Opinions and interpretations offered here, in good faith, regarding events witnessed by the author are his own and will not invariably accord with those of others.
July 2005
I am walking near our home in Samcheong-Dong, heading north, towards the park. A helicopter rises, as it does daily, from the presidential palace or ‘Blue House,’ five hundred yards away. Roh Moo-Hyun is half-way through his term in office. Last year he survived impeachment, moved on a technicality by a savage opposition but overturned two months later by the Constitutional Court, his stock consequently rising with the public. I am learning how deep the dichotomy is between progressives and conservatives, how polarized political opinion, and am about to experience the first of many encounters with avowedly illiberal elders nostalgic for the era of post-war dictatorships, now some fifteen years distant. With this type, as I already understand, there is no point – and some risk of inviting a violent altercation – in observing that, over much of that period, those regimes in the South and their counterparts in the North were fairly evenly matched for brutality committed upon their own citizens.
I have seen no-one else in the park, and pause by an area furnished with exercise equipment and benches. I am not yet at that stage of life where it would normally occur to me, when out and about, that I might like to stop and rest, but since my emigration to Korea last autumn I have been frequently depressed, this being the reason for the walk. I sit down in order to wait for my spirits to lift. Within half a minute a man in his seventies, small and sinewy, lunges into view, throws himself on a set of monkey bars and swings across, ardently and demonstratively, snarling and grunting, dropping from the end of the frame, gasping in triumph, defying the heat and humidity. The spectacle seems too absurd to feign admiration. His daughter, son-in-law and grand-daughter (in push-chair) also enter the clearing from the path, and I find myself cornered. He may be a veteran of the Korean War, but many who could not have been go about as though they were. The pride of the man-at-arms in beating back senility does not afford contentment. The war never officially ended. In fact, it ‘solved nothing: only the status quo ante was restored, only an armistice held the peace.’* But the tension in his face and body evinces a seething belligerence; a vendetta in search of an alliance. This is discernible before he has spoken.
I am asked where I am from: a question that I somehow feel it always incumbent upon me to answer. I feel most at ease among Korean people who don’t speak English. Those who do frequently take it upon themselves to open an unwanted conversation, while those who do not tend to be less likely to hold opinions utterly contrary to my own. The presumptuous English speakers often turn out to have spent some part of their lives in the United States, for which their families left this destitute country in the aftermath of the war, adopting the worldview, and foreign customs, of their new milieu. They did not invariably thrive.
When it is duly assumed, on the basis of a common language, that someone from the UK is de facto an American, I can’t help feeling a little nettled, but he is evidently disposed not to notice. The helicopter I saw earlier, or another, is overhead and descending towards the Blue House, drowning out the drone of cicadas. I glance upwards and say, for some reason: ‘President Roh Moo-Hyun.’
This prompts, on the instant, between hunched shoulders and clenched fists, the declamation ‘He’s a communist!…’, but with my affinity and approval taken as read. The younger man, who joins us as his wife places the child on a swing, nods sourly in accord. George Bush Junior had discarded the Agreed Framework with his ‘axis of evil’ speech; the DPRK thereupon resumed weapons testing. Nevertheless Roh has maintained the ‘sunshine policy’ initiated by his predecessor Kim Dae-Jung on the conviction that nothing positive in inter-Korean relations can eventuate other than through dialogue. However, some response being due, I feebly observe that ‘a lot of people seem to agree with you.’ A Korean friend of mine had the honour of working with President Kim (who constructed the national health system: a boon especially for the old, ungrateful reactionaries included). In my own country, I voted for the opposition from the start to the end of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership and was arrested at a protest against her government. Anything like this, here, would mark me as a fellow-traveller. But my credentials go unexamined and my ambivalence undetected. Having readily worked up a head of steam, and amid further invective for the lawyer from Bongha, the patriarch continues to work out his fury on the exercise machines, as the scion sets about recruiting me as head of his private English school, a fresh venture alongside his import-export business and part of a burgeoning and lucrative racket kept afloat by legions of exhausted schoolchildren and their parents’ endless determination to meet the expenses. In wheedling he physically encroaches, step by step, on the ground where I stand, in a manner that seems tremendously non-Korean. I put it to him that a random native English speaker found languishing in the park does not necessarily possess either the skills required from training and experience, or any interest in and awareness of the language itself; a Korean teacher of English who really needs the job might be a better choice. I should have had the sense instead to say ‘No thanks’ and elbow him aside. He is bemused, but gives me his card; I slide away. Later I show his details to friends who happen to know that the people I have met belong to Chun Doo-Hwan’s extended family, Chun being the architect of the Fifth Republic of Korea and murderous suppressor of the Gwangju uprising.
There may be places and eras where the path of political conservatism is a better option than the alternative, but not, it might be said, the ROK in the early twenty-first century. Great fear drives, on one side, a visceral hatred of the left, and on the other the determination to maintain the advance of democracy and prevent a reversion to authoritarianism enabled by that hatred. Internal tensions are as hard to resolve as the overarching problem of the divided peninsula, in which they are fomented.
South Korea has the highest rate of suicide among OECD countries; most are young people under forty. The suicide of public figures, particularly politicians pursued by prosecutors under charges of corruption – I can’t recall a time when this was not going on – is as likely if not more likely to be committed by the innocent as the guilty, and has resulted in the loss of a number of individuals whose contribution to the community was positive and progressive, and who are much missed.
Under the administration of Lee Seung-Man, the Criminal Procedure Act of 1954 granted investigative authority to the prosecution service alongside its powers of indictment. The enactment accorded with the view of the prosecutor-general that the police, for the foreseeable future – even ‘a hundred years’ – could not be allowed investigative powers in respect of their role in the colonial period, and overruled warnings that the empowerment of prosecutors to both investigate and indict would lead to ‘prosecutorial fascism.’ Since the end of authoritarian rule, forty years later, attempts by progressive governments to substantially reform the service have so far come to little. A hefty division of those prosecutors, many graduates of Seoul National University from the Conservative stronghold of Gangnam in Seoul, or that of Daegu and the south-east Gyeongsang province, is active only in the protection of its own interests and those politicians who serve them. Also tirelessly obstructive to reform are the chief intelligence agency and the Korean press, possibly on balance the most abominably pernicious in the world (taking into account the UK). Political liberals on a perceived trajectory to office and those already in it are persecuted with bestial tenacity, and months or years expended in bringing about their eventual imprisonment, customarily on the basis of grossly inflated charges. Or they may choose to kill themselves in the process, now that it has permanently befouled their lives and in order to spare their kin, who are assaulted with equal fervour.
October 2006
Late one evening, shortly after the DPRK’s first nuclear weapon test, I take the air outside the hanok in Samcheong-Dong where we have lived for sixteen months and which we are soon to leave for a new home in Seongbuk-Dong, an adjacent district. A meteor approaches from the north, blazes almost directly overhead and burns out somewhere, as it seems, across the Han river. In July we saw two rounds of missile tests from North Korea, both long and short range, following the ‘Valiant Shield’ exercises by the US in the Pacific the preceding month. Since then the situation has remained tense. Because the meteor, though something like fifty miles high, is the mightiest, brightest and slowest I have ever seen, momentarily I wonder if it is not another missile, and Seoul is not about to become the ‘sea of fire’ long threatened by Pyeongyang. But as months and years pass I am less easily alarmed, and settle into the weary resignation that is the general response among South Koreans to these endless games.
May 23rd 2009
Himself harried by prosecutors in the way I have described, since leaving office last year, Roh Moo-Hyun is found after leaping from a cliff near his home, with injuries from which he dies within hours. Six days later my wife and I attend his funeral service in Seoul; there are boos for his successor, the conservative Lee Myung-Bak, and cheers for Kim Dae-Jung, who weeps while paying his last respects. Kim limps from an old injury; he was run over by a truck after almost defeating President Park in the 1971 election. (Another of Park’s political opponents, Chang Chun-Ha, appears to have had his skull smashed with a hammer on a mountainside near Pocheon). Outside Deoksugung we visit a shrine to the deceased president. I sidestep a curious journalist. Soon afterwards, the memorial is torn down by a militaristic far-right group, emboldened under a conservative government.
July 2018
The suicide of the charismatic and well-liked lawmaker Roh Hee-Chan takes place after a similarly pertinacious campaign. Roh was imprisoned in the 1980s for organizing a union. Ten years later he was informed of a wiretap containing evidence of Samsung’s slush fund for prosecutors; for his actions in making this public, prosecutors engineered his ejection from parliament. Later re-elected, he was targeted again for failing to declare a donation to his Justice Party. Compared with indictable offences committed by his enemies this was a trifle but, like Mercutio’s fatal wound, ‘served’ for his destruction. Once Roh has jumped from his mother’s apartment building in Seoul, the mysterious benefactor is traced and apprehended, and confirms that the money was unsolicited. But the diligence of the opposition and special prosecutor, and Roh’s slandering in the press, had by then ensured that he would never be President. Just before their deaths, both he and Roh Moo-Hyun write apologies to their families and others whose suffering their failures have caused.
2019
Kim Kyoung-Su, Governor of South Gyeongsang and a rising star on the left, is ‘investigated’ and indicted by the Supreme Court for ‘online rigging operations.’ He was once briefly detained for pro-democracy activism under the Roh Tae-Woo government. Now he finds himself back in prison for a somewhat longer stretch.
Cho-Kuk, previously senior secretary to the president in the Moon Jae-In administration, is nominated for the position of Minister of Justice, but forced to withdraw within weeks under other investigations in respect of his wife, son, daughter and brother, on charges variously of illegal business practices, falsifying academic records, embezzlement and bribery. His wife is sentenced to four years in prison; his daughter is expelled from university and her career in medicine stymied. Interviewed on the journalist Kim Ou-Jun’s political podcast, she denies the allegations against her and determines to become a doctor no matter what obstacles are thrown in her way. The case against her mother is built on testimony from an obliging university principal, which is contradicted by staff, but those who talk to journalists are threatened with the sack.
In a disastrous misstep President Moon Jae-In appoints Yoon Seok-Yeol, formerly chief of the Seoul central district prosecutor’s office, to the position of Prosecutor General. It is Yoon who then launches the investigations into Cho-Kuk’s family, leading to conflict with the Moon administration and his own resignation two years later, but increasing his appeal to conservative voters.
July 9th 2020
In the morning I leave my home in Seongbuk-Dong, a few hundred yards from the old city wall that marks the northern perimeter of Seoul, momentarily vacillate over my choice of route to Incheon – two hours away – and decide to walk south towards the underground station at Hanseong University, rather than west, through an opening in the wall and across Waryeong Park to Anguk-Dong. Had I made for Anguk instead it is not unlikely that I would have met the Mayor of Seoul, Park Won-Soon, heading east, incommunicado, alone, out of the city and towards the trail that follows the wall in the direction of Bukhansan mountain. Our paths would have crossed not many steps short of the spot among the pine trees where he then dies, evidently by his own hand.
I do not set out here a case for his acquittal of the seamy recriminations that led to his death, but would say they speak more the iniquity of the accusers than that of the accused. Of course it would not be the first time that someone in a position of public trust is respected for the good they do until the harm caused by their private depravity is revealed. Park knew that certain prosecutors employ themselves full-time in taking down liberal figures like himself, on any shred of material that might be aggrandized for their assassination. But it was also in his nature to believe the best of people rather than the worst. To many, it is inconceivable that he could have found an opportunity, on top of the civic duties and projects he was seen to immerse himself in day upon day without pause, continually donating what he had to those in greater need, to transform himself into ageing sex pest during his hours away from the public eye. It is all too conceivable that what passed for evidence – typically, a photo that in itself proves nothing – had been used for malignant misrepresentation. He himself felt he had been betrayed, owing to his naivety. The exhausting onslaught intensified as his depression deepened.
He is loudly vilified, even as his coffin is borne through the streets, by the Korean chapter of the #MeToo movement. Whatever welcome and vital good comes of that organization elsewhere in a world plagued with the violent abuse of women by men, here its apparent instrumentation by powerful interests against its own allies is even more distasteful than the dancing on graves barely dug.
Park Won-Soon and others targeted by the Establishment recognized the need for Korean politics to evolve beyond the immaturely and banefully adversarial, and the importance to the summum bonum of building a culture of consensus. It may yet happen, though in the West a trend has accelerated in the reverse direction.
March 9th 2022
Yoon Seok-Yeol narrowly wins the presidential election against Lee Jae-Myeong. In view of his inept performances in televised debates, which betray brute ignorance and jaw-dropping idiocy, this is at first mystifying as well as dismaying. But he has garnered support particularly among young men dependent on social media for the construction of their worldview and suggestible to extreme ideas disseminated there. Anticipatory celebrations by other young people who voted for Lee sadly and abruptly cease.
August~November
Internationally, Yoon cuts a reliably embarrassing figure; at home he presides vacantly over disasters such as the lethal floods in August and the deaths of 159 young people in the Itaewon crowd crush three months later, attributable in part to his choosing – without precedent – to run the country from a complex at Yongsan, having turned the Blue House over to tourists. This entails stripping out national safety systems installed and operated there by the Moon government. At the same time heads of ministries and commissions have been replaced by sycophants, and police numbers at Itaewon are depleted by his requisitioning a heavy contingent on permanent guard at the Yongsan residence. This year, neither the police nor the local council make the usual checks, or plan for crowd control, ahead of the annual festival where the tragedy occurs. The bodies are sent to a number hospitals, probably to prevent relatives assembling in a single group. Flood prevention was highly prioritized by the late Park Woon-Soon; monitoring and clearing drains, deploying defenses to protect vulnerable residents. But the present mayor of Seoul is Yoon’s collaborator Oh Seh-Hoon, who does nothing at all. At least nine people die and about a hundred and seventy lose their homes.
January 2nd 2024
Lee Jae-Myeong, leader of the Democratic party and, naturally, under constant assault from the government and its prosecutors, survives a near-fatal stabbing in Gadeokdo, administered by a man who has long prepared for the attack.
August 8th
The acting chief of the Anti-Corruption and Civil Rights commission is found dead, along with private messages expressing his anguish over the commission’s refusal to proceed with an investigation of Kim Geon-Hee, Yoon’s wife, for improper solicitation. The ACRC is legally required to process a case within sixty days, but on this issue it has twice extended the review period before closing the case without forwarding it to investigative authorities. The deceased, whose full name is not disclosed, had worked for the commission for twenty years. In the several messages sent to himself he declares his intention to offer his life to ‘rectify his mistakes.’ He adds: ‘the misuse of anti-corruption laws for political purposes has to stop.’ The scandal is among several that has dominated Yoon’s first two years.
September 27th
I am walking from Anguk station towards the civic centre built last year to commemorate the late president Roh Moo-Hyun. At Jae-Dong I find my acupuncturist standing outside his clinic and gazing quizzically at what looks like a marquee, but with transparent walls and towed down the street on a trailer. It comes to a halt nearby.
He turns to greet me and says ‘Isn’t it ridiculous?’
The marquee is in fact a swaggering mobile showroom, enveloping a new Bentley. This has been ordered, with all the ostentation and attention that is the point of the arrangement, by a neighbouring doctor whose wife is now at the scene, screaming orders at the driver of the truck from a few feet away.
‘What on earth does she think…?’ I begin, but my doctor twists his head towards me, not having heard. Military jets are suddenly roaring overhead, eclipsing the pride of the châtelaine. They have been audible for some days, but this afternoon they appear in much greater number: several F-50s, ROKAF.
By the time I arrive at the Centre – my wife has joined me – the aircraft are looping and swooping over north Seoul, over our very heads, and the din is louder than ever. Something is deeply amiss here; people are uneasy. I ask her why this is allowed to take place over the city. A terrible accident is easily imaginable.
‘It’s mad. They don’t care. Meant to be scare people like us.’ Seoul, particularly north of the Han, is a predominately liberal area, like the Honam region in the south-east of the country. The Minister of National Defence is Kim Yong-Hyun, friend to Yoon Seok-Yeol’s from their schooldays and another worshipper at the shrine of Park Chung-Hee. His dangerous fantasy of forcibly unifying the peninsula (never entertained by Park) has recently been coming to light.
Next Tuesday, October 1st, is Armed Forces Day. Why this unsettling aerial performance should be prematurely under way is not explained, but it feels intentionally provocative. Permission for the exercise was given by Oh Seh-Hoon.
November 24th
It’s the twentieth anniversary of my emigration to this country. At the end of my long journey home from work, on the other side of Seoul, I pause on the hillside above our house, recalling my first impressions of this strange landscape. It has been an unprecedentedly warm autumn. Early the next morning I am woken by my wife, crying out. I know what this means: she is dreaming, and has found herself in a long-familiar nightmare. She will have seen, again, through a window, a terrifying intruder. I rise and cross quickly to the room in which she sleeps, but find her sleeping peacefully. It is I who was dreaming. That keening sound has been heard often enough to produce a desolate and eerie echo in my unconscious. Only last night the phantom had visited again. The world beyond the walls of our small home is increasingly more perilous; we are older, more infirm; friends and family still living are gradually fewer. But this dream has recurred since her youth, seemingly at odds with the courage, equanimity and good cheer with which she faces that world in her waking hours. Even in a person so positively integrated, subliminal fears absorbed in the day-to-day must cast their pall somewhere.
I have pondered the identity and origin of the interloper. Can the oriental psyche be studied on the same principles as the occidental? There is the collective unconscious, and such a thing as psychic memory. Lacan realized that the unconscious functions like a language. I recall unforgettable images of startling cruelty, committed by the Japanese during the colonial period, seen in a Mokpo museum. For my wife and many of her compatriots the perceived threat never quite receded. The dispensation from America meant no atonement on the part of the aggressor state. Meanwhile Korea was divided, as if it and not Japan had been the Axis power. Importantly, no reckoning for Korean collaborators ever arrived. It was during the American military government of 1945 to 1948, with its installation of Lee Seung-Man – who had spent most of his seventy years in the US and once accused General John Hodge of being a communist – that the residuary issue of justice for collaborators and resistors was submerged perpetually in a communist-anticommunist paradigm. Even by the end of 1945, ‘Korea was effectively divided… the de facto policies of the two occupations (the Soviets who had fought the Japanese in the North, the Americans in the South) had identified the Soviets with Kim Il-Sung and the (Seoul-based) people’s committees, while the Americans… opposed the committees and widespread Korean demands for a thorough renovation of colonial legacies.’*
I have not experienced nightmares myself since childhood. In the first weeks after my emigration to Korea I dreamt of discovering, as I descended from the stair head in my former English home, a Siberian tiger in the hallway below. Or it might have been had it not two (or possibly three) heads, like an amphisbaena, and was not rather smaller than a normal tiger; about the size a boar. Or Cerberus, as a blended archetype, in association with my recent bereavement. I took it at first for a statue, but its eyes followed my movements. On the morning of a winter solstice twenty years later, a stray cat in the front yard, crouched before dishes of food and water we provide, casts a shadow in low-angled sunlight. I am reminded of the tiger dream and see that the shadow is several times the size of the cat; again, about that of a boar. In recent years those belligerent animals are encountered more frequently in the hills behind our house and have begun to encroach on the town, rampaging through streets and shops, sometimes having to be shot.
December 3rd
At a quarter to eleven in the evening a message arrives from a friend: Yoon Seok-Yeol has declared a state of martial law. On the journalist Kim Ou-Joon’s News Factory channel – which survived its attempted termination by Oh Seh-Hoon – we look through the lens of a camera carried by Kim’s colleague Joo Jin-Woo as he runs at full pelt towards the National Assembly building at Yeoido, scrambles up the steps before the entrance and pauses there, panting and surveying the scene. A broadcast is cut in from Lee Jae-Myeong, also heading to Yeoido, requesting other lawmakers of the Democratic Party to make their way there with all speed. Helicopters are heard above our house; these or others are presently seen landing at the National Assembly. Joo Jin-Woo is advised to leave for his own safety, and refuses. A concourse of other journalists and alarmed citizens forms around him. The lawmakers begin to arrive and are urgently enjoined to get inside the chamber while they can. Squadrons of soldiers emerge from helicopters, others approach from the street. Woo Won-Sik, the 67-year old Assembly Speaker, scales a barrier at the rear of the building to gain entry, in time.
The tussle that ensues, citizens against soldiers and police, involving forced entry to the premises by military units, is intense but bloodless. Meanwhile the motion to cancel martial law is passed. This is possible because the insufficient number of democratic lawmakers is augmented by the conservative Han Dong-Woon, formerly allied to Yoon but newly disaffected, and fourteen of his faction, who have journeyed there on their own account. But, extraordinarily, Yoon Seok-Yeol does not thereupon rescind the directive, and the confrontation wears on for hours until he finally relents. Troops then abandon the attempt to take over the building but do not withdraw entirely.
At a point where the assembly grounds give onto the street, a solitary soldier apologizes to citizens for his part in the violation and outrage with a long series of deep bows, as he retreats.
December 4th
We learn that Kim Ou-Joon, on being informed the previous evening that he was about to be arrested, dispatched his friend Joo Jin-Woo to the National Assembly and fled to a safe house. Kim is a neighbour in Seongbuk-Dong but I’ve never had the temerity to accost him. The warning is said to have come via US intelligence; his home was surrounded shortly afterwards.
I write to friends in the UK:
‘We hear the attempt to impose martial law wasn’t abandoned. The vote on impeachment will be 10:00am UTC Saturday. Yoon purged his party of non-loyalists but some lawmakers said to be wavering. Whatever Han Dong-Hoon says today, no-one knows which way he and his lot will go tomorrow. He’s pathetic and unreliable. Unfortunately his decision is critical. The military could be back on the streets, journalists detained. Demonstrations are building massively regardless, but in that case may involve bloodshed.
‘Manoeuvres around Seoul since September signified something mad in the offing but the timing on Tuesday was a surprise. Whatever happens there’ll be disorder for a long time. No need to worry about me and mine – her generation went through it before. But tyrants back then knew that their communist infiltration claims were spurious. This lot are raving – they believe what they say.’
December 7th
Back in the National Assembly, where Democratic lawmakers have remained around the clock, the first impeachment motion fails; ruling party lawmakers have marched out en masse.
‘Why don’t they co-operate? How can they not?’ I ask my wife.
‘Because they’re fake. Not politicians.’
But one, Kim Sang-Wook, later returns, breathless from running, having broken away from the band of obstructionists. In the face of their coercion and threats that would have taken some doing; his face is tense with emotion. He will vote for impeachment. The numbers are still short of the quorum, however.
December 12th
Cho-Kuk’s conviction – of forgery – nearly two years ago is upheld by the Supreme Court; he goes to prison four days later.
December 14th
Anxious hours precede the second impeachment vote. During the count, I am aware that my hands are clammy and adrenaline surging. This time the motion passes. Jubilant crowds, at the end of a week-long vigil in freezing temperatures outside the National Assembly, make an exhilarating spectacle; celebrations continue into the night. Not a single item of litter remains in the morning. Military jets are again overhead, but at higher altitudes; it seems to be the Americans now.
December 27th
In Gwanghwamun, opposite the Joong-Ang Daily, I find a mostly elderly but wired-for-sound group gathered around a temporary stage, taking turns to climb up, seize the microphone and lead the chant ‘Kill Lee Jae-Myeong, kill Moon Jae-In…’ in a version of the Two Minutes Hate which goes on all day and can be heard a mile away in all directions. The statue of Yi Sun-Sin looks on, like Boadicea at a National Front rally on Westminster Bridge. Lee Jae-Myeong almost died in an attack last year. These public exhortations are illegal, but no-one stops them. If the old fool I met in Samcheong Park twenty years ago were still around, he would likely be here. But who provides the equipment: the transport, the rostrum, banners, speakers, amplifiers? These people do this all the time; someone pays for it.
December 29th
Jeju Air Flight 2216 crash-lands at Muan airport in South Jeolla following multiple mechanical failures; two crew survive but other lives may have been saved had the craft not struck a concrete berm on its overrun, despite the urgent removal of that structure being advocated early this year in anticipation of precisely such an event. The advice would have been heeded under a functioning administration.
For the third time, Yoon ignores a summons for questioning from the Corruption Investigation Office, which duly submits a request for an arrest warrant.
December 31st
A threat is issued from an anonymous source, who also claims responsibility for the ‘sabotage’ of Flight 2216, to explode a bomb at the Democratic Party headquarters. The building is evacuated; no bomb is found.
Investigative journalism (that now-rare thing, but Korea still possesses a vibrant intellectual culture) in the persons of Kim Ou-Joon and friends has brought to light extensive information in regard to the attempted coup, its origins and objectives, awaiting full confirmation in due course, which may take months or years given the present chaos. But I cite contents of the reports in further dispatches:
‘We are told that martial law was planned from the start of Yoon’s government. The plans included disguised attacks on American forces, here and in Ukraine, to draw the US into a war with North Korea. Direct missile strikes on the North were also mooted. Military manoeuvres were evident in Seoul and around the country, throughout last year. Assassinations of politicians and journalists were planned. Some military units did not return to barracks after the failed coup. They’ve disappeared with their weapons, for the moment no-one knows where.
‘Yoon should have been arrested weeks ago, but his people are in powerful positions. He has had nearly three years to install them everywhere. Now that the court has finally issued the order, he has to be forced out of his bunker. Many of his supporters are ready to use violence.’
Wartime operational control over the South Korean military by US forces, effective since the Korean War, might have been ceded to the ROK long ago – this was nearly achieved by the Roh Moo-Hyun administration during America’s war in Iraq – but the initiative has always been stymied by tensions between the US and DPRK on the one hand and, on the other, the refusal of South Korean conservatives to countenance the transfer of command. But Yoon’s alarming and deranged project was seen as such by US intelligence, hence their covert information-sharing.†
January 3rd 2025
An arrest warrant is granted, but the frustratingly half-hearted attempt to extract Yoon from his bolt-hole in Han-Nam-Dong, behind a barricade of barbed wire, buses and armoured personnel carriers, is easily seen off. His security has been ordered to fire if the barricade is breached. It seems that special forces are needed, but conservative lawmakers are still procrastinating. Pro-democracy protesters maintain vigils in tents on the streets with temperatures some way below zero.
January 4th
Yoon, his entourage and security detail are drinking round the clock, as reported by some of their number who have decamped. Nevertheless the Yoon-friendly prosecutor Kwon Seong-Dong announces a motion to annul the impeachment. Kwon is later found to have procured undeclared funds for Yoon’s election campaign from politically active religious groups.
January 7th
A second arrest warrant is obtained but not immediately executed. Under questioning, the defence minister Kim Yong-Hyun is invited to compare himself to Cha Ji-Cheol, bodyguard to Park Chung-Hee. Cha, killed together with Park by KCIA chief Kim Jae-Gyu in 1979, had been about to crush a popular uprising at Masan by the massacre of ‘one or two million Koreans,’ inspired by the Khymer Rouge, and with Park’s consent. Kim Yong-Hyun demurs, claiming that Cha Ji-Cheol was ‘a much greater man’ than himself.
The Constitutional Court at Anguk, where the ostentatious delivery of the doctor’s Bentley took place in September, is now besieged by virulent pro-Yoon protestors and consumers of online conspiracies. These, with the accompanying police presence, make it impossible to walk there; adjacent businesses are being ruined.
January 9th
Oh Dong-Hoon, prosecutor overseeing the anti-corruption unit established by the previous government but himself installed by President Yoon, and who miserably failed in the initial arrest attempt, was educated in the best universities and achieved top grades, yet proves himself shamefully inept when critical decisions are needed. This phenomenon is another frequently-observed legacy of the dictatorship. He has been in thrall to Yoon and browbeaten by his fellows, but continual haranguing by the democrats eventually wakes him up and re-educates him: ‘this is supposed to be your job’. He tries to affect more of an appearance of rising to it and rolling his sleeves up.
January 10th
The head guard at Yoon’s garrison defecting, the thuggish Kim Seong-Hoon and his crackpot gang assume sentry duty, brandishing rifles for the TV cameras. Kim was filmed last year manhandling, with startling brutishness, a frail-looking gentleman out of a conference at which he had respectfully asked a question that Yoon didn’t care to answer. Kim is one of many unappetizing figures that Yoon’s wife Kim Geon-Hee has brought with her to the party; meanwhile, as facts trickle out, she continues to shape up as a central operator in the totality of this affair.
January 15th
At the second attempt to execute the warrant, Yoon’s heavies refuse Kim Seong-Hoon’s order to move against the police. After a further six-hour standoff, Yoon steps into a police car at 10:33am.
Vox pop: ‘Now that he’s in custody, I suddenly don’t know what to do with myself,’ and ‘Finally I can get some sleep.’
January 17th
Videos of birthday parties and other gatherings emerge in which the sycophancy of Yoon’s followers is on unseemly display. We’ve seen this before with Park Geun-Hye’s administration (until now regarded as calamitous), that of her dictator father and others: fealty and worship of exactly the same nature as that bestowed on leaders of the DPRK. Yoon himself patently believes he’s above the law, as untouchable as a mediaeval king.
January 19th
Early in the morning, after some hours’ delay, the order is issued by Judge Cha Eun-Kyung at the Seoul Western District Court to extend Yoon’s detention for twenty days, pending a decision on indictment. Within minutes the courthouse is besieged by a mob who break through police lines and into the building, wielding metal pipes, assaulting journalists and law enforcement officers. Exhausted police deploy a large unit to restore order, which takes hours. In every aspect the scene resembles the attack on the US Capitol four years ago; many perpetrators carry pictures of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and scream threats at Judge Cha, who fortunately evades them. Nothing like this has been seen here before. Eight years ago, the fanatical devotees of Park Geun-Hye protesting her impeachment were vicious enough, but familiar; these are dead-eyed youngsters. It’s a deeply disturbing development. Again the question is asked: who sent them? One of their articles of faith is that the Chinese are engineering the usurpation of Yoon by the CCP puppet Lee Jae-Myeong. This is a notion as risible as Chun’s pretext for his killing spree at Gwangju: that the uprising was a North Korean incursion. The difference this time is that the US president gives credence to the diagnosis. Lee is accused by Conservative lawmakers, in any case, of provoking the riot.
January 21st
Recordings produced by a JTBC journalist who joined the group incognito, scaling the courthouse wall with a phone camera, suggest a high level of organization; the group knew the layout of the building and its contents and targeted certain rooms, equipped with torches. Furthermore, links are indicated to insurrectionist groups in the US (those for example that Trump has just pardoned), apologists for the Japanese occupation who are ever active and lunatic agitators like the populist pastor Jeon Gwang-Hoon who has long held seditious hate-driven rallies in Gwanghwamun, audible on many a Saturday from our home. Jeon is closely tied to Kim Geon-Hee and appears to have talked up the siege of the courthouse.
Having conceded nothing, Yoon elects to attend hearings at the Constitutional Court in Anguk, despite it not being required of him and his refusal to assent to anything that is. On his appearances he is immaculately groomed, and perhaps hopes to encourage more mob frenzy in his support, which he hasn’t condemned.
Feb 21st
For some days Yoon supporters have held rallies on university campuses in Seoul and around the country, leading to more violent clashes, particularly at Ehwa Women’s University. A majority of students are for impeachment but a not insignificant number adhere to the opposing camp. Other stakeholders, including youtubers and right-wing groups, also get involved. Protests on campuses are not required to observe the Assembly and Demonstration Act, but once again police must be called in.
March 6th
Two South Korean KF-16 jets accidentally bomb a civilian-populated area in Pocheon during a live-fire drill conducted jointly with the US Air Force; forty-three people are injured.
March 10th
Prosecutors contrive successfully to have Yoon released from custody. At Yoon’s declare of martial law that night three months ago there was a cry of despair from my wife I had never heard before. Now she lets it out again. ‘It is as though the Japanese never left.’ Grotesquely, Yoon is at liberty to swan around the city, glad-handing venerators, even as deliberations at the Constitutional Court proceed.
Three of the nine justices of the Court are appointed by the president, or in this case acting president Han Deok-Su. One of them has retired at the end of his term; the ambitious Han, in cahoots with Yoon, is in no hurry to supply a replacement. This, with the fact that one of the other eight is historically connected to Chun Doo-Hwun’s military government, explains the foot-dragging.
March 24th
A motion to impeach Han Deok-Su is defeated.
March 26th
The Seoul High Court acquits Lee Jae-Myeong of violating the Public Official Election Act during the 2021 presidential primary, the most significant obstacle to his presidential candidature being thereby removed.
April 4th
At 11:22am Yoon’s impeachment is at last declared enacted by Constitutional Court Judge Moon Hyeong-Bae. A tremendous roar goes up from a rejoicing crowd massed in central Seoul, many of whom have encamped there for months. A presidential election will take place within sixty days.
May 1st
Two days after Lee Jae-Myeong is nominated as presidential candidate for the Democratic Party, the Supreme Court mounts a ‘second coup’ by overturning the Appellate Court’s decision to acquit. Sitting in a coffee shop in Jong-Ro as the news lands, I witness the outrage of customers. The Chief Justice Cho Hee-Dae, like the other nine justices of the Court, are Yoon’s appointees. The deadline to register candidates for the election is May 11th; a conviction and sentencing would put both Lee and his party out of the running.
But within a week the Seoul High Court responds by postponing Lee’s trial until mid-June. Charges of this kind cannot be pursued against a president in office. On June 3rd, as expected, he wins the election.
June 4th
Entering the Ministry of National Defence at Yongsan, the operational centre of Yoon’s administration, Lee’s team finds the offices throroughly emptied as if by a retreating army. Far from attempting to prepare or facilitate the transition of power, the outgoing government is obstructive to the last; Lee must somehow begin from scratch. Among innumerable tasks ahead the Blue House will be restored as the president’s executive office and residence.
June 16th
At the G7 in Alberta Lee Jae-Myeong is thanked by Keir Starmer ‘for your support in Ukraine.’ It is not clear that he hasn’t been confused with Yoon, who mooted sending military assistance at Zelenskyy’s request. Lee has slammed the idea, both on the principle of keeping his country out of foreign conflicts and for the (one would have thought obvious) impracticability of any engagement with Russia, let alone North Korea, with whom the ROK is still technically at war. He smiles as Starmer bumbles on, and leaves it at that.
Yoon has invited an associate of Trump to guest lecture at Seoul National University, one of a number of Korean-Americans propagating the story of Chinese intervention in Lee Jae-Myeong’s election. It is revealed that the same people have been funding Korean ‘Yoon again’ groups who attach provocative messages to balloons launched at the North Korean border, hold rallies screaming for Yoon’s reinstatement and Lee ‘s crucifixion, so on. The university now rows back on its welcome, but Oh Seh-Hoon has already bought the man’s air ticket: zealots greet him at the airport waving, as always, both the Taegeukgi and the Stars and Stripes.
July 31st
Inquisitions, confessions, recordings and documents continue to verify the extent of the project culminating in the botched coup. Mass deaths among the populace were forecast and plans drafted accordingly; the disappearing of journalists, politicians and others, whose names were listed, was also in the scheme. To first goad the DPRK into a response that would induce a national emergency, strategies included the deployment of drones to Pyeongyang between October 3rd and 11th. When the North declined to rise to the bait, more were sent in November, their flight path adjusted away from Pyeongyang after a revolt by the Drone Operations Command. Additional provocation was attempted by flying Apache helicopters along the Northern Limit Line. Kim Yong-Hyun’s next recourse was to be a missile attack, as directed to senior staff at the Joint Chiefs Command on the 18th November. To his fury, they refused to countenance it. At about that time, however, an intelligence agent in China was told by an informant in North Korea that ‘a major incident is going to go down in South Korea next month.’
The governments of Lee Myung-Bak and Park Geun-Hye, from 2008 to 2016, also destructively cultivated tensions with the North for domestic advantage. For thirty-one years – that is, from Eisenhower to Bush senior – American nuclear warheads parked here were aimed at the (non-nuclear) North. But nothing this unhinged has been contemplated since MacArthur’s proposal to ‘drop between 30 and 50 atomic bombs across Manchuria’ and turn the DPRK into ‘a belt of radioactive cobalt.’ (Truman was there to rein in the ‘dumb son of a bitch’).*
August 1st
‘Hunter-gatherers. Tens of thousands of years, until the Bronze Age. The start of civilization. Then you had elites, small dominant groups, commandeering land, grain supplies, weapons. It became less egalitarian. That kind of society can’t be sustained, that concentration of wealth, greater and greater inequality, so the collapse happens, repeatedly. But it was regional, in kingdoms or boundaries of empire, like the Romans, or the Koryo Dynasty. Now we’re all in the one rotten global system. And now it’s these buggers, fossil fuel corporations, big-tech… ‘
‘Arms manufacturers,’ my wife puts in.
‘Yes. Yet the collapse could be avoided. The trouble is, the most powerful -‘
‘It’s finished. All too late. And did you also read what Yoon Seok-Yeol did today?
‘No,’ I say. ‘Was it as edifying as anything else he’s done?’
‘When the special counsel came to take him for questioning he took off his clothes and lay on the floor in his underwear.’
‘ “Scoundrels raised from the dust upon the merit of their vices.” ‘
The next time they come for Yoon he struggles so madly that the attempt is abandoned again, for fear he might injure himself.
My father once remarked of the First Lady of the United States, at the time of dangerously heightened tensions between east and west: ‘She’ll do anything to get into the limelight, even if it means bombing the Soviet Union.’ He and I had both lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis. But any comparison of Kim Geon-Hee with Nancy Reagan would be somewhat unfair. Imelda Marcos may be a closer fit; like her, Kim is the sort to covet high-end accessories that cost about twice an average annual salary. Now gathering pace, investigations have thrown up burgeoning evidence of gifts solicited in exchange for appointments to government positions, along with stock market manipulation.
It doesn’t stop there. If there are things in the world we may call evil, the whole image presently emerging is unquestionably among them. Notwithstanding awful scenes televised from Vietnam and Biafra during my childhood, it was lived at a moment in which we believed in a future that evil, however defined, would no longer prevail in. But that these people exist is proof of its perenniality as much as its famous if mind-numbing banality. Almost every day, Yoon would sleep off a night’s drinking while an empty motorcade with its black windows would be sent from his residence at Hannam-Dong to the Yongsan headquarters. There, with or without him, his wife would predominate at meetings and oversee business. Such international policy as there was appears to have been calibrated on grounds for self-enrichment, but also featured the potentially catastrophic adventure in North Korea. At the time of writing it isn’t known if the aim of consolidated power and permanent immunity encompassed the aggressive absorption of that country, but on the basis of what has come to light it’s no longer unbelievable. The additional possibility is taken seriously of a link between Kim Geon-Hee and the party or parties who made the attempt on the life of Lee Jae-Myeong.
6th August
With the special counsel closing in, Kim Geon-Hee has checked into Asan hospital claiming to be suffering from ‘depression’ and having to use a wheelchair – a prop unfailingly employed by villains brought to bay – where doctors wearily ask: ‘Why this hospital – why us?’ She is later spotted trotting in and out of a rear entrance but, on arrival at court, affects to be barely capable of pulling herself out of the car and staggers studiously before the cameras. In this masquerade, the allegations against her are supposedly a calumny so shocking as to bring on paraplegia.
11th August
Cho-Kuk receives a pardon from Lee Jae-Myeong; on leaving prison he undertakes once again to lend ‘what small effort he may’ to ongoing reform of the prosecution service.
13th August
The decision is taken to detain Kim Geon-Hee in order to prevent the destruction of evidence. Again, worryingly, young people are seen among her grieving supporters, but as yet no further sieges of court buildings take place.
Thirty years ago Kim Min-Seok, prime minister and adviser to Lee Jae-Myeong, was a student activist who forced the US embassy to reveal what it knew about the Gwangju incident. At some point amidst the pandemonium of the past several months he likened Yoon Seok-Yeol to a wild boar. His remark brought to mind Ted Hughes’ Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, an examination of Shakespeare’s use of religious myth, although Hughes offers the basic idea only as ‘a sort of musical adaptation’. In his Introduction he writes:
‘Adonis’s myth proper begins where Aphrodite hides the Divine Child in a chest and gives him into the care of Persephone, Goddess of the Underworld. As he grows, Persephone falls in love with him and refuses to give him back to Aphrodite, even though the Goddess of Love descends into the Underworld to beg for him. Aphrodite appeals to Zeus for justice and it is finally arranged that she shall have Adonis for one part of the year, and Persephone shall have him for another part.
‘Now it is Aphrodite’s turn to refuse to Adonis over to Persephone (who), enraged, emerges in her animal form as a wild boar, and reclaims him by killing him. After that, he alternates between the two goddesses.’
This is Hughes on Macbeth in Chapter Three:
‘…there is never any doubt what will happen. In fact, two things are happening simultaneously, one in the pattern of the Tragic Equation, which Macbeth’s Adonis self has to suffer, and one on the pattern of the Rival Brothers, which fills him with exultation. In the first, Lady Macbeth resembles Persephone coming at him in the form of a boar – to ‘kill’ the Adonis/Macbeth and transform him into her infernal consort, in her Underworld, as the ‘hot tyrant.’ In the second, Persephone is actually recreating him, out of her own ‘divine,’ infernal substance, as the Boar – who will now kill King Duncan.’
While holding by the objectivity of his idea, Hughes admits that ‘almost anything can be projected onto Shakespeare.’ Looked at the other way, Shakespeare takes in everything and everyone, everywhere, although the essence of Yoon and his wife can be extracted from an airport novel as easily as from Jacobean drama. But (Hughes again) ‘Macbeth affects the imagination as he does, more disturbingly than any of the other heroes… because of his double life, undergoing the Adonis-into-Tarquin tragic fate, like all Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, while at the same time living out, as none of the others does, that full subjective awareness of the Boar.’ In Yoon there is no space for Macbeth’s transformation, or his agonized awareness.
Who would be the Duncan/Lucrece figure in a Yoon-Kim version? The Chinese, North Korea; communists, actual or imagined. Lee Jae-Myeong, Cho-Kuk. Those whose elimination is demanded by the excited old people in Gwanghwamun, or by youtubers and hooligans ransacking the court building; anyone who would speak or move against them, and in whom they incarnate a world of menace.
15th August
The 80th anniversary of Independence Day. The lavishness of the commemoration acknowledges what people have endured and withstood since last December; it offers a catharsis. In his speech Lee Jae-Myeong addresses both North Korea and Japan, recognizing the first as an independent nation that is ‘not our enemy,’ and undertakes to work for a lasting peace for the prosperity of all. Co-operation and concord with Japan, also, only makes sense, but it would help if the barbarities of the colonial era were no longer extenuated, and the facts faced up to. Meanwhile he will redress the long neglect of those whose parents and grandparents fought for independence but were later ostracized as communist sympathizers. This resulted from the American intervention, in 1945, on behalf of a governing committee of ‘several hundred conservatives who… served the Japanese, (although) that stigma (was expected) eventually to disappear.’ (H. Merrell Benninghoff, State Department adviser to General Hodge).*
5th September
Cho-Kuk stumbles fatally by making light of a scandal in his party that results in the resignation of two female victims of widely-corroborated molestation, as the male perpetrators evade punishment. Another beacon of rectitude in opposition turns out to be ruinously blind on finally attaining to office.
*Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: a Modern History, Norton, 1997
† With Trump in office the US government no longer seeks the transfer of control on the basis of increased Chinese hard power in East Asia. It Is, however, seeking a higher payment for providing ‘protection,’ causing some resentment. Lee Jae-Myeong has publicly declared his intention of finally completing the transition.