Author: ahasuerus

On a website called Sino-NK, Steven Denney, who in 2013 called South Korea a “nation that trusts the state,” has described an East Asia Institute study as “further evidence that South Korea is not the Unloved Republic.” Since his article makes no mention of the Choi scandal, I assume it was written quite a bit earlier than October 28, when it was posted.

The evidence adduced hardly justifies such a rosy conclusion. Apart from the fact that the EAI leans conservative, and thus has an incentive to constate a rise in patriotism under Saenuri rule, its studies have so far indicated that pride in Korea derives largely from such things as K-Pop’s standing overseas, the success of Korean athletes and exporters, and so on.

If we have learned anything from Trump’s victory, it’s that “expert” surveys should not keep us from drawing our own conclusions from what we see and hear around us every day. Has the Republic of Korea ever been more obviously unloved than in this year of “Hell Chosun”? Has the constitution ever been regarded by more South Koreans as an anti-democratic force, an obstacle in the way of the sŏngnan minsim, the Angry Popular Mood? If I may be allowed an anecdotal point: Never have so many of my students expressed a wish to emigrate after graduation.

Although Denney calls me a polemicist, his take on this matter is the contrarian one. The section of my published paper on “North Korea’s State Loyalty Advantage” (2011) in which I referred to South Korea as the “unloved republic” accords with a long-held consensus in political discussion here. Left and right agree that the ROK does not elicit as much loyalty from citizens as most other democratic states do.

That’s where their agreement ends, of course. The left sees the problem in the illegitimacy of a republic whose premature establishment cemented national division, and which compounded that sin by neglecting to “purge” former pro-Japanese elements. Any official efforts to counter the general lack of state spirit are vigorously opposed on the left as signs of state-chauvinism or kukkajuŭi. Hence the campaign against standardized history textbooks, a campaign which many Koreanists in the West (who are oh-so-quiet about the scandal in their own ranks) felt they had the moral authority to support with a petition.

On the South Korean right, on the other hand, the lack of patriotism (as opposed to nationalism) is chalked up to brainwashing by “North-obeying” (chongbuk) educators and journalists. In my opinion Syngman Rhee and Park Chung Hee deserve more of the blame; in the republic’s formative decades they let demonization of Kim Il Sung take the place of state-building. I like reminding conservatives that it was Roh Moo Hyun who inserted mention of the Taehan minguk into a pledge to the flag that had hitherto demanded loyalty only to the race and homeland. And it was under Lee Myung Bak that people had to start going to work on Constitution Day, meaning that the ROK no longer has a true republican holiday in the calendar.

When reading poll results about patriotism, one must keep in mind the vagueness of the name Taehan minguk. In English it is translated as Republic of Korea or South Korea, names which to us foreigners denote the state as a political entity distinct from its northern neighbor. To most people here, however, Taehan minguk conveys that sense only when used in contrastive proximity with the word Pukhan (North Korea).

Ask South Koreans when the Taehan minguk was established; more will answer “5000 years ago” than “in 1948,” because to them it is simply the full name for Hanguk, Korea, the homeland. That’s all it meant to most people who shouted those four syllables so proudly during the World Cup in 2002. (The North’s killing of six ROK sailors that same month was generally ignored.) The majority of South Korean elementary schoolchildren who recently said they would choose to be born again in the Taehan minguk explained their answer with reference either to its long history and beautiful traditions or to its climate and scenery. Only 23% of those who gave that answer did so “because it is a free and democratic state” (kukka). I suspect that’s more than would have given such an explanation ten years ago, but it’s still less than one in five (19.8%) of the total of children polled.

Use of the terms minjokchuŭi (nationalism) and minjok (nation) is also a complex affair. Despite its constant Japan-bashing and prioritization of ethnic grievance over state security, the South Korean left tends to use the word nationalism as a pejorative — especially in discussion of multiculturalism, of which it approves. Someone who is asked by a pollster whether he is prouder of the Taehan minguk or of the minjok therefore knows which answer is better, more progressive-sounding. In all likelihood he is not prouder of the republic than of his Koreanness. One should be wary of polls on this issue that were not conducted precisely and clearly.

Having learned nothing from the Arab Spring, Western media still take it for granted that peaceful street demonstrations must be liberal-democratic in inspiration. Journalists covering the current crisis in South Korea would do well to pay more attention (as Michael Breen has done) to the ochlocratic nature of much of the sloganeering: “the people are above the constitution,” and so on.

Americans saw Watergate as a threat to their republic. They countered by following constitutional and legal procedure to the letter. In Korea, many people appear unwilling to separate the political system from the wrongdoings of politicians. There has thus been a further deterioration of basic standards of civility in National Assembly hearings; indifference, in discussion of Park Geun-hye’s wrongdoing, to the distinction between the illegal and the inappropriate; and growing talk of the need to reverse decisions made by all branches of government during her presidency. That includes calls to overturn the convictions that put Lee Seok-ki and Han Myeong-suk in prison.

This is not to imply that Park’s die-hard supporters have any more state spirit than most of her detractors; if they did, they wouldn’t still think she has done nothing to warrant impeachment. No one who respects the  constitution and the rule of law would shrug off the charges against her the way these people do. As with the left’s defense of Han Myeong-suk, to say nothing of its beatification of Roh Moo Hyun, there is a general sense here that while corruption is always regrettable, it’s scandalous only when the other side is involved. A lot of state-building remains to be done.

Here is the post indignantly referred to on another site. I had withdrawn this and all other posts for the time being, because I knew that the old guard would respond by trying to deflect attention away from the issue at hand, and from textual excerpts that speak for themselves. My other postings will all be back too, don’t worry. 

The South Korean left has hitherto tried to convey the impression to the West that there was no fifth column in South Korea at all. The South Korean right, for its part, refuses to show any understanding for why so many intelligent and good people chose to side with the DPRK against the Park and Chun dictatorships. 

We foreigners have a special duty to get past both moldy Cold War-era narratives to the more nuanced truth. The older generation of American Korea scholars and Korea hands is just going to have to deal with this, I’m afraid. You can control discussion in the US, but not everywhere in the world.

To be clear: I am far from convinced that the North Koreans organized the event. But it must at least be acknowledged (as the South Korean courts have had to acknowledge) that there is good evidence for believing that North Korea had its agents in Gwangju as in every large South Korean city, and that they did not sit quietly on the sidelines that tragic May. 

Note also that I urge a critical reading of Kim’s book. I have gone to the trouble of checking several of his fascinating citations of demonstrator testimony, and at least they match the text. (Nor do I see any evidence that he is trying to take credit for the scholarship of others.) I urge everyone to read the book, or learn Korean and read the book, before presuming to pass judgment on its content.- B.R. Myers, 16 September 2016.

Update:

Don Baker continues to lament that I do not observe the field’s fatwa like a good boy, and treat Kim’s book like the Satanic Verses. May I remind him that I recommended Tyranny of the Weak in 2013 despite being the only person in the field fundamentally opposed to the book’s thrust? Had I not found the very troubling problems I discussed in the posting below “Revoking a Recommendation,” I would still be recommending it.

Call me crazy, but I like to tell open-minded scholars of Korean history about books I’ve read that offer useful content. If I consider them sound from start to finish, I say so. If not, I urge people to read them critically. I did this with Kim’s book just as I did with Tyranny.  

A book that consists to at least 30% of unedited passages and even whole pages from primary materials (for the most part, in the first two volumes, eyewitness and veteran demonstrator testimony) can hardly be described as “totally concocted,” can it? 

There is plenty of stuff in there, in the latter two volumes especially, that seems to me preposterous, like the martial-arts battle in the North Korean village described either in vol. 3 or 4. But much of what is said in the first two volumes, particularly by the demonstrators or veteran demonstrators themselves, is sound. And much of that runs counter to the more recent and hyperbolic myth-making.

Estella says in Great Expectations, “Moths and all sorts of ugly creatures hover around a lighted candle. Can the candle help it?” And could the good citizens of Gwangju help it if a few dozen North Koreans were hovering around them? What, were they supposed to check ID’s? Would the fact of a North Korean presence make their cause any less respectable, their grievances any less legitimate? Of course not.  Does the fact that there were some communists in the US civil rights movement tarnish its history? 

What is at work here with Baker et al is the misguided notion that if any piece of information serves the other side, or conforms in any way with the military dictatorships’ own propaganda, it must be denied or swept under the rug. As has happened with the Soviet archival evidence that the DPRK funded the so-called reformist parties in the 1960 election campaigns, just as the right wing had fulminated at the time. Good luck finding that evidence mentioned in new South Korean books on those parties (or on the Minjok Ilbo). 

The person really being libeled in this whole discussion is poor Kim Il Sung. By North Korean logic, he would have betrayed the revolution and the nation, and the content of all his own ROK-related speeches, had he not done everything he could to try to make the Gwangju uprising “go wide.” That was the southern part of the DPRK, as far as he was concerned. And in that famous speech in 1955, about the first half of which such an ill-informed fuss has been made, he said quite clearly that the most feasible way of getting the south back was by riding a southern revolution.  

I have too much respect for the man to believe he said to his anti-South apparatus, “I’ve been telling you for 20 years that when the next uprising comes, we’ve got to be ready to pounce and exploit it. Well, forget all that. If there are any of our men in Gwangju now, pull them out. Let those kids fight the puppet state on their own.”  What possible reason could a unification-obsessed nationalist have had to take such a line?

The writer of the book in question believes that the North instigated the uprising. Again: I am not convinced. (Nor, incidentally, are some of my most arch-conservative friends.) But a historian cannot dismiss sound information because there is unsound stuff in the textual vicinity, or a danger of someone else using the truth the wrong way. 

I needn’t go into the issue of how different libel laws are here in the ROK. I just find it interesting, and unfortunately typical of our field, that Baker appears to be angrier about an unorthodox opinion than about any of the examples listed in the posting below “Revoking a Recommendation.” — B.R. Myers, 17 September 2016. 

Ahn Cheol-soo’s People’s Party has called for a ban on “all cutting down or distortion” of the Gwangju uprising of May 1980, or the Gwangju Democratization Movement as it is routinely called. For “all cutting down or distortion” read: any mention of a possible North Korean role in the events. If the PP’s proposed law were to go into effect (a distinct possibility), offenders would be sentenced to up to 5 years in prison. And Ahn Cheol-soo considers himself the voice of centrist reason! So far there has apparently been no English-language reporting on the proposal, nor any complaint from the Western Korea scholars who recently protested the current ROK administration’s textbook policy.

The uprising of 1980 is one of those many issues in regard to which South Korean historians express themselves very differently depending on the level of knowledge of the people they are talking to. In the company of monolingual Western academics and journalists, they tend to dismiss all talk of a North Korean presence in Gwangju as absurd right-wing slander. In Korean-language discussion with their peers, on the other hand, they protest only against the right’s alleged overestimation of the North Koreans’ role. No one here seriously believes that Kim Il Sung would have refrained from sending at least some operatives to the scene. The fact that the Rodong Sinmun beat the South Korean media to certain key updates speaks for itself.

There is enough other evidence or testimony to back up the claim of DPRK involvement (including testimony from KPA veterans and other migrants) to prevent the use of the existing libel laws to muzzle discussion of it. Hence the perceived need for a new law that would put all heterodox talk of May 18th off limits.

The orthodox Western narrative of modern Korean history is by and large congruent with the South Korean progressivist narrative. American graduate students in search of a degree or an academic job should therefore stick to wide-eyed viewings of May 18th (Hwaryŏ han hyuga, 2007), the standard cinematic mythologization of the uprising. Naturally the film met with the great approval of the Seoul Foreign Correspondents’ Club, which presented the director with a prize.

But those with the luxury to remain open-minded should engage in a critical reading of Kim Tae-ryŏng’s four-volume book May 18th as History (Yŏksa-ro-sŏ-ŭi 5.18, Seoul, 2013). The first two volumes are the best, relying as they do on the demonstrators’ own written and spoken testimony, which runs counter to much of the current myth-making. As can be said of all books, this one could have benefited from some more editing and tightening up; three volumes would have made the author’s case more effectively. All the same, much of Kim Tae-ryŏng’s criticism of the orthodox account of Gwangju (to which even most conservatives now pay lip service) seems unanswerable. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the whole story of the South Korean opposition.