Tag Archives: Korea

I worry about Korea

Posted on by
7

No, I haven’t forgotten my Korean friends. I daily fear for their safety. Yet merely saying that I am angry at Donald Trump for increasing their danger doesn’t seem adequate.

Besides, I’m distracted. Almost daily the president draws me into a new worry by saying, Tweeting, or doing something insensitive or abusive. Before I have time to write my concerns about Korea, he’s taken me in another direction.

With an attention-challenged president our population responds in like manner. One day I worry about Korea, the next day about young African American men, the next about Dreamers, the next about Puerto Ricans, even—I still can’t believe this—I worry about football players. Today we mourn the loss of life in Las Vegas. Tomorrow? Trump seems intent on keeping us off kilter. That way we don’t have time to criticize him in a coherent manner.

Yet I’m trying, for a moment, to focus on my concerns for Korea.

I have fond memories of the country and its people. Some I met when they studied here in the U.S.. Others I learned to know when my husband twice taught a semester at Yonsei University in Seoul. I hesitate to make generalizations about any group of people. I will say, though, that Koreans I have known are earnest, persevering, passionate, and hospitable. If cultural ways become embedded in the genes, it’s likely that their relatives to the north, whom I have not met, share those qualities.

Donald Trump is obviously unaware of history and cultural differences. Because Korea is a small country (north and south) its destiny has been at the whims of others. Still fresh in people’s memory is the brutal Japanese occupation of the peninsula and the civil war that ravaged the entire country, especially the north, which the U.S. carpet bombed. There is no reason to believe that Kim, if he feels threatened, will not send missiles to Seoul, a city of nearly 10 million people and a mere 35 miles from the border. Trump seems to believe that victory (his personal victory over Kim) will come via bullying on Twitter.

Why aren’t Americans saying more about this? Partly because we daily have something new to react to. A new Tweet, a hurricane, a gun massacre. Many of us do care but we feel helpless. That’s how tyranny becomes implanted, isn’t it?

 

 

Kim Jong-Un as a cult leader

Posted on by
1

In 2008, on an autumn day in Seoul, my husband and I hiked the mountain behind Yonsei University. Part way we came upon a group of young men in camouflage digging a long ditch. What were they doing, we asked in English. They were South Korean soldiers digging a trench in case North Korea invaded. North Korea’s threat became real to me.

Two semesters in Seoul and one day in North Korea do not qualify me as an expert on the peninsula. The day trip north, though, made me aware of how short a distance the border is from Seoul, one of the planet’s most densely populated cities.

A novel I’m reading, set in the compound of a cult, brings to mind the Jonestown Massacre, where 900 of Jim Jones’s followers drank cyanide-laced fruit punch. If we have learned anything from groups like that, it is that cult leaders don’t operate out of what many of us consider rational behavior. For the leader, at least, submitting to someone else’s authority is worse than death.

It’s no stretch to believe that Kim Jong-un, like his father, is a cult leader. He has convinced the North Korean people that no matter how bad things are, it’s worse everywhere else. He also promotes paranoia: the U.S. is set on annihilating their country. All sacrifices the people make are for a greater good.

In Kim’s apocalyptic world view, violence and destruction are inevitable. He can justify the murder of a half-brother and uncle, the imprisonment and oppression of the North Korean people. Perhaps North Koreans have come to accept that if they are going to die anyway, their Supreme Leader will at least be in control of their final days.

Meanwhile the U. S. military acts as if Kim might respond according to our rationality. Place a battleship nearby, rattle the sabers. He’ll see our resolve and back down.

What we know about cult behavior, though, suggests that it’s hard, if not impossible, to predict the leader’s and his followers’ reactions. An apocalyptic end that includes bombing Seoul may be more alluring than all other options.

Sure, we may prevent Kim from producing a missile that can reach the U.S. But Seoul, with its population of over 10 million, is just 35 miles away.