Toppling tyrants

By Kyung Moon Hwang

We know things have gotten really bad in inter-Korean relations when the South’s government very openly reveals the formation of a special “decapitation” squadron targeting the North Korean leader. Such units have always existed in some form, probably, but the point now is to make an impression on such a mercurial, absolutist dictator, as every other approach appears to have failed.

How to shake some sense into, or better, get rid of a tyrant whose behavior seems not just unpredictable or bizarre, but frightening, has been a universal problem throughout human history. In hindsight, a well-timed assassination at times would have produced an undeniably better outcome. Who could argue against the notion, for example, that killing Adolf Hitler sometime in the 1930s would have prevented much of the carnage around the world in the 1940s?

In Korea’s past as well, this challenge arose alongside systematic rules on political legitimacy. Until the 20th century, as in most other places, sovereignty almost always lay in a hereditary monarch, whose supreme authority came from being the child or relative of the preceding monarch and hence a descendant of the man who originally took power through military action. The military leaders, who founded the dynastic states, whether it was Goryeo, Joseon or North Korea, established lines of monarchical power in which legitimacy was passed down to the founder’s descendants in orderly succession. A new king would formally take the throne once the previous king, usually his father, died.

But this did not always work out as designed. Some monarchs were pushed out by ambitious or merciless royal relatives coveting the throne. Others were forced to abdicate under extraordinary circumstances. The last two Joseon monarchs, Gojong and Sunjong, for example, were stripped of their positions by the conquering Japanese in 1907 and 1910, respectively. And the Joseon founder himself, Taejo, couldn’t stomach the murderous infighting among his children and stepped away from the throne in 1398, just six years after founding the dynasty.

Throughout the five centuries of the Joseon era, however, only two monarchs were considered so terrible, so dangerous, and so immoral that top ministers took the initiative to topple them. The latter of those two, Gwanghaegun, was condemned for his cruelty, although he didn’t seem any crueler than many other kings. More importantly, he favored making peace with the newly-rising Manchus instead of unconditionally supporting the Chinese Ming dynasty in the early 17th century, and for that, he was overthrown in 1623.

Recently, however, the historical judgment on Gwanghaegun has undergone major revision in popular and scholarly circles, and he is now more frequently viewed as a wise pragmatist who foresaw the futility of militarily resisting the Manchus. Indeed, the man who replaced him on the throne, his nephew, had to bow in ritual submission to the Manchu emperor on the outskirts of Seoul in 1637, one of the most humiliating moments in Korean history.

The other deposed Joseon king seems to have been a more clear-cut case. This was Yeonsangun of the late 15th to early 16th century, whose debauchery and indiscriminate brutality, together with other depraved behavior, present reminders of perhaps the most notorious such monarch in Western history, the Roman emperor Caligula of the first century.

Both Yeonsangun and Caligula are being invoked these days in baffled attempts to characterize the current North Korean leader. Like the other two, Kim Jong Un inherited the throne as a young man and seems extraordinarily unfit to lead, acting capriciously, tempestuously, and maliciously on his way toward destroying himself, but not before possibly destroying many other things.

Like the high ministers of the Joseon dynasty wondering what to do with such a menacingly puzzling man, South Korean officials (and perhaps some North Korean ones too) are wringing their hands about the available options and veering toward taking extreme action in their desperation. But they also know that taking this ultimate step would likely will lead to unpredictable and possibly uncontrollable developments. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that the elimination of Kim Jong-un would result in a leader who is easier to figure out, although the Kim dynasty itself might cease.

Such lessons also come from Korea’s experience with assassinations in the 20th century, especially the two killings that make up the most extraordinary coincidence in the country’s history: the 1909 assassination of the Japanese overlord, Ito Hirobumi, by a Korean resistance fighter, and the 1979 assassination of the South Korean dictator, Park Chung-hee, ironically by the head of the secret police. The two events took place exactly 70 years apart, both on October 26.

It remains curious why the historical reputation of the former assassin, An Jung-geun, is so different from that of the latter, Kim Jae-gyu. Both men claimed righteous justification for killing a ruthless tyrant, but one is considered a national hero and the other a criminal.

More to the point, the results of those assassinations were ambiguous at best. The 1909 killing actually might have accelerated or finalized the Japanese decision to colonize Korea the following year, in 1910. And the 1979 shooting led to not democracy in South Korea but rather a bloody suppression of a mass civil uprising and an even worse dictator the following year, in 1980.

History has shown, then, that cutting off the head of a regime does not necessarily destroy the many other actors that serve as its vital organs.

Kyung Moon Hwang (khwang3@gmail.com) is a professor at the Department of History, University of Southern California. He is the author of "A History of Korea-An Episodic Narrative" (Second edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).