North Korea’s Juche Myth:
Introduction (2015)
— B.R. Myers

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

Kim Young-hwan Photo: Ilyo sinmun

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

Inoue Enryō (1858-1919)

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

Nishida Kitarō (1870-1945)

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.”

Robert Smith, the Cure; photo: edi fortini ©2013

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

Andy Warhol (1928-1987). Source: BBC

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.

광복 70년 역사르포](17) 유신체제-장충체육관… 정통성 없는 정권의 ...

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.

On the Demolition of the
North-South Liaison Office
— B.R. Myers

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.

On “Fake News” — B.R. Myers

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.

Cover of NORTH KOREA: FAKE NEWS (and How to Avoid It)

On the United Future Party —
B.R. Myers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE: 3 May 2020: Anti-Communism?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE: 9 December 2020

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

On Foreign Coverage of South Korea’s Response to the Coronavirus
— B.R. Myers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Note on the “Peace Regime”
— B.R. Myers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Fascist” North Korea? — B.R. Myers

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

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

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

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

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

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

FATHER: the husband of one’s birth mother.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suzy Kim goes on to ask rhetorically:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And in the conclusion I write:

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

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

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

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

 

UPDATE: 9 May 2020:

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

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

UPDATE: 23 August 2022:

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

“Conspiracy Theory”? — B.R. Myers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the Peace Treaty … and Confederation
— B.R. Myers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE: 9 December 2020

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

South Korea’s Nationalist-Left Front
— B.R. Myers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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