This article was originally published on May 14, 2017, under the title” Moon’s right-hand guy, former companion to the North”. It was republished on June 18, 2020, after next- Chief of Staff Im Jong- seok was mentioned as next- President’s Moon Jae- in’s possible candidate for the article of unification minister. In response to the news that former President Moon has claimed in a recently published narrative that he credits Kim Jong Un’s pledge to forego the North’s nuclear weapons, another author ended up getting the job, but we are publishing the item for the second time with new articles.
South Korea’s fresh leader was appointing a right-hand man about whom there could be no question as US prosecutors hunkered down last week to evaluate whether US President Donald Trump’s election campaign colluded with a hostile government.
Im Jong- seok served a jail term for actions that a judge considered aiding his country’s key enemy, North Korea. Im was found guilty and given a sentence in 1989 for organizing a fellow leftist activist’s illegal visit to Pyongyang, which the regime of North Korea exploited for propaganda gain. And he’s also the president’s chief of staff, Moon Jae-in.
There seems to be little surprise in Seoul about the appointment of Im, who’s now 51. After all, Moon was a former militant anti-government activist. Later, he was a staunch supporter of two previous presidents ‘ decade-long efforts to implement the” Sunshine” policy of making nice to the North in the hope that the two would be able to settle their differences.
Moon has since his election sought to downplay his differences with US policy toward North Korea. So it is left to only a few observers to make the suggestion that Im’s appointment sounds like an appalling development.
Among them is the conservative Liberty Korea Party, which expressed “regret” and claimed the move raised questions about Moon’s own attitude toward North Korea.
Another is yours truly, who happened to be in Pyongyang in 1989 – for the World Festival of Students and Youth, when the activist’s forbidden visit occurred – and again in 1992, when the Northern regime was showing off the propaganda fruits. Here’s the background to the story:
Whatever cosmetic touches North Korea had used to sway its claims to have “made a paradise,” and how far behind South Korea and China had actually fallen, the nation in 1989 still managed to have an air of dynamism that appealed to some people outside its borders.
The ideology was even proving exportable to South Korea. In the South’s quest for stability, a virulent Pyongyang fever had grown to become a significant complicating factor.
Radically inclined South Korean students found revolutionary egalitarianism, economic self-sufficiency, unification zeal, and anti-Americanism in North Korean President Kim Il Sung’s teachings appealing. His pre- liberation guerrilla opposition to the Japanese made him a patriot hero in their eyes.
Based on that curiosity, the Kims continued to believe that a resurgence of unrest in the South would cause a leftist insurrection, reversing the otherwise established course of history and facilitating reunification under Pyongyang’s terms.
The main influences on Koreans in the South as well as the North had been authoritarian up until that point. They had lived under the dynastic system of royalty and hereditary nobles backed up with Chinese Confucian thought. Then, under the emperor-admitting Japanese colonial rule, they had lived.
The only significant change was that North Korea underwent Soviet and then Chinese communist influence starting in 1945, while South Korea underwent American influence. American- style democracy was far from transforming South Korean politics completely. Even after a relatively free election in 1987, the authoritarian tradition continued to rule among political leaders of all stripes.
Thus, it was not unreasonable to assume that American influence was just a thin veneer that could be replaced with socialist and communist ideas, as did many in the North and some in the South. By 1989, the campus atmosphere in the South had become reminiscent of Americans ‘ 1960s slogan,” Do n’t trust anyone over 30″.
By the time they returned to their teaching positions in their home countries, the vast majority of South Korean scholars were too old and established to be regarded by the student radicals as trustworthy advisers.
Some ardent supporters of outright pro-communist propaganda were present. So did some foreign scholars ‘ revisionist theories that condemned the roles of the American and South Korean governments while going easy on criticism of the Northern regime.
After the South had previously outlawed books on these subjects, South Koreans who had been drawn to Marxist ideas while abroad were unable to publicly promote them after their return. After 1987, a belated grant of democratic freedoms had suddenly given Southerners the freedom to experiment with Marxism and North Korean ideology.
After decades without contact with such ideas, perhaps it should not have been surprising that substantial numbers in the South were not inoculated with the skepticism needed to counter the simple, if often deceptive, appeal of Northern propaganda. The sensation was made more compelling by the new and previously unattainable.
It almost seemed as though Koreans on both sides of the Demilitarized Zone had traveled back five decades in an intellectual time machine because North Koreans themselves practiced the same kind of Stalinism that briefly appealed to some leftist Americans in the 1930s during the Great Depression.
South Korean officials were at wit’s end trying to cope. American diplomats and military leaders also expressed concern. South Korean students were largely unaware of the North’s existence, and they were still prevented from visiting without special permission.
When their government insisted that the North was a bleak place, they considered what the government had told them previously and, perhaps understandably, decided not to believe it.
I attended the well-known stage production of Kim Jong Il’s” Flower Girl,” which is a propaganda production. It’s comparable to” Les Miserables,” which I just saw on Broadway, in terms of the emotional quality. Just before the curtain rose for the first act the guest of honor swept into the theatre, receiving a standing ovation.
Im Su-gyong, a stunning South Korean university student, traveled to Pyongyang from a third nation to attend the youth festival, defying her government. She was promoting a student march for a pro-unification initiative that ran from the peninsula’s northern border to the southern tip, through the normally unreachable Demilitarized Zone, and down to the southern tip.
Her arrival in Pyongyang created pandemonium. She was mobbed by Northerners, who obviously were genuinely moved and delighted by her visit. The agitated cameraman could n’t keep his camera still in the televised arrival scene, creating a moment of impromptu programming.
Im Su- gyong soon returned to the South, where she, Im Jong- seok and the Reverend Moon Ik- hwan, a dissident leader who had accompanied her were jailed for violating the National Security Act. ( She was given the surname Lim back then, and it turns out that the two Ims are n’t related. )
Im Su-gyong’s imprisonment only served to make her a martyr for the Southern radicals ‘ cause, much to the delight of the North’s authorities, who turned their attention to creating domestic propaganda out of her plight.
During another visit to Pyongyang in 1992, I was taken to an art studio where the main non- Kim subject of the artists turned out to be Im Su- gyong. The most dramatic courtroom scene from her trial in Seoul was a collection of sculptures and paintings of hers in a variety of poses.
The South Korean radicals ‘ affinity for seeing issues in black and white was reflected in the image of ideological purity Pyongyang projected.
The propaganda mills of Pyongyang never failed to point out that the South still suffered the ignominy of having foreign troops on its soil,” controlling” its armed forces, buying its women, golfing on its prime real estate and disseminating crass American culture over one of the most desirable of the scarce television channels.
Never was made of the fact that US troops were present to prevent a similar invasion by the North in 1950; instead, Northern propaganda still claimed that the South had invaded.
In contrast to the more complicated and cautious South Korean policy, Pyongyang’s call for immediate reunification had a straightforward appeal.
Pyongyang presented early reunification as a spiritual as well as a practical imperative for achieving Korea’s destiny as a major nation, free of contaminating foreign influence and able to stand alone, whole, combining the North’s considerable mineral resources with the South’s arable land. A cooperative farm’s director said,” If our country is reunified, it will be rich in food.”
Pyongyang continued to insist in the open that it was not interested in using force to unify the peninsula. Many young South Koreans fell for this, failing to realize that the Northern regime knew it was doomed if it could not prevail absolutely.
Along with its reunification policy, North Korea’s emphasis on economic equality helped some South Korean radicals overcome the abundant evidence that capitalism had allowed them to advance much further and more quickly in terms of economic growth.
Despite Seoul’s advantages, Pyongyang’s leaders hoped to use young South Koreans ‘ admiration for Kim Il-sung’s ideas to revolutionize the South and win the race. South Korea had a few thousand radical disciples of Kim Il Sung, problem enough for the authorities in Seoul.
However, one would have assumed that almost all of the Southern people were willing to worship Kim in light of North Korean propaganda. People in the North appeared to believe all of this because there was hardly any information on the contrary.
As has been frequently reported, radios made available to regular people were actually built so that they could only receive government broadcasts. The newspapers purveyed strictly the party line.
As I discovered years later when I interviewed de facto prisoners in the South, including Ahn Myong- chol, a former prison camp guard, the joke was on the propagandists who had supported Im Su-gyong’s visit. I asked Ahn if he’d known anything about South Korea before his defection in 1994.
He responded,” Only that it was economically a better place than North Korea.” ” When I watched televised demonstrations in South Korea, I could see the buildings in the distance; the South Koreans looked pretty well off. I heard rumors of vast numbers of cars. 1989 was a significant year.
Then Ahn made up this zinger:” People’s thought changed after Im Su-gyong’s visit.” They believed South Korea was better off than North Korea because they could n’t feed them. It was seeing her appearance – she seemed well off, acted free and confident”.
Another defector interviewee, Nam Chung, had escaped in 1997 after being banished from Pyongyang and sent to a mining camp with other family members to atone for the sins of his elder brother, a student in Moscow who had defected to South Korea.
Nam told me,” I first learned that my brother was in South Korea in 1994. After all the negative things I had learned about South Korea, I began to wonder why he would go there.
Then, according to Nam,” I saw Im Su- gyong and Moon Ik- hwan on television, then reports of their arrest after they arrived in North Korea. But when they came we could see they were well- fed. After only three years, she was released from jail and gave birth to a child. After only three years, a marriage and a child, I assumed South Korea must have a lot of freedom.
” Then there are the film clips of students demonstrating,” Nam continued”. We could n’t even dream of such a thing in North Korea, which is unthinkable. What’s the rest of society like, if they have that kind of freedom to fight the police, I wondered, despite the North Korean media’s portrayal of it as a problem?
” And they were n’t starving. That’s when I began to criticize the Kims ‘ cronies. I’d never dare to criticize the Kim family.
And what, one wonders, has new Presidential Chief of Staff Im Jong- seok learned over the decades since 1989? According to reports, he is still suspected of having pro-Pyongyang beliefs. In some way or another, I guess we’ll find out.
Veteran Asia correspondent Bradley K. Martin is the author of Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty, from which some passages are excerpted in this article.