2001
Busan, South Korea
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.
I would define Prof. B.R.Myers - judging from what he writes on his blog - as a liberal fundamentalist of sorts. I am afraid that he, pretty genuinely, can NOT bring himself to understand how in the world might it be possible for the people comfortably ensconced in liberal and democratic South Korea to wish for a confederation with their illiberal and undemocratic Northern neighbours. And since it is incomprehensible to him, all Southern attempts to build some sort of peaceful coexistence architecture with North are attributed to ethno-nationalism. What else can you ascribe it to? In the imaginary geography of liberal fundamentalists, the non-liberal world is Netherworld. It is beyond the pale, beyond the boundaries of human settlement...
There are too many problems with liberal fundamentalist worldview to enumerate here - just as with any fundamentalism, to be sure. The worst problem, in my view, is the deep, essential ahistoricity of liberal fundamentalism. Liberal fundamentalists do not understand a simple historical truth - the liberal set-up was born in one particular place, namely the Euroamerican core of the capitalist world-system, in the late 18th - early 19th centuries, and, due to the structural constraints of the accumulation process, NEVER really spread much beyond the core. Accumulation processes in the periphery and semi-periphery predominantly take place under other regimes - many of which, unlike North Korea, do NOT feature free medicine or education, by the way. We may deplore this fact, but if we are to criticize the peripheral authoritarians, it would be logical to criticize the whole system of global capitalism, of which they are a part. And since the ways in which capitalist world-system works are not going to change very soon, the peace-making and, furthermore, some sort of confederation-building with North Korea are, indeed, our hopes - if we want peace and stability on our peninsula...
-----------
“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” 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.
------------
“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:
- 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.
- 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.
- On 4 October 2007 Roh Moo Hyun and Kim Jong Il publicly renewed the two Koreas’ commitment to the June 15 2000 agreement.
- On 16 August 2012 Moon Jae-in publicly pledged to bring about an inter-Korean league or confederation during his presidency.
- 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.”
- 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.)
- 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.
- 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?”
- In March 2019 the Ministry of Education published elementary school textbooks for “virtue” or civics class presenting North-South league as the second part — after reconciliation — of “the desirable unification process we must strive for.”
Before some skim-reader tries claiming that a league is much looser than a confederation, let me repeat Moon’s statement that there’s no real difference between the two. (The North itself has taken to promoting “league-confederation.”) Needless to say both words denote an alliance of some sort.
The only thing Lankov seems to find more absurd than the notion of a “confederation scheme” is the notion of an “unequal” one, but all partnerships between states are unequal. One of the two Koreas will get the upper hand; the only question is which. Considering that the North has got the better deal in each joint declaration dating back to 1972, and that the South has been the more passive side through the past four or five ROK administrations (including the “hardline” ones), it’s hardly absurd to expect the pattern to persist in a league or confederation. Wrong perhaps, but not absurd.
Note also the overwhelming consensus on the left that a) the center of such a formation should be in Kaesong in the DPRK, and b) that despite the South’s far greater population the two states must have equal votes in a North-South council. Such a body would inevitably consist of DPRK representatives voting en bloc, so that one supportive vote from the pluralist ROK side would suffice to tip things Pyongyang’s way.
In puncto “crypto-Jucheist”: Many right-wing commentators do indeed talk of the president’s having formed a “Juche Group” (chusap’a) government. Nobody, as far as I can gather, genuinely believes people in the Blue House are sitting around cramming Kim Jong Il’s On Juche Thought like they did in the old days. The word refers instead to Moon’s conspicuous habit of appointing veterans of the protest movement who saw prison time between 1985 and 1995. Chusap’a is thus shorthand for a distinct generation of leftists marked generally (not unanimously) by a much higher degree of pro-North, ultra-nationalist sentiment than the old-school Marxist generation directly before it, which the Moon administration is said to have been shunting aside.
From discussions on the street with conservative flag-wavers I can confirm that many of them do believe Moon wants to surrender the South to Kim Jong-un. This is not my assessment but I can see how someone could get this idea. Having repeatedly disavowed any desire for regime change in the North, the president announced last week that unification would take place by 2045, when Kim Jong-un would be in late middle age. The only benign way to interpret that is to assert that Moon didn’t really mean it.
For a long time now there’s been a cheerful debate here as to what a unified peninsula should be called, with some plumping for retention of “Republic of Korea” (Taehan min’guk) but many preferring the North-friendly term “Koryŏ” instead (see here and here). It’s by no means just the right, then, that believes unification-by-confederation would mean the end of the Republic of Korea.
But the hearings undergone by Moon’s cabinet appointees have given everyone quite an education into the extraordinary acquisitiveness and tax-dodging ingenuity of the Gangnam Left. (The manifold scandals now besetting Cho Kuk, Moon’s choice for Justice Minister, are illustrative.) Many conservatives I have spoken to therefore share my belief that most people in the ruling camp don’t want to see the North take over, but are instead pursuing confederation as an instrument with which to hold onto power here indefinitely.
Minjoo members seem adamant that power must not be relinquished for at least 20 years. The party leader has spoken of the urgent need — for democracy’s sake — to keep the Blue House for ten presidents in a row. That’s half a century. I can see why these people fancy their chances of framing each post-confederation election as a choice between maintaining a peace-friendly status quo and risking war by “turning back the clock.” The same threat could conceivably be invoked to criminalize conservatism as a danger to the peace. (Last spring over 1.8 million people petitioned the government to dissolve the main opposition party.)
The problem of course is that the North’s priorities are very different. It hasn’t attained to what it considers superpower status only to disarm itself during — let alone before! — a long period of symbolic parity with the South, a period destined to end at some stage in peninsular free elections. No personality cult can survive having an expiration date placed on it, however vague or far off it may be. And no, I don’t buy the common notion that if the US and South Korea promise convincingly enough never to topple the Kim dictatorship from without, it will let itself be toppled slowly from within. As the current leader’s grandfather said to Zhivkov in 1973, North Korea’s interest in confederation is in first disarming and then eliminating the rival state.
I agree with Lankov that Moon sincerely wants to improve relations with North Korea and pump as much aid northward as possible. But that’s not all he wants. Too many foreign supporters of this president fail to grasp the full implications of his pledge to create a whole new order on the peninsula, a Korea such as no one has experienced before, and so on. This is about much more than better relations and subsidies. It’s about going as far beyond the Sunshine Policy as Kim Dae Jung went beyond Nordpolitik.
I’ve repeatedly used the word “public” in this post for a reason. To count as a conspiracy, a plan involving two or more parties must be covert. Not even Alex Jones would talk of a Democratic Party conspiracy to field a candidate who can beat Trump. The term “conspiracy theory” is to be used and understood accordingly. Had Lee Harvey Oswald spoken just before his death of a second gunman on the grassy knoll, one would not be a conspiracy theorist for taking him seriously. The information could still be wrong, but someone disagreeing with it would have to engage in actual refutation. The same goes for all who seek to dismiss talk of the ROK government’s confederation drive as a conspiracy theory.
UPDATE (28 August 2019): Tread softly, nationalist left, for you tread on their dreams
Chŏng Ch’ang-hyŏn is director of the trendily titled Peace Economy Research Institute, which was established last March by Moon-loyal Money Today Media. It professes to be committed to providing a blueprint for North-South prosperity by analyzing things “from an objective and neutral perspective.”
A few weeks ago at a venue in Gwanghamun he 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.
------------
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.
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 neo-liberals,” 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.)
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.
--------------
A Note on Propaganda “Tracks” —
B.R. Myers
Having come up with the terms “inner track,” “outer track” and “export track” in the discussion of North Korean propaganda, I can perhaps be excused for insisting that the original distinction between the three be maintained.
There are more tracks and track-internal gradations than I need to deal with here. It is enough if the reader keeps in mind a distinction between a) the inner track, by which I mean propaganda intended for North Koreans only, b) the outer track, which is propaganda written for domestic consumption in the constraining awareness of outside monitors, and c) the export track, or propaganda for outsiders. This last, which includes statements made in negotiations, can in turn be divided into the kind aimed at South Koreans and the kind aimed at foreigners. (North Korea’s Juche Myth, 2015, 9.)
I see and hear these terms used my way, but not always; NK News, for example, seems to be settling into the use of “outer track” to mean North Korean propaganda for South Korean readers.
If this custom takes hold it will obscure the important differences of tone and content between the actual outer track (Rodong Sinmun, the nightly TV news, etc) and the inner track (party lectures, political novels, etc).
This in turn may contribute to an unfortunate trend in Western academic papers on North Korea: token quotation from the Rodong Sinmun or KCNA, and nothing else from the DPRK itself, as a way of ticking the primary-research box.
-------------
Trends in South Korea’s
Nationalist-Left Discourse
— B.R. Myers
For years the American press gave us sporadic reports on how blasé South Koreans were about the threat from the North, and how indifferent they had become to the welfare or human rights of the people up there.
Yet early this year the commentariat suddenly had to explain the dramatic change in North-South relations without resorting to meta-ideological discussion, which it hates above all things.
At first we heard from our leading newspapers how the South Korean public had been turned upside-down by the immense charm and fashion sense of Kim Yo-jong, of all people. This talk was so obviously trivial and false as to incur a backlash.
Since then the press has pushed the line that Moon’s outreach to the North reflects South Koreans’ yearning to be free from the sleep-robbing fear of nuclear war, free also from fear of a US strike on their brethren above the DMZ. (No one acknowledges the contradiction to the line we used to get.)
In accordance with this new consensus, the lumpencommentariat dismisses all talk of ideological affinity between the Blue House and the Kim regime as “McCarthyist” ravings or “fucking John Birch shit,” to mention a few epithets on Twitter directed at my ally-as-intermediary piece.
Much as I want to put this blogging stuff behind me, the upcoming summit compels me to draw attention, if only for the record, to how the nationalist left’s own discourse backs me up.
A few months ago I predicted the ruling Minjoo Party would begin agitating for a league or confederation before the June 13 elections. I said that in doing so it would focus on the economic benefits.
Last week I received the various parties’ campaign materials in a big envelope. (As a permanent resident I am eligible to vote in local elections.) Sure enough, the Minjoo pamphlet has a slogan in big brushstroke font at the top of one page: “Peace Equals Economy!” Underneath, next to a photo of President Moon, is the somewhat coded but still urgent pledge to “construct a permanent peace system this year.”
Of course his base knows what this means. To quote an approving headline in the nationalist-left Hankyoreh on April 29:
The plan for unification via a North-South league is hidden in the Panmunjom Declaration.
Indeed it is, and in plain sight. But the Hankyoreh was quick to drop this talk, being mindful of the need to get the Americans to Singapore in as blissful a state of ignorance as possible. This is why street demonstrations for the “peace system” have so far been rather small and sedate affairs (though with a higher proportion of young participants than conservative rallies).
A less prominent, therefore less constrained source of Moon camp discourse is Tongil [Unification] News. In a recent article Paek Nak-ch’eong, an SNU professor emeritus of some influence, is quoted as saying that the leaguing-up or confederating process has in effect already begun.
The stage of a North-South league, in which North and South maintain their own constitutions, governments and militaries while forming a league of the two states, can be said to be already underway.
Such remarks are becoming common. On May 29, just after the second Kim-Moon summit, the head of a research institute had his presentation summarized as follows:
The ‘Panmunjom Declaration’ has effectively opened the door to the stage of a North-South league. In less than a month, North-South summits have become routine and regular, and if a formal structure for North-South cabinet meetings is created, and meetings on the parliamentary level take place this year, a ‘North-South league’ will be complete.
South Korea is an unpredictable place, but at present I see no pressing reason why things couldn’t unfold in the way described. After all, the main reason the ruling party has been touting its plan for a “peace system” in the run-up to local elections — in contrast to the shrewd downplaying of North-South issues during Moon’s presidential campaign — is in order to claim a mandate on June 13 to gallop towards it.
(Yes, gallop. After Kim Jong Un said that North-South relations must progress as fast as a “10,000 league horse,” the ROK Unification Minister allegedly said in the earshot of reporters: “We need to make a faster horse.”)
The conference that produced the last indented statement above was hosted by Tongilmaji, a civic group run by the ruling party’s own Yi Hae-ch’an. (Many groups that seem more radical than the government itself would be considered astroturf organizations by American standards.) The published proceedings offer valuable insight into the mindset of the sort of people the Moon administration likes to see on its advisory “TF” or task forces.
In the front matter is a warm letter from the “Committee of National [minjok] Conciliation” in Pyongyang, complete with North Korean orthography and Juche calendar date, and talk of a shared “patriotic movement” (aeguk undong). To North Koreans the obvious implication is that the South Korean friends share their love of the DPRK.
Whether the folk at Tongilmaji realize this, I am not sure; they may well think reference is to the North-South league (one country or kuk, two systems) which in their minds is already a done deal.
Either way, the events of the past few months have had quite a disinhibiting effect. Not since the Chang Myun era (1960-61) has the National Security Law been so loosely enforced. One encounters increasingly casual invocation of Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il or Kim Jong Un as an authority on whatever is being discussed. For example: We Koreans are too easily fooled by others, so we must read Kim Il Sung’s memoirs With the Century, and learn how he always kept his guard up. (The irony! But I know a few foreign Koreanists who swallow the “memoirs” too.)
While there is great affection for “Inny,” as the South Korean president is sometimes called, there is more solemn respect for the three Kims. This is only natural, for by nationalist standards they are far superior.
Still, it’s obvious that the left is consciously holding back until after the Singapore summit. As Ko Sŭng-u of the Citizens’ League for Democratic Media put it in a recent talk:
Some people are saying that to make sure the US-North Korea summit goes ahead, it is better not to mention the problem of the withdrawal of US troops.
I get the logic. If Trump realizes how quickly low-level confederation will come about, and what is bound to ensue, he might be less impressed by what Kim Jong Un refrains from demanding. And less inclined to reward this forbearance.
But take it from me, Moon camp: You can talk as loudly as you want, and the Americans won’t pay the slightest attention. Least of all Trump. As far as they’re concerned, the North Koreans are communists, and you’re liberal democrats.
Ko himself doesn’t need my encouragement. He comes right out and says that the construction of a “permanent peace system” must lead to the abolition of the Mutual Defense Treaty in its current form. Which is of course true. (Ko believes it already violates the ROK constitution.)
To return to the Tongilmaji gathering: A paper by Yi Hyŏk-hŭi, chairman of the group’s steering committee, confirms my hunch — as expressed in the ally-as-intermediary posting — that political power is now being exercised not by an administration in the full sense, but by a clique answering to a popular movement.
In the current situation the executor known as ‘government’ does not appear very different from the public [min’gan]. It is known that for reasons related to security, urgency and importance a very small group inside the Blue House is making policy decisions, and shaping the current state of affairs. When you get right down to it, the worrying reality is not so much the ‘bypassing of the public’ but the ‘bypassing of government.’
Sounds a bit like the Trump administration, doesn’t it? But Yi isn’t worried for the reasons you or I would be.
While the president is racing along, the offices directly and indirectly responsible for implementing policy are not doing their work. Worse, they are causing ‘mishaps’….. Inside ‘government’ there appear to be no bureaucrats who understand the Moon government’s philosophy. A second fundamental reason appears to be the lack of a purge of accumulated ills [cheokpye]. Expecting bureaucrats who worked in the Unification Ministry and other offices under the Lee Myung Bak and Park Geun-hye governments to correctly understand the current situation and correctly do their work is in itself nonsensical.
So many North-critical people to purge, so little time. After local elections generate the appearance of a mandate, this endeavor will pick up pace in a big way.
As it must. April 2020 is not far off.
Let me explain: Judging from cyclical trends in ROK political history, and the international track record of economic policies like Moon’s, there is a strong likelihood of the conservatives taking back the National Assembly in the 2020 legislative elections, whereupon they would move to nullify North-South agreements, and restore whatever US troops and weaponry might have been sent home by that time.
The many apologetic Pyongyang watchers who attributed the twin military attacks of 2010 to Lee Myung Bak’s abandonment of the Sunshine Policy will have to agree with me that the dictatorship would not take a much greater reversal of its fortunes lying down.
No doubt the same people who jeered at me last winter for thinking confederation possible will now find me crazy for suggesting that the South Koreans might get cold feet at the altar of this eminently sensible “peace system.”
But the scenario in question certainly looms large in the Moon camp’s own thinking. This is why it wants the legislature to compel future compliance with all summit agreements — regardless of whether the North violates them, it seems. It has also, as I have said before, expressed a commitment to keeping the right out of power for the next twenty years.
Unfortunately the US government shows no awareness of how dangerous the “peace process” is likely to be. Trump has given his blessing to inter-Korean dialogue of which he clearly understands nothing, and praised Kim Jong Un as an “honorable” person, while making clear that US troops will remain here for as long as they’re wanted. In this manner he has encouraged the South Korean people to sign off on risks they may well balk at later. Our troops could end up paying the price.
No comments:
Post a Comment