or Cold War standards of that word).

We must keep in mind that Chun Doo Hwan’s was the first ROK administration to publicly propose: a summit at a location of the North Korean leader’s choosing; a Seoul-Pyongyang highway; a joint tourist zone encompassing the North’s Mount Geumgang and the South’s Mount Seorak; the opening of one harbor in each Korea to free inter-trade; and a unified Olympic team (for Los Angeles). Chun’s crony and successor Roh Tae Woo proposed an inter-Korean league; announced a readiness to make “preemptive concessions” to the North; lifted the ban on many of its publications, including fiercely anti-American ones; and called for schoolchildren to be taught to regard North Korea as a partner.

These things were not said or done in grudging response to grass-roots demands; the improvement of North-South Korean relations has always been an elite-driven affair pulling an only sporadically interested electorate behind it. A majority polled under Roh Tae Woo fretted that he was moving far too rashly with the North.

Before this update gets too long let me just recall Kim Young Sam’s “no ally is better than the same nation” statement in 1993; Park Geun-hye’s grinning encounter (before her presidency) with Kim Jong Il, a man likely to have been complicit in the killing of her mother; Lee Myung Bak’s initial response to the killing of a South Korean housewife in the North, which was to call for better inter-Korean relations; and the same “hardline” president’s refusal even to close down the Kaesong Industrial Zone after the deadly North Korean attacks of 2010.

As Norman Jacobs pointed out forty years ago, the central argument here is always over which side is morally better qualified to do the things generally considered advisable. Ever since Rhee left for Hawaii the right has been closer to the nationalist left than is generally believed.

Understandably this remains one of the latter’s main criticisms: not that the right is rigidly and fanatically “anti-communist,” but that it cynically whips up fears of the regime in Pyongyang that deep down it does not share itself. Hence the use, by Moon Jae-in among others, of terms like “vendors of conservatism,” “fake conservatives,” etc. Indeed, I can well imagine how ROK propagandists would have howled had Kim Dae Jung proposed in 1971 the sort of inter-Korean agreement the Park Chung Hee administration signed in 1972.

In 1989 Yim Su-gyeong was demonized for going sans authorization to the World Youth Festival in Pyongyang, yet the ROK government saw no problem in sending tributaries of its own, because, hey, it was the government. In fairness to today’s parliamentary right, I must say that its tradition goes back to Kim Young Sam and not Roh Tae Woo, but its lack of any firm principles in re Pyongyang is Roh- and Kim-like.

I suppose it’s a natural concomitant of globalization that — as I’ve heard colleagues in other fields complain — the Western-academic consensus on foreign countries drifts ever closer toward the orthodoxies prevailing in the countries themselves. I just hope that our media can make an effort to explain this unique political landscape to Western readers, instead of simply trying to encourage support for the Moon administration.

UPDATE: 9 December 2020

Note: The UFP has since been renamed the People’s Power Party and has moved further leftward, as witness how, in this week of a direct government assault on the prosecutors’ office (and the arrest of another journalist) the PPP has shown less interest in agitation or resistance than in a) marginalizing what remains of its old-school conservative element (Kim Jin-tae, Jun Hee-kyung, et al) and b) calling on members to support a collective public apology for offenses committed in the past by actual conservative parties with different chairmen and different names. No South Korean government has been less troubled by the main opposition party since the Chun era (1980-88).

The twin obsessions of the foreign press corps in Seoul are a) North Korea and b) K-Pop, K-Film, K-Anything-But-Politics. So rare is it for a big Western news outlet to say anything substantial about either the South Korean government or the opposition that when one does, it makes headlines here. Each side crows loudly on seeing itself praised overseas, and even more loudly when the other side comes in for criticism. Translation of the relevant quotes is done freely to say the least; Pound’s renditions of Chinese poetry were pedantic in comparison. A common trick is to claim that Famous American Newspaper X criticized South Korean politician Y, when in fact the former was merely reporting on South Koreans’ criticism of the fellow.

But such propaganda goes down well. The collective fury at Park Geun-hye in late 2016 – which many South Koreans now recall with embarrassment, the way Britons recall the hysteria after Lady Di’s death – was fed into by constant updates on how scandalized the world allegedly was. Most people groaning over their morning Hankyoreh or Chosun at the disgrace Park had brought to their country failed to realize they were really just reading local coverage of foreign coverage of local coverage.

Now that Moon’s administration is mired in scandals uncannily like the ones Park got impeached for, Western journalists show less interest than ever in covering South Korean politics. I can think of various reasons for this.

1) Since Trump was elected, most Western correspondents feel a moral duty to root openly for whatever main political figure in the host country they consider less Trump-like, who in this case is Moon. The same “mirror imaging” dictates that they root against South Korea’s main opposition party, to which they occasionally apply the label “far right,” although it’s well to the left of our Republicans, and most of its members voted in favor of impeaching Park in 2016.

2) When deciding which local stories merit attention, correspondents (and perhaps their editors) seem to follow the lead of the New York Times’ bilingual correspondent Choe Sang-hun, whose own record of stories over the past 10 or so years parallels the agenda of the once-opposition, now staunchly government-loyal Hankyoreh newspaper he used to write for. The language barrier also forces correspondents to rely on local assistants and interns who, like most young people here, get their news from the Naver portal, which has ties to the Blue House and steers clear of stories riling up the Moon-critical half of the country.

3) Foreign journalists are as reluctant as their local colleagues to annoy Moon’s excitable netizen base, especially since the orchestrated attacks in 2019 on a South Korean journalist for Bloomberg who had referred to his reputation in some quarters as a “spokesman for Pyongyang.” (The chairman of the ruling party denounced her as “a black-haired foreigner” for her “borderline traitorous” article.)

Perhaps you think I’m reading too much into media practices that have more to do with the fact that most Western people are just not interested in Asian party politics. Let me instance, then, the general failure to report on the local reaction to the lunch party Moon threw on February 20 for Bong Jun-ho, the director of Parasite. The president had allegedly just been briefed on the first steep jump in the number of daily coronavirus cases.

Now there you had a half-celebrity, half-political story that was both topically important and likely to interest a large number of Westerners, the movie buffs if no one else. It had the added advantage of coming with a photograph of the lunchtime merriment that became an instant meme in South Korea. But how much coverage of the ill-timed event or the backlash was there in the foreign press?

As the virus spread rapidly, keeping South Korea in second place for the total number of infections for several days on end, public anger grew over such things as:

• President Moon’s premature assurance that efforts to contain the virus had “entered a stable stage” for which reason the crisis would “end before long” (February 13)
• the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism’s public-service video, created to counter alarmism about the virus, that suggested: “How about watching a movie in the theater, or taking in a public performance, or having a meal in a restaurant?” (February 20)
• the ruling party spokesman’s sensational statement that “maximum sealing-off measures” would be imposed on the city of Daegu, forcing Moon to deliver a hasty (and not entirely convincing) clarification that no Wuhan-type sequestering had been meant (February 25)
• the “mask chaos,” i.e. the government’s flip-flopping statements on when and where citizens can buy masks, its inability to ensure a steady supply, and the resulting need for entire families to queue outside for long periods of time, raising the perceived risk of infection and placing special burdens on the elderly (esp. February 27 — March 8)
• the health minister’s various gaffes, ranging from his curiously heated assertion that the virus had been brought into the country by Koreans, not Chinese (February 27), to his claim, which infuriated the medical community,  that doctors were only complaining about the shortage of masks because they wanted to stockpile them (March 12)
• and most of all, the government’s refusal to heed repeated calls by the Korean Medical Association for restrictions on the entry of Chinese, let alone the public petition on the Blue House website (initiated in January) for an entry ban on all Chinese travelers.

As an American I wish my own country’s health-care problems were of this relatively minor sort. For that matter I don’t believe things would have been handled any better by a conservative administration. But my point is that reasonably or not, half the South Korean public is angry about what it sees as incompetence, not least because Moon was elected in part on extravagant promises to out-mother Park on the health and safety front. Many a news outlet and Youtuber has congratulated him sarcastically on fulfilling his famous pledge to create “a Korea that has never been experienced before.” The snaking queues for masks are regarded by many Koreans, including left-wing friends of mine, as a national disgrace. A video by a tearfully angry Daegu woman has racked up over two million views. And in none of this has the Western press shown much interest.

The government’s response to public criticism has been to scapegoat the Shincheonji religious sect, a gathering of whose members inadvertently played a key role in spreading the virus around Daegu. These big sects have close ties to both sides of the aisle and are usually spared media scrutiny as a result — a few travel guides for Westerners say the whole topic should be avoided — but this time was different. (I don’t need to tell you which American newspaper led the way for the foreign press with an article on the “shadowy church.”) There have also been ruling-party attempts to link Shincheonji especially closely to the conservative opposition, despite the group’s ardent campaigning for an inter-Korean peace treaty. In a move widely criticized as empty grandstanding, the Moon-loyal mayor of Seoul sued the leader of the sect for “murder, injury and violation of prevention and management of infectious diseases.” Nor did prominent Moon supporters like the novelist Gong Ji-young scruple to imply in public that Daegu had been especially hard hit because it votes conservative.

Now that South Korea shows signs of turning the corner on the coronavirus, the foreign press is again hitting the panegyric notes it struck so prematurely in early February. John Power’s article in the South China Morning Post is a very long string of compliments and favorable soundbites, with a token “not without its missteps” bit at the end. (No critic of the government is actually quoted.) Praise is meted out more to the “authorities” than to the heroic medical workers in Daegu or its civic-minded citizenry.

It’s a good thing academia exists to provide the necessary nuance, depth and — no, scratch that. An article on “why Trump can’t copy South Korea’s coronavirus strategy” was in The National Interest on March 14 courtesy of Pusan National University’s Robert Kelly:

Finally, and this must be said, the leadership gap between the two countries is yawning…. Moon has shown a far greater willingness to take corona seriously and allow experts to run the response. There has been nothing here like Trump’s dithering over the last month, or his bizarre public announcements that this will just go away soon or is under control.

Where to begin? And why bother? I do wonder, though, how the Western press and its readers will make sense of the South Korean elections on April 15, should they result in anything less than a resounding victory for the ruling party. In closing I can only remind everyone overseas who has a serious interest or stake in Korea, and wants to anticipate developments here to some degree, that our media do no more justice to this complex half of the peninsula than to the other.

A former intelligence officer for Czechoslovakia, discussing the East Bloc’s advantages in the Cold War, highlighted America’s tendency to react to developments rather than to anticipate them. I think our inattention to ideology is at least partly to blame. Pearl Harbor, the outbreak of the Korean War, the Iranian revolution, 9/11: each of those events came as a shock to us not because intelligence-gathering in the narrow sense had failed, but because we’d refused to take seriously an ideology with very clear goals.

Perhaps it’s because journalism and academia are especially Americanized walks of life that the Western Korea commentariat steers collectively clear of ideology, instead focusing on the most topical and front-stage developments: the missile just launched, Trump’s response, pending ROK-US exercises, etc.  Rather than delve into a cultural context of which the most vocal experts know nothing, the discussion stays realpolitisch, nuclear- and economy-oriented (and therefore quantitative), and fixed on the Pyongyang-Washington axis.

In 2018, after Moon and Kim’s visit to Mount Paektu, I wondered aloud what it would take for the West to wake up to Korean nationalism. Now it’s 2020, and I still don’t know the answer. The commitment to a North-South league or confederation, which has been in school textbooks and on the Ministry of Unification’s website for quite a while already, continues to be dismissed by foreigners as a chimera of the paranoid right. Judging from a video on Youtube, a recent conference in Washington ostensibly devoted to the topic of “Building a Peace Regime on the Korean Peninsula” was about everything but that. The ROK was treated once again as an impatient bystander or facilitator of Trump-Kim talks, not as half of the “peace regime” in question.

Most people these days assume that Pyongyang is as furious at Moon as it makes out to be. I hear this asserted by South Korean experts as well (including one I respectfully differed with in a KBS World Radio discussion two weeks ago). But the main guarantor of the dictatorship’s security remains its ability to launch a devastating retaliatory strike on Seoul. If Kim Jong Un is to turn up the heat on the Americans while ingratiating himself with the South Koreans, it’s vital that the former consider him capable of such a horrible thing and that the latter do not. The outward aspects of North-South fraternization must be managed accordingly. Hence Pyongyang’s alternation of apocalyptic threats with assurances that the South has nothing to fear from its nukes. Anyone strolling around Seoul or Busan can see which of those two modes of expression is taken more seriously.

By responding to insults with goodwill gestures Moon shows he understands the position Kim is in. And he too must present inter-Korean relations in one way for the US, another way for South Korea. The Beltway must go on taking him for a good ally, albeit one with a bold new approach to effecting the North’s denuclearization. His own people are to understand that the “peace regime” remains under steady, ethnic-autonomous construction regardless of what happens on the nuclear front.

Although the ROK’s drift into the orbit of Pyongyang and Beijing is finally getting noticed overseas, most foreigners refuse to regard it as ideologically driven, or even as ROK-driven. To assert that nationalism is bringing the two halves of this divided nation closer together is still to be accused of a wild conspiracy theory. Never mind that Moon himself, in one speech after another since May 2017, has put his North policy in the tradition of the anti-Japanese struggle.

Like the other Korea the ROK is patronizingly regarded as an ideology-free, “reactive” state responding to stimuli from Washington. And like his northern counterpart Moon is seen, with the same ignorance of Korean hierarchies, as needing American concessions so as to keep his more extreme underlings in check. It’s therefore the trend among experts to suggest that whether Seoul goes its own way with Pyongyang will depend on Uncle Sam’s input in the short term. You see, while no sense of proud belonging to an ancient nation could bring these staunchly liberal South Koreans closer to a dictatorship, our arrogance may have that very effect if we’re not careful. Everything revolves around us.

I can’t fault the Moon camp for trying to encourage and exploit this guilty America-centricity, but our self-styled experts have no excuse for ignoring the very different tenor of its domestic discourse. Something tells me the US will go on being the most “reactive” player in the mix.

I was 29 when I first began drawing attention to North Korean propagandists’ heavy use of mother symbolism, and their depiction of adult Koreans as overgrown children or babies. See my article “Mother Russia: Soviet Characters in North Korean Fiction” (Korean Studies 16, 1992).

In my first book Han Sŏrya and North Korean Literature (Cornell East Asia Series, 1994) I contradicted conventional notions of a Stalinist-cum-Confucian personality cult by showing that the pioneer iconographer of the personality cult depicted Kim Il Sung as a mother figure instead.

In 2004 I wrote a long article for the Atlantic entitled “Mother of all Mothers: Leadership Secrets of Kim Jong Il.”

I returned to this topic in The Cleanest Race (Melville House, 2010). In a chapter entitled “Mother Korea and her Children” I discussed the Mother Homeland, the Mother Party, and the preponderance of young maternal characters in fiction. In other chapters I discussed the matricentric symbolism of the personality cults of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il.

To drive home the importance of this unique aspect of the North’s official culture I translated the following entries from a dictionary (Pyongyang, 1964) and used them as the epigraph to the book:

MOTHER: 1) The woman who has given birth to one: Father and mother; a mother’s love. A mother’s benevolence is higher than a mountain, deeper than the ocean. Also used in the sense of “a woman who has a child”: What all mothers anxiously want is for their children to grow up healthy and become magnificent red builders. 2) A respectful term for someone of an age similar to one’s own mother: Comrade Platoon Leader called Dŏngmani’s mother “mother” and always helped her in her work. 3) A metaphor for being loving, looking after everything, and worrying about others: Party officials must become mothers who ceaselessly love and teach the Party rank and file, and become standard-bearers at the forefront of activities. In other words, someone in charge of lodgings has to become a mother to the boarders. This means looking carefully after everything: whether someone is cold or sick, how they are eating, and so on. 4) A metaphor for the source from which something originates: The Party is the great mother of everything new. Necessity is the mother of invention. 

FATHER: the husband of one’s birth mother.

Imagine my complete lack of surprise then, upon finally catching up with Suzy Kim’s “Mothers and Maidens: Gendered Formation of Revolutionary Heroes in North Korea” (Journal of Korean Studies, Fall 2014, 257-289), to find the first reference to my work only after 11 pages, 46 citations and the statement — made in the tone of someone breaking new ground — that “North Korean discourses do not emphasize the father figure so much as the mother” (Kim 268, italics in the original).

I suspect I might have received even less/later acknowledgment in the article had Suzy Kim not felt the need at that point in her text to invoke those dictionary entries I’d discovered.

And these couldn’t very well be cited without the admission that “Myers has documented the extensive use of maternal imagery in North Korean publications” (Kim, 268-9). I think even the Closely Knit Club might have understood the circumstances behind this unfortunate recognition of my contributions. They would surely have granted points for the author’s keeping it far away from the introductory state-of-research paragraphs, where the requisite homage-nods to the field’s gatekeepers are made instead. (See endnotes 2, 3 and 4.)

To be on the safe side, though, Suzy Kim writes in the attendant endnote: “Despite my use of [Myers’] work here, I have critically reviewed it elsewhere.”

That’s not enough of course. No CKC or CKC-minded reference to my work is complete without disparagement of my supposed characterization of North Korea as fascist.

Myers interprets this emphasis on the mother and the motherland as reminiscent of fascist ideology that unites the idea of nation with territory (Kim 269).

At the very least this formulation omits the 90% of my interpretation of maternal imagery that has nothing to do with Japan or fascism. (Suzy Kim has no apparent interest in that 90%.) But I’ll let that go.

Then issue is taken with my description of some salient attributes ascribed to the North Korean dictator as “feminine.” The logic as I understand it is that there’s nothing necessarily feminine about the tropes in question, eg cute dimples, Kim nurturing all Korean children at his expansive bosom, etc.

No argument here. I’m the guy who once wrote, while reviewing detective fiction for the Atlantic, “Like all men I have a maternal instinct, but I can clutch only so many characters to my breast at one time.”

In my book however I was speaking of what the North Koreans manifestly consider typically feminine. I was never asserting my own view let alone some objective truth. When I wrote that female protagonists preponderate “because they are more natural symbols of chastity and purity and thus of Koreanness,” I thought it obvious that this too referred to the North Koreans’ perspective as reflected in their culture. I admit it wouldn’t have cost me much to say this more clearly. Sloterdijk says somewhere that we neglect at our peril the full-time misunderstanders, be they amateur or professional.

Suzy Kim goes on to ask rhetorically:

How are “chastity” and “purity” naturally associated with a feminine “Koreanness” that is then read as fascist? (Kim 269)

The second part of the sentence is what I find so wearisome. A few times a year I see attributed to me, with disapproval of course, the model of a fascist North Korea. I tend to encounter this in the work of gatekeeper-puffing grad students or junior scholars whom — I’ve been sternly told — one must never “punch down” at by refuting. This is why I now discuss a five-year-old paper by an established professor instead.

I do indeed write often of North Korean culture’s iconographic similarities to the official culture of fascist Japan. Does anyone except the North Koreans deny them? Yet I get the impression a few Western academics, often the same ones who make much of the Japanese aspects of Park Chung Hee’s ROK, think it very bad form of me to tar the “guerrilla state” with this brush.

All I can say is I didn’t start it. South Korean and Japanese observers have been pointing out the obvious similarities for a lot longer than I or any other Westerners have. In Kim Jillak’s fascinating memoirs (1972), to name just one example, he talks of his surprise at encountering Japanese-style sloganeering while training as an operative near Pyongyang in 1967.

But let me say this as clearly as possible: Nowhere in The Cleanest Race or my other books do I call North Korea a fascist state. Nowhere do I refer to its culture or ideology as fascist. Similar to fascism in many ways, as has often been said of communism itself, and vice versa? Yes. Fascist? No. When writing The Cleanest Race I considered the disclaimer “I do not, however, intend to label North Korea as fascist” important enough to be included in the preface (TCR 15).

Nowhere have I treated mother symbolism as something inherently or characteristically fascist either.

For a quarter-century my emphasis on the North’s matricentric imagery has been part of a greater effort to counter the fallacy of a communist or Stalinist North. Among other things I assert that the Marxist-Leninist spontaneity-consciousness dialectic that formed the “master plot” (Katerina Clark) of Soviet official culture — and that has an obvious counterpart in Confucian culture — is turned on its head in North Korea.

The Soviet protagonist learns to temper his spontaneity with political consciousness, often under the tutelage of a fatherly cadre, thereby becoming a “positive hero” for readers to emulate. Ostrovskiy’s How the Steel Was Tempered (1932-34) is the classic example. I used to help American audiences understand by saying An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) was a socialist realist narrative minus Leninism — see Lou Gossett, Jr in the cadre role — but no one remembers that film anymore.

In contrast the North Korean hero is often depicted as fatherless, living with a mother who is more an indulgent than a disciplinary or didactic figure. Very often the narrative goes not from spontaneity to greater consciousness but in the opposite direction, with the hero casting off the shackles of mere theory or book-learning in order to give rein to his or her instincts – which being Korean are thus pure and good. The parallels to fascism need hardly be pointed out. But as I said in my first book, there’s an indigenous tradition of this very thing, as witness the New Tendency tales of purgative violence written by Ch’oe Sŏ-hae et al in the 1920s.

The cults of Kim Il Sung and Hirohito, I write, are “fundamentally alike … because they derive from a fundamentally similar view of the world” (TCR 109). I stand by that.

The second part of that sentence makes clear, however, that “alike” is to be understood as “similar” (which is one definition for alike in the OED) and not as “indistinguishable” (which is another). On the same page I stress that unlike Hirohito before 1945 — and contrary to a once-common bit of American fake news — Kim Il Sung is not worshipped as divine. Surely no one who admits that huge difference can be accused of equating the two cults!

And in the conclusion I write:

But while drawing a clear line between North Korean ideology and communism, we should not overlook that which distinguishes the former from Japanese and (even more so) German fascism. The Text has never proposed the invasion of so much as an inch of non-Korean territory. This is not to say that it does not propose military action against the US either as a preemptive strike or as revenge for past crimes…. But this is not the same as wanting to reshape the world. Where the Nazis considered Aryans physically and intellectual superior to all other races, and the Japanese regarded their moral superiority as having protected them throughout history, the [North] Koreans believe that their childlike purity renders them so vulnerable to the outside world that they need a Parent Leader to survive. Such a worldview naturally precludes dreams of a colonizing or imperialist nature (TCR 166).

So you see, my main motive has always been a destructive one, namely, to get people to discard both the communist / Stalinist and the Confucian model and to grasp what is sui generis about North Korea, as opposed to replacing one label with another.

Everyone is more than welcome to disagree with my assertion that North Korea is “at the very least, ideologically closer to America’s adversaries in World War II than to communist China and Eastern Europe” (TCR 16). They may challenge also my characterization of the North as a far-right state, keeping in mind, I hope, that there’s much more to far-rightism than fascism. See the Nationalkonservativen in Weimar Germany.

What I feel I have a right to ask — and would not need to ask in a less dysfunctional field  — is that my work not be reduced to a reduction that isn’t in it.

 

UPDATE: 9 May 2020:

A reader of the above has kindly reminded me that in an article in the fall/winter 2011 issue of Columbia University’s Journal of International Affairs I wrote (on page 118):

Not all far-right states are alike any more than all far-left ones are, and to apply the fascist or Hitlerian label to North Korea would be grossly misleading. 

UPDATE: 23 August 2022:

For a few years now, amused friends and readers have been sending me the link to a Youtube video (2016) with Slavoj Žižek, for much of which he sounds like he’s just read a certain book. But perhaps he’d been doing his own primary research. You decide.

Most people are like Proust’s Duc de Guermantes, in that they assume all criticism of someone the critic knows personally must derive from personal resentment. Before I take issue for the second time in two months with something Andrei Lankov has written for NK News, let me make clear that he and I have never had a cross word, despite the fundamental difference in our perceptions of the peninsula.

This is the part of his newer article I want to discuss:

A number of right-leaning conspiracy theorists in South Korea honestly believe that their current President is a crypto-Jucheist of sorts, whose secret dream is to surrender all of South Korea to the North through some unequal “confederation scheme.” This absurd fantasy has a remarkable number of followers on the right-wing flank of South Korean politics.

Conspiracy theories notwithstanding, there is little reason to doubt President Moon’s sincere desire to improve relations with, and resume subsidies — both direct and indirect — to North Korea.

I realize that by the current standards of South Korea’s English-language press the above show of partisanship is nothing excessive. A few weeks ago an article in the Korea Joongang Daily started off with “Conservatives squawked Thursday about….” But the foreign historian writing for an inquiring Western readership has to hold himself to a much higher standard.

Here’s what I find odd. While South Koreans’ anti-Japanese sentiment gets taken at face value as the inevitable result of what happened well before most of them were born, conservatives’ fears for the security of the South, which was last subjected to a deadly military attack in 2010, tend to be treated as laughable delusions. Lankov’s tone is all too representative.

Let’s remember not only how many South Koreans were killed, injured or abducted during a war the North started, but also that one of the most shocking parts of that conflict for people who experienced KPA occupation was seeing neighbors emerge on day one as fully-formed, snitching supporters of the enemy. Many bore titles in the underground organizations to which, it turned out, they had belonged for years. In several recorded cases they denounced people who were shot on the spot. That trauma sits deep. South Koreans still use the term “people’s trial” (inmin chaep’an) in the sense in which we say “kangaroo court.”

Bear in mind also that since the truce it has been the North’s self-declared strategy to conquer the South not by out-and-out warfare but by inducing the southern masses, be it in elections or through an uprising, to effect the withdrawal of US troops and the end of conservative rule. All that time the North has publicly vaunted the enormous size of its underground network in the South. Soviet archives attest to the North’s guidance and funding of the “reformist” parties of 1960-61. The former student leader Kim Young-hwan has spoken of his own close ties to Pyongyang and meetings with Kim Il Sung in the early 1990’s.

For almost 60 years now the North has promoted an inter-Korean confederation with economic cooperation as the way to “peaceful, autonomous unification,” all the while publicly urging South Koreans to carry out a revolution. I can understand why conservatives worry when the same leftists who subscribed to this doctrine in the 1980’s still advocate confederation, economic cooperation and “peaceful, autonomous unification” today. The average foreign observer is blissfully unaware of the associations; someone who doesn’t know a country’s history is bound to chuckle at the things its people worry about. But at least the Beltway “experts” mocking the South Korean opposition on Twitter come by their ignorance honestly. It’s depressing to see the relevant context willfully disregarded by a historian of modern Korea.

Of course history must also be taken into account when discussing left-wing fears of a return to rightist dictatorship. Is it too much to ask that some effort at understanding both sides be made before the mockery starts?

As for “conspiracy theory,” consider the following information, much of which will already be familiar to anyone following this blog:

1. On 15 June 2000 Kim Dae Jung and Kim Jong Il publicly pledged that the two Koreas would work together in the direction of the common ground between the South’s concept of a league and the North’s concept of a confederation.
2. On 7 April 2007 Kim Dae Jung publicly called for a 3 stage process to end the division of the peninsula: league, confederation and unification.
3. On 4 October 2007 Roh Moo Hyun and Kim Jong Il publicly renewed the two Koreas’ commitment to the June 15 2000 agreement.
4. On 16 August 2012 Moon Jae-in publicly pledged to bring about an inter-Korean league or confederation during his presidency.
5. On 25 April 2017 Moon Jae-in, asked in public by a rival candidate if he supported the North’s proposal for “low-level confederation,” replied, “I think there is not much difference between low-level confederation and the league proposed by the South.”
6. On 31 August 2018 Jeong Se-hyon, one of Moon’s mentors, told a journalist that inter-Korean economic cooperation must be raised to the level of a league. (Jeong is now Executive Vice-Chair of the National Unification Advisory Council.)
7. In September 2018 the mainstream-left Hankyoreh newspaper welcomed the establishment of a North-South liaison office in Kaesong by referring to it in two articles (here and here) as a first stage in the “systematization of a North-South league.” A Peace Party representative also spoke publicly of the office as opening the way to a league. Paek Nak-cheong, another of Moon’s famous mentors, publicly declared in a respected (offline) journal that the current goal of the two Koreas is a league; his article was approvingly reported on in the press (see here and here).  The Blue House saw no need to correct any of these statements.
8. On 27 October 2018 the South China Morning Post ran an article by John Power on the South Korean discussion of a “one country, two systems” transition to unification. Power wrote that “voices on the left, including figures close to the president, have been pushing to see such a union finally come to fruition.” Quoted among supporters of the plan was a South Korean professor of political science at Wonkwang University who predicted Moon would establish some form of union by the end of 2022. “Is there any other path to peaceful unification … than federation?”
9. In March 2019 the Ministry of Education published elementary school textbooks for “virtue” or civics class presenting North-South league as the second part — after reconciliation — of “the desirable unification process we must strive for.”

Before some skim-reader tries claiming that a league is much looser than a confederation, let me repeat Moon’s statement that there’s no real difference between the two. (The North itself has taken to promoting “league-confederation.”) Needless to say both words denote an alliance of some sort.

The only thing Lankov seems to find more absurd than the notion of a “confederation scheme” is the notion of an “unequal” one, but all partnerships between states are unequal. One of the two Koreas will get the upper hand; the only question is which. Considering that the North has got the better deal in each joint declaration dating back to 1972, and that the South has been the more passive side through the past four or five ROK administrations (including the “hardline” ones), it’s hardly absurd to expect the pattern to persist in a league or confederation. Wrong perhaps, but not absurd.

Note also the overwhelming consensus on the left that a) the center of such a formation should be in Kaesong in the DPRK, and b) that despite the South’s far greater population the two states must have equal votes in a North-South council. Such a body would inevitably consist of DPRK representatives voting en bloc, so that one supportive vote from the pluralist ROK side would suffice to tip things Pyongyang’s way.

In puncto “crypto-Jucheist”: Many right-wing commentators do indeed talk of the president’s having formed a “Juche Group” (chusap’a) government. Nobody, as far as I can gather, genuinely believes people in the Blue House are sitting around cramming Kim Jong Il’s On Juche Thought like they did in the old days. The word refers instead to Moon’s conspicuous habit of appointing veterans of the protest movement who saw prison time between 1985 and 1995. Chusap’a is thus shorthand for a distinct generation of leftists marked generally (not unanimously) by a much higher degree of pro-North, ultra-nationalist sentiment than the old-school Marxist generation directly before it, which the Moon administration is said to have been shunting aside.

From discussions on the street with conservative flag-wavers I can confirm that many of them do believe Moon wants to surrender the South to Kim Jong-un. This is not my assessment but I can see how someone could get this idea. Having repeatedly disavowed any desire for regime change in the North, the president announced last week that unification would take place by 2045, when Kim Jong-un would be in late middle age. The only benign way to interpret that is to assert that Moon didn’t really mean it.

For a long time now there’s been a cheerful debate here as to what a unified peninsula should be called, with some plumping for retention of “Republic of Korea” (Taehan min’guk) but many preferring the North-friendly term “Koryŏ” instead  (see here and here).  It’s by no means just the right, then, that believes unification-by-confederation would mean the end of the Republic of Korea.

But the hearings undergone by Moon’s cabinet appointees have given everyone quite an education into the extraordinary acquisitiveness and tax-dodging ingenuity of the Gangnam Left. (The manifold scandals now besetting Cho Kuk, Moon’s choice for Justice Minister, are illustrative.) Many conservatives I have spoken to therefore share my belief that most people in the ruling camp don’t want to see the North take over, but are instead pursuing confederation as an instrument with which to hold onto power here indefinitely.

Minjoo members seem adamant that power must not be relinquished for at least 20 years. The party leader has spoken of the urgent need — for democracy’s sake — to keep the Blue House for ten presidents in a row. That’s half a century. I can see why these people fancy their chances of framing each post-confederation election as a choice between maintaining a peace-friendly status quo and risking war by “turning back the clock.” The same threat could conceivably be invoked to criminalize conservatism as a danger to the peace. (Last spring over 1.8 million people petitioned the government to dissolve the main opposition party.)

The problem of course is that the North’s priorities are very different. It hasn’t attained to what it considers superpower status only to disarm itself during — let alone before! — a long period of symbolic parity with the South, a period destined to end at some stage in peninsular free elections. No personality cult can survive having an expiration date placed on it, however vague or far off it may be. And no, I don’t buy the common notion that if the US and South Korea promise convincingly enough never to topple the Kim dictatorship from without, it will let itself be toppled slowly from within. As the current leader’s grandfather said to Zhivkov in 1973, North Korea’s interest in confederation is in first disarming and then eliminating the rival state.

I agree with Lankov that Moon sincerely wants to improve relations with North Korea and pump as much aid northward as possible. But that’s not all he wants. Too many foreign supporters of this president fail to grasp the full implications of his pledge to create a whole new order on the peninsula, a Korea such as no one has experienced before, and so on. This is about much more than better relations and subsidies. It’s about going as far beyond the Sunshine Policy as Kim Dae Jung went beyond Nordpolitik.

I’ve repeatedly used the word “public” in this post for a reason. To count as a conspiracy, a plan involving two or more parties must be covert. Not even Alex Jones would talk of a Democratic Party conspiracy to field a candidate who can beat Trump. The term “conspiracy theory” is to be used and understood accordingly. Had Lee Harvey Oswald spoken just before his death of a second gunman on the grassy knoll, one would not be a conspiracy theorist for taking him seriously. The information could still be wrong, but someone disagreeing with it would have to engage in actual refutation. The same goes for all who seek to dismiss talk of the ROK government’s confederation drive as a conspiracy theory.

 

UPDATE (28 August 2019): Tread softly, nationalist left, for you tread on their dreams

Chŏng Ch’ang-hyŏn is director of the trendily titled Peace Economy Research Institute, which was established last March by Moon-loyal Money Today Media. It professes to be committed to providing a blueprint for North-South prosperity by analyzing things “from an objective and neutral perspective.”

A few weeks ago, at a venue in Gwanghamun, Chŏng gave the second lecture in a series sponsored by unification-minded Tongil News. The media outlet’s Kim Ch’i-gwan summarizes it in this week’s headline article, which is entitled, “We Have Already Entered the First Stage in the North’s Confederation-League System.”

Now there’s a headline you won’t see in the left’s English-language press anytime soon, eh? It’s a very enjoyable and substantial article, but I will skip the historical bit. Of the Panmunjeom Declaration (27 April 2018) Chŏng is quoted as having said in the lecture:

If you look at the articles in it, most of the systematic apparatus … that conforms to the first stage of the North’s  confederation-league system is in there…. Everything is emphasized in the form of peace and prosperity but the icon of unification is hidden here and there…. Through the Panmunjeom Declaration, North-South relations can now be regarded as having entered the first stage of a North-South league.

I like how Chŏng peels away glittering South Korean generalities like “systematization of North-South relations” to point out that things like the Kaesong liaison office, routine meetings of defense ministers, etc, tick boxes traditionally foreseen as belonging to the first part of a league or confederation process. The only step that hasn’t happened yet, he says, is the meeting of the legislative assemblies of the two Koreas.

But for the approving tone this might all have been said by one of those right-wing conspiracy theorists Andrei Lankov finds so ridiculous.

So again: If one wants to claim that the attribution to the Blue House of a confederation drive is fantasy, i.e. has no grounding in reality, one is of course free to do so. But one must first argue that point, a tall order under all these circumstances unless you’re Bishop Berkeley. Nobody who reads Korean should be conveying to Western readers the impression that this issue is only being discussed on the right. If anything, the left is more inclined to claim that confederation is already underway.

[Below are the opening remarks to a speech on history I gave last Thursday at the École française d’Extrême-Orient in Anam-dong. During the Q & A afterwards I was assured by a South Korean academic that most of his country-folk support North-South confederation. Keep this and the remarks below in mind the next time Andrei Lankov dismisses as “fantasy” the right-wing’s worries about a peace treaty — worries grounded in the fear that confederation will soon follow. Once so hard to imagine, some sort of meeting between the democratically elected National Assembly and the rubber-stamp Supreme People’s Assembly already seems likely. As readers of my blog may remember, this is the event many leftists have long envisioned as one of the final two or three steps to confederation. 

So I’m curious: How much longer is the commentariat going to run from this topic? Or have I missed someone’s reasoned explanation as to how North-South confederation can co-exist with the US-ROK military alliance for more than a highly dangerous transition period? If it is “needless to say, a fantasy” to imagine US troops leaving, it’s one to which many on the left are also prone. 

All this conflation of the intellectual and parliamentary right with geriatric flag-wavers is getting a little geriatric itself. American readers are being cheated out of an entire half of a dramatic debate, one with direct relevance to their own security as well as their assessment of Trump’s performance. It’s a rare foreigner who can claim to know the nationalist left better than the conservatives who went to university with it in the 1980’s, when many of them were in that camp themselves. None of this is to imply that our press does justice to the local left-wing discourse either.] 

According to a poll published last month, 1 in 5 people here supports confederation with North Korea. If that seems negligible to you, note that only 1 in 4 South Koreans still identifies as conservative. You may wonder how so many people know enough about this plan to support it, considering how the Blue House keeps the discussion out of the headlines. The answer: a nationwide “consensus-building” campaign has been unfolding to this end since 2017. In schools around the country, children are routinely taught the advantages of the “peace system” on the way. At government-sponsored town-hall meetings, locals from across the spectrum are brought together with unification-minded “activists,” as they’re described in official texts.

And every few weeks another prominent member of the Moon camp lectures some civic group on how confederation is nothing to fear. The standard line is that the pro-American president Roh Tae Woo (1988-93) also wanted a North-South league, so it can’t be anything risky; conservatives are making a fuss about nothing. Never mentioned is the fact that Roh premised a league on the basis of shared liberal-democratic principles, which is to say that he never seriously thought it would happen.

Last week a former unification minister said cheerfully people should think of confederation as a marriage. Which has always been my analogy too. The danger is that when one spouse gets rough with the other, the neighbors tend to plug their ears. Now, it’s the Koreans’ peninsula, and having divided it we Americans can’t be telling them how to put it back together. But that goes also for Americans who like jeering at South Korean opponents of President Moon’s policies.

As an American what I worry most about is a transitional overlap between the alliance with the US and confederation. The Blue House wants that overlap so that South Koreans settle down into the new dispensation with a minimum of fuss. But if the electorate gets cold feet and votes for a conservative government in March 2022, which then seeks America’s help annulling the marriage, the North’s nuclear weapons will take on a whole new meaning. By that time at the latest Washington will realize why they were developed in the first place.

Meanwhile the White House seems intent on selling confederation to the South Korean mainstream, and not just by constantly asserting that Kim Jong Un can be trusted. Trump publicly praised the first Panmunjeom summit in April last year, thereby giving America’s blessing to the two Koreas’ renewal of their pledge to work toward confederation without foreign meddling.

As critical as our media usually are in regard to Trump’s diplomacy, they seem to have no problem with this part. I’ve seen only one serious article on Korean confederation in the world press, and it was in the South China Morning Post last year. The New York Times still shows zero interest, though its BTS coverage has been top-notch. And USA Today has taken to printing Korea journalism sponsored by the Atlantic Council, which is sponsored by the Korea Foundation, which in turn is sponsored by…. So you won’t get anything on confederation there either until the Blue House is good and ready. At which point our media will come out in support, and Pyongyang watchers will assure us that this is going to open up the North and hasten democratic reforms. Washington will get on board soon enough. Our State Department has a perennial weakness for “subversive engagement” strategies; that’s how we turned China into a superpower.

For a while there I thought NK News might twig to the confederation drive, but a few months ago it analyzed the last two years of inter-Korean relations without once referring to the only goal that each Moon-Kim summit has brought the peninsula closer to.

If you want to know the current level of expert discussion in Washington, here’s an exchange from a Senate hearing that took place on March 26. Victor Cha was there from the CSIS to assure a foreign affairs subcommittee that South Korea’s interest is in a mere “economic marriage,” the goal being to get the North to denuclearize.

South Korea is committed [….] to using economic incentives to bring North Korea to the table. I think the ultimate goal … is to try to create at least a one country, two systems approach for the time being. The current South Korean president hails from the progressive end of the political spectrum and there’s a long line of thinking …. that the goal is not unification but it is to try to create this one country two systems, where there’s an economic marriage between the two sides, but they would allow the North Koreans to maintain sort of a separate political entity at least for the foreseeable future.

(The South would “allow” the North Koreans: I especially like that part.) But in a flash of intuition Senator Todd Young (R) asks, “Sort of a confederacy?” Which is precisely what yeonbangje means.

Whereupon Cha repeats the word in reluctantly concessional tones while again framing the plan as a way to defuse the nuclear stand-off.

A confederacy of sorts that is sort of a non-conflictual political solution. There are lots of human rights issues that come up with something like that but I think that’s what they’re aiming towards.

In fact confederation is often called for on the left as a way to insulate the North from American pressures, military and economic. Some say this will lead to denuclearization, but the older tradition foresees confederated Korea taking the next step to unification as a nuclear power. When I said this to a US government official 2 years ago, he thought it an appropriate response to turn to his subordinates with a smile. American party politics are so transparent and predictable, and move in such a narrow ideological range, that the notion of a foreign political force espousing one platform for our consumption and pursuing a very different one in practice strikes Americans as ludicrous.

Did the Republican from Indiana ask any follow-up questions? No. Perhaps he suspected, as I did, that Victor Cha had already exhausted the CSIS’ store of knowledge on the subject. Even so: Can you imagine an expert at a Senate hearing in the 1980’s saying, “West Germany wants a sort of confederacy with East Germany,” and a Senator saying, “Fine, let’s move on to the next item”?

I shouldn’t have to say this, seeing as how the bloodiest war in American history was fought against a confederacy, but the word denotes an alliance. And whatever noises the two Koreas astutely make to the contrary, the alliance they are pursuing will, at some early stage, obviate the one the South is in now.

UPDATE: 9 December 2020

I don’t need to spell out the relevance to the above of this article, “Head of US think tank CSIS awarded S. Korea’s highest diplomatic medal.”

It was only a year ago that American observers referred to Moon Jae-in as “security-conservative,” and assumed he’d been “blindsided” by Trump’s suspension of war games. Since then it has dawned on almost everyone that the Blue House is well to the soft-line side of the White House. Yet most Korea watchers still believe Moon shares America’s commitment to denuclearizing the North. He just favors a different approach, is all.

The reason: Very little news that reflects badly on the ROK government makes it into the English-language press. Few Americans have so much as heard about its union-aided grip on broadcast media or the use of libel suits to silence its critics. Fewer still think freedom of speech suffers much as a result. Some of the staunchest American believers in Moon’s liberalism live here in South Korea — with their heads stuck firmly in US cyberspace. If they did a little channel surfing they would realize, even with the sound off, how rare the broadcast of fundamental political debate has become.

Application of the epithet McCarthyist to Moon’s domestic critics is a sure sign of someone uninformed or disinforming. It’s Korean nationalism, not communism, that the Chosun Ilbo warns against most often. The appeal exerted by Pyongyang on an influential minority here is correctly seen as nationalist. This is in contrast to the Western assumption of a failed communist state no sane South Korean looks up to.

The word communization (kongsanhwa, chŏkhwa) tends to be used here in the sense of what I call pro-Northing. When the pop singer Yi Hyŏk used it on Facebook recently he was complaining more or less apolitically about the creeping regulation and censorship of online media. (He quickly thought better of his frankness and deleted the post.)

Since 2017 several controversial appointments to top government posts have drawn attention to the Gangnam left’s fabulous wealth. South Koreans hardly bat an eye anymore on hearing that this or that candlelight-revolutionary owns a few million-dollar apartments in Seoul, or has a Porsche-driving son at university in (of course) the USA. Very few conservatives fear that this lot wants to put an end to private property.

I get the impression many American observers haven’t moved out of the Roh Tae-woo era, when the parliamentary right consisted mostly of former collaborators with the military dictatorship. The Liberty Korea Party’s warnings against the weakening of ROK security are mistrusted accordingly. In fact the LKP carries on the tradition of President Kim Young Sam (1993-98). Like him it has no firm political principles. Its strategy has always been to try to win over the leftward-drifting mainstream without losing the old-school conservative vote.

It was presidential administrations led and staffed by these people that got rid of the constitution day holiday, the only republican one in the calendar; that initiated apologetic commemoration of the 1948 Jeju revolt against the planned establishment of the republic; that popularized the slogans “economic democracy” and “balanced diplomacy”; that formally agreed South Korea should stop “slandering” the North. It was these people who helped impeach their own president in the hope of introducing a trough-widening parliamentary system.

This “phony right,” as Moon has perceptively called it, projects its own lack of principles onto his administration. Seeing him put veterans of the pro-North protest movement in every position of authority and influence, they assume he’s just rewarding old cronies. His endless purge of their people is seen as vindictiveness, his intolerance of criticism as touchiness. Except for a small minority the LKP’s members don’t seem to connect these things either to his confederation pledge or to the Minjoo’s professed determination to rule for 20 more years.

A few weeks ago a conservative lawmaker startled the ruling-party side of the aisle into an uproar simply by referring to Moon’s overseas reputation as a spokesman for Pyongyang. That shows you how mild-mannered the opposition usually is.

Which isn’t to deny that it’s harder on Moon than Washingtonians generally are. His few sharp critics in the Beltway are well outside the consensus view of a good ally committed to denuclearizing the North.

This although the ROK left has shown next to no urgency in regard to that goal. Since 2000 we have seen from it everything from denial of the North’s nuclear ambitions (Kim Dae Jung) to sympathetic understanding (Roh Moo Hyun) to outright support on the grounds that the nukes will end up in a unified Korea (“civic groups,” inner-track nationalist-left media).

What isn’t encountered is much argument between those who shrug off the North’s nuclear program and those who assure Washington they’re dead-set against it. Even more tellingly, the latter prefer the former to their own kind. Moon’s appointment of Im Jong-seok as chief of staff is a well-known case in point. The academic Kim Yeon-cheol, who has long advocated a much more appeasement-minded approach than Moon has supported in public, is set to be the new Unification Minister.

The great harmony in evidence on that whole half of the spectrum is quite a recent thing. Until five or six years ago three distinct camps were discernible: 1) the labor-centric socialists or social-democrats, 2) the pro-North nationalists, and 3) the “left-wing neoliberals,” to borrow Roh Moo Hyun’s term for his own ilk. The United Progressive Party was so called because it housed “3 families under one roof.” Then two of the families denounced the third as “North-obeying” and left the UPP, which soon ended up banned. (The People’s Democracy Party now carries the torch.)

Since then the protest veterans who attended university between 1985 and 1995, when the Juche Movement reigned supreme, have succeeded in sweeping aside their elders, who tended to be either more Marxist-minded or more liberal-democratic. What was once the nationalist Left is now the Nationalist left. The candlelight protests of 2016 are mythologized by Moon himself not as class struggle or anti-corruption drive but as the culmination of a long heroic fight for national liberation. The implication — kept tacit to let sleeping American dogs lie — is that by working with Washington against Pyongyang, Park Geun-hye betrayed the race, the minjok.

Nationalism is about putting the (ethno-)nation above liberal-democratic and leftist values alike. Once one takes that step, one is not separated from other nationalists by anything irreducible. Having sought out the porridge that tastes just right, one rubs shoulders with those eating from hotter or cooler bowls. Because the differences are merely of degree, the various groupings shade almost imperceptibly into one another, with plenty of interlocking personal relationships. And the “radical” knows that the “moderate” has an important role to play.

I use the one term as reservedly as the other. When I think radical American I think of the Weathermen and not AOC. By that standard there is no longer real radicalism in South Korea, though many people, including some judges, don’t greatly mind seeing policemen roughed up now and then. If it comes from a good place, you understand. (Weimar says hello.)

Such amorphousness is far from typical of the international left. As a student in West Germany in 1983 I signed a petition protesting the firing of a local mailman for membership in the communist party. A Young Socialist law student in my dorm took me to task, saying only suicidal states allowed anti-constitutional elements into their civil service. Comparable divides can be found left of the center of most Western political spectra. Firm principles, easily summarized, separate the liberal from the social democrat from the socialist from the communist.

If Moon’s popularity slips under 40%, things may change, but for now the South Korean left presents a more united front than the literal one formed under US military occupation. The Justice Party and (Jeolla-based) Democratic Peace Party complain when the Blue House nominates a particularly brazen scofflaw for a top post, but that’s about the extent of their opposition to a president most of their voters support. The Minjoo bowed out of the by-election that just took place in Changwon so as to facilitate a Justice Party victory, a front victory. South Koreans talk of the pŏmyŏgwŏn, the pan-ruling-camp, although no formal coalition exists.

Criticism of the government from extra-parliamentary left quarters is strident but sporadic. The Blue House doesn’t seem to mind it much. Tongil News scolds Moon for kowtowing to Washington, who in return congratulates the online newspaper on the 18th anniversary of its founding. The need to maintain the appearance of divided camps could explain why Lee Seok-ki is yet to be let out of prison – and why, for a while there at least, he seemed so understanding about it. (His sentence was recently added to for financial wrongdoing.)

In closing, let me forestall reductio ad absurdum by again conceding that the left’s discourse is by no means uniform. The “radical” praises the North. The “moderate” assails those who mistrust it. The one denies the legitimacy of the ROK founded in 1948. The other talks up the ROK-superseding legitimacy of an exile republic said to date back to 1919. But such differences are rhetorical, tactical. The point of the front after all is to appeal to all the constituencies it needs. One of them is the US government.

Having come up with the terms “inner track,” “outer track” and “export track” in the discussion of North Korean propaganda, I can perhaps be excused for insisting that the original distinction between the three be maintained.

There are more tracks and track-internal gradations than I need to deal with here. It is enough if the reader keeps in mind a distinction between a) the inner track, by which I mean propaganda intended for North Koreans only, b) the outer track, which is propaganda written for domestic consumption in the constraining awareness of outside monitors, and c) the export track, or propaganda for outsiders. This last, which includes statements made in negotiations, can in turn be divided into the kind aimed at South Koreans and the kind aimed at foreigners. (North Korea’s Juche Myth, 2015, 9.)

I see and hear these terms used my way, but not always; NK News, for example, seems to be settling into the use of “outer track” to mean North Korean propaganda for South Korean readers.

If this custom takes hold it will obscure the important differences of tone and content between the actual outer track (Rodong Sinmun, the nightly TV news, etc) and the inner track (party lectures, political novels, etc).

This in turn may contribute to an unfortunate trend in Western academic papers on North Korea: token quotation from the Rodong Sinmun or KCNA, and nothing else from the DPRK itself, as a way of ticking the primary-research box.

Last autumn I did an interview in my office with a regional Swiss (German) TV station. Having parked too far down Mount Ŏmgwang, the crew had to lug its gear the rest of the way. Seoulite journos who make this mistake need a good sprawl on the couch before they can talk in full sentences, but my Helvetians probably sang all the way up. The first thing they asked as they strode into the lobby was: “Why don’t more Koreans live on top of mountains?”

Anyway, this is what I said (at the 10 minute mark) as part of my response to a question on Methodik.

Like Goethe and Spengler I’m convinced that history has an inner, organic logic which can’t be grasped purely in terms of causality. For me, in other words, the peninsula isn’t a silver ball in a giant, geopolitical pinball machine, the trajectory of which can only be understood in terms of cause and effect. It’s more like a tree which, although influenced by external conditions, and tossed this way and that, still has an organic, inner directedness. Meaning that when you take an old homogeneous nation and cut it in two, as we did in the last century, you can take it for granted that that which belongs together, will grow together again.

In that sense Willy Brandt said something very profound when he made his famous remark [in 1989, that “what belongs together, is growing together”]; he practically expressed a natural law. For every biologist, every gardener — every surgeon even – knows what inosculation means, namely, the growing into each other of closely-related and adjacent organisms. Both Koreas will grow into each other, I’m sure of it, and provided war with the USA doesn’t come first, North Korea will –unfortunately — lead this inosculation process.

It was in the same long-term frame of mind that I followed the Hanoi summit. The US-ROK alliance’s position on North Korea has been inexorably softening, with only minor and temporary reversals, for over half a century now, while North Korea, arming steadily, has always held fast to its commitment to “final victory,” to unification under its own flag. One need only take a few steps back from the daily news to see where this is headed.

Donald Trump did the right thing in Hanoi, in a rare accession of good sense, but only because Kim Jong Un, in an equally rare lapse of it, tried to get too much at once. Conservative South Koreans on Youtube cheered the summit collapse as the end of America’s efforts to appease Pyongyang. They also mocked Moon Jae-in for having announced, on the very next day, that he will continue pushing for what I call the ethnic exemption from sanctions, namely, permission for some degree of inter-Korean economic cooperation.

In fact Moon understands the Americans far better than his opponents do. He knows the softening of our resolve has quite a way to go yet. If talks between Pyongyang and Washington do not resume very soon, we can expect the usual American op-ed writers to back Moon’s call for the ethnic exemption. If Kim is smart he will offer just enough to bring it about, and visit Seoul to help force the Americans’ hand.

But the Koreas do not necessarily have to work together economically to come ever closer together. This was made clear not just by South Korean media’s fawning coverage of Kim during the Hanoi summit, but also by President Moon’s speech on the 100th anniversary of the independence demonstrations of 1 March 1919. The key part:

The Japanese imperialists labeled independence armies as bandits and independence activists as thought offenders … The word “Reds” originated from them….. Hostility between the left and the right and ideological stigmas were tools used by Japanese imperialists to drive a wedge between us. Even after liberation, they served as tools to impede efforts to remove the vestiges of pro-Japanese collaborators. They were also used to brand the public as enemies when it came to massacres of civilians, spurious accusations of spying for North Korea and the student pro-democracy movement….. Still now in our society, the word “Reds” is being used as a tool to vilify and attack political rivals, and a different kind of “Red Scare” is running rampant. These are typical vestiges left by pro-Japanese collaborators, which we should eliminate as soon as possible. The 38th parallel drawn through our minds will disappear all together once the ideological hostility that caused internal rifts are removed.

The view of history informing these words is the mouldy “revisionist” one which the declassification of Soviet archives rendered obsolete a quarter-century ago. We always knew anyway that there was no shortage of former collaborators in the North. The personality cult has long praised the Great Leader for giving them a second chance. In my own research I have shown that former pro-Japanese intellectuals of some notoriety made it with Kim’s blessing to the top of the cultural apparatus, where they exerted a formative influence on the North.

Considering the Soviet complaint that there were almost no workers and no peasants at all in the Korean communist party in North and South in late 1945 (see Tertitskiy’s superb new book),  and considering South Korean leftist testimony that in the weeks after the emperor’s surrender the yangban leaned far-left, while entire settlements of the working and peasant classes moved spontaneously to the right (Yun Hakjun, 1994), we can assume that the portion of landed people who had enjoyed Japanese college educations and cushy white-collar jobs under colonial rule was higher on the left. More leftists had done prison time, certainly, but almost all had “converted” by the late 1930s and begun working with the Japanese. The nationalists had a better record of standing firm.

More to the point, we now know that much of the bloody unrest in the South in the late 1940s, which involved orchestrated attacks on policemen and their families – attacks of a cruelty and brutality that even Cumings has felt compelled to comment upon — was indeed planned, funded and guided from above the 38th parallel, as Rhee and the US military claimed at the time. That was no “red scare” but a correct assessment of the reality. We know from Kim Il Sung’s archived account that he was funding the ROK’s “reformist” parties in 1960, and inviting key members to Pyongyang; on that point too the right-wing suspicions of the time proved correct. That many leading members of the ostensibly pro-democracy student movement of the 1980s and 1990s understood that lofty keyword in either the Marxist-Leninist or the North Korean sense is clear enough from their own strident testimony.

Nor can there be any doubt — to mention what the right is currently most worried about — that Moon and his camp are by their own explicit, public account committed to bringing about North-South confederation in the short term. I notice when reading the full spectrum of political commentary that it’s perfectly acceptable to talk approvingly of this matter. Only when the news is imparted in tones of alarm does it suddenly become “fake.”

Now, I have long argued on this blog that the Moon administration is ideologically and emotionally closer to Pyongyang than to Washington. I have predicted that the two Koreas will whip up anti-Japanese sentiment to rally public support around their “new peninsula system,” “peace system,” “peaceful unification plan” — the reassuring euphemisms for confederation are endless. I have been called McCarthyist for this, as if anyone ever saw less trace of communism on the peninsula than I do.

But the March 1 speech proves my point. In it Moon attributes anti-North, anti-left sentiment wholly to the lingering influence of Japanese propaganda. He forbears to mention that what really changed a generally pro-socialist South Korean public in 1950 to a right-leaning one was a brief taste of North Korean rule. (Kim Sŏng-ch’il, for example, writes in his diary of how the KPA occupation made him identify with the ROK for the first time.)

As far as Moon is apparently concerned, the main division on the peninsula today is between the great community of nation-loving North and South Koreans who do not use pejoratives like “commies,” and the minority of South Korean colony-nostalgists who do. Yes, Moon astutely pretended to criticize only language and not the users of it, but the notion that today’s conservatives are descendants of collaborators — that they have bad sŏngbun, to put it in North Korean terms — has been central to leftist myth here for decades. (Jeong Dong-yeong of the pseudo-opposition Peace Party invoked it a few weeks ago; Moon’s speech is uncannily similar to the points Jeong made.) Unlike the trivial differences inside the pan-Korean, trans-DMZ community of good democrats — so trivial that the 38th parallel has no real intellectual or ideological importance — the scare-mongering speech of the South Korean rightists cannot be lived with. It must be eliminated, purged.

I needn’t add that these are the staunchest supporters of the US-ROK alliance whom Moon wants to see muzzled.

Funnily enough, his line of logic could be used a fortiori to stigmatize criticism of the USA. After all, it was the Yankees and not Korean “reds” – a tiny force even in their 1920s heyday — whom the Japanese authorities were most intent on infamizing. After Hirohito’s surrender all the main tropes went straight into the agitprop of the South Korean left. Thus did the Workers’ Party vilify Yankees as “bloodsuckers” when agitating Jeju islanders, who had been subjected to especially intense Japanese propaganda during the war.

The more recent canards according to which US soldiers got out of their armored vehicle to laugh at the schoolgirls they’d run over, that Uncle Sam was out to poison South Korean children with beef unfit for US consumption – this nonsense wouldn’t have gone down such a storm had there not been a colonial tradition behind it, one that informed many an anti-American novel and movie under that former collaborator Park Chung Hee.

But enough of history; as I’ve said before, it’s what’s done with it to contemporary ends that matters. Plenty will be done in the months ahead, to harmonizing North-South effects that the Western commentariat will cheer, and polarizing ROK-internal effects it will continue dozing through. It’s not America’s place to meddle, but we should be aware of what our supposedly liberal-democratic ally is up to.

 

UPDATE (5 April 2019)

Above I wrote: “If talks between Pyongyang and Washington do not resume very soon, we can expect the usual American op-ed writers to back Moon’s call for the ethnic exemption.” Sure enough:

[Moon] laid out his approach in a speech he gave in Berlin in July 2017: first build a “peace regime” on the Korean Peninsula by improving North Korea’s relationship with South Korea and the United States and then pursue step-by-step denuclearization as trust is cultivated among the parties. Joint inter-Korean economic projects are a key mechanism for the parties to build trust, along with cultural exchanges and regular meetings of separated families.

The inter-Korean projects include the Kaesong Industrial Complex, tourism at Mount Kumgang, and an inter-Korean railway. As the two Koreas form an economic relationship, the repeated interactions arising from such a relationship would gradually lead to a measure of trust between the two countries. […..] Inter-Korean economic projects represent a compromise that both the United States and North Korea can accept [….]  The United States need not lift sanctions wholesale to have the inter-Korean projects progress. It merely needs to grant sanctions exemptions to those projects, allowing the sanctions to take effect once again if North Korea does not follow through with its promised denuclearization steps. (S. Nathan Park in Foreign Policy, 4 April 2019)

1

Imagining what will have to happen before the Western commentariat begins taking Korean nationalism seriously is an instructive exercise. I thought the two leaders’ trip to Mount Paektu on September 20 might do the trick. But foreigners are still talking only of Moon’s peace-minded pragmatism and Kim’s desire for security guarantees and investment.

Ideology, legitimacy, authority: Such topics used to interest academics no end. The mania for quantifying the social sciences and the attendant decline in foreign-language acquisition have changed things. I remember Sovietologists lamenting this trend when I was at school in the 1980s. It’s gone much, much further since. What cannot be researched with the proper statistical-numerical methodology is thought beneath serious analysis. On the rare occasions when a non-quantifier takes the microphone at a conference, the Gradgrinds lean back with an indulgent smile: Time for some light relief.

In North Korean studies the fallacy of a failed communist state renders this tendency more extreme. Attention focuses squarely on economic matters, as it doesn’t in discussion of the Iranian nuclear crisis. Despite the Koreas’ long competition for nationalist legitimacy (which the South abandoned in May 2017) the relative power of the two states is grasped in numbers of missiles, tanks, soldiers. As a result the South, or at least the ROK-US alliance, is assumed to enjoy a solid advantage over the North.

If you discuss not quantifiable power but unquantifiable authority and legitimacy, and assert that inter-Korean relations are informed not just by economic and security concerns but also by ideological affinity, and you back everything up with texts from both political cultures, you will be accused of taking a “literary” approach, or having no methodology at all. Rather than try to refute you, people will accuse you of “cherry-picking” texts, as a Redditer accused me the other day of doing.

Odd how these people never pick any countervailing cherries, let alone the bushel of them needed to prove I’m deviously seeking out the anomalous ones. Has the Moon administration ever expressed opposition to confederation?

I am also taken to task on Reddit for my “outdated” views on South Korea. This has become shorthand for “denying that the nationalist left is maturer and wiser, thus a better ally of the US, than it was in the naive Sunshine Policy era.” Call into doubt Moon’s commitment to denuclearization, and you’re behind the times.

My views were thus called outdated last January by one of two people who asserted months later that Moon Jae-in was more security-conservative than Kim Dae-Jung. I predicted a while back that this wishful myth would not survive the summer (which ended last Friday), but I’ve overestimated the commentariat before. In any case, nothing is more old-fashioned than all this complacency about the alliance.

Anger at my imputation of a league drive to the Blue House implies a moralizing rejection of league itself. Many Americans seem to consider the North too awful, too irredeemably a giant gulag, for the South ever to think of joining hands with it. Clearly they have an even lower opinion of the North than I do. By liberal-democratic standards too there are worse places. If I had to send my hypothetical teenage daughter to live somewhere else for a year as an average citizen, and had to rank all the countries in the world according to my preference, North Korea would not be in the bottom thirty.

More to the point: Researchers of the peninsula will get nowhere unless they take a break from their quantifying now and then, and enter into an imaginative sympathy with Korean nationalism, the way any sensible literary scholar assumes a Christian frame of mind when reading Bunyan or Blake. Having done that one begins to understand why the North appeals strongly to an influential minority in the South. They don’t want to live up there any more than a moderate Muslim wants to live under the Taliban, but they see it as the purer Korea in many ways, the real deal.

Some observers regard the word nationalism (now a pejorative in the West) as inappropriate for what they see as a natural, healthy yearning to make the peninsula whole again. But a distinction must be made between:

a) feelings of ethnic community, pride in a shared cultural tradition, and a sense of special humanitarian duty to one’s own people, all of which West Germans felt in 1989-90 despite being generally anti-nationalist, and

b) an ideological commitment to raising the stature of one’s race on the world stage.

What holds South Korean nationalists together is b) and not a). This can be seen by their inordinate horror of the financial and social disruptions of unification, which in the past has actuated deliberate exaggeration of the likely costs, and which still induces many Moon-supporters to propose maintaining a one-nation, two-state system indefinitely. We see it also in the general indifference to human rights abuses in the North, and in the great pleasure and pride the ROK’s envoys showed last week at being in the dictator’s presence.

To be fair to my critics on Reddit and Twitter, I can see how my comparison of the two Koreas to a betrothed couple might have seemed “hyperbolic.” But it was Moon Jae-in himself last week who recalled, in all seriousness, how he and Kim Jong Un had held hands in April “like warm-hearted lovers” (tajŏng-han yŏn’in ch’ŏrŏm).

2

In North Korea, government-directed campaigns tend to manifest themselves first in inner-track propaganda before moving with time into news outlets prominent enough for foreigners to be monitoring.

It’s getting like that here too. After several months of bubbling under the mainstream media, while the Blue House talked airily of a “peace system,” support for league-confederation is now expressed straightforwardly in the Hankyoreh newspaper, known to the West as a “liberal daily.”

The topic’s full-blown emergence in outer-track discourse began in late August. In Pressian, for example, Professor Yi Chae-bong of Wonkwang University could be found saying:

It is when discussing North Korea’s proposal for unification through confederation in the course of giving testimony at court that I get a little tense, while at the same time feeling the greatest sense of pleasure and reward. In South Korea someone who supports the proposal can easily end up excoriated as a “grade A, North-following leftist” or be punished for “treasonous behavior,” but in front of judges and prosecutors I unashamedly support and propagandize for unification by confederation.

He says he keeps up the propaganda work wherever he goes, so obviously it’s not easy to get in trouble for it after all. These days people like Yi are more likely to end up in the Blue House or KBS than in jail. But for over 20 years now the fun of moving up in the world while striking rebellious poses has been the great perk of being on the nationalist left.

August 31 saw Chŏng Se-hyŏn, a known mentor to the president, telling the Maeil Kyŏngje that only by raising a North-South economic community to the level of a league can the peninsula hold its own in negotiation with the US and China. The attitude to the alliance implicit in this matter-of-fact talk bears reflecting upon.

The ball really got rolling with the publication of the Fall 2018 issue of Ch’angjak-kwa pip’yong (The Quarterly Changbi, it calls itself in English), which contained a lead-off article on North-South league by Paek Nak-ch’ŏng, the editor emeritus.

A mentor to Moon Jae-in and an icon on the nationalist left, Paek was among the movers and shakers who joined the president on his trip to Pyongyang. At the start of his much-promoted, much-praised essay, which bears the title “What kind of North-South League is to be made?”, he says what I get called “conspiratorial” for saying:

The immediate goal of the Korean peninsula is “a low-level North-South league.”

A quick review of the terminology: Plain confederation was what the North called for in 1960, when it lifted the idea from Walter Ulbricht’s proposal for a German-German Konföderation. In the 1980s the South, eager to palliate Kim Il Sung, began proposing a league, a word which in Korean sounds much looser. The North then tried to reassure South Koreans it wanted a low-level confederation. And now the Moon camp speaks of a low-level league, thus implying something more reassuring still.

I will recur to Paek’s article below, but for the most part it repeats assertions of his that I have discussed in earlier posts.

League-confederation hype increased in September as the opening of the Kaesong Liaison Office drew closer. A headline in the Hankyoreh on September 12 read: “With Opening of Kaesong Liaison Office, North and South Take First Step in Systematization of North-South League.” Another Hankyoreh article two days later reiterated that “the systematization of a North-South league has begun, albeit on a beginning level.” On September 13 Pressian held a conference at which various professors called for a league.

On September 14 the Kaesong office opened. Ch’oi Kyŏnghwan, an assemblyman from the Democratic Peace Party, greeted the event with a press statement picked up by numerous outlets:

The opening of the Kaesong Liaison Office is historically significant in that it opens the way to a North-South league, the first stage of unification.

As seems to be standard in talk of this matter, Ch’oi hearkened back to Kim Dae Jung:

The peaceful-unification plan of President Kim Dae Jung’s Sunshine policy foresaw North-South league as a first stage, North-South confederation as a second, and complete unification as a third.

For all intents and purposes the Democratic Peace Party is the Jeolla party, but Ch’oi’s reference to the region’s most famous son is meant to reassure the entire public that nothing radical is being planned. Ch’oi also said that the North-South league (nambuk yŏnhap) must pave the way for a Korea league (k’oria yŏnhap) — whatever he means by that exactly.

The many articles published this month attest to a good deal of confusion about what North-South league entails, and what must precede or follow it. Is it more or less the same thing as confederation, as Moon Jae-in said in 2017? Or is it a stage on the way there? Is it in de facto operation already? In other words, is the Kaesong office the first stage in the systematization of the league (as Paek and the Hankyoreh assert), or the starting point on the road to it (as the Kyunghyang Sinmun and Hankyoreh 21 put it)? And is league the first stage of unification, or just a step in that direction? How fast is the end goal to be achieved?

I can find no serious debate on any of these points. Perhaps this is the great strength of the nationalist left. Those who approve of current developments generally get along fine, regardless of how differently they interpret them. Moon can thus float above the supportive discussion without having to pin himself down to any plan in particular.

3

Focusing on denuclearization as always, the Western commentariat generally downplayed the importance of the third Pyongyang summit.

Washington is thinking, “Let them have their get-togethers; we’re going to maintain sanctions until the North has to yield.” Seoul and Pyongyang are thinking, “Let them maintain their sanctions; we’re going to keep coming closer together until America has to yield.”

Near the top of the summit declaration was the statement that the two leaders had “reconfirmed the principles of ethnic autonomy and self-determination.” Most of the other points can also be interpreted in the context of league-building or league-preparing. But all these things had almost certainly been agreed to in advance.

The main point of holding the summit and the attendant photo ops was to habituate the South Korean public to the notion of the North as a normal, legitimate state, one fit to be trusted and leagued up with. The right wing here was therefore wrong to gloat over the lack of public interest in the event. Normalcy is supposed to be boring.

There was method even in Moon’s fulsome expressions of gratitude for the welcome he had received. He was in effect playing along with Kim Jong Un’s pretense that the citizens of Pyongyang had come out in droves on a weekday because they wanted to.

Were the South Korean president the liberal our journalists think he is, he would have insisted in advance that he not get the welcome accorded to Kim Dae Jung in 2000, who had realized at once who the crowds were really cheering for, and who later publicized the Dear Leader’s admission that they hadn’t lined the roads on their own initiative.

Instead Moon professed to be thrilled that this time, people were waving even from apartment windows. Is this because he is more naive and vain? Not at all. Unlike DJ he has a league to help build, and a dictatorship to help legitimize.

He must now ensure a respectful reception for his counterpart in December. This next milestone in the process may serve as a pretext for “regulating” conservative Youtubers, something the Moon-loyal media have been agitating for with increasing stridence.

September has also seen a concerted effort to downplay the Kim regime’s resemblance to a monarchy or a chaebol clan, which is the one aspect of the North that rubs even sympathetic people here the wrong way. Appearing on TBS Radio soon after his return from Pyongyang, Pak Chi-wŏn of the Democratic Peace Party said in regard to Kim Jong Un’s sister:

It’s because she’s of the Paektu bloodline that she hasn’t achieved the prominence merited by her ability …. It’s completely different from Park Geun-hye, who achieved much more prominence than her ability warranted.

So although Park came to power in a free and democratic election with a majority of votes, the ROK’s system is more rigged and nepotistic than the North’s, where blood-ties to the leader are more of a hindrance than a help. Pak’s interviewer Kim Ŏ-jun, a prominent Moon-loyal journalist, chimed in with:

[Kim Yo-jong] is highly regarded in North Korea too. Not because she’s his sister, but because of her ability.

I especially like that “too.” We can expect much more in this vein as Kim Jong Un’s visit draws near.

4

Let me return, by way of a conclusion, to Paek Nak-ch’ŏng’s essay. In it he reiterates a point he has already made a few times this year: A league must precede denuclearization, since it’s the only true guarantee against the “great threat” now posed by the “very existence of South Korea.” I must repeat my clarification that neither the ROK-US alliance nor the ROK’s arsenal is meant. He means the political threat to the Kim regime posed by the subversive contiguity of an independent co-ethnic state, one that periodically elects North-critical presidents.

Paek says that in a league the Koreas will “arrive at a situation in which large-scale change becomes inevitable in South Korean society as well.”

Both sides will see big change all right, but on very different fronts. If the whole point of a league is to make the Kim dictatorship feel perfectly secure, the North will see little more than economic and technological change, a rise in its material standard of living. The large-scale change Paek envisions for the South, though he is discreet enough not to come right out and say so, can only be of the threat-nullifying, political-cultural sort.

Impossible to believe? I wish it was. While watching Moon and Kim disport themselves on Mount Paektu — the modern nationalist myth of the ancient iconicity of which mountain our media swallowed hook, line and sinker — I was struck by a sobering thought: It has already become easier to imagine Seoul with a Kim Il Sung statue than to imagine Pyongyang without one. Not a lot easier, but easier.

We may all disagree about what exactly a North-South league will mean, or even whether it will come to pass. But let’s stop the denials — the old-fashioned denials — that this is what the two Koreas are working on.

UPDATE (5 October 2018)

I must confess to liking Park Won-sun, the mayor of Seoul, who has done much to relieve the plight of stray dogs and cats over the past several years, thereby setting an example for Busan and other cities. When you take the animals’ side in the war being waged against them, as I do, you gain a certain emotional distance from inter-human affairs, which can be an asset when researching a foreign country.

But readers who think I underestimate the South Korean nationalist left’s interest in human rights and overestimate its admiration for the North’s political culture should find the mayor’s remarks in the English Chosun eye-opening. Having just returned from the North, he said:

“I thought that we must preserve Pyongyang. It took almost 10,000 people just a few seconds to flip from one scene to the next. This is something you can see only in North Korea.”

When one reporter pointed out that some people feel uncomfortable watching the eerily synchronized display of conformity, Park said, “That’s because it’s their first time. We should be able to resolve [differences] if we see each other more often.”

So resolving differences means that South Koreans must get used to the aspects of the North they now find problematic, like its exploitation of children to political and economic ends.

To repeat a point I’ve made often in the past: The North’s mass games and tile displays are not communist exercises in the grinding-down of individuality, as the West misperceives them, but ultra-nationalist celebrations of ethnic homogeneity and unity. This doesn’t make the Moon camp’s sincere enthusiasm for these spectacles — or their regret that they are not replicable in the South — any easier to reconcile with liberal-democratic principles.

In other league-building news, South Korea’s prime minister is strengthening my hunch that Kim Jong Un’s visit will be preceded by a crackdown on strong criticism of the Moon administration (and of its North Korea policy in particular).

Western Pyongyang watchers tend to outsource judgment to institutions, as the Tyranny scandal has shown; we mustn’t presume to judge the clear evidence ourselves, but must leave that task to Columbia University and Cornell University Press while we go on citing pages riddled with indisputably fake sources. The same mindset dictates that the opinions of people not degreed, titled, or affiliated to any swanky institution are beneath notice. (I was just sneered at on Twitter for having responded in the above blog post to criticism from anonymous Redditers.)

When the time comes, therefore, Moon’s foreign supporters will likely shrug off measures against mere Youtubers as a needed check on all the kooks shouting “Fire!” in the peninsular movie theater. In fact the most popular commentators were, until very recently, respected contributors to TV panel discussions and the op-ed pages of the Donga or Joongang. They are not extremists. Jeong Gyu-je and Hwang Jang-su have been subjected to foul-mouthed insults from the actual far right for their criticisms of Park Geun-hye and other conservative politicians.

I reject the conventional notion that all this crackdown talk marks at worst a return to, or a lack of progress from, the last administration’s alleged intolerance of dissident speech. At the very least those were more pluralist times than these. Has everyone forgotten that in 2014 Park Geun-hye appointed to her Unification Preparatory Council none other than Moon Chung-in? Has everyone forgotten how her Unification Ministry used to invite some of her harshest critics to an annual conference of Pyongyang watchers?

In fact we are seeing here something new: the first stage of the “large-scale change” in South Korean society that the nationalist left, by its own admission, considers necessary for the coming “peace system.”

UPDATE (28 October 2018): The Foreign Press Finally Takes Notice

Kudos to John Power and the South China Morning Post for what is by far the best and most important English-language article on Korea to have come out since Moon Jae-in took power in May 2017. I’m not going to pretend to wonder why it had to be written by someone outside the foreign press corps in Seoul. The Blue House’s astute bridling of that lot would make a great story in itself – but who would dare write it?

I only wish Power hadn’t described North Korea as a communist country. This fallacy is bound to obscure the inherent precariousness of the very un-China-like set-up which — to hear some on the nationalist left tell it — is already in the first stage of de facto operation.

It shouldn’t be long now before the rest of the Western press kicks in with flippant “A League of Their Own” headlines, and cocksure optimism from the same experts who refused for so long to believe that any of this was being seriously considered.

I expect to hear everything spun as our loyal ally’s bold but pragmatic effort at subversively engaging the North, and boosting the South’s own economy in the process.

But what we’re talking about here is a confederation between a proud, resolute, ultra-nationalist state and an admiring, avowedly pacifist, moderate-nationalist one. No great gift of intuition is needed to predict that Kim Jong Un, not Moon Jae-in, will be the gardener guiding and shaping the inosculation of the two states.

In the meantime even those in Washington who refuse to accept the ideological realities must ponder the grotesqueness of our having an ally that is now, or very soon will be, quite literally in league with our adversary.

And a nuclearized adversary at that. The Moon camp has made abundantly clear — even if the Blue House hasn’t — that league or confederation must come before the denuclearization of the North, for only such a union would give Pyongyang the security it craves.