B.R. Myers on the Propaganda Campaign to Cover Up ROK Government Corruption and the Coming Korean Confederation

ROK Drop favorite Professor B.R. Myers has a new article posted about the intense propaganda campaign launched by the Korean left to first impeach President Park and now is currently being used to cover up for ruling party scandals and setting conditions for implementation of the Korean confederation:

Druking, Burning Sun, Mokpo real estate, SillaJen, the Ulsan mayoral race, Pak Won-soon, Optimus, Yun Mi-hyang, Lime, Cho Kuk — Justice Minister Cho Kuk: More interesting than any of the recent scandals these keywords stand for has been the nationalist left’s unyielding defense of the pols and officials involved. We even saw self-described feminists jeer the frightened woman who had complained of the Seoul mayor’s sexual advances. Whistle-blowers and investigators are denounced as “pro-Japanese” elements working for the opposition, which is in fact the most docile and insignificant one this country has seen since the early 1980s.

The temptation now, to which my conservative acquaintances have succumbed with a certain relief, is to write off the ruling camp as a network of insider traders and real-estate speculators: old-school pols who rig elections, demote prosecutors, and imprison journalists for no other reason than to keep outsiders from the trough. But corruption and conviction are not the antitheses they are made out to be. One can hardly expect people who question the very legitimacy of the South Korean state to fret overmuch about breaking its laws. This is not to imply that the parliamentary right is more honest.

Granted, the  cascade of scandals has given the lie to the ruling camp’s vaunted commitment to reform. The general non-response, meanwhile, has belied the public’s commitment to it, something the foreign press corps — “big-mouthed and clueless,” to borrow what Peter Handke once said of the Spiegel — took at face value in 2016.  None of the alleged misconduct, which uncannily replicates or amplifies that for which Park and her people were convicted, has aroused much indignation from the man in the street. Even considering that voters are more tolerant of abuses of power when public expenditures are rising sharply (Melo and Pereira, 2015), as they have been here since 2017, we must acknowledge that the so-called Candlelight Revolution was a more top-down affair than we were led to believe.

This should have been obvious to us from the demonstrators’ struggle to give coherent reasons for their festive-seeming “outrage” on the nightly news. They weren’t really mad as hell, but they believed they should be, thanks to an intense propaganda campaign orchestrated by the politico-media complex. 

B.R. Myers

I highly recommend reading the whole thing at the link. Professor Myers goes on to talk about the propaganda efforts going on now to describe the Korean left’s Confederation idea as being like the European Union. The propaganda effort is also trying to bury historical memory of North Korea in order to set Clinton era like conditions for a deal to be struck with the U.S. All this is going on with little notice or care from the media or the so called North Korea policy experts who Myers is most critical of in his article.