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Recently former Assemblyman Lee Seok-gi got a 12-year prison sentence (reduced to nine years) for an attempt to create an armed underground group to assist North Korea in the event of a major war. This is another reminder that North Korea, however bizarre it may appear to most observers, still has a small fan club in the democratic South. Lee was an open admirer of North Korea, a member of the radical Left Unified Progressive Party.
In South Korea, Lee's party, as well as other groups of the radical left are on the margins of the political scene. Nonetheless, their existence should not be ignored, especially given the fact that 20 years ago, their presence was far more prominent and significant than now.
Immediately after the 1945 division of the country, the Stalinist model that took root in the North had a number of sincere admirers in the South as well. One should not be too harsh on the southerners for this: after all, Picasso was well known for his heartfelt paeans to the greatness of Joseph Stalin.
However, after the Korean War, sympathies for the North all but disappeared, only to reappear in the late 1970s, as South Korean student politics began to drift leftward with remarkable speed.
South Korean students of the 1970s grew up in a society that was inundated with crude and hysterical anti-communist propaganda. Since such propaganda came from dictators who students despised, they were loath to believe it. If General Chun Doo-hwan and his lackeys said that North Korea was poor and repressive, this meant that it was actually rich and free ― or so did many students come to believe by the 1980s.
The Marxist-Leninist left reappeared on campus in the 1980s, soon to become divided over the question of how to treat North Korea. To simplify things a bit, two major groups emerged. One of these groups was known as the ''NL" (National Liberation) line. This group combined Leninism with heavy doses of nationalism, making NL activists natural admirers of the North Korean Juche ideology. Another group, known as ''PD"(People's Democracy) line being generally orthodox Marxist, tended to see North Korea with its intense nationalism, dynastic rule and personality cult as a deviation from, or even embarrassment to the cause of the world communist revolution.
In the late 1980s, both NL and PD basically dominated political life of South Korean universities. They naturally enough became an outlet for aspiring young left-wing politicians, most of who are now in their 50s (including the above mentioned Lee).
Very soon, though, the PD group suffered a major blow. The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe demonstrated that these countries were not the working class paradises that PD activists had hitherto believed them to be. For a brief while, the collapse of the communist bloc strengthened the positions of the NL line. After all, the latter group had from the very beginning emphasized the unparalleled strengths of North Korean-style socialism, which had indeed survived the collapse of the Soviet Union.
However, in the late 1990s, NL also suffered a major blow as well. The number of North Korean refugees in South Korea, hitherto negligible, began to increase; many more North Koreans began to flee into China, too. It soon became impossible to dismiss the testimonies of all these people as propaganda fabrications bankrolled by the CIA, the South Korean secret police and their henchmen. Such testimony left the average South Korean in little doubt: North Korea was a poor and very repressive place.
In an interesting twist, some of the most vocal and militant enemies of the Pyongyang regime amongst South Korean politicians, journalists and political activists are former NL leaders. They became shocked and disaffected by the revelations of the mid-1990s and came to see North Korea as a dictatorship to be opposed, rather than a paradise to be emulated.
At any rate, from the late 1990s, pro-North Korean sentiments in the South entered a period of steady decline. A serious blow was delivered in 2010 when the North shelled Yeonpyeong Island, killing South Korean civilians.
This does not mean, however, that the old NL line is completely extinct. There are always people who remain loyal to the dreams and hopes of their youth, facts be damned ― and, of course, there are some internal political and social reasons behind the survival of such ideologies on the margins of South Korean society.
In some cases, such people can be highly visible (the press loves controversy after all). These people are marginal, though, and the chances of a revival are quite slim.
Professor Andrei Lankov was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and now teaches at Kookmin University in Seoul. You can reach him at anlankov@yahoo.com.
