Am I the only person who finds the South Korean attitude toward the North and Kim Jong Il completely baffling? Yes, he's just a nice fluffy Stalinist mass murderer bunny! I too would be ecstatic at a reunified Korea, just not a reunified Stalinist Korea. I don't get it. It seems to be wishful thinking completely overpowering reality.

Keep in mind that both sides are thoroughly steeped in intense propaganda efforts. Kim Dae Jung's 'Sunshine Policy' was pretty much a direct response to the North's unceasing vitriol. Would replying with more of the same improve matters for South Korea? I sorta suspect not. The South Korean leadership know that it's just a matter of time before the North collapses in on itself. From their point of view the most important thing is keeping the paranoid regime from feeling cornered and lashing out in the meantime. While it might make us in the States feel safer to take out the North by force of arms, thus removing the threat it represents, it would be practically suicidal for the South to advocate such a course. So they say calming things, and wait.

If you ever get the chance (and you'd probably better hurry) I highly recommend taking a tour of the DMZ (from the southern side). They show you the giant signs with korean propaganda phrases (which are on both sides of the river), and you can listen to the loudspeaker broadcasts (from the north in the evenings, the south during the day). Of course there's not really anybody on the northern side to receive the propaganda, except for a few token humans riding bicycles around the fake village. You can scope them out via binoculars from the museum. And they let you go down an interception tunnel into one of the invasion tunnels that the North was caught digging under the DMZ. It's sealed up with concrete and two ROK soldiers standing guard 24 hours a day. The one facing the wall has to be bored out of his mind...

One thing that's noticeably absent from the Christian Science monitor piece is the increasing popularity of Neomarxist thought among South Korean intellectuals. Every South Korean I've encountered in graduate school has demonstrated a Neomarxist take on world events, and spouts Marxist dogma about inperialism and globalization.

This is not to say that South Korean youth have adopted a Stalinist outlook to support North Korea. They're quite aware of the wrongs that Kim Jong-il has done, but they are very likely to interpret the situation on the peninsula as a case of the two Koreas being exploited by "hegemonic powers" (specifically the US).

I think "victimhood" may be the defining characteristic of many South Koreans these days. For example, if you refer to the Sea of Japan in conversation, many South Koreans will throw a hissyfit and shout "East Sea! East Sea!" (Such is the perceived indignity of giving a body of water a Japanese name reference.) A kind of generational amnesia has set in; lacking any knowledge of the Korean War, South Korean youth look eastward to Japan and westward to America and see their "victimizers." Ask them about Kim Jong-il, on the other hand, and they'll tell you he's made "mistakes."

Other than the fact that North Korea proliferates for profit, I cannot think of a single reason why US troops should remain on the peninsula anymore. The South Koreans should be left to deal with Kim's mistakes on their own.

As someone who did his graduate work in IR at a major South Korean university, I think I can offer a little bit of insight on Matthew's comment. South Korean scholars show a distinct tendency to favor models of international relations, such as Wallerstein's world system model and dependency theory, that emphasize Korea's "powerlessness" in determining its own destiny. There are several reasons for this - perhaps most important among them is that such models play to deep-rooted feelings of "victimization" shared by many Koreans. This sense of victimization, in tern, has been utilized to the extreme by both governments on the Korean peninsula - in the South, it has been used both to generate enthusiasm for ambititious national projects (i.e. we have to work for slave wages because we gotta beat the Japs!) and to deflect responsibility away from the government for its own policy mistakes (i.e. it was Bush's fault that the Sunshine Policy failed, not Kim Jong-il's or Kim Dae-jung's). Even among "pro-American" Koreans, the depth to which these feelings exhibit themselves can be truly astonishing; when Koreans discuss among themselves the (perceived) need for the US military in South Korea, little is ever mentioned of the historic ties between the two countries, or the common interests between Seoul and Washington. Rather, the arguments run something like this - Korea is a small, weak country, and it has no choice but to rely on the US. If the USFK leaves, then foreign investors will run away and our economy will be destroyed. If the US leaves, then Japan will re-arm, and we'll once again be a "shrimp between two whales." Poor, helpless Korea! Of course, the reality is much different - South Korea possesses the world's 13th largest economy, one of the world's largest (and toughest!) militaries, and is a major foreign investor abroad. Still, the feelings are there, buttressed by an education system that indoctrinates "victimization" from a very early age.

It should be pointed out, however, that in the Korean context, there are very few "Marxists," per say. "Progressive" Korean students simply use the language of Marxism to cover an intellectual system that, at its base, is really quite reactionary and disturbingly similar to the racial theories expoused by Japanese militarists during the 1930s. Despite recourse to such terms as imperialism and the "masses," the Korean "Left"'s beef with capitalism, globalization, and the US has nothing to do with its concern for the international working class, and everything to do with globalization's "assault" on Korea's (supposedly uniquely unique) cultural identity. The work "minjok," which most closely corresponds to the German word "volk," is one of the most oft-used in Korean radical student discourse (and in North Korea, as well). It's used all the time; in fact, one almost never hears referrences made to "class struggle." "Struggle," when the term is used, is almost always used in a racial context. The Japanese have the same work - minjoku - except that in the Japanese context, the word carries strong connotations of the 1930s, and only re-entered common use in Japan after Nakasone's prime ministership in the 1980s (the term was actually banned by American occupational authorities).