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In September 1988, a monthly magazine named Sahoe Wa Sasang, or Society and Thought, provided a beachhead for South Korean leftists, who had been keeping a low profile until then, to assert their human rights. The development was akin to one in the 1950s, when a politically mainstream magazine run by Chang Jun-ha called Sasanggye, or World of Ideas, breathed fresh life into the nation's movement for a free and democratic society. With Society and Thought, socialism in the South, hidden so long in society, had a chance to emerge and take form.
The name of Song Doo-yul was mostly unknown until the January 1989 issue of Society and Thought was published. A professor in Germany, Song contributed an article to that issue, "We Still Need Philosophy," which had first appeared in "Philosophy Fulfilled," a compilation of writings arranged by the German philosopher Juergen Habermass. South Korean readers who had grown sick of the pamphlet-like articles put out by domestic leftists were impressed by the new ideas in Song's article, which was full of fresh insight into works by thinkers such as Hegel, Marx and Weber.
But in the ensuing years reality distanced itself from Song's article, as the gap between South and North Korea widened broadly in the 1990s. Then Professor Song, who styled himself as the prophet of the nation's enlightenment and liberation movement, suddenly began preaching his theory of "intrinsic access": that North Korean society can only be explained using its own internal, subjective logic. The theory was essentially a unilateral and unconditional defense of North Korea, instead of a means to truly understand North Korea. His impartiality was clear enough, when you note that he condemned Park Chung Hee's Yushin system, but defended Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il's dictatorial system.
About the time the interest in Song shifted from the South's academic figures to its security authorities, the German doctor Norbert Vollertsen started showing up in the media. Though the two men are completely unrelated to each other, they share three worlds - Germany, North Korea and human rights - which they approach from completely different directions. Vollertsen, while living in North Korea, discovered the virus of the Kims' Juche ideology, which pushes humans into miserable and disastrous situations. Song, by contrast, had portrayed himself as the nation's elite intellectual, and conducted interviews with Kim Il Sung.
But it's curious that Song, after devising his intrinsic access theory, kept tight-lipped about the miserable human-rights realities in North Korea. He went "inside" the country, but never criticized it.
Vollertsen's dream - that Kim Jong Il will be brought before an international court and tried for crimes against humanity - may never be realized. And Song's intrinsic access theory, preaching enlightenment and liberation, is now dead, mostly because he killed it by blinding himself to the North's human rights abuses.
On Tuesday morning, these two figures were here in South Korea. Vollertsen attended a National Assembly hearing over the Daegu Universiade incident, in which he and a group of South Korean rightists were attacked by a few North Korean reporters. Song met with agents from the National Intelligence Service, to be questioned about his alleged pro-North activity.
What a strange juxtaposition.
The writer is an editorial writer at the Chosun Ilbo
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