“Good-bye, Moon”

The Gray Panthers on Saturday 7 May 2022

A week ago Saturday, about 500 energetic people staged the last Anti-President Moon Jae-in rally across the street from the historic Gwanghwamun Square in downtown Seoul. This was the culmination of five years of near weekly demonstrations against the unpopular South Korean President.

The demonstrators who worked peacefully to hold President Moon accountable for being too soft on both China and North Korea were almost all retired senior citizens who had come of age during the deprivations of the post-Korean War era, and have no interest in forfeiting the Phoenix-like economic miracle that allows for the prideful reference to the country as The Republic of Samsung.

The older generation of South Koreans has no interest in appeasing either China or North Korea, and the example of what British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain offered Adolf Hitler in the Munich Agreement on September 30, 1938 is not lost on anyone. 

 A year after Chamberlain had announced: “We have peace in our time,” the German Nazis launched WWII in Europe with the invasion of Poland.

Geography is destiny, and the Korean peninsula is an extension of China, a country that has dusted off Japan’s playbook of power politics from the last century, and is poised to bring Taiwan to heel – just like Hong Kong two years ago.

After Taiwan, the Korean peninsula will likely be the next target.

Seoul, a city of almost 10-million people, is 952 km from Beijing, less than two hours by flight.

 The distance to Tokyo is 1,159 km, slightly more than two hours by flight. 

And the distance to Vladivostok is only 746 km, just under two hours by flight.

Calling John le Carré.

Seoul is at a pivotal intersection in the Orient, and one may be certain that agents in the lingering Great Game of politics are still doing fieldwork on the streets that no amount of high tech surveillance can quite match. The Cold War has never ended. Just ask George Smiley.

 The Korean War, a civil war, is regarded as lasting from 1950-1953, but no official peace treaty has ever been signed. 

Under the present constitution, a South Korean President can only serve one five-year term. When Moon was elected President as the Democratic Party candidate in 2017, he vowed to work toward closer ties with China and reunification with North Korea.

To say that the group of retired Seoul seniors who demonstrated regularly was dismayed with President Moon is understatement.  They quickly denounced him as a Chinese lackey, a North Korean stooge, and a black-belt loser.

However, an equally serious grievance against Moon was his unwillingness to pardon the recently impeached Park Geun-hye, the former President. She served as the first female President of South Korea starting in 2013, and fell spectacularly from Grace by early 2017.  Shakespeare could not have written her tragedy any better.

The 70-year-old Park Geun-hye is the daughter of Park Chung-hee (1917-1979), who ruled briefly as a military dictator (1961-1963), and then President from 1963-1979. 

Kim Jae-gyu, the Director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, shot Park Chung-hee dead on October 26, 1979 following a banquet in Seoul. Afterwards, Kim Jae-gyu and several co-conspirators were tortured and executed for the assassination.

Park Geun-hye’s mother, Yuk Young-soo, was killed on August 15, 1974 by a North Korean sympathizer who intended to assassinate President Park during an Independence Day speech at The National Theatre in Seoul. He missed and shot the President’s wife instead. 

During a trial, the assassin expressed regret for not killing President Park and was executed by hanging in a Seoul prison

 

Park Geun-hye’s presidency ended in her impeachment for corruption in 2016 and removal from office in 2017. She was sentenced to 24-years in prison on April 6, 2018. yet finally pardoned by President Moon and released in 2021 from the Seoul Detention Center.

President Moon’s pardon of Park Geun-hye was a transparent effort to win the support of his many critics for bungling so many things during his presidency.  Yet this political gesture was too little, too late and maverick politician Yoon Suk-yeul of the People Power Party won election as the next South Korean President.

Last Saturday, the demonstrators across from Gwanghwamun Square who marked Moon’s demise had even more to celebrate after Yoon Suk-yeul announced that Park Geun-hye would be a special guest at his inauguration on Tuesday, May 10 at The National Assembly.

The 300-seat National Assembly is an obvious source of pride for South Koreans. It was built between 1969-1975 in Yeouido, a large island on the Han River in Seoul. Yeouido is the Wall Street of Seoul, and serves as the main finance and investment-banking district of the country.

From 2004 to 2009, the assembly gained notoriety as a frequent site for legislative violence. The Assembly first came to the world's attention during a violent dispute on impeachment proceedings for then President Roh Moo-hyun, when open physical combat took place in the assembly.

Since then, it has been interrupted by periodic conflagrations, piquing the world's curiosity once again in 2009 when members battled each other with sledgehammers and fire extinguishers.

The National Assembly since then has strong measures to prevent any more legislative violence.

Yoon Suk-yeul is politically conservative and has expressed no interest in reconciliation with North Korea that would lead to reunification.

Kim Jong-un, the third-generation dictator of North Korea, has continuously demanded the withdrawal of all U.S. military forces from South Korea before he would even consider reunification of the Korean peninsula.

Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper in the Trump Administration,  recently revealed that the American Commander-in-Chief was prepared to order all U.S. troops out of South Korea on very short notice because President Moon balked at a 400% increase in payment for hosting the American forces. Esper and others persuaded Trump to postpone the idea.  Esper has now gone on record as describing Trump as the biggest threat to American democracy.

“Hello, Yoon”

The scenes outside the National Assembly on Tuesday 10 May

President Yoon may be a political maverick, the classic “outsider,” yet as a former star prosecutor, he helped imprison two former presidents, as well as the head of Samsung, and a former chief justice of the country’s Supreme Court on charges of corruption.

 Moon’s popularity among South Koreans began to dwindle quickly when both his government and his Democratic Party were rocked by a series of scandals that exposed ethical lapses and policy failures around sky-high housing prices, growing income inequality and a lack of social mobility.

The middle-class in South Korea is also being crushed by exorbitant property taxes - in the face of ever-changing pandemic polices and food and energy-related inflation like the rest of the world.

 For President Yoon, some of the top issues facing him are:

·      Political Polarization;

·      Gender and Generational Gaps;

·      The Metaverse;

·      New Leadership and Korea-Japan Relations;

·      U.S.-ROK Indo-Pacific Cooperation;

·      North Korea and the Pandemic.

 

 Political Polarization

South Koreans are becoming more polarized. A local government survey in 2019 revealed that Koreans viewed political affiliation as the source of the most severe social conflict.

 

Gender and Generational Gaps

Gender stratification is becoming an increasingly serious issue in South Korea. While the country has made great technological and economic advancements, it ranks 108 out of 153 on the World Economic Forum Gender Gap report. Women earn less than men and are poorly represented in positions of political and economic power.

 

The Metaverse

With continuation of the pandemic and people spending more time online, utilization of the virtual space, metaverse, became a buzzword in technology and business, including in South Korea. As global tech companies such as Facebook (now Meta) and Microsoft expand their investment and resources in the metaverse, South Korea is also eyeing on becoming the next global leader in this new territory.

 

New Leadership and Korea-Japan Relations

After a series of incidents starting in 2018 caused Korea-Japan relations to plummet, the resignation of former Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo and inauguration of Suga Yoshihide in September 2020 slowed the freefall in ties last year.

The Japanese Occupation of Korea from 1910-1945 remains a sore point between the two neighboring countries.  There is also the painful tragedy of “Comfort Women,” when young Korean females were forced to be sex slaves for the Japanese Army during WW II.  Some of the women are still alive.

 

North Korea and the Pandemic

After two years and massive amounts of money spent on missiles capable of reaching the U.S,. Kim Jong-un has finally admitted that the COVID-19 pandemic is poised to ravage North Korea.

Both Shanghai and Beijing have been in near total lockdown, as the Chinese struggle to contain the latest outbreak. The industrial-strength coiled barbed wire that signifies the DMZ on the Korean peninsula is not going to stop the spread of the virus southward to Seoul.

 

Geography is destiny, and President Yoon is about to be tested.