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President Yoon Suk-yeol speaks at a Cabinet meeting held at the presidential office in Yongsan, Seoul, on Aug. 19, 2024. (Yonhap)

President Yoon Suk-yeol’s mention of “anti-state” forces during the Cabinet meeting coinciding with the kick-off of the 2024 Ulchi Freedom Shield military exercise has taken the country by storm.
 
What were his exact words? This is what he said:
 
“We need to enhance our responses to North Korea’s gray zone provocations such as the spread of misinformation, fake news, and cyberattacks. Anti-state forces threatening free democracy are secretly operating in our society. From the early stages of hostilities, North Korea mobilized [a fifth column] to exacerbate national disorder and divided national opinion with violence, opinion manipulation, propaganda, and incitement. We should work to actively develop ideas for preventing disorder and division and increase the whole nation’s commitment to fighting back.”

Whenever groups of people critical of Yoon get together, they joke, “Hey, when are we going to get slapped with the ‘anti-state’ label?” As the president accuses everyone critical of him as an “anti-state” force, the term itself has lost any meaning to become a running gag. When Yoon refers to “anti-state” forces, who is he referring to?
 
Taking red scare tactics to new vulgar heights
 
Yoon has been a prosecutor his entire life. It’s easy for most prosecutors to become stalwart right-wingers. In our country, which has been divided for so long, prosecutors have functioned as upholders of the system and guardians of the administration.
 
In the 1980s and ’90s, prosecutors would chant, “Strength to the right!” when passing out drinks — mixes of hard liquor and beer — to their right and “Death to the left!” when those drinks were passed to the left. Yoon would have been influenced by such traditions.
 
The National Security Act is the law that mentions “anti-state,” or “anti-government,”  the most out of all South Korean legislation. The act’s stated purpose is, after all, to “secure the security of the State and the subsistence and freedom of nationals, by regulating any anticipated activities compromising the safety of the State.”
 
The act defines the term anti-government organization as “a domestic or foreign organization or group which fraudulently uses the title of the government or aims at a rebellion against the State, and which is provided with a command and leadership system.”

The act itself is harrowing, punishing everyone who constitutes those organizations, commits any act to accomplish the organizations’ purpose, voluntarily assists and receives money and goods from them, infiltrates or escapes from them, praises, incites or propagates the activities of those organizations, or meets and makes correspondence with any of such organizations’ members. It also penalizes those who fail to report such instances.
 
Yoon’s “anti-state forces” seem similar in meaning to the “anti-government activities” and “anti-government organizations” stipulated in the National Security Act. However, the exact phrase “anti-state forces” is never mentioned in the law itself.
 
Yoon started vilifying his critics with ideological labels after entering politics. When declaring his presidential run on June 29, 2021, Yoon claimed, “This [Moon] administration is not stopping at the privatization of government authority but seeking to prolong its rule so that it can continue plundering the South Korean public. It is trying to take the ‘liberal’ part out of the liberal democracy that is the backbone of our Constitution.”
 
He continued such rhetoric at a launch ceremony for the People Power Party’s North Gyeongsang Province election campaign headquarters on Dec. 29, 2021, stating, “People joined the ranks of the democracy movement after learning left-wing revolutionary ideology and North Korea juche theory, and they have been treated as ‘fighters for democracy,’ surviving by helping one another. Now, under the Moon Jae-in administration, they have been plundering the state and its public.”
 
Although the Moon administration was the one to appoint him as prosecutor general, Yoon went out on a limb to utilize red scare tactics as he ran for president against it.
 
He thawed out a little after his inauguration, as can be seen in the policy speech to the National Assembly he made at the time, in which he emphasized bipartisan cooperation by saying, “We have a proud history of overcoming crises through cooperation across party lines in the face of the people’s livelihood, despite fierce competition between the ruling and opposition parties.”
 
As his ratings entered a death cross less than two months after his inauguration, with his approval ratings plummeting to the 20 percent range while negative ratings stayed in the 60 percent range, Yoon began to show his true colors.
 
Yoon made the following remarks at a luncheon meeting with PPP local bargaining committee leaders on Oct. 19, 2022. What follows is an excerpt of a transcript put together and distributed by the presidential office.

“Our country is facing poor economic conditions both at home and abroad, as well as a challenging security situation. The most important thing at such times is to hold a firm belief and conviction in our liberal democratic system. I’m willing to collaborate and reach compromises with anyone, including progressives and leftists, as long as they’re in agreement about liberal democracy. But members of the Juche faction, who are sympathizers with North Korea, are neither progressives nor leftists. There can be no collaboration with hostile anti-state forces.”

Yoon is basically denouncing his political opponents as anti-state forces. After all, the opposition is the group the administration typically needs to collaborate with when running the country.

This appears to have been the first time Yoon used the phrase “anti-state forces.” But what’s particularly striking is the phrase “juche faction,” which is even more provocative than “anti-state forces.”

When a reporter asked him to clarify the phrase in a brief press conference on his way to work the next day, Yoon softened the remark. “That wasn’t aimed at anybody in particular. People know in their hearts whether they’re part of the juche faction or not,” he said.

President Yoon Suk-yeol speaks at a luncheon with PPP local bargaining committee leaders on Oct. 19, 2022. (courtesy of the presidential office)

Like a declaration of war against the opposition party and the Korean people

Then in a Cabinet meeting on June 13, 2023, Yoon recalled that June is “Veterans’ Month” in Korea before remarking, “We must not allow these heroes’ sacrifices and dedication to be misrepresented and disparaged. Such behaviors are anti-state actions that reject the very identity of the Republic of Korea.”

That was when Yoon began freely throwing around the label “anti-state.” The phrase must have tickled his fancy, because he began to use it with greater frequency.

Yoon made the following remarks in a speech while attending a celebration on the 69th anniversary of the establishment of the Korea Freedom Federation on June 28: “Anti-state forces with a distorted historical perspective and irresponsible views on the state have been prating on about an end-of-war declaration that would dismantle the UN Command and begging the UN Security Council to lift sanctions against the North Korean communist gang even as it upgrades its nuclear arsenal.”

Yoon was describing former president Moon Jae-in and his Democratic Party-led administration as anti-state forces.

He went even further in his address on Liberation Day (Aug. 15) that year: “Nonetheless, still rampant are anti-state forces that blindly follow communist totalitarianism, distort public opinion, and disrupt the society through manipulative propaganda. In a divided nation, the confrontation between liberal democracy and communist totalitarianism is a reality. And the activities of those anti-state groups are likely to persist. [. . .] The forces of communist totalitarianism have always disguised themselves as democracy activists, human rights advocates or progressive activists while engaging in despicable and unethical tactics and false propaganda.”

That amounts to a declaration of war against the opposition party and, frankly, the Korean people as a whole.

Yoon has made similar comments at various points since then. During a Cabinet meeting on Aug. 21, 2023, before Korea held the Ulchi Freedom Shield military exercises with the US, he said, “North Korea will cause severe social chaos and division through a false peace offensive, the distribution of fake news, and propaganda and agitation involving anti-state forces.”

At an event celebrating the anniversary of the Incheon amphibious landing on Sept. 15, the Korean president claimed that “communist forces and their minions and anti-state forces are threatening our liberal democracy through falsehoods, fabrications, propaganda and agitation.”

During a Cabinet meeting on March 26, 2024, Yoon said that “denying that the Cheonan corvette was sunk [by North Korea] undermines national security and threatens public safety” and that “we all need to come together to prevent anti-state forces from weakening national security and endangering public safety.”

After Yoon’s People Power Party was trounced in the parliamentary elections this past April, Yoon held off on ideological remarks for a while. One might have assumed that the defeat had dented Yoon’s confidence, but that wasn’t the case. He was back to his usual tricks during his speech on Liberation Day, which falls on Aug. 15.

Yoon spoke of “anti-freedom, anti-unification forces” that “are only bent on dividing people through instigation and fabrication and reaping rewards from the division they sow.” The Korean people, the president said, must “fight back” against these “dark forces of instigation.” Then four days later, he was talking about “anti-state forces” again.

Denying and deflecting psychological wounds

Why is Yoon so fond of the term “anti-state forces”?

Sigmund Freud coined the term “defense mechanism,” which refers to subconscious behaviors and thoughts that function as subconscious self-deception and deflection when psychological conflict within the ego cannot be avoided through more rational means.

One of the classic defense mechanisms is projection, or blaming other people or situations for one’s own unacceptable thoughts, attitudes, feelings and desires. The president is, of course, human. When something goes wrong, he would rather not acknowledge that the blame and responsibility lie with himself.

The memoir of President Kim Young-sam.

When Kim Young-sam wrote in his memoir about the devastating impact of the Asian financial crisis, which struck Korea in the late ’90s at the end of his presidency, he criticized the press, the business community, academics and bureaucrats for failing to give him advance warning. He also blamed politicians, including Kim Dae-jung (who succeeded him as president), for a lack of cooperation with labor reform and a bailout of the automaker Kia.

Lee Myung-bak had a similar attitude about massive candlelit rallies driven by fears that imported American beef could cause mad cow disease. The former president took aim at civil society, politicians who refused to accept his election, MBC’s investigative program “PD Notebook” and former President Roh Moo-hyun, who failed to finish negotiating a free trade agreement with the US before leaving office. In his memoir, he completely ignored the fact that he had stirred the pot with his tone-deaf remark that “people who don’t like [the beef] don’t have to buy it.”

Yoon is acting the same way. After his victory in the presidential election on March 9, 2022, he wrote in the visitors’ register at Seoul National Cemetery that he would “build a prosperous and unified country along with our great people.” I’m sure he wanted to do a good job.

But his approval rating began sinking early on because of botched appointments and public policy. A deadly crowd crush occurred during Halloween festivities in Itaewon, and Busan’s bid to host the World Expo ended in failure.

And then Yoon led his party to a crushing defeat in the general election because of largely avoidable controversies about his wife’s ethically dubious acceptance of a name-brand bag, alleged meddling in the Marine Corps’ investigation of the death of a corporal in a flood rescue operation, and clueless comments about the price of large green onions (daepa) at a supermarket.

Yet Yoon is back to his shrill rhetoric about anti-state forces, without any apparent remorse for, or even awareness of, his own mistakes.

Surely what Yoon ought to do now is offer the public a major mea culpa — to own up to his shortcomings. He ought to stop sowing division and blaming other people, and make an honest attempt to unify the public and engage the opposition in dialogue.

But is he up for that? What do our readers think?

By Seong Han-yong, senior political writer

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]