Tag: B.R. Myers

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.

I think all of us who closely follow Korea issues have noticed how the foreign press will not report on Moon administration scandals that are very similar and arguably worse than what former President Park Geun-hye was impeached for. This is in stark contrast to the massive interest the foreign press showed during the timeframe prior to the impeachment of President Park.

Well now ROK Drop favorite Professor B.R. Myers shares his opinion on why this is:

1) Since Trump was elected, most Western correspondents feel a moral duty to root openly for whatever main political figure in the host country they consider less Trump-like, who in this case is Moon. The same “mirror imaging” dictates that they root against South Korea’s main opposition party, to which they occasionally apply the label “far right,” although it’s well to the left of our Republicans, and most of its members voted in favor of impeaching Park in 2016.

2) When deciding which local stories merit attention, correspondents (and perhaps their editors) seem to follow the lead of the New York Times’ bilingual correspondent Choe Sang-hun, whose own record of stories over the past 10 or so years parallels the agenda of the once-opposition, now staunchly government-loyal Hankyoreh newspaper he used to write for. The language barrier also forces correspondents to rely on local assistants and interns who, like most young people here, get their news from the Naver portal, which has ties to the Blue House and steers clear of stories riling up the Moon-critical half of the country.

3) Foreign journalists are as reluctant as their local colleagues to annoy Moon’s excitable netizen base, especially since the orchestrated attacks in 2019 on a South Korean journalist for Bloomberg who had referred to his reputation in some quarters as a “spokesman for Pyongyang.” (The chairman of the ruling party denounced her as “a black-haired foreigner” for her “borderline traitorous” article.)

B.R. Myers

You can read much more at the link, but Professor Myers goes on to explain how the foreign media is giving favorable reporting to the Moon administration for how they are handling the coronavirus outbreak despite weeks of problems that Koreans were highly upset about similar to what you seeing going on in the U.S. now. The foreign media is also helping the Moon administration to scapegoat the Shincheonji Church for the coronavirus outbreak problems as well.

ROK Drop favorite, Professor B.R. Myers has posted his thoughts about the outcome of the Hanoi summit between President Trump and Kim Jong-un. In the article Myers says President Trump did the right thing walking away from the summit which will probably not win Professor Myers too many fans in academia and the media:

Donald Trump did the right thing in Hanoi, in a rare accession of good sense, but only because Kim Jong Un, in an equally rare lapse of it, tried to get too much at once. Conservative South Koreans on Youtube cheered the summit collapse as the end of America’s efforts to appease Pyongyang. They also mocked Moon Jae-in for having announced, on the very next day, that he will continue pushing for what I call the ethnic exemption from sanctions, namely, permission for some degree of inter-Korean economic cooperation.

In fact Moon understands the Americans far better than his opponents do. He knows the softening of our resolve has quite a way to go yet. If talks between Pyongyang and Washington do not resume very soon, we can expect the usual American op-ed writers to back Moon’s call for the ethnic exemption. If Kim is smart he will offer just enough to bring it about, and visit Seoul to help force the Americans’ hand.

B.R. Myers

You can read more at the link, but Myers believes that the Moon administration will now highly pressure the Trump administration to allow an “ethnic exemption” to sanctions to reopen Kaesong and the Kumgang Resort tours. I don’t see President Trump bending on this unless the North Koreans give something up just as valuable in return.

Myers in the rest of the article also provides a good historical analysis how the Korean left was just as much if not more collaborating with the Imperial Japanese than the Korean right. This is significant because with the failure of the summit, the Moon administration in South Korea will likely further push anti-Japanese sentiment to create a common cause with North Korea.

The Korean left also uses Japanese sentiment to label their domestic political enemies on the right as pro-Japanese collaborators even though historically the left was probably the more significant collaborators.

B.R. Myers does relatively few radio interviews, so it was a pleasure to speak with him at length this week while I hosted a KBS radio program. #korea #dprk https://t.co/1B4JTqL1Us

— Kurt Achin (@KurtAchin) September 26, 2018

Below are excerpts from some more great analysis by Professor B.R. Myers about the state of Inter-Korean affairs and the United States.  This first excerpt shows how President Moon really feels about the US-ROK alliance:

This is in line with the remarkable discretion Moon Jae-in has sustained since the start of his election campaign. Never does he speak more guardedly than when around foreigners critical of the North. Shortly after he took office I asked two Americans who had talked with him on separate occasions what impression they had got: “well-rehearsed,” said one, “well-drilled” the other. Had he given vent to the sort of anti-American, pro-North remarks Roh Moo Hyun went in for (though Roh was conservative in comparison), his policies would have encountered more resistance.

His base knows how he really feels. During the presidential election campaign in 2012 the novelist Kong Chi-yŏng, a prominent supporter, tweeted cheerfully that the Yankee-go-home candidate Lee Jung-Hee sounded “like Moon’s inner voice.” The conservatives pounced, and she had to do a quick Prufrock: It wasn’t what she’d meant at all. Since then the Moon camp has shown remarkable discipline. Professor Moon Chung-in is an exception of sorts, since it’s his job to send up trial balloons.  [B.R. Myers]

I have long believed that President Moon is just a better polished, smarter, and more disciplined version of former President Roh Moo-hyun.  Remember Moon was Roh’s Chief of Staff during his presidency, so learned well from all of Roh’s mistakes.  This discipline and political smarts he learned has allowed Moon to sell himself as a centrist when he is in fact a leftist.

This next excerpt shows how the Moon administration plans to implement their confederation plans with North Korea:

To assume that the two Korean administrations do not already see each other as confederates, and behave accordingly, albeit discreetly, is like assuming that a man and woman planning a marriage are not yet having sex. When we ask for Moon’s help in getting the other half of the peninsula to denuclearize, we are in effect asking this fervent nationalist to help remove the future guarantor of a unified Korea’s security and autonomy. Why should he comply? The only remaining point of the US-ROK alliance is to ease the transition to a confederation — which would obviate that alliance altogether.

The recent news of South Korean violations of sanctions (and of a presidential award just given to the main importer of North Korean coal) is merely illustrative. It’s trivial in comparison to the basic truth staring us in the face: No true liberal-democratic ally of the United States would think of leaguing up with an anti-American dictatorship, let alone one still in the thrall of a personality cult. I’m not sure whether the Trump administration is unaware of this or merely pretending to be.

At any rate a peculiar pattern has repeated itself every few weeks or so since Moon took office. It goes like this. First the Blue House is caught in some statement or act of disloyalty to the spirit of the alliance — like appointing an unrepentant former enforcer of North Korean copyrights to the second most powerful post in the government. (I don’t mean the prime minister.) South Korean conservatives then shout in chorus, “The Americans won’t stand for this!” Whereupon the White House rushes to say, in effect, “Oh yes we will!” It seems to revel in making pro-American, security-minded South Koreans look foolish.  (…….)

It’s therefore easy to imagine Trump or Pompeo expressing support for whatever “peace system” Moon and Kim happen to agree on, so long as progress toward denuclearization is made first. Any significant step in that direction — which we can expect the upcoming Pyongyang summit to announce with great fanfare — would then compel the US to sign off on  confederation, thus encouraging the South Korean public to do likewise. Before we know it, the ROK could be locked in an embrace it might eventually need American help to get out of.  [B.R. Myers]

As always I highly recommend reading the whole article from Professor Myers at the link, but at some point you would think the Trump administration would start pushing back on President Moon’s pro-North Korean agenda.  Possibly the suspension of Inter-Korean railway inspections by the United Nations Command is the start of a push back?

ROK Drop favorite Professor B.R. Myers has posted some thoughts about the Singapore Summit:

Considering how much of the agreement was obviously worked out before the summit — and with how many portents of American weakening — it’s wrong to blame Trump for what happened on the day itself. His buffoonery was mortifying, yes, but edifying too. All he did was act out the hoary conventional wisdom as if on a pantomime stage. The spectacle was a devastating caricature of all our wishful dealings with the North.

As the day unfolded it became clear that, once again, our side had devoted far more attention to event-planning than to ideological reconnaissance. We saw the usual indifference to the question of how the North could justify its existence after disarming. We saw the lie given to our tough-guy rhetoric. We saw a familiar and quintessentially American combination of credulity and condescension.

All this was as old as the nuclear crisis itself. But for once we got it without any dignifying sheen of sophistication. I suspect many observers who professed to be appalled by Trump’s performance were really only lamenting the lack of that sheen. Their criticism of him for not getting more from Kim in writing makes little sense. Either the regime has changed fundamentally or it hasn’t. If it has, it would indeed be counter-productive to impose a series of hurdles that must be jumped over within a certain time. If it hasn’t, no concessions it might commit to paper are going to have any more value than the last ones.  [B.R. Myers]

As always I recommend reading the whole posting at the link, but Professor Myers’ big issue with the Trump administration is that they are viewing North Korea as a failed communist state eager to open up and develop like China.  Myers believe this is wishful thinking if one studies and understands the ideology of the Kim regime.  The very legitimacy of the ruling Kim regime is threatened if it disarms and no longer seeks reunification under North Korean terms.

Professor Myers has been one of the strong advocates of the viewpoint that the overall goal of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program is to force the withdrawal of US troops and create a confederation of the Korean peninsula under North Korean terms.  This viewpoint has led to criticism by people who think the nuclear weapons are just to keep the US from trying to militarily remove the Kim Regime and that the North Koreans are not stupid enough to think they can actually unify the peninsula on their terms.

What this viewpoint does not understand is that the Kim regime is not going to seek reunification in a 1950’s like invasion, but rather through a war of skirmishes ending in a confederation on North Korean terms. One Free Korea sums up the Kim regime’s strategy the best in the below analysis:

The fall of Seoul will not end with the crash of tank treads through the Blue House gates, or by renaming Seoul Kim Il-Sung City, but with signatures, handshakes, smiles, clicking shutters, and the praise of editorialists that two warring states “de-escalated tensions pragmatically” by embarking on a “peace process.” The surrender will be too gradual, and the terms too vague, to be recognizable as such. It will have something like the consent of the governed — that is to say, the soon-to-be-ruled — through the assent of elected leaders who will approve a series of easy, lazy decisions to yield to Pyongyang’s calculated confrontations, embarking irreversibly toward the gradual strangulation of free debate, and then, a slow digestion into one-country-two-systems hegemony on Pyongyang’s terms.  [One Free Korea]

Read the whole thing at the link.

As usual Professor B.R. Myers has correctly predicted how the Korean left led by the Moon administration will push for a confederation with North Korea by touting the economic benefits:

Image of B.R. Myers from the Korea Herald.

A few months ago I predicted the ruling Minjoo Party would begin agitating for a league or confederation before the June 13 elections. I said that in doing so it would focus on the economic benefits.

Last week I received the various parties’ campaign materials in a big envelope. (As a permanent resident I am eligible to vote in local elections.) Sure enough, the Minjoo pamphlet has a slogan in big brushstroke font at the top of one page: “Peace Equals Economy!” Underneath, next to a photo of President Moon, is the somewhat coded but still urgent pledge to “construct a permanent peace system this year.”

Of course his base knows what this means. To quote an approving headline in the nationalist-left Hankyoreh on April 29:

The plan for unification via a North-South league is hidden in the Panmunjom Declaration.

Indeed it is, and in plain sight. But the Hankyoreh was quick to drop this talk, being mindful of the need to get the Americans to Singapore in as blissful a state of ignorance as possible. This is why street demonstrations for the “peace system” have so far been rather small and sedate affairs (though with a higher proportion of young participants than conservative rallies).  [B.R. Myers]

I highly recommend reading the whole article at the link.

ROK Heads may remember that the Moon administration has been attempting to take the word “free” out of the ROK constitution in order to allow the Kim regime to maintain power in North Korea after a confederation.

Besides constitutional reform, to make this confederation possible, President Moon and Kim Jong-un need President Trump to drop sanctions.  This would allow the Moon administration to invest billions into North Korea, re-open the near-slave labor Kaesong Industrial Complex, and open the tourism projects on North Korea’s east coast.  They would prefer President Trump to do this without the Kim regime having to give up their nuclear weapons.  Trump pushing the Kim regime to completely give up their nuclear weapons before sanctions are dropped makes Moon’s plans for a confederation much more difficult.  This is why Moon has been so complementary to President Trump and thrown around accolades such as “Nobel Peace Prize” in effort to win him over to drop sanctions.

Eventually, as B.R. Myers writes, both the Moon administration and the Kim regime hope this confederation will lead to their ultimate goal of the withdrawal of USFK.  As I have written about before, I don’t expect the Moon administration to directly call for this because it will mobilize the conservative ROK political opposition against him.  Instead he will use the cost sharing negotiations and anti-US groups to make life difficult for USFK to where the Trump administration decides on its own to withdraw USFK.

Once again I recommend reading B.R. Myers entire article at this link.

Below is an excerpt from ROK Drop favorite B.R. Myers who takes on Kim regime apologizers in regards to their recent military parade right before the start of the Olympic Games:

We have also been hearing that the parade of February 8 has nothing to do with the Olympics because a) the restoration of this day for commemorating the KPA’s founding took place in 2015, after a 37-year interval, and b) 2018 marks a “round” year in special need of a big splash. The obvious retort is to ask why the Kim Jong Il regime, for all its militarism, saw no reason to restore the holiday in time for the much “rounder” anniversary in 1998. Besides, in 2015 everyone already knew when and where the 2018 Winter Olympics would take place.

In line with an older tradition of South Korean apologism is the effort of the Unification Minister and other Pyongyang watchers to argue that the parade is no cause for alarm because these displays of resolve and might are merely for “domestic propaganda use,” for “unifying the North Korean people,” or for “maintaining the system.”

This recalls the wishful approach to propaganda with which many foreigners and even German Jews deceived themselves in the first years of the Third Reich. “Anti-Semitism,” they argued, “is too central to the legitimacy and popularity of Nazism for the regime not to profess it constantly in the strongest terms. Were Hitler to give the Judenhetze a rest even for a month or two, the public backlash would be swift and harsh. Yet we aren’t to worry too much, because he can’t possibly intend to act on that nonsense.”

If anything, the South Korean variant is even more irrational. After all, what the Nazis were planning was without precedent, whereas that same North Korean military whose founding is to be celebrated on February 8 once came very close to destroying the Republic of Korea.  [B.R. Myers]

You can read the rest at the link, but it is pretty convincing that this parade was organized specifically as a response to the Winter Olympics being hosted in South Korea since it wasn’t celebrated as a holiday until 2015.  The regime knew when the Winter Olympics were going to occur and this holiday fit nicely with the timeline.  If Park Geun-hye was still president I am sure the parade and rhetoric would have been more threatening to an external audience, however with President Moon in power they toned it down by North Korean standards.

Myers in his article goes on to explain how the regime must continue with bellicose rhetoric and threats domestically especially during a charm offensive like they are doing now with the Olympics.  The rhetoric and threats like this parade are used to remind North Koreans that final victory will only come through military strength that will defeat the evil American imperialists and their ROK lackeys.

It is this mentality which after the Olympics is over I suspect at some point the Kim regime will return to provocative behavior.  However, instead of blaming the ROK government they will likely try to blame the US in an effort to inflame anti-Americanism in South Korea.  The narrative will likely be that the Kim regime has tried to be peaceful and work towards unification during the Winter Olympics timeframe, but the evil American Imperialists continue with their aggressive behavior.  This will justify them conducting more nuclear and missile tests.

The earliest flashpoint to promote this narrative will be the Key Resolve military exercise coming up reportedly a month after the Winter Olympics are over.  This is assuming the exercise happens with reports that it may be cancelled.  Either way the Kim regime wins because both scenarios advance their effort to separate the ROK from the US.

Here is another great read from ROK Drop favorite B.R. Myers who discusses how the likely ultimate goal of the current Inter-Korean talks is to lead to Seoul being able to circumvent UN sanctions:

It seems very likely, then, that the North and South had discussed the Games and agreed on key points well before Kim Jong Un’s “surprising” reference to the event in his New Year’s address. In another sign of close coordination, key phrases from that speech turned up in the joint statement issued after the first talks.

I have seen a few American op-eds warning Moon not to be naive, but I don’t believe he seriously expects the current round of talks to make the North more amenable to discussing disarmament. Regardless of his astute rhetoric to the contrary, which is aimed at Washington, denuclearization is not a priority to him or the left in general, which has long seen the North’s nuclear program as America’s problem, and no serious threat to the South.

The two Korean governments are now getting on so well because they share the short-term objective of making the North look better despite its refusal to disarm — better to the South Korean people above all, but also to the world community, whose support is vital if the South is to regain its ethnic license to bypass UN sanctions on the North. It’s hardly unrealistic for Moon to hope for such a result.  [B.R. Myers]

As I have been saying repeatedly the glamorization of North Korea’s Masik Ski Resort and Mt. Geumgang are all intended to convince both the domestic and international public that South Korea should be able to restart tours to North Korea.  These tours were a major cash cow for the Kim regime before they were shut down in 2008 after a South Korean grandma was shot in the back and killed by a North Korean soldier.

Here is another passage from his article I think has a lot of truth to it in regards to describing the younger generation in South Korea:

It wouldn’t do, in any case, to make too much of young people’s dissatisfaction about either the hockey team or the planned entrance into the stadium under the peninsula flag. Moon is right in distinguishing it from principled opposition to inter-Korean reconciliation. (Not that he would be put off by that either.) As I have written before, the young here generally shift between nationalism and state spirit depending on which of the two requires less action or sacrifice from them at the time in question.

The lack of strong ideological education in support of the ROK nation before one’s self is something the Kim regime is clearly taking advantage of to push their agenda.

Anyway as alway I recommend reading all of B.R. Myers article at the link.

ROK Drop favorite B.R. Myers has been one of the strong advocates of the viewpoint that the overall goal of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program is to force the withdrawal of US troops and create a confederation of the Korean peninsula under North Korean terms.  This viewpoint has apparently led to a lot of criticism by people who think the nuclear weapons are just to keep the US from trying to militarily remove the Kim Regime and that the North Koreans are not stupid enough to think they can actually unify the peninsula on their terms:

Oddly enough, the most furious people are on the softline or apologetic part of the Pyongyang-watching spectrum. They never get this worked up when North Korea is called a gangster state, a drug-running operation or a giant gulag. Nor do they express such fervent opposition to (say) imperialist proposals for the US and China to get together and decide the fate and political character of the peninsula on their own.

No, it seems that the craziest, most reprehensible thing one can possibly say about North Korea is that it wants to unify the peninsula with as little bloodshed as possible. And apparently the worst thing one can say about the South Koreans — “INSANE” “psychobabble” even – is that the North might have reason to believe they wouldn’t fight to the death against such an effort. (Needless to say, I never said South Koreans are ready to “give away” their republic, as “T.K.” is no doubt well aware.)

I repeat: it is self-styled progressives and liberals who find these ideas so scandalous. True, I have often clashed at conferences with South Korean conservatives who bristle at my emphasis on the North’s nationalism. Being nationalists themselves, albeit of a more moderate sort, they think it makes the regime look too respectable, dignified, legitimate. I am told to chalk up the unification drive to a communizing urge — “it sounds scarier that way,” I was helpfully advised — or to the regime’s evil desire to cause as much suffering as possible. But the other side of the spectrum now seems far more upset.

Particularly striking is the general tendency to identify the idea as my personal thing. “T.K.” has not yet questioned the sanity of South Korea’s Minister of Unification, though he too is alarmed by increasing signals that Pyongyang wants to use its nukes to take over the peninsula. And many quite moderate analysts in South Korea have been saying much the same stuff since the 1990s. But for the Westerners now raging on Twitter, this is my trademarked idea. (As it becomes harder and harder to refute, the tendency will no doubt go in the opposite direction.)  [B.R. Myers]

You can read much more at the link, but B.R. Myers is not the only person who has been advocating this viewpoint.  It makes me wonder if the criticism he is receiving is caused more by the fact that his viewpoint is gaining traction with people inside the Trump administration?