By Kim Ji-soo
There is usually something different about people who are so-called “leaders.” Some inspire. Some are so intellectually superior it’s hard to not be persuaded. Some are charismatic. And some ― and this group I think is the most persuasive ― are the ones who disarm. It’s people with clarity in insight and warmth. I am sure we have all met several of these disarming leaders, which was the case of my meeting with the late Rhee Young-hee.
It was in the year 2006 when we went for an interview with the dissident in his residence in Seoul. He was not in the best of health, having suffered a stroke in 2000. He was in a wheelchair, and his speech was slightly slurred. Perhaps it was because of his turbulent life. He was fired twice as a journalist, and twice as a professor for his writings and ideas. But he spoke emphatically and in length about his thoughts and ideas.
Admittedly I have not read all of his books, just his most representative “Logic in the Era of Transition.” After reading that book, I experienced a certain sense of liberation, a notion that I could think freely about things, in this case communism. His book criticized the sweeping anti-communist sentiment and its side-effects that were prevalent in Korea during its days of rapid growth. It was as a bright ray of light of understanding went through my brain, an experience that I also had while studying for the first time in the United States in the early 1990s.
Anyone having gone to college in the late 1980s in Korea can largely be divided into three groups. While student activism on democracy was at its full peak in the earlier part of the 1980s, the late 1980s were an extension of that period. Those who participated in the democracy protests, those who sat on the sidelines and those who engrossed themselves headlong in university studies.
Nevertheless, a large majority share a certain sense of debt to the democracy movement. And a large majority also shared a certain obligation to take either one in political thought. But after a few months of studying at a picturesque San Diego campus after the tumultuous college years, I experienced a sense of liberation, a freedom to explore all facets of issues, not face only a dichotomous situation of left or right. It must be this sense of freedom and the beckoning of intellectual curiosity that prompts scholars to pursue the path of infinite learning.
And it must have been with that sense of liberation that collegians in South Korea’s 1970s and 1980s read his most representative book. He’s not without critics, largely that in unmasking the fallacy of the sweeping anti-communist sentiment in the rapidly industrializing Korea, he maybe went to the other extreme. He was open to North Korea. On North Korea’s nuclear program, Rhee had in several writings said that the North is attempting to possess nuclear weapons as a form of self-defense. In his writings on China that he authored in the 1970s and 1980s, he supported the Cultural Revolution. He later said that he could not give the full picture because of a lack of data during that time.
But where are leaders that are without critics? It’s hard to shake off, even now, the moment of clarity that his book presented.