05 My life and the Destiny of My Nation Kim, Nak Jung 김낙중

Presented in the AWP meeting in 2005

Not sure whether he is a Quaker.

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My life and the Destiny of My Nation 

Kim, Nak Jung 


(1) Introduction 

When we say ‘Corean,’ it means 'kyorae' in Korean language. Let me explain to you first the meaning of 'kyorae' before I move on to today's subject. 

Written in Chinese character, 'kyorae' means family, clan, tribe, nation and a great nation. In other words, family is a basic unit of the great nation, kyorae. Clan is a nation by kinship, tribe is a nation by geographical relations and the nation is combining these two with common language, customs and culture. The people of the same nation share their life and death. In the 20th century, people lived, at large, with the concept of nationalism. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century the people of the world are trying to make a ‘hankyorae’ (a great nation), which is the final stage of the development of kyorae.  The hankyorae means the entire human community or community of all people.  

Human being is synomous with life. Life doesn’t mean an individual’s life but a kyorae’s life in which multiple individual lives are organically connected. The individual comes from kyorae, lives with kyorae, and becomes an eternal being within kyorae. Hankyorae (the great nation) means the organic community of individuals at the global level where the destinies of all human beings are intricately connected. Now we are in the middle of building such hankyorae. 

(2) My Life 

1) My boyhood and youth 

I was born in 1931 when Japan invaded Manchuria and attended the elementary school from the time of the Sino-Japanese War of 1937 to the start of World War II of 1941. In short, I was born during a war and grew up with wars. 

In 1945, when I was 16, my country was liberated from Japanese occupation. I was shocked when my country was liberated from Japan. When poor farmers took to the streets to hail with joy 'long live Korean independence', former Japanese collaborators and landlords all fled. Shortly after, American troops landed in Korea, and Syngman Rhee took power as the first president of South Korea. After this, all circumstances changed in favor of former Japanese collaborators. Former Japanese collaborators regained their hegemony and power, and they labeled poor farmers as communists.  I was not very much interested in politics at the time, not only because I was too young but also too weak, suffering from tuberculosis. Because of the illness, I was more concerned about life and death, probing various religious and philosophical issues. 

When I was a middle school student, from 1945 to 1950, I was a desperate seeker after truth. On Sunday mornings I attended church in Seoul where I joined the Bible study group and listened to the sermon of the minister wholeheartedly. After lunch I went to a Buddhist Temple where I also listened to a monk’s sermon. Then I went to the YMCA in order to attend a study group led by the Korean Gandhi, Ham Sok Hon. As Confucius once said, I thought I would gladly face death as soon as I have discovered the real truth. Instead of going to school, I went to the library and studied religion and philosophy. 

Then the Korean War started in June of 1950. Within a week Seoul was occupied by North Korean soldiers. As I left Seoul to the countryside, I saw lots of disfigured dead soldiers in the streets, together with wreckage of the war here and there. In the countryside, the left wing took power and former pro-Japanese collaborators were in hiding again. Not long after, North Korean soldiers forcefully enlisted South Korean young men. Many of my friends joined the North Korean army then were sent to the war frontline. I did not join the North Korean army but felt uneasy about staying at home safe. 

I could never understand why I, holding Russian rifles, had to fight against South Korean soldiers who held American rifles in their hands. Therefore, I hid deep in the mountains. Then, UN troops took over Seoul from North Korean soldiers. This time I was forced to join South Korean army against North Koreans. But I did not want to join the South Korean army either. Frankly, I neither wanted to kill my North Korean brothers nor did I want to die. Then I began to work at an American military base. As the Chinese became involved in the Korean War in November, I became a refugee in Pusan. 

In 1952, in the middle of the war, I entered Seoul National University in Pusan with sociology as my major. Through the experience of the war I realized that human beings should live in a society whether they like it or not. That's why, although I was deeply interested in religion and philosophy, I took sociology as my major at university. I wanted know about the society which pushed me to carry a rifle against my own fellow people. 

Why did Korea become a Japanese colony? Why did Korea become divided and Koreans kill each other though we are the same nation? Why do countries oppose each other in the name of left and right ideology and risk a nuclear war? Why do people have to kill each other? Of course, I was not able to find answers easily, despite my continuous search. 

Then one more problem occurred. I was working at a US army base as an interpreter in order to earn my college tuition. At that time I used to see lots of injured young men and corpses everyday. But against my will, whenever I went to the university, I had to join pro-war demonstration, ordered by then president Syngman Rhee. I felt guilty because while studying comfortably at a university, I demonstrated in support of continuing the war. So I stopped joining the demonstration and hid in forest, suffering an immense mental agony. 

I asked myself and God “Who I am? I am neither left nor right. I did not join either North or South Korean army. But now I have joined a pro-war demonstration. What the hell am I doing? I don’t have any courage. What is the meaning of life? Although a couple of million people have already died during the Korean War, why has no one talked about stopping the war? I asked myself. “Why don’t even any Buddhists or Christians speak out at all against the pro-war policy of Syngman Rhee?” I think if you were in Korea during the Korea War, some of you would definitely have spoken out to stop the war and you would willingly have gone to prison to protest against the Syngman Rhee regime. Then I, with your support, may have had greater courage. But unfortunately in the 1950s in Korea I did not know of pacifism and I was not able to find any pacifist friend. 

I even thought that maybe I was born into this world by mistake. “Maybe I should have been born into a different world. Why do people have no tears facing this misery?” In April 1954, I reached the conclusion that there was no reason for me to live anymore. Having experienced the Sino-Japanese War, the Pacific War and the Korean War, I just saw lots of killings even between brothers, and I felt that life was not worth living. 

So I determined to kill myself, and I went out into the street with a lamp in Pusan. I found myself walking in the street and shouting “stop the war, support a peaceful reunification!” I think I imitated Diogenes. Soon I was arrested by the police as expected. The policeman asked me how I was going to reunify Korea peacefully. But I could not answer his question because I did not have any specific plan or proposal.

(3) My struggle for the peaceful unification of Korea 

After I was released from the police station I pondered about the peaceful reunification of Korea. One year later, I presented a plan for the peaceful reunification of Korea to the South Korean government.

I proposed that we should not let the young people of North and South Korea kill each other but should enable them to decide their future together peacefully. I asked myself, ‘the conception, ideology, politics and economic system are all human-made and if so, how such things can be more precious than human lives?’ I was arrested by the Rhee regime on a charge of violating the National Security Law and interrogated, but soon released because they thought I was insane. They said I was a lunatic because I tried to make peace with Communists. 

Thus, I decided to go to North Korea with the same proposal for ‘peaceful reunification’ which I had submitted to President Rhee. It was not easy to reach North Korea crossing the mine fields in DMZ and the wire entanglements while avoiding surveillance. However, the death was not a fear for me when I believed that my life would be completely meaningless unless this nation would achieve a peaceful reunification. 

However, when I crossed the Imjin River and reached North Korea, I was suspected to be a spy dispatched by the South Korean government. I was incarcerated in Pyongyang where I went on a hunger strike and suffered from the pleurisy which made me debilitated. I ended up spending 6 months in the hospital. In June of 1956 I was repatriated to South Korea without a trial. North Korean government took me to the north front of the cease-fire line and let me go down to South, saying that the North Korean authority was not in complete agreement on my proposal of ‘peaceful reunification,’ but it would like to have a talk with South Korean authorities on this issue whenever the South wanted to and asked me to send this message to South Korean government. 

Coming back to South Korea, I was examined for 3 months by US army and the military intelligence and then deported to South Korean police where I was once again interrogated with severe torture. Later, I was handed over to the prosecution where I was asked if I had been trained as a secret agent for 1 year in North Korea and indicted for spying and violating the National Security Law. I was freed from the charge of espionage but I had to spend one year in prison for violating the National Security Law.  

Having seen both South and North Korea, I concluded that both South and North Korean authorities didn’t need ‘the proposal for peaceful reunification for people of this land to live in harmony and peace’ but rather, their only interest was to expand their power to each other’s territory. The South and North Korean regimes talked about liberty and equality. However, I thought, talking about liberty in Capitalist society where people have no money or equality in Communists society where people have no power would be a mere excuse to maintain and expand their power. And we were not able to achieve peaceful unification, not because we didn’t know the way to achieve it, but because the people did not have power to achieve it. At that time, more than 80% of the people were farmers and they didn’t have the power to say no to the ruling class who had power, money and the support of foreign superpowers. 

(4) My Peasant and Labor Movement

After 1957, I reentered university to study economics and attempted to find my role in the peasant movement and labor movement. From 1957, for a decade, I endeavored to grope for the potential of Korean peasant movement working as a member and a researcher of the‘Korean Research Center for Agriculture’ and as a reporter of monthly magazine, ‘Nongwon.’ But it was not very successful.
The first reason for my failure was that until the 1960s, the Rhee regime accepted an unlimited amount of surplus crops donated by the United States and sold them in Korean market to fund national defense expenditure. The regime concentrated on an arms race with the North, and the farmers did not dare to object the government’s agricultural policy under the heavy influence of ‘anti-communist’ propaganda. 

Secondly, the Rhee regime resigned after the uprising in April of 1960, which was soon followed by a military coup which brought the military regime of Park Chung Hee  to power and I was put in a situation where I was tried at the court-martial on a charge of being a ‘North Korean spy on the campus’ and was sentenced to death. All the newspapers of the nation featured my story that Kim, Nak Jung who went to North Korea in 1955 was dispatched to South after having been trained for 1 year as a spy and he went into the campus and conducted his secret mission concealing his identity. The students were advised to watch out for North Korean spies in their campuses. As the anti-regime movement of students was holding back, the authority just accused me of ‘praising North Korea mentioning the free education and free medical service in North Korea’ and sentenced to 3 years and 6 months of imprisonment. Hence, I was only used by the military junta as a tool to suppress student movement. 

Released after 3 years and 6 months in prison, I got married to my current wife. Ever since 1965, South Korean economy underwent rapid industrialization, and many farmers left the rural district to the cities as laborers. The citizens of Korea, the master of history, were turning into laborers and thus, I chose the Labor Research Center of Korea University as my working place. I did my best to conduct labor education for laborers and cooperative education for farmers, whose objectives were to make the public the master of their own fates. 
But this didn’t last long. In 1972, President Park declared ‘Revitalizing Reform’ to prolong his regime, and the students protested against it. The authorities desperately needed a North Korean spy scandal to suppress and punish students’ protest. People tend to forget what were on the newspaper 10 years ago very easily. 

During my trip to Jeju Island for the education program targeting the executives of labor unions, I was suddenly arrested and sent to the Central Intelligence Agency. There, I was tortured by the Agency to admit the charge of attempting to lead a rebellion against the military regime with my students of Korea University and planning to overthrow the government to form a socialist government. The people who tortured me said, “Why are you devoted to labor and agrarian issues, the main interests of the communists? You even have an experience of visiting North Korea!” They insisted that there was no doubt that I was a communist who claimed to lead the revolution by the power of laborers and peasants. Due to unbearable tortures, I was coerced to sign my accusation of attempting and leading a civil strife. I tried to tell the truth to the prosecutors that the previous confession was forced by the torture , but the prosecutors only sent me back to the Central Intelligence Agency in Namsan, where I was once again I beaten to death and was carried back to the prison on another prisoner’s back. Obviously, I promised them that I would not say a word in the prosecution and the court against their demands. But the authorities were concerned if I would not be sentenced to be guilty of instigating a rebellion with merely 10 students. They brought the documents of year 1970 which I registered to get the passport in order to participate in an academic seminar related to German labor issues as I was invited by Evert Foundation of West Germany. They accused me of being a North Korean spy saying that if I had gotten the passport to go to West Germany, my original plan was to go to West Germany, then to East Germany and finally to North Korea to deliver intelligence about South Korea. I was sentenced to life-imprisonment and spent 7 years in prison. Professor Lee Moon Young, the president of Labor Research Center of Korea University was dismissed on charge of hiring Kim Nak Jung, the North Korean spy. However, the real reason was that the military regime didn’t want us to enlighten the executives of labor unions, which might cause wage increase. 

After serving out my sentence, I was freed in 1980 but Corea was still under another military regime of Chun Doo Hwan who brutally suppressed the ‘Kwangju Uprising’ and my scope of action was heavily restricted by the law of ‘Purification of Political Actions.’ The only thing I could do was to sit down at home and write. During this time, I could concentrate on writing ‘The History of Korean Labor Movement,’ ‘The Fundamentals of Social Science’ and ‘Planning the Reunification of Korea’. In late 1980s under the president Roh’s regime, I gained opportunities to deliver the speech in many occasions about the reunification issue thanks to the progress of the pro-democratic  movement, and finally in September 1999, I, as a chairman of the policy committee of a civic organization, presented the proposal on peaceful reunification named ‘A Four-Phased Reunification Proposal According to a Three 7-year Plan’ in a public hearing organized by the ‘special committee on the reunification’ of the Korean National Assembly. 

However, this caused another problem. In 1990, the following year, the North Korean authorities sent me an agent. Kim Il Sung expressed a regret for my previous suffering in North Korea and sent a person to deliver the message that he liked my idea presented in the National Assembly and he wanted my cooperation to achieve peaceful unification. But according to South Korea’s National Security Law, I was prohibited from contacting a person from North Korea and if I did not report him to the authority, I would be punished. It was clear that he would be sentenced to death or life sentence if I would have reported him to the South Korean authorities. 

Should I choose to violate the current law which will result in the sufferings of myself and my family members or should I report this to the South Korean government so that the authority will arrest this person from North Korea which would mean I am refusing the favor of Kim Il Sung to peaceful reunification? I was at a crossroads of these two choices. I was a father of 3 children, the head of the family and a celebrity being exposed often in the media. I was deeply concerned. But I could not report my contact with  North Koreans to the authorities; instead, I continued to discuss with him the issues related to our people and reunification. Of course, I realized a big gap between my opinion and that of North Korean authorities and tried my best to reduce it. 

However, not long after, in 1992 I was arrested by South Korean authorities, demanded death penalty and sentenced to life-imprisonment. Then, I was amnestied by the Kim Dae Jung government on 15th of Aug, 1998, but I am not a completely free man till now; rather, I am still a life-timer on probation, without voting rights or eligibility for a South Korean passportto go abroad. 

It would take too much time to explain all my life stories. If you are interested, please read the book ‘Tamlu (Seeking Tears)’ written by my daughter. Just adding one more point, I had to suffer a number of unbearable tortures and face the threat to death, for I visited North Korea pursuing ‘Peaceful Reunification’ and treated those who came from North Korea as brothers, but I am still grateful that I am standing here in front of you telling all these stories; I am so grateful to God who led me to here. 

(5) The Fate of ‘Kyorae’ 

Now is the time to tell you the life of our people, the destiny of this ‘kyorae.’ In the current stage, ‘kyorae’ means Corean nation whose basic unit is the individual families just like my family. Probably, in the future generation of my sons/daughters and grandsons/granddaughters, their ‘kyorae’ would imply the  whole‘human community, or‘Hankyorae.’ 

Coreans were people who peacefully lived on this land for thousands of years, mainly devoted to cultivating in the fields. Nonetheless, Coreans was often harassed by invasions from surrounding superpowers. Despite all these, this people never attempted to be a military power which invades and enslaves other nations though it is true that we have a tragic past to dispatch troops to Vietnam forced by the demand of the United States. 
In the course of civilization dominated by the law of survival of the fittest, Coreans endeavored to live in harmony and peace, respecting and learning from the cultures of neighboring countries. 

To look back the human history recorded for last 5,000 years, there were three big civilizations in this world. First is the ‘Indian Civilization’ occurred around the basin of Ganges and Indus Rivers, and the other is ‘Chinese Civilization’ around Yellow River and Yangtze River. Then, the third, ‘Mediterranean Civilization’ (or Western Civilization) appeared along the Euphrates and Niles which later reached Greece of Aegean Sea up to Rome, then across the Europe and England reached the United States. To symbolize these three civilizations, the form of circle represents the Indian civilization meaning the eternal cycle, while Chinese civilizations can be expressed as a quadrilateral meaning the heaven and earth or yin and yang. Finally, Mediterranean civilization can be symbolized into a cross, the intersection between time axis and space axis.    

Coreans were eager to accept and learn from the cultures of neighboring nations to form a society in which people would live together in peace. Consequently, until the Koryo Dynasty of one thousand years ago, Buddhism was a dominating culture which is the essence of Indian Civilization. 

Then, Buddhism showed some shortcomings which led Confucianism and Taoism to rule the country during the Chosun dynasty founded around 600 years ago. But these, too, brought vices, and when the ‘Mediterranean culture,’ so-called the western civilization, flowed into Korea 100 years ago, Coreans became colonized by Japan following the rule of Survival of fittest, and then, once again the nation was divided and occupied by the Marine power of the US and the land forces of the Soviet Union. We suffered internal war among our own people committed by two different authorities founded by two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States. And I was born and have grown up in between those conflicts. But now I see the limit of the western culture or the Mediterranean culture  

The western civilization brought some evil elements and I see the limit of this culture. I believe we, the people of our nation, have a historical mission to create a new culture for the life of ‘hankyorae’ in the 21st century. 

I, Nak Jung Kim, was born to this world and all problems I have faced in my life were actually the matters in the history of world civilization in which the Coreans have lived, particularly the ones which show the limitation of this society dominated by the western idea of survival of the fittest in the modern society.

 

Theism and atheism, materialism and idealism, evolution and creation, capitalism based on private property and socialist economy based on public property, individualism and collectivism, the Cold War between the Soviet Union and US, nuclear weapons, terrorism, pollution and destruction of the environment; these are some lists of evil elements brought by modern Mediterranean culture. 
For last 60 years, Coreans have recognized that we are at the stage where we should overcome the limitations of Western cultures, and we are facing the great mission of solving this. 

Therefore, I believe that the peaceful reunification is not only the matter of Coreans but it is a mission of the whole human race to create ‘hankyorae .’ The future society in Corea, in the reunified peninsula, will become the micro model of ‘hankyorae.’ The American culture which have settled all the troubles in the law of power boasting of its superpower in terms of military and economy can not become the culture of ‘hankyorae’ which we pursue.

 
I presume that the era of culture of ‘hankyorae’ is now approaching in which all kinds of religions including Christianity, Islam, Brahman, Buddhism will be respected, the theism/atheism and the materialism/idealism coexist. Nevertheless, it is not the power of nuclear weapons which rules the history nor the bombs of terrorists. I believe it is the ‘love’ understanding each other which will solve all troubles.

The culture of hankyorae will become the ‘culture of life, love, peaceful coexistence’. Each nation of the global village preserves its inherent color, respecting others’ differences and will live in harmony and peace forming a colorful world. 

I, Kim Nak Jung, feel confident that as my life was inseparable from the destiny of Coreans, the destiny of Coreans, a single nation, is inseparable from the life of ‘hankyorae,’ the whole human race. From now on, in the 21st century, I cordially request your support for and active participation in constructing a peaceful and beautiful ‘Hankyorae’ on this planet. Thank you very much.  

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2005.10.28 김 낙 중 드림