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When I started conducting research in the field of Korean studies in the 1990s, and then I moved to Korea to live and to teach in 2007, I made up my mind that I would avoid talking about either North Korea or unification.
I learned early on that the debate on North Korea is controlled by a handful of experts on North Korea who are jealous of their territory; they do not welcome outsiders, or amateurs, into their discussions—whether in Washington D.C. or in Seoul.
Moreover, I found the materials concerning North Korea that were available to be difficult to assess. Too many analysts were in the business of hyping up the North Korea threat, or working with North Korean defectors who dress up like pop singers to promote their books for profit. Analysis was aimed at receiving backroom rewards from military contractors for their help in securing funds for weapons systems.
Nothing about the approach of the North experts inspired confidence for me. I found that most of them avoided discussions that might force them to talk about what the real dangers of North Korea, such as spreading deserts and the destruction of the environment, were.
On the other hand, I had no interest in becoming a defender ofPyongyang. North Korea was clearly controlled by an oppressive political system, one that is closed to the world, and one in which the ideas of egalitarianism of the 1960s have been completely replaced by a rigid class society.
Although I admired the frugality and the honest culture of ordinary North Koreans, I never felt that North Korea offered an alternative to the decadent and narcissistic culture of South Korea that has been created by multinational corporations.
Both societies are deeply ill in a spiritual sense. The tragedy of the Korean Peninsula is that the intellectuals of Seoul have had their minds so numbed by test taking for college admissions and competition in corporations that they cannot conceive of a third way forward.
So I decided to stick to my strengths. I built on my knowledge of Korean literature, philosophy, and history, and my training in classical Chinese. While teaching as a professor at Kyunghee University, I wrote articles and books about how the best of Korea’s traditions could inspire a renaissance in Korea. That renaissance of traditional Korean culture that I imagined would be a rejection of the superficial and meretricious culture of waste I observed around me in Seoul.
But, although I was interviewed on television frequently after one of my books became a best seller in 2015, the ideas that I promoted about a culture of frugality and spiritual depth, a society focused on organic agriculture and sustainability, were appreciated by some, but no one was interested.
Instead, the Koreans wanted me to promote K food and the wonders of Korean technology, to praise the success of BTS.
But I saw the boy band BTS as an example of how corporations have taken over process by which music is produced, making a fortune from banal music aimed at rendering the population passive, and destroying in the process the local music scene that once made Korea so unique.
K Pop was a highly controlled form of music and dance, produced for the profit of multinational corporations, and was at a great distance from art. It gives me no pleasure that the K Pop that is sweeping the world transforms young men, and women into objects of sexual desire within a ruthless consumer culture.
Other Koreans wanted me to write about the Korean miracle, about how Korea had grown economically faster than any other nation over the last fifty years–and how that miracle was linked to Korean philosophy.
But I increasingly perceived the Korean miracle as a disaster that had not only destroyed Korea’s traditional culture, but also reduced Korean society to a wasteland in which citizens are worn down in a ruthless competition to meet the demands of multinational corporations, like Samsung and Hyundai that pretend to be “Korean.” I watched with dismay the destruction of small businesses, the brain washing of elementary school students, by this “Korean miracle” of selfishness and competition.
The miracle on the Han of rapid development made Korea dangerously dependent on the import of food and petroleum, and on the export of a narrow range of products such as semiconductors and automobiles—products that cannot be produced without massive loans from multinational banks.
It was hard to see this situation as optimal. A South Korea in which few Koreans can no longer grow their own food faces a security threat far greater than North Korean missiles.
Moreover, teaching at a Korean University allowed me to observe firsthand the radical decline in the intellectual curiosity of the students who were forced to take grueling tests in order to be admitted to school.
I saw how the courses in the humanities, classes that taught you how to be human, how to understand how society really works, how to express yourself, were ruthlessly reduced because corporations did not require them for employment any more. Those meaningful classes were replaced by economics courses which were ideological training in which false narratives about the need for consumption and trade in order to produce economic growth were taught to students. An economics of enrichment for the few via stocks and the manipulation of currencies was brazenly presented as a form of science.
Engineering courses were also promoted as a “practical” form of education that has real application in terms of getting a job, but that does not teach one anything about how the world works. In fact, engineering classes, although providing practical knowledge about semiconductors, are loaded with false ideological assumptions about the need for technology and economic development.
I could not compete with the other foreigners in Korea who became famous by promoting the Korean Wave, kimchi, and Korean economic prowess. I could not compete with them because I felt that Korea was going in the wrong direction.
The obsession with instantaneous gratification in South Korea had erased Korea’s noble tradition of commitment to metaphysical and ethical truth. The promise that the Korean wave showed back in 2002 had become a Korean tsunami of waste, commercialized sexuality, and technologies like smart phones that promote simplistic, monotonous, thinking.
When I saw this tragedy unfold, I started to think about North Korea, and about unification, in a different way.
The destructive culture of South Korea had grown so malignant, so ruthless, that I was no longer sure that South Korea held an advantage over North Korea.
Of course, daily life was much better in South Korea for most people in terms of products to consume, but the relations between family members, between neighbors, had become so distant, and the conversations between people had become so superficial, that it was not really life anymore. I doubted that South Korea could serve as a model for the world, let alone for North Korea.
And then came the COVID 19 pandemic. Suddenly, a fraudulent disease promoted by the United States Department of Defense and private intelligence contractors was embraced by the Korean government, by Korean universities, and by the Korean media. Lies became truth in South Korea and the truth became an unspeakable lie. Everything was lost.
The entire Korean system that I had hoped could be an alternative to the corruption and fraud I saw in the United States seemed just as bad, or worse.
Just about everyone whom I had considered to be my friends in Seoul over those 13 years of my life: professors, journalists, diplomats, and businessmen, went along with this ruthless new agenda. When they saw what I wrote about the COVID 19 fraud,they did not want to meet me, and those who did meet me only talked with me about light trivial topics.
There were a handful of notable exceptions to this hypocrisy and cowardice.
As a result, I found myself meeting with just a tiny handful of Koreans over the last three years, most of whom I did not know before. They were men and women who were brave enough to openly express their opposition to this conspiracy to force everyone to take deadly vaccines. My colleagues at Kyung Hee University, or at Yale University, had disappeared from my life.
This new stage in the decay of South Korea’s political culture completely changed my perspective on unification. I saw that the decision making process in the Korean government had been taken over by multinational corporations and private intelligence firms who were under orders to destroy the Korean economy, kill off large numbers of Koreans, and to reduce the people to idiocy using AI coordinated journalism, entertainment, game, and pornography campaigns.
What got my attention was not that South Korea was just as corrupt and totalitarian as North Korea, but rather that South Korean corporations, government agencies, newspapers, and universities had become a direct threat to the citizens, that was more dangerous than North Korea. That is right, Pfizer, and the Koreans who support its vaccines and the bogus lock downs and masks meant to disorient, confuse and demoralize Koreans, became a greater threat to Koreans than the Kim regime in Pyongyang and its nuclear weapons and military. The Kim regime might kill people, but Pfizer Korea and its minions in the government are killing them as we speak.
It became clear to me that only a revolutionary change could possibly stop the further contamination of Korean culture and of Korean institutions, of Korean government and research institutes, by global finance and the puppets of the billionaires.
Unification is no longer a noble goal for some date in the far future, nor another opportunity for ruthless multinational corporations like Samsung and Hyundai to make fortunes by exploiting North Korean workers.
Nor is unification simply something that had to be pursued because Korea is a tragically divided nation, or, for that matter, because Korea will be more economically powerful if it is united.
No. It is clear today that unification is necessary immediately in order for Koreans, North or South, to survive the attacks of the globalists on humanity.
Unification is the only way to completely overthrow the corrupt alliance of global capital, private intelligence firms, and Korean multinational corporations that has taken over the entire government and media, that dominates Korean society much more completely than the Japanese colonial forces ever did, forcing everyone to repeat lies that they do not believe as part of their daily experience. This brutal tyranny is not about the benefits of the Korean people, but about paving the way for the creation of a slave society controlled by the super-rich through the cats paw known as the World Economic Forum.
It became clear to me clear from my conversations with Korean patriots over the last two years, while I lived in a tiny room in Yeosu, unemployed and blocked from any social interactions with my previous friends, that only complete restructuring of Korea, a process of establishing a new nation, like the founding of Goryom in 918, or Choseon in 1392, and not a political and economic unification like the failed takeover of East Germany by multinational corporations with headquarters in West Germany, would give Korea the chance it needs, and deserves, to reinvent government, education, journalism, and the means of production, distribution, and communication in a manner that will end the sickly, decadent and destructive consumption, extraction and exploitation system now in place.
Only a fundamental shift at a philosophical and moral level can possibly restore freedom, equality and righteousness, can possibly help to rebuild families and communities.
That unification has to be a creative process. It cannot be the imposition of the corrupt establishment of South Korea on the north. The South has to be transformed as much as North Korea has to be transformed.
Unification must not be the introduction of South Korean highways, apartment buildings, factories, smart phones, on-line games and semi-nude K pop stars in North Korea. Electrifying North Korea, which has tremendous environmental costs and creates dangerous dependency on the import of coal and petroleum, is less important than taking things off line in South Korea, going back to writing things down, reading books, and engaging in meaningful conversation. If anything, all of Korea must reduce the meaningless waste of energy in the pursuit of fashion, image, sensation, and narcissistic distraction. South Korea must end the use of AI and smart phones to destroy the minds of its citizens.
We need spiritual depth and moral commitment, not a spiritually deadening culture of convenience.
Unification must be about people, ordinary people and it must be led by inspired Koreans who make the best of Korea’s noble traditions of philosophy and culture.
There can be no role in unification for global consulting firms, for fake “Korean” companies that have Korean CEOs but actually serve the stockholders, that is the billionaires around the world who hide behind private equity firms.
There can be no role for American or Japanese investment banks in search of short-term profit, or smiling billionaires like Jim Rogers who present themselves as somehow enlightened thinkers but are actually attracted to the ruthless exploitation of the Korean people, starting in the North and working South.
Enough of these fake progressives who say that we can unifty Korea with the help of multinational corporations, postulating for the citizen, falsely, that the only alternative to war with North Korea is unification via corporations–a process in which Korean citizens will play no role.
Korea is one of the few places in the world where it might be possible to create a new nation precisely because it is divided now and unification is eminently possible. It is the only nation where such a true revolution could be successful, where a new government could be built that is not dependent on the bankers who are now running France, and other nations, into the ground.
The recent Itaewon incident suggests that the assault of the shadow governments of the world against the Koreans is getting worse, and this new form of “shadow imperialism” is taking root everywhere. We still do not know what happened in Itaewon. As the entire operation was classified, only a true revolution will make the truth manifest.
It seems most likely that Itaewon was yet another attempt to make Korean citizens more passive, to prepare them for tyranny by having them accept phony stories to explain the attacks of the globalists.
Peace must be our goal, and unification is the only road forward towards peace. At the same time, we must recognize that strength, and the use of deadly force, will always be there, just behind the curtain, in the process of unification.
Vague concepts of peace are not going to be enough to get us there. If the globalists in Korea, and around the world, are ready to kill millions with vaccines and 5-G, are willing to shut down the economy using fake market crashes and digital currencies, we must be ready for the worst when they are at last cornered. We must pry the Korean economy away from them through the process of unification.
It will not be a matter of smiling faces and the heads of conglomerates leading cows to the North. It will be more like prying a bone from the jaws of a rabid dog. We must defend ourselves from our real enemies, and that shift in our security paradigm will be central to the unification project.
We must recognize that over-priced fighter planes, worthless “missile defense,” and antiquated nuclear submarines are useless against vaccine wars, against attacks from military satellites, and against armed robots and drones controlled by the globalists and their private intelligence contractors, and against campaigns to dumb down the population through hypnotic media and brain-numbing educational programs.
I remain optimistic. I believe that Korea can become a model for the world.
But we must start with a sober, grim, assessment that unless integration with North Korea means the formation of a sovereign nation, then there will not be a future for our children.
I want to give credit to Preston Moon, the founder of the Global Peace Foundation, who wrote a book entitled “Korean Dream” that inspired me.
Moon argues that like the founding of the United States at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the opportunity to establish a new government, an alternative to corrupt monarchy, was a precious opportunity that the United States offered to the world.
So also the unification of Korea under the principles of “Hongik” (universal benefit for all citizens) offers an opportunity for real reform in Korea that is civilizational in nature and goes beyond what can be achieved by elections or lobbying.
Just as the democratic system established in the United States in 1787 inspired writers and politicians all over the Europe to pursue reforms, to move beyond the monarchy and the church as the foundations of civil society in the 1840s, so also a unified Korea could serve as a model for governance for the world if it addresses fundamental contradictions within our society and offers us a clear alternative.
The new nation established as a result of Korean unification canbring together the best of the political philosophies of the West with the best of the East—especially the Confucian tradition of ethical governance that is so well represented in Korea.
This process does not require money from investment banksor multinational corporations. All it requires is a group of committed intellectuals with a deep sense of responsibility to society and family who have the vision and the bravery to step forward and propose a real unified Korea that leaves behind corrupt and decadent Korea we face today.
Although the Republic of Korea was inspired by American democracy, especially by the concepts of freedom, equality, liberty articulated in the United States Constitution, few know how the Confucian tradition inspired the writers of the Constitution in the United States to embrace a government that was not dominated by a monarchy or the Catholic church.
For example, Benjamin Franklin was quite explicit about how the Confucian model of ethical governance by the committed intellectual offered a true alternative to the tyranny of monarchy and class systems. Thus the Confucian traditions of Korea can be linked directly to the philosophical foundations of the United States Constitution.
Unification of the Korean Peninsula will also be an opportunity to reinvent the United Nations (an organization whose function was profoundly altered by the Korean War and the Korean division) and to create a global organization that is dedicated to promoting peace, rather than deeply compromised institution that functioned imperfectly until around 2010 but since then has degenerated since into a play toy for the rich.
The current Yoon administration represents the final stage of decay for the government of the Republic of Korea, suggesting to us that only a complete restructuring of not only the government, but the entire philosophy of governance, an affirmation of the contract between the citizens and the government, can cure the horrific privatization of all government functions undertaken by the Yoon Administration.
This administration, following the precedents set by the Moon administration, has transformed the military into a mechanism for buying weapons systems, the ministry of education into a tool for dumbing down children, and the Bank of Korea into funnel for the transfer of the money of the Korean people to multinational investment banks.
That decay cannot be separated from the decay of institutions in the United States that has spread to the Korean Peninsula, and is part of the total collapse of Western Civilization itself.
It is clear that if there will be an alternative civilization, it must come from the East. And yet, China, India, Japan, Korea, Thailand and other Eastern nations are caught in the ruthless grip of the decayed Western Civilization, often pursuing a radical financialized and digitalized agenda dished out by the IMF and World Economic Forum.
But if Korea reunifies, and not only creates a new nation, but also lays the foundations for a new civilization, it can offer a true alternative.
Unification must not be about geographical unification. Building roads that connect North and South is the least important part of unification. Highways, tall buildings, the internet, shopping malls, and smart cities have destroyed local communities, alienated families, increased suicides and despair, and created a wasteland in South Korea where once was a vital community. Whereas once citizens organized their own daily lives, ran their own local economy, now South Korea is a deeply divided nation–not just North and South but at every level, in every family.
The people of South Korea are separated from each other by greed, narcissism and competition. So many in South Korea have become lonely people who know nothing but competition and self-indulgence, who turn to their smart phones for propaganda, pornography, and distraction.
Unification must be a spiritual unification in which we come together as on; a cultural unification in which culture draws citizens together and creates ties between the lives of the citizens. There is no room for corporations and banks in unification. If anything, the first step towards unification is the formation of cooperative banks run by citizens–North and South.
We need a unification between words and deeds so that what is written in the newspaper represents what policies are, the actual reality for the working man and woman. We need a unity of word and action. To achieve that goal, we must be brave enough to unify our thoughts with our deeds.
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This article was originally published on Fear No Evil.
Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.
Featured image is from Antiwar.com
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