Clash of Civilizations Update

A few days ago, I blogged here that a careful listener would hear secondary explosions near the Blue House during the visit of the mercurial neocon sage Michael Horowitz to Seoul. And without further ado . . .

ka-BOOM!

Horowitz once advocated changing North Korea through a process like the old Helsinki process, one that I consider hopelessly naive in the North Korean context. Since then, however, Horowitz has joined the militant wing, and Norbert Vollertsen sticks close to Horowitz and his think tank, the Hudson Institute, on his visits to Washington. He now openly advocates regime change, and as one with plenty of experience lobbying the halls of Congress, it ought to get the E.F. Hutton reaction when Horowitz can publicly declare that there is “absolutely no chance” of another Agreed Framework-style Dane Geld buyout.

The Marmot takes exception to what is admittedly some rather undiplomatic language on Horowitz’s part:

‘He is making love to a corpse,’ said Horowitz, who was in Seoul to participate in a seminar hosted Tuesday by Save North Korea, a local Christian group. ‘Only Roh Moo-hyun, so far as I am concerned, is out there working for and acting on this strategic premise that we can keep this lunatic regime in power.’

. . . .
‘The head of the nation is saying, ‘let my brothers and sisters (in North Korea) starve to death and be governed by a lunatic because it would be too expensive for me if they were free. . . . That is not the position of a great, democratic nation, and South Korea is a great nation.’

Horowitz shifted his azimuth to the east and fired for effect:

Horowitz also rejected Roh’s assertion that China is ‘arm-in-arm’ with South Korea in seeking a diplomatic solution to the North Korean nuclear standoff without regime change. ‘For China, the cost of supporting Kim Jong-il will be increasingly great, particularly in terms of its relations with the U.S.,’ he said, indicating that Beijing is actively planning how to assert its influence on North Korea after its ‘Dear Leader’ is ousted.

After I cleaned the coffee spatter off my monitor and put an ice pack on my dislocated fist-pumping shoulder, I contemplated the utility of such blunt language. In diplomacy, we are told, as in kindergarten, if you can’t say something nice, you shouldn’t say anything at all. A nanosecond later, I concluded that this kind of bluntness was exactly what was missing in our public conversation with South Korea.

There is a natural draw toward the shouted argument. Whatever is shouted with passion always sounds from the moral high ground. In Korea, part of the reason why we have lost the public debate is that we have been tactfully silent in the face of enthusiastic shrillness. In our conversation with Korea, so embittered in recent years, Korea mostly shouted, and America mostly pretended not to hear. Through this “volume gap,” the idea of sewing Hyundai and Samsung emblems onto North Korean gulag uniforms gained a position of moral superiority. Discrimination became an expression of equality. The suppression of speech, books, radio, and movies critical of North Korea became a hallmark of liberalism. The corrupt enabling of despotism stood for sovereignty and self-determination.

Someone needs to tell South Korea how badly it has botched the freedom for which it (and we) bled so much. Michael Horowitz isn’t throwing Motolov cocktails into army bases or spitting on Korean officials. He’s holding a mirror up before a victim of self-mutilation. And as someone who holds no official U.S. government position but has the ears of those who do, he’s in an excellent position to do that.

Wind him up and let him go.