Minister of Historical Amnesia

Updated again Nov. 3; thanks to reader usinkorea for the hat tip; thanks to the Marmot for linking and to his readers for stopping by.

Once again, anti-Unification Minister Chung Dong Young has opened his mouth, and once again, nothing good came out of it. The latest nominal justification for giving Chung a supply of ink so far out of proportion to his intellect is the 55th anniversary of the Korea Times. Chung’s first sentence, however, makes it apparent that the real reason is the rollout of Chung for President ’07 (the article includes a photograph depicting the precise moment Chung sealed his pact with Satan, which is a rare event in law and politics). It’s all very gauzy stuff, and reads like it was sprayed onto a silkscreen. His first sentence reads like an unintentional parody of Martin Luther King’s Letter from the Birmingham Jail:

When I was a college student majoring in history, I was once detained on charges of demonstrating against the constitutional amendment drawn up by the then dictatorial Park Chung-hee government.

Sitting in a jail cell, I pondered over a historical supposition, which is usually regarded as a taboo among historians. While French philosopher Blaise Pascal once said for his intellectual pleasure, “If Cleopatra’s nose had been a little shorter, the history of the world might have been different,” I then thought in grief, “If our politicians had been more gravely concerned about our future”¦” (emphasis mine)

Of course, analogies are always imperfect. For one, Martin Luther King was fighting for freedom, and for the equality of all citizens under the law. And while King’s stints in jail were not lengthy, Chung was, to borrow his own carefully chosen term, “detained,” not convicted or sentenced–briefly, one presumes. For most of his post-college life, Chung was a journalist–make that pretty-boy news-reader–as opposed to a silenced and persecuted dissident. Nothing I was able to find mentions Chung’s particular prominence or sacrifice for anything, in contrast to, say, Lee Hai Chan, who did four years in prison, or Kim Moon Soo, who did several stretches, including one that lasted three years. Being “detained,” suggests something more akin to the experience of a drunken frat boy after a wild night in South Padre.

(If South Korea maintains at least one point of contact with reality, Kim Moon Soo would slaughter this man in a general election matchup.)

But of course, what’s really galling about Chung’s MLK act is how hard Chung has worked to divert attention from modern day horrors like this. According to Chung, “Human rights problems in communist countries have never been solved by way of applying pressure.” Chung’s policies have inestimably reduced the odds that those living and dying in these conditions will ever be free again. You want to know about hard time, Minister Chung? Take a page from President Bush’s calendar and find a few minutes for Kang Chol Hwan. Kang is one of very few to have survived to contemplate that experience. As Chung himself says, if only politicians were more gravely concerned about their future. Until then, give us a fucking break, k?

This is the part where Chung shows us his erudition by reflecting on history. Almost instantly, it goes terribly awry.

Tracing back the history of Korea, this year is quite significant; it marks both the 60th anniversary of the nation’s liberation from the Japanese colonial rule and centennial of the Katsura-Taft Agreement, signed between Japanese Prime Minister Katsura and the U.S. Foreign Minister Taft, which led to Korea’s national tragedy of becoming a colony of Japan.

This closed-door agreement mediated by then U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt provided that Japan turn over its control over the Philippines to the U.S. in return for the U.S. acknowledgement of Japan’s predominance over the Korean Peninsula.

Two alert readers have now pointed out that Chung can’t even keep his Roosevelts straight. Theodore Roosevelt, not Franklin, was President in 1905. Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, won the Nobel Prize for negotiating the Treaty of Portsmouth to end the Russo-Japanese War, by which time Japan had uncontested naval dominance of the Northwest Pacific. The Taft-Katsura agreement paved the way for that peace treaty and the end of the war. Taft was not the Foreign Minister–this position has actually never existed in the U.S. government–he was in fact the Secretary of War. Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore’s younger cousin and a Democrat, was twenty-three at the time of the Taft-Katsura “gentleman’s agreement.” Finally, there could not possibly have been an agreement that “Japan turn over its control over the Philippines,” because in 1905, Japan had no such control, and the United States already had it. Sure, there are things from college I don’t remember, either, but we’re in Dennis Hopper territory now. I mean, can you imagine if G.W. Bush or Dan Quayle had tried to pass off such manifest ignorance as insight?

Beyond this, I’m completely unsympathetic to Korean complaints about Taft-Katsura, and not merely because of the expiration of the statute of limitations. Of course, there would have been no annexation but for Korea’s own political perfidy and economic weakness, the latter condition mostly a result of the very xenophobia for which Korea shows such a lingering affinity.

How little times have changed. In some ways, Korea’s self-perfidy (in the South) and isolation (in the North) are no less great today.

What exactly does Korea expect for the United States to have done here? Was it really in the interests of the United States to get into a naval war with Japan over faraway Korea just after Japan had shellacked the Russian Navy at the Tsushima Strait and Port Arthur? Would the U.S. navy have fared better? What in fact did U.S. acquiesence change that wouldn’t have happened anyway? What was the U.S. obligation to, or interest in, Korea? Finally–how was that agreement somehow more nefarious and conniving than Roh’s own gentleman’s agreement with Kim Jong Il, which in essence tells the people of North Korea to rot in hell?

It is, indeed, ironic that after the agreement, President Roosevelt received the Nobel peace prize, while the Korean Peninsula was annexed to Japan. It is such a tragic reality that we have taken a backseat, and never had the opportunity to take charge in deciding on our own future.

I don’t disagree that there have been many ironies in the choices of Nobel Peace Prize awardees, but it’s hard to find a better specific example than this; hey, at least TR ended a war.

I don’t know what other significance survives the factual errors here, other than that I seem to recall that this younger President Roosevelt was also involved in some interaction with Japan that affected Korea’s fate in some significant way. But it’s obviously not that important if it’s slipped Chung’s mind, too. The man is a historian.

On Aug. 15, 1945, our people rejoiced over the end of the war and national liberation, but on the same day we were also divided into two nations, the South and the North, and still have to live in an era of tension and confrontation.

And help me remember–who was President after the younger Roosevelt again? Safe to assume he never did anything for Korea, either. Same with the guy who followed him, too, I suppose.

Welcome to the alternative reality of Chung Dong-Young, in which the United States, not the Yi emperors, sold Korea to Japan. In which Korea’s liberation from Japan was a spontaneous occurrence, apparently unrelated to all the fuss in Tarawa, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, Bataan, or the Burma Road. In which the United States (not those who refused to hold free, U.N.-supervised, pan-Korean elections) divided Korea in two, and in which 1953 appears to be significant for some vanishing reason, although no one is sure quite what leads up to it. South Korea is running a terrific trade deficit in blame these days, and it’s causing a liquidity crisis for its dwindling reserve of truth.

Chung, of course, is not an isolated nut. He’s a nut of national significance. Under those circumstances, it’s hard to assign too much significance to the fact that a neo-Communist teachers’ union is peddling Marxism to the kiddies, although I’m glad to see the press talking about it, and hope that there will be a backlash leading to debate, argument, and enlightenment. In fact, I ardently wish for the exposure of all historical distortions passed off as education, something that has incurred the wrath of Chung’s party and inspired some positively ghastly manipulation of schoolchildren by some South Korean teachers. Just last April, as South Korea was entering its second abstention against a U.N. resolution calling on North Korea to ratify the Convention Against Torture and give free access to the U.N.’s special rapporteur on human rights in North Korea, the South Korean delegation to the U.N. Human Rights Commission was still obsessing over–you guessed it–Japanese textbooks.

Of course, history must be rewritten incrementally, and some scholars and patriots of “deep ethnic purity” do carry things too far, too fast. And isn’t it regrettable that some old-fashioned, reactionary minds make a big deal about it?

However, the reality is that a so-called South-South conflict, an ideological division among the South Korean people over the inter-Korean issues lingers within us.

Therefore, it is such a pity that some people still immersed in a totalitarian mindset used Professor Kang Jeong-koo’s historical viewpoint on North Korea to instigate a South-South conflict and conjure up the ghost of the Cold War.

Chung is actually blaming Kang’s critics for starting a messy ideological disagreement–otherwise called public discourse–because Kang himself stated that Korea would have been better off if Kim Il Sung had been permitted to unify the country by force.

I, as unification minister, do not agree with Professor Kang’s point of view. His arguments are not consistent with historical facts, and there are huge jumps in his logical reasoning. Hence, I believe that there are few who agree on his point of view.

French philosopher Voltaire emphasized the human rights of criminal suspects, saying to a suspect who was in custody on charges of murder, “I do not agree with your ideas but I will fight for your right to state your opinions. Two hundred and forty years have passed since then, and it is such a shame to see a resurrection of a witch-hunt that existed back in the middle ages, in a liberal democratic country which guarantees the freedom of thought.

What’s saddest about this is that Chung manages to come closer to saying the right things about free speech than Park Geun Hye, although Chung’s criticism of Kang ends with the word “but,” naturally enough, before he moves on to his false piety. The GNP brought this argument on itself, and I’ve said plenty about that. What Chung doesn’t mention is his own party’s authoritarian behavior in power, including attempts to muzzle the press, permitting the beating of a peaceful human rights activist, permitting vicarious censorship by pro-Pyongyang militant street thugs, confiscating leaflets, and unlawfully detaining peaceful protestors. Worst of all, the South Korean government fails to uphold the rule of law in the face of political violence, effectively giving that violence a veto and making it increasingly risky to go to a protest without a big stick.

And let us not forget that Chung would not so much as lift a pen to defend the right, someday, of any North Korean to speak freely. His government’s explicit goal is the maintenance of that regime–and I challenge anyone to show me evidence that there has been a more repressive, barbaric regime than North Korea’s since Pol Pot fled to the hills.

Our citizens, who have been sick and tired of ideological debates for a long time, do not wish to witness the revival of the Cold War and look forward to seeing a bright and hopeful future.

From a different perspective, the incident involving Professor Kang can be regarded as froth, which comes to the surface in the stream of massive historical changes on the Korean Peninsula. The froth will soon dissolve in the huge current of history.

I am confident that if we dismantle internal Cold War confrontations, there will be a bright and hopeful future opening before us.

Whatev. Chung is really saying that is sick of the GNP trying to separate Chung from his base by forcing him to actually repudiate their violence and support for the world’s most totalitarian system of government (meet Chung’s base). Chung wants us to clear away these distractions so that we can concentrate on the main point: sometimes, prolonging the reign of murderous totalitarianism is the humanitarian thing to do.

In fact, North Korea’s land stands for not only our realities but also our future. If we step on the territory of North Korea, we will realize that not one single plant or tree is different from those of the South [links added by OFK].

We are assisting the North not just to help North Korea but also to help ourselves because it is on this territory that our people have lived for thousands of years and will live together.

Thus, we are obliged to help the North build SOCs and infrastructure including roads, railways and ports.

And we shouldn’t forget “nuclear weapons, 40 Soviet-made MiG jets and a submarine from Kazakhstan.” How can North Korea be expected to feed 6.5 million starving people without submarines, fer crying out loud?

Then comes this:

The first was that among the 191 member countries to the United Nations, 140 countries came to being as sovereign states after 1945, and only two of them have been able to independently establish democracy during the 60-year period and develop their economies with a per capita income of more than $15,000. The exceptional cases were Israel and Korea.

Someone help me out here. What exactly has been independent about the establishment of democracy in either Israel or South Korea? I could think of dozens of other nations that have democratized with far less U.S. support, but so could you, and I don’t have all week. As for the rise in incomes in Israel and South Korea, U.S. aid and protection no doubt did wonders to stimulate both economies and encourage foreign investment. And his point? That the pursuit of freedom for North Koreans is pointless? Maybe, if you believe that the North Koreans are less human than these people. Or these.

[B]y the end of this year, more than 170,000 South Koreans would have stepped on North Korean land since the end of the Korean War in 1953.

Especially, the year 2005 will mark a watershed in the history of inter-Korean relations since it opens up an era of active exchanges of personnel with more than 100,000 South Koreans visiting the North annually. Moreover, if we include the 300,000 South Korean tourists’ visits to Mt. Kumgang, the total number will top 400,000 this year.

Impertinent to ask, I know, but how many North Koreans (aside from refugees and frogmen) have been allowed to stroll around Namdaemun on shopping jaunts, or to experience the night life in Myongdong or Apkujong? Chung’s vision of engagement–a vision he shares with Kim Jong Il–excludes the people of North Korea, except for those selected to labor in Hyundai factories for $58 a month.

Minus “voluntary payments” to the Dear Leader, of course.

Update: The Pusan chapter of the Korean Teachers’ Union has a truly astonishing response to the outpouring of criticism of its crude and profane work of propaganda, accusing the press of covering the story from an “ideologically biased perspective.” Since that’s a completely self-parodying statement, I won’t waste keystrokes. On the other hand, I’m actually impressed with how Park Geun-Hye and the GNP have handled this one so far:

The GNP has formed a fact-finding committee to investigate the materials. GNP chairwoman Park Geun-hye told a meeting of the party’s senior lawmakers the issue was not political but went to the question of true education, “whose aim is to guide students in the right direction and teach civic values. The materials reportedly portray APEC as a tool of multinational corporations and the U.S., and invite students to stage protests against the November forum in the city.

And just to completely reverse the roles back to where they belong, the Uri government is back to its cowardly old self:

However, the Information Communication Ethics Committee has turned down a request from the Education Ministry to censure the materials. “Based on comprehensive scrutiny of the content and intention of the class materials, we have decided that they are not so excessively derogatory as to threaten social order, although they could minimally dampen international ties,” it said. The ministry has nonetheless ordered local education offices to take legal action if unionized teachers use the materials in class without the approval of principals.

It’s one thing to say that people should be free to speak their opinions, but quite another to say that schools systems can’t set higher academic standards than this. I see a great political issue. If you really want to scare Korean parents, try giving their kids an unmarketable education in Marxist economics.