http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/MC09Dg01.html

Long ago, maybe around 1994, I took a slow train from Pusan – or Busan, if you insist – to Seoul. (No KTX bullet train in those days; though that’s been having its problems lately.) It was October, and I spent much of the journey just watching the colors of autumn roll by.

My seat companion was colorful too. A student recently qualified in Oriental medicine, he was about to go to China, then newly opened to South Koreans. But his real aim, he confided with some excitement, was not strictly medicinal: “Chinese people, they don’t know Jesus!”

This was my first encounter with what is now a global phenomenon. Koreans are tireless rankers. The world’s seventh-largest exporter of goods is also its second-largest exporter of missionaries, after the United States. According to the Korea World Missions Association (KWMA), their number has nearly doubled in five years from 12,159 in 2004 to 22,130 in 2009.

Asia has mostly proved stony ground for Christianity, but Korea is a fascinating exception – for reasons that would make another article. South Korea’s 8.6 million Protestants and 5.1 million Catholics, taken together – not that they always get along – outnumber its 10 million Buddhists. Mind you, the 47% who profess no religion may include many passive Buddhists.

South Korea today is Asia’s most Protestant nation, and evangelical with it. Many want to preach the gospel, as is their right. I’m a firm believer in a free market for faiths; aren’t you?

Well, obviously not if you’re a murderous bigot in Pakistan, or other countries where Islam seems afraid of the competition. In 2004 Iraqi jihadi thugs seized and brutally beheaded a young Korean, Kim Sun-il. They claimed he had conducted “annoying religious activities” under cover of his work as a translator. A harrowing video of him pleading in vain for mercy sharpened the already fierce debate in Seoul about the wisdom of sending troops to Iraq.

As this tragic case shows, evangelists not only put their own lives on the line but can impact on affairs of state. In 2007, 23 Korean missionaries were stupid enough to go to Afghanistan, of all places, defying an official warning from Seoul not to. The Taliban kidnapped them and killed two; a large ransom was paid for the rest. Such behavior is just plain irresponsible.

Yet they’re still at it. In January staff at the South Korean Embassy in Sana’a had to rush out to stop Korean missionaries singing hymns on the street in the Yemeni capital – for the third time in a month. Christian proselytizing is banned in Yemen; you can be jailed – or worse. In 2009 a Yemeni suicide bomb killed four Korean tourists, and a young Korean woman, Eom Young-sun, was among nine foreign religious medical volunteers kidnapped and murdered.

Here I make a distinction. Ms Eom was doing a worthy job, and knew the risks. I respect and mourn her. Similarly, I applaud those brave souls, many Christian, who help North Koreans in China on their long and perilous journeys to Seoul and freedom. Several such have been jailed in China, then deported. They are the lucky ones. At least two South Korean pastors in northeast China have been abducted by Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) agents: Ahn Seung-woon in 1995, and Kim Dong-shik in January 2000. The latter is thought to have died of hunger and torture in 2001.

In my book, Ahn and Kim are – or were, God rest their souls – heroes. Whereas those hymn-singers in Sana’a are idiots. Some, reportedly, were students on vacation getting a cheap thrill – while putting at risks the lives of Korean business people who live and work in Yemen.

Heroes, idiots – and holy fools. Remember Robert Park? The young Korean-American who on Christmas Day 2009 marched into North Korea and a whole lot of trouble, calling on Kim Jong-il to repent. He claims to have been sexually tortured there. In interviews he is clearly not well, and latest reports are that he’s checked back into hospital. May he find healing.

Then there was Park’s copycat, Aijalon Mahli Gomes, who pulled the same stunt a month later. This time it took former US president Jimmy Carter, no less, to fly to Pyongyang to get him out. Gomes appears less unhinged than Park, so he has less excuse. Faith and compassion are all very well, but judgment and prudence are Christian virtues too. (And don’t even start me on Laura Ling and Euna Lee, who as far as I know haven’t yet claimed divine guidance for the irresponsible antics which required Bill Clinton to come rescue them from Kim Jong-il.)

Meanwhile, back in Seoul, Protestants are – well, protesting. Unusually, the target of their wrath is one of their own: none other than President Lee Myung-bak, whose own intense Presbyterian allegiances were well described in these pages by Sunny Lee – no relation, I assume; just kidding, Sunny – even before he took office three years ago. Since then Lee – the president – has managed to offend Buddhists in every way possible, as well as Catholics whose bishops have condemned his flagship US$20 billion plan to “restore” four major rivers as a potential ecological disaster – much as he likes to tout his supposed green credentials.

Undaunted, on March 3 Lee infuriated the Buddhists yet again, and was widely criticized in the Seoul press for insensitivity, when he and his wife were photographed kneeling at an annual Protestant prayer breakfast. As the left-wing Hankyoreh wittily put it, this “marked the first time a sitting South Korean president sat on his knees in a public place”.

Why was he there? Some might say the president is on his knees politically too. His fellow Protestants had been Lee’s loyal supporters – until now. So what prompted an influential religious leader like David Yonggi Cho – founder-leader of Yoido Full Gospel Church, the world’s largest single congregation – to declare war on Lee and threaten to topple him? Dear reader, allow me to me keep you in suspense for a little while, and to take you back in time.

Yoido Full Gospel Church: That rang a bell. But David Cho? I thought he was Paul Cho. And so indeed he used to be. But in 1992. “God showed him that Paul Cho had to die and David Cho was to be resurrected in his place.” In the same year Cho was elected Chairman of the World Assemblies of God Fellowship: the first non-American to head the planet’s largest Pentecostalist denomination, with 50 million members in 60 countries.

So a big fish, if a contentious one. Cho’s view that material wealth shows God’s blessing is not to all tastes, mine included. I once started writing a song, which got no further than this:

I don’t recall seeing Jesus with the winners;
He hung out with publicans and sinners.

Others say Cho runs a cult, and that his theology is heretical. His business practices and reluctance to retire (he is 75) have their critics too. But he is a mighty power in the land.

He was big already back in 1989, when on my fourth visit I decided it was time to seek out some Korean experiences which had so far eluded me. I resolved to do two things: Go to Yoido Full Gospel Church (YFGC), and get tear-gassed. Not both at the same time, you understand.

(While speaking of “typical” Korea, a quick aside: In over 20 trips, I have never eaten dog. Never looked for it, never been offered it; it’s just never crossed my path. Surprise you?)

I duly fulfilled my resolution, but can’t say I’d care to repeat either experience. Each in its own way I found choking. (Admittedly my preferred form of worship is an hour of Quaker silence, so horses for courses.) YFGC is totally over the top. Not just an organ, but a full 50-piece orchestra. The church seats 12,000, and is full up for seven Sunday services – with a further 20,000 following on TV in overflow chapels, according to The Economist in 2007.

People may praise God as they please, of course. And YFGC clearly pleases a lot of people. But the politics stuck in my craw. In that second summer of South Korea’s new democracy, two radicals – Moon Kyu-hyun, a turbulent priest still going strong; and a student, “flower of unification” Im Su-kyong, who has since repented – had illicitly sneaked off to Pyongyang.

This was a big deal at the time, especially to Pastor Cho. You’d think the world had ended. I’ll never forget his astonishing invocation: “Lord, save this nation which is heading for communism!” And the faithful, in their thousands, responding with a heartfelt “Amen!”

So much for Paul aka David Yonggi Cho’s political nous. 22 years later, it’s got no better. Only now, the threat is – had you guessed? – Islam. What’s got him and his ilk hot under the collar with Lee is a proposed bill to give tax relief to sukuk (Islamic bonds) – I don’t have to explain those in Asia Times Online, hopefully – the same as interest-bearing accounts receive.

Islamic finance is a trillion-dollar business. South Korea has heavy commercial involvement in the Muslim world, all the way from Indonesia to Libya. In the latter, even when it was a pariah (first time around), Korean firms won huge construction and other contracts. Yet there too a Korean pastor got himself arrested last year. It took four visits by Lee’s big brother and fixer-in-chief, Lee Sang-deuk, to free him. (There were other issues in play too.)

South Korean banks long to emulate the chaebol (conglomerates) like Samsung and Hyundai and go global. Specifically, they’d like to attract capital from the Middle East – which means having sukuk products in their portfolio. There may also be a link here, though this is denied, to a recent deal to build nuclear power plants in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Much touted initially, it now transpires that Seoul is having to lend half the US$20 billion cost.

This is the 21st century, right? It’s the age of globalization – on which South Korea depends more than most, and more than is healthy. Islamic finance may once have seemed strange to non-Muslims, but sukuk bonds are now a normal part of the landscape. In an interdependent world, anyway, we respect one another’s beliefs and practices. This is called civilization.

Not in Seoul, apparently. Another cleric has accused Muslim nations of fighting “economic jihad”, claiming in all seriousness that the planned legislation would enable them to wield oil money to promote the Islamization of Korea. Thus the Reverend Kiel Ja-yeon: no fringe nutcase, but the head of the Christian Council of Korea. It was he who organized the prayer breakfast. In similar vein, Yonggi Cho met finance minister Yoon Jeung-hyun February 24 and later bragged: “I told him this will be a life-or-death fight.”

Specifically, Cho threatened to mobilize the Protestant vote against candidates supporting the sukuk bill in by-elections on April 27. These aren’t crucial. Whatever happens, Lee’s ruling conservative Grand National Party (GNP) will keep control of the National Assembly. But with barely a year to go till the next general election in April 2012, they’ll be seen as a straw in the wind. A separate presidential election follows in December 2012; Lee can’t run again.

Hang on, though. In theory the GNP controls the assembly, but in practice they’ve already caved in to the backwoodsmen. Or backwoodswomen. Another implacable opponent of the bill is Lee Hye-hoon, a Christian GNP lawmaker and a rare woman in Korean politics. She has been quoted as saying that the 2.5% of returns from sukuk bonds which go to charity (zakat) that may be used to support terrorism.

Faced with this, on February 22 the GNP decided not to bring the bill forward for debate, at least until after the April by-elections. It remains to be seen how it fares then. The liberal opposition Democrats (DP) are no less craven: citing the alleged UAE nuclear link as an excuse, when everyone knows they too are scared of losing the bigot vote. The DP leader, Sohn Hak-kyu, was down on his knees with Lee at the same Protestant prayer breakfast.

All credit then to former premier Lee Hoi-chang, head of the small Liberty Forward Party (LFP). A Catholic, Lee is even more right-wing than his namesake the president. Yet his is a rare voice of sanity: “The constitution states that religion and politics are strictly separate. Churches should stay away from politics.” That brought instant criticism from the Council of Presbyterian Churches in Korea, who challenged the LFP leader to a public debate.

I’ll leave the last word – well, almost – to a columnist in the Hankyoreh. According to Jung E-gil, writing on March 3, both David Yonggi Cho and Kiel Ja-yeon have in the past marked Easter by carrying big wooden crosses, as if to re-enact the passion of Christ. But there was a difference. They bore no burden: these crosses were on wheels. No nails pierced their flesh; instead, padding protected their delicate skin and expensive suits. Jung quotes a Protestant online newspaper News and Joy: “Death waited at the end of Jesus’s march with the cross … whereas beautiful luxury cars were waiting after these men’s performance.”

Pharisees is the word, if I recall. Also: Render unto Caesar. Strange Christians, these.

By Aidan Foster-Carter
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/LJ22Dg01.html

I’m a sociologist, by discipline. Or indiscipline, do I hear you sneer? True, my subject has its share of what one eminent sociologist, Garry Runciman, has called ”attitude and platitude”. Plenty of obfuscating jargon, too. Nor is it half as trendy as when I first got hooked, back in 1968 – when I mixed it up with Marxism. These days, subjects like psychology, history and even economics (despite our present discontents) are more highly regarded than sociology.

But my trade has its uses too, as I shall now try to demonstrate. Take Kim Jong-eun, newly crowned dauphin of North Korea. A communist monarchy: that’s a strange beast indeed, and a contradiction in terms. But sociology, I contend, may shed some light here. What is going on? How on earth did it come to this? And can such a peculiar system survive?

Trotsky saw it coming
Let’s start with Trotsky. Lev Davidovich Bronstein (1879-1940), who took the name Trotsky, was by profession a revolutionary, not a sociologist. Before they joined forces to lead the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, he had criticized Lenin’s methods and in particular his elitism.

Despite starting out as democrats, intellectuals who believe they have history on their side tend to get the idea that they know best. The people’s will becomes whatever they say it is. We are progress, we must prevail. You, conversely, who beg to differ, are an enemy of the people, on the wrong side of history – so shut up, or else. (A word for this is ”vanguardism.”)

The young Trotsky’s critique of such arrogance – before he sold the pass and joined the club, seduced by the smell of power – was sociologically sharp, prescient, and indeed fateful:

”In inner-party politics, these methods lead, as we shall yet see, to this: the party organization substitutes itself for the party, the central committee substitutes itself for the organization, and, finally, a ‘dictator’ substitutes himself for the central committee.”

Which is exactly what came to pass. Having seized power, the Bolsheviks betrayed hopes of democracy by quashing all who disagreed with them: not just counter-revolutionaries, but fellow socialists. Before long, the suppression spread to within their own ranks. The logical conclusion was the monster Stalin – whose agents murdered Trotsky in his Mexican exile.

Had Trotsky lived to see the further perversion of communism that is North Korea, he might have taken this further. Soviet Stalinism spawned mini-Stalins elsewhere. Even as the USSR repudiated Stalin, his Korean epigone Kim Il-sung moved in the other direction: to cement control. Moreover the Great Leader resolved that his system should not perish with him.

And it hasn’t. Kim Il-sung was no sociologist, but he understood what it took to grab power and build a tyranny that lasts. Trotsky’s three stages – three substitutions, in his word – take us from democracy to dictator. But history doesn’t end there. The tyrant must secure his power: both in his lifetime and especially after he has gone. Succession is the Achilles’ heel here.

Looking at how North Korea has managed to endure, three factors appear essential. One is force, pure and simple. With all pretence of democracy gone, Mao’s dictum becomes the bottom line: Power grows out of the barrel of a gun. North Korea’s relentless militarization is thus no surprise, nor is its formalization by Kim Jong-il as Songun (military-first policy): even twisting Marxist theory to make soldiers, not workers, the revolution’s driving force.

Unlikely generals
How far Songun has come was clear from the rare conference on September 28 of the nominally ruling Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK). At least the WPK now has a Poliburo and a Central Committee (CC) again; both had atrophied since Kim Il-sung died in 1994. And of course the main point was to hail the new princeling. But first things first. On the eve of the meeting Kim Jong-eun – aged 27, with no known military experience – was made a four-star general.

So was his equally civilian aunt Kim Kyong-hui, Kim Jong-il’s younger sister, whose field is light industry. Only then did Kim Jong-eun acquire Party rank: as a CC member and (crucially) as joint vice-chairman of the WPK’s Central Military Committee (CMC). (Connoisseurs of comparative communism may care to note that China’s vice-president Xi Jinping, widely seen as President Hu Jintao’s successor, acquired exactly the same position on October 18.)

But back to North Korea. Nephew and aunt look an unconvincing pair of generals – what do real soldiers make of this? – but the symbolism and pecking order are clear. What counts in Pyongyang these days is the Korean People’s Army (KPA). And while Kim Il-sung as an ex-guerilla had the kudos to control the KPA, his pampered son lacked that clout. Indeed, when the Dear Leader dies an actual military takeover looks a distinct possibility. That isn’t the Kims’ plan, however, so two additional strategies have been devised to try to prevent this.

One is family rule. Kim Il-sung took that step as early as 1966. The last time the WPK held a delegates’ meeting like the one we have just seen in Pyongyang – 44 years ago: due process is not North Korea’s forte – it was to be told the startling news that their leader had picked his younger brother Kim Yong-ju – later out-maneuvered by Kim Jong-il, but thought to be still alive at age 90 – as successor. That stuck in some throats, even of those who had seen how ruthlessly Kim purged his foes a decade earlier – they used Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing Stalin to try to get rid of him, but failed. The lucky ones managed to flee to the USSR and China. Thereafter Kim’s cult of personality grew apace, but extending this to his brother was a step too far for some. Those rash enough to voice objections were duly purged.

Communist monarchy
Communist monarchy: what a grotesque paradox. Yet there is a double logic to this. First, at the end of the day who can you trust? Especially in a culture that prizes filial piety, your own family looks the best bet. Kim Jong-il certainly thinks so, promoting not only his son but his sister – Kim Kyong-hui also becomes a full Politburo member – and of course her husband Jang Song-taek, now an alternate Politburo member as well as a vice-chair of the National Defense Commission (NDC), the highest executive body of state outranking the Cabinet.

Second: In a state barely 60 years old, but preceded by centuries of Confucian monarchy and (more immediately) four decades of emperor-worship under Japanese occupation (1905-45), keeping it in the Kim family presses powerful buttons. Or to put it more sociologically, this mode of essentially patriarchal legitimation of rulers is familiar, indeed deeply ingrained.

On October 8 Yang Hyong-sop, a veteran Politburo member aged 85, told Associated Press Television News (APTN): ”Our people take pride in the fact that they are blessed with great leaders from generation to generation… Our people are honored to serve the great president Kim Il-sung and the great general Kim Jong-il. Now we also have the honor of serving young general Kim Jong-eun.”

He sounded deeply traditional: a loyal courtier to his kings. But North Korea’s communist origins mean it can’t admit it has become a monarchy, so this isn’t quite enough. Both the ruler, and even more his successor, have to justify their rule in some other way. This is the third factor, and it takes two forms – or more precisely, stages.

The first is a cult of personality: originated by Stalin, extended by Mao, and pushed to its extremes by Kim Il-sung. Hey, if a guy claims absolute right to rule, he’d better be special. This is what the German sociologist Max Weber called charisma: a term which has entered the language in a looser sense. Or if he’s not so special, you make up stories to pretend he is. These may be ludicrous, but woe betide anyone rash enough to giggle or cast aspersions.

Yet as Weber saw, as a mode of rule charisma has problems. Unlike traditional authority – a monarchy proper, for instance – charisma is vested in just one exceptional individual. What happens when they die? The challenge, in Weber’s rather ugly term, is to routinize charisma.

Immortal presidents
Well, North Korea has done that. One way is to make the hero immortal. Kim Il-sung is still ”eternal president”, despite being dead for 16 years. The final step, logical enough, is to turn adoration into veneration and in effect create a religion. Again the recent WPK meeting is a case in point. Pouring into Pyongyang from every corner of the land, what was the first thing the delegates did? Before the conference came an act of worship. As a group, they all visited the ”sacred temple of Juche”. That’s how the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) refers to Kumsusan Memorial Palace: where Kim Il-sung lived and worked, and where even now his embalmed corpse keeps a glass eye on things. KCNA noted that the delegates ”paid high tribute” even to Kim’s statue, and ”made deep bows to the president” in person.

Weird, yet it makes a kind of sense. To sum up so far. Trotsky’s grimly accurate forecast of what happens when an elite thinks it knows better than the people it purports to represent – first the party, then a clique, and finally a dictator – is only half the story. For the dictator to hold onto power, even after his death, entails three further steps: militarization, family rule, and a quasi-religious cult. Or at least that’s what North Korea’s peculiar evolution suggests.

Two caveats. This isn’t a complete sociology of power in North Korea, obviously. A fuller account would look more at the role of ideology. This too has mutated far from communism into what Brian Myers bluntly calls ”race-based nationalism”. His book The Cleanest Race examines North Korea’s internal propaganda. The story the regime tells its people about the world and their place in it is even nastier, narrower and more noxious than you’d imagine. Read it, especially if tempted to believe that this regime genuinely wants to make peace.

Can it last?
Second, I dare to hope for a happy ending. Kim Il-sung’s sociological nous has kept the state he created alive longer than many (me included) had expected. But can it go on for ever?

That I doubt. A full answer would loose more hares than there’s room for here. In the 21st century, refusing market reforms is a recipe for self-destruction. Abroad, North Korea’s old game of militant mendicancy, despite some success from the Sino-Soviet dispute right up to the six-party talks, is past its sell-by date; other powers are fed up and won’t play any more.

But just to stick to the processes already mentioned, these too are far from foolproof. The weakest link is familism. Past history, in Korea or anywhere – think of the Borgias in Italy – suggests that monarchies or other forms of family rule can be riddled by strife. Some crown princes just aren’t up to the job. People plot, and before you know it the knives are out.

Specifically, promoting a third son over his elder siblings is asking for trouble. What does number one son think? On October 12 he told us. Interviewed in Beijing by Japan’s Asahi TV, Kim Jong-nam broke ranks, saying: ”Personally, I am against third-generation dynastic succession”. Adding that he didn’t care, and would help little brother ”while I stay abroad”, doesn’t make this any less of a bombshell. Kim Jong-nam has gone off-message, big time.

Nor is he the only one. Even in Pyongyang the mask is slipping. The WPK conference and subsequent military parade seem to have passed off smoothly, but dissent is growing. One recent visiting group (which included a Korean-speaker) heard a full-scale row between their guides – it was evening, and drink had been taken – as to what right Kim Jong-eun had to be foisted on them as leader. That is still dangerous talk; but many more will be thinking it. The young general has much to prove, and may not have long to do so. Interesting times.

Aidan Foster-Carter is honorary senior research fellow in sociology and modern Korea at Leeds University, and a freelance consultant, writer and broadcaster on Korean affairs. A regular visitor to the peninsula, he has followed Korea for over 40 years.