Allegory- Admonish King Yoon Seok-yeol at "Risk of Death"

TV Chosun compares Yoon Seok-yeol to Cheonsangun, the worst king in the Chosun dynasty.

[TV Chosun] Unchanging Yeonsangun (Yoon Seok-yeol) and the 3 Ministers.

The suggestion here seems to be that the righteous three ministers with the moral and physical courage to give the king advice he doesn't want to hear are Cho-Joong-Dong, the three dominant conservative media giants in South Korea (Chosun Ilbo, Joongang Ilbo, and Donga Ilbo) which had remained uncritical of President Yoon until just recently. Until now criticisms of Yoon as tyrannical and incompetent, were only heard through independent media and opposition politicians now under attack. Does this signal the end for the Yoon Seok-yeol administration? Yoon has also turned on party colleagues and allies that made his presidency possible and now is running the party into the ground. Do the conservative media think their advice will sway Yoon? Doesn't look like it. So do they wish to absolve themselves of their own complicity by saying that Yoon and his cadre of opportunists in the so called People's Power Party (PPP) brought the prospective failure in the upcoming April 2024 general election upon themselves?

(Source- TV Chosun Anchor Briefing 신동욱 10.16.23) Evil of the Times, Article 10, "The people are like the waters, and the King like the ship that floats easily upon them; the ship can also capsize." Journal from the reign of Yeonsangun (1502). Another quote was "the cicada has a loud voice because it does not hear."

(Source= TV Chosun Anchor Briefing 신동욱 10.16.23) This is an old adage from Chinese classical history, "Admonish the king at the risk of death."

*Although the calculation did not change, the spirit of the three monks who were not afraid of death is conveyed in the Annals.

During the Spring and Autumn Dynasty, Shi Chu, the godfather of the Wei Dynasty, directly told the monarch Yonggong, “Throw away the treacherous Mi Zihe and appoint the loyalist Geo Baekyu.” When Yeong-gong did not listen, he died and said, “Put my body under the window.” Only then did King Yeong appoint Geobaekok and cast out Mijaha. This is a terrible remonstrance, ‘ ( the corpse's remonstrance 尸諫) ,’ which achieved its will with my corpse.*

*Quoted in-[TV조선] 바뀌지 않는 연산군(윤석열)과 3정승(비윤계) https://www.fmkorea.com/6289431276

Among his other grievous faults Yeonsangun as king presided over two purges of the literati, the scholarly nobles. This is analogous to Yoon's censorship camgaign against critics and independent news sources like MBC and KBS and their overseeing agency the Korean Communications Commission. The Justice Minister Hong Dong-hun functions as President Yoon's modern day "executioner" persecuting labor, dissent, political opponents, and media figures. I understand that the president of JTBC News, Son Seok-hee, a reknowned award winning journalist, retired recently. It wasn't too long ago, that prosecution investigators conducted a search of JTBC News offices (for reporting on misuse of prosecution expense account funds). What connection, if any, there exists between the two events is unknown. Perhaps Son is no longer up to the kind of tumultuous events he covered during the Park administration. MBC and even National Assembly members' offices have been ransacked by Yoon's prosecutors, no one is above his power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeonsangun_of_Joseon

There are copious comparisons of Yoon to Yeonsangun since he took office. A google search in Korean revealed about 120,000 links. Of course many are social media posts, redundantly referring to the same sources. Among the top links, the first major political figure to make the comparison, that I found was democratic party National Assembly member and party executive committee member, Go Min-jung. Assembly member Go criticized President Yoon for sacking the Presidential Archives Director, Shim Seong-bo, who was appointed at the end of the Moon Jae-in administration, saying, “Does President Yoon Seok-yeol want to be remembered as Yeonsangun?” This story was reported by Chosun Ilbo February 3, 2023.*

*고민정 “尹, 연산군으로 기억되고 싶나” 대통령기록관장 직위해제 비판 https://www.chosun.com/politics/politics_general/2023/02/03/TRT37QOOJZFLFCTUFFJII6TNNU/

Along analogous tyrannical developments it was recently disclosed that the National Elections Committee allowed the National Intelligence Service access to its computer software programming for election counts, because it felt it was under some compulsion to do so for "security reasons." After the NIS inspection, the NEC Director at a National Assembly committee hearing revealed that his agency found upon checking their system, the NIS had left some its own software on NEC computers.*

*선관위 보안점검 뒤 '미삭제' 국정원 프로그램 있었다?
OhMyNews 10.13.23
https://www.ohmynews.com/NWS_Web/View/at_pg.aspx?CNTN_CD=A0002969128&CMPT_CD=P0001&utm_campaign=daum_news&utm_source=daum&utm_medium=daumnews

The Chairman of the South Korean National Election Commission, No Tae-ak, is now being investigated by public prosecutors for neglect of duties for failing to safeguard the election processes from North Korean hacking and interference.* There is no evidence of any security failures or potential failures. The Yoon administration fears impeachment and intends to interfere in election processes related to the general election for National Assembly seats next April, itself, particularly early voting which typically favors progressive voters. Just another public institution under attack by the right wing Yoon administration.

*검찰, '투·개표 보안 부실 의혹' 노태악 수사 착수, YTN 10.17; 임성호
https://www.ytn.co.kr/_ln/0103_202310171828349340

Both siderism in analysis of the Yoon administration.

(Source- 열린공감TV youtube, composite photo from Yeollin Gonggam TV) Pictured First Lady, Kim Gon-hee(left), Yoon Seok-yeol (center) and Kim's mother Choi Eun-soon (right)


South Koreans are dissatisfied with Yoon's pro-Japanese policies. Yoon reduced the budget for alzheirmer's patients, and also RandD. He's used millions for his wasteful move of the presidential office to the old MND building and the new presidential residence in Hannan dong. Yet, he now wants to use the Blue House whenever he wants. The added burden on police caused by the move contributed to the Itaewon disaster in which 159 young people died by being crushed in a crowd. Yoon's clique of prosecutors persecute critics of Yoon, his wife, and his mother in law. Yoon has always had a dictatorial personality. He is an admirer of the former dictator Chun Doo-hwan.

Prosecutors in Yoon's clique frame political opponents with false witnesss testimony and constant leaks of false accusations against the accused to Yoon's conservative media supporters who dutifully publish to defame the critics of authoritarian pro-Japanese rule. Known as press prosecution collusion (검언유착) it is directed against the political opposition and independent media. Yoon also oppresses labor unions, and is taking control of otherwise non-partisan government institutions and agencies by staffing them MB retreads and unqualified former prosecutors. Like most dictators, he's trying to rewrite history, to make Japan and South Korea's dictators the good guys. If he doesn't start another war with North Korea it will only be luck. Yoon and his new right supporters label all critics and opposition "anti-state enemies" and stooges of North Korean. According to Yoon human rights advocates fall into this category.

Above all, Yoon is incompetent. He's had no prior military, foreign policy, or political experience prior to his election to the South Korean presidency. He has no domestic program whatever and spends as much time overseas as possible. Almost all of his cabinet appointees were disapproved by the National Assembly. Unfortunately, that doesn't matter under South Korea's constitution, he appointed them anyway. Anyone, who wants to "both sider" the problem with South Korea's Yoon administration today, doesn't really understand Korean politics, history or Yoon. Does any South Korean president have a worse economic record than Yoon? Yoon's wife had a government minister move a planned expressway interchange closer to real estate her family owns. She and her mother have been implicated in multiple real estate fraud schemes. While people suffer under the bad economy, she purchases jewelry and clothing costing tens of thousands of dollars or more on Yoon's overseas junkets. As far as the Daejangdong scandal goes Yoon is the one who overlooked the Pusan Savings Bank scandal which provided the seed money for the Daejangdong development. So far, after two years, over three hundred warrants, and several ongoing investigations, hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence, there is no tangible proof of any wrongdoing by Lee Jae-myung, the democratic party leader. The scanty evidence against him is mostly from improperly induced perjured statements elicited by prosecutors, from people subject to prosecution themselves and under duress. Trying to pin Daejangdong corruption on Lee is a classic case of Yoon projection and conservative mainstream media misdirection to cover his own misdeeds. He has been disciplined twice for unethical conduct as a prosecutor (it took him nine tries to pass the bar exam). He is a heavy drinker known to drop three thousand dollars in a single night of partying. There is a lack of transparency for his offices' rather large office account expenditures. The claim is that receipts are either no longer available or if available cannot be released due to "security reasons." Get real.

Victor Cha recommends pre-emptive strike

The Quiet Warmonger: Here's what Victor Cha of @CSISKoreaChair called for before the Senate this week. The adoption of a pre-emptive clause by the trilateral US-Korea-Japan alliance would be exceedingly dangerous. Plus he wants ROK arms sent to Ukraine. https://t.co/rSAVCxMxPB pic.twitter.com/NYV1htgWSx

— Tim Shorrock (@TimothyS) October 6, 2023

CSIS Korea chair Victor Cha's prepared testimony is at this link, FWIW.

https://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/6d1240b7-bfd7-859b-3fc5-ecd6d083540a/100423_Cha_Testimony.pdf

Tim cited Cha's proposed military interception of North Korean missile tests. This is a bad idea, that I had been waiting for some high profile "expert" to recommend. Declaring that the US will attack North Korean ICBM testing pre-emptively is a bluff that will be called. It will have no deterrent effect on North Korea. There are always zingers in these very biased assessments pushed by CSIS for their arms manufacturer and state sponsors. They've been cranking this stuff out on youtube. Two more Cha quotes that I just can't take seriously:

It is noteworthy that the administration has stated its interest in reengaging in dialogue with DPRK with no preconditions as to the results of such talks. This is a subtle but significant change that suggests greater flexibility.

The Biden administrations professed willingness to engage in "dialogue without preconditions" is meaningless boilerplate. The Biden administration has nothing substantial to offer in the way of diplomacy. But they're willing to listen to Kim surrender without preconditions. I'm not big on Cha's "saving face" argument either. This is in the same category as the establishment disapproval of Trump's leader to leader overtures with Kim, which according to the neocon critics, unfairly and unduly "rewarded Kim Jong-un" by elevating his status by having the president meet with him. This always was meaningless drivel.

To me this is the kind of argument people make when they don't want to address the substantive issues. When your negotiating approach fails, namely the US "all or nothing" humiliating approach delivered to Kim, by John Bolton at Hanoi, necessarily he's going to look elsewhere for support. His covid lockdown basically put DPRK foreign policy in deep freeze. That's over now. Before "fire and fury" the US had already bypassed China and Russia and thereafter pursued a new cold war policy of block politics. Where else would Kim go?

Cha's praise for Yoon's foreign policy is absurd. Yoon has no domestic support to speak of. He's a lame duck. Frankly he's a corrupt simple minded psychopath. Anyone who criticizes him is "an anti-state actor." His policy is turning South Korea into a security/surveillance/police state. He's got nothing else to offer. A military crisis is probably something he feels he could use to bolster his foundering administration.

There are some who argue that this new development in DPRK-Russia cooperation is a response to the Camp David summit. I do not believe this to be the case. Russia’s need for ammunition alone would have made this cooperation inevitable regardless of U.S.-Japan-Korea trilateral cooperation

This is ridiculous.

I think any sort of attempt to destroy an upcoming ballistic missile test launch, either on the launch pad, or in flight by the US or South Korea, will result in military retaliation by North Korea. After which, it will be difficult to restrain Yoon, or the US from further escalation and the possible outbreak of war.

I've read that a satellite launch effort might be made by North Korea before Oct 26. Further ICBM testing could be expected in the future as well.

This US official apparently has some common sense.

Bonnie Jenkins, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, made the remarks, a day after Victor Cha, senior vice president for Asia and Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies made the proposal at a congressional hearing.

Cha noted the need to consider a "declaratory" policy to signal the capability of destroying a North Korean missile headed towards Japan, Hawaii or the U.S. West Coast when it is on the launch pad or in other flight phases.

"I think I would just say that we have a very close relationship, strong discussions on the way in which we want to address North Korean threats and their intercontinental ballistic missiles and all the tests that they're doing," she said at a forum hosted by the Stimson Center.

Jenkins said she would not say a preemptive strike is "the way to go."

Senior U.S. official stresses 'strong' ties with S. Korea, Japan over N. Korean threats

Doomsday Machine scenario in North Korea?

Daniel Ellsberg in his 2017 book, the Doomsday Machine, lists 24 situations, other than Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in which the US implicitly or directly threatened to use nuclear weapons. Some of these instances are quite specific and others less so. I had encountered a few of these situations before in history books. There were the US nuclear threats made against China, and/or North Korea. There were various Berlin crises during the cold war, and of course, the Cuban missile crisis, which Ellsberg describes in great detail earlier in the book.

One thing I learned from Ellsberg's book, was the central importance and futility of nuclear policies revolving around the so called "decapitation attack," designed to take place in various contexts, usually considered in a cold war context by Ellsberg, against the Soviet Union as part of the strategy of nuclear war. Ellsberg generally speaking regards the decapitation strategy as the wellspring of the "doomsday machine" referred to elsewhere as the "dead hand" mechanism to make sure the nuclear counterstrike takes places place regardless of what happens to the targeted national leadership structure. The "doomsday" response mechanism involves several dangerous, and totally suicidal potential outcomes.

Ellsberg was critical of US and Soviet efforts to keep secret their "doomsday" response mechanisms to potential loss of national command centers in a nuclear war. His logic is that if the opposing side is unaware of a doomsday mechanism that survives a first strike, there is a loss of deterrence value. Why keep it a secret? The side that launches a first strike decapitation attack is going to sustain a devasting nuclear counterstrike in any event despite disabling the enemy's command and control structure. In the case of the US, he speculates that the reasoning is that it is too disturbing to the public to consider that control of nuclear weapons is decentralized with lower commanders having the authority to launch nuclear weapons without regard to the principle of commander in chief and civilian control of the military, if certain conditions appear to be present.

I hadn't previously realized that decapitation strategies were a major component of nuclear war planning. It's almost fundamental that command and control would naturally be subject to an attack during a general war, but an evaluation of the full implications of exclusive destruction of the national command authority during a nuclear conflict are more fully explored in Ellsberg's analysis than I had ever encountered. So what's the point? I'm only addressing North Korean decapitation below. There are many other ramifications addressed by Ellsberg, particularly with respect to Russia. These are my observations below, not Ellsberg's.

Decapitation strategies with conventional forces on North Korea by the US armed forces have been discussed openly in South Korean media. My reaction was that this was an inadequate tactical response to a strategic problem, North Korean military nuclearization. In other words, the strategy would in all likelihood fail and invite the very military responses one was ostensibly trying to prevent, either general war, or nuclear war with North Korea. Two sources that I knew of, Victor Cha, CSIS Korea Chair, and Thae Yong-ho (North Korean defector and current assembly member, South Korea National Assembly), separately stated their opposition to the so called "bloody nose" approach, recommended by one of Trump's military advisors. Trump had used the expression "fire and fury" at one point. I think Joseph Yun, a career diplomat leading US diplomacy efforts with North Korea, resigned not too long after the bloody nose issue was floated, so that was subject to similar speculation, that the US was contemplating or planning some military response to North Korea that he may have also opposed. Thae Yong-ho specifically mentioned in the way of a caution to US planners, that North Korea had already adopted a nuclear doomsday response or "dead hand" response to attacks on its command and control structures.

William Arkin raised the notion more recently that the new tactical warhead W-76-2 on the submarine launched Trident missile was possibly aimed at North Korea or Iran. This was the only public indication (that I know of) that the decapitation effort against North Korea might be in the form of a nuclear attack from the US, until US nuclear submarines began visiting South Korean ports in recent months. These included one Fleet Ballistic Missile submarine that docked in Busan and was visited by President Yoon.

In light of Ellsberg's detailed discussions of nuclear (first strike) decapitation scenarios, decision flow, and likely responses and outcomes, I now realize that the discussion of a conventional "decapitation attack" against North Korea, is probably intentionally misleading, and that it was likely intended to include nuclear strikes all along.

Interestingly enough, it wasn't too long ago, that North Korea announced its intention to launch a nuclear response to any US/South Korean attack on North Korean command and control elements, conventional or otherwise. Ironically, this follows Ellsberg's theory of deterrence to nuclear decapitation strikes- let your opponent know you have a "doomsday" response mechanism in place. I could easily anticipate the Pentagon arguments why this can't be true for North Korea, but if you read Ellsberg's book, one could easily do their own informed speculation on that. Highly recommend The Doomsday Machine, (the book).

In keeping with the theme, International Day of Non-violence.

South Korean press censorship- no limits?

President Yoon Suk-yeol seems to be pushing South Korea in a repressive direction, with no protest from his American partners. https://t.co/DAKlYgUrdN

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) September 30, 2023