By Andy Jackson
Centuries ago in my undergraduate days, there was a popular T-shirt on my campus that roughly read ``I must be a mushroom, because they keep me in the dark and feed me cow manure.'' The actual expression was more vulgar: We were a potty-mouthed lot at my college.
The sentiment behind that slogan was common and universal: the belief that the powers that be are not telling us the whole truth and, worse yet, feeding us lies.
Back in America, I spent enough time around those mysterious ``powers that be'' to discovered a shocking truth; most politicians tell the truth most of the time. Even more shockingly, most politicians will at least try to implement the policies they championed in their election campaigns.
Politicians in democracies aren't generally truthful because they are called to a higher plain by their desire for public service. They tell the truth because they know that, in a democratic society with a vibrant political opposition and a free press, the truth will eventually come out and it would be damaging to their reputations and careers if they were found to have knowingly lied to the public.
Of course, things are different with our neighbors to the north.
North Korea has neither a legal political opposition nor a free press. Televisions and radios can only be set on official government channels. Those who are caught tampering with them to receive unauthorized broadcasts are severely punished.
That frees the Kim Jong-il regime to continue to keep the North Korean people ignorant of the outside world and to lie to them to without consequence. In true Orwellian fashion, a key to Pyongyang's continued domination of its subjects is careful control of what information they can and cannot have.
A few North Koreans used to get alternative information from South Korean government sources, but Seoul and Pyongyang agreed to end their official propaganda campaigns in 2004. Of course, by that point, the obvious difference in the level of development on the opposite sides of the DMZ made North Korean claims of superiority ridiculous to the point of self-parody, rendering their propaganda attempts in the South useless except for a few activists on the left. In that context the deal was less of mutual agreement than a concession from Seoul to Pyongyang.
The partial collapse of the central order in the country over the past decade has made state repression less efficient. Chinese and South Korean cell phones have been smuggled into the country, allowing for some communication with the outside world for those who can afford them. Missionaries and human rights groups have been able to work with North Korean refugees in China and even make incursions into North Korea itself.
While breakdowns in the North Korean system have made Pyongyang's control of information in the country less complete, much of the population, especially those who live far from the border with China, are still trapped behind the Kim Jong-il regime's wall of ignorance and lies.
One way to break through that wall has been the spreading of leaflets through the use of balloons launched from south of the DMZ or boats in the West Sea by private Korean citizens. Relatives of South Koreans abducted by North Korean agents and defectors from North Korea are the most active in the endeavor.
Suzanne Scholte, who was awarded the Seoul Peace Prize in September in recognition of her work on behalf North Korean human rights, is a strong supporter of the campaign, saying, ``There is nothing more powerful than North Koreans living in freedom reaching out to North Koreans living in slavery.''
The effectiveness of the campaign is evident in the reaction the Kim Jong-il regime has made to them. Pyongyang has threatened to downgrade or even shut down the Gaeseong Industrial Complex in retaliation. While the North Koreans are unlikely to close one of their few legal means of making hard currency, they could expel some South Korean managers and refuse to meet South Korean officials.
The threats caused the Gaeseong Industrial Complex Tenant Companies Association to ask that the leaflet balloon launches be stopped. The Hankyoreh, Korea's leading leftist newspaper, demanded that the government ``put an immediate end to the distribution of leaflets to North Korea.'' Other sources have also called for the government to step in and put a stop to the practice.
In response to those calls, Unification Minister Kim Ha-joong requested civic groups to refrain from distributing the leaflets but noted that the government has no legal basis for stopping them.
It is one thing for the South Korean government to end its official propaganda campaign as a concession to North Korea. It is another thing entirely for the South Korean government to become Pyongyang's flunky by applying North Korean censorship to South Korean citizens.
While it is unfortunate that Kim felt obliged to pay lip service to Pyongyang's demand to suppress South Korean citizens from providing alternative information to those in North Korea, the government is to be commended for so far not seeking some excuse to shut down one of the few sources of real sunshine for North Koreans.
Andy Jackson teaches American government in the Lakeland College bridge program at Ansan College, Gyeonggi Province. He can be reached at andyinrok@lycos.com.