Martial Law in South Korea (Cancelled)!

It’s Christmas Day. A lovely white Christmas here in South Korea. From up there, where I took this photo, you can just see what must be, bar a few utterly failed states in Africa, the worst country on Earth: the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. They’ll be no Christmas Day over there. Just more misery.

For one reason or another, I haven’t written any blog entries since the summer. Mostly, this is because I’ve been busy working on two new book projects and  making art in my wonderful new studio. I’ll write more about these soon.

But I feel compelled to comment on the recent drama here in the Republic of Korea. I refer to President Yoon Suk-yeol’s martial law declaration on 3rd December, which turned out to be the shortest period of martial law in history, as it was cancelled the next day.   But it’s certainly been a wake-up call about how vulnerable democracy is, but also how robustly it can protect itself. 

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Martial law officially involves the armed forces stepping in when civilian authorities have stopped functioning, as in the case of war, insurrection, or natural disaster. In democracies it is usually used in times of war, or in relation to a specific threat or crisis within the nation, in which case it’s not imposed across unilaterally. But the ROK’s relationship with martial law is unique, in that the nation was founded in 1948 under martial law due to the communist threat both from the DPRK and from within the ROK itself. Then the Korean War began, lasting from 1950 to 1953.  In May 1961 there was an army coup, which brought General Park Chung-hee to power and began another long period of martial law. When Park was assassinated in 1979, a brief moment of non-military rule began, but this was stamped out that same year by the military, and another eight year period of martial law began, including the brutal suppression of the  Gwangju uprising in 1980.   In 1988 the first democratically elected President of the ROK was Roh Tae-woon heralded a period in which, until the 3rd December, there has never been martial law. A lot has changed in the republic of Korea since the 1980s, but this seems to have been missed by President Yoon.

The most important difference is that the ROK is now a working democracy. Another is that it is a powerful world economy. And another is that despite the threats of the DPRK, including nuclear threats, the two Korea’s are now living in totally unequal worlds, a situation that’s been acknowledged by the DPRK leadership’s decision to stop pretending they want a re-unified Korean peninsula. They recently even blew up on their side the roads that traverse the DMZ., effectively announcing their status as a prison-nation. Kim has also sent a large quantity of munitions to Russia, and several thousand of his elite forces are currently being put in the meat grinder in Ukraine. The DPRK is therefore as unlikely now to invade the South as at any time.

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Here are some choicer extracts from President Yoon’s statement announcing martial law.

He begins by accusing his rivals, the Democratic Party, of the very thing he is about to attempt:

This is a clear anti-state act of conspiring to incite rebellion by trampling on the constitutional order of the free Republic of Korea and disrupting legitimate state institutions established by the Constitution and the law.

The lives of the people are of no concern, and state affairs are in a paralyzed state solely due to impeachments, special prosecutors, and the opposition party leader's shield (against prosecution).

Now, it’s true that Yoon has been a lame duck President for some time because his party lost out big time in local elections, and the winning Democratic Party has been blocking more or less all Yoon’s attempts at legislative reform. His wife is being investigated for accepting expensive gifts (bribes), and his popularity has plummeted. Yoon must have felt very frustrated. But this is hardly grounds for martial law. Therefore, like the military rulers of the pre-democratic Republic, Yoon sought to justify his actions by evoking the imminent threat from the DPRK:

 Dear fellow citizens, I am declaring a state of emergency martial law to protect the free Republic of Korea from the threats of the North Korean communist forces, to eradicate the shameless pro-North anti-state forces that plunder the freedom and happiness of our people and to safeguard the free constitutional order.

 And here’s the best bit of all, from towards the end of Yoon’s short statement:

 Due to the declaration of martial law, there may be some inconveniences for the good citizens who have believed in and followed the constitutional values of a free democracy, but we will strive to minimize such inconveniences.

‘Inconveniences’! ‘Strive to minimize such inconveniences’! Yoon’s low assessment of the South Korean people is summed up here. Did he really believe they would only experience martial law as an ‘inconvenience’, as if it was nothing more than roadworks slowing down their commute home? What was in Yoon’s deluded mind? He seems to have lost touch with reality, or perhaps its more accurate to say reality got funneled into a very narrow space full of his petty political problems. He lost any sense of the Big Picture.

In the end, I felt very proud of the South Korean people, and most particularly of the army, whose top brass showed themselves to be far more wedded to democracy than the President and his cronies. Huge numbers of South  Koreans rallied to democracy and sent the scoundrel packing. Unfortunately, Yoon is still at large. But not for much longer. Several Presidents  (5, including the President  and former general who led the 1979 coup, Chun Doo-hwan) have been impeached  and/or given prison sentences, including death sentences. But all - except Roh Moo-hyun (President from 2003 -2008) who committed suicide - received pardons. Yoon Suk-yeol will therefore in all likelihood soon be the sixth ROK President to go to prison, and maybe will even be given the death penalty if he is found guilty of treason. But history suggests he will also be pardoned.

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I was also struck by the timing of Yoon’s declaration of martial law, which was almost exactly one month after Trump was elected President (5th November). I can imagine that Trump will try the martial law card in the US in the not too distant future if it seems necessary. In fact, federal and state governments  in the USA have declared martial law over 60 times during its history –  for example, after Pearl Harbor in 1942 and until the end of World War Two. The last time was limited to a single town in Maryland during in 1963 Civil Rights Movement crisis.

What Yoon’s action exposes is the influence of the trend towards populist and authoritarian leaders which is undermining democracy and emboldening half-baked wannabees like Yoon to accelerate the process. In the case of the ROK, he totally underestimated the sound commitment of his country to democratic government of the kind that has checks and balances put in place to make sure no one person can try to do what Yoon did. He also underestimated the sea change in the minds of South Korea’s military leaders, who refused to be employed as his bully boys.  

But I’m wondering if the Constitution of the United States, which is famously buttressed by such checks and balances, is going to be able to take the strain of another Trump Presidency. The US seems so utterly ravaged. To borrow Ezra Pound’s words, it’s almost beginning to look like the US is a ‘botched civilization’.

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Here’s a glimpse of one of my new ‘LP Paintings’, in which I make monochrome paintings based on the covers of LP’s, preserving only the original typography of the title and artist. In this case, its an LP by Bob Dylan. The title seems timely. I liked the way the sunlight in my studio played over its surface, so I turned it into a New Year’ card.

Hope (Part II)

As I waited with baited breathe for the outcome of the American election, I  thought of Thomas Kincade.  This is a painting by the man who is probably the most well-known artist in the United States today (he died in 2012).  It is entitled ‘Garden of Hope’. Here is what the artist himself says about it on his Thomas Kincade Studios website:

‘Hope is the great gift of a loving God. In ‘The Garden of Hope’, second in my Gardens of Light collection, I celebrate the bountiful blessing that is a hopeful spirit. Radiance bathes a garden in the woods, pouring down in a flood of light upon an ancient stone urn that is a vessel of hope.

The deeply mysterious relationship between hope and sacrifice is expressed in the symbolism of the urn. Central is the Roman cross, bearing the visages of Mary and Jesus. A magnificent spray of flowers bursts forth from the urn. Surely, ‘The Garden of Hope’ is a garden lavish with new beginnings.’[1]

 Why am I thinking about a mediocre American artist when the fate of not just the United States but the whole world hangs in the balance? Because his paintings open a window onto the subjectivity (or lack of it) of the millions who voted Republican. 

I don’t think it’s enough to focus on the anger and resentment factors when seeking to understand how so many people can behave in what to me – and to you -  seem incomprehensibly stupid ways.  No. We need to look to other dimensions of the human psyche,  especially, I think, to the nature of the hope these people nurture.  Trump and the Republicans mirror these hopes just as much as they give substance to their supporters’ fear, anger, and resentment. As I said in the last post, hope is two-edged. It can be a real catalyst for action and change, but it can also delude and foster false beliefs and aspirations, impossible or irrational goals. But one way or another, we all harbor hopes for the future.  Looking at a Kincade painting is like looking at the soul of a Republican. And what we see is the visual image of their hopefulness.

In the 1990s  the dissident Russian artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid set out to learn what  a real "people's" art  looked like. In other words, informed by their experience of the Socialist Realist propaganda art of the Soviet Union, they were interested to know what people everywhere really wanted to see in a picture. They began with the United States, their adopted country, and conducted a survey through a professional marketing firm in order to paint America's ‘Most Wanted’ and also America’s ‘Least Wanted’ paintings. They didn’t ask a question like: ‘What does a hopeful picture look like?’ Instead, their questions were more straightforwardly visual, such as ‘What’s your favorite colour?’,  ‘Do you prefer paintings with sharp angles or soft curves?’, and  content-based, like, ‘Would you rather look at a painting with figures that are nude or fully clothed? Should the people in the painting be at leisure or working? Should they be indoors or outside, and if the latter, in what kind of landscape? This painting is the one they painted as a result of the questionnaire – America’s ‘Most Wanted’:

Yes. That’s George Washington in the middle foreground (I suppose we can up-date it to an image of Trump).  In the end, Komar and Melamid polled 14 countries, and discovered, for example, that Russia’s most-wanted painting was remarkably similar to the United States’ - minus Washington, but still with children playing  beside a lake, and a predominantly blue colouration. In fact, they discovered that in every country they polled— from China and Kenya to Iceland and Ukraine, but with the curious exception of Holland— people seemed to want more or less the same picture.And what was the  various people’s “Least Wanted’ picture? You have probably already guessed. Modern art. Especially, abstract art of the monochromatic, geometric and textured variety. 

Komar and Melamid’s project shows that a secure, that is to say, socially uncontroversial,  message of hope is what most people want to have communicated through pictures. But this is simply because that image expresses the kind of hope they nurture within themselves. In this sense, art’s has a practical function , which is essentially therapeutic, preventative and prophylactic.  But we would be wrong to blame ‘mass’ or ‘popular’ culture for this phenomenon.  A look at  art history confirms that this kind of picture has always been what is ‘most wanted’.  Most images have been made to communicate unproblematically optimistic or hopeful states of mind or messages based on the presentation of familiarly affirmative content  and the use of an aesthetically pleasing style   that serve  to consolidate people’s need for a positive outcome,  personal and collective. So, it should come as no surprise that Komar and Melamid’s painting looks remarkably similar to Thomas Kincade’s oeuvre.

So the Russian artists’ project tells us a good deal about the troubled and troubling relationship  not only between hope and art, but also between hope that is truly empowering and hope that is emasculating. It certainly helps to explain why so many people find modern art to be very far from being  images of hope, even when the artists themselves and their apologists expressly declared that it was. But it also goes a long way towards explaining Trumpism and the way the Republican Party has evolved.

America’s ‘Most Wanted’ painting and Kincade’s ‘Garden of Hope’ are both facile and banal images of hope. They serve the purpose of saving people the trouble of truly imagining hope for themselves. The  genuine expression of feeling, the communication of complex values and ideas, is evidently not what the majority of people want from looking at pictures. They prefer images that reduce experience to amenable clichés, to the conventional and manageable.  Once an image is so familiar and lacking in originality it is indeed  ‘evil’, in a sense, because it acts as an obstacle to the communication of authentic thoughts and feelings.  

In the 1940s, George Orwell referred to what he termed a ‘huge dump of worn-out metaphors’. These are verbal images ‘which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.’ When an image is so totally familiar, it is possible to be almost unconscious when employing them, and as a result, we will be lulled into a ‘reduced state of consciousness’ which, wrote Orwell,  ‘if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.’ 

 Kincade is pandering to a very large audience, and as Komar and Melamid affirmed, he is only giving people what they want. This is what an image of ‘hope’ looks like to millions of people, and  it is, therefore, what ‘hope’ is for them.  If we are going to take the political ramifications of hope seriously it is definitely necessary to acknowledge the trivializing sentimentality so often associated with its ostensible expression within images, most especially in popular culture. 

[1]  https://thomaskinkade.com/shop/limited-edition-art/gardens/garden-of-hope-the-limited-edition-art/  

Ignorance is Bliss

A couple of especially depressing news items caught my attention yesterday (September 17, 2020). Apparently , a new survey has found almost two-thirds of young American adults do not know that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and more than one in 10 believe Jews actually caused the Holocaust.

The next news item I read reported on a  ‘town hall’ held by Donald Trump in which he spoke, in relation of the Covid-10 pandemic, of ‘herd mentality’. What Trump actually meant, of course,  was ‘herd immunity’. But he hadn’t just made a slip of the tongue, because he used the same phrase three times.

Ignorance is lack of knowledge, information, education, or awareness. Today, the problem is not so much access to information, but  discrimination, or what we do with all the information at our fingertips. In fact, paradoxically, there seems to be a direct  relationship between high levels of accessible information and high levels of ignorance.  

Research shows that lack of knowledge often does not motivate an increased, unbiased search for information.[1]  This is because the brain's reward circuitry selectively treats an opportunity to gain knowledge about future favorable outcomes, but not unfavorable outcomes. In a nutshell,  people seek information that will create positive beliefs, and avoid information that creates negative beliefs. People  who feel uninformed or unable to understand important social issues do not  therefore seek more information. Instead, they  depend  on what the government says, which  is usually positive. This obviously increases their faith in the government. Consequently, this increases the  desire to avoid learning about a relevant issue, when the information is likely to be negative.  

Ignorance breed more ignorance.

But ignorance, conviction, and power are a powerful trio,  and so I’m afraid Donald Trump will win in November…..

[1] Stephen Shepherd and Aaron C. Kay ‘On the Perpetuation of Ignorance: System Dependence, SystemJustification, and the Motivated Avoidance of Sociopolitical Information’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2012, Vol. 102, No. 2, 264-280.

https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-102-2-264.pdf