Kim Won Ung: A Most Joyous Political Obituary

Imagine an America in which Cynthia McKinney chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and holds regular meetings with Osama Bin Laden, and you can be begin to grasp the national embarrassment of Kim Won Ung’s tenure as leader of the Korean National Assembly’s Unification, Foreign Affairs and Trade Committee. Perhaps this analogy will also illustrate the depth of my ambivalence at confirming that Kim has lost his bid for reelction.

In his five years of very real and significant prominence and influence in the ruling Uri Party, Kim Won Ung was, functionally speaking, North Korea’s instrument in the National Assembly and Uri’s primary instrument for exploiting anti-Americanism. Let me walk you through the brief, incendiary history of Kim Won Ung (or Woong, or Wung, as he spells it) and show you what we’ll all be missing.

February 2003: Kim goes to Pyongyang to inaugurate an anti-Japanese propaganda exhibition.

April 2003: Kim must have been well-received in Pyongyang, so he makes a second (initially) secret visit to plan another propaganda visit — this time, a “peace” and sports festival on Cheju Island in the South. The visit, in October 2003, marks the start of a series of frequent appearances by Kim as a propaganda tool in the North Korean “news” service KCNA. KCNA lauds the event’s promotion of the uriminjokiri spirit and highlights Kim’s role in receiving and sending off the North Korean delegation.

May 2003: Kim emerges as one of the chief political opportunists capitalizing on anti-Americanism following the deaths of two Korean girls in an armored vehicle accident. Here’s KCNA’s approving coverage almost a year after the fact.

November 2003: KCNA highlights Kim’s role as an opponent of sending Korean troops to Iraq.

September 2004: Kim, who was actually born in Chongqing, China, submitted a bill in the National Assembly to repudiate the Treaty of Gando, which defined the boundary between China and Korea. Some view Kim’s action as an implicit territorial claim on parts of Manchuria.

December 2004: Kim reacts to al Qaeda’s beheading of South Korean hostage Kim Sun-Il by doing his best to reward the murderers. In a textbook example of how and why terrorism works, Kim led a legislative effort to respond to the beheading by withdrawing Korean troops from Iraq.

April 2005: By now, anyone can see what sort of person Kim Won Ung is, but one could still plausibly deny that he represents the sentiments of the Roh Administration, until the Roh Administration makes a conscious decision to elevate Kim and other like-minded co-factionalists into positions of greater responsibility.

July 2005: After concentration camp survivor Kang Chol Hwan met with President Bush, Kim blamed the United States for the North Korean famine — the famine in which the North Korean regime systematically impeded the delivery of food aid, most of it from the United States, to the people who needed it most. Kim also submits a bill in the National Assembly entitled, “Resolution Against Persistent Diplomatic Pressure on North Korea by the Strong Nations Putting Forth North Korean Human Rights Problem. The bill evokes this demoralized reaction from one North Korean in Chongjin, who hears of it on Radio Free Asia:

Mr. K quickly turned off the radio. “Now they are full and rich they want to live well by themselves, right? Are they saying “take care of yourselves” to us when we cannot even listen to a radio openly?

Mr. K spit on the street and took out a cigarette. “Is this all I could get for listening to a radio covered with blankets in a hot day like this?” He lit the cigarette and took a deep breath in. He then turned on the North Korean radio which he never listens to. [Daily NK]

October 2005: Kim takes up the cause of nationalist historical revisionism, blaming America for Japan’s occupation of Korea and for Korea’s division into what were to have been temporary occupation zones. (They would have been temporary had Kim Il Sung agreed to hold free nationwide elections in the northern zone. As Stalin himself said, “[W]hoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise. If now there is not a communist government in Paris, [the] cause of this is Russia has not an army which can reach to Paris in 1945.” Kim Il Sung would soon attempt to remedy the latter defect.)

December 2005: In reaction to reports that North Korea was (among other things) counterfeiting our currency, U.S. Ambassador Alexander Vershbow stated the obvious and called North Korea’s “a criminal regime.” Rather than calling on North Korea to, oh, stop counterfeiting or disprove the allegation by letting Secret Service investigators visit Printing House Number 62, Kim said:

The ruling-party lawmaker was speaking on a PBC Radio talk show. “If I were told to choose between peace on the peninsula and our allies, I would say that we need to give up our alliances,” Kim said. “It seems to me the neocons in the U.S. are not aware of what is going on.

“I am saying this clearly to Ambassador Vershbow: no country that becomes an obstacle on the path to reunification of the peninsula can ever be a friend of Korea, and this is something that Vershbow needs to bear in mind,” Kim said.

Kim warned the envoy faces being called in “for a talk” by the Foreign Ministry, “or, in the worst case, we can ask the U.S. government to recall him. He said given the character of relations with the U.S., “the Korean government is likely to be submissive on this issue. But if Vershbow persists with the same attitude, we will present a resolution or a proposal calling for his recall to the National Assembly. [Chosun Ilbo]

This also earned Kim his first “Death of an Alliance” post, a thinly veiled personal rebuke from Henry Hyde, and an approving reference in KCNA, whose thesaurus apparently contains the word “malarkey.” Who knew?

January 2006: Kim makes an appearance in KCNA as part of a South Korean delegation to a North Korean propaganda ceremony.

In July 2006, Kim, now the ruling Uri Party’s Chairman of the National Assembly’s “Unification, Foreign Affairs and Trade Committee,” earned his second DOA post. When USFK Commander General B.B. Bell warned about the danger of North Korea’s short-range missiles, Kim publicly denounced Bell, saying, “It is careless for a responsible soldier to say that the North has Scuds to attack the South. As of this date, however, there has been no call for the withdrawal of all of those Patriot missile batteries carelessly and irresponsibly deployed all over South Korea, at the expense of American taxpayers.

Fall 2007: During last year’s election campaign, Kim appeared in a televised debate to oppose a U.N. resolution condemning North Korea’s human rights atrocities calling on the U.N. to condemn what he calls a “Nazi-like concentration camp” at Gitmo. (Funny, I don’t think this was ever a problem for the prisoners at Dachau, who, after all — and I realize that this distinction will always be lost on some people — weren’t members of an organization dedicated to the theocratic subjugation of the world through the mass murder of civilians. There’s no reason to strain facts or logic to draw the Nazi analogy.)

April 2008: Here’s Kim’s home page today, shortly after his electoral defeat, and shortly before the url is taken over by a gay porn site.

In defeat, Kim joins Comrade Chung, Sohn Hak-Kyu, fellow lawmaker Im Jong-In, who always seemed to be just a degree removed from North Korea’s fifth column in the South. These were Korea’s leading advocates of what sometimes seemed more like inverse absorbtion than mere appeasement. Collectively, this string of losses amplifies our reasons for celebration, as does the election of better men:

On the contrary, 12 candidates among the 15 who actively raised their voices for human rights were elected. Former members of the National Assembly Na Kyung Won, Hwang Jin Ha, Hwang Woo Yea, Park Jin, Shim Jae Chul and Chun Yu Ok, along with Song Young Sun, president of Liberty Union Shin Ji Ho, Cho Juen Hyuk and others accomplished the feat of winning their elections. [Daily NK; links added by OFK]

Even here, Kim’s defeat stands out as cause for a special degree of schadenfeude. Chung’s bloggability was always moderated by a certain natural sympathy some (I am not among them) hold for the abjectly stupid. Im’s was really a matter of connecting dots and waiting for revelations from NIS files that still haven’t come. Sohn was positively accomplished at wearing moderate drag. As an eventual and inevitable co-partisan of Kim and Im, who wouldn’t seem moderate?

Kim, on the other hand, was (how it delights me to use the past tense) congenitally incapable of not saying the things that sent his opponents back to their keyboards in horror and, to be completely honest about it, delight. Kim armed American opponents of our anachronistic military presence in Korea with maces and battleaxes every time he spoke in the presence of a reporter. No one could mix a cocktail of venom and lunacy — and insist that his entire nation join him in rounds of love shots — like Kim Won Ung. Will K-bloggers ever find another source of such exquisite material?