Pen/Insular_Notes

I just wanted to update a post I wrote almost a year ago on attempts by victims of Agent Orange to get compensation from the chemical manufacturers that made it (Monsanto and Dow). It seems that despite the fact a Vietnamese lawsuit last year failed, a court in Korea has now ruled in favour of 6,800 Korean veterans of the Vietnam war. The high court in Seoul has ordered the two companies to pay $62 million in damages to the former soldiers. On the subject of last year’s failed case brought by Vietnamese victims the BBC article points out:

The chemical companies defending that case - including Dow Chemical and the Monsanto Corporation - argued that the US government was responsible for how the chemical was used, not the manufacturers.

This was despite a 1984 deal whereby several chemical companies paid $180m to settle a lawsuit brought by US war veterans, who said that their health had been affected by exposure to the substance.

Back to the present case. According to a story in the Korea Times, getting the money out of the US companies will be the hard part:

Although the ruling was hailed as a landmark victory for Korean war veterans, it is still not certain whether they will actually receive payment from the U.S. companies.

As both U.S. companies have no listed property in Korea it means there is little Korean authorities can do should they refuse to abide by the court ruling.

If the U.S. companies refuse to pay the plaintiffs, the Korean war veterans will have to take their legal battle to a U.S. court for possible compensation.

I discovered two more interesting articles at Oh My News International that also relate to this. The first is on the struggle of the Vietnamese victims of this form of chemical warfare. The second is a photo essay on the Korean veterans, documenting their protests.

Try as I might (not very hard) I couldn’t spot any amusing stories in the Korean press to accompany the start of the dog year. Oh well. The BBC on the other hand have been running a FOOC story about the conflict of interest in modern Chinese society now that dogs are increasingly popular pets as well as menu items.

So here is something pretty instead:

Yes, a lovely Korean kite that a friend of mine gave me recently. Didn’t get a chance to fly it today unfortunately.

This new year is 丙戌 (pyŏngsul/병술) or ‘fire dog’ in the sexagenary cycle. Previous pyŏngsul years have included 1946, 1886, 1826 (etc). Can’t think of anything particularly interesting that has happened in a pyŏngsul year before, but perhaps something will come to mind…

By the way, I’ve just discovered that Wikipedia now has an excellent guide to the Chinese/East Asian sexagenary calendar. It gives all the ‘heavenly stems’ and ‘earthly branches’, showing how they are written and pronounced in Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese and then all the 60 combinations that make up the years of the cycle. I have to tackle this calendar quite a bit in my research but I still haven’t learnt all the characters or how they are pronounced. I suppose that will have to be my new year’s resolution…

Time to plug an article of mine that came out last week in International Socialism 109 on the early history of North Korea and what it means for our understanding of the country today. It’s basically an introduction to/review of the work of Kim Ha-yông, and in particular her book The Korean Peninsula from an Internationalist Perspective (국제주의 시각에서 본 한반도). At some stage it would be nice to translate the whole of this book, but that will have to wait until I have time.

Regular readers of this blog (if there are any) will have noticed that I have referenced or quoted from Kim Ha-yông’s work before. If you read the article you might also notice that I have made quite a bit of use of two excellent books on the early history of North Korea: Charles Armstrong’s The North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 (2003) and Andrei Lankov’s From Stalin to Kim Il-sung (2001). Both are highly recommended as works of history, although I think their analysis is lacking in comparison to Kim Ha-yông’s.

They haven’t put the article up at the ISJ site yet for some reason, but I’ll link it when they do. In the meantime here are a few sample paragraphs (from the middle):

After liberation, factories and other industrial facilities formerly owned by the Japanese remained under the effective control of the Soviet administration until late July 1946, when the Korean-run government (now called the North Korea Provisional People’s Committee) took them over and soon after announced their nationalisation. Further nationalisation happened rapidly, and by 1949 state-run industry accounted for 90.7 percent of total industrial production. The nationalization of industry and the commencement of a series of one-year plans in the late 1940s are one of the main developments that have led historians and commentators, whether hostile or friendly to the regime, to call North Korea socialist from this time on. In opposition to this view, Kim Ha-yong puts North Korea’s state ownership of industry into the context of the worldwide trend towards state capitalism, particularly in the period after the Second World War:

It was very common, particularly in developing countries, for the state to take a direct role in planning and overseeing resources and means of production in order to achieve rapid industrial growth. Representative examples include China, Cuba and African countries such as Mozambique, but South Korea’s economic development strategy under Park Chung-hee cannot be excluded either. In the period immediately after liberation, even right wing parties such as the Korean Democratic Party (Hanmindang) insisted that the main industries needed to be nationalised in order to overcome the society’s backwardness. From this point of view, North Korea’s nationalisation programme of 1946, far from being a break away from capitalism, was only an extreme manifestation of the trend towards the statisation of capital that continued from the 1930s through to the 1960s.

You can even subscribe if you’re desperate to read the rest…

I’m not going to pretend to offer very insightful analysis of the recent elections to the leadership of the Democratic Labour Party (민노당) since I’m far away and far from knowing all the complexities of left politics in Korea. However, I do want to point out that it was a good day for the radical wing of the DLP with Ta Hamkke’s candidate for policy chief, Kim In-sik gaining five and half thousand votes or 16.86 percent. This was a huge acheivement when Kim was an outsider from a faction many party members hadn’t heard of. It is also significant that a Ta Hamkke candidate could get many many times more votes than the group has members. It shows that there is a sizeable audience inside the party for a radical, militant and internationalist alternative to the dominant social democrat and left-nationalist factions.

And now for the not so good news: the winner was the left-nationalist (ie NL) Yi Yong-dae. As Antti mentioned in the comments to a previous post, Kim In-sik laid into Yi Yong-dae in one of his speeches over his popular frontist politics and attitude toward North Korea. Here’s what Kim had to say on the latter subject:

Our DLP has to have the right attitude toward North Korea. I believe that North Korea is fundamentally exactly the same sort of exploitative and repressive society as South Korea. So the DLP must make policy in relation to exchanges and cooperation between North and South from the point of view of solidarity between the workers and oppressed people of the two countries. It’s only from this standpoint that we can put forward the working class position on [issues such as] the North Korean defectors, North Korean human rights, the nuclear issue and the rights of workers at the Kaesŏng industrial complex.

On other hand, Pak Noja has this to say about the elevation of Yi Yong-dae to DLP policy chief:

You know, my sort of gut feeling is that Yi Yongdae would be careful enough not to mix his personal/factional allegience to the “national liberation” too much/openly with the official business of the DLP. The Chusap’a [left-nationalist faction] knows too well in what way they are perceived by the most people outside of their faction, and they know also that speaking about Swedish welfare state would earn them more Brownie points with the wider audience in and outside of the party. One Hangyoreh poll around a year ago (if you are interested, I can find concrete date and link to the article) suggested that around 45% of those polled were more in favour of the Northern European sort of social system - so, it would be very irrational if Yi Yongdae were to ignore this sort of sentiment. Although the big issue here, of course, is whether the Scandinavian welfare reforms of the 1930-60 can be repeated at all today inside the framework of a single nation-state. But it doesn’t look as if the soc.-dem. faction in the KDLP asks themselves exactly this question.

The full results of the recent elections to the leadership of the Democratic Labour Party are now in. I’ll add some analysis soon, but here are the figures for the main posts:

Total number of electors: 47,400
Total number of voters: 33,663
Turnout: 71.02%

Party Chair
Chu Tae-hwan (주대환) 2,499 votes (7.62%)
Mun Sŏng-hyŏn (문성현) 15,596 votes (47.58%)
Cho Sŭng-su (조승수) 14,682 votes (44.79%)
[Since no candidate got more than half of the votes no-one was elected in this round. There will be a second round of voting between Mun Sŏng-hyŏn and Cho Sŭng-su to take place from the 6th to the 10th of February]

Secretary General
Yi Yong-gil (이용길) 15,678 votes (47.80%)
Kim Sŏn-dong (김선동) 17,123 votes (52.20%) - Elected

Chief Policymaker
Yun Yŏng-sang (윤영상) 10,534 votes (32.27%)
Kim In-sik (김인식) 5,505 votes (16.86%)
Yi Yong-dae (이용대) 16,609 votes (50.87%) - Elected

It’s a bit of a hoary old cliche to say that things change fast in the world of politics. But things have changed remarkably for Korea’s Democratic Labour Party since I wrote this post at the end of 2004. At that time things seemed to be on the up and up after the party had made a major breahthrough in that year’s parliamentary elections, gaining 11 seats. But since then and particularly since October last year when it lost a supposedly safe seat at a by-election, the party has been in something of a crisis. This is really just one aspect of a more general ’sense of crisis’ being felt by the whole Korean left at the moment. How real this crisis actually is is a matter of debate, but there can be no doubt that there have been a number of major problems over the last year, particularly in the labour movement, which have reflected badly on the DLP. The most obvious of these have been the corruption scandals in the KCTU union confederation and the failure of the unions to make any real headway in many of their campaigns, perhaps most crucially over the government’s plans to extend the flexibilisation of labour.

So the current elections for the top posts in the DLP come at a crucial moment in the party’s history. The elections began last Friday and continue until 6pm Korean time tomorrow evening and will elect a number of positions including chairperson, policy chief and secretary-general. They have been covered in the English-language press (Korea Times article), although the DLP elections have been somewhat overshadowed by the concurrent elections for the leadership of the ruling Uri Party.

One interesting factor in these elections is that Kim In-sik of the Ta Hamkke faction is standing as the radical left candidate for the position of policy chief (정책 위원장), promising to push for a militant, fighting DLP that is closely linked to the struggle for rights for non-regular (flexibilised) workers. He has a blog here, which currently has a transcipt of the speech he gave a few days ago at the final rally for all the candidates. Call me superficial, but I’ve got to give him respect just for the fact that he’s the only candidate who doesn’t wear a uniform-like charcoal grey suit.

Anyway, on a more substantive level, it is important that the left wing of the party is making its presence felt and trying to influence the direction of the organisation as a whole, even if on this occasion Kim is not elected. Sometimes these days there seems to be a dreadful inevitability about the drift of social democratic parties based on working class representation toward third way/social liberal/neo-liberal politics (especially so in a time when it is no longer clear that social democracy is actually possible in practice). For the British Labour Party the process took around 100 years, for the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT) perhaps 20-30. But the DLP could complete this whole process of going from raising workers’ hopes about substantial reforms to abject neo-liberal compromise in around a decade if it carries on in the current direction. And looming in the background, as we have seen in the last year, there is also that other danger that comes with the professionalisation and bureaucratisation of politicians and union leaders: corruption (something which has also hit Lula’s Workers’ Party hard recently).

Of course the radical wing of the DLP is small and divided itself between a number of different factions (전진 [Forward], 다함께 [All Together], 해방연대 [Liberation Solidarity]). The mainstream of the party is dominated by a coalition between two main factions: the social democratic wing (led by such famous names on the the Korean left as Kwon Young-ghil, No Hoe-ch’an, Tan Pyong-ho and Chu Tae-hwan) and the left-nationalist wing. This prevents the more radical factions, including Ta Hamkke, from gaining influential positions within the party. However I would have thought that this doesn’t stop them from being influential in other ways, especially when it comes to an organisation like Ta Hamkke that seems to be so well organised as well as consistent and distinctive in its politics. I hope, whatever the outcome of tomorrow’s elections, they will at least have brought the radical wing of the party to a wider audience and with it the possibility of a future for the DLP that doesn’t end with a PT or, god forbid, New Labour-type scenario. 파이팅!

I have a feeling that we’re all going to need to know a bit more about Iran before long. So here’s some recent writing on the subject that has caught my eye:

++ As usual Lenin’s Tomb has been on the case already.

++ Subject Barred provides a fantastic post on the ‘Return of the MacGuffin‘. There is no doubt that the Iranian nuclear weapons are a classic MacGuffin and if you don’t know what that is you have one more reason to read the article.

++ Gary Leupp has some observations in the second half of this article at Counterpunch.

++ Another article in Counterpunch argues that the US could be falling further into what the author describes as Al Qaeda’s gambit, designed to draw the superpower into a massive conflict it cannot win.

++ Meanwhile, Mike Whitney pulls apart some of the lies and scaremongering that are currently doing the rounds in the media.

++ The usual good analysis from Alex Callinicos in Socialist Worker.

++ And finally some interesting letters to the Guardian yesterday.

One of the aspects of this affair that is interesting me most at the moment is the changing attitude of ‘my own’ government in the UK. A few years ago it was all about engagement and the foreign secretary Jack Straw was leading the way in flying off to Tehran to have talks and make soothing noises. Now the government is going around warning everyone not to trust Iran and sounding for all the world like the right hand of the US government’s propaganda operation. It’s hard to fathom why a government, whose advisers and perhaps ministers too surely still believe in engagement, is going around publicly eschewing this path.

Another observation: it is slightly amusing that the US is categorically rejecting an offer of talks from a country that does not have nuclear weapons and says it has no intention of getting them while at the same time pursuing the (albeit currently stalled) six-party talks with Another Country that quite possibly does have nukes or at least has intentions of getting them post-haste.

This is probably the first modern textbook produced in Korea. Entitled An Elementary Reader for Citizens (國民小學讀本), it was first published by the education ministry of the country that was then known as Tae Chosŏn’guk (‘Great Chosŏn Nation’) in 1895, or year 504 of the dynasty, if you use the short-lived dating system that was current at the time.

A facsimile edition was published in the 80s which still seems to be available at secondhand bookshops. It is certainly a book that I’d like to get around to looking at in greater detail. The first attempt at creating some sort of general, state-led educational material in Korea must have echoes that can be seen and felt even today, 111 years later. It is also fascinating to see what these early educationalists thought was important for the citizens of Chosŏn to know about. And some of the language used, even in the chapter headings, is interesting too, like the use of the word Chinaguk (支那國) for China instead of Chungguk (中國).

The title page and first page of contents.

The book contains 41 lessons/readings in all, covering everything from the American War of Independence to camels. Here are the titles of the first 12 lessons:

Lesson 1: Great Chosŏn (大朝鮮國)
Lesson 2: General Knowledge (廣智識)
Lesson 3: Hanyang [Seoul] (漢陽)
Lesson 4: Our Family (我家)
Lesson 5: The Reign of King Sejong (世宗大王紀事)
Lesson 6: Commerce and Trade (商事及交易)
Lesson 7: The Transformation [evolution?] of Plants (植物變化)
Lesson 8: Books (書籍)
Lesson 9: Getting Revenge through Kindness (以德報怨)
Lesson 10: Clocks (時計)
Lesson 11: The Camel (駱駝)
Lesson 12: The Treaty Powers (條約國)

I think some of my translations probably leave something to be desired, so any suggestions or corrections would be welcome. Or perhaps you might like to translate some of the rest of the lesson titles. Here are the rest of the contents:

[Crossposted at Frog in a Well Korea]

I should really catch up on the news coming from Korea and Hong Kong.

Actually there’s some breaking news: It seems that 11 of the protesters held in Hong Kong after last month’s anti-WTO demos have been unexpectedly released today, after numerous solidarity protests, hunger strikes (or threats at least) and a threat from the KCTU to send a 1000 protesters to Hong Kong. Eight of those released were Koreans, along with one mainland Chinese, one Hong Konger and a Japanese guy). However, three people, all of them Koreans, have been charged by the court today. Whether this release is due to the threats of more protests, possible diplomatic pressure from the Korean government, or perhaps just a lack of evidence (as the court says) I don’t know

One of the most interesting things about this whole affair is how it has made all the rightwing expat bloggers froth at the mouth (examples thereof at Marmot’s Hole, Simonworld etc). Funny really, since I don’t suppose they’re usually the sort of people who cheer on the Chinese state when it incarcerates people. There’s also some follow up from a rather more sympathetic commentator at Two Koreas. More reports and analysis of the protests here at the Globalise Resistance site. And yet more at the Ta Hamkke site if you read Korean.

UPDATE: Article on this at the international edition of Oh My News.

Had to come out of temporary hibernation to announce the astonishing fact that the Frog in a Well group of group blogs on Korean, Japanese and Chinese history have won the Cliopatria Award for best group history blog. Hearty congratulations to Konrad for putting this whole thing together. [That’s enough back-slapping - Ed.]

Normal blogging will resume soon, hopefully.