My Korean teacher and the conspiratorial minds of the South Korean intelligencia

My Korean teacher is a wonderful, patient and expert woman. I admire her tremendous yet understated zeal for her language; like all good language teachers she knows her language inside-out, she can explain anything in Korean and English. Her English is rather too good, when I try to talk to her in my very basic Korean I usually choke with embarassment because her English shames me. She used to work with foreigners all the time, using just English, so it is understandable that she would be very good at English. You might have guessed from my writing style that I am an impatient, and loud learner, a rather dominant presence in the class room; yet one-to-one my teacher and I still get on well, in spite of the fact that I am not always conducive to group learning.

She is a very knowledgeable person, she knows a great deal more about Korean politics and history than the average person does about their country and its history. From our infrequent one-to-one chats I think she leans leftwards on the Korean political spectrum. This is not saying much, in this age of Neo-Liberal globalisation, to lean to the left anywhere except in western Europe, a couple of ex-communist countries (North Korea, and China), and in some parts of South America is unremarkable. It also usually means little more than an advocacy of a few extra percentage points on general taxation. In domestic and foreign terms this is very much her position, and I find myself, as I become more and more pragmatic with age to be in agreement with her most of the time.

The South Korean left can be broken down into three main parties, which roughly correspond with three factions. There is the Democratic Party (민주당) which is roughly equivalent in most regards to the British Labour Party, or to the Left-wing of the American Democratic Party. This is the dominant, and rather prosaically Liberal part of the South Korean left. The people who are now members of this party ran the country from 1998 to 2008. Both Kim Dae Jung, and Roh Moo Hyun were part of this faction (although because South Korean political parties have a habit of fragmenting and reforming, their respective parties changed names).

The other two notable parties of the Left in South Korea are the Democratic Labour Party (민주노동당) and the New Progressive Party (진보신당). These two parties have remarkably similar Socially Democratic ideological platforms; the key cleavage between them is the former's emphasis on nationalism and the nation. The Democratic Labour Party advocates what is called National Liberation (민족해방), seeking to free South Korean society from the excesses of Capitalism. Whilst the New Progressive Party seeks People's Democracy (민중민주), this slogan connotes a desire to correct the excesses of capitalism embedded in the international economic system. The New Progressive Party is also refreshingly anti-Nationalist. The South Korean left as epitomised by the Democratic Party and its more extreme cousin the Democratic Labour Party is well known for being nationalist. In fact, at times almost xenophobic racial nationalism is one of the fundamental loci of group identity for the South Korean left. The state has always been captive to the 'US imperialists' and their capitalist designs, therefore patriotism is treachery to the left. Rather the race itself is what unites the people, the the downtrodden toiling masses (민중) are united racially by their pure blood line. This is ever so redolent of North Korean nationalism...

My teacher is not a racial nationalist, she has an open mind and a kind heart. She enjoys teaching foreigners, and finds our stories of our homelands interesting, although she prefers it when we tell them in Korean. Yet she on one topic she seems to get her political identity from this nationalism that I just described. The sinking of the Cheonan has spawned lots of paranoid and rather ridiculous conspiracy theories on the South Korean left. Apparently the United States has aided and abetted, a Conservative coverup of the 'real story'. It is all too convenient so the story goes that the Cheonan should be sunk just before an election, and it is to the advantage of the ruling conservative Grand National Party (한나라당). These conspiracies are both baseless, and spring from the nationalism of the left, which is distinctly anti-American. Frankly it was shocking to hear my otherwise sane teacher echoing these conspiracies with a straight face. She told me that she also suspects that the 1987 bombing of Korean Air Flight 858 by North Korea, may not have been what it appears to be.

It is ironic how well the left did in the elections therefore. It is also worth reiterating that this racial nationalism on the Left rose in reaction to the perception on the left of the corruption of the state. Therefore it is at the very root of the Left's Weltanschauung to perceive the state and its investigation as lies. The state is captive to the United States and its flunkeyist (사대주의자) right-wing running dogs.