Walk Away from South Korea

2,448 words

On December 3, 2024, the President of South Korea, Yoon Suk Yeol, declared martial law. The Korean Army ruled the land until opposition parliamentarians organized a riot in Seoul and the whole thing fell apart after two hours or so. Presently, the mainstream media is praising a “badass woman,” Ahn Gwi-ryeong, for “saving democracy” when she briefly grabbed a soldier’s rifle during the riot. Nobody in Seoul “saved democracy,” however, and the situation is more complex and problematic than claimed by the mainstream media. Even if President Yoon Suk Yeol eventually gets the Saddam Hussain treatment so that democracy can go on forever and ever and ever, amen, the political and social problems that led to the crisis will remain. These problems are not able to be resolved without a major social revolution.

Americans don’t need to be involved in this revolution. It is time for Americans to be out of the Korea business entirely. South Korea is in a deceptively peaceful neighborhood. Northeast Asia is a dangerous place – mushroom cloud, poison gas, and biological warfare dangerous. The South Koreans are not worth protecting from this danger. Americans should demand enormous tariffs on South Korean products, as well as a travel ban. American troops should be withdrawn too. If you know of a Korean immigrant in the USA with iffy papers – call the DHS and demand deportation immediately. Sell any South Korean investment. If a thing is South Korean – burn it! Unless it’s coal. Boycott. Divest. Sanction.

The Group Evolutionary Behaviors of a People Always Ruled by Others

At no point in the history of Korea was there an epoch which compares to the glories and discoveries of ancient Greece. There were no Korean seafaring explorers such as Pliny the Elder or Christopher Columbus although Korea is surrounded on three sides by the wide open sea. There were and are no innovative philosophical ideas or scientific insights which have emerged from Korea. This dismal cultural output could be because they never developed the cultural pre-requisites for liberty and self-rule.

Korea was a vassal of China for centuries and then effectively became a Japanese colony in the 1890s. After 1945, Korea became nominally self-ruling, but in its most critical functions, especially security, she still relies on the United States. By treaty, should a shooting war break out on the Korean peninsula, the Americans have operational control of the South Korean military. Should the Americans leave, South Korea’s freedom of action will be curtailed by the Japanese, Chinese, and Russians in the same unpleasant way that Cuba’s freedom of action is curtailed by America.

Admittedly, there is the chicken or the egg question here. It could be that the Koreans have been ruled by others because they’ve been unable to create a society like ancient Greece as much as the reverse, were foreign rulers stifle innovation by taking out any Korean with initiative. Regardless, the present prosperity marked by neon signs and skyscrapers in Seoul is new and might be a temporary aberration. Korean industry is a copy of that found in Japan and America and is carefully sheltered by the supportive economic policies of both nations. Korean culture without American and Japanese connections is North Korea. When the Americans arrived in Korea after World War II, orphans died ignored on the street. When the Japanese arrived in the 1890s, the situation was even worse. K-Pop is an imitation of music from Japan and American boy bands.

Koreans don’t really understand cause-and-effect. Perhaps that statement is too harsh. It is certain, however, that a large proportion of the Korean people have a difficult time envisioning the likely outcome of an ongoing event. A perfect example of this was the actions of the passengers and crew of the MV Sewol, a ferry which slowly capsized and sank in 2014 after its improperly stowed cargo shifted. The captain left the ship immediately and claimed he was a passenger after being rescued by the Coast Guard. The remaining crew told the passengers to stay put. The passengers, many of whom were students, stayed in their cabins and played on their cell phones as the ship slowly overturned and went under. No chaperone or teacher organized the students to get on the lifeboats before it was too late. Hundreds perished.

The events on the MV Sewol weren’t a one-off thing. The US Army shows videos to its newly arrived solders warning them that Korean children have no sense of danger around a roadway. The videos will show young children carelessly running around on the edge of a busy street and then stepping in front of the moving cars. Korean parents don’t see the danger themselves, so there is little to no instruction on how a child should behave in such a circumstance.

In 2002, two Korean teenage girls were killed in a traffic accident when they failed to recognize the danger they were in on a roadside. The girls were squatting on their haunches with their eyes shut and hands covering their ears on a blind curve as a convoy of American combat engineers drove by. One of the vehicles ran over the girls. The accident caused an uproar, but the root cause of the event went unrecognized, the girls should have been paying attention to the danger. Life is an IQ test.

Similar catastrophes abound in Korea. Shopping malls collapse due to shoddy workmanship and holiday events become crowd crushes. There is also a steady drip of such tragedies which are too small for the American media to notice.

The French philosopher Joseph de Maistre said words to the effect that there was no universal human. The different languages shape the thoughts of different nationalities thereby making Frenchmen incompatible to Germans or Moroccans. Language itself is shaped by the configuration of the brains of the speakers also, so there is an evolutionary factor. This is especially true regarding Koreans. Paul S. Crane, a missionary doctor who lived in the country and fully knew and understood the people, describes a Korean word, kibun, which is a perfect example of de Maistre’s idea. Crane writes,

[Kibun] has no true English equivalent. “Mood” may come close, but much more is involved. When the kibun is good, one “feels like a million dollars,” when bad, “one feels like eating worms.” Kibun is one of the most important factors influencing conduct and relations with others…In interpersonal relationships, keeping the kibun in good order often takes precedence over other considerations. It is believed by many that it is more important to feel right than to be right, if a choice must be made. One tries, by all means, to operate in a manner that will improve the kibun both in oneself and in those with whom one has dealings. To damage someone’s kibun may effectively cut off relationships and create an enemy…This emphasis on feelings and appearance often makes it seem that, in the minds of many, it is more important to have things appear well than that they actually be well. [1]

In a culture fettered by kibun, feelings matter more than facts. To avoid damaging kibun, one must lie and say, “the job will be done by 5 p.m.” even though the job won’t be finished at that time. The captain of a sinking ship who was the first to leave will say he is a passenger to keep his and other’s kibun on an even keel. There isn’t a way to avoid major kibun damage when the lie is discovered, however. Should a Korean get pinned down by such a lie, he will ask a series of irrelevant questions to the matter at hand which hint that the matter should be dropped so that kibun can be maintained. The reader is correct to see this as disingenuous, confusing, and deadly in the case of a crisis.

Then there is another emotion which also proves that de Maistre’s ideas are correct – han. This word has no English equivalent. It is a mix of ugly and negative emotions which are best expressed in the “manifesto” of the 2007 Virginia Tech mass shooter, Seung-Hui Cho.

Han is a neologism. South Korean society – its propaganda offices, NGOs, and educational institutions – continually seek to cultivate resentment towards the Japanese, the Americans, and others. This has grown the collection of pre-existing negative emotions a Korean might feel into the menace of han. There was something like han before Japanese rule, however. It certainly didn’t fall out of the sky.

A Korean locked in the throes of uncontrolled han cannot be reasoned with. What is more alarming is that correctly determining the facts as they are can damage a Korean’s kibun which then creates uncontrolled han. To put it frankly, these emotions are immature and silly. They don’t indicate a greatness of soul, and they are the foundation of much of the ugly churn in South Korea’s domestic politics. These emotions are also why the expressions on the faces of South Koreans during their many protests convey petulance rather than anger or steely resolve.

The Road to the Crisis

South Korea is as politically polarized as Kansas Territory was before the US Civil War. The polarization became apparent after the Americans set up Syngman Rhee, a former student at a Methodist missionary school, to be South Korea’s president. He took office in 1948. Rhee’s administration was immediately challenged by North Korean backed communists in South Korea, however. The communists had differing rates of success in the different South Korean regions during the 1948 unrest. They made the most significant gains in southwest South Korea. The region also became a hotbed of apolitical banditry, and the South Korean army was oriented there during the outbreak of the Korean War in mid-1950. The most significant city in southwest South Korea is Kwangju (sometimes spelled Gwangju).

This rebellion in southwest South Korea was ugly. Many of the government officials and their families were killed in cruel ways if they were captured by the communists. The rebellion also had an impact on American white advocacy. Jack Mohr, the Christian Identity preacher, was briefly captured by communists while serving in Yeosu, which is in southwest South Korea, and he was radicalized by the atrocities.

Rhee resigned from the presidency in 1960 after accusations of voting fraud led to large protests. The next administration was weak and troubled, and it was ousted in a coup in 1961 led by a military leader named Park Chung Hee. President Park was a left-of-center military technocrat cast from the same mold as Harry Truman. He rapidly industrialized the country. This industrialization wasn’t a series of inefficient five-year plans such as that carried out by Stalin, it worked because Park capitalized on the American Cold War policy of buying compliance from allies by allowing low-end manufacturing from America to be outsourced. Wealth and jobs flowed from America to Korea.

President Park was murdered by his intelligence and security chief on 26 October 1979. The motivations for the assassination are vague, and multiple theories for its cause abound. The most likely reason is mundane – the kibun or han of Park’s killer. On 12 December 1979, the Korean Army carried out another coup, installing Chun Doo-hwan as president.

Chun was immediately faced with a rebellion in Gwangju – in southwest South Korea. He sent the army there and put the conflict down. This event marks the start of the bad blood between South Koreans and the Americans, since Americans were presumed to have supported the repression. Most Americans have no understanding of this fact.

Ironically, the entire affair was the result of declining American involvement in South Korea. The Americans were withdrawing troops after a three-year low-grade border war on the DMZ ended in 1969. President Carter was considering a full withdraw when Park was assassinated. The Americans were thus trapped between too little support to influence events and too much involvement to avoid any consequences.

Chun ruled until 1988, when he peacefully transferred power after the elections of 1987. Anti-American attitudes then exploded. They first manifested during the Olympic Boxing events at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, and they’ve never subsided. From the viewpoint of the timeframe of the End of History, from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 until the 9-11 attacks in 2001, the protests in Gwangju were “pro-democracy” protests. However, given the history of communist insurgencies there – where the wives of the police and government officials were cruelly chopped into pieces in 1948 – the idea the protestors cared about “democracy” in 1980 falls flat. Democracy is a meaningless term compared to the political reality of the friend-enemy distinction underpinned by ferocious ideologies and regional hatreds. The people of southwestern South Korea are bitterly at odds with northern South Korea and will do anything to harm a president from a region or party which is not part of their community.

The current South Korean President, Yoon Suk Yeol, was elected in 2022 and is from Seoul. He is from the “conservative” political faction at odds with the “liberals” in southwest South Korea. The crisis which led to his abortive military coup started when Yoon recognized that South Korea didn’t have enough doctors. He therefore encouraged the medical schools to recruit and train more students. This damaged the kibun of enough of South Korea’s doctors that they went on strike, compounding the health care problem. Meanwhile, parliament is investigating Yoon for corruption – he is corrupt – they’re all corrupt – so the investigation is pointless.

Yoon’s opposition in parliament has done nothing to help deal with the health care crisis or any other problem, and the government is in complete gridlock. The doctors’ strike is the perfect example of a faction of society badly damaging other parts of society for trivial reasons. This failure of patriotism invites tyranny and repressive government actions.

Edmond Burke perfectly expressed the situation when he wrote, “Kings will be tyrants by policy when subjects are rebels from principle.” This statement is not taken out of context when applied to the ongoing trouble in South Korea. President Yoon is behaving like a tyrant because one social class in South Korea’s unhappy society is rebelling from the principle of supporting the other parts of society with its self-aggrandizing han-fueled kibun-damaged petulance. Americans need to walk away while the South Koreans foul their own nest.

Notes

[1] Crane, Paul S., Korean Patterns, (South Korea: Kwangin Publishing Company, 1967) p. 25

Bibliography

Burke, Edmond, Reflections on the Revolution in France, (London: James Dodsley, Pall Mall, 1790)

Crane, Paul S., Korean Patterns, (South Korea: Kwangin Publishing Company, 1967)

Hong, Cathy Park, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, (New York: One World, 2020)

Straub, David, Anti-Americanism in Democratizing South Korea (Stanford, California: Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, 2015)

Wickham, John A., Korea on the Brink: From the “12/12 Incident” to the Kwangju Uprising, 1979 – 1980, (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1999)