North Korea founder's memoir triggers censorship debate in South
04 May, 2021
A good South Korean publisher's defiant proceed to release the memoirs of the North's founder Kim Il Sung has triggered a heated debate over Seoul's decades-old ban on Pyongyang's propaganda under national security laws.
Critics of the measure say Southerners are actually politically mature enough to guage such material for themselves and argue it amounts to unnecessary censorship in a captivating democracy that is the most wired and educated countries in the world.
But the South continues to be officially at war with its nuclear-armed and impoverished neighbour, with legislation to match.
The national security law dates from 1948, before the outbreak of the Korean War, and still blocks ordinary citizens from accessing most North Korean-produced content, including its official Rodong Sinmun newspaper.
Reproducing or perhaps possessing banned pro-Pyongyang materials is punishable by simply up to seven years in prison.
However, publisher Kim Seung-kyun in April released the North Korean founder's eight-volume memoirs, titled With the Century, telling AFP that he did so to promote inter-Korean reconciliation.
An anti-North civic group filed a good criminal complaint, police launched a study and within days the country's major bookstores - who had received it via a publishers' association - pulled it from their shelves.
It briefly remained available online for 280,000 won (US$250) for the entire set, but by the other day, it was no longer available from popular web portal Naver, while searches on the subject of local book-selling platforms Kyobo and Yes24 showed no results.
The movements triggered a debate over censorship and whether people really would have to be protected from reading what of Kim Il Sung.
"South Koreans already have a high degree of judgement," said Ha Tae-keung, a lawmaker from the conservative People Power Party - who was simply jailed beneath the national security law as a student activist.
"No one will be deceived by a good fantasy-like memoir of Kim Il Sung anymore," he told AFP. "We have now need to actively guarantee freedom of expression."
PERSONALITY CULT
Kim Il Sung, the grandfather of the North's current leader Kim Jong Un, ruled the world's most reclusive country for almost five decades until his death in 1994, with a mixture of his own make of Stalinism and an unabashed personality cult.
The memoir, first published by Pyongyang in 1992 and available in about 20 languages all over the world, portrays him as a heroic Korean guerilla head against Japanese colonial forces, sometimes denying and downplaying his Chinese and Soviet connections.
Researchers describe it as largely a "do the job of fiction" with archival Soviet evidence disproving a few of its key claims, but add that it offers value no matter historical inaccuracies.
Despite its "mind-numbing prose", the book unveiled Pyongyang's "propensity to falsehoods" and "cult of personality", said Sung-yoon Lee, a Korean analyses professor at Tufts University in the United States.
Suzy Kim, a Korean history professor at Rutgers University, said it demonstrated how the regime in Pyongyang "traces its legitimacy to its anti-colonial roots".
To this day, she added, most of the North's challenges are "often justified as sacrifices made for standing up to continued imperialist policies imposed by japan and US governments".
DEMOCRACY AND WAR
The national security law technically makes mere possession of pro-North materials punishable by up to seven years in prison - while visiting the united states without government permission includes a maximum 10 year sentence.
The United Nations has said the act poses a "seriously problematic" challenge to freedom of expression in the South, and the US State Department regularly criticises it in its total annual human rights reports.
Thousands were imprisoned under the legislation by the authoritarian military governments that ruled the South for many years, often accused of engaging in pro-Pyongyang activities or perhaps spying for the North.
Publisher Kim - who formerly obtained the text several years ago for a good government-authorised restricted distribution to analyze institutions - said he previously no intention of benefiting Pyongyang.
Releasing the written text was "ways to love my country" simply by promoting inter-Korean understanding, the 82-year-old told AFP at his dwelling in Goyang.
"If that's deemed a crime, I am ready to be punished."
Police confirmed to AFP that their investigation into whether Kim had violated the national security legislation was continuing.
New Paradigm of Korea, the group that filed the complaint, insisted that the general public was susceptible to "totalitarian propaganda manipulation".
Allowing the book's distribution will be "much like handing a nuclear tote to the enemy upon a spiritual level", it added.
But Professor Lee said: "Allow publisher and consumer act freely and invite the market, like the market of ideas, determine the book's fate.
"The freedom of speech, even false and outrageous speech that beautifies the despicable, ought to be protected in an authentic democracy."
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