Sthele Press

If I may adapt something G.K. Chesterton said about the English and Ireland: Americans will speak to Korea, and speak for Korea, but they will not hear Korea speak. Least of all do they care to hear Koreans speak to Koreans. Our journalists present President Moon’s approach to the North not in the context of a decades-old movement and ideology, but as the product of his personal commitment to peace. Because everything must revolve around America, this commitment is often explained — though I don’t get the logic myself — with a backstory about how the US military helped Moon’s parents escape the North.

The following is from the latest TIME cover story on the man. The headline: “South Korean President Moon Jae-in makes one last attempt to heal his homeland.”

Moon’s parents and eldest sister fled North Korea on Dec. 23, 1950, aboard the S.S. Meredith Victory…. The boat docked at South Korea’s Geoje Island, where Moon was born two years later. Today, the refugee camp his family called home has been turned into a memorial park; diorama displays surround rusting planes and tanks, an enormous concrete flyover looming overhead. The scars of this tumultuous background guided Moon into student activism, human-rights legal work and ultimately the Blue House….

I sense a little confusion with the POW camp for which Moon’s father did manual labor during the war. In any case, Moon was in fact born in a house in Namjeong, a village on the island where he lived for years until the family moved to Busan. Having enjoyed an island childhood myself, I’m curious as to how his parents’ background translated into scarring tumult for the boy. That according to Moon’s memoirs (2017) his parents traveled not on the famous Meredith Victory but on a US military LST or tank landing ship; that his most famous “human-rights legal work” was done for perpetrators of a deadly arson attack on the US Cultural Center in Busan; that as president he sent two North Korean fishermen back to North Korea, where they were certain to be executed on murder charges: these pertinent facts are of course omitted. Then again, it’s always easy to fault someone for leaving things out.

Much of the article reads like the ones we got from the Western press in what for Moon were happier times. He’s a good ally who wants what we want; he just has a different way of going about it. Alas, he is “so invested in rapprochement … that he has lost support from those who put him in power.” Once again, then, we have a foreigner putting a more flattering spin on things than even the Hankyoreh would now attempt. The consensus here is that the administration was undone to a much greater degree by its unpopular war on the prosecutors’ office. It began in 2019, right after the chief prosecutor turned his attention to Moon’s inner circle. A left-wing and now anti-government legal activist has just put out a book on this subject. (The TIME article makes no mention of the Cho Kuk saga.)

But I write this post to take issue with the final paragraph:

Certainly there are few original ideas on how to break this [inter-Korean] cycle: engagement, negotiation, provocation, estrangement, rapprochement. The next attempt, when it comes, will be clouded by the inevitable sigh of ennui. “There’s no real solution to this problem,” says [CSIS analyst Sue Mi] Terry. “It’s been like this for over 30 years.” That might, after all, be Moon’s true legacy—the grim realization that if he couldn’t fix things, perhaps nobody can.

This seems to be the current orthodoxy among Western journalists and pundits, most of whom, I suspect, will sing a different tune the moment another summit is announced.

For now of course their ennui is very real. Infectious too; how dull they make even North Korea seem! Kim Jong Un tightens, loosens, tightens control of the economy; his sister is more, less, more powerful; the regime wants, doesn’t want to talk to Washington – around and around the speculation goes, through stations that were once exotic and are now drearily familiar, often calendar-predictable: New Year’s address, missile test, party-gathering, anniversary parade. Neither infusions of fresh trivia (“Kim’s floating amusement park appears headed for Wonsan”) nor the occasional 9-day wonder (is he in a coma?) can dispel a mounting sense of otioseness — the sense that one could skip the coverage for months on end and be no worse off.

The South Korean news delivered in fits and starts to the American public is hardly compelling either: inaugural promises of reform, of a new approach to North Korea, setbacks on these fronts, a string of ruling-party scandals, crushing electoral defeat – how many times have we seen this play out since the 1990s?

But the impression of an eternal peninsular return results in large part from the commentariat’s refusal to discuss Korean nationalism. Beating around the bush is an inherently circular and boring affair, even when, or especially when, the bush itself is flourishing in fascinating ways. The truth is that in only four years Moon has transformed South Korea’s political culture, perhaps irrevocably. From mid-2017 to mid-2019 his administration made full use of its power and popularity to control the discussion of North Korea in media and in education, and even to shape the depiction of it in government-subsidized movies and television dramas. Meanwhile principled critics of the drive for a “peace system” were excluded from television news panels and hounded from the boards of broadcast companies. (They have not returned.) In this manner the administration succeeded in framing opposition to North Korea as the anachronistic, nation-dividing obsession of the “pro-Japanese faction,” a largely mythical caste supposedly comprised of former supporters of colonial rule and their descendants.

Conservative politicians’ Pyongyang-bashing had long been more of a vote-getting device than the reflection of deep conviction, as I tried to make clear in a blog post last year. After some early failed efforts to whip up public anger at Moon’s appeasement policy, the right concluded that it could gain more votes — and television viewers and newspaper readers — by adjusting to the times. I knew a big change was afoot in April 2018 when the Chosun Ilbo carried a friendly interview  with Kim Jae-yeon, one of the most prominent pro-North radicals in the country.

The opposition party did so well in the April mayoral elections precisely because it steered away from ideological issues, instead presenting itself as a more competent, less corrupt alternative to the ruling party. Hardly did the new mayor of Seoul take office than he expressed support for his predecessor’s proposal for a Seoul-Pyongyang Olympic Games in 2032. He has also allowed the country’s leading nationalist-left demagogue to remain on the city-funded radio station — another sign that while the right may slow down the cultural revolution in progress, it lacks the will to reverse it. Busan now has a conservative mayor too, but when I went to City Hall a few weeks ago the same anti-USFK activists were still ensconced in the center of the lobby — with no counter-force in sight.

A few months ago, 30 conservative parliamentarians – including the defector Thae Young-ho — voted with the ruling party to amend an inter-Korean cooperation law so as to allow projects to bypass the Ministry of Unification. Meanwhile provinces and municipalities continue pledging  to strike deals with North Korean entities as soon as the Americans say it’s okay. Joe Biden’s signed expression of support for inter-Korean cooperation, marked as it was by the sort of “affable imprecision” that Harold Nicolson warned diplomats against, may come back to haunt the alliance.

Arguably the most important division in South Korea’s political class right now runs through left and right, not between the two camps: I mean the division between supporters and opponents of a semi-presidential system. If the former carry the day, the constitution will be revised in more ways than one — and South Korea will take a big step toward the “peace system” Moon envisions. Whether our media will cover it is another matter.

UPDATE: 8 July 2021

Never has the commentariat’s respect for its central taboo been made more comically obvious than it is in this Joongang article, in which a CSIS pundit endeavors to explain Moon’s high opinion of Kim Jong Un without once mentioning ideological matters. Evidently we’re to consider it more likely that Kim really is a wonderful fellow than that Moon’s judgment is colored by nationalism.

In November 2019, shortly after making the scandal-ridden Cho Kuk his Justice Minister, Moon Jae-in was described in the sub-heading of an Asia Times article by Andrew Salmon as “Mr Clean, Mr Nice Guy.” (The headline: “Defying Darkness, Moon Shines On.”) In 2020 Salmon called the president “probably the nicest fellow ever to inhabit the Blue House,” and a “people person …. always ready to pose for a selfie with a fan.” A week or so ago the correspondent referred in another Moon article to “Mr Nice Guy,” the appellation doing additional service as a sub-heading.

And why not, eh? Heaven knows the partisanship on the other side of the discussion is just as obtrusive. (May I call a halt to “Bad Moon Rising/Falling” headlines?) The interesting thing is that the above type of cheerleading is more common in the foreign press than in the Hankyoreh, the de facto organ of the ruling Minjoo Party. I don’t necessarily mean talk of “Mr Nice Guy,” but the tendency of even experienced journalists like Salmon — the author, by the way, of an excellent book on the Korean War — to praise Moon on naive, moralizing, emotionalist or (to use a more neutral word) apolitical grounds. My readers will recall the Economist article last year that stated matter-of-factly, as if the point were self-evident, that he “wants to take politics out of prosecutions.”

I see here a confirmation of what Hannah Arendt and others have noted in very different contexts: outsiders are often more willing to take a leader’s cant at face value than his followers are. Having a longer and deeper acquaintance with him, and sharing as they do his ideology, the latter know better when — and for what strategic reasons — he’s putting on an act. (James Mattis is quoted in Bob Woodward’s book Rage as saying that Trump’s supporters “somehow believe in him without believing what he says.”)

Another factor at work: Your Western news junkie focuses on the collective dealings of governments and oppositions, and knows the biographies (potted ones at best) of only a few people at the top of the ladder. This conduces to the attachment of great hope and faith to “new” leaders, even when they’ve been none too gloriously active in politics for decades already. The South Korean political buff, on the other hand, takes a genealogical view, showing a strong interest in the backgrounds of dozens of people. “If you want to understand politics here,” I was told a few years ago, “you have to know the family registers” (kyebo). This is meant literally and figuratively. Journalists can tell you off the cuff which university and even which high school a politician went to, who was a year above or below him, who his in-laws are, when he went to prison and for what, which faction he belonged to before switching to the current one, and so on. They cannot unlearn all this — which they would have to do to attain to the untroubled, guileless simplicity of Western Moon-puffery.

Neither, of course, can South Korean journalists omit all reference to unfavorable things about Moon, these being too well-known to the local public. They must be spun instead. The nationalist-left reader is looking for that spin: for arguments with which to defend the president against critical family-members, co-workers, his own creeping doubts.

The average Western reader’s need for phatic punditry, and the illusion of understanding a foreign political culture in a matter of minutes, is more easily satisfied — can only be satisfied — with one-sided information dished out on a “need to know” principle. Mr Clean in power in South Korea? There’s hope for the region yet, I wish we had a leader like that, etc. “He liked his newspaper,” Tolstoy writes in Anna Karenina, “for the slight haze it produced in his brain.”

To make the most obvious correction first: A “people person” Moon isn’t. In a not unsympathetic profile piece in 2011 the Weekly Chosun singled out his introversion, with corroborative quotes from the man himself, as the main hindrance to his political aspirations. In recent years left-leaning TV pundits have lamented the similarity between his personality and Park Geunhye’s, and urged him to stop hunkering down with yes-men like she did.

Introversion is no bar to niceness (or to selfies with fans). Most South Korean progressives, however, would reflexively say that the nicest occupant of the Blue House wasn’t Moon but Roh Moo Hyun. I remember how scathingly the former was described in some left-wing circles before becoming a president the whole camp had to rally around. (See for example the account of his “candlelight opportunism” in a book put out in early 2017 by Kim Uk, a very readable writer on the Jeolla left.) 

Negative comment can be found, for example, on how Moon 1) refused to assist his friend Roh’s presidential campaign, then seated himself front and center when Blue House jobs were being handed out, 2) promised to relinquish leadership of his party if Jeolla didn’t support it in parliamentary elections, and then shrugged off his pledge as the “result of various strategic judgments,” 3) wrote a thank-you note to the children who drowned in the Sewol sinking, their deaths having boosted his cause as — he seems to have assumed — they would have wanted, 4) tried to interest Park Geun-hye in retiring with honor, lest impeachment result in an inopportune constitutional reform, then jumped on the candlelight bandwagon, finally presenting his election to the presidency (with 41% of the vote) as the triumph of the popular will.

Since taking power, Moon has appointed numerous people to top posts in the face of public anger at their records of corruption, pushed for bans on the heterodox discussion of modern history, suggested that adoptive parents exchange their kids for different ones if they don’t like the ones they got, and taken legal action against a young man who distributed satirical leaflets about him; the suit was dropped over a year later after criticism from the right and left.

I mustn’t over-correct. All I’m driving at is that this is no Gandhi or Mandela but a politician, a vain and calculating power-person like the rest of them. Not that his base wanted a saint for president. It wanted someone who would purge the political class of “accumulated evils,” read: conservatives likely to obstruct the creation of a new peninsula. The vision of a society purified of this or that group of people (be they “reds” or “pro-Japanese”) is inherently anti-democratic, but even those who look back approvingly on the purge of 2017-2019, which lost all legitimacy and momentum when the Cho Kuk scandal-cluster emerged, will admit that a nicer president would have lacked the stomach for it. Roh Moo Hyun? He would have pardoned Park years ago.

I have already adduced a few explanations for the peculiar quality of foreign observers’ praise for Moon, but the most important one, in my opinion, is their aversion to discussing his ideology. This although it can be very easily reconstructed from his frequent talk of mentors as well as from a study of his holiday speeches (1 March and 15 August), which make the same simple points over and over.

Because foreign correspondents can’t or won’t talk about Korean nationalism, yet cannot assume their readers’ awareness of it like local journalists do, they must explain Moon’s central preoccupation in pacifist or humanitarian terms instead, or with reference to his personal wonderfulness. His tolerance of North Korean abuse and provocations is set down to his being too nice for his own good, when ideology affords a much more credible explanation — particularly in view of his lawsuits against South Korean critics. All this redounds to the advantage of his image overseas, where the countervailing facts are unknown.

Here the praise for Moon is implicit:

For the US, North Korea is at best a secondary concern. Yet for Moon and future South Korean presidents, there is no more important foreign policy issue than North Korea. Entire families remain separated by the 38th Parallel. Both countries face the prospect of violent skirmishes and all out confrontation at any time. (Dan DePetris, NK News, 20 May 2021.)

We’re to infer that a key driver of Moon’s interest in inter-Korean relations is his desire to bring together separated families. It isn’t. The urgency went out of the reunion process when both governments realized that these brutally short and final get-togethers do nothing for the North’s popularity in the South. Nor has the general public paid much attention since the first few rounds of reunions. The number of people awaiting a turn to participate is shrinking fast. As for the return of abducted South Koreans, Moon has shown no more inclination to discuss it at summits than Kim Dae Jung or Roh Moo Hyun did. Meanwhile Tokyo’s unrelenting effort to get abducted Japanese out of the North baffles the nationalist left here. Nationalism is a concern with the nation’s stature on the world stage, not the welfare of individual citizens. 

Yet Moon and his camp know that the plight of divided families tugs at the hearts of Americans like no other Korean issue — as well it should, considering our country’s role in dividing the peninsula. The hope of many here is that by projecting great impatience for family reunions, and talking up a need for related outlays and projects, Uncle Sam can be pressured into relaxing restrictions that now prevent bigger forms of inter-Korean cooperation. A relevant quote from Yi Gi-beom, the chairman of a North-sympathetic NGO, in the Hankyoreh:

If people are to go back and forth between North and South … [there] have to be medical facilities to deal with COVID, with emergency situations. There has to be the possibility of rail and highway travel between North and South. If one proceeds from the problem of family reunions, at a time when North-South travel has come to a complete halt, can’t it become an opportunity to expand things to inter-Korean relations as a whole? Because the issue of family reunions brings with it a moral justification for the Biden government, which emphasizes humanitarianism and human rights, it can receive a magnificent appraisal as a first step of his North Korea policy.”

In the NK News article excerpted further above the American writer implicitly attributes to Moon a fear of “all-out confrontation at any time.” Yes, but between which states? It was traditionally the rightists who warned against the threat of another civil war, and the nationalist left which — refusing for decades to acknowledge who started the first one — dismissed all such talk as scaremongering. Moon, it will be remembered, was among those who refused to accept even the North’s responsibility for the Cheonan sinking in 2010.

He had to change that particular tune to get elected, but there’s no reason to believe he now perceives a real and present threat to the South. His almost comically serene declaration in 2017 that no military action can take place on the peninsula without his consent shows that the prospect of North Korean aggression is outside his field of vision; it’s an American strike on the North that he and his camp are determined to prevent. As I’ve written here already, Moon’s brain trust makes plain that a central goal of the envisioned “peace system” (the official euphemism for confederation and economic union) is to guarantee the North’s security from American attack — before it gives up its nuclear weapons.

Confederation may seal a lasting peace, but it may have the opposite effect, as the cautionary example of Yemen’s transition to unification suggests. In any case we are not dealing here with a principled, absolute peace-mindedness. Moon seems keen on pounding the racial tom-tom, rehearsing the defense of Dokdo (that kind of military exercise is always all right), and letting close associates dispense belligerent anti-Japanese rhetoric at times of tension — like Cho Kuk’s invocation of the “Bamboo-Spear Song” in August 2019. I repeat: What actuates Moon Jae-in’s preoccupation with the North is Korean nationalism and not humanitarianism or pacifism, let alone exceptional niceness. Judging from Joe Biden’s pledge of support for the Panmunjom Declaration of 2018, in which Moon and Kim Jong Un renewed the commitment to confederation signed in 2000, foreign journalists aren’t the only ones who fail to understand this.

The press is always behind the times, as T.S. Eliot noted, and it’s only natural that the foreign press should be further behind, but the lag seems especially great in South Korea. Bias plays a larger role than the language barrier. Until this spring most correspondents for foreign media avoided reporting on ruling-camp corruption and incompetence much more assiduously than the locals did.

The conservative mayoral-election landslide of 7 April has finally forced them to acknowledge that Moon Jae-in is seen far less favorably here than overseas. The New York Times’ Choe Sang-Hun had to do an explanatory dash through scandals and failures in which he had hitherto shown little interest. There was great rejoicing on the South Korean right at seeing him introduce the political catchphrase naero nambul to American readers, though it seems a little stale now. I discussed it on this blog in February 2018:

Upon his election [in 2017] Moon appointed several Gangnam leftists with records of tax avoidance, real-estate speculation, and the … pulling of strings on relatives’ behalf. This prompted much use of the crypto-Sinitic compound naero nambul, short for “When I cheat, it’s romance, when others do, it’s adultery.”

Incidentally the electoral commission, which ensures that election propaganda is kept within narrow limits — especially the conservative kind — made clear a few weeks ago that pseudo-neutral banners bearing this anti-hypocrisy slogan would not be tolerated. The reason given: everyone would know which party was being criticized.

It won’t be much of an improvement if the foreign media, having fallen for the government’s posturing for so long, starts taking the opposition’s at face value. The Deutsche Welle headline “Mayoral elections sink Moon’s North Korea peace drive” will be proven wrong in short order if it hasn’t been already. Still a tiny minority in the National Assembly, albeit an invigorated one, the People Power Party is in no position to make this remarkably obstinate president change course.

Nor is it especially interested in doing so. Of all the things the Western press gets wrong about South Korea, the perception of the conservative opposition as a bunch of hardline Cold Warriors may be furthest from the mark. Having triumphed last week in no small part because it jettisoned most conservative principles years ago, the PPP is at least as far to the left as Kim Dae Jung’s administration was. It says a lot that when Na Gyeong-won and Oh Se-hoon were vying for the PPP nomination last February, each claimed to be more moderate than the other. The ensuing run-up to the elections in Seoul and Busan saw both sides argue over which one was morally and technically better qualified to do the things everyone considers necessary.

Along with a few dozen other Busanites, I now sit on a committee, established days ago by the new mayor, which is meant to explore ways for the city to become greener, more international, and so on. The first speaker invited to address us, I see, is Kim Kyung-soo: the governor of South Gyeongsang Province, a member of President Moon’s innermost circle, and a key player in one of those big stories the New York Times thought readers needn’t know much about. In American terms this would be like a new Republican mayor of New York inviting, say, Andrew Cuomo to kick off a lecture series.

Busan is famous in Korea for its lack of a sharp left-right divide, but even in Seoul the ideological polarization is mild by American standards. It takes much longer than 10 seconds, which seems to be the current norm back home, for encounters between the unlike-minded to turn ugly. Personally speaking, I’d sooner engage with the far-left or far-right here than have to reason with an American wokester or gun nut.

The average Korean’s response to encountering fundamental disagreement is to change the subject. After I spoke on North Korean culture to nationalist-left researchers the other day, the kind lady running the Zoom conference began with, “You said some debatable things we needn’t discuss right now.” Meaning of course ever; still, they heard me out. I admit that the foreigner enjoys a sort of court-jester’s freedom which the native doesn’t, but I received more threats while holding an animal-rights sign in front of a KFC in Albuquerque than I’ve heard go back and forth between “clashing” demonstrators in Seoul.

Even if South Korean conservatives were willing and able to put pressure on Moon, he would stand firm. What choice does he have? Kim Ŏ-jun, the government-loyal host of the aptly-titled radio show News Factory, is correct in saying that any rightward shift would be the end of the ruling party. The main reason for this, which he forbore to mention, is that alienating the southwestern Jeolla region means political suicide for any progressivist force, as Moon’s old boss Roh Moo Hyun found out.

From the start, the current government has rested on this demographic base, which includes the enormous Jeolla diaspora in other parts of the country. (The region proper only holds about 10% of South Korea’s population.) It was in order to get out this crucial part of the vote a few years ago that the ruling party chose Jeolla people to run for district chief in most of Seoul’s 25 districts, all of whom were elected.

Yet discussion of the ideological distinctness and monolithicity of Jeolla is a taboo topic in South Korean political discussion. It’s always in geography-free language that the media tell us of Moon’s “hardcore supporters,” of a “concrete” base that keeps his approval ratings from sinking too far — as if the bulk of that 30% or so were not also the bulk of the roughly 25% who plan to vote next year for his old foe Lee Jae-myung, a man not unlikely to seek prosecution for key Moon-camp members and maybe (the Korean tradition being what it is) Moon himself.

Public opinion in Jeolla now diverges more markedly from that of the rest of the republic than ever before. It’s not as if the economy were any better there, the new tax burden lighter, the pace of vaccinations less glacial, or the big corruption and sexual-harassment scandals less common knowledge. Its support for the ruling party can be explained only with reference to ideological matters that must never be publicly discussed. I suspect this is why, in coverage of last week’s elections — in which the PPP mayoral candidates took every last district of Seoul and Busan — the ruling party’s victory in four Jeolla by-elections went almost completely undiscussed. (In none of those races were conservatives even contenders; the Minjoo candidates ran against nationalist-left independents.)

Let’s just say, if I may touch very lightly on the forbidden topic: Jeolla has a uniquely strong interest in the improvement of inter-Korean relations. Hence also its support for Lee Jae-myung, the governor of Gyeonggi Province, who bangs that particular drum more often than any of the other likely contenders for the presidency, and makes sure the mayors on his turf bang it too. A look into his power-base in Seongnam is enlightening.

To return to the conservative party: its real focus, now as during the impeachment drive of 2016, is on bringing about a semi-parliamentary system through constitutional revision. As I explained in 2018, here and here, this is something many on the nationalist left also want, albeit for very different reasons. Mind you, the PPP’s current aversion to the “imperial presidency” may dissipate if it reckons it can wrest back that institution next year. The party’s chances still look pretty dismal, due to the likelihood of a three-way election in which the moderate and conservative candidates would split the non-left vote. On the other hand, if South Koreans continue being vaccinated at one of the slowest rates in the developed world, and must walk around in masks while other countries go back to normal, the conservatives might be able to win even without a personally popular candidate.

Suffice for now to observe, however, that if a semi-parliamentary system were to come about while the National Assembly is under Minjoo control, it would create very favorable conditions for constructing the “peace system” Moon and his circle have long envisioned: an inter-Korean league or confederation. He’s not quite a lame duck yet.

UPDATE: 22 April 2021:

Sure enough; just in the past week there have been ample indications that neither the president nor the ruling party intends to change course. More interesting than the relevant inter-Korean news was Moon’s decision to appoint to the newly created post of presidential secretary for disease control Ki Moran, the former leader of the COVID-19 task force, who until late 2020 had assured the public that there was no urgent need for South Korea to secure vaccines. The promotion of such a person a few weeks after the conservative electoral landslide, as the full scope of the vaccine debacle dawned on the public, reflected a level of ideological commitment such as one rarely encounters in late-term presidents here.

I bring up ideology because Ki Moran (nomen est omen, the peony being a flower associated with….) is the daughter of Ki Se-ch’un, a veteran of the DPRK-loyal, DPRK-funded underground Unification Revolution Party of the 1960s, which puts her in the “core class” of the nationalist-left’s de facto sŏngbun system. President Moon’s favorite thinker, as he told Kim Yo-jong in 2018, was the long-imprisoned URP cadre Shin Young-bok. The ruling camp’s determination to overturn the bribery conviction for which former prime minister Han Myeong-sook recently served a few years in prison has much to do with the fact that she married into the exalted URP family.

But Moon’s readiness to appoint Ki in the face of growing public criticism of his administration may also reflect confidence that a semi-presidential system can be brought about before he leaves office. (A weakened Blue House and a strong, assembly-appointed prime minister would be more likely to keep Moon from meeting the same fate as Lee Myung Bak and Park Geun-hye.)

Meanwhile, however, there are signs that the People Power Party is indeed having second thoughts about constitutional revision. A leading member has said publicly that this is not the time for it. Now, the PPP could simply be playing hard to get before entering into the relevant negotiations with the Minjoo. But it may well have concluded that South Koreans will be even angrier at the ruling camp by March 2022 than they are now, thus more likely to vote for one of the lackluster PPP politicians who now poll in single digits.

UPDATE: 23 April 2021: 

Having  engaged in confederation-drive denial for the past few years– “absurd fantasy … right-leaning conspiracy theory,” etc, etc — NK News reported yesterday on Unification Minister Lee In-young’s public call for a “one nation, two states, two systems, and one market” model on the peninsula. (That’s my translation; NK News talks of “one people, two countries,” etc.) I suppose a mention of confederation would have been too much to ask, even if the context did scream out for it, but readers had a right to expect some discussion of the implications of Lee’s remarkable words. Instead NK News placidly added what the Unification Ministry told it: that the minister had expressed his “personal opinion, not the official stance on unification of the South Korean government.” This would be implausible enough even if “his” vision, right down to the European Union analogy, hadn’t been standard among government officials, presidential appointees and even provincial inter-Korean cooperation committees for quite some time already. (I mentioned it six months ago.) I see that no such disclaimer has been added to the Seoul Shinmun article in which Lee’s remarks originally appeared.

“The only rule of which everybody in a totalitarian state may be sure,” said Hannah Arendt, “is that the more visible government agencies are, the less power they carry.” Or as Friedrich and Brzezinski wrote of such systems, the “prerogative state” always takes precedence over the “legal state” of public organigrams and formal procedures. These rules and their corollaries apply a fortiori to the North Korean regime, which is more secretive about its inner workings than Nazi Germany or the USSR.

Unfortunately much of the insight into dictatorship that was gained in the 20th century now goes unheeded. Our technology worship is such that a journalist in search of soundbites on North Korean politics is more likely to call on a nuclear expert than a political scientist. Even Kim Yo-jong’s recent “demotion” was thus widely regarded as a change, however minor, temporary, or hard to interpret, in the actual power structure.

For what it’s worth, the young woman is now said to be First Deputy Director of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party. Her main function in export propaganda, however, is to make plausible the myth of internal hawks-vs-doves struggle, which — as we know from John Bolton — her brother trotted out in Singapore when asking for military exercises to be cancelled. Trump seems to have fallen for it then, but when pressed for a larger concession in Hanoi, he reminded Kim Jong Un who “calls the shots” in the DPRK. (“If I can ignore all my subordinates,” Trump probably reasoned, “why can’t he?”)

According to Bolton’s book The Room Where It Happened (2020), the North Korean replied that “even a leader who controlled everything still could not move without providing some justification.” This is a perfectly valid point, and need not have been a reference to the hawks-doves myth; no dictator can flout the ideology from which his legitimacy derives. (This alone is reason to dismiss some Americans’ fantasy about turning North Korea into a second peninsular ally.)

But the Hanoi debacle may well have turned Kim’s attention to the problem of how to restore the hawks-doves myth to the power it exerted over US negotiators a hereditary succession or two ago, when it was still possible to believe that the DPRK was something other than an absolute monarchy.

For such talk to do the intended work in arms negotiations, as the Soviet Union knew, the warlike faction must always be presented as less powerful than the peace-craving leader. Otherwise the enemy will balk at making a concession the hawks will exploit. On the other hand, the hawks may not be posited so low in the command structure that the leader’s professed fear of angering them seems fake. An especially fine touch is needed here, for Kim Jong Un has to project reasonableness southward while projecting to America an undiminished readiness to destroy the ROK if attacked. (It’s thus impossible for inter-Korean relations to get too far ahead of US-DPRK relations, as I’ve said before.)

How to stage a hawks-doves act plausibly in a family-owned state? You make a prominent family member the leading hawk, then formally “demote” her, so as to put just enough apparent distance between her and the leader. Thus has the woman the foreign press touted as “peace messenger” during the 2018 Olympics become the main source of belligerent rhetoric. Her role turns the leader’s notoriously ill health to advantage; we must make a deal before someone less reasonable takes over. If you think such tactics could never work on American officials, you haven’t read Don Oberdorfer’s approving account (in The Two Koreas) of how the Agreed Framework came about.

Ask Korea watchers why the peninsula’s road to unification has been so much longer than Germany’s, and you’re likely to get the answer: “The Germans never fought a war with each other; the Koreans did.” The implication is that much more trust-building is needed here. Why the bulk of it must be done by the side that got attacked is never explained.

But if the Germans never fought each other, neither did a generation of Wessi college students ever consider Erich Honecker the sun of the nation. Nor was there anything in the Federal Republic to compare with the bizarre surge of South Korean good will toward the North — popular and governmental good will — that came in 1988, only months after Kim Il Sung had a Korean Airlines plane blown up in mid-air.

It’s because so few people give the war a thought that the North’s arsenal is widely seen as America’s problem alone. The ROK government’s special envoy spoke for many in 2017 when he said Washington should learn to accept it. A year later President Moon gave a speech in Pyongyang in which he praised Kim Jong Un and his subjects for the “astonishing development” they had achieved with “indomitable courage” in “difficult times,” thereby “guarding the [Korean] nation’s self-respect.” If that isn’t an encouragement to stand firm, what is?

Occasionally one encounters the view that Kim’s weaponry is not just a non-problem but a positive good, one that may ease the coming together of the two Koreas by forcing the US to assume a lower profile. I took this for quite a radical position until the Korea Herald, of all outlets, quoted a fellow at a law firm in Seoul as saying matter-of-factly:

“We launched a separate team specializing in inter-Korean economic cooperation and North Korea nearly a decade ago, once the North had begun to show noteworthy progress in its nuclear program — we knew it was going to bring some kind of change,” Kwon said. (Korea Herald, 2 August 2018.)

Needless to say, America talks of economic cooperation only as a prize for denuclearization. (A bathetic temptation scene was enacted in Singapore when Trump, playing Satan to Kim’s Jesus, showed him the wonders of the kingdom on a laptop.) The nationalist left, meanwhile, wants even billion-dollar projects to start first, so Kim realizes he has nothing to fear. This is where provinces and cities are told to come in. A few years ago a senior researcher at a South Korean think-tank put the reasoning in a nutshell:

“Sanctions on North Korea will not be lifted unless North Korea abandons its status as a nuclear power. Therefore government-led North-South exchange is bound to be limited. Therefore we must explore exchange and cooperation at the regional government level.”

There’s been a sharp increase in such talk this winter. Now that the first part of the island-linking West Sea Peace Highway has been completed, there are bold calls to extend it to North Korea. In similar vein, a Jeolla outlet reported on plans to connect the planned North-South railroad to Saemangeum New Port. Just last week Gyeonggi Province officials were controversially forced to attend an online “talk concert” on the need to reopen the Kaesong Industrial Zone. In the Olympic city of Pyeongchang, a conference took place at which experts discussed a “livestock belt” spanning both the DPRK and ROK parts of divided Gangwon Province.

The dominant tone at these events is one of impatience to see the two central governments get back into that Panmunjom spirit. Yet as the annual Unification White Papers make clear, these displays of regional autonomy-mindedness are funded by the ROK government itself. Most receive a central seal of approval in some other form too; the premier put in an appearance at the Pyeongchang “peace forum,” and President Moon sent a congratulatory message. Bills to give provinces and cities greater autonomy to bypass Seoul in inter-Korean dealings are being pushed at the very top of the ruling party.

No one really believes that the current sanctions regime makes an exemption for “non-central” economic cooperation. Nor do these conferences and forums encourage activity in the here and now; the projects talked up at them are on too grand a scale for anyone to think they could be realized under current circumstances. I suspect that if sanctions are violated it will continue to be through transactions (like Namdong Power’s imports of North Korean coal) that are low-profile, small-scale or complex enough for the Americans to look the other way should they choose, and for the Blue House to have a measure of deniability should they object. Even minor deals that bring the occasional DPRK-made product to South Korean consumers will keep going quietly through Chinese middlemen.

So what are we to make of this orchestrated rash of forums and news stories? It appears to be serving a threefold propaganda function of 1) persuading the provinces that while they may be hurting now, they will do better in the long term under North-friendly, i.e. Minjoo leadership, 2) generating support for decentralization, thus for constitutional revision, and 3) “expanding the consensus for a peace system,” to use the official euphemism.

In practice, that last one boils down to persuading everyone that Kim Jong Un is a partner to prosper with even if he keeps his nukes, as most South Koreans polled expect him to do anyway. Increases in the percentage of the population with a favorable view of the North and decreases in the number who think it a place “to be on guard against” are therefore held up by the Ministry of Unification as the fruit of its education effort. (See for example Chapter 6 of the 2019 Unification White Paper.) That’s inter-Korean cooperation right there, considering that the North’s southward propaganda aims for the very same effect.

Such educating agents abound in Moon’s ROK, from subsidized movies and TV series with handsome North Korean heroes to last month’s respectful coverage of the Workers’ Party congress. (That event, with its “demotion” of Kim Yo-jong, was in itself an effort to disguise the most absolute monarchy in history as a staid one-party state following formal procedures.) But at the center of peace rhetoric is always the economy, for Moon knows he must assuage fears of a return to the unilateral “ladling out” (pŏjugi) of aid to the North.

I don’t mean that inter-regional cooperation is a mere glittering generality. It’s yearned for in all earnestness by provinces and capital city alike. My hunch is that the Moon government sees it as a way out of the Fraternization Trap, if I may give that name to the security dilemma I explained in a post (and Asia Times article) last summer. For if the two Koreas come closer on the provincial or municipal level, as opposed to through high-profile inter-state cooperation (as was embodied in the ill-fated liaison office), the DPRK can more easily maintain the plausibility of its threat to respond to any American attack by destroying Seoul — a threat that for decades has been vital to protecting its own security.

Such considerations, I believe, also color the plan to engineer confederation as an incremental union of provinces rather than as a sudden marriage of two states. And that plan is a big reason for the ruling party’s eagerness to decentralize the ROK, something likely to get more attention after the April mayoral elections.

Despite some hardline noises from the new US administration, many here are confident it will reach a small deal with Pyongyang that will loosen sanctions enough for “peace system” construction. John Bolton’s revelations about the State Department’s eagerness for “action-for-action” have not been lost on anyone. The hope is that more displays of impatience for inter-Korean cooperation, combined with vigorous lobbying in Washington — including the attritive tactic of repeatedly petitioning the White House and Senate to exempt Kaesong in particular — can help speed up things. Meanwhile South Korean conservatives are so sure Biden will stand firm that they mock Moon for clinging to a doomed cause. Perhaps the one ideological camp gives the American ally too little credit, and the other too much, but my money’s on the nationalist left being proven right. I have a feeling Kim’s is too.

 

UPDATE: 16 February 2021:

Hardly had I posted the above than a reader alerted me to the governor of Gangwon Province’s public proposal (made yesterday) to send vaccines to North Korea from a factory in the city of Chuncheon.

“If we send vaccines from South Korea (which are made using Russian technology) – and if Russia is a mediator in the process – this could help improve inter-Korean relations,” he said.

In early 2020 the heroic teamwork of doctors and nurses in Daegu and South Koreans’ collective willingness to take proper precautions induced the foreign press to hail Moon Jae-in as a master of pandemic control. The international hype helped his party win a parliamentary majority with which it has since passed a few un-hyped laws restricting freedom of expression. Until recently South Korea was even praised for its devotion to COVID testing, on which front it actually ranked lower (taking population size into account) than about a hundred other countries. Many of these will get vaccine before we in South Korea do.

At this late point in Moon’s term, it’s safe to conclude that he’s not fixated on expanding human rights, improving health care, putting an end to official corruption and neglect of duty, reducing the gap between rich and poor, making housing more affordable, or doing anything else voters were led to expect from him during his 2017 campaign. Surprised? I’m not. When a movement calling for social justice elects a man who then claims in his speeches — in the face of all evidence and collective memory — that it was really a movement for warmer ties with the neighboring dictatorship, we can have no illusions about his top priority. Am I saying he has subordinated domestic policy to it? Yes.

All along Moon has acted in accordance with the teachings of his ideological mentors, the most influential of whom is Paek Nak-ch’ŏng. Now 82, Paek got his doctorate at Harvard with a thesis on D.H. Lawrence before becoming a Seoul National University professor and — more famously — the editor of a nationalist-left journal that many in today’s ruling elite read in their formative years. As it happens I was chosen for a Korean Studies position in 2005 by his older brother Paek Nak-hwan, who then headed Inje University’s board of directors while overseeing the Paek Hospital empire, which thanks to his rapport with Kim Jong Il — or so he told me, pointing at a large corroborative photograph on his office wall — got the contract to handle medical care at the Kaesong Industrial Zone. He passed away in 2018, but the younger, Lawrentian Paek remains in the core of the ruling camp. Just last summer he was chief celebrant at the Seoul mayor’s funeral.

Paek’s book Making the 2013 System (2013-nyŏn cheje mandŭlgi) came out to great fanfare in early 2012 before being chewed over in approving conferences and articles throughout the year. The author presented it as a guide for the (then still undetermined) nationalist-left candidate he hoped would win the presidential election in December 2012.

There was a lot of that hope going around then. It strengthened in the last hours of the vote count, as I remember from walking by jubilant squatter-demonstrators that chilly Seoul evening on my way to a TV studio. Moon’s defeat has since been set down to the indiscretion with which he pledged to bring about a North-South Korean league or confederation within his five-year term. The practicability of that goal had been asserted by Paek Nak-ch’ŏng.

Before I summarize the brief paperback here, let me disclaim any belief that it’s being thumped like a Bible in the halls of power. Its value is as a concise expression of a consensus articulated by dozens of other prominent people, to no significant camp-internal resistance. While it cannot fully explain anything, it can help us understand a lot, to mention here only the ruling party’s grim insistence on its need to remain in power for 20 straight years.

My summary of Making the 2013 System (Changbi, Seoul, 2012), in italics:

Although divided, the peninsula can be regarded as one Division System from which both Koreas’ economic, political and human rights woes derive. A peace treaty, the normalization of Washington-Pyongyang relations and large-scale economic aid to the North are much to be desired, yet they will not stop the Kim Jong Un regime from perceiving South Korea’s very existence as a threat in itself. If progress is to be made toward unification, the next president cannot content himself with picking up where the last progressive one left off in 2008. In computer terms, it’s time for Accommodationism 2.0. Only the formation of a North-South league or confederation — a step no conservative ROK government will be able to undo — can reassure the North enough for it to embark on denuclearization. 

This proposal is neither radical nor new. The pledge to work together toward realizing it was the core of the 2000 North-South summit agreement so heartily welcomed in both halves of the peninsula. The measures agreed upon at the 2007 summit – routine further summits and meetings of top officials, economic cooperation, etc — were envisioned as first steps in the realization of that pledge. Had Lee Myung Bak not come to power in 2008 they would have all come to pass.

Because neither a unified currency nor free travel ex North Korea is feasible, the foreseen league or confederation must be looser than the European Union. The most suitable English translation: “Association of Korean States.” The next president should not announce it first, then make it live up to its name. Instead he should realize it discreetly, with a steady expansion of economic cooperation, cultural exchanges and trust-building measures, until the new order has become irrevocable. Only then should it be announced to South Koreans and the world as a fait accompli. This can all be done by the end of the president’s term in 2018.

But no inter-Korean progress can be made without first bringing about sweeping, fundamental change in South Korea. The political and judicial system must be thoroughly reformed; all NGOs must become, first and foremost, unification NGOs; and social welfare and equality must be drastically enhanced so that average people feel they can finally afford to support the unification drive. How can the South expect the North to reform, if it does not lead the way with reform itself? 

Most of the book was compiled from speeches Paek Nak-ch’ŏng gave in 2011, which was the last year of Kim Jong Il’s life, and the year after two North Korean attacks killed a total of 50 South Koreans. (Paek refuses to identify the DPRK as perpetrator of the first attack and assigns blame for the second to the South’s provocative military exercises.) There is thus no reason to assume that the very common ideas informing it gave way in 2017 to a more reserved approach.

On  the contrary: As I noted here years ago, Paek was quoted in Tongil News  in June 2018 as saying:

The stage of a North-South league, in which North and South maintain their own constitutions, governments and militaries while forming a league of the two states, can be said to be already underway.

Far from distancing himself from this talk, President Moon took his mentor with him to Pyongyang for the September 2018 summit, granting him pride of place in an official photograph.

Another photograph shows Paek at the head-table at the Okryugwan banquet with Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong Un.

That same September (as I noted here at the time) a headline in the Moon-loyal Hankyoreh read: “With Opening of Kaesong Liaison Office, North and South Take First Step in Systematization of North-South League.” Another Hankyoreh article reiterated that “the systematization of a North-South league has begun.”

Despite the demolition of the liaison office in 2020 the Moon camp still likens the desired form of partnership to the European Union, something Paek refrained from doing in 2012, and asks schoolteachers to promote it accordingly, as I mentioned in my last post. The vague term “peace system” tends to do service for league or confederation (yŏnhap), but the Ministry of Unification still uses the latter word on its website.

Why do so many Moon-friendly Korea watchers try to deny the ruling camp’s amply documented interest in this matter? Why do they chalk it up to an “absurd fantasy” or “conspiracy theory” of government critics? Let me be clear here: They don’t accuse people like me of getting the relevant discourse wrong, or of taking it too literally. They convey the impression that no such discourse exists. If these were English-only pundits, the ones the press turns to when it wants its own opinions fed back to it, we could assume honest ignorance were at work. But some Korean-reading foreigners are in the front ranks of the deniers. I realize it’s often the people overflowing in North Korea trivia who evince the shakiest grasp of South Korean politics and history. But this isn’t the whole explanation either.

So let me make two related points. First, South Korean officials want Uncle Sam kept in a state of katchi kapshida innocence for as long as possible. Second, it’s becoming hard to tell the mainstream of the academico-journalist Korea commentariat apart from what must now be called the North-South Korea lobby. Look at the panels of recent conferences and webinars in the US and you’ll see what I mean. Look also at South Korean academics’ appeals to Pyongyang watchers to practice self-censorship for the sake of peace — appeals that have not stopped them from being treated abroad as reliable authorities.

I say lobby not in the sense of a monolithic team of hired shills, but in the sense in which John Mearsheimer talks of the Israel lobby: a community of people who, despite mutual disagreements, pursue a shared interest in moving US foreign policy in a direction favorable to a certain government or (in this case) governments. Note also that mild or parenthetical criticism of the rooted-for leader(s) is compatible with lobbying — indeed, is often a deliberate tactic to enhance its effectiveness.

What puzzles me is why these people didn’t acknowledge the confederation drive straight off while emphasizing the tameness of the published concept. Summits, ministerial talks, mutual parliamentary delegations? By those standards much of the world is in a confederation.

Not that I’d have let that line go unchallenged either. If Paek and friends really foresaw only get-togethers and economic deals, they wouldn’t regard confederation as a bridge of no return. Nor would they expect a petty ceremonial eventfulness to re-assure Kim Jong Un more than a peace treaty and US embassy put together. Still less would they expect it to nullify the threat to the DPRK hitherto posed by, as Paek puts it, the very existence of South Korea. Nor would they insist on keeping the extent of the partnership secret until the public can no longer back out. (I call it a Palmolive strategy, Madge with an iron grip: Confederation? You’re soaking in it.)

What should worry Washington is that the thing envisioned amounts to an alliance between our ally and our adversary. Paek said in 2018 that confederation would mean “the firmest possible military guarantee” to the North of its security from US attack. (Cho Sŏng-ryŏl of the Institute for National Security Strategy talks in similar vein here.) The OPCON ramifications alone merit more attention than any of the above has hitherto received inside the Beltway.

It follows that we would do well to find out just how far things have progressed behind the scenes or, as Koreans say, “under the water.” In my view Kim Jong Un can have little real interest in a public “Association of Korean States” (which would clash with the personality cult for starters), but he can exploit South Koreans’ interest to extract one concession after another. Something like that may have unfolded last year in the hours (yes, hours) between Kim Yo-jong’s tirade about leaflet balloons and the Minjoo Party’s pledge to pass an anti-leaflet law — which now informally bears her name.

Sporadic nationalist-left calls for recognizing the DPRK as a state should be seen in this same light. Not for nothing does Pak Jie-won, who did time for his role in illicitly transferring money to North Korea, and now heads the intelligence agency — perhaps a sic! is needed here — say that his dream is to become the South’s first ambassador to Pyongyang. This talk shouldn’t be taken for a coming-to-terms with the permanence of division; the very opposite is the case.

I’m not sure our commentariat grasps this part either. Last month Andrei Lankov brought his reflexive centrism to bear on proposals to recognize the DPRK, saying such a move would be a “step in the direction of sanity and stability” but too small a step to improve things much. He also referred readers to a precedent: “East and West Germany did officially recognize each other as sovereign states in 1972.”

Not quite. An agreement was reached according to which they would develop “normal neighborly relations” as equals, but Bonn never recognized the other Germany by völkerrechtlich or international-law standards. One might well argue that de facto recognition came in 1987, when Erich Honecker was received with great ceremony by Helmut Kohl, but he never got his wish of seeing an FRG embassy in East Berlin. It was after the Wall fell, interestingly enough, that the West German left called for immediate recognition of the GDR. To what avowed end? Confederation.

 

UPDATE: 21 January 2021:

“I have been wallowing in the bog of politics for a long time, and I have in fact come to be quite fond of it. In it, corruption cleanses people…. It makes you forget what should be forgotten, and overlook what should be overlooked.” – A character in Yukio Mishima’s After the Banquet (1960; transl. by Donald Keene)

Druking, Burning Sun, Mokpo real estate, SillaJen, the Ulsan mayoral race, Pak Won-soon, Optimus, Yun Mi-hyang, Lime, Cho Kuk — Justice Minister Cho Kuk: More interesting than any of the recent scandals these keywords stand for has been the nationalist left’s unyielding defense of the pols and officials involved. We even saw self-described feminists jeer the frightened woman who had complained of the Seoul mayor’s sexual advances. Whistle-blowers and investigators are denounced as “pro-Japanese” elements working for the opposition, which is in fact the most docile and insignificant one this country has seen since the early 1980s.

The temptation now, to which my conservative acquaintances have succumbed with a certain relief, is to write off South Korea’s ruling camp as a network of insider traders and real-estate speculators: old-school pols who rig elections, demote prosecutors, and imprison journalists for no other reason than to keep outsiders from the trough. But corruption and conviction are not the antitheses they are made out to be. One can hardly expect people who question the very legitimacy of the state to fret overmuch about breaking its laws. This is not to imply that the parliamentary right is more honest.

Granted, the cascade of scandals has given the lie to the ruling camp’s vaunted commitment to reform. The general non-response, meanwhile, has belied the public’s commitment to it, something the foreign press corps — “big-mouthed and clueless,” to borrow what Peter Handke once said of the Spiegel — took at face value in 2016. None of the alleged misconduct, which uncannily replicates or amplifies that for which Park and her people were convicted, has aroused much indignation from the man in the street. Even considering that voters are more tolerant of abuses of power when public expenditures are rising sharply (Melo and Pereira, 2015), as they have been here since 2017, we must acknowledge that the so-called Candlelight Revolution was a more top-down affair than we were led to believe.

This should have been obvious to us from the demonstrators’ struggle to give coherent reasons for their festive-seeming “outrage” on the nightly news. They weren’t really mad as hell, but they believed they should be, thanks to an intense propaganda campaign orchestrated by the politico-media complex. As the left and right today are equally loath to recall, this last included Park’s own party and the conservative media (which broke the Ch’oi Sun-sil scandal). I’m coming around to Emerson’s way of thinking:

The sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, but are put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs.

By “cleansing” away the cant, however, — to borrow Mishima’s figure of speech — the recent scandals have brought into sharper relief the one cause to which the nationalist left remains loyal. Particularly noteworthy was the effort to discredit the former “comfort woman” who had asked why she and other survivors had received but a tiny fraction of the money donated for their welfare. Although the nonagenarian is as sharp as a tack, Moon loyalists responded much as Japanese rightists respond to such people’s testimony: with imputations of dementia.

You see, those donations had been managed by a prominent member of the ruling camp, who for added “cred” is the wife of an avowedly North-sympathetic intellectual. The couple is alleged to have used a house ostensibly built for aging sex-slavery survivors as a venue at which to harangue North Korean defectors into returning home. The lesson here is that not all nationalist causes are equal. There is a central one to which the whole anti-Japanese Themenkomplex is auxiliary.

The Minjoo Party must keep the myth of its democratic holiness shining not for immediate purposes, for which its huge majority in the National Assembly is sufficient, but because that myth — and the corollary localization of “accumulated evils” in the anti-North right — are vital for what it has planned. This shared objective is why, for the first time in history, Pyongyang now shrilly defends a sitting South Korean government against charges of corruption and abuse of power.

The other day on Youtube I watched Jeong Se-hyeon, Executive Vice-Chair of the National Unification Advisory Council and a well-known friend and mentor to the president, inform a group of approving educators in N. Jeolla Province that the planned inter-Korean league will be “like the European Union,” and should be pitched to schoolchildren accordingly.

Now, most Korea watchers are firm believers in what C.S. Lewis dryly called “the beneficence of commerce,” the amity-inducing effects of which on US-China and ROK-Japan relations are so well-known, to say nothing of the inter-Korean barter trade that continued from 1945 through the late 1950s, or the economic cooperation underway from 2002 to 2010, when only 57 South Koreans were killed by the North. I therefore expect the EU analogy, which is already standard here, to work a treat in Washington when the time comes. Approval may be enhanced by visions of the rich South playing the German Oberherr to the North’s Greece.

But first of all, the EU is nothing if not an alliance. (There has even been debate as to whether it’s a de facto military one.) Remember this the next time some Blue House envoy waffles on about the fine distinction between confederation and league, two concepts which seem very grandiose to Americans, thus equally unlikely to be realized. The undeniable fact of the matter is that our ally wants an alliance with our adversary. No, not after denuclearization but before it, to bring that goal about, or so it says. And an alliance is not difficult to get started. Nor must it start in the public eye.  

Second, South Korea will carry its current subservience into the next stage, whatever that may be. Even foreigners who refuse to acknowledge the nationalism informing the relationship must at least admit that the South is the only state holding itself to inter-Korean agreements. If I may mention something that never gets enough attention: they’re only ROK-DPRK agreements after all. Like East Berlin before it, Pyongyang sees no problem in signing benign inter-state deals while pursuing the incompatible goal avowed by the ruling party, which is above the state.

Recently we saw yet another demonstration of the Koreas’ unequal relationship. Although the Kim regime must have ordered the shooting of a middle-aged South Korean who floated across the NLL, the incident resulted — after the Blue House’s undignifiedly brief show of disapproval — in renewed calls for an end-of-war agreement. The more flagrantly the North violates deals already signed, the more confidently the South asserts that a bigger one will tame it forever. Note also that President Moon wants a new constitution to bind his successors to these agreements, regardless of what the North does. The South’s subordination is to be enforced by the South itself.

Unlike me, most American observers seem to believe that the US-ROK alliance should be strengthened. Why aren’t they troubled by Seoul’s pursuit of a parallel or countervailing alliance with our nuclear enemy? Because the media are yet to declare this issue important, or even real.

Every morning and every evening the web of news is inescapably lowered upon earth, determining what has been and what one must be aware of. — Niklas Luhmann

And what has not been. Among Moon-critical Americans I encounter the chuckling assumption that the North “isn’t answering the South’s phone calls.” Whatever gave you that idea? I ask. “Because no railroad is being built, and neither the Kaesong Industrial Zone nor the Kumgang Resort has reopened.” In other words: because there hasn’t been enough televised hullabaloo to make inter-Korean dialogue a “thing” again.

It doesn’t help, I find, to remind people that the last time the two sides were thought to be not talking, they were hammering out details of the North’s participation in the 2018 Winter Olympics. Haven’t most inter-Korean dealings since 1945 taken place well outside the public eye? That includes the negotiations of joint declarations that were wrapped up before the stagy summits began. Why should this tradition change under the most tight-lipped president in ROK history, a man who reads even the shortest statements off a sheet of paper? He has a much greater incentive to keep inter-Korean dealings from Washington than Kim Dae Jung or Roh Moo Hyun had.

I refuse to moralize. Deception and secrecy are integral to politics and inter-state relations. And surely it’s as true of governments as of individual human beings that their real character comes out behind closed doors. Nowadays, however, the attribution of more importance to the covert than the overt will get you dismissed as a conspiracy theorist. Americans will look at you skeptically enough, I find, if you discuss overt peninsular developments that are yet to be mediatized in English. Our academics used to pride themselves on not letting the press set their agenda; now they join journalists in exchanging endless particulars about the latest or most imminent spectacle. Premium subscribers will enjoy access to a very special round-table on the military parade.  

The advantages for Seoul and Pyongyang are obvious. As the Marxist theorist Guy Debord argued (to whom the title of this post is an homage), the chief function of the spectacle is to “bury historical memory.” And there’s a lot there to be buried, if the Americans are to revert to the Clinton-era mindset now required of them.

Perhaps the more important advantage is this, that the Koreas’ cooperation on the political-ideological front can unfold in plain sight and still escape Washington’s critical attention. The unflagging promotion of league-confederation, the two governments’ joint vilification of the ROK prosecutors’ office, the coalescence of pro-North groups in the US with the South Korea lobby: none of these historic developments is splashy enough to generate Western media interest. Until our journalists care, our experts will go on ignoring them too.

 

UPDATE: 3 December 2020

It’s so rare to see governments do any job well that the Blue House’s management of the foreign press corps gives me an almost aesthetic pleasure, especially now. I hope it isn’t just a matter of spoiling the relevant people rotten. A young German man did marvel to me once about how the Moon government had laid on a driver and translator for him, despite the relative obscurity of the news outlet he worked for, just so he could go to the countryside to research a story that reflected badly on an earlier administration. He also raved about the facilities set up in Seoul so that people like him did not have to work out of coffee shops. “There’s only one place they treat foreign journalists better,” he told me with a grin, “and that’s Pyongyang.”

But carrots are dealt out to the local press too, along with sticks or threats of sticks the foreigner needn’t worry about. Yet these days even left-of-center South Koreans are publicly criticizing the government’s frantic effort to shut down investigations into various scandals, particularly the nuclear-related one in regard to which there is apparent evidence of the president’s involvement. (The timing of the suspension of the Prosecutor General speaks for itself.)

To judge from recent articles, however, and I admit I couldn’t stomach more than five or six, the foreign press still thinks it’s 2017. I don’t believe they’re writing in conscious service to the Blue House à la Choe Sang-hun. So unguarded is their work as to indicate both a good-faith attempt at objectivity and genuine ignorance of the talk raging around them in the Press Center. This is where my aesthetic pleasure comes in. Anyone can keep someone in Pyongyang in the dark for a week or two, but in Seoul? For years on end?

Case in point: an article in the Economist (28 November) bearing the title, “South Korea’s president wants to take politics out of prosecutions.” Yes, and Mark Zuckerberg wants to take the surveillance capitalism out of social media. I’m not sure if all art is propaganda, as Orwell claimed, but I know presidents can do nothing of importance that is not eo ipso political. Whatever they do is going to reflect their beliefs, and benefit their side more than the other.

Journalists should not be blamed for what their headliners come up with, but the article is in much the same vein. “A central aim of Mr Moon’s reform of the prosecution service … was to put an end to such abuses [as those committed under previous administrations] by limiting prosecutors’ investigative powers.” So the regaling word reform is dished out and as it were endorsed in the writer’s own voice: Moon wants reform, wants to de-politicize prosecutions. I can only marvel at the mindset needed to write that after all that has gone on here — and not gone on here — since May 2017.

Thumb on scale, the (unidentified) writer then hides behind a string of “critics say” and “supporters say” sentences. The former group, which for months now has included left-of-center intellectuals and NGOs, is implicitly reduced to the right, some of whose members’ foul language and death threats the article leads off with. Perhaps the writer doesn’t know that many “supporters” deal in the same kind of verbal abuse, which sounds a lot more frightening when coming from the side in power. In the unlikely event that the writer should ever offend the ruling camp, as a South Korean working for Bloomberg did not long ago, he or she will find out.

The following is untrue and almost comically off the mark (as any politically minded journalist should have intuited even without the relevant language skills):

So far, not even his fiercest critics have accused the president of crimes that could match theirs [= those of Lee and Park].

My admiration for the official press liaison aside, articles like these make me nostalgic for the days when our correspondents used to cover South Korean developments, exercising personal judgment in the process, instead of pseudo-disinterestedly summarizing what they think is the local debate about developments. What do they do in countries where there is no debate? Ah, that’s right: they do what the AP’s “bureau” in Pyongyang does.

I refrained from posting this South Korean video last time, because it shows a kind of approving contempt for friendly foreign journalism that reminds me unpleasantly of North Korean writing on the subject, but perhaps it makes my point better than I can.

 

 

NORTH KOREA’S JUCHE MYTH (Sthele Press, 2015)

INTRODUCTION

With minor variations from writer to writer, the Western version of North Korea’s ideological history goes like this:

In 1955, seven years into his rule, Kim Il Sung proclaimed the nationalist ideology that had been guiding him all along. Instead of mimicking the USSR, he said, Korea had to establish Juche — which is usually translated as self-reliance, but means much more than that. Although Kim did not mention Juche for the next few years, he formalized it in 1965 on a visit to Indonesia. In 1972 its central maxim, “man is the master of all things,” was revealed to a delegation of Japanese journalists. But by that time Juche had already replaced Marxism-Leninism as North Korea’s official ideology, intensifying the country’s obsession with self-reliance. Unfortunately, this only made it more dependent on aid. While pragmatism is now on the rise in Pyongyang, ideologues inside the elite try to reassert their influence by provoking the outside world. A proper grasp of Juche therefore remains necessary if one is to understand the country’s behavior. Alas, we foreigners cannot hope to get past its impenetrable, ever-receding name.

It’s a tall tale indeed; one needs only an open mind to see the holes and implausibilities. Yet it continues to inform the assumption that in 1955 North Korea’s goal changed from the unification of the peninsula to the establishment of Juche above the thirty-eighth parallel. We are therefore told not to take its bellicose rhetoric too seriously; the country really just wants the United States “to keep the South from swallowing it. Sooner or later an American president will come to understand this, the crisis will end, embassies will be exchanged,” etc.¹ Whatever the North Koreans may understand by self-reliance, then, their commitment to it is in itself quite harmless. The problem lies in the counter-productive excitability with which they react to perceived encroachments on their quasi-religious mission. Nuclear armament, periodic attacks on South Korean troops, talk of a “holy war” of unification: such things are but the Juche state’s way of asking for peace and respect.²

Although this foreign consensus served the dictatorship well for decades, the country has finally grown powerful enough to want to be feared — particularly by South Korea, which, rationally enough, it would rather bully into submission than have to fight. Now as in 1950, its goal, though no longer a short-term one, is unification on its own terms.³ The world’s underestimation of the regime’s seriousness only results in more dramatic demonstrations of it. The Juche fallacy is therefore more than just a cautionary example of academic groupthink. It induces so gross a misunderstanding of this rising nuclear state as to be downright dangerous. In the following pages I will try to lay it to rest.

The state of research need not detain us long. Bruce Cumings, who is by my count the authority cited most often, has for decades asserted that “the closer one gets to [Juche’s] meaning, the more it slips away.”⁴ Authors of ostensibly comprehensive tomes on the country get around the topic by claiming it has been researched enough already: “There have been many books written by political scientists about this bizarre ideology.”⁵ South Korean books, certainly; our own political scientists have yet to come up with one. The occasional scholar who promises to supply the deficiency can be counted on to deal with the DPRK’s foreign policy instead, or some other presumed example of Juche in action. Journalists looking for answers about the doctrine per se end up with lists of ingredients: humanism, Christianity, Confucianism, even shamanism.⁶

If the convention is to stress Juche’s ideological centrality while dodging explanation of the thing itself, I aim in this book to do the opposite, namely, to demonstrate its peripherality to North Korean ideology by tracing its history in detail and explaining its content as thoroughly as necessary. I do not deny that the Juche myth — the myth of a guiding ideology or philosophy conceived by Kim Il Sung — has done great service for the personality cult. My point is that the content of the thing in question has never played a significant role in policy-making or even domestic propaganda. It exists to be praised and not studied, let alone implemented.

The Juche myth’s other main function has been to decoy the world’s attention away from the de facto ideology of radical race-nationalism.⁷ This is not the only state compelled by foreign-policy considerations to dissimulate its unifying obsessions; Saudi Arabia and Iran come to mind at once. More relevant to North Korea, however, are historical examples of secular taqiyya. Mussolini espoused his thuggish fascism to the Italian masses while presenting a more sophisticated, ethically-minded doctrine to intellectuals abroad, with no small success. Even Hannah Arendt took the “ideology for export,” as Dante Germino called it, for the real one.⁸ In comparable fashion the Nazi propaganda apparatus whipped up xenophobia and anti-Semitism on the home front while Hitler reassured Europe with his Friedensreden.⁹ The pretense of being guided by something high-minded or abstruse may enhance a dictator’s standing even with his own people, and inhibit them from judging the discrepancy between official intentions and performance. The key is that the “front-stage” message — to borrow a term from Cas Mudde’s discussion of right-wing parties in pluralist societies — must never be espoused urgently enough to interfere with the “back-stage” one.¹⁰

It is harder than ever these days to keep a national mission secret, but invoking it only in the indigenous language while making cant available in English (and online, if possible) tends to keep the world’s attention where one wants it. Being in on the game, the man on the street knows what to say around foreigners. Should the regime be called to account for its back-stage propaganda, it can always speak of errors down the line of command, or the need to address the masses in their own crude terms. Such excuses are accepted more readily than one might think. Whenever an exotic government or movement professes two contradictory ideologies at once, the urbane Westerner will assure himself that the more moderate one is operative.

Granted, the communist states of old were no models of transparency either. China’s Red Guards used to rough up foreign visitors caught reading wall-poster criticisms of top officials.¹¹ But what they sought to hide was the disparity between ideology and reality, not the ideology itself. The Moscow Olympics of 1980 were meant to convey much the same message to everyone: the USSR was the only peace-loving superpower, its system the best for helping man fulfill his potential, and so on. The Berlin Olympics of 1936, in contrast, saw Germans unite in an elaborate effort to hide core Nazi values.¹²

Although North Korea is no Nazi Germany, it too is a far-right state, by which I mean one that derives support mainly from the public’s perception of its strength, resolve, and commitment to enhancing the stature of the race. A communist state on the other hand, be it ever so nationalist or well-armed, asks to be judged by its performance on the socio-economic front. Political scientists who lump the DPRK in with Ceausescu’s Romania and Hoxha’s Albania, perhaps under the clunky term “national Stalinist,”¹³ are overlooking the very reason why only this regime — the one with the worst economic record of them all — is still going strong. They also fail to understand how different nationalism in the literal and North Korean sense is from mere loyalty to a multi-ethnic state.¹⁴ I am not wedded to the terms far left and far right for their own sake. We can say “square” and “round” for all I care, so long as we understand how different the two kinds of state are, and how differently they must therefore be dealt with. The one cannot yield on matters which to the other are only of secondary importance.

In 2004, when I wrote of North Korea in this vein in The Atlantic, liberal readers thought I just wanted to paint the regime in the worst possible colors. By printing my article, Chalmers Johnson wrote, the magazine had itself moved closer to fascism.¹⁵ I suspect that what bothered these people most was the inference to be drawn from the piece, namely, that one cannot reason with a dictator whose legitimacy derives from a pose of implacable hostility to a race enemy. To grasp North Korea as a far-right state is to admit the futility of engagement, something many remain reluctant to do. Even the Stalinist label is thought preferable, despite its evocation of a far more murderous regime, because it holds out hope for a thaw.

The last ten years have confirmed my assessment, however, just as Kim Jong Il’s successor has so far fulfilled the prediction I made at the end of The Cleanest Race (2009) — which was drowned out at the time by cheerier talk — that he would stay on the Military-First road, regardless of what happened in the economic sphere. Judged by the percentage of citizens in uniform, North Korea is now a more highly-militarized society than Italy and Nazi Germany were in the 1930s. The more its economy resembles the rival state’s, the more it must show its superiority on far-right grounds. (Those who keep calling on the DPRK to take the “pragmatic” road to reform are yet to explain how a poor man’s version of South Korea could hope to maintain public support.)¹⁶ Already Kim Jong Un has had more belligerent and racist notes struck in exoteric propaganda than were heard during his father’s rule. Take, for example, the description of President Obama recently published by the Korean Central News Agency:

That blackish mug, the vacant, ash-colored eyes, the gaping nostrils: the more I study all this, the more he appears the spitting image of a monkey in an African jungle.¹⁷

But much of this book deals with the Kim Il Sung era, when the regime tried to keep its worldview under wraps in order to maintain the communist camp’s support and protection. The extremes of left and right being neighbors on a circular spectrum, dissimulation was not as hard as all that. The language barrier helped enormously. But Kim soon realized that if he was to succeed in marginalizing Seoul, his republic had to be seen as the better Korea by non-aligned countries too. Thus did the front-stage ideology change in the early 1970s from bloc-conform Marxism-Leninism into the people-first uplift of Juche, the relationship of which to communism had to be kept uninterpretable.¹⁸

A former South Korean dissident has dismissed Juche as being on the intellectual level of “if you raise a lot of chickens, you will get a lot of eggs.”¹⁹ I couldn’t agree more, but I see no reason to dwell on its triteness. As Henry David Aiken summed up Lenin’s insight, ideology is a form of thought

meant to focus, guide and energize the minds of men in society….[It] is the role, not the content, which determines whether a theory or doctrine is working ideologically.²⁰

Before I am accused of ignoring the compromises and dilutions every ideology must put up with, let me make clear that I have judged Juche by the loosest possible definitions of focusing, guiding and energizing minds. Even so, I have had to conclude that it was never meant to work ideologically.

Others figured this out long before I did. Communist states’ refusal to criticize Juche — an attitude the former East German ambassador says he found “astonishing”²¹ — suggests that they knew it was not being preached in earnest. In 1978, the West German Sinologist Helmut Martin stated that “Kim’s writings are not invoked as a means of legitimation,” and that his “biography has the central function in the canon.”²² (Voilà tout.) In 1986, Alfred Pfabigan, an Austrian professor who studied the doctrine at the official Juche Institute, pointedly noted “the randomness of its formulae.”²³ After defecting to South Korea, Hwang Jang Yop, who served for many years as Party Secretary for Juche, made clear that it was conceived to enhance the DPRK’s reputation abroad.²⁴ The leader of South Korea’s own Juche movement, Kim Young-hwan, finally met Kim Il Sung in 1991, only to find him ignorant of the doctrine and uninterested in discussing it. Now a critic of Pyongyang, the ex-dissident repeatedly asserts, “Juche and North Korean ideology are two different things.”²⁵

I have argued that last point on and off for the past ten years, to little avail.²⁶ One still comes across sentences such as:

There is no dispute that [Juche] has over the decades become the dominant leitmotiv that shapes the ways in which the North’s political, social and economic activities are organized.²⁷

Judging from citations I read here and there, I have at least made headway against the myth that Kim Il Sung’s speech to propagandists in 1955 marked a watershed in the republic’s history. The unfortunate result is that Juche’s emergence is often projected back to an even earlier time.

I concentrate in this book on the West’s Juche fallacy, because debunking the version current in the ROK (where I live) would entail emphasizing very different things. South Korean scholars at least know the relevant primary materials well enough to discuss Juche at length. Depending on their own politics, they either chew solemnly over assertions that man is the master of all things, born with creativity, and so on, or have a field day mocking their claim to profundity. Either way they regard the doctrine as the basis of North Korean life.²⁸

In contrast, Western observers reduce Juche to an ideology of self-reliance before boiling it down further to Korean nationalism. It means “putting Korea first in everything,” it is a “passionate and unrestrained cri de coeur against centuries of perceived incursion,” and so on.²⁹ If this were a mere matter of applying the wrong name to a properly understood nationalism, I would not complain. After all, average citizens of the DPRK have long used the term to denote the de facto ideology, not Juche doctrine, of which they know almost as little as our Pyongyang watchers do. A woman who had taught high school near the border to China once told my students in Busan how she had had to interrupt her mathematics classes for excursions into chuch’e sasang. I asked for specifics. “Well, I would praise Kim Il Sung, or condemn the Yankees’ crimes.” Thus is the name of the leader’s doctrine applied to the ultra-nationalist personality cult that preceded it by a quarter of a century. The latter is so forceful and appealing an affair that truisms like “man is the master of all things” barely register beside it.

The problem is that foreigners insist on viewing North Korean nationalism through Juche’s cosmetic haze.³⁰ Instead of realizing that the republic’s mission has always been the unification of the race, they take its nationalism for an inward-directed kind. Here too we are dealing with that exasperating Western confusion of nationalism with loyalty to a state.³¹ Yes, North Koreans are loyal to their state; but their nationalism — like their state’s — entails a commitment to the entire peninsula, not just the part the Yankees pushed them back up on.

Last year a researcher asked me rather testily why I want to debunk something the field has tacitly abandoned. It is true that Juche is not referred to as often as it used to be, but isn’t that because the conventional wisdom has become so familiar? The Kim Il Sung era is still looked back upon as a broadening of Juche from precedent to precedent.³² The New York Times and other newspapers still refer to the country’s “ideology of ‘juche’ — or self-reliance.”³³ Even the current Sŏn’gun or Military-First doctrine is derived from Juche, and denatured accordingly.³⁴ That’s not the worst part. Because today’s North Korea is equally uninterested in communism and self-reliance, more and more observers, mistaking this for a new development, assume that ideology has dwindled down to a “residual” role in the country, which they call a “reactive” state.³⁵ According to two journalists’ recent book, ideology “no longer matters” there.³⁶ The old Juche myth thus inspires a new misperception from which the regime can benefit.

The consensus that Juche is central to North Korean ideology (if not necessarily to the state as a whole) has always accommodated a wide range of varying opinions. Conservatives have demonized the doctrine as a cynical rationale for one-man rule.³⁷ The softliners who dominate academia, on the other hand, tend to take even its claim to humanism seriously. Some people use the word Juche as a name for the personality cult. Others apply it to the entirety of Kim Il Sung’s discourse, or to all political discussion under his rule after 1955. A few imagine it as a written canon consulted before big decisions, but most talk in broader terms of an all-pervading commitment to self-reliance. That last word — which has no direct Korean equivalent³⁸ — is itself subjected to different interpretations. Some Pyongyang watchers think in terms of literal self-sufficiency.³⁹ Others thin it out to independence, autonomy or a hankering after more respect; this allows them to concede the DPRK’s chronic dependence on aid while still granting it points for self-reliance.

It is telling that these differences are not considered worth resolving. But whether or not the fallacy has become a matter of mere lip service, it must still be ruthlessly cleared away. Only then can we come to terms with the regime’s true ideology, and the dangerous role it still plays.

Each chapter of this book refutes one or more elements of the over-arching fallacy: that Kim began showing his feisty autarkic spirit during the 1940s, that he proclaimed a new ideology in 1955, which supplanted Marxism-Leninism in the 1960s, and so on. Why a chronological approach? Because this is a classic case, to borrow what Nietzsche said about another myth, of “the historical refutation as the final one.”⁴⁰ Not for nothing are our traditionalists so desperate to date the advent of the Juche era back to 1955, when much of Pyongyang was still in ruins. Only then can the doctrine plausibly be said to have shaped the DPRK. Date it to 1967 or 1972, and there is no dodging the question of which ideology prevailed in the country’s formative years, and what (if any) assignable changes Juche wrought thereafter. I will also analyze the main doctrinal texts, which contain much the sort of thing one would expect from something issued during a charm offensive. Later chapters will show how the Juche myth has influenced Western perceptions of North Korea’s nuclear program, its economic woes and its attacks on the rival state, usually to the dictatorship’s benefit.

In the course of this book I will make frequent reference to North Korea’s multi-track discourse. There are more tracks and track-internal gradations than I need to deal with here. It is enough if the reader keeps in mind a distinction between a) the inner track, by which I mean propaganda intended for North Koreans only, b) the outer track, which is propaganda written for domestic consumption in the constraining awareness of outside monitors, and c) the export track, or propaganda for outsiders. This last, which includes statements made in negotiations, can in turn be divided into the kind aimed at South Koreans and the kind aimed at foreigners. The man on the street knows that the inner track is where the ideological action is. This is not to imply that he ignores or disbelieves the outer one. (The existence of an export track does not appear to be widely known.) We are not so different; we nod in approval when spokesmen for our in-groups tone down our views for out-group consumption. In any case, the North Korean gets more of an inner-track message from the outer track than most Pyongyang watchers do, because he knows how to read it in context.

He knows, for example, that the formal commitment to “peaceful unification” reflects the hope that the DPRK need not fight the South Korean masses again; the inner track acknowledges the likely need for a preliminary South Korean uprising, and vows revenge on the Yankee enemy no matter what. It also raises the possibility of a straightforward war of unification.⁴¹

Although I cannot assert the currency of a fallacy without citing examples, too exclusive a focus on the top spreaders of the Juche myth will make readers think I am carrying out a vendetta. On the other hand, if I give equal attention to researchers of economics, culture, etc, who have merely followed those authorities’ lead, I will be accused of making things too easy for myself. I have therefore opted for a middle course, which will no doubt result in my being criticized on both counts. It should go without saying, however, that disagreeing with people about a certain point, even one as important as this, is not the same as dismissing their research as a whole. Of the many scholars I cite critically in this book, there are only a few from whom I have not learned much of value. I approach no one’s work from a presumed position of infallibility, having made enough mistakes of my own — not least in regard to Juche, which I too used to take at its orthodox valuation. Like every book this one will have its errors. I am confident that they will not nullify my argument.

Before going on, I would like to discuss the keyword juche (주체), or chuch’e as it is written according to the McCune-Reischauer system. Standard Western practice is to repeat and at the same time disparage the translation of it as self-reliance, while hinting at a world of additional meaning one lacks the space to go into. Chuch’e is “often rendered as self-reliance, but such a translation is woefully inadequate”; it “is usually described in shorthand as self-reliance, but there is much more to it than that,”⁴² and so on. It is also common for writers to dilate on the ancient meanings of the constituent characters 主 (main) and 體 (body), leaving readers to assume that the compound, “unique to Korea,” sprang out of deep indigenous soil.⁴³ One scholar claims it “has been in use as long as the Korean language itself.”⁴⁴ Others assert or imply that it was an obscure or archaic word until Kim Il Sung breathed new life into it; still others seem to regard it as his invention.⁴⁵

In fact chuch’e comes from the Sino-Japanese compound shutai (主體), which first appeared in 1887 in a book entitled The Basics of Philosophy (Tetsugaku yōryō).⁴⁶ The author, Inoue Enryō, used the word to translate the German word Subjekt, i.e., the entity perceiving or acting upon an object or environment. By 1903 Chinese residents of Japan were using it in their own discussions of Kant, in which the relevant compound was pronounced zhuti.⁴⁷ The word found its way into Korean at about the same time. The nationalist-anarchist Sin Ch’ae-ho used it a few times in 1908 in a polemical text, under the apparent assumption that readers either knew it already or would grasp its meaning from the self-explanatory ideograms.⁴⁸ Such Japanese loanwords are very common in modern Korean and Chinese.⁴⁹

J. Victor Koschmann has explained how the philosopher Nishida Kitarō employed the words shukan (主觀) and shutai in the early 1900s to distinguish between the passive and active senses of Subjekt. While the older word shukan “took on the connotations of contemplative consciousness… shutai referred to the ethical, practical subject theorized by Kierkegaard and Marx.”⁵⁰ This distinction too was adopted by the Koreans.

The above may confuse speakers of Western languages. English and French complicate matters by using the word subject / sujet more often in the sense of an entity under another’s control. The anti-monarchist slogan “Citizens, not subjects,” which I saw recently on a pop star’s guitar, shows how far from the average Anglophone’s mind the other sense of the word is. We also refer to the subject of an article or sentence. Few of us, therefore, would immediately grasp the statement “The proletariat is the subject of history” to mean, “The proletariat is the central force of history.”

Even philosophy majors would have a moment’s trouble with “Progress in science demands a subjective attitude,” so accustomed are we to use the adjective to mean “emanating from a person’s prejudices or partiality.” But if it is rendered into the right one of the two Korean words for subjective (namely chuch’ejŏk and not chugwanjŏk), any teenager on the street in Seoul will readily understand that we must take the initiative as the protagonists of scientific progress. In short, the ambiguity lies not in the Korean word, as so many outsiders seem to think, but in its English equivalent. (Andy Warhol: “My mind always drifts when I hear words like ‘subjective’…. I never know what people are talking about.”)⁵¹

The words shutai and chuch’e were used by bilingual Koreans throughout the colonial period in a variety of contexts. Those who read Marx in Japanese encountered the compound in a few of his works.⁵² (Kim Jong Il or his ghostwriter acknowledged its appearance in “antecedent classics” of socialism.)⁵³ When Yŏ Un-hyŏng accepted the transfer of [police] power from Japanese authorities in August 1945, it was under the condition that Korea “subjectively” (chuch’ejŏgŭro) manage its own security.⁵⁴ The following year he said publicly, “because we are Koreans to the end, we are the masters of Korea and the subject [chuch’e] of Korean politics.”⁵⁵ A former member of the Seoul-based Workers’ Party has said that it used the word after liberation in a vain effort to assert indigenous communists’ primacy over Koreans arriving from China and the USSR.⁵⁶ Early North Korean editions of Marx used the word too. All this being so, it was too current for Kim Il Sung’s belated mentions of it in 1955 to make it his own, especially since he did not recur to it for years.

Until the mid-1960s use of the word chuch’e and its cognates chuch’ejŏk (subjective) and chuch’esŏng (subjectivity) was more of a South Korean thing. Cho Pong-am ran for president in 1956 on a platform advocating development of the country’s “subjective capabilities.”⁵⁷ Calls for “national subjectivity” were common among intellectuals during the turbulent term of the premier Chang Myŏn (1960-1961).⁵⁸ Park Chung Hee spoke of chuch’esŏng more often in his first three years in power (1961-1964) than Kim Il Sung had done in his first fifteen.⁵⁹ If the West failed to notice, it was because Park’s translators put his words into plain English: “We must grasp the subjectivity of the Korean nation.”⁶⁰ When he created a rubber-stamp electoral college in 1972, he called it T’ongil chuch’e kungmin hoeŭi, which literally means Unification Subject Citizens’ Assembly.

The word chuch’e thus made it into the South Korean constitution first. It featured during the memorial service for Park in 1979, when a taped excerpt from one of his speeches boomed out from loudspeakers: “The spirit of autonomy means the awareness that we are the masters of this country and the subject [chuch’e] that creates history.”⁶¹

The word’s popularity in the DPRK has never been held against it by the South Korean right. During the ROK presidential campaign in 2012, both candidates referred to the country’s “main economic actors” or kyŏngje chuch’e. All this is in contrast to foreigners’ assumption that if North Korea did not create the word, it effectively took it over.⁶²

Not wanting us to trust our instincts when reading its propaganda, the regime in Pyongyang has left the word chuch’e untranslated in foreign-language texts: from 1961-1964 as Jooche, then as Juche.⁶³ In this way the reader is given an impression of Kim-trademarked abstruseness quite unlike the impression Koreans get. Western scholars and translators should stop following that practice when rendering North Korean texts into English. It is also high-time that the pan-Korean word chuch’esŏng were translated as “subjectivity” or “agency” instead of “Juche-ness.”⁶⁴ To avoid confusion, I make sure in the rest of the book to use the English words subject, subjective and subjectivity only in the sense corresponding to chuch’e, chuch’ejŏk and chuch’esŏng.

Let us turn now to sasang (思想), the word with which chuch’e is so often linked in the DPRK. Of the two this poses more difficulty for the translator, because it can refer either to an idea or a body of thought. Official use of the phrase chuch’e sasang or “subject(ive) thought” in the 1960s shows that it was understood much as the Chinese understood Mao Zedong sixiang, i.e., to mean guidelines for the country-specific application of Marxism-Leninism.⁶⁵ It made no claim to being a stand-alone ideology. The Workers’ Party treated it as its collective product until Kim’s purge of top officials in 1967. From then on, chuch’e sasang was touted as his personal conception. In English-language propaganda it was referred to, with uncharacteristic modesty, as “the Juche idea,” so that foreigners could praise it without appearing to betray their own creeds.

Not being bound by official conventions, I can translate chuch’e sasang as I like. Unfortunately no English equivalent fits the bill entirely. I have decided to translate its use inside quotes and excerpts as “Subject Thought” – “subject(ive) thought” in texts written before its exclusive attribution to Kim – so as to convey the un-exotic and dry feel the words convey to native speakers. I reluctantly use the realia chuch’e sasang in order to distinguish the prop in the domestic personality cult from the “Juche idea” exported for public-diplomatic purposes. Instead of talking of a pseudo-ideology or pseudo-anything I will be referring to a doctrine, this word being applicable to any body of teaching, regardless of its content, scope, function, originality or sincerity.

I use the McCune-Reischauer system of transliteration with the customary exception of Korean words and names (Kim Il Sung, Pyongyang) better known under other spellings. Unfortunately there are various ways to write the one I use the most often: namely juche and, in more academic texts, chuch’e, each appearing with and without a capital letter, in plain and italic script. Inexplicably, juch’e and Juché have also been introduced. I trust I can replicate various spellings in quotations of secondary literature without confusing the reader.

One of the many Korean phrases I feel would enrich our language, and which deserve a place in it much more than je ne sais quoi and mi casa es su casa, is the wonderfully pithy almyŏn mwŏ hae? Usually a reply to another question, it means, “What’ll you do if you know?” I feel the urge to say it whenever I encounter Westerners intensely interested in the rise of North Korean Big Shot A or the decline of Big Shot B who cannot explain why it matters. At most I hear something like, “The guy spent time overseas, so he’s more likely to be a reformer,” a line of reasoning that should have been laid to rest in 2012.

It has therefore been exasperating over the past week to read so much speculation about the perceived change in Kim Yo-jong’s stature.  Something tells me this could be the cue for the Washington branch of the Air Koryo Mileage Club to dust off its hawks-doves myth again. Or maybe not? One good thing to have come out of the Trump-Kim summits has been the weakening of that set’s claim to authority, i.e., that it understands the dictatorship uniquely well because it has engaged in talks with a few officials.

But I started this post in response to something I have been asked several times since the demolition of the liaison office in Kaesong. I might as well reproduce, with one or two minor changes, the relevant page from a long, off-the-record talk I gave at a hotel in Seoul on Thursday (18 June 2020):

….. All of this raises the question, an especially topical one, of why the Kim regime is so abusive toward the friendliest, most nationalist South Korean government in history. Now, there has long been in the North a very real contempt for the South Korean left, the kind that radicals always feel for moderates no matter how obsequious the latter might be. Believe it or not, there were always more South Koreans willing to work with the North than it was willing to work with. The history of the underground in the 1960s and 1970s is replete with tales of how this or that Kim disciple got cold-shouldered by the DPRK embassy in East Berlin and had to go begging for funds in Japan instead.

The North Korean regime, which forgets nothing, is also cynically aware of how the South’s ruling elite stands to benefit from the grand inter-Korean projects it likes to posit in the center of the relationship. That whole side of the Sunshine Policy years is of course a taboo topic here, but it’s hard to understand the North’s cavalier treatment of so-called progressive governments unless one knows that history.

We can certainly infer a certain contempt and mistrust from the way Kim Jong Il talks to Roh Moo Hyun in the transcripts of the 2007 summit. It also appears that when Moon Jae-in was in Pyongyang in September 2018 he promised Kim Jong-un certain things, probably in regard to the US, that he has so far been unable to deliver.

But let’s also keep in mind a fact that never receives enough attention, namely, that the North owes its security not to nuclear weapons, but to American fears that even a minor strike on the North would result in devastating retaliation against Seoul. Any consistent outward improvement of inter-Korean relations naturally casts doubt on the automaticity of such retaliation and therefore undermines the North’s security. The consequence is that the Kim regime must walk a tightrope. On the one hand it must project reasonableness and an openness to negotiations, while on the other it has to project great volatility and excitability, a readiness to stop at nothing.

Whatever goes on between the two Koreas behind the scenes, therefore, their outward relationship is never allowed to get too far ahead of the relationship between Pyongyang and Washington. This is why there was a sudden ostentatious freeze-over of inter-Korean relations after the “axis of evil” speech in 2002. On the face of it this made no sense, the 2000 summit declaration having made clear that the two Koreas would work together regardless of what outside powers said or did. But the perceived increase in the danger of an American attack forced Kim Jong Il to deny that the North-South relationship had improved at all.

Something comparable has happened since the failure of the Hanoi summit. The liaison office was an embryonic version of confederation HQ, as the left-wing press said publicly when it opened 2 years ago. Back then, the show of inter-Korean partnership was expected to create momentum that would bowl over Donald Trump. That strategy having since failed, it made more security sense to get rid of the building. The North will not want another ostentatious monument to inter-Korean cooperation until the Americans lift sanctions at the very least.

The Moon government understands all this, which is why it stays on course. These outwardly bad periods in the relationship have the added advantage of reassuring the Americans and the South Korean mainstream that Moon is not too close to Pyongyang after all. The insults heaped on him do not hurt his popularity that much here, because he has not been spending significant sums of money on unilateral aid. The average South Korean does not even see a problem in his own government binding itself to agreements that North Korea is flagrantly violating. If you don’t believe me, wait until the relevant laws are passed in the National Assembly in the coming months, to the general indifference of the public. South Koreans do not identify enough with their “unloved republic” to feel anger when the North humiliates it, and they are reassured enough by the military alliance with the United States not to worry about where all this appeasement will lead.

Note: Asia Times reprinted this blog post (under a different title) on 24 June 2020.

UPDATE: 3 July 2020

Tolstoy says of an intellectual discussion in Anna Karenina: “Every time they got close to what seemed to [Levin] the most important point, they promptly beat a hasty retreat.” The other day I listened Levin-like to a 50-minute podcast discussion in which four Pyongyang watchers, all clearly intelligent and articulate, able to read Korean, very up on the relevant details, and keen to establish the exact order of the dramatic events of the preceding two weeks, seemed always on the verge of digging deeper — only to agree in the end that inter-Korean relations had come back to square one. Since 2017, NK News’ Oliver Hotham said,

it seems like not much has really changed. We had an inter-Korean liaison office, but now we don’t. [Laughter.] I think, you know, anyone who speaks to people who have followed this topic for decades, like Jacco [Zwetsloot] here and Andrei [Lankov], they’ll tell you that often it feels like these things go in circles.

This is indeed the consensus, so Zwetsloot saw no reason not to sign off on that note.

But I too have followed this topic for decades. I needn’t repeat my interpretation (above) of last month’s leaflet brouhaha. My conviction is that inter-Korean relations have suffered no serious setback and are still moving ahead, albeit in political-cultural areas that the commentariat, consciously or not, keeps diverting the world’s attention from. These things go in circles? So too, seen from only one angle, does a screw when tightened. It’s a slow tightening in this case but all the more effective for that; even the biggest changes go unnoticed if they take place gradually enough.

How many foreigners are aware, for example, that harsh criticism of the South Korean government has become a surefire way to enrage the North Korean one? Yes, you read that correctly. Of course it’s all right to fault Moon — as many “civic groups” do — on North Korea’s own grounds, complaining of his insufficient autonomy from the US, his reluctance to defy UN sanctions, etc, but allegations of corruption or abuse of power will bring the North’s propaganda apparatus down on the offending South Korean like a ton of bricks.

So it came to pass that on 30 June 2020, Jin Jung-gwon found himself excoriated by Meari, one of the North’s South-oriented propaganda outlets. To those in need of background: Jin left the pseudo-opposition Justice Party not long ago due mainly to its support for Cho Guk, President Moon’s scandal-ridden choice for Justice Minister. Since then he has written many Facebook posts assailing the ruling camp for what he perceives as its hypocrisy, corruption and authoritarianism.

Meari was not pleased:

[Jin Jung-gwon] may have looked like a scholar when he was satirizing the lackeyist Yushin dictator Park Chung Hee, but now that he has become a schemer like Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello, citizens spit on him. Is this perverted temperament, which takes pleasure in whipping up animosity between the ruling camp and the opposition,  not a forte exclusive to Jin Jung-gwon? …. Snakes and serpents bursting forth whenever he opens his mouth, he’s a present-day Iago!

If the North thinks that sort of agitprop will work here, it must be more isolated than I thought. Then again, perhaps the folk responsible were content with knowing that Jin, a former professor of aesthetics, would grasp the Iago reference if no one else. The use of serpent imagery, common to the tragedy itself, indicates they weren’t just tossing out the name of any old stage villain. This makes the analogy all the more intriguing, and not only in view of the regime’s attitude toward miscegenation (on which more below).

Before I go further, let’s just ponder for a moment the strangeness of the North Korean regime’s raging at a South Korean intellectual for sowing discord between his government and the opposition. Stranger still is what the Iago analogy implies, namely, that what should rightly be a loving relationship of two decent entities is being kept apart by a trouble-maker. (It’s not impossible that the North takes the minority or Leavisite view of Othello as a self-regarding blowhard undone by his own flaws, but the whole focus on Iago suggests the conventional view of the Moor as a noble yet perfidiously misled innocent.) Now, although the United Future Party has ceased to be conservative in any meaningful sense, it remains anathema to Pyongyang. Meaning that the discord Meari laments must be that between the ruling camp and the pseudo-opposition Justice Party. To my knowledge, however, no one in Jin’s former party is still paying attention to him.

Meari again:

Showing contempt even for the bloodline of the Dangun Nation, and having gone so far as to produce, with a Japanese female, a child of mixed blood, he now seems to have completely lost his mind.

Ah yes, the “communist” North. Or the “post-ideological” North. Take your pick.

Jin’s response a day later was to address the Kim regime in a witheringly ironic Facebook post. An excerpt:

Leave the South Korean revolution to me who was born and raised here. That’s Juche Thought….  Comrade Kim Yo-jong’s line on Moon Jae-in, “Worse than the bastard who does a bad thing is the one who pretends not to see it,” is my line. Only, it must be applied subjectively, in accordance with South Korea’s situation and conditions.

The man knows his stuff. It was indeed Kim Il Sung’s post-war view that the South Koreans had to get a revolution started on their own; the North would intervene only in the “decisive period.” The need for revolutionary practice to fit a country’s unique conditions is another of the Great Leader’s central and purportedly original brainstorms, though of course Lenin was riding around on this very point well before the Korean’s birth. Jin Jung-gwon’s informedness will make his banter all the more offensive to the regime up north as well as to the Moon camp. I just hope the fellow knows what he’s in for.

You see, in South Korea, where support for social welfare and public health care is virtually universal, as is opposition to mass immigration, it’s largely one’s attitude to North Korea that decides whether one counts as “progressive” or “conservative.” The consequence is that there’s no room on the left for opposition to the Kim Jong Un regime. Even token criticism is thought acceptable only a) when it centers on some recent action or statement relevant to inter-Korean affairs, and even then only b) when refraining from criticism altogether would seem downright odd. The recent tut-tutting consensus, for example, was that by blowing up the North-South liaison office the Kim regime did not help its own cause — which continues to be regarded with sympathy and even admiration.

Back to square one? Far from it.

In North Korea everything revolves around Kim Il Sung’s Juche Thought. The country has “miracle rice” that will protect it from famine. Kim Jong Il is a budding reformer. Hawks and doves are battling it out in Pyongyang. North Korea has no nuclear program. The summit of 2000 has brought peace to the peninsula. North Korea has no uranium program. It has a nuclear program, yes, but no intention of weaponizing it. Kim Jong Un is a budding reformer. Hawks and doves are (again) battling it out in Pyongyang. Byungjin is a new slogan marking the end of the military-first policy. North Korea has attained to agricultural self-sufficiency. It has expressed a commitment to denuclearizing itself.

There was never as much evidence for the above assertions as existed for the relevant counter-assertions. Each resulted primarily from wishful thinking. Each had the potential to mislead the world into miscalculations. Each turned out to be wrong. Yet none of those responsible came in for the sort of widespread scolding and jeering that those who speculated about Kim Jong Un’s health were subjected to earlier this month.

It seems the term “fake news” can only be applied if an assertion is both wrong and inimical to North Korea’s interests. But Donald Trump appeared confident that Kim was alive and well, and clearly wanted him to be, so the danger of some air-strike or Bay-of-Pigs type idiocy seemed as remote as ever. I think that what really angered so many observers, particularly in South Korea, was the possibility that the rumors might undermine Kim Jong Un’s authority in the North.

I saw no profit in chewing over the gossip myself, let alone in commenting publicly on it, but I reject the notion that it was foolish or even malevolent of people not to accept the Moon administration’s assurances that Kim was fine. This “scandalization of the normal,” so characteristic of political communication in our times, seems to encounter less resistance here than anywhere else. Thae Yong-ho lost no time in begging for forgiveness – good practice for a new member of the opposition party.

What I don’t like about speculation centered on any individual North Korean is the way it distracts the world from what matters. As I have said many times: There is no evidence of significant ideological or policy-related disagreement inside the regime. Why, then, do people attribute so much importance to the question of who might take over in the event of the current leader’s death? Or to personnel changes in the published, outer-track hierarchy?

It makes far more sense to focus on the ideology that all North Koreans in the ruling elite appear to share. If 10% of the attention devoted to Kim Jong Un’s health went to the -ism in question, and I don’t mean leftism of any sort, we would be much better prepared for the year ahead.

 

UPDATE: 13 May 2020 17:20

In line with my perception of the functioning definition of “fake news” (see above) are the media guidelines published just two days ago (11 May) by professors at Kyungnam University under the English title: NORTH KOREA: FAKE NEWS (and How to Avoid It).

Prof. Woo Young Lee is summarized as describing “fake news” as that which

stresses the “abnormal” nature of North Korea and increases anti-North Korean feelings among South Koreans.

This bit from Professor Dong-Yub Kim strengthens my suspicion regarding the main reason for anger about the recent speculations:

Fake news about North Korea, which includes news about Kim Jong Un’s ill health or discussions on succession or an “unexpected event” in North Korea, potentially creates discontent in North Korea.

And we mustn’t have that.

The best part is the summary of Professor Eul-Chul Lim’s contribution on “The Desirable Role and Attitude of the Media and Experts”:

Members of the media and experts should conduct strict self-censorship, reflection, and take special countermeasures to prevent the spread of fake news regarding North Korea in the future.

The following steps are proposed as a way to guarantee that members of the media and experts ensure they adhere to desirable roles in reporting on North Korea.

-(Move Toward “Peace-oriented Journalism”)

There is a need to move away from journalism aimed at creating ungrounded distrust and hatred toward North Korea, along with conflict and division in South Korean society, that is based on the hope that South Korea will absorb North Korea or that North Korea’s government will collapse.

Media outlets that deal with North Korea-related issues should contribute to long-lasting peace and stability on the Korean peninsula.

-(Strengthen the Media’s Ability to Self-censor)

Given the lack of heavy punishment or other legal devices aimed at holding media outlets responsible for their reporting, there is a need for media companies to follow the “Journalism Code of Ethics.”

A South Korean in the know once told me that prosecutors here love interrogating academics, because they break under pressure fastest. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to see professors over-conforming by leading the push for self-censorship and government-supportive speech. What I find more striking than the Tongil News-like tone of the Korean text — a tone that has been spreading here since 2017 — is the guilelessness and unguardedness with which the summary was translated into English. The authors seem genuinely unaware of the reaction it is likely to elicit from foreigners, even Moon-friendly ones.