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Several years ago, I met a Methodist minister, jailed for his religion in the North Korean city of Wonsan, who had survived a massacre of prisoners in the opening weeks of the Korean War.
This devout man lived a minimalist life in a dingy apartment down by the Han River, slept on a hard floor with a wooden pillow and passed much of his time reading the Bible. He had even taught himself Hebrew.
When he told me his story, in English and in excruciating detail, the innocence of his thinking stood out. He had believed at the time that his jailing had been a misunderstanding that would get sorted out provided that he remained virtuous and did not allow fear and anger to color his outlook.
And so, that day when the prisoners were herded into trucks and assembled in a long line at the foot of a hill, roped together in groups of four, he remained positive and chatted amiably with his three partners. They got to know one another as the line shuffled up the hillside, stopped, then shuffled forward again. This went on all afternoon. He even remembered their names all those years later.
Finally, they reached the mouth of a cave. As his eyes adapted to the gloom, he saw, deeper in the cave, a pile of bodies. Two guards ordered the line of four men in front of him to kneel on the pile, shot them in the head, then called him and his partners forward.
"It was only then that I realized that the communists were not our brothers," he said. "I thought the Japanese were the enemy."
One of only six survivors out of around 300, he emerged having learned that civil conflict is the most vicious, and that any brotherly love that may have existed between Koreans was lost.
Elsewhere in Korea at that time, the same lesson was becoming apparent. Thousands of well-meaning leftists probably had a similar revelation just before they were shot, in similar fashion, by the police and army in South Korea.
These horrors explain why the war generation never seemed as anti-Japanese as the post-war generation which had never experienced occupation. They had been through something far worse after the occupation at the hands of their own people.
It also helps explain why that generation never saw a chance for reunification without regime change in North Korea.
But to young people _ that is, today's under-60s _ their posture is so old-fashioned.
Every few years, it seems, new figures who know better step forward to dedicate themselves to reunification, convinced that, if only we are nice to them, the North Korean leadership will respond in kind.
It's an understandable desire but has been proven time and time again to be a delusion.
Just as we learned there could be no reunification with the son of Kim Il-sung, so it is with his son.
And yet the expectation that reunification could come without change in the North does not go away. Why is that?
The problem as I see it is that South Koreans, in a very broad sense, have yet to adjust in an explicit way to _ ie, openly acknowledge _ the actual values that underlie their new democratic state. Rather, there is a peculiar adherence to a nonexistent past, to a romantic ethnic nationalism whose basic story is that we Koreans were divided by foreign powers and must reunite and whose core value starts and ends with ethnic identity.
But, truth be told, nobody actually wants that Korea. If it were to be realized, all those people demonstrating every day in downtown Seoul about this, that and the other would be swept away for "reeducation."
South Korea today bears no relation to old Korea, which was a backward, unpleasant and oppressive place. Just as Japan today bears no relation to the brutal militaristic state of the 1930s, South Korea is no longer what it once was.
It is now one of the world's most impressive democracies and, as such, it shares with other democracies, including Japan but excluding North Korea and China, certain values that it will never surrender, such as liberty, equality, justice and the right to choose its leaders, its newspapers, what music it dances to and what careers it pursues.
There can be no unification with a state that does not share these values.
So, until North Korea changes, I think we have to engage to stop them from going nuts, say all the right liberal things and tie them up with all kinds of giddy projects, but do so with a wink and a nod and know in our hearts that we are just biding our time.
Michael Breen is the CEO of Insight Communications Consultants, a public relations company, and author of "The Koreans" and "Kim Jong-il: North Korea's Dear Leader."
