Sthele Press

In Asia Times this week Andrew Salmon writes:

Ever since 2006, when North Korea first tested a nuclear device, the broad understanding among analysts and observers has been that North Korea’s nuclear arsenal exists to deter an Iraq- or Afghanistan-style attack by nuclear-armed US forces… Of late, cracks have appeared in this long-held belief.

This reminds me of reading in the media in 2013 about how we Pyongyang watchers had all wrongly expected “Swiss-educated” Kim Jong Un to be a reformer, and were bitterly disappointed. In The Cleanest Race (2010) I had predicted a very military-first chip off the old block.

I realize “broad understanding” doesn’t mean “unanimous consensus,” but surely David Maxwell, Nicholas Eberstadt, Daniel Pinkston and I, to name just a few of us, made for a few earlier cracks in the conventional wisdom Salmon describes?

His article induced me to revisit what I’d written on this point. Like the following, from a cover story for Newsweek in 2013:

Especially subversive, now that so many of Kim Jong-un’s subjects have access to outside sources of culture and information, is the South Korean public’s manifest lack of interest in either the personality cult or unification. The regime is right to believe it cannot be secure until the peninsula is unified under its own rule. This is, of course, the “final victory” that Kim Jong-un and his media keep boldly promising the masses.

In 2016 I wrote an article for NK News entitled “Taking North Korea at its Word”:

The nuclear program has already progressed far beyond the stage needed to keep the enemy at bay. The regime hardly needs long-range missiles, or any more nuclear capability than it acquired years ago, to keep using Seoul as the world’s largest human shield.

Isn’t it time, then, that we paid more attention to the DPRK’s own declarations of its intentions? …. The slogan of “autonomous unification” … has always stood for the conquest or subjugation of South Korea.

In February 2017 I said in an interview with Reuters War College:

Those who treat the “axis of evil” remark and the bombing of Libya as watershed traumas in the North Korean psyche are really lampooning their own narrative, because if a regime has spent 50 or 60 years defying, humiliating and threatening a trigger-happy superpower like the United States, and the greatest shocks it has been dealt in return have been a rude line in a speech and an attack on a completely different country, its safety clearly does not depend on [its] developing a new kind of weapon. Its conventional artillery must have been protecting it very well indeed.

…. The very success of the nuclear program, the fact that it has gone this far, proves that it was never necessary for North Korea’s security in the first place.

So the question we have to ask ourselves in 2017 is: Why does North Korea risk its long-enjoyed security by developing long-range nukes? Why is it doing the one thing that might force America to attack, to accept even the likelihood of South Korean civilian casualties?

The only plausible goal big enough to warrant the growing risk and expense is the goal North Korea has been pursuing from day one of its existence: the unification of the peninsula.

That year saw journalists finally take notice of this view of things, as I noted in a blog entry:

For a long time there, I seemed to be the only Anglophone Koreanist who kept bringing up unification when discussing the North’s motives….[But] with every new missile launch or nuclear test, a few more people seem to realize that the North is arming too urgently, and at too great a risk to its own security, for such benign explanations to keep making sense. As a result more journalists than usual have been asking me to elaborate on my published views….. I feel safe in saying that this interpretation of North Korea’s motives has finally “arrived.”

How premature I was. Perhaps I was subconsciously trying to create a bandwagon effect. Granted, the old maddening consensus that the regime wanted to develop nukes only in order to trade them away for an aid deal had disappeared by 2017, but the newer trendy ideas were equally wishful, equally far removed from my view: the regime wanted only perfect security from US attack; it wanted to force the normalization of Pyongyang-Washington relations; it wanted a peace treaty; it wanted only to survive, to muddle through; and so on.

If memory serves, Andrei Lankov went in for most of those reassuring lines in turn, making him more popular in Foggy Bottom than yours truly. For a while there the US Embassy in Seoul would invite us in tandem to deliver North Korea briefings to people passing through. In retrospect I think the reason I was always instructed to speak first was so that Andrei could provide the quick economy-centric antidote to my nationalism-centric poison.

“Between us existed from the beginning the antagonism that unites dear friends,” as Yeats said of AE. In a Russian-language article in December 2017 Andrei nutshelled my views in indulgently-dismissive passing — including my assertion of the North’s intent to conquer the South — while expressing doubt about their “relation to reality.”

But I’ll be darned if he didn’t appear in the FT the other day sounding uncannily like — well, you tell me:

“But now [the nuclear program] is clearly overkill from a defensive point of view. They don’t really need intercontinental ballistic missiles and they don’t really need a thermonuclear device. This leads me strongly to suspect that their ultimate dream is to assert their control over South Korea.”

They all come around in the end.

2

Here’s the thing though: you can’t do justice to the topic of the North’s unification/control/domination drive without also discussing South Korean politics. To talk of the former while ignoring the latter is to convey the very wrong impression that Kim can only get his way through some form of “hot” coercion. Indeed, the FT quotes Andrei as giving the following scenario:

“When the situation is favourable … the North Koreans would provoke a crisis, deploy their ICBMs, and keep the Americans out by forcing them to choose between sacrificing San Francisco or Seoul,” said Lankov. “They could then use their tactical weapons to obliterate the significant conventional superiority of the South Korean forces, and install an ambassador in Seoul with veto power over any South Korean policy they do not like,” he added, likening Kim’s ambitions to Vladimir Putin’s “demilitarisation and denazification” strategy in Ukraine.

I feel bad criticizing soundbites, because I know how much vital and qualifying context they tend to get ripped away from. Let me say it anyway: Kim needn’t go to those lengths to achieve that end. The simple reason is that South Koreans’ attitude toward their state and the would-be hegemon next door couldn’t be less like Ukraine’s.

The longer explanation, which my readers have heard ad nauseam from me already, is that the South can be much less riskily subjugated via confederation, something that North Korea began proposing in 1960, and both states formally pledged to work towards in 2000. The ROK’s Unification Ministry has promoted the concept online and around the country since 2017.

The planners and architects of confederation — like Moon’s mentor Paek Nak-chung — make clear that the main goals are a) the elimination of the American military threat to North Korea and b) the elimination of the ideological threat to the Kim regime posed by the very existence of the South Korean state. Note also the expert consensus that the supra-state body administering the confederation should be located in Kaesong, and consist of equally-sized delegations from the two states. The North’s delegation, I need hardly add, would vote en bloc, enabling it to win every vote with only one supportive vote from the more pluralist side. An easier way to veto power than risking nuclear war, eh? Lankov would no doubt agree, if he didn’t consider the imputation of a confederation drive to the South Korean left a laughable “conspiracy theory.”

Not that the inter-Korean partnership has to be accompanied by any visible institutions or formal procedures. As many here argue, it makes more sense for Seoul and Pyongyang to come together “underwater” until such a time as the masses (and the US) can be safely apprised of the new reality. The Moon years thus saw both flashy displays of nascent partnership — like the construction of the liaison office, touted in the press as the first step to confederation — and “underwater” stuff like the South’s coaching of Kim on how to deal with Trump.

Then the breakdown of US-DPRK dialogue in Hanoi in 2019 forced the Koreas to revert (as they had done in 2002 after the “axis of evil” speech) to outward frostiness. This brings me back to what I call the Fraternization Trap, i.e. the fact that any significant, lasting improvement in inter-Korean relations raises the risk of America thinking it can strike North Korea without incurring the retaliatory destruction of Seoul. It was to keep an increasingly unfriendly Trump administration from doubting the automaticity of such a retaliation that the inter-Korean liaison office had to be blown up in 2020, and Moon subjected to a string of theatrical insults he well understood the reasons for.

The spirit of partnership continued regardless, occasionally making itself plain to the public, as when Kim Yo-jong angrily demanded the passage of a law criminalizing the launch of leaflet balloons into North Korea, and South Korean lawmakers proposed relevant legislation the next day.  They did this not because they feared the dictatorship but because they respected it, on nationalist grounds I have explained here at length. No coercion was necessary.

3

Contrary to what some Westerners may have assumed, the recent election to the presidency of an ostensible conservative — who is in fact an avowed admirer of the two Sunshine presidents, and a former prosecutorial scourge of the anti-North right — portends no reversal of South Korea’s drift into confederation. A slowing down or arrest of it perhaps, until the bumbling Yoon is either impeached or made irrelevant through constitutional revision, but not a reversal. His people have already pledged to abide by the 2018 Moon-Kim military agreement that effectively prevents ROK troops from rehearsing the defense of Seoul.

Lankov and others are free to go on discussing North Korea’s nuke-backed unification/domination drive in isolation from the topic of South Korean politics. They should realize, however, that in doing so they may make Uncle Sam more worried and jittery about the threat of fireworks than is conducive to peace on the peninsula. I’m afraid it does no good for Andrei to add the somewhat contradictory disclaimer, on the apparent basis of nothing more than optimism, that the scenario he describes is “very unlikely.” We Koreanists may be listened to in regard to Kim’s motives, but the man’s ability and readiness to act militarily on them is for experts of a different sort to judge.

In closing let me repeat what I’ve said before: There’s no understanding the one Korea without understanding the other. I hope I don’t have to wait five more years for people to come around to that.

 

UPDATE: 25 May 2022:

Having expressed incredulity in 2019 at the notion that Moon Jae-in might be interested in “some unequal confederation scheme,” Lankov wrote in the Chosun Ilbo on 16 May 2022:

If America takes fright and abandons Korea, North Korea will begin an all-out attack on South Korea. The ROK military’s weaponry would be no more than toys in the face of North Korea’s tactical nuclear weapons. What would the next stage be? North Korea could unify the peninsula by absorbing the South, but there is a higher possibility of its establishing an unequal relationship through confederation. Simply put: the Hongkongification of South Korea…. Many people will think this a too pessimistic scenario. Of course it would not be easy to realize. But while the possibility of this scenario was zero until recently, I think it is now 5-10%.

I can overlook the second half of that last sentence; whatever percentage values a man chooses to put on his gut feelings are up to him. I’d like to overlook the first half of it too, if only to avoid looking like I’m hounding Andrei, but I know what will happen if it’s left unchallenged.

First, people will start thinking that North Korea has only recently made some very fundamental shift in strategy. Then we’ll start hearing about what belligerent American statements or behavior provoked it, and how we can make things right again. And still more time will be wasted.

So let’s get serious here. Kim Il Sung began calling for unification by confederation in 1960, and began talking of a North Korean nuclear program only a few years after that, according to many sources. The DPRK has been pursuing a nuclear program in earnest since the 1980’s, all along making clear in its inner-track propaganda that the ultimate objective is “final victory,” i.e. unification.

South Korea’s pro-North left has been publicly putting 2 and 2 together since about 2000, when Han Ho-seok et al began articulating the scenario of the two Koreas entering a confederation after nuclearization forces the Yankees out. The Kim Jong Un regime’s ROK-oriented propaganda has been about as explicit on this point as it could be without waking the dozing Americans. As NK News reported some 4 years ago, Uriminzokkiri said:

The current South Korean government has no need to fear or feel unnecessary repulsion about our nuclear weapon. It is a means for securing peaceful unification and the survival of the race (minjok).

And all this is why for the past several years I have blogged and spoken publicly about the nuclear program in the context of a confederation drive to which the two Koreas have repeatedly expressed their commitment. During that time the very notion of a confederation drive was subjected to mockery from various Pyongyang watchers, of whom Andrei Lankov was perhaps the most vocal and influential.

So perhaps I can be forgiven for insisting on clarification: Was there really zero possibility of the scenario in question until very recently? If so, when, why and how did things suddenly change? Wouldn’t it be closer to the truth for Andrei to say that he didn’t begin taking the scenario seriously until very recently?

UPDATE: 27 May 2022:

I was just contacted by a friend who suggested I’d misunderstood Andrei. The gist: “Surely his point is that while unification was always the North’s goal, Kim Jong Un is only now militarily capable of bringing it about by forcing the ROK into a confederation. So while there was zero chance of this happening a few years ago, now it’s a 5-10% possibility.”

I see I presumed too much familiarity with Andrei’s work on the part of some of my readers. His position has until very recently been the common one of asserting — in direct contradiction of my own view — that neither North Korea nor the pro-North left even wants unification or confederation. In February 2019 he wrote: “The unification idea produces little optimism in both parts of the country.” Of confederation: “No serious politician in either Korea will ever consider such an option.” The reasoning, given at some length, is that these things would be equally impracticable for the South (for economic reasons) and the North (for domestic political ones). Official talk of unification/confederation in North and in South Korea is thus but “lip service.” (Andrei’s article mocking the ROK right for worrying about confederation followed several months later.)

This is why I find these latest statements so interesting. We are obviously to infer from them that the goal of the North’s nuclear weapons program has now changed. The logic behind this apparent view is what I would like to see clarified.

UPDATE: 6 July 2022:

I have it on the immense authority of native Irish speaker Myles Na gCopaleen (1911-1966) that apart from meaning “a heron’s boil,” “a sound made in an empty house by an unauthorized person,” and many other things, cur is Gaelic for “the art of predicting past events.” I see some cur on display in Lankov’s latest, “How North Korea could control the South without ever conquering it.”

In a scenario in which it wins a second Korean War in say the 2030[s] or 2040s….North Korea would probably demand the removal of what it would label reactionary forces from South Korean politics, art,  education and culture…The DPRK would reserve the right to intervene in South Korean politics, easily silencing all political forces, individuals and media outlets hostile to the new system.

In other regards, South Korean life would continue in established ways….[but the North Koreans] will seek to find ways to extract their due through some forms of obligatory payments and money transfers, though this could be a difficult task. In a sense, such an unequal confederation under nearly complete North Korean control would amount to the Finlandization of South Korea.

The above scenario is discussed without mention of any of the following:

• the purge and imprisonment of scores of prominent conservatives in 2017-2018, with special prejudice shown toward people who had aroused North Korea’s anger,
• the Moon camp’s assertions in 2018 that the two Koreas had entered the first stage of confederation,
• the alacrity with which the ROK National Assembly fulfilled Kim Yo-jong’s demand for a ban on anti-North leaflet balloons,
• pro-government academics’ call for Pyongyang watchers here and abroad to engage in peace-minded self-censorship, refraining especially from statements that might make it harder for Kim Jong Un to maintain control,
• the ROK foreign ministry’s campaign to get sanctions on North Korea eased or lifted, and the attendant coalescence of the North and South Korea lobbies in Washington,
• the government’s hours-long refusal to intercede with the DPRK on behalf of a ROK fisheries official who had floated across the NLL,
• the government’s proposal to send back North Korean fishermen suspected of murder even before extradition was requested, and
• a Blue House official’s advice to the DPRK on how to maximize the propaganda effect of its military parades.

Much more in that vein can be found in my blog entries from the past five years, and more will doubtless become known to us in the months ahead. But doesn’t the above suffice to indicate that Finlandization (to use the mildest possible word for it) was well underway by the time Yoon was elected? And can anyone deny that the process would have continued under Lee Jae-myung? Again: North Korea does not need a war to get much of what it wants.

Lankov’s repeated invocation of a conderation-via-war scenario deserves attention from the many Pyongyang watchers whose desire to downplay the threat of North Korean aggression is matched only by their commitment to covering for the ROK left. They’re going to have to choose between those two urges, for if America goes on ignoring what happened here under Moon (as Lankov seems determined to do), it will be all the more likely to overestimate that threat.

UPDATE: 12 July 2022:

Two days ago the Joongang Daily published an article, “The gutting of Korea’s spy agency,” about the Moon administration’s effort to end the gathering of critical intelligence on North Korea. I read this as further confirmation that a loose confederation was already underway.

And here are photographs from 2019 of South Korean officials at Panmunjeom forcibly returning two North Korean fishermen — ROK citizens, according to this country’s constitution — to the Kim dictatorship.

UPDATE: 14 August 2022:

What better way for a pro-North ROK administration to disable counter-intelligence than to transfer domestic spy-catching duties to a police agency that has just been purged of North-critical people?

Pennmike looks into the purging prosecutors’ unconstitutional argument that online criticism of North Korea by members of the police agency constituted illegal meddling in politics. The implicit extension of the concept of the domestic is yet another indication that in 2018 the Moon government already considered itself — as many prominent people on the nationalist left considered it — the partner in a de facto confederation.

[Note: This is the start of a thread on the race; I will be posting updates until 9 March.]

“There’s never been a presidential election like this one,” the newspapers keep saying. Because the two parties are already looking beyond it to “democratic integration,” they’ve been going easy on each other, to the annoyance of their respective voter bases. Most of the ideological noises made thus far have been of the integrating sort. The left-wing candidate Lee Jae-myung has praised Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo Hwan for their economic policy, while his conservative rival Yoon Seok-yeol has again pledged to enshrine the spirit of the “Gwangju Democratization Movement” (May 1980) in a new preamble to the constitution.

Most of the time the two candidates just promise extravagant hand-outs, and say disapproving things about each other’s moral failings. Their followers are remarkably impervious to bad news. It seems no number of serious allegations about the corruption of Lee and his wife can keep his approval ratings under 35%. Conservatives are no less ready to shrug off the fact that Yoon was until 2019 Moon Jae-in’s loyal servant, and a left-winger by his wife’s proud account. He’s still reluctant to criticize Moon by name. The Christian right overlooks even the couple’s interest in shamanism, talismanic symbols and fortune-telling, although baseless rumors of weird Blue House rites did much to turn it against Park Geun-hye in 2016. (By the way, Western observers who want to treat shamanism as a kooky right-wing thing should read about the role it played in the minjung movement.)

The main issue dividing left and right remains North Korea, but the two parties disagree with each other much less strongly about it than their bases do. Last year the opposition party framed the Seoul mayoral election as an opportunity to protest the government’s obsession with inter-Korean relations. No sooner was Oh Se-hoon elected in a landslide than he vowed to support the bid for a Seoul-Pyongyang Olympics.

Having argued already that the local right isn’t as hardline as the foreign press makes out, I want to make clear in this post that pro-Northism has always been more moderate than Western or Japanese radicalisms. One of the things that drove the student leader Kim Young-hwan from Marxism-Leninism into the figurative arms of the Great Leader was the film The Killing Fields (1984), about the Khmer Rouge. Seeking a kinder, gentler socialism, he found it in the bland truisms of Juche Thought, as well as in North Korean radio broadcasts, which urged the campus protest movement to employ more populist rhetoric and tactics than its Marxist-Leninist core was then using.

Not surprisingly his National Liberation or NL group (known here by that English acronym), ended up outnumbering the Leninists by a ratio of about 9:1. To its credit neither faction went in for the terrorist killings we associate with the Rote Armee Fraktion or the Brigate Rosse. While the Leninist youth were big on throwing Molotov cocktails, the NL protesters staged the more effective downtown lie-ins of the so-called June 1987 Struggle.

Although mythologized nowadays (as in 1987: The Day Comes) as the driving force behind democratization, the student protest movement was monolithically abstentionist and in favor of “people’s democracy,” despite its belated strategic alliance with the bourgeois opposition. A good book on this subject has just been put out by Min Gyeong-u, an oft-imprisoned former official of the Pan-Korean Alliance for Reunification. It wasn’t pro-North students like himself, he says, but Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung who forced the Chun regime to allow direct elections.

Let me just say something here about the word “pro-North.” Globalization globalizes taboos, so Korea watchers are now as nervous about calling people “pro-North” as South Koreans themselves have become. For some reason “pro-” is thought to express something far more extreme in this connection than it does in all comparable ones. You can call South Koreans pro-American without implying they want another US military occupation. But you can’t attribute pro-Northism to South Koreans without some Western fool on Twitter accusing you of thinking they want a North Korean takeover. Even saying that Moon Jae-in admires the country is considered a horrible slander, although the address he delivered to a packed stadium up there in 2018 speaks for itself.

I could understand it if the Korea watchers flying off the handle at the word “pro-North” considered the DPRK as impossible for any sane person to like as Pol Pot’s Cambodia. But no, these tend to be the same people who tell us what a wonderful place it is when you get to know it. So forgive me if I find their jeering a little forced, and “double down” on my use of the term in question: South Korea’s nationalist left is pro-North.

But there have always been differences of opinion inside this ideological community. Even the hardcore students who slogged through Juche texts in the 1980s could be divided into those who did and those who didn’t accept the Leader Theory twaddle. (The latter group was larger.) There was also a branch of the NL movement that refused to take orders from the North’s southward radio broadcasts. To my knowledge none of these groups wanted KPA tanks to come rolling down again like in 1950. They wanted — just as Kim Il Sung professed to want — a transition stage on the way to unification, namely federation or confederation.

Here the Westerner, determined to keep rooting for what CNN tells him is the “liberal” South Korean party, asserts that the nationalist left must have abandoned its earlier beliefs. But age doesn’t necessarily moderate people. (I’m more radical about animal rights now than I was 20 years ago.) The most prominent members of today’s ruling party refuse to renounce the National Liberation movement. They still consider the “poorer but purer” Korea the more legitimate state, just as it’s routinely presented in those inter-Korean buddy movies and romance dramas the Moon government likes subsidizing. Min Gyeong-u has remarked on how radical (gwagyeok hada) many people who went to university 30-some years ago still are. The president’s own worldview as expressed in public-holiday speeches is straight out of the 1980s. Whatever he may say to his Western counterparts, his base sees no reason why the North should denuclearize, and holds Washington responsible for the ongoing crisis. The efficacy of appeasement, a word which in Korean lacks the negative associations it has in English, is still wholeheartedly believed in.

One plank most pro-Northers  certainly have abandoned is the “Yankee go home” line. Yes, this is partly because they don’t want Kim Jong Un to do anything crazy. But they also understand which half of the peninsula the US-ROK alliance has done a better job of protecting since the truce. Make Yankee go home, and South Korea ceases to be a human shield deterring even the most limited strike on the North.

The goal of the nationalist left, then, is still an inter-Korean confederation, or “de facto unification” as many (including Lee Jae-myung) prefer to call it, but on paper this is a remarkably loose and tame affair. We’re told it would come down to little more than routine summits, a constitutionally anchored commitment to cooperate economically, and some sort of EU-type, supra-state body to administer the partnership. Let’s leave aside for now the restrictions on anti-North expression that would be sure to accompany such a set-up here. Let’s also disregard the question of whether (and why) the North would be interested in it. My point is that the concept is probably moderate enough for the Minjoo and the People Power Party to integrate over in the near future — or at least to join in removing all constitutional obstacles to. The sanctions currently in place would give the conservatives cover with their voters: Relax, it’ll never come to fruition.

In any case I don’t see that a President Yoon would have much choice but to go along with this, and with whatever else the Minjoo-run National Assembly chose to make a stand on. He’d be lucky to serve a full term anyway. Already some are saying a Yoon victory in March would constitute a “coup d’état.” The implication is that street resistance would have to begin at once, probably before his inauguration in May, for the nationalist left reserves the right to remove or at least neutralize a president if voters pick the wrong one. This sort of thinking goes back to the protest movement too, the apex of which was the May 1991 Struggle to topple President Roh Tae Woo — whose successor was due to be elected the following year. But that’s one episode of modern history there won’t be a movie about.

UPDATE: 9 February 2022: Protecting President Moon

Edward Banfield’s The Moral Basis of a Backward Society [1958; not, as I had originally written, The Unheavenly City] has received quite a bit of attention in South Korea, where sociologists have been struck by the parallels between southern Italy (as he describes it) and their own society. I like Banfield’s anecdote about how a mere payment dispute induced a Monarchist Party member to join the Communist Party, only to defect back again as soon as the problem was resolved.

Of course that wouldn’t fly in North Korea; defect from their monarchist party and you’d better keep running. But here in the South I see a leftist lawyer speaking out on behalf of Yoon Seok-yeol, and Lee Myung Bak’s former nuclear negotiator stumping for Lee Jae-myung. Self-styled followers of Park Geun-hye have come out for Lee too, on the grounds that Yoon put Park in prison on trumped-up charges. (Which is an odd motivation considering that Lee, although a mere mayor at the time, was one of the first to call for her impeachment.) And in the city of Ulsan, about 200 Minjoo Party members, declaring themselves disgusted with Lee’s corruption, have defected to the conservative opposition.  Rumor has it that whether the independent candidate Ahn Cheol-soo throws in his lot with Yoon or Lee will depend on who can offer him the best post in the next government.

I suspect the above has as much to do with Korea’s patrimonial tradition as with what Banfield referred to by the somewhat unfortunate term “amoral familism”; so many high-paying, perk-laden jobs come up for grabs with each new administration that it pays to be open-minded. If the aisle-crossings seem especially numerous now, it’s because the ideological gap between the two main camps has never been narrower, due mainly to the leftward drift of the right.

Many Moon-loyalists are thus still undecided about who to vote for, because they can’t figure out whether Lee or Yoon is more likely to have their man prosecuted when he steps down. (The Blue House’s alleged meddling in the Ulsan mayoral election would be enough to get things rolling.) Implicitly acknowledging that Moon is vulnerable to prosecution, a Minjoo lawmaker in Lee’s camp has assured the party’s base that he’s the only candidate who “can watch over President Moon Jae-in well,” the other fellow being likely to “inflict harm on him through an investigation.” This may be one reason why the mounting allegations against the Minjoo candidate are not hurting him that much in the polls: Moon’s many followers may be reasoning that if anyone now has an incentive to stop the custom of presidents sending their predecessors to prison, it’s Lee.

UPDATE: 11 February 2022: Strong Anger

In an interview with the JoongAng Ilbo the other day, Yoon was asked if as president he would subject the Moon administration to a “purge of accumulated evils,” i.e. an investigation into corruption and abuse of power. Moon himself came to power on pledges to carry out such a purge against the Park administration. Instrumental in the wave of arrests that followed, which saw almost 200 former officials sent to prison with remarkable speed, was Yoon Seok-yeol, who rose to the post of prosecutor general as a result.

Until that interview Yoon had asserted that he considers Moon an honest man whose underlings have let him down. He has to take this mild position if he wants a) to win over Lee-disdaining Minjoo voters and b) to work as president with a National Assembly dominated by Moon loyalists.

On the other hand Yoon knows that many conservatives now plan to boycott the election, claiming to see no meaningful difference between him and Lee. So in answer to the question, Yoon said, yes, of course, a “purge” would take place if necessary, in accordance with the law.

Surprised to hear the opposition party candidate sounding like an opposition party candidate, Moon responded by saying through a spokesman: “I express strong anger, and demand an apology” for “treating the current government, without basis, as an object of an accumulated-evils investigation.” (In its translation the Korea Herald rendered “I express strong anger” as “I am deeply resentful.”)

In fact there’s quite a bit of evidence that the Blue House has abused its power, especially in connection with the Ulsan mayoral election and the shutdown of a nuclear reactor, but Yoon rushed to explain that he and the president are “of the same mind”:

Our President Moon has always emphasized the need for investigations without sacrosanct areas, in accordance with principles and the law.

[Note that in the above the possessive pronoun connotes affection or good will.]

I too have said that official corruption and irregularities must be handled in accordance with laws, principles, and a fair system.

Meaning that an investigation would not necessarily be a matter of “political retaliation.” But even when there is evidence that an administration abused power, Koreans tend to regard it as score-settling if the next president lets prosecutors go after its officials. Roh Moo Hyun, who killed himself in 2009 after being apprised of the case against him, is considered a martyr here; Moon referred to the cautionary “tragedy” of his death in that interview I just mentioned. The reason Kim Dae Jung is still held up as a model of integrative spirit is because he turned a blind eye to the wrongdoing of the government that preceded his.

Why then (you ask) was there no outcry against the 2017-19 purge of Park and her people? Because the opposition party and media also needed it to take place, in order to justify their calls for her impeachment — calls that had actually been motivated by the drive for constitutional revision.

This whole episode must be seen as a blunder on Yoon’s part; he has spooked the Lee-mistrusting left without convincing conservatives that he’s one of them.  And Moon, the opposition party now alleges, has broken the South Korean law forbidding presidents from siding openly for or against a particular candidate.

In an interview on 10 February, Moon also said in regard to Yoon that whether it’s election season or not, sowing discord and division is not the way to “go towards a politics of integration.” There’s that word again.

UPDATE: 17 February 2022: Lee Changes His Tune

“Everyone agrees,” Professor Jeong Byeong-gi (Yeungnam University) wrote in the left-leaning Kyunghyang a few days ago, “that the main problem with our politics is the imperial presidential system.” That may indeed be the consensus of South Korean journalists, academics and politicians these days, but I doubt if one in ten average citizens would agree with it, or with the assertion that “the fundamental reform of changing the presidential system to a parliamentary one is necessary.” If any institution has a worse reputation here than the presidency, it’s the National Assembly.

There’s no arguing with the professor, however, that by this yardstick of reform-mindedness, “Yoon Seok-yeol is ahead of Lee Jae-myung.” Since the start of his campaign Lee has stated a few times, to the disapproval of many in his party, that he’s no more interested in a parliamentary system than the public is. At most he would support the change from one five-year presidential term to an American-style four-year term with the possibility of re-election (which, as a few critics have pointed out, would hardly weaken the Blue House).

Lee could afford to play the maverick in this fashion when he was beating Yoon in the polls, but the (ostensible) conservative is now slightly ahead according to most of them. Particularly damaging to the former governor’s popularity have been recent allegations that his wife had two provincial government employees at her beck and call, their daily challenge being to find ways to charge family expenses to the taxpayer. Meanwhile the investigation into the Daejang-dong development scandal has been progressing at a tempo which in itself reflects Lee’s lack of Blue House support. (The wheels of justice grind far more slowly for President Moon’s kind of people, i.e. veterans of the nationalist-left protest movement.) That investigation has just yielded more momentous revelations, but the talk of expensive Lee family meals charged to various Seongnam-municipal  and then Gyeonggi-provincial government accounts is easier for the public to understand.

Lee has thus felt compelled to strike more conformist notes on reform, pledging to “form an integrated citizens’ government in solidarity and union with all political forces supportive of political change,” and to implement a system whereby the National Assembly would put forth one or two candidates for prime minister, a post to which Lee now agrees to assign more powers. If necessary, he added, he would serve a four-year term, and even refrain from talking of a Lee Jae-myung administration. This doesn’t quite add up to a parliamentary or even a semi-presidential system, but it’s about as far in the direction of one as Yoon has said he wants to go. Whether this reassures the Moon loyalists in the National Assembly that they would be able to prevent a President Lee from allowing their leader to be prosecuted is another matter.

UPDATE: 18 February 2022: Incel Election?

The literary historian George Saintsbury wrote of “the sound rule that anonymous writing should never be personal,” and took Leigh Hunt to task for violating it. But Hunt at least encouraged one great poet and wrote a few excellent poems himself. This is more than can be said for the DC-based lawyer and member of the Korea lobby who, when not reviling the Moon government’s critics on Twitter under the handle “TK of AAK,” shills for it in slightly more measured prose under the name S. Nathan Park. (Many of his older and more abusive tweets were recently deleted.)

A few days ago Unherd published an article of Park’s entitled “Inside South Korea’s incel election.” The gist: If Yoon wins the election on 9 March, despite the marvelous record of “liberal” Moon Jae-in, the “most popular president in [the ROK’s] democratic history,” it will be in large part because the conservative party’s chairman Lee Jun-seok has had such great success in riling up young misogynists who aren’t getting enough sex.

Korean conservatives have found a new lease on life by appealing to sexism and male grievance politics. If Yoon Seok-yeol does prevail on 9 March, his victory will be touted as the triumph of anti-feminism. That will be an ominous sign for South Korea’s future.

No one who has been following South Korea’s English-language press for more than a few weeks will be taken in by the piece, but let me just set out the main countervailing facts as concisely as possible.

• The Moon administration is considered by most left-wing commentators to have been a disappointment. (Many of them judge even his performance on the inter-Korean front quite harshly, or more harshly than I do; as I’ve explained here, there’s no way for overt inter-Korean relations to progress beyond the state of US-DPRK relations without endangering the North’s security.) To quote the left-wing Hankyoreh: “Moon’s performance has been dismal…. Nor does Moon have anything to show in terms of political reform.” This despite his party’s having enjoyed a comfortable majority in the National Assembly for the past two years.

• Moon’s current approval rating is 40%.

• Polls indicate that only about 40% of the electorate want to see another Minjoo government. Alas, there aren’t nearly enough young men in this country (as we provincial university professors know better than anyone) for the anti-feminist portion of them to make up a substantial part of the over 50% of voters who want a change.

• In 2019 the former nationalist-left governor of South Chungcheong Province was sentenced to a three-and-a-half year prison term for the protracted sexual exploitation of a female provincial employee. The nationalist-left mayor of Seoul committed suicide in 2020 after a city employee reported him for sexual harassment. (The frightened woman was then attacked on Moon-loyal social media for making a fuss over nothing.) The nationalist-left mayor of Busan had to resign that same year amid charges of sexual assault. The last two of these scandals were followed by conservative landslides in mayoral elections — victories which S. Nathan Park attributes to, of all things, a surge of hostility toward women.

  

• The nationalist left’s sense of humor shows that it’s anything but liberal, let alone feminist. In 2012 a media personality who had joked publicly about raping and killing Condoleezza Rice was nominated by the Minjoo to run for a National Assembly seat. (He lost.) Nor can there be any denying the misogynist overtones of much of the criticism of Park Geun-hye between 2012 and 2017. (See the “satirical” picture above.) Since last year the nationalist left has tried to “slut-shame” Yoon’s wife by alleging that she was a bar hostess in her younger years. Mockery of her plastic surgery is on the rise; a middle-aged singer loyal to Lee Jae-myung has just put out a song entitled, “The Woman who Looks like Michael Jackson.”

• The conservative party chairman is now unpopular among Yoon’s supporters, as witness the daily excoriation to which he is subjected on popular Youtube channels like Garosero. There is general unease over his reluctance to criticize Moon, which exceeds even Yoon’s, and the support he gets from some left-leaning commentators as a “reasonable conservative.”

• As for Lee Jae-myung: Rather than take responsibility for his family’s misuse of government employees and expense accounts to private ends, which could hardly have continued for as long as it did without his knowledge, he has had his wife and a female employee take the fall. (See the previous update.)

• Like Moon, he does indeed seem to appeal more to young female voters and less to young males than Yoon does, but considering the Minjoo’s record over the past five or so years, I think this can be sufficiently explained in regard to longer-standing, Korea-transcending gender differences in support for higher taxation and social welfare. In any case, the latest poll (reported on in the Hankyoreh) puts Lee Jae-myung’s popularity among South Koreans in their 20s at 20%, so clearly most young women are no more interested in a continuation of Minjoo rule than most young men are.  (The incel- or feminist-relevant issues that Park makes so much of do not feature in the pollster’s breakdown of voters’ reasons for preferring this or that candidate.)

Whether writing under his own name or as “TK,” S. Nathan Park always seems to proceed from the assumption — perhaps a correct one — that his readers are too parochial or dim-witted to get their Korea news from anything but an American source. Thus does he omit all mention of the scandals now besetting Lee Jae-myung, which are doing far more to boost his lackluster rival’s poll numbers than anything else.

UPDATE: 23 February 2022: No Costco in Gwangju 

“There is such a thing as the Jeolla viewpoint,” a European couple said somewhat wearily to me after a year in the region, “and everyone there seems to have it.” But the southwest has been looking less monolithically supportive of the nationalist-left candidate than everyone expected. Recent polls have put Yoon’s popularity in Jeolla and Gwangju at a whopping 18%. This is partly due to his success in wondering aloud, on a recent campaign stop, why the city of 1.5 million residents — which would put it between Philadelphia and San Diego in an American list — doesn’t have a single megamart or big shopping mall.

That the news of this lack was at first indignantly denied by ruling-party officials in Seoul, and took even the conservative media by surprise, shows how isolated from the rest of the ROK the southwest still is — or, to be more exact, how few outsiders who are not of the Jeolla diaspora ever go there for a visit.

Upon confirming that there is indeed no Costco, E-Mart or Starfield mall in Gwangju, some Minjoo members explained that it’s because local merchants don’t want them around. Well, of course they don’t; but other cities in Korea have overridden such opposition and continue to do so. It has been uniquely effective in Gwangju only because the Minjoo power elite wants to keep Big Retail out too. Ideology is at work here. One Moon-loyal panelist responded to Yoon’s problematization of the issue by saying clumsily that “putting a brand-name watch on a poor person doesn’t make him rich.”

Such talk is of a piece with the viewpoint mentioned above, central to which is the claim that Jeolla was so cruelly held back by the Gyeongsang-centric military dictatorships that it still hasn’t caught up to the rest of the country. Paradoxically enough this mythohistory goes hand in hand with pride in the southwest’s preservation of a more rural and sobak han (benevolently naive), therefore more “purely Korean” way of life. Hence the common assumption that Jeolla somehow represents the true will of the nation (minshim) regardless of what national polls say. It’s sort of an aggrieved version of Texans’ belief that their state is the most quintessentially American one, that the Dallas Cowboys are “America’s team,” etc.

Whatever other elements go into this victimhood regionalism – if I may adapt J.H. Lim’s term victimhood nationalism – the bloc voting that results has served the nationalist left well enough to make it worth cultivating. The mood in Jeolla matters so much because its diaspora is so numerous, especially in Seoul – which is why most district chiefs in the metropolis are from the area.

But word has finally got around in Gwangju that the city’s per capita GDP is higher than megamart-rich Busan’s, and locals, the younger ones in particular, are wondering why they can’t live accordingly. When polls appeared showing a solid majority in support of change, Lee Jae-myung — who had only just accused Yoon of “far-right populism” for bringing up the issue — pledged to help the city reach a compromise between supporters and opponents. It has been odd to see the two candidates treating this municipal affair as a president’s business, despite agreeing that the office must be weakened.

UPDATE: 4 March 2022: Asymmetric Mudslinging

Like all Americans here I relish the civilized escapability of Korean election campaigns. On a 40-minute trip from Yeoju to the Democratization Movement Memorial Museum the other day I saw no indication that the country was about to choose its next leader. And this is the heart of Lee Jae-myung country.

President Moon isn’t even allowed to express support for the ruling party’s candidate. Then again, it was pretty obvious why he chose to claim in his March 1 speech that the Kim Dae Jung government was the first democratic one in Korea’s history. (This remark elicited a swift protest from the Kim Young Sam Center for Democracy.) Another signal of sorts was the decision of a candidate for the obscure New Wave Party to abandon his run and join hands with Lee. The man in question, Kim Dong-yeon, had been rumored to be Moon’s choice of a last-minute substitute for Lee should the latter have to bow out early. Yet on the same day a group of Moon-loyal “honey badgers,” as they call themselves, came out in support of Yoon Seok-yeol.

The third-party candidate Ahn Cheol-soo had been expected to live up yet again to his name, a homonym for the Korean word for withdrawal. The only question had been which of the two main candidates would win his favor; now of course we know. The assumption is that Yoon promised him a few ministerial posts to distribute among members of his party, which will now merge with the People Power Party. (Yoon couldn’t simply promise to make him premier, as the Minjoo majority in the National Assembly would have to sign off on that.) This makes me wonder how Yoon could afford to give a few additional posts to Minjoo people — as he would have to do to live up to his promise of an “integrated government” — without making conservative voters feel thoroughly duped.

What I found more interesting, since Ahn stands for nothing in particular, was an electoral alliance that didn’t quite come to pass: Lee Jae-myung reached out invitingly to the arch-conservative candidate Cho Won-jin, a Park-loyalist firmly opposed to the constitutional enshrinement of the spirit of Gwangju 1980. Even by Korean standards of bedfellowship this was a bit much, and Cho evidently felt the same way, explaining his “firm refusal” by saying simply, “Our ideologies are different.” It was an odd proposal from a strategic viewpoint too, since Cho’s candidacy can only cut into Yoon’s vote.

It would be wrong to conclude from such episodes that the Minjoo has abandoned ideological principles to the extent the People Power Party has. A nationalist-left candidate trying to get a conservative to drop out of the race is something quite different from a conservative – an ostensible conservative – positioning himself as the true heir to the nationalist-left tradition, the way Yoon does with his constant homages to Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun.

One could of course argue that Kim and Roh were both more conservative than Moon. It’s also true that Lee Jae-myung has said kind words about the military dictators’ economic policy, as if it hadn’t consisted to a large extent of suppressing workers’ wages, which for the braver and bolshier gender in the vanguard of the labor movement translated into things like being doused with fecal water and beaten with steel pipes.

What matters here, however, is not history but the mnemo- or mythohistory generally agreed upon. The so-called Miracle on the Han River is now remembered mainly as proof that government intervention in the economy works wonders, a message harmless enough for a nationalist-left candidate to invoke. The myth of Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyun, on the other hand, is inseparably bound up with the Sunshine Policy. Yoon’s invocation of it is by no means nullified by his noises about tolerating no guff from North Korea, which recall remarks made by Kim, Roh and Moon on the campaign trail. He cannot live up to that part of his rhetoric without running afoul of the National Assembly.

The two main candidates are still ideologically far enough apart for their docile voter bases to consider the election on March 9 hugely important. The die-hard left-wing third of the populace will hold its nose and vote for Lee, just as the die-hard conservative quarter of it will vote disdainfully for Yoon. If the latter candidate ends up winning, it will be because the free-floating vote is so big here, and many more undecideds fear the kleptocracy that the right warns against than fear the “prosecutor’s republic” the left warns against.

One reason for this is that the Moon camp itself made much of Lee’s alleged dishonesty back when it perceived him as a rival. It was the left-wing entertainment industry that put out the movie Asura (2016), about a corrupt mayor pushing a land development project in “Annam”; it was the pro-Moon Youtubers who had a field day with Lee’s foul-mouthed telephone call to his sister-in-law, and with his effort to have an older brother sectioned (who, in his own recorded conversations, seemed the more stable of the two men).

Another reason is that the left cannot fully explain its fears of prosecutors running rampant under a Yoon presidency — fears shared by old-school right-wing pundits like Jeong Gyu-jae — without admitting that Yoon and his colleagues played fast and loose with the law during the Moon administration’s purge of conservatives (“accumulated ills”) in 2017-2019. This forced reticence has left voters wondering what was so horrible about Yoon’s insistence on prosecuting Cho Kuk and his wife, two members of the Minjoo camp against whom the evidence of document forgery appears to have been solid.

UPDATE: 5 March 2022: Yoon and Ahn, Together at Last 

I have to return to Busan tomorrow, but as luck would have it, Yoon Seok-yeol and Ahn Cheol-soo chose to make their first joint campaign appearance today in Icheon, about half an hour away from the house on the Han River where I’ve been staying. Due to difficulties finding a parking space, I arrived only minutes before Ahn and Yoon stepped up on stage to great cheering and balloon-shaking. The crowd was smaller than the one at the Moon Jae-in rally I attended in Busan in 2017, but seemed to fill all the space available on the street. (I see the Hankyoreh’s man on the scene had the same impression.)

After Ahn and Yoon walked up and down the runway for an unconvincing display of chumminess, Ahn came back out on his own to call briefly for a change of government. Then it was Yoon’s turn to speak. Urged on perhaps by the icy wind knifing up and down the street, he got straight to the point, assailing the “clique politics” and “protest-movement ideology” of the current administration as if a different Yoon Seok-yeol had done its bidding for two years. The Daejang-dong development scandal, the selective enforcement of the law, and the government’s beholdenness to militant trade unions: all came in for special criticism in a voice surprisingly free of late-campaign hoarseness.

Meanwhile I scanned the masked faces around me. There were a few more young men and women in sight than is usual at conservative events, but not enough, I thought, to justify the Chosun’s hype about Yoon’s popularity with the so-called 2030 demographic. On the other hand those present seemed as confident of their man’s victory on election day as Moon’s followers did at that Busan rally five years ago.

After talking for about twenty minutes Yoon summed things up by calling the election “a battle between the corrupt Lee Jae-myung forces and the great citizens of the Republic of Korea.” Then Ahn came out again, the two men shook hands with people on both sides of the catwalk, Yoon did some of his signature “victory uppercuts,” which went down a storm — and then they were off to the next campaign stop. The crowd didn’t linger either.

As I walked back to my car a silver-haired man coming from the other direction asked if everything was over. I said yes. “Did Ahn Cheol-soo turn up?” he asked, turning and falling into step with me. I affirmed that question too. “He didn’t arrive together with Yoon, did he?” “Different cars, I think.” He pondered this for a moment, then shook his head ruefully, saying, “I wanted to hear what he had to say.” And with that he stepped off the sidewalk and opened the driver’s door of his taxi. So maybe Ahn stands for something after all?

UPDATE: 9 May 2022: Election Day

12 pm: To everyone’s surprise, the turnout so far is over 3% lower than it was in 2017, which is good news for Lee Jae-myung, even if it’s especially low in the nationalist-left stronghold of Jeolla. At this point I don’t see how it can reach the 75% turnout that Yoon has said would be necessary to counter the very high turnout in the early vote, which everyone assumes went for Lee. (Polls had shown that far more of his supporters than of Yoon’s intended to vote early.) Granted, some pundits are pointing to the difference in predictions emanating yesterday from the two camps — the left talking  of winning by 2-3% at most, the right of winning by 10% — as an indication that both parties’ own last-minute (unpublished) polls point to a Yoon victory.  Nevertheless, my impression while going back and forth between the pro-Lee and pro-Yoon broadcasters is that the conservatives are more worried.

9:00 pm: Well, it’s going to be a long night of vote counting, but despite Yoon Seok-yeol’s razor-thin edge in exit polls I don’t much fancy his chances of coming out on top. The glum eyes of the masked people at PPP headquarters also seem to me to indicate foreknowledge of defeat.

Even if Yoon somehow ekes out a victory, there is clearly a disparity between the outcome of the exit polling and the consistent poll finding over the preceding months according to which about 50-53% wanted a change of government. Of course some 2.5% of that group seems to have voted for the Justice Party candidate Sim Sang-jung, the closest thing to a real liberal in the race. Nevertheless, Lee seems to have pulled off much the same sort of feat that Park Geun-hye did in 2012: being of the ruling party while appearing to be somehow not of it at the same time.

Another one or two percent that wanted change yet clearly did not come out for Yoon consisted of those conservatives — represented by well-known pundits like Jeong Gyu-jae, Hwang Jang-su and Byun Hee-jae — who talked all along of either boycotting the election or voting in protest for some fringe candidate, either because they hadn’t forgiven Yoon for his role in Moon’s purge of “accumulated evils,” or because they opposed the semi-parliamentary system he and the PPP appeared to favor. But when a candidate loses by a very small margin, virtually all explanations for his defeat can be considered valid to a certain degree.

10 March 2022, 0:30 am. It’s just after midnight, and now that the early votes are out of the way, Yoon has edged into the lead, to great cheering at PPP headquarters. There is increasing talk that the exit polls may have been quite seriously off, a claim that would seem to be borne out by Yoon’s having apparently received over 10% in Jeolla. But a lot of votes remain to be counted.

02:20 am. KBS has tipped Yoon as the likely winner. The exit polls turned out to have been quite accurate after all.

UPDATE: 10 March: Finally, a Note on US Press Coverage

Anyone who relies wholly on the American media for insight into South Korean politics is likely to be wondering today how such a well-educated people could have rejected, by however small a margin, a candidate as obviously wonderful as Lee Jae-myung. The answer, in a word, is Daejang-dong, the name given here to the land-development scandal that most American journalists seemed averse to discussing at any length.

TIME’s puff piece on the man who “wants to calm his country” was too laughably over the top to be considered representative of anything except TIME. (See its piece on Moon). All too common, however, was this sort of effort to equalize the negative talk about Yoon and Lee:

South Korean media has dubbed the race the “most off-putting election” over the mudslinging between the two candidates. There have been accusations of abuse of power and shady real-estate deals. The wives of both major candidates came under fire over alleged improprieties. Mr. Lee apologized after leaked audio showed him hurling obscenities at his sister-in-law. Mr. Yoon denied associations with a shaman and an anal acupuncturist. (Timothy W. Martin, Wall Street Journal, 7 March 2022.)

The great importance of mudslinging in this election resulted largely from the de-politicization process that has been underway here since Park’s impeachment. But extraordinary things would have to happen for an American journalist to venture into topics like that.

Instead the WSJ’s readers — many of whom might well have had a financial interest in the outcome of the election — were left with only a hazy impression of unpleasantness, of pols being pols. They were to regard the mutual accusations as beneath notice because they cancelled each other out. They weren’t to consider the quite obvious difference between shamanism and anal acupuncture on the one hand, and sexist verbal abuse on the other; nor were they to consider the difference between an apology and a denial.

Note especially: “There have been accusations of abuse of power and shady real-estate deals.” Surely a financial newspaper could have condescended to explain which candidate had been accused of what. After all, one of those deals was Daejang-dong, which Lee Jae-myung organized (by his own proud admission at the time), and one of the men involved described in a secretly recorded conversation as the “theft” of almost 400 million dollars (in our terms). Two other land-development deals in the same province were also made much of in the conservative press. The general public appeared more interested, however, in Lee and his wife’s alleged, systematic abuse of municipal and provincial funds to private ends (see the relevant update above).

Now, Lee and his wife are of course innocent until proven guilty, and Yoon’s wife’s purchase of a favorably priced property from a man mixed up in the Daejang-dong scandal is something I too find hard to set down to mere coincidence. In regard to some of the people Yoon and his wife are rumored to associate with, I hope I don’t need to explain how I feel about “folk-religious” ceremonies that entail the skinning of live cows.

But the fact that the allegations dogging Lee all winter far outnumbered those aimed at Yoon (who had already been under intense and hostile official scrutiny for three years) was something American readers deserved to know before the election. Daejang-dong alone played a much larger role in the political discussion than any of the stuff our press preferred to divert readers with: the backstory about Lee’s impoverished childhood and factory accident, the Korea-as-curiosity-cabinet talk of shamans and anal acupuncture, and the few ideological issues that Americans could grasp without background knowledge of the country (feminism, incels).

I’ll say this for the press, having recently said a few things against it: any journalist at a respectable newspaper who was found to have linked plagiarized information to a bogus source 8 times, let alone 80, would be out of a job very quickly. But this makes it all the more remarkable that no major news outlet reported on the scandal surrounding Charles Armstrong’s prize-winning book Tyranny of the Weak (Cornell University Press, 2013), which contained 83 separate linkages of plagiarized information to irrelevant or — more often — non-existent East Bloc sources. Nor did any big paper except the New York Post report in 2019 on Columbia University’s decision to force the professor into early retirement.

In contrast, evidence of relatively minor research misconduct in Arming America (Knopf, 2000), a study of 18th century gun ownership, made the Emory professor Michael Bellesilles the object of several critical articles in both the New York Times and Washington Post. He resigned in 2002, but the press dredges up the affair in regular updates on his effort to live it down. So it is that he and not Armstrong is thought responsible for “arguably the greatest scandal the historical profession has ever seen” (The Week, 18 September 2019).

Why did the more newsworthy story — an Ivy League research hoax dealing with the perennial headline topic of North Korea — go virtually unreported on? Armstrong’s bland centrism had something to do with it; neither the left nor the right saw anything to crow over. (The gun lobby went after Bellesilles.) A more important reason, I believe, was that the scandal would have embarrassed the top echelon of US academia, and by extension our intelligentsia, at a time when all their authority was thought necessary to counter Trumpism and “fake news.”

The field itself, it seems, is yet to come to terms with what happened. To my knowledge I remain the only person to have revoked a recommendation of Tyranny. None of those who publicly accused the main plagiarism victim Balázs Szalontai in 2016 of “sour grapes” or “cyber-bullying,” of having “no balls, no decency,” etc, has apologized. In October 2021 a Canadian Koreanist tried to frame the scandal in passing as a methodological controversy over actual research, even warning gothically of “temptations” inherent to archival work. (My understanding is that it didn’t tempt Armstrong enough.)

But now the European Journal of Korean Studies gives us Robert Winstanley-Chesters’ account of the Tyranny affair, a welcome step forward. A brave one too, for which I commend both the British geographer and his editors. The title of the article (which deals with other cases as well): “Authorship, Co-Production, Plagiarism: Issues of Origin and Provenance in the Korean Studies Community.” This is a much more dispassionate and thorough chronicle than the one I created here piecemeal as everything unfolded; the precise nature of the misconduct that went into Tyranny is discussed in great detail. Winstanley-Chesters also fills readers in on the Columbia committee’s report, quoting, for example, its conclusion that Armstrong had “more likely than not” made uncredited use of Szalontai’s work even in his tenure application package (2003), which has conveniently gone missing.

We learn too that the committee found against Armstrong in all 61 of the cases of alleged misconduct that it chose to examine (namely cases in which his bogus Russian or German source bore the exact same date as Szalontai’s authentic Hungarian one). There’s an interesting revelation in puncto Soviet archives that I won’t spoil here. Also noted is an allegation of sexual assault that a former student has leveled against Armstrong, who denies it.

I have to admit, I’m much less interested in the Tyranny hoax itself than in the academic power elite’s efforts to sweep it under the rug. Like, say, how the American Historical Association privately informed Armstrong in 2017 that it was revoking his Fairbank Prize, then let him “voluntarily” return it weeks later. That kind of thing. But Winstanley-Chesters prefers

to use the experiences of 2016–2019 to explore previous moments of unsavory, unconventional or substandard academic practice in Korean Studies both historically and in contemporary times.

I shouldn’t be surprised to see a Koreanist grouping “unconventional” with “unsavory” and “substandard,” but this reverse-chronological, large-to-small approach seems odd, like bringing up a recent bank heist only to draw attention to old shoplifting cases. We’re taken from the drama of Tyranny to the story of how, in the late 1990s, an Italian lifted stuff from a prominent American’s translation of an old Korean text and got quickly rebuked for it. No collegial wagon-circling there. Why did the field react so differently, 20 years later, to more serious misconduct? I would have liked to see this question answered or at least asked. Winstanley-Chesters alludes in passing to the power Armstrong had amassed, but the declared goal of his article is

to question and consider issues of authorship, co-production and plagiarism in Korean Studies more widely than simply a highly detailed review of the issues surrounding Charles Armstrong. In order to do so the paper will have to a certain extent, define terms and concepts. When it comes to authorship or by co-production what do we mean as scholars of Korean Studies?

I think we mean what everyone else does. Neither the Tyranny hoax nor the attempted cover-up resulted from good-faith confusion that must now be brooded over with a lot of theoretical talk. Nothing good will have come of this bizarre and unprecedented scandal if we allow it to be filed away as “merely the latest example of the complicated navigation of notions of individual authorship,” to quote from Winstanley-Chesters’ astonishing conclusion. Complicated? Every college freshman knows that linking stolen info to a bogus source is wrong, always wrong, and that it can’t happen 83 times without an intent to deceive. It was because the old-boy network instantly grasped the import of our evidence that it attacked us for making it public. No debate over issues of “authorship and co-production” was even attempted.

The actual root cause of the whole affair was — must I say it? — the tendency of academic fields to concentrate too much power in the hands of one or two networkers. Most of my readers will know what I mean already. Let me explain for the benefit of the younger ones. Were I to become Korea Foundation Professor at Columbia University, and then get all the fellowships, journal and book editorships, board memberships and project managerships that accrued to Armstrong in his heyday, the whole tenor of Korean Studies in the West would change within a year, even if I did nothing to assert myself. Why? Because every Koreanist would have to reckon on encountering either me or someone intent on pleasing me at each key stage in his or her career: doctorate, journal submission, job interview, grant application, MS review, review of published book, tenure application, prize committee, and so on.

My main ideas would become orthodox very quickly. To be on the safe side, scholars would have to cite me within the first few pages of anything to do with North Korea. “This paper examines pre-natal care in Pyongyang, a city known for ‘enormous monuments’ (Myers, 2010)….” My citation index would go through the roof. Journals would give each new book of mine the double-review, roundtable, big-event treatment. Token acknowledgment of a flaw or two would be followed with something like: “But it seems petty to quibble with such an impressive….” Everyone who’d dissed me in the past would have to set out on the wanderings of Cain. “We can’t invite Fitz-Boodle to the Honolulu conference, not with Brian there. It would be awkward.”

All this would have a bad effect on more than just my work, for no academic community tiptoeing around a gatekeeper can compete with researchers working in freedom outside the gate. Each year my coterie and I would fall further behind. We’d have to defend ourselves by slagging off the outsiders, but rather than expose our disparagement to counter-criticism, we’d  restrict it to withering asides in classrooms, offices and conference breaks. The younger generation would get the message soon enough, and review our rivals’ work accordingly. Always the tactic in our own writings, to renew a formulation I’ve used elsewhere, would be that of moving cuckoo-like into the outsider’s nest with the air of being its first truly scholarly occupant. Naturally this would mean non-citation of the cite-worthy, shading into deliberate plagiarism and worse. And woe to anyone who called us out.

Junior scholars are more content with this culture than I’d always assumed. In Tied Knowledge (Sydney, 1998), which I wish I’d read earlier, Brian Martin writes: “Students and academics believe wholeheartedly in the necessity and virtue of a hierarchy of positions.” Yes. Go through that thread on the Korean Studies listserv in 2016, and you’ll see that young and old alike were much less bothered by the evidence against Armstrong than by the sarcasm with which the victim of his parasitical plagiarism presumed to address him. Whatever the author of Tyranny might have done he was an Ivy League professor, dammit, and that had to count for something.

A few self-styled neutralists even sounded us out on a proposal whereby Armstrong would wipe the slate clean by allowing Szalontai to co-host a conference with him. Yessir, the Hungarian would get to sit shoulder-to-shoulder with the Columbia professor, quasi as his equal, right there on the opulent Manhattan campus! Surely there could be no ill will after that? 

I bring all this up again, for what I hope is the last time, not only to set the record straight, but also to urge anyone pondering a career in Korean Studies to think it over carefully. If nothing is changed, the field will get another ward boss in the last one’s place; it’s a matter of time. At the very least, the simple measure should be taken of ensuring that no professor sits on too many boards and committees. Or is even that asking too much?

 

UPDATE: 30 April 2022: Podcast interview on the scandal 

On 17 April Jed-Lea Henry and Robert Winstanley-Chesters engaged in an interesting discussion of the Armstrong scandal on Henry’s Korea Now Podcast.

A British journalist called me a few years ago with questions about South Korean politics. I told her I’d grown tired of talking for twenty minutes only to see one sentence in print, and suggested she get a soundbite from someone else. “But everyone’s a Pyongyang watcher these days,” she replied goodhumoredly. “Where are the Seoul watchers?”

Indeed, things have changed a lot since the early 1990s, when every Koreanist I ran into at the Library of Congress seemed to be researching either the “Miracle on the Han River” or (groan) something minjung-related. K. P. Yang at the Korea desk was so pleased to encounter a young North Korea buff, he used to let me browse the stacks on my own — until an aproned busybody caught me back there and raised hell. When I told the curious in the photocopier queue what I was researching, they’d return incredulously, “North Korea?”

Nowadays I suppose you’d be likelier to hear “South Korea?” (Unless you were doing Hallyu of course.) The young Westerner interested in politics, ideology, etc, is far more likely to specialize in North than in South Korea. It’s a worrying trend.

Not that I can’t understand it; Pyongyang watching is the quicker and easier route to recognition. Someone who focuses on the Kim regime’s relations with Washington can rely quite safely on news reports in English. Read a few books, follow events closely for a month or two, and you can speculate as well or badly as the next person. (It’s mostly speculation.) The less context you know, the more glibly you can pronounce on the latest developments. Stick to the consensus, and invitations to conferences will soon follow.

[As will calls and emails from Western journalists, who are always on the hunt for a fresh soundbite provider — of the right sort. When turning down media requests I used to recommend this or that South Korean expert, only to hear back that his English wasn’t good enough. I then learned that journalists on the Korea beat don’t want to talk to knowledgeable Westerners overseas either. For local color they need a white person physically on the peninsula.]

Becoming a South Korea analyst is a more difficult affair. Anyone who attempts authoritative discussion of the latest developments on the basis of English-language coverage is going to look a fool. Korean reading skills are a must. But keeping abreast of developments here poses challenges even to native monitors. The number of news sources that must be followed makes perusal of North Korea’s short and predictable party daily seem very easy in comparison. To further complicate things for the foreigner, the language of South Korean politics is richer and more difficult than official DPRK idiom, which hasn’t changed nearly as much over the decades. Older South Korean texts are replete with Chinese characters to boot. Why go to such trouble to acquire expertise that’s in no great demand right now?

Because for one thing, there’s less static to deal with than in the North Korea discussion. Far fewer English-only types are tossing out nonsense you must constantly waste time in correcting. No one too lazy to learn the language can claim to know South Korean politics on the grounds of having visited this country a dozen times, or resided here for a year or two, or done business or charity work. Still less can one spin a whole country-expert career out of having participated in diplomatic talks with ROK envoys 20 or 30 years ago.

South Korean politics is also much more fun to research, and I say that as someone still fascinated by the North Korean system. Surprisingly enough Western scholars will find more doors open to them than local ones will. I’m no networker, to put it mildly, but I’ve somehow come into contact with many prominent people over the past 20 years, from Kim Young Sam to protest-movement leaders to National Assembly members on both sides of the aisle. This isn’t to deny the pleasures of North Korea research, but if I could go back to my twenties, I’d want to be right in the thick of things, meeting newsmakers, attending rallies, gathering eyewitness testimony on modern history, etc, and not looking at microfilms of old Rodong Sinmun issues. Not to mention that my spoken Korean would be less awful had I gone that route.

Ideally, though, one should start by concentrating on the South and then gradually read one’s way northward, because there’s no understanding the one half of the peninsula without understanding the other. This will become more obviously true over the next few years. Whoever wins the presidential election here in March, the construction of the “peace system” — the official euphemism for confederation — is almost certain to continue. I’m not talking of splashy summits and joint declarations, but of a slow and low-profile process the outside world is likely to keep ignoring for a while. I call it inosculation, with an implicit nod at Willy Brandt’s line: “What belongs together, grows together.” We’ve reached the point where a pan-Korean or holistic approach to the peninsula virtually forces itself upon us.

Divided Vietnam used to be looked at in the sort of way I mean, and not just by scholars. One reason many Americans were skeptical of upbeat war propaganda was because they grasped the full importance of the two Vietnams’ shared nationhood; they knew what a formidable force we were up against. Something like Willy Brandt’s meaning was widely intuited if not articulated. Perhaps we retained some collective memory of the lengths to which our North had gone to get our South back. (My middle name comes from a Union general killed at Gettysburg, a direct ancestor on the Pennsylvanian side of the family.) It helped that neoliberalism hadn’t yet weakened our ability to take nations seriously. I mean ethno-nations of course, minjok.

Analysis of Vietnam was conducted accordingly. No stand-alone fields of North or South Vietnamese Studies existed to encourage the misperception of two countries whole unto themselves. Due attention was given to — if I may borrow a striking phrase I encountered in Korean somewhere — “the South in the North and the North in the South.” Especially the latter; Viet Cong infiltration was a common subject.

Of course a war concentrates the academic mind as well as a pending hanging famously concentrates the mind of a condemned man. I’m not saying North Korea watchers must focus quite so exclusively on what is here the main issue. The problem is that they talk only about the side-issues — and yes, even the US-DPRK relationship is a side issue. Or at least, it gets discussed like one, with little recognition (for example) of the effect an end of war agreement would have on the North’s unification drive.

The result: Many Westerners seem to be under the impression that North Korea has evolved into a stand-alone nation — still speaking the same language as South Korea, but constituting a virtually separate ethnos, like Austria vis à vis Germany. “There’s no reason for this conflict [between the US and North Korea] to persist any longer,” Stephen Biegun, the deputy secretary of state, said in 2019, purely on the grounds that America means North Korea no harm. Did the North’s commitment to hegemonic unification, to the elimination of our ally, not rise for him to the level of a reason for conflict? More probably he took it for granted — as I have it on tolerable authority that many in Biden’s State Department do — that that commitment has been abandoned.

As Barry Buzan emphasizes in People, States and Fear (1982), the two Koreas are part–nation-states, each one necessarily undermining the other’s security through its separate existence. Paek Nak-cheong and other South Korean proponents of confederation say much the same thing. I have the feeling that a failure to grasp this will induce America, with its usual mix of credulity and condescension (see our dealings with the Taliban), to sign an end of war agreement at some point. Yes, it will open a very large can of very large worms. It will also make for an interesting time to be in Korean Studies.

Here’s a thought experiment for my American readers. Imagine it’s 2024. The economy’s in bad shape, and at least half the electorate wants the Democrats thrown out of power. Despite an inept campaign the Republican presidential candidate leads in half the polls.

Meanwhile prominent members of his campaign committee publicly blame America’s woes not on the Democrats, but on the presidential system itself. The office is just too powerful, always has been. The German system? Much better.

What’s needed, they say, is a new constitution that would transfer half the White House’s power to Congress. The head of the Republican campaign committee adds that he’d like to see a “democratic integrated government,” with members of both parties in key posts. Then the Republican candidate announces he is creating a so-called Power Reform Committee to decide what must be done.

Is your head spinning yet? Now imagine that at the time in question the Democrats have the largest majority in the House in American history.

The above is a transposition of the latest South Korean political developments into American categories. (I trust I’ve already given enough background information about constitutional revision on this blog; I’ve also explained how the desire for a weakened presidency induced the conservative party to turn on Park Geun-hye in 2016.)

Why would the People Power Party want a weaker president even if he or she is from its own ranks? Because a stronger National Assembly would have more say in key appointments, thus enabling each of the party’s factions to have a turn at the trough. The key Korean verb here is haemŏkta, literally do-and-eat: to get and patrimonially exploit a post for the benefit of oneself and one’s faction.

The last time South Korea had a weak president and a strong National Assembly, things fell apart so quickly that right and left initially welcomed the military coup of 1961. The division of power between the president and the prime minister was a big reason why neither fellow put up any resistance, the latter quite literally getting himself to a nunnery. But all that’s forgotten.

The chaebols’ hope for a semi-presidential or semi-parliamentary set-up is easily explained; lawmakers constantly seeking re-election are much less likely to defy them than a strong president who can serve only one 5-year term anyway. But why (you ask) are the conservative media so keen on “integration” after decades of demonizing the left? Because they now make most of their money from their cable TV ventures, which they want to see protected from recurring, ideologically-motivated efforts to shut them down.

Another advantage of “integration” is the depoliticization that would result, making the electorate increasingly indifferent to public affairs, and giving the power elite an ever freer hand when divvying up goodies and executing policy. (I recommend in this context Chantal Mouffe’s On the Political, 2005, a critique of depoliticization.)

I suppose there’s no point in hoping the Western press will abandon the  Luce-TIME tradition of personalizing exotic politics in the simplest terms. But can it perhaps give the two main candidates’ disparate family backgrounds a break for a while, and show some interest in the “integration” discussion? If only for its relevance to everyone’s preferred topic of North Korea?

In negotiations over constitutional revision the Minjoo-held National Assembly would be certain to demand removal or amendment of every article now impeding a “peace system,” i.e. inter-Korean confederation. We also know which key posts the Minjoo would insist upon in an “integrated democratic government” such as Yoon’s campaign chief Kim Chong-in envisions, namely the intelligence agency, which has always handled all the real work of inter-Korean affairs, and its front organization the Unification Ministry.

I’m sure Kim Jong Un and Xi Jin Ping see much the same advantages in a strengthened National Assembly that the chaebol do. In 1972 Erich Honecker famously told one of Chancellor Willy Brandt’s officials not to worry about a pending no-confidence vote in the Bundestag; he would make sure his friend stayed in power. Sure enough, two conservative lawmakers were bribed by East Germany to vote against the measure.

If you’re Kim Jong Un, and you need a man in the Blue House who can wheedle Uncle Sam into an end of war agreement and sanctions relief, you may well consider an ostensibly pro-American fellow on a Minjoo leash preferable to a wayward populist lefty like Lee Jae-myung. Either way, this is one election the regime in Pyongyang won’t be losing sleep over.

 

UPDATE: 19 December 2021

Some video of this weekend’s conservative street protests against a new constitution, a semi-parliamentary system and a “democratic integrated government.”

 

In his latest NK News article Andrei Lankov expresses concern at the prospect of a Yoon Seok-youl presidency. The conservatives will insist on denuclearization, and since this is a non-starter, inter-Korean relations can only get worse, etc. I’m of course familiar with the assumption that if a demand is unacceptable to Pyongyang, the wise thing for the rest of us to do is to drop it, thereby accepting what we hitherto found unacceptable; the more rational side must always yield. I find this approach both irrational and dangerous, but I’ve argued the point often enough already.

Instead let me note that Park Geun-hye’s so-called Trustpolitik delinked cooperation from denuclearization, at least initially, and there’s no reason a man well to her left can’t do likewise, whatever noises he makes on the campaign trail beforehand to get the flag-wavers’ vote.

But near the end of his article Lankov goes so far as to say Yoon would “most likely … freeze all interaction with the North for the entire length of his term, extending the Cold War on the Korean Peninsula.” For that prediction to come true, Yoon would have to be the most hardline president since Syngman Rhee. And this with the National Assembly firmly under nationalist-left control.

Lankov goes on:

What if the North Koreans use limited military force against South Korea, replaying the Yeonpyeong Island and Cheonan provocations of 2010?

The dominant attitude of the conservatives can be summed up with an oft-repeated North Korean slogan: “We will revenge tenfold, hundredfold, thousandfold for every attack on our sacred land.” It’s quite possible that even a relatively minor confrontation could lead to escalation.

So we get only North Korean rhetoric in illustration of a South Korean attitude. It’s one even the military dictatorships showed no sign of, despite the North’s insurgencies and assassination attempts, but we could expect it in 2022 … from Yoon? The man who helped put so many conservatives behind bars — with the book thrown especially at defense and intelligence types — that he was promoted to chief prosecutor in 2019? The man who turned against the Moon government only when it moved to limit the power of the prosecutors’ office? The man who last week pledged to help enshrine the spirit of Gwangju 1980 in the constitution?

As for the People Power Party, thirty of its lawmakers voted with the left in 2020 to allow provinces to cooperate directly with North Korea. Its young chairman recently said he wants honor restored to participants in the Yeosu unrest of 1948 – which was in fact a rebellion against the republic itself. (The North’s account of this episode is more accurate than the current orthodoxy here.) And last spring one of the PPP’s candidates for the nomination advocated legalizing the sale of Kim Il Sung’s partly posthumous “memoirs.” These people are out to turn the inter-Korean clock way back, and vengefully escalate conflicts?

The election may well be won by Lee Jae-myung or, if the Daejangdong scandal ends up engulfing him, a Moon-picked replacement. But should Yoon win, what many here expect to follow, myself included, is a bipartisan push for constitutional revision: in other words, for an assembly-strengthening, trough-widening, semi-presidential system. Although Yoon made dismissive noises about a “naegakche” (the Korean term) a few months ago, he now surrounds himself with known naegakche advocates.

Most of these are the same center-rightists who helped the Minjoo Party impeach Park Geun-hye in 2016, but quite a few are fresh aisle-crossers from the center-left (like Kim Han-gil). All now join in presenting Park’s nemesis as the future of enlightened conservatism. Imagine if the Republican Party had nominated a Watergate prosecutor to run against Carter in 1976 — Archibald Cox say — and you get some idea of how strange all this is.

Many a flurry of talk about constitutional revision has fizzled out the day after the election, and this one may fizzle out too. That would still leave a President Yoon in no position to clash with the National Assembly — not least because that would also incur the wrath of the labor unions, which shut down Lee Myung Bak’s presidency in spring 2008 and Park’s in fall 2016. The implications for the next administration’s North Korea policy are obvious.

I don’t mean to deny that the inter-Korean relationship could deteriorate under Yoon, but this would likely have more to do with the North’s traditional reluctance to work with a conservative administration than with any “freezing” intention on his part. As I wrote in my earlier post on the United Future Party, as the People Power Party used to call itself, every conservative president since Rhee’s ouster has taken a more conciliatory approach to the North, and responded more passively to its military attacks, than his or her campaign rhetoric led the right-wing electorate to expect. Had it been up to the conservative power elite, something not unlike the Sunshine Policy would have begun under Roh Tae Woo (1988-93).

Most Western consumers of South Korea news want simple, moralizing commentary on the political scene: the “peacemakers vs Cold Warriors” narrative, if they’re on the left themselves, or the “loyal US allies vs communists” one if they’re on the right. But there’ll be more than enough of that sort of thing over the next few months without us Koreanists adding to it.

After months of isolation at a riverside house in Gyeonggi Province I now have to return to Busan for face-to-face classes. Yesterday, to ease my way back into society, I went to a Ministry of Unification event in Seoul to which I and a few dozen others, Korean and foreign, had been invited. The occasion was the launch of the Council on Diplomacy for Korean Unification.

I’d been out of circulation so long that I found myself paying attention to people’s appearances. Every male in attendance, I noticed, had a variation of the Erich von Stroheim haircut which Korean barbers offer the older gent as an alternative to the hegemonic Moe Stooge. Whereas I haven’t seen a pair of scissors since last spring. Getting the event underway, the moderator asked Andrei Lankov, sitting on my right, to introduce the lady on his left.

In their congratulatory remarks the Minister of Unification Lee In-young and former occupants of the office made clear that t’ongil oegyo or unification diplomacy, the vagueness of which term had intrigued me, means persuading the world to support President Moon’s North Korea policy. Which is where we foreign Pyongyang watchers were to come in. An afternoon more hortatory than informative lay ahead. I decided I’d be able to make the 6 pm bus home after all.

But I sat up when Michael Reiffenstuel, the German ambassador, rose to say a few words. Will this be the time, I wondered, when an envoy from Berlin finally…? No, the message, while eloquently expressed, was the usual: Although unification took Germans by surprise, its foundations had been laid by Willy Brandt (1969-74), who opened the door for people-to-people contacts and exchanges that helped break down barriers, and it’s to be hoped that Korea too, though it will be a long process, etc.

This is the pat story of German unification one hears from South Koreans all the time. My question is why Germans always feel they must play along. They know full well that people-to-people contacts began before Brandt’s Ostpolitik — that they were agreed upon at the very height of Cold War tension, by two superpower-loyal governments that loathed each other. It was in 1964 that East German pensioners became able to spend up to a month in West Germany. Postal and telephone connections had been in regular use since the late 1940s.

So much then for the popular notion that Washington, the sanctions regime or “Cold War mentality” — or as the right-wingers would have it, communism — is to blame for the two Koreas’ inability to sustain the most minimal forms of humanitarian exchange and cooperation. (Even routinizing online family reunions is too challenging, it seems.)

Also untenable is the notion that German unification resulted organically from economic cooperation and displays of mutual recognition. As most German historians agree, that stuff actually strengthened the Honecker regime, which was the very reason no one expected it to collapse. A close friend of mine, whom I got to know in Görlitz in 1983, risked her life to escape via a third country in 1988. A man less fortunate died trying to escape in a hot air balloon in 1989, mere months before the Berlin Wall fell. It fell quite suddenly and despite Ostpolitik, for the simple reason that the USSR publicly withdrew support for Honecker. (See Margit Roth’s excellent book Innerdeutsche Bestandsaufnahme der Bundesrepublik 1969-1989, Wiesbaden, 2013.)

Of course there might have been more inter-German unpleasantness had a confrontational relationship persisted. But good relations certainly didn’t hasten unification, and there are grounds for arguing that they delayed it. Even the destabilizing effects of heightened East German access to Western culture, media, etc — which the North Koreans blame for what happened — appear to have been neutralized by the increase in surveillance and oppression with which the Honecker regime felt compelled to protect itself. (We saw a similar dynamic on a smaller scale in Kaesong, when the joint industrial zone was in operation.)

The Federal Foreign Office describes human rights on its website as “a cornerstone of German foreign policy.” If this is so, its diplomats should refrain from colluding in a misrepresentation of their country’s history that is often deployed to discourage criticism of the Kim regime. It’s unfortunately true that Bonn didn’t say much about Honecker’s violations of human rights, but behind the scenes it was at least committed to buying the freedom of political prisoners.

That practice began under Adenauer in the early 1960s. Ludwig Rehlinger, who was one of the responsible government officials — and who celebrated his 94th birthday last week — wrote a marvelous book on the subject called Freikauf: Die Geschäfte der DDR mit politisch Verfolgten 1963 – 1989 (Berlin, 1991).

Especially moving is the part where he discusses one of the first East German prisoners released. A carpenter by profession, the man had been given a life sentence by the Soviet Military Administration for an offense no one could clarify. He had no family. No one had shown interest in his case. He was oblivious to the wheels suddenly turning on his behalf. One day in 1963 he was taken uncomprehendingly out of prison and handed over to West German lawyers in East Berlin.

They took the carpenter by S-Bahn to West Berlin, then drove him to an office building and gave him a cup of coffee. The lawyers later reported that (my translation)

he was very still, looking mutely around him and incredulously taking in his surroundings. As he recognized the reality, and grasped that he was actually free, he collapsed in shock. The only words he could manage to bring forth were, “That somebody thought of me.”

Reading this, I was reminded how much goes undiscussed here lest it complicate the pursuit of the great abstract goals of peace and unification. There’s a lot to be said for the West Germans’ relative interest in quiet, steady humanitarian improvements, and in the fates of individual human beings. It would be nice if German diplomats said it.

 

UPDATE: 15 October 2021: 

This is from a “card news” sequence about German unification on the website of the Ministry of Unification:

“Minister Lee In-young has said we must pay attention to the fact that Germany’s unification processes resulted from processes of steady and continuous dialogue and cooperation.”

Another “card” in the sequence informs us that news of Germany’s unification was welcomed around the world. “Except on the South Korean nationalist left,” I feel tempted to add. Anyone who doubts me on this should read Hwang Sok-yong’s The Old Garden, a novel I reviewed for the New York Times in 2009.

Relax, Afghanistan is nothing like South Korea — or so the media have been telling everyone here over the past few weeks. An esteemed Dongseo colleague from the neighboring office just wrote an article for the Korea Times in this vein. Me, I have a hard time overlooking one parallel in particular. I’m generalizing of course, but not overmuch, when I say that in the one country our troops defended moderate Muslims from fundamentalists, and in the other they defend moderate nationalists from fundamentalists.

By moderateness in each case I mean not a principled, liberal-democratic opposition to the fundamentalism in question, but rather an untheorized, unreflecting preference for life under a less rigorous dispensation. America’s ally and its adversary thus form one ideological community in which real hostility is felt only by the fundamentalists toward the moderates, who in return feel a sneaking admiration for their antagonists’ superior resolve and purity.

(Granted, it’s much less sneaking in the South Korean case; North Korean soldiers and spies have been glamorized in hit movies and serial dramas for twenty years, and especially frequently since 2017.)

Is fundamentalist aggression lamented, bewailed, disapproved of? Certainly. But the indignation is missing — that concerted, angry sense of offended constitutional values which alone indicates a state ready to defend itself unaided. Such are the unwinnable conflicts America likes to send its young people into.

Not only America of course. In a Guardian article the other day a former British soldier recalled

the simplistic assumption that everyone in Afghanistan could fall into two categories, enlightened liberal reformers who would welcome a western presence, and conservative folk susceptible to the Taliban. Needless to say, things were more complicated than that…. 

One morning, an interpreter who had worked with the British for decades sidled up to me at breakfast and pointed at a young Afghan woman who also worked as an interpreter. In a voice loud enough for her to hear everything, he declared her a “filthy whore”. His reason? She was wearing a pair of jeans and a bright pink headscarf.

I just hope the dear man got on a rescue flight out, don’t you?

That anecdote reminded me of Kim Seong-chil’s brief diary of life in wartime Seoul under North Korean rule. Like most South Koreans then as now, the young and married academic belonged to no political camp in particular. This makes his record all the more fascinating and (I believe) representative.

Between late June and mid-September 1950, Kim went from joy at the sight of the conquering North Korean troops to a desperate hope — as the US Army drew nearer — that they would be driven back out of Seoul. But here’s the thing: Even while yearning for an American victory, he recorded his great pride at how many US soldiers the North Koreans were killing.

Clearly the ostensibly anti-Taliban mainstream in Afghanistan thought along similarly blurred lines; the rapidity of its capitulation speaks for itself. I dare say that the majority of foreigners on whose behalf so many young Americans have fought and died since 1950 — majority does not mean entirety — have been people like Kim Seong-chil and that Afghani interpreter.

In my experience, our young soldiers are more clear-eyed about this than their superiors. When I lecture on North Korean ideology to military audiences here, it’s usually the enlisted who say, “But this sounds a lot like how South Koreans see things.” The top officers on the other hand trust, or pretend to trust, the line put out by the host government at grip-and-grin events. (So I’m less surprised than Lawrence Peck at the news that Christine Ahn, formerly of the North Korea lobby, now of the North-South Korea lobby, has been invited to address the US Indo-Pacific Command.)

Our commentariat is no more inclined to question South Korea’s commitment to liberal democracy than our government is. Not even the ruling party’s attempt in 2018 to alter constitutional mention of “liberal democracy” to “democracy” has deterred our experts and journalists from talking of the liberals in power here. (That attempt failed, by the way; not so the attempt to make the same alteration to history textbooks.)

The refusal to face facts is such that a recent article in the Diplomat on South Korea’s Media Punishment / Muzzling Law (as the new version of the Press Arbitration Act is informally called) bears the self-contradictory subtitle:

South Korea may be the only liberal democracy using a “fake news” law to target large traditional media companies.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m pleasantly surprised when the Western press covers things like this at all. Certainly the writer James Constant, a former editor at the Joongang Daily, offers a solid introduction to the law in question. The whole tone of his article, entitled “The Trouble With South Korea’s ‘Fake News’ Law,” is one of concern and disapproval.

Unfortunately, Constant forbears to mention a very relevant fact: that Moon Jae-in and his party were themselves helped into power by an unprecedented tsunami of fake news. There would have been no “candlelight revolution” in 2016 had it not been for the groundless media assertions that — where to begin? — Park Geun-hye belonged to a bizarre religious cult; was addicted to plastic surgery and drugs; had entrusted her secret love-child to a billionaire gal-pal, who in return was shaping foreign policy; that when a ship carrying hundreds of schoolchildren sank off the coast in 2014 — sank either because Park had ordered its sinking, or because an American submarine had hit it — she was cavorting with a secret lover in the Blue House, the Viagra budget of which…. but you get the idea.

There has been no shortage of fake news from the ruling camp since 2017 either, with TBS radio’s News Factory (sic!) leading the way. Let me mention here only a) the allegations about the wife of the leading conservative contender for the presidency, and b) accusations of sinister ties between the prosecutors’ office and a conservative cable channel. This doesn’t get mentioned in the Diplomat either. Nor does the massive astro-turfing generation of fake internet comments and “likes” that one of Moon’s right-hand men is now in prison for his role in.

Instead we get:

Conservative papers’ articles make up the bulk of content on portal site Naver, where most Koreans get their news. Only 32 percent of South Koreans trust the media…. It’s tempting to link conservative dominance of the press to this low trust, as the Democratic Party is doing.

No qualifying or contradictory statement follows. It’s tempting, and we too should be tempted.

First of all: Conservative dominance? What, no mention of the government’s union-enforced grip on the main television and radio broadcasters? I just looked at Naver’s political news section, by the way, and it bears no relation to the above assertion.

As the supposedly corroborative South Korean article linked to by the Diplomat makes clear, the reason two conservative newspapers enjoy a tiny combined edge in the top four sources to which Naver news users are exposed (21% versus 20.4%) — presuming they still have that edge now, which I doubt — is because they churn out a greater number of daily articles. Many of these are about celebrities, not politics. (The Chosun Ilbo leads an increasingly schizophrenic existence, with the click-baiting side of it in frequent conflict with the print version — as was seen recently when the newspaper argued ludicrously with itself over a female Olympic archer’s short haircut.)

The gist of the Diplomat article seems to be: These South Korean liberals face a real conservative threat to truth and objectivity in media, and mean well in trying to combat it, but alas, they fail to see where things could lead:

This year’s “fake news” bill could redefine the future of the press in South Korea in ways that both opponents and proponents would find hard to predict…. By taking this step to correct what they see as a hopelessly biased media landscape, the Democratic Party could be setting the stage for a severely weakened press.

If any ruling party in the West were to introduce such a bill, would we be hearing that the effect of it was “hard to predict,” or that it “could be setting the stage” for a weakened press? Would the relative popularity of three opposition-minded newspapers be taken at the ruling party’s assessment as top-down dominance the public doesn’t want — and as the main cause of fake news? And all this without a single example of fake news?

The Media Muzzling Law isn’t a Korean quirk unique among the world’s liberal-democratic states. It’s the manifestation of a commitment to a very different sort of political system, all impediments to which (“accumulated ills,” in official invective) are being purged or at least neutralized, one after the other.

Let’s not act like we don’t know what constitutes “fake news” for these people. Just last year it was helpfully defined by a raft of pro-government academics as anything that undermines the peace process or destabilizes the North. The notion that all this is about protecting official corruption from scrutiny is therefore too cynical and too charitable at the same time. The ruling camp must be left alone, however it chooses to reward itself on the side, so it can carry out “the people’s will” or minshim.

The Minjoo Party’s readiness to pass such a law six months before the presidential election, despite the sword’s potential to be turned against it, should in itself give outsiders pause. It reflects great confidence that neither the prosecutors’ office nor the higher courts are going to be giving the construction of a “peace system” much trouble down the road.

Nor does the ruling camp yet see much reason to worry about the conservative party, whose chairman has publicly expressed a reluctance to criticize President Moon. For in this great nationalist community, which knows gradations but no insuperable, unnegotiable divides, the right’s approach to the left is a lot like the left’s approach to the North. But katchi kapshida and all that.

 

UPDATE: 8 September 2021: Youtube journalists arrested

South Korea has become a country where someone accused of defamation by another citizen, even by a third party, can expect to have several policemen turn up at his door – provided the alleged libel was of someone in or close to the government. I always thought it was naive of the Youtube journalists arrested yesterday to think that the News Factory business model of tossing out new aspersions and insinuations every week could work for opposition media too. Or that they could emulate the other side’s custom of ignoring requests to come down to the station for questioning. It was only last December that one of them was hauled away from his apartment, mid-breakfast, because months earlier he had falsely identified a man shaking hands with President Moon in a photograph as cult leader Yi Man-hee. That he had already publicly apologized for the error was thought beside the point.

The video of one of the arrests yesterday is thumbnailed with the word “Shock!” As an American I’m equally shocked at the idea of simply refusing to open up when the police come knocking, as Kim Se-eui did. He’s lucky that door is still usable.

UPDATE: 9 September 2021:

I see the video posted by the offending Youtube channel has been taken down from Youtube by court order, so here is the YTN report of the arrests:

 

If my hypothetical daughter made a great show of buying an extra cellphone purely for calling that boyfriend I hated, and then kept announcing, with remarkable equanimity, that he wouldn’t answer because he was angry at her for siding with me, I’d smell a rat.

But no sooner was an inter-Korean hotline established with fanfare in 2018 than the commentariat began thinking it vital to communication between the two governments. Forgotten was the fact that Moon’s first appointee as spy boss had said his mission lay in bringing about a Kim-Moon summit, read: in conducting secret diplomacy. Forgotten a little later was the fact that his successor Park Jie-won had done prison time in connection with the illicit transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars to Kim Jong Il.

The old rivalry and ill will between Moon and Park is well-known; he was appointed because the North is known to trust him. The intelligence agency has since handed off much of the work of spy-catching to the under-equipped police, so as not to complicate the secret inter-Korean diplomacy that now constitutes its core function. By secret I mean primarily: secret from the country both governments regard as the main obstacle to the “peace system.”

Even Americans who believe Alger Hiss was innocent wouldn’t necessarily want his calligraphy to enjoy pride of place at CIA headquarters. But the ROK intelligence agency now has a state-loyalty-slogan slab in front of it inscribed, as a wink to the nationalist left, in the distinctive “font” of Shin Young-bok, who did several years for belonging to a North-funded underground party committed to toppling the ROK. (Moon and Kim Yo-jong posed in front of Shin’s calligraphy in 2018.) In short, the last thing these two co-ethnic neighboring states either want or need to depend on are formal liaison lines Uncle Sam knows about.

But because many Americans consider secret diplomacy immoral, sinister, and behind the global-transparent times, and therefore prefer to believe it’s rare, especially among their country’s allies, they respond warily to mentions of it, as if to outlandish conspiracy theories. Perhaps the greater problem is that, as the German Sinologist Harro von Senger has put it, Westerners tend to be “stratagem-blind” —  obtuse to the employment of tricks and ruses by countries that do not share our moral disapproval of them.

So when the South said the North wasn’t answering hotline calls, it could only mean the peace drive was “back to square one,” even if Moon seemed to take the setback remarkably well.

In various interviews with KBS World Radio I differed strongly with this consensus. I also warned (here too) against taking the demolition of the liaison office at face value. To sum up what I said then: The two Koreas’ outward relationship must never get too far ahead of the US-DPRK relationship, lest the Americans doubt that Pyongyang would respond to a US strike by flattening Seoul. The ostentatious freeze of inter-Korean relations after the Hanoi summit (2019) served the same security purpose as the one that followed George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” speech (2002).

The Biden administration having since allayed Kim’s fears to a certain extent, inter-Korean communication can again be admitted to; the ROK government announced that Kim and Moon have been in epistolary contact for the past three months. We’re to believe that the younger man was moved in some way by an unremarkable-sounding letter Moon sent on 27 April 2021, the third anniversary of their first summit in 2018. The two Koreas needed a plausible reason for his purported change of heart and this was all they had. If the anti-Moon fury the dictatorship displayed last year had been genuine, neither a letter nor the passage of so little time would have assuaged it.

Of course, admitting to discussion is one thing, and filling America in on the things discussed another, as we should remember from the Roh government’s assurances that the maritime border hadn’t come up at the 2007 summit in Pyongyang.

The Biden administration gamely welcomed the restoration of inter-Korean liaison lines, but it must have known for months about the Moon-Kim letters, if not about the “underwater” or mulmit’ talks we can assume went on all along. Last May, when our president first expressed support for inter-Korean agreements that commit our ally to the pursuit of confederation with our enemy, I wondered if he’d done so in the innocent confidence that Kim would never answer Moon’s calls anyway.

Now I find his endorsement even harder to understand, though perhaps he and his people merely skimmed the relevant ROK-DPRK declarations; Washington has always had the collective philological instinct of a block of wood. In an interesting NK News interview the other day Wi Sung-lac, who was the ROK’s nuclear envoy under Lee Myung Bak, said that no US president but Trump could have signed a deal as obviously bad as the Singapore agreement. I sure hope he’s right.

Pak Byeong-seok, the speaker of the National Assembly, responded to the hotline news by saying that “a meeting of the North and South Korean assemblies is always possible.” For years now nationalist-left thinkers — including Moon’s mentor Paek Nak-cheong — have advocated just such a coming-together of the South’s elected lawmakers and Kim Jong-un’s rubber-stampers as a crucial step on the road to confederation.

It would indeed be hard to promote confederation without first presenting the Kim dictatorship as something within hailing distance of the South Korean political system. (Not that some people here — including election officials in what conservatives wryly call A Certain Region — don’t already argue that it’s a democracy.) The ROK intelligence agency’s effort to arrange a papal visit to North Korea, thereby creating an impression of religious freedom, is another part of the endeavor to legitimize the regime as a partner. By the way, it was that same agency which handled the technical side of restoring the hotline, and not its front organization the Unification Ministry.

Prominent conservatives here have been saying that the alleged resumption of dialogue is of no great importance; there may be another empty “peace show” or two staged (as the 2007 summit was) with a view to boosting the Minjoo candidate in the presidential election, but the North will not disarm. Well, of course it won’t, as Moon knows fully well, but asserting the unbridgeable distance between the two governments is very different from warning against their dark collusion, which was the opposition strategy in the Sunshine Years.

Why the change? Because the unprincipled parliamentary right and the three conservative newspapers want to see the patrimonial feeding-trough widened through constitutional revision, which cannot be negotiated with the ruling party in an atmosphere of fundamental ideological conflict. Taking these people for staunch defenders of the US-ROK alliance would be as foolish as taking the Moon camp for liberals.

 

UPDATE: 3 August 2021: Park Jie-won resigns?

For what it’s worth the conservative Youtube channel Garosero Research Institute has just announced (9:46 am) that Park Jie-won has resigned from his post as director of the National Intelligence Service. Yet Park is to address the National Assembly this morning.

Six hours later (3:45 pm) there is still no confirmation of Garosero’s story, though it may be relevant that a ruling party lawmaker at this morning’s hearing characterized Park’s testimony, in which he called for a “flexible response” to Pyongyang’s demand for cancellation of US-ROK military exercises, as the director’s personal position and not the official one of the NIS. On the other hand it is common for the ruling camp to try to have things both ways; the government has in the past responded to Moon Chung-in’s provocative brusqueries by claiming the special envoy was speaking as a private citizen. If Park has indeed handed in his resignation, it would seem that President Moon has yet to accept it.

UPDATE: 5 August 2021: NIS denies reports of Park’s resignation

The National Intelligence Service has dismissed Garosero’s report as “groundless,” but the Youtube channel, which has quite a good track record over the past year or so, has since altered its story only to the effect that Park handed in his resignation some time ago. We should perhaps keep in mind here that Justice Minister Choo Mi-ae handed in her resignation weeks before Moon finally let her go.

What I found interesting was the government’s contradiction of Park’s rather obvious assertion in the Tuesday hearings that the impetus to reconnect the hotline came from Kim Jong Un. It was, we’re told, a decision made in mutual consultation. This seems an odd correction, inasmuch as the South had allegedly been asking for re-connection for some time; surely it was Kim’s decision that then made it reality. But as the election nears, the government is growing more sensitive to the charge that it takes orders from the North.

As for the official emphasis on Park’s having spoken as a private person, it may have resulted largely from his undiplomatic disclosure of the North Korean elite’s urgent need for imported liquor and suits. (The usual strategy in DPRK-sympathetic circles is to argue that sanctions are only felt by the poor.) We’re reminded here that while Park has hitherto got on famously well with the Kim clan — first the Dear Leader and more recently Kim Yo-jong — he’s not a true-blue nationalist leftist, but a former US-based businessman who became involved in inter-Korean relations through his connection to Kim Dae Jung. In contrast the de facto # 2 in the NIS, Park Seon-won, led the Yonsei branch of the revolutionary pro-North group Sammintu, and did a few years in prison in the 1980s for his role in the occupation of the US Cultural Center in Seoul. That, combined with his more recent record of loudly denying the North’s role in sinking the Cheonan, makes for a superior background from the ruling camp’s perspective — and perhaps now from Pyongyang’s too.

Update: 10 August 2021: The Cheongju Four

Predictably enough, some Moon-supportive Korea watchers on Twitter have been trying to present the news of the recent arrests in Cheongju as a sign that their man is security-conscious after all. The first and most obvious thing to be said here is that the rank and file of the NIS did not sign up to provide support for “underwater” inter-Korean diplomacy and are still more conservative than their top officials. Second, the green light to investigate at least one of the Cheongju suspects was allegedly given before Moon took over in May 2017, and considerable evidence was amassed before Park Jie-won became NIS chief last year.

Considering its penchant for appointing people who did prison time for violating the National Security Act, and its determination to have the police take over all the work of spy-catching by 2024, the Moon administration is unlikely to have had much interest in seeing this investigation carried to term. Especially not a) with an election in the offing, b) the accused having been active in a formal capacity in Moon’s campaign in 2017, c) their North Korean handlers having exhorted them to whip up support for the official “reform” drive, and d) a lot of the sleuthing having been of a kind the police couldn’t have done.

This last is usually the case in ROK counterintelligence, for the simple reason that most illicit inter-Korean encounters take place in China. Which I suspect is why the police must get the job in the nascent “peace system,” though the official spin, as I understand it, is that the intelligence agency has too notorious a record of abusing power. (As if the police’s record weren’t just as bad.)

But it isn’t easy yet to kill an official investigation of illegal activity once it’s well underway and yielding incriminating evidence. The police’s new “security investigation office” had no choice but to get involved in January 2021. The main charge against the Cheongju Four, apparently, is “accomplishment of purpose,” the carrying out of North Korean instructions by, among other things, delivering information about members of the (pro-North) Minjung Party.

The irony is that while Park Jie-won naturally tried to keep all this from becoming a big news story, the openly pro-North press complained while the suspects’ domiciles were being searched on 27 May; it even named all four, as the mainstream media are yet to do, and left online an older article with a photograph of one of them protesting (as allegedly instructed by the North) against deployment of the F-35A Stealth. What’s more, the man in question was bold enough, or confident enough of support in high places, to use his own little news outlet (since shut down) to criticize Park Jie-won. Even at that late time, allegedly, reports were still being sent to the North, including — a sign of disunity in the NIS — the names of the agents investigating the group.

If the rumor of Park’s having tried to resign is true, his failure to impress the “people’s will” on the NIS might have something to do with it, as some on the right have already asserted. All this takes me back to how the intelligence agency ruined the Roh administration’s plan to install Song Du-yul at Seoul National University by letting the South Korean public know that he was, in his other life, a Workers’ Party official of some importance.

The question now, according to Yeom Don-je, a former NIS man who’s been very critical of the government, is whether anything is heard in the next several months about the dozens of other people allegedly investigated in connection with the Cheongju Four. As for our Korea watchers’ claims that the Blue House remains committed to counterintelligence despite wanting the police to do it, I suppose I’ll believe this when people are caught who came under suspicion after the first Moon-Kim summit.

UPDATE: 12 August 2021: Sure enough? 

The Kookmin Ilbo reports that the National Intelligence Service’s investigation into the Cheongju spy group was downsized and put on a back burner by Moon’s first NIS chief Suh Hoon, a man appointed in large part, as I said at the time, for his famous rapport with North Korean officials. The article says too little about that alleged downsizing, and deals too heavily in the word atmosphere, for me to ascribe much weight to it. The “atmosphere of inter-Korean reconciliation” in 2018 resulted, both in the NIS and the prosecutors’ office, in an “atmosphere of trying to block the investigation,” but the responsible team kept amassing evidence regardless, and this year it took advantage of the shift in public perceptions of inter-Korean relations (or was it the decline in Moon’s poll numbers?) to speed up things.

I see nothing at all in this report to indicate that Suh Hoon or Park Jie-won obstructed the investigation. Doesn’t every bureaucracy intuitively shift its priorities when a new administration comes in? Then again, the NIS would likely have encountered more than just a discouraging atmosphere had it focused on people of more importance. Anyone conversant with a) East Berlin’s complete infiltration of the West German power elite and b) the ideological leanings of South Korea’s ruling camp will understand that the extent of infiltration is likely to be far greater here. Seeing as how the North Koreans were able to afford $20,000 for the relatively trivial services of the Cheongju Four, and that’s only the payment the NIS found proof of, they still have as large a budget for covert operations as ever. (The dictatorship was throwing spy money around even in the famine years.) If the NIS needed so much time just to catch this amateurish quartet, it’s hard to see how the police could do a much worse job.

17 August 2021: The plot thickens   

The prosecutors only have about a month left in which to bring charges, which is very little time to ascertain the full extent to which the suspects carried out instructions allegedly received from the Kim regime. Now seen as more important than the order to protest against F-35 deployment are the instructions to the group to a) make use of its contacts in the ruling party and b) recruit some 60 people into serving the North.

The natural assumption is that at least some of the targets of recruitment were members of the Minjoo Party and the administration. But the last thing the Moon camp wants in the run-up to presidential elections in 2022 are any embarrassing revelations on this front.

Since the Druking affair was uncovered in early 2018, candlelight-revolutionary strategy has been to slow all unwelcome prosecutorial and judicial proceedings down to a crawl, so that cases drag on until after the public has lost all interest. See for example the keywords: Ulsan mayoral race; embezzlement of donations to former “comfort women,” Wolsong-1 nuclear reactor. When trials finally get underway they are adjourned at the drop of a hat for weeks at a time. The Jarndyce v. Jarndyce pace is in sharp contrast to the speed with which veterans of the last two administrations (aka “forces of accumulated ills”) were whizzed through the courts and into prison in 2017-18.

It’s not all that surprising, then, that Seoul has apparently denied the Cheongju prosecutors’ request for reinforcements. Nope, not a single extra prosecutor with relevant experience shall the sleepy provincial city get to handle the biggest spy case since Wangjaesan in 2011.  (I have a hunch this will change if the newspapers raise a big enough fuss.) The man now expected to lead the investigation is one Song Gang. Formerly of Seoul, he was only recently relegated to Cheongju after helping investigate — bad career move — a particularly embarrassing ruling-camp scandal: the illegal imposition of a travel ban on a veteran of the Park administration.

UPDATE: 11 October 2021: BBC report on former North Korean intelligence official

The BBC’s Laura Bicker has interviewed Kim Kuk-song, a former North Korean official who defected to South Korea several years ago.

Considering all that has come to light in South Korea since 2019, and the Porsche-bribe allegations that just ruined the special prosecutor who worked up relatively tenuous charges against Park Geun-hye, this is the most scandal-ridden ruling camp in post-democratization history. Yet all will be forgotten if Moon Jae-in himself can retire in peace to his spread in Yangsan. Naturally almost the entire Minjoo Party wants to see this happen. It’s therefore wary of Gyeonggi governor Lee Jae-myung, who is now the country’s most popular contender for the presidency.

Moon and Lee were never close, and are known to have fallen out in 2017 (to put things mildly) when Lee challenged the older man in the Minjoo primaries. Rightly or wrongly, it’s widely assumed that Moon would be safer from prosecution under a different Minjoo successor.

That’s not Lee’s only problem. Winning the full trust of the nationalist left without having done prison time for National Security Law violations is like becoming a made man in the Mafia without Italian heritage. On the other hand, Lee has the best possible excuse: being from an exceptionally poor and large family, he had to work his way through college in the 1980s, leaving him no time for the protest movement.

He has since done much to compensate for that hole in his resume. He was on exceptionally  good terms with the pro-Pyongyang, now-banned United Progressive Party, whose candidate stood aside in 2010 so he could win the mayoral race in Seongnam. Since he became governor of Gyeonggi in 2018, the province (which abuts the North) has led the ROK in declarations of eagerness to engage in inter-Korean cooperation. Lee has also shown fewer qualms than Moon about criticizing America, especially in regard to THAAD and sanctions on the North. When he complains about how conservatives keep questioning his loyalty to the republic, he is really signaling to fellow party members his suitedness to lead it.

The inter-Korean stuff is by no means the entirety of Lee’s platform, but it seems the most constant plank. His advocacy of a basic income has wavered of late, and to judge by his recent calls for a transfer of the capital to Sejong, he now supports the constitutional revision he professed not to consider urgent.

Speaking of American sanctions, they are turning out to be a godsend for the ruling party. It’s because none of the quiet confederation-building of the past four years has cost anything significant that tax-payers have paid no attention. The ROK opposition can no longer assail the government’s North policy by saying, as was said to great vote-getting effect in 2007, that the South should take care of its own citizens first. The People Power Party must now avoid the topic, or else be seen by younger voters as behind the times.

It’s a remarkable state of affairs, considering that in South Korea, where there has always been agreement on the need for social welfare, dislike of the North and a concern for security used to be the main distinguishing marks of the conservative. Nowadays the opposition party stands only for a vague promise to do things better — and to stay cleaner while doing them. The past few weeks have shown how vulnerable this image is to scandals anywhere in the PPP camp, even if the ruling party is also implicated (see the seafood fraudster); vulnerable also to whatever screw-ups can be attributed to conservative governors or mayors (see the COVID surge in Seoul).

Meanwhile the left is going strong despite this administration’s abysmal track record precisely because it stands for something that transcends the technical and mundane. “Belief is power,” Leslie Stephen said, “even when belief is most unreasonable.”

As I asserted in my last post, the transformation of inter-Korean cooperation into a neutral topic and the reduction of the right to a mere critic of official incompetence and corruption can be regarded as a political-cultural revolution of sorts. It may go down in history as the Moon administration’s most significant achievement on the road to the “peace system.”

Back to Lee Jae-myung. Early this month he revisited the conventional myth (popularized in the West by Bruce Cumings) according to which South Korea was stymied at birth by its retention of pro-Japanese elements. Lee left out the usual contrastive part — unlike North Korea, which conducted a thorough purge — but the left understands the need for such omissions. Moon himself kept mentions of the North to a minimum during his last campaign, when he pretended to be fixated on job creation instead.

In fact Kim Il Sung gave all but the worst ex-collaborators (read: biggest landowners) a second chance, as DPRK historians state with approval. In later years the Great Leader told Erich Honecker he couldn’t have run the country without their help. Honecker must have understood, considering all the ex-Nazis in the SED. I can’t help wondering, though, if the “North Korean revolution” — as I love hearing it called — really needed such front-row cheerleaders of the Japanese war effort as Song Yŏng, Ch’oi Sŭng-hŭi and Cho Myŏng-am?

The thing is, most South Koreans want to believe that former lackeys of the colonial government were few enough for Rhee to have purged them with no adverse consequences had he only made the effort. It’s like how German movies about the Third Reich reduce the Nazi element to one reviled brownshirt per neighborhood. The fallacy of North Korea’s clean break with the past is thus given a grudging pass even by many on the right.

Yoon Seok-yeol, now the main conservative contender for the presidency, unwisely took greater issue with Lee’s talk of how the US military helped the colonial-era elite remain in power. (Worse, Yoon seemed to object to the term occupying troops itself.) He forgot that the opposition party, which he is yet to join, has done quite well over the past year or so by avoiding ideological disputes of this sort.

Needless to say the nationalist left approves of what Lee said, and even the mainstream likes his sniping at the Suga administration. The South Korean public’s receptiveness to Japan-bashing waxes and wanes in roughly two-year cycles, the last high point having been in the summer of 2019. The Tokyo Olympics bear rich potential to take things up several notches. If this happens it will give Lee another boost at a perfect time.

So too will the profile pieces we can expect from the American press if the arch-nationalist Lee officially becomes the “liberal” nominee it must root for. His politics, like Moon’s, will be explained in terms of childhood biography. “The son of a rest-room attendant….” will be the new “The son of a North Korean refugee….” Such friendly US coverage will in turn be invoked here to persuade voters that the scandals attached to Lee’s name are old hat and beneath notice.

(South Korean voters’ tendency to trust the judgment of observers who don’t even speak their language has long helped the left here, though it results from an inferiority complex the left criticizes the loudest.)

I suppose I should say something about the best-known scandals. (Others are described on Lee’s wiki page.) It has been alleged a) that in 2007, when he was a lawyer, he had an extramarital affair with an actress whom he deceived into thinking he was single (a punishable offense); b) that while mayor of Seongnam, he tried forcibly to commit his older brother to a mental institution, which the latter’s family attests was an effort to muzzle a healthy accountant who had criticized him in public, and c) that he subjected his sister-in-law to a stream of filthy misogynist abuse over the telephone; a sound file is online. At present he is under police investigation for allegations of bribery relating to money gathered from businesses in 2015 for the ostensible purpose of supporting the Seongnam football club.

There is also abundant video evidence of Lee’s irascibility under critical questioning, to mention here only the most recent exchange with his Minjoo rival Jeong Se-gyun who, having called in a debate for scrutiny of Lee’s past, received from him the retort: “Must I drop my pants again?”

Thus did the governor publicize the fact that the investigation into the actress’ allegations had entailed… but why insist on these details? What I want to stress is that none of the above seems to hurt Lee much with Gyeonggi voters, among whom he is generally popular, or with the nationalist left rank-and-file around the country, which sees him as just the kind of scrappy fighter the Cause needs. Here’s a man, they feel, who will resume the purge of the right with the necessary rigor, and forge ahead with Kim Jong-un whether Biden likes it or not.

It’s ironic that by keeping his foe on the margins of the Minjoo, President Moon has saved him from the taint of failure and hypocrisy that now attaches to the party establishment. Lee thus seems much more attractive to young voters than other Minjoo candidates. A new poll positing a two-way match-up puts him at 43.9%, the conservative Yoon at 36%.

Even if he bears grudges of his own, a President Lee would certainly be better for Moon, Kim Jong Un and the confederation project than a President Yoon. It might never happen; there are rumors of vastly more incriminating “X files” being kept in reserve against the governor. Other variables include the pandemic, the economy, and that bribery investigation.

There is also a possibility of Yoon’s campaign collapsing this summer, which would make the right more interested in the trough-sharing semi-presidential system that many in the Minjoo, including Moon, are known to favor — meaning that after an interim the ROK would get a conservative figurehead president (Yoon? Ban Ki-moon? Choe Jae-hyeong?) and a powerful nationalist-left premier.

Both right and left-wing media have been trying to build support for just such a dispensation. Candidates for the presidency are praised or criticized depending on their apparent interest in “integration” (t’onghap), a word now functioning as code for the semi-presidential system, just as “peace system” means confederation. If things move in that direction over the summer, as some observers say they are already moving, Lee’s lack of a strong parliamentary faction will hurt him and help his Minjoo rival Lee Nak-yeon.

Be all that as it may: at present South Korea looks more likely to stay under nationalist-left rule in 2022 than to move in the other direction.

 

UPDATE: 14 September 2021: Sure enough:

Above I talked of

the profile pieces we can expect from the American press if the arch-nationalist Lee officially becomes the ‘liberal’ nominee it must root for. His politics, like Moon’s, will be explained in terms of childhood biography…. Such friendly US coverage will in turn be invoked here to persuade voters that the scandals attached to Lee’s name are old hat and beneath notice.

But I hadn’t expected London-based Reuters to lead the way, as it has done with a remarkable puff-piece on “S. Korea’s ‘Bernie Sanders’.”

Born to an impoverished farming family in a remote mountain village in the country’s southeast, Lee, 56, attributes his focus on economic equality to an early life as a child labourer in chemical factories that left him with impaired hearing and a wrist deformity….

Lee, who came in third during the Democratic Party’s last presidential primary in 2017, has been dogged by personal controversy while in office….

Yet the only controversy mentioned is the one Western readers are most likely to shrug off:

…including allegations of an affair with an actress, which he has denied. As proof of their alleged relationship, the actress said the governor had a large mole on his body. In 2018, Lee publicly undertook an examination to refute that claim, with doctors concluding he had no such mark.

Lee can expect a lot more coverage in this supportive vein in the months ahead.

UPDATE: 13 October 2021: How’s this for supportive?

NK News has gone one better than Reuters with a long profile piece on Lee Jae-myung that refrains from mentioning any of the scandals surrounding him — including the land-development scandal that for weeks has been engulfing the South Korean media and complicating his political aspirations.