The Cleanest Race - B. R. Myers [19]
But the deterioration of the information cordon since the first summit in 2000 had changed things. Kim Jong Il could no longer hope to pull off the feat of posing to the South as a jovial peace-maker while posing to the North as the condescending host to a tributary delegation. What the one half of the peninsula would hear and see of the summit, the other was likely to hear and see as well. The General had no choice but to put his domestic image first. At their first meeting, which took place outdoors, he stood stock-still and poker-faced as the broadly smiling Roh approached to shake his hand. The South Korean delegation claimed that Kim warmed up behind closed doors the next day, but word soon spread that he had mocked his counterpart for being unable to decide on his own whether to stay a few days longer. If billions of dollars in unconditional aid had effected an improvement in inter-Korean relations since 2000, there was no sign of it. The summit ended in another declaration averring both sides’ determination to work towards unification, but the damage had been done. The South Korean electorate’s disaffection with the Sunshine Policy played an important role in helping the conservative candidate win in November.
Had the Kim regime been misled by the sheer vociferousness and visibility of South Korea’s anti-American left into doubting pollsters’ predictions of a Lee victory? Perhaps. The propaganda apparatus certainly appeared to have been caught off guard by the election results when South Korean TV announced them in November 2007. What to say to the North Korean public? With so many citizens now accessing outside sources of information, none of which had criticized the vote-counting process, it was not feasible to claim that Lee had stolen the election. But neither could the truth be conceded that the southern brethren had chosen the pro-Yankee candidate; this would mean either that the Korean race was not so pure after all, or, even more unthinkably, that there was something in the Dear Leader that had alienated them.
For several weeks the official media simply said nothing about Lee’s triumph. (The apposite Korean phrase: muksal, to kill with silence.) Finally, in early 2008, it began asserting that the “traitor” had hoodwinked the electorate by keeping his true political intentions secret. For decades so surefooted in its strategy, the propaganda apparatus was now reduced to hoping the masses would not remember its criticism of Lee’s campaign platform! But luck was on Kim Jong Il’s side. Hardly had the new president taken office than the South Korean public lashed itself into another of its xenophobic frenzies. This time the occasion was the administration’s intention to open the beef market to American imports. As rumors spread of a unique Korean susceptibility to mad cow disease, massive crowds took to the streets of Seoul denouncing Lee as a dictator and traitor, and accusing the Yankees of saving their most diseased meat for the peninsula. Many of the demonstrators interviewed by reporters said they felt cruelly deceived by a man they had just voted into power. The Kim regime could not have asked for a more timely and dramatic confirmation of its propaganda; it gloated over the crisis for months while exhorting the southern brethren to rise up and sweep the puppet state from power.
But by summer 2008 the beef crisis had passed. Realizing that Lee was in the Blue House to stay, the Kim regime turned a critical eye to the two North-South cooperation projects upon which