Hypocrisy and Double Standards
Cho Se-hyon
Korea Herald
Aug. 24, 2004

Some so-called progressive and reform-minded politicians are taking hypocritical and self-righteous attitudes as they have come under intensifying public scrutiny in recent months. In the latest development, Chairman Shin Ki-nam of the ruling Uri Party was forced to resign last Thursday after he was found to have lied about his father.

Mr. Shin had spearheaded the current campaign to weed out "the traitors" who collaborated with the Japanese colonialists in the first half of the last century. Ironically, it turned out that his father had been one of the most ardent collaborators, having served the Japanese emperor as an officer of the Japanese imperial army's much-feared military police. If Mr. Shin had had a modicum of conscience, he could not have dared to lead the campaign against the pro-Japanese collaborators and their families to condemn and marginalize them.

Examples of hypocrisy like this abound.

Some leftist politicians who have been active in anti-American campaigns since the Kim Dae-jung administration have ended up going to the United States to study or reside for extended periods after failing to attain their goals in politics or high government positions.

Perhaps they wanted to familiarize themselves with American society so they could return and be more effective anti-American activists or critics. Whatever their reason, however, I don't think it is conscionable for them to go to the United States with straight and innocent faces as though they have loved that country all their life. Of course, one doesn't have to like America to live there. But it doesn't make a whole lot of sense for anyone to go to a country that he or she publicly hated so much.

Another more serious and glaring case of hypocrisy involves a group of Uri Party members who have been criticizing the U.S. House of Representatives for adopting a resolution urging the communist leaders in Pyongyang to improve human rights conditions in North Korea. Those South Korean lawmakers have appeared to be more upset over the U.S. Congressional action than over North Korean leader Kim Jong-il and his lackeys.

What is really amazing, though, is the fact that it was those very same Uri Party members who, as student activists in the 80s, staged protest demonstrations almost daily against what they alleged was U.S. connivance over human rights abuses by the South Korean government headed by former army generals. Is anything more hypocritical than this?

Maybe, to these people, the basic rights of hundreds of thousands of North Korean dissidents are less precious than their own and those of their fellow leftists. In other words, they believe that human rights abuses by a rightist dictator should be condemned while abuses by a communist dictator like Kim Jong-il should be overlooked, if not condoned.

By the way, most of those Uri Party representatives in the National Assembly reportedly believe that China - not the United States - should be regarded as the more important diplomatic and economic partner for South Korea in the future. When China brazenly and arrogantly declared that the kingdom of Goguryeo was part of ancient China or a vassal state, those lawmakers barely voiced a feeble protest while President Roh Moo-hyun's administration promised to give the issue top diplomatic priority. Some politicians said the South should act in concert with North Korea.

But why try to work with Pyongyang? What can North Korea do about the Goguryeo history issue at a time when the very survival of its regime, let alone its tottering economy, depends entirely on Chinese support? What can Kim Jong-il do, even if China comes right out and claims that North Korea was and is part of its territory? Not much under the current circumstances, I am afraid.

Anyway, the only party that North Korea can get angry at and drag around by the nose, so to speak, seems to be South Korea. After Seoul took in more than 450 North Korean defectors, Kim Jong-il, who is unable to feed all his citizens, became angry at Seoul. And the South Korean government, ever so mindful of the mood of Kim Jong-il, promptly announced that it no longer considers it financially feasible to bring in and accommodate all those North Korean refugees, said to number in the hundreds of thousands, who are wandering in limbo in China and other countries.

The North Korean defectors in China are said to be under constant threats of arrest by Chinese security officers working with North Korean agents. If caught, they are sent back to the North to face certain punishment that includes execution or incarceration in concentration camps.

And yet, Seoul publicly announced recently that it could not take care of North Korean defectors in large numbers any longer, even though it still is willing to honor its pledge to provide the communist regime in Pyongyang with millions of dollars worth of economic assistance, including food and tourist payments.

That is not all. Most people in the South, as well as the Workers' Party faithful in the North, talk a lot these days about their desire to realize unification of the country. But one has to wonder how South Korea, when it cannot support a few hundred refugees from the impoverished North right now, would propose to meet the cost of unification which, scholars say, would amount to hundreds of trillions of won.

We know that most politicians are accomplished in the art of subterfuge. But they would be quite wrong if they believed they could fool all the people with their hypocritical lies all the time.

 
About the Columnist
For most of his career, the writer was a reporter working in Tokyo, New York and elsewhere for Associated Press. He returned to his native Korea in the early 1990s. His e-mail address is choseh@hotmail.com. - Ed.