South Korea Wants to Brainwash Students to Whitewash North Korea’s Bloody History

For those whose world is based in moral equivalence, there is no difference between liberal democracy and totalitarian dictatorship. Supposed micro-aggressions or past human rights sins are disqualifying factors to condemn an enemy’s contemporary embrace of slave labor and concentration camps.

Sound ridiculous? Welcome to the mindset of South Korea’s supposedly progressive leadership.

At issue is the so-called “Sunshine Policy.” Some background: Kim Dae Jung, president of South Korea between 1998 and 2003, made the Sunshine policy his cornerstone program. Its basic idea was that South Korea would not attempt to undo Pyongyang’s grip on North Korea in any way and would instead seek active cooperation to promote reconciliation. In effect, such a policy would be analogous to Cold War-era West Germany unilaterally recognizing the permanent legitimacy of communist East Germany to exist. Rather than, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” the Sunshine equivalent would be, “Mr. Gorbachev, let us offer you grants to solidify the wall.”

The problem with the Sunshine Policy under Kim Dae Jung was that it had very little success to show for its efforts. Efforts to open North Korea to South Korean tourism and business collapsed quickly. Many Sunshiners point to the June 2000 summit between the South and North Korean presidents as a victory for the persistence of their engagement, but it subsequently emerged that the summit occurred only after a secret $200 million pay-off from Kim Dae Jung.

But as South Koreans began to turn on the Sunshine Policy, desperation to justify it grew. As Sung-Yoon Lee, a professor at Tufts and a researcher at Harvard University explained, “What had begun as a means to an end had become an end itself—an end from which there could be no deviation and a dogma to which, as the Sunshine Policy approached its denouement, there could be no official denunciation.” Indeed, South Korea’s left-of-center leadership and their partners in the Clinton administration bent over backwards to acknowledge any evidence to suggest the Sunshine Policy had failed. They blamed everything North Korea did in terms of assassinations, human rights clampdowns, their ballistic missile program, and even the 2006 nuclear test on everything but efforts to take a soft approach to North Korean provocation.

Enter current South Korean President Moon Jae-in: He began his career as a human rights lawyer and an advocate for the Sunshine Policy. He eventually became chief of staff to President Roh Moo-hyun with whom he had previously worked and associated in leftist political circles. It was Roh who doubled down on Sunshine as North Korea doubled down on its nuclear program. And it was Moon who directed his policy. That Moon would enter office determined to take off where his late boss (Roh committed suicide in 2009 after a succession of bribery accusations) left off should not surprise. It is one of the reasons why he has been so determined to encourage and plan summits. That President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accept his mediation—and believe what he has told them when no independent witnesses are in the room during his discussions with his communist counterparts—is, for Moon, a dream come true.

While any independent assessment of the Sunshine Policy and North Korean behavior show that it was far from successful, Moon now seeks to simply whitewash history.

According to Chosun Ilbo, a conservative paper which is among the largest circulated in South Korea, Moon is seeking to change the textbooks used in South Korean schools beginning in 2020. Not only will the new books omit that the Republic of Korea (i.e., South Korea) is the unilateral government of the Korean Peninsula, as recognized by the United Nations, but it will also include no mention of North Korea’s invasion of South Korea during the Korean War.

In other words, Moon believes that a communist dictatorship’s invasion that sparked a war killing an estimated 2.5 million people is not worthy of mention because to do so might contradict the political narrative which Moon and his fellow travelers want to put forward.

In addition, the Chosun Ilbo report suggests that the new textbooks will not include the phrase “liberal democracy,” nor mention North Korean human rights abuses or military provocations. Put another way, Moon does not want future generations to learn that while his previous boss was showering North Korea’s leader with $200 million in cash, that same leader was running a series of concentration camps which continue to exist to this day. (On these topics, all the carefully-researched and well-documented publications from Committee for Human Rights in North Korea should be mandatory reading for U.S. officials). In effect, what Moon apparently is doing is surreptitiously ceding any argument based on facts, and replacing it with one based on wishful thinking,

Alas, there is a long history that shows that sleight-of-hand does not bolster security nor does wishful thinking change the true character of rogue regimes. To pretend otherwise risks far more than simply the truth, however. On the Korean Peninsula, such political delusions are often measured with body bags.