Ask a Korean Looks at the Life of Roh Moo-Hyun

I am a huge fan of Ask A Korean!, and I find him perhaps the most thoughtful and eloquent Korean-American Blogger/poster I’ve yet encountered.

Unfortunately, this particular piece lacks the Korean’s usual combination of depth and balance, to be charitable. I am not going to be able to do a thorough rebuttal due to both lack of time and dictates of prudence. So let me limit myself to a few egregious deficiencies.

To begin with the most flagrant: The Korean almost exclusively concentrates on Roh’s attributes as a campaigner (which he vastly over-exaggerates) to explain his 2002 election victory. Too bad the truth is less tidy. Most critically, the Korean leaves out what is widely recognized as the critical reason for Roh’s victory: The emergence of the second major conservative candidate in Chung Mong-jun and his siphoning off of the conservative votes away from Lee Hoi-Chang. To make a long story short, Chung, the peripatetic Hyundai tycoon, initially split the conservative vote by running as a third-party candidate (as had Rhee In-je’s bolting the conservatives in 2002 as well) and was right behind Lee in second place for much of the election campaign. And when Chung realized that he was unlikely to beat Lee, he formed a proverbial 11th hour, ideologically mismatched alliance with Roh in the quixotic hope that he’d be Roh’s successor, clashing ideology be damned (which is again reminiscent of DJ’s more explicitly dishonest seduction of Kim Jong-pil in 1997).

(I have written about this in the Asian Wall Street Journal [http://www.discovery.org/blogs/asianistArchive/2005/08/korea_s_anti_americanism.html]; here’s more in-depth look by Asia Society [http://www.asiasociety.org/publications/update_korea2.html#election].)

The upshot: To leave out Chung’s critical role in Roh’s victory is like explaining Lincoln’s victory in 1860 without the fracturing of the Democratic Party. To be blunt: It’s an unconscionably bad history.

Next, the Korean downplays the gravity of Roh’s transgressions by (among other questionable deflections) comparing it to Lee Hoi-chang’s GNP receiving political contributions/bribery in greater sum than Roh received. But can he not distinguish a difference between accepting bribes on behalf of a political party for organizational use and doing the same on behalf of oneself for personal enrichment? To me the difference is not of a degree, but of a kind.

Third, the Korean continues (as he has in prior Blog posts) to portray the Gwangju tragedy as a black and white affair, with evil jackboots massacring innocent democracy activists. Again, the truth is a bit more complicated, though I will not beat a dead horse yet again. In the least, however, I would have expected a more nuanced articulation of the affair from someone of the Korean’s intellectual sophistication than something right out of the Leftist propaganda.

Finally (and yes, I am not even going to touch the bizarre–from the abandoned parking lot [that is, not even from the left field!]—claims like that Roh was a top 3 president!), the Korean even commits a clear factual error, an unusual departure from his usual meticulousness. That is, John Chang (a truly funny piece of work) was not President but Prime Minister. The President of that particular regime was Yun Po-Sun. While I can see the Korean responding that Chang was the real power behind that regime, he ought to know as a lawyer to pay more painstaking attention to the explicit “letter” of what he writes, rather than expect his readers to divine its “spirit.”