History of blacklists

By Park Moo-jong

The government's blacklist of a total of 9,473 artists and cultural figures has reminded many people of the censorship and oppression under the administration of Park Chung-hee (1961-1979), the father of the embattled President Park Geun-hye.

To the shock of the people, several former and present high ranking officials of the Ministry of Culture, Sport and Tourism and the presidential secretariat involved in concocting the blacklist have been put behind bars over the past several weeks.

Former Culture Minister Cho Yun-sun, Park's former chief of staff Kim Ki-choon and others will be prosecuted on suspicion of abuse of power and perjury. In particular, Cho was the first sitting Cabinet member to be arrested on criminal charges.

A blacklist is a list or register of entities or people that, for one reason or another, are denied a particular privilege, service, mobility, access or recognition.

As a verb, according to English dictionaries, to blacklist someone means to deny them work in a particular field, or to ostracize them from a certain social circle.

U.S. President Donald Trump's travel ban on immigrants from seven Islamic countries can be a kind of blacklist (of people denied entry into the United States).

The problem of the blacklist here is that the government abused its official power to exclude professionals in cultural and artistic fields from its subsidies and to restrict their activities, just for being critical of or opposing the Park government.

I wonder if there may be a "whitelist" of people or entities that are accepted, recognized or given privileges for supporting President Park.

The word "blacklist" originates with a list England's King Charles II made of 58 judges and court officers who sentenced his father Charles I to death in 1649. When the son was restored to the throne in 1660, the monarch put 13 of them to death and imprisoned 25 for life, according to the Henry Holt Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins.

Hitler's Nazi blacklist was notorious as the register in the "Black Book" that was drawn up of 2,820 prominent British citizens such as Winston Churchill and Bertrand Russell who would have been sent to concentration camps if the United Kingdom had not won the Battle of Britain; and Nazi Germany's Operation Sea Lion had succeeded in conquering Britain.

Very similar to the blacklist of the Republic of Korea in nature was the Hollywood blacklist, instituted by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 to block screenwriters and other Hollywood professionals who were purported to have Communist sympathies from obtaining employment.

The infamous and systematic blacklist started by listing 151 entertainment industry professionals and lasted until 1960 when it was effectively broken by the acknowledgement that blacklisted artists had been working under assumed names for many years.

A 1991 U.S. film, "Guilty by Suspicion," about the Hollywood blacklist and associated activities stemming from McCarthyism well depicted the ordeals of the affected professionals and the seriousness of the situation.

Starring Robert De Niro as a movie director in 1950s Hollywood, and Annette Bening as his wife, the film shows the director's fight against the then rising tide of McCarthyism and the "Red Scare" that led to him not being allowed to work in films after his return from abroad.

He would only be allowed to direct if he implicated his colleagues as Communist agents, and was forced to decide whether to turn informant or stick to principles at the cost of his life's work. He chose the latter.

This kind of blacklist like ours of today should disappear, even if any government has the right to confirm who its supporters and who its opponents are.

But what the Park administration did wrong was that with the blacklist it caused problems in the fairness of the government's legal subsidies for cultural and artistic professionals and infringed on their freedom and creativity of artistic expression.

And the top officials lied about the list, thus facing charge of false testimony.

It is not wrong for a government to grasp the inclination of cultural and artistic professionals as their work ― either movies or paintings for instance ― influences the public.

On the basis of its understanding of cultural and artistic tendencies, the government is supposed to work out proper policies, not a blacklist aimed at putting them in pain financially or restricting their activities.

A friend of mine living in the United States for nearly 40 years sent me his "Black List" after the Park government's blacklist scandal surfaced last October.

Included on his blacklist are the 44th U.S. President Barack Obama; Martin Luther King Jr., an American Baptist minister and a leader in the Civil Rights Movement; boxer Muhammad Ali; Alex Haley, author of 1976 novel "Roots;" Malcom X, a Muslim minister and human rights activist; Nelson Mandela, the former South African president; Booker T. Washington, an educator and author; Maya Angelou, poet and human rights activist; and so on.

He said that they are "my African-American (Black) brothers and sisters who helped me live happily in this free America and helped prevent race discrimination I might have suffered...they are Black pioneers who had to suffer, included being place on a blacklist."

Park Moo-jong is the Korea Times advisor. He served as the president-publisher of the nation's first English newspaper founded in 1951 from 2004 to 2014 after working as a reporter for the daily since 1974. He can be reached at moojong@ktimes.com or emjei20@gmail.com