The Bully (Part 2)
Three bullies from the same Korean family.
There are two versions of ‘modern Korea’. One is ruled by the most autocratic dictatorship today - which makes Putinism look very amateurish - while the other has just elected a new President coming from the political party that had previously been in opposition. Two radically different systems developed, starting with the same circumstances and the same people. One Korea seems to have used Nineteen Eighty-Four as its guidebook, while the other started out with an authoritarian regime but evolved into an American-style liberal democracy. This situation has nothing to do with intrinsic ‘Korean’ proclivities. How can it? The same ethnic and historically extremely homogeneous people have gone very separate ways, like identical twins separated at birth.
One explanation of this bizarre and tragic siutuation is to see Korea not in isolation but as holistically connected to everything else going on in the world, and so to more or less random factors. Specifically, in 1945 Korea had the misfortune of being a colony of the defeated Japanese, and so was carved up by the two victorious forces: the Soviets and the Americans and allies. As a result of the Cold War an Iron Curtain descended across the 38 Parallel. Two nations were created. War ensued. No definitive conclusion to the war was achieved – neither side was wholly vanquished - and so the two rivals Koreas remain to this day. And so here I am, writing my blog near to where the Iron Curtain still remains drawn and looks like staying into the foreseeable future.
But chance factors also extend down from the macro to the micro level. Yes. Korea became a pawn in the Great Power’s struggle for world hegemony. But what happened was also due to individual players on the ground. Specifically, Korean leaders and their entourages. The first President of the Republic of Korea, Sygman Rhee, the American choice, was no friend to liberal democracy. Ostensibly in order to protect the Republic from North Korean aggression (In 1968, for example, North Korean commandos almost succeeded in assassination Park, making their incursion to within a few hundred meters of the presidential Blue House in central Seoul), the South Korean leader, the former army General Park Chung-hee (who had taken control of the state in 1960), suspended the constitution in 1972 declared martial law, and wrote a new constitution that gave him much increased executive power for life. The new constitution would remain in force until Park’s assassination (by his own bodyguard, not the North Koreans) during a military coup 1979, whereupon the military extended its powers of repression even further. In 1980, there was a popular uprising in the south-eastern city of Gwangju which was brutally put down, and most of the 1980s passed under authoritarian rule. However, finally, after the amendment to the constitution in 1987, a democratic presidential election was held for the first time, and since then, elections have been peacefully held every five years.
Why was this possible? Critics will say the United States engineered the semblance of liberal democracy, making South Korea into a compliant a vassal state. But this can’t be true. The level of genuine democracy here cannot be imposed either from outside or above, by fiat. That much we know from history. It must grow from within and below. Which isn’t to say, like some apologist for democracy, that democracy is somehow inevitable. Is certainly is not. Which is one very good reason why democracy needs to be well defended. North of the DMZ, a very different political situation occurred. Things froze into totalitarian place, and this was largely due to the odious bully Josef Stalin and the equally odious bully Kim Il sung and his two progeny. The bullies are certainly there in the Republic of Korea. But the Republic of Korea, like other liberal democracies, devised ways to hem them in, limit the damage they can do.
Steven Pinker marshals plenty of compelling evidence in books such as the better Angels of Our Nature (2011) and Enlightenment Now (2018) to show that history can be read as a narrative in which societies have become increasingly buttressed against the inevitably of zero-sum thinking by creating checks and balances to diminish the chances of a bully getting so much power that he or she can enslave us. This has happened at all levels of society, especially over the past fifty years.
At my grammar school for example, which i mentioned in my previous post on bullies. In the mid-1970s the headmaster of Eastbourne Grammar School changed, and the new headmaster arrived with an updated education philosophy in which the aim was no longer to instil the necessary body of learning through intimidating, and, more profoundly, did not see life as a zero-sum game. There was now enough for everyone. Admittedly, by this time I was sixteen, so I was no longer at the bottom of the bullying pecking-order. But I’m sure what I perceived was generally felt - even by the even-year-old squirts who made up the First Year. The ethos at my school went very quickly from the terroristic to the consensual. You could say it went from totalitarian state to liberal democracy in less than five years. That is no trivial change, and was largely down to the revolution is how people thought about society that happened in the sixties. Obviously, bullying did not disappear. But it was no longer institutionalized, and so could do less harm.
This same process has occurred on the level of nation-states. Look at Donald Trump. He’s almost a caricature of the bully. When he was a reality tv star doing The Apprentice, that was basically his role. And, yes, the show as a hit, because, yes, we enjoy watching bullies at work – as long as they’re bullying someone else. The zero-sum psychology is something like this: if I’m watching someone else getting bullies, then it’s not me. But when he was President of the United States, Trump the Bully - who was largely elected because he was a bully - found he was unable to do what he needs to do as a bully, which is intimidate the vulnerable and keep all the pie for himself. The United States Constitution got in his way. What does this tell us? Yes. I know. The United States is very far from perfect, but it has a political system that is obviously more able to stop bullies than, say, Russia’s. Indeed, all liberal democracies have this in-built capacity. This is real progress, and we should be able to celebrate.
Which leads me back to the point I’ve been making in previous posts: in our eagerness to show how far our liberal democracies are from perfection, we progressives spend a lot of energy exposing their imperfections. In fact, this is precisely one of the main reasons why liberal democracy is the least bad political system: it makes room for criticism and opposition. It knows that if you don’t have freedom of speech and diversity of opinion, you don’t have the ability to stop the bullies. We can’t get rid of them entirely, because they are an aspect of being human. But we can make them less able to freely bully, to bully without consequences. The deeper problem is how to ween us of our primitive admiration for bullies.
To do that, we would have to address a very deep predisposition.
A few years back I was disgusted to discover that my Korean wife’s sister-in-law, who lives in the USA, had voted for Trump. When I asked her why, she replied it was because he was “strong.”
If we want to get rid of the cult of the bully, our acceptance of being bullied, and our collusion with bullies, we will have to change the whole idea of what human ‘strength’ is.
Not easy!
Credits:
Kim photos: https://www.freepressjournal.in/world/kim-jong-un-kim-jong-il-kim-il-sung-why-are-all-north-korean-leaders-named-ki