hankyoreh

President Yoon Suk-yeol speaks at an event commemorating the March 1 Independence Movement at the Yu Gwan-sun Memorial Hall in central Seoul on March 1, 2023. (courtesy of the presidential office)

By Pak Noja (Vladimir Tikhonov), professor of Korean Studies at the University of Oslo

The National Institute of Korean History, Academy of Korean Studies, Independence Hall of Korea and the Northeast Asian History Foundation — these four Korean organizations have one thing in common. Academics associated with the “new right” have recently been put in charge of all these organizations by President Yoon Suk-yeol.

To put that into perspective, the Korean government has appointed a figure from the new right who gives short shrift to the independence movement during Japan’s colonial occupation of Korea as director of Independence Hall, the very organization charged with researching and commemorating that movement.

The administration’s appointment provoked sharp criticism not only from the Heritage of Korean Independence, an organization for descendants of Korean freedom fighters, but even from the Dong-a Ilbo, a conservative daily newspaper that might be expected to side with the Yoon administration. In other words, even a fair number of conservatives are disturbed by the Yoon administration’s penchant for the new right.

Under Yoon, a bust of Gen. Hong Beom-do, a prominent freedom fighter, was removed from the Korean Military Academy because of his associations with communism. More recently, the Korean government signed off on a Japanese initiative to have the Sado mines, where many Koreans were subjected to slave labor during the colonial period, registered with UNESCO as a World Heritage site. Korean negotiators didn’t even force Japan to explicitly acknowledge that Koreans were forced to work at the mines.

Downplaying and denying the achievements of the left-leaning independence movement, prioritizing the brilliant careers of a handful of local elites over the pain suffered by Korean laborers and peasants during colonization, and trumpeting the “civilizing effect” of Japan’s colonial occupation — those are all hallmarks of the new right’s attitude toward history. Why has the new right earned the favor of Yoon to such a degree that he’s even being censured by conservative newspapers?

The historical campaign of the new right coalesced during the years 2004-2006, during the presidency of Roh Moo-hyun. It’s no exaggeration to say that the campaign was essentially a coordinated response by the conservative establishment to the Roh administration’s attempts to reckon with the history of collaboration with the Japanese occupiers, a reckoning that was demanded, either tacitly or vocally, by a large segment of the public.

The fact is that a major portion of the “ancestors” (both physical and institutional) of Korea’s establishment either personally served in Japan’s colonial administration or at the least focused on acquiring power and accumulating wealth while avoiding conflict with then colonial powers. Getting to the bottom of collaboration with the Japanese necessitated asking awkward questions about the colonial roots of family-owned newspapers, major chaebol conglomerates, religious institutions and the academy institution, questions that challenged the presumed legitimacy of Korea’s vested interests.

Those vested interests, in turn, felt obliged to launch a massive counterattack. What they wanted was total societal capture through new arguments that would not only thwart criticism of collaborators, but actually glamorize the practice.

Tragically enough, some of the scholars who succeeded at crafting the desired arguments were reformed Marxists. Though this trend is no longer much in evidence, some Marxists in Europe, America and Japan who were blinkered by a Western-oriented bias believed that other parts of the world had been trapped in an “Asiatic mode of production” and could not have modernized on their own without the aid of colonization.

Rhee Young-hoon, a former professor at Seoul National University, was one of the few Marxist-leaning historians in Korea who had studied the Joseon dynasty from the perspective of the Asiatic mode of production. As Lee pivoted to the far right in the 1990s, his former Western-centric Marxist position transformed into prototypical advocacy of colonial modernism.

Seen from this perspective, the Japanese Empire was the only force capable of “civilizing” the Joseon dynasty, a backward slave state that did not even have a basic system of private property — the only force capable of grafting modern capitalism onto its systems. And just like that, collaboration with the Japanese was repackaged as a patriotic contribution to civilizing the Korean nation.

As it happens, this view of world history has been highly useful for the Yoon administration. The new right’s rationalizations of Japan’s colonial program tie directly to the Yoon administration’s unwaveringly positive view of modern capitalism and imperialism.

Illustration by Kim Dae-jung

Along with justifying the Japanese Empire, Yoon and his allies regard our modern capitalistic civilization, which is grounded in private corporations and private property, as being a “blessing” for humanity. In contrast, they regard the Chinese and North Korean states, which originated in revolutions that rejected private property and which subordinate private corporations to the state, as “enemies of civilization.”

This kind of dichotomous attitude and the unconditional romanticization of the hegemonic state of the global system and its regional allies completely overlap with the Yoon administration’s diplomatic vision. Yoon’s ultra hard line of confrontation with North Korea and his rash and clearly contrived decoupling with China are only too well justified by a historical narrative that demonizes the two countries. By the same token, Yoon’s line of blind obedience to the US and of pursuing a de facto military alliance with Japan are justified by a historical narrative that pronounces those two countries as the champions of capitalist civilization.

In that sense, the new right’s historical narrative amounts to the wellspring of Yoon’s governing philosophy.

To be sure, the new right’s take on history evokes an innate antipathy from the majority of Koreans who trace their ancestors not to the capitalists and landowners who multiplied their wealth under the protection of their Japanese colonial overlords, but to the farmers and workers who were the victim of their depredations. Members of the far right disparage that antipathy as being “ethnonationalism,” but that has nothing to do with it.

From the perspective of younger Koreans who are engaged in the issue of climate change, the new right’s indefatigable praise of the capitalist powers who have been in the historical vanguard of demolishing our climate looks much more blinkered and anachronistic than any ethnonationalism.

As China, buoyed by its model of state capitalism, gradually emerges as the competing pillar to the US in a bipolar global order, the new right’s theory of history, which only credits the historical experience of America and Europe, looks like a tattered relic of the bygone era of Western-centrism.

Nevertheless, the Yoon administration, given its fondness for the new right and its historical perspective, has continued to employ a politics of memory grounded in that perspective, despite the criticism of the conservative press, and to crudely and awkwardly position new right figures in leadership positions at the very organizations responsible for managing Korea’s historical memory. Yoon apparently believes that such a historical policy will ultimately be tolerated amid inter-Korean tensions and the geopolitical conflagration sparked by the outbreak of war in Ukraine.

But I think that Yoon’s belief will ultimately be proven wrong. At a time of low growth, high inflation, contraction of real wages and insolvency for small business owners, the government’s wholehearted support for Japanese politicians’ agenda without any kind of corresponding concessions will strike a majority of Koreans as shameful subservience.

It’s simply nonsensical to sing Panglossian praises to “capitalist civilization” at a time when capitalism, both in Korea and in other countries, confronts a multifaceted crisis on many fronts. In the end, this thoughtless and biased recruitment of new right figures is a ticking time bomb that will one day detonate, inflicting a crippling blow on the Yoon administration.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]