The Politics of Karl Popper - Part 2: Alternative Voting Systems

Democracy matters – we can all feel it in our bones. There is something emotionally satisfying about being able to hire and fire your government, to stand in judgement over how your society is run. And by handing this authority to the masses, it is denied to the oligarchs, the aristocrats and the dictators. Yet despite all these things having a recognisable value, even thinking in this way is a grave mistake. The problem that democracy solves has nothing to do with rights, freedoms or even ensuring that the best possible leaders get into power. In some ways these come along for the ride, but democracy has only one significant advantage worth caring about – error-correction.

Just as it goes with knowledge creation, we cannot predict the future – and so the natural state of things is error. We are all wrong, incompetent, flawed and prejudicial in ways we don’t properly appreciate, all the time. This, of course, also applies to our political leaders, and to our ability to select those leaders. The hope of choosing “The Best” people – as Plato put it – to govern society is misplaced, as is the underlying question – also Plato’s – of “who should rule?”. Karl Popper’s solution to this might have felt like an easy fix, but it was also the most important development in political philosophy that had ever occurred. He did so by embracing the fact that mistakes are everywhere, and then turning the question around, asking instead ‘how do we best remove bad leaders without violence?’

From this we get democracy, but only in concept – it is the best system we have available to us for error-correcting bad leaders and bad policies. Yet this only takes us so far, in fact it leaves most of our work still ahead of us. The limitations we see in our democratic systems often come back to the fortuitous, yet tragic, fact that we historically found our way to democracy not through Popper, but through Plato – with the wrong question still in mind. Free of this, and with Popper’s criterion, it is possible to tune-up and improve upon our democratic institutions – to solve problems of disproportionate political power, and achieve arithmetic fairness. The ‘Open Society’ is still, and always will be, within our reach; we just have a slightly different question to ask now – ‘what kind of democracy is most effective at removing bad leaders and correcting bad policies?’

The dismissal of a government by regular voting, is a robust form of ensuring that leaders are always accountable, and of avoiding anti-democratic takeovers. But we never actually rule ourselves – on election day the keys of government are always handed over to our political leaders, after which we sit and hope that they are returned to us at the appropriate time. And when it comes to the bureaucracy – the people in charge of implementation, of minor decisions, and whose information and advice politicians rely upon – we often don’t have any mechanism to change them at all (barring malpractice of some variety).

And yet when you start with Popper and not Plato, everything simplifies. We don’t need to edge delicately into this imperfect space, but rather go straight for the jugular of democratic change – voting systems. The idea behind democracy that we instinctively hold, is that parliament should be a representation of the people – each individual member a mirror for their constituency; the nation in a microcosm. As closely as seats in parliament can be matched numerically to the views of the people voting, the closer a society is to the best democratic system… or so the theory goes. This is called proportional representation, and it is a terrible mistake.

Proportional representation favours parties and not people, with citizens tending to vote for what they most clearly recognise and understand – political parties – and it is those parties that select who should represent which constituencies. And what is the purpose in setting up a political party other than to further an ideology – policies may change, but their founding principles rarely do, lest they risk losing their established supporter base. This becomes a shield against error-correction and a system designed for personal advancement. The people who most adhere to the core ideology are shuffled into safe seats and conferred with significant campaign financing, while voices to the contrary (error-correction) are filtered out the other direction.

Elected representatives in this system owe their allegiances much more so to the party that supports them, than to the people who voted for them. A candidate that is elected under the banner of one political party and then later defects to a different party, or to sit as an independent, is often considered to be betraying his/her constituency – because they likely gave their votes only in consideration of the party’s platform, and not with the individual candidate.

This doesn’t just rob the voters of choice (the possibility of error-correction), but also robs the elected individual – and the political system as a whole – of personal responsibility between political leaders and the voting public. With this aspect built into its fabric, proportional representation tends to also cause a proliferation of political parties – and though increased choice seems to come with this, it presents a significant roadblock against the removal of bad leaders.

The more proportionate the political system, the more power that is afforded to smaller parties and independent members of parliament. In any given single electorate it is increasingly rare that one candidate will secure the votes of more than fifty percent of the population. Trying to match these numbers to elected members, a proportionate voting system tends toward ensuring that no political party holds a majority of seats in parliament. When seats in parliament successfully mirror the broader societal breakdown in this way, the means by which governments form, or fail to do so, is through coalition – and in coalition the desired fairness breaks down, from the opposite direction.

By forming government through proportional representation, the smaller coalition parties are –perhaps counterintuitively – afforded disproportionate political power. With no major party holding a majority of seats, and therefore needing the support of minor parties to form government, it means those minor parties effectively get to choose the government and to choose who becomes Prime Minister. And, of course, they are likely to make this decision in their own political interests. Rather than weighing the merits of each major party, or even leaning toward the party that has achieved the most votes, they will seek to make conditions upon their support and smuggle their own policies into power.

The fear of having unpopular political decisions legislated through the backdoor in this way, has often led to a renewed support for either of the two major parties. The thinking runs: if your political views best align with a minor party, then you should instead vote for the major party that most closely (though less perfectly) matches-up with you – anything else might risk overt minority party control, and not necessarily from the minor party that you support.

But this still doesn’t protect against bad policies in the way that people hope – a greater majority for the two major parties doesn’t do much to change the calculation here. If they both increase their votes equally, then they will stand as counterweights, and the role of selecting government will still be returned to the minor parties, unaffected by their diminished votes. The price of gaining power is unchanged. (The only challenge to this being that if minority party votes shrink dramatically, then maybe a major party could achieve government in their own right. This is a possibility, but a decreasingly likely one based on the range of views and the range of parties now operating in many democracies).

This bores the inevitability of coalition government into the foundations of most modern democracies – and with it the fragility of that government, both in its formation, and also its sustainability. Worse, by producing coalition governments, proportional representation further reduces political responsibility by making decisions not only reducible to the party as a whole rather than to individual representatives, but also reducible to the collective decisions and policies of multiple parties, in arbitrary coalition.

With an understanding that no party will likely achieve a majority, voters are stuck when it comes to Popper’s criterion of seeking to remove bad leaders as quickly and effectively as possible. By voting against an incumbent, you might inadvertently end up returning them to power if they cut a deal with the alternative that you voted for. Under a system like this, it becomes incredibly difficult to ever vote ‘against’ anyone, as opposed to ‘for’ a particular candidate – and so we are back with Plato, having made no progress and still trying to answer the wrong question. It becomes impossible to be decisive with one’s vote, and impossible to send a decisive message of judgement upon a government or set of policies. And this is witnessed today by the attitudes of political parties that suffer electoral setbacks, who more often than not see this as a natural fluctuation, rather than a firm and conscious indictment upon their failures.

Proportional voting systems allow for very bad governments to remain in power in the face of very good oppositions, so long as they can wheel-and-deal for minority support with greater success. For many the solution to this has been preferential voting, whereby people don’t just vote for a single candidate, but also select second, third and fourth choice options in the event that their first choice doesn’t manage to secure over fifty percent in the original round of voting. The hope here, is that by selecting a list of candidates it becomes more likely that better leaders gain power. But of course, this is the wrong question. What we want to do is remove bad leaders, not elect good ones.

In some ways the preferential voting system does this. If the vote in any given electorate is split between various parties, and yet there is a consensus that the incumbent member is a bad leader, the divergent voting patterns might still end up removing them from power by a majority of voters placing that incumbent last on their preference list. There is scope here to remove bad leaders despite no party receiving a majority of votes.

This is something, but it is still a narrow and constrained form of error-correction. The removal of any individual, poorly performing, Member of Parliament is good, but it doesn’t limit the problem of disproportionate minority party control at the level that matters. Preferential systems do open up avenues for removing bad leaders, but they don’t address the issue of minority parties influencing the government through insisting on cabinet positions, the legislation of unpopular policies, and even the king-making ability to select who holds power. On the national scale, bad policies and bad governments are still increasingly immune from error-correction if they can secure third party support.

By entrenching minority rule, all such systems fall down badly. The only thing that the third largest party in any political system of this kind realistically fears is becoming the fourth largest party; not the electorate in any real sense. Minor parties need huge swings against them to ever force them out of power, and so major parties can also take more liberties with – and often outright ignore – the voters, under the knowledge that their success in achieving power hinges much more so on making deals with minor parties.

This is error-correction, but an incredibly parochial and poorly functioning variety. Government ends up being run from fringe ideas, politicians fall over themselves to please the views of minor, single electorates, and parties bargain their way into power instead of being elected. Even occasionally producing the absurd spectacle – and catastrophe for political accountability and representation – of just one individual in an entire country being able to make-and-break both governments and national policies. The hope of institutionalising error-correction, in its best form, dies here.

So what should be done – in what direction would Popper have us move? A return to something that feels a little archaic, and that appears to lack the arithmetic nuance of proportional voting systems. The two-party system is something designed to secure majority governments, and institutionalise not only accountability but also constant error-correction through criticism and comparison with an alternative government. It is a system that presents elected members with a simple proposition: perform well and in their electorates’ best interests, or be removed from power. There are no backdoors, no deals to be cut and no way of ignoring the will of the voters – they either succeed or fail on their own weight, and the intended reward or punishment is always delivered unambiguously.

In a first-past-the-post, two party political system of this kind, leaders and parties will hold higher degrees of power once elected – allowing manifestos and policies to be implemented without third party hindrance or the fudging of policies. This can then be tested in public view, and a clear option can then be presented to voters as to whether to stick with the policies or accept the criticism from the second major party and vote to change government. A dialectical process of constant policy conjecture, constant unfettered application of those policies, constant criticism, constant presentation of alternatives, and then constant clear and unequivocal electoral choice.

This is still less than perfect, and there is a risk in this system that the scope of possible error-correction – possible criticisms and alternative policies – will be limited in the absence of widespread minor parties. And there is also a feeling of suppression and disenfranchisement here by denying the space for minority parties to rise and/or major parties to fall. It can all begin to look a touch anti-democratic. But the reach of this fear isn’t quite as pernicious as it might feel – healthy debate and constant error-correction will occur inside the two major parties, and the changing of a party platform is likely to become quite drastic and radical after two or three electoral losses in a row, with the failure of each party laid bare by the fact that they are only one-of-two games in town, and this is likely to happen even in the absence of a significant or sustained defeat.

When a political system is thick with minor parties, adjustments of this kind are unlikely to ever happen, with change predominately coming about through the rise of new political parties; which even in the friendliest of conditions is not an easy thing to organise. Returning again to Popper’s criterion of being able to remove bad leaders most effectively, a well-functioning democracy doesn’t need a spread of voices (this will always likely occur) as much as it needs sensitivity to the wishes of the voters, policy flexibility to match that sensitivity, and the healthy development of ideas followed by the healthy criticism of those ideas.

Just as with knowledge creation, we don’t – and never will – know the best possible political system; only ever approximations of it, that will then also require constant error-correction and improvement. It is a utopian fantasy to imagine that a government exists by some make-up of society that when voted for will not make mistakes, will not enforce bad policies, and who understand the future. Knowledge cannot exist in advance of problems, mistakes are the human condition, and any coalition-producing political system has the quality of making it harder to correct bad leaders and bad policies than it needs to be. All we can do is choose better-and-better political systems judged solely by their ability not to elect the best leaders, but to remove bad leaders as easily as possible without violence.

For Karl Popper this is the Open Society, and yet once here the risk of authoritarian relapse still exists, edging ever inwards in search of space and opportunity… Continued in part 3

The Politics of Karl Popper - Part 1: Asking the Wrong Question

Modern democracy remains frozen in a moment – broken from its centre out. It feels like a new problem, but it’s not. It goes back to Plato and to the first questions of how societies should be ruled, to our first attempts as a species to theorize about alternative political systems and weigh the benefits of monarchy, aristocracy or a government of the people. Concerned that it would always deteriorate into a rabble – that the poorly informed masses would simply vote for other poorly informed people, or for demagogues able to manipulate them – Plato never warmed to the democratic option. And for many this still seems like the problem of our day… it’s not!

From those origins the question has always been ‘how do we ensure that the best people get into power?’ Plato was anti-democratic but the philosophers that came after him were increasingly the opposite, all the way up to Karl Marx who believed so strongly that people should have the right to govern themselves that he tried to supplant voting altogether. They were both wrong, in exactly the same way… and in the same way as most modern proponents of democracy are wrong too. It is an understandable mistake, but not so understandable that we keep making it.

Though Plato didn’t see it this way, Athens was ahead of its time. They were a direct democracy, with all important decisions of state handed back to the citizens for their vote. The term ‘citizenship’ was limited in such a way that it only applied to a minority of the population, but it was in principle a society where the people ruled themselves. The reason for this was fear – fear of tyranny, fear of domination, and fear of capricious governance. And so if they could ensure that they ruled themselves, then they would never have to suffer in this way. But democracies don’t guarantee good policies, or even good leaders – caught in this problem, Plato tried to abolish the institution altogether.

Once he had answered the question of ‘who should rule?’, there was really no other option – just as there was also only one answer: “The Best”. The brightest, the most knowledgeable, the most courageous, the most morally upstanding, and so on. If you are going to have a government, and if someone (or a collective) needs to be in charge, then it stands to logic that they need to come from this group of people. And democracy dilutes this possibility, because voters always make mistakes, and rarely know what is in their best interest.

And yet built into this – the hope to appoint someone, or a specific party, that are The Best – is a formula for tyranny. Once in power, The Best are beyond regulation, and beyond criticism, because no one else is, by definition, qualified to hold them to account. And this is exactly what happened for most of human history. Roman military might supplied all the legitimacy that the Caesars needed. They were unquestionable, their edicts absolute, and it was only in the decline of the empire that the errors of their rule were ever called into light… too late to be fixed.

The lesson here for our forebears was understood not in terms of needing to error-correct our political institutions more quickly and more effectively, but once again in terms of needing to find a better leader; someone with more authority, more legitimacy; someone infallible. Enter monotheism and the Catholic/Christian Church. Constantine latched onto this, and so he ruled not through any demonstration of ability, strength or earthly opinion, but by the grace of God. Anyone challenging this was also challenging the faith of society as a whole, so wisely only foreign armies ever did.

The question of who should rule, now had a very neat and uncomplicated answer: God and his human representatives. Our ancestors trudged through the Middle Ages in pain and suffering, and without a doubt in their minds that society was how it should be, because those people with the most right to rule were doing so. Of course the hiccup here was the Reformation followed by the English Revolution, where the monarchy was overthrown by people wanting self-rule… but only because they saw it as their divine right. The question of legitimacy was still echoing down from Plato.

The people’s divine right to choose became the foundation for Oliver Cromwell to establish a dictatorship under different colours, and so things continued largely unchanged. The tide was shifting though, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 became the wellspring of parliamentary democracy, the limitation of powers, and the slow end to authoritarianism. However, this change in direction occurred around the same flawed question – the debate was still around deciphering theological intentions and after which finding the right balance between the monarchy and the people. ‘Who should rule’ was being asked again, just in different, more appealing, ways.

The problem that kept Plato awake was being answered more-and-more definitively in just the way that he hoped it wouldn’t. Plato was wrong, but so were those early movers of democracy… just as we are today. When Karl Marx entered the scene, and sought to tear the whole political and economic order down, he was still doing so with Plato’s question in mind – ‘how do we get the best people into power?’ Targeting the capitalists and the landowners, Marx thought the workers should rule; and because these people are always in a majority, then there was also no need for elections anymore.

Millennia-upon-millennia of humanity’s finest political thought, poisoned by a single bad question. All of which was cured, and should have remained so, by Karl Popper. He did so in the same way that he had previously for the problem of how knowledge accumulates – how it is that we can know anything at all. For too long people believed that knowledge came to them through their senses, through empiricism or induction. And this seemed to make sense – unseen explanations resembling the seen world around us. And just as the growth of our political institutions were being held back by Plato, this also held back the growth of science.

Again, the problem was buried inside of the question, and not the answer. Until Popper, people had understood the term knowledge to mean ‘that which you can know for certain’ or ‘how it is that we can be sure about something’. It wasn’t just the wrong emphasis, but it was also claiming access to something that was never available to us. The idea of proving something to be true is a mistake in itself, all we can ever do is prove something to be wrong through a process of conjecture and refutation – guesswork (ideally educated), and then the testing of those guesses through criticism. The ideas that survive this ordeal are never accepted as true, but simply not discarded as false. No truth is ever so undeniable that it cannot be questioned. And so instead of certainty, all we can ever hope for is improvement – the replacement of bad ideas, with less bad ideas, and so on.

Moments like these are not as rare as they might seem. The barrier holding back our understanding of evolutionary biology wasn’t the idea of intelligent design, but rather a bad question that made it appear that intelligent design was the only answer. The question of ‘why do birds have wings?’ for example would never get anyone beyond the logical response, ‘so that they can fly’; design is inferred at every stage in this mode of thinking. What Charles Darwin did, even though he didn’t recognise it at the time, was change the question from ‘why do birds have wings?’ to ‘what type of process would lead to a bird having wings?’ The old explanations fell away under this new scrutiny, and Darwin had solved the problem by simply asking a different question.

What Popper exposed was more fundamental. It comes down to fallibilism, the recognition not only that we can be wrong about absolutely everything we currently hold as true, but also that the natural state of things is error. We are wrong all the time, because no one has access to future knowledge. What seems certain today, will be laughed at as ignorant tomorrow – just as we tend to do when looking back on the values of previous generations. So any theory of political order needs to hug close to the idea that those people in government, regardless of how they came to be there, or their apparent qualifications, are going to invariably make mistakes and expose themselves as horribly flawed; as we all are.

So how do you build a political system out of this unavoidable mess? By simplifying things. Dump the abstract language of ‘reason’, ‘freedom’ and ‘rights’ – not because they aren’t desirable, but because they aren’t helpful. Words like these have simply become too malleable, too loosely understood, and too tainted to do the work that is required of them. Instead leave Plato’s flawed question behind, and the answer falls naturally into place, just as it did for Charles Darwin.

People should have the right to choose their leaders, yes! But it is not because people have a ‘right’ to choose their government, or even that this is a good mechanism to get The Best people into power, but rather by an inversion of that question. Instead of asking ‘who should rule?’, we should only be asking ‘how do we best remove bad leaders without violence?’ It is a political theory built on the understanding of how knowledge develops through constant flaws, missteps and error; and that there is no such thing as an obvious truth. Just as it is wrong to pursue certainty in knowledge, it is also wrong to pursue utopia in politics – or utopian leaders. As Popper quickly recognised, the source of all tyranny comes from the idea that the truth is manifest. What we want is error-correction!

Once here, the theory follows fairly intuitively. Any viable political system needs two simple qualities: 1. The ability to highlight errors as quickly as possible, and 2. The most efficient mechanism for removing bad leaders and changing bad policies once they have been recognised as such. More than anything, the goal here is the minimisation of harm. Democracy matters, and is a superior political system to theocracy, aristocracy, communism or anarchy (which Popper had a slight sympathy for in its attempts to escape the control of the state), only because it matches most neatly with these criteria.

Voting is an imperfect means to change imperfect politicians, but it does allow for – when done well – every member of society to voice criticisms of current leaders or specific policies, to weigh those criticisms against the publically voiced criticisms of alternatives, and then exercise the removal of bad leaders effectively and peacefully. This mess of constant criticism, change, and control by the rabble-forming masses is what Popper famously called the ‘Open Society’. A place where the emphasis should be on removing leaders, not on electing them – a place where utopia is never promised, only the opportunity for progress… and only then if we play our cards right.

Democracy as it has come to be known today, is mischaracterised and misunderstood. It is not that ‘the rule of the people’ has any intrinsic value – it is just a functional solution to a technical problem. Any government can be removed by a majority vote, and no majority consensus is ever enough to justify the rejection of future elections or the rule of law. Democracy is the best mode of government only because it is the best mode of error-correction (that we currently know of). Yet tragically, the democracies that we have today are still those designed with Plato’s question in mind, and not Popper’s. We have stumbled onto truth, and not discovered it through explanation – and so based on this old misconception, our political systems tend to be hopelessly flawed, despite being democracies.

With most people arriving at democracy from a completely different direction, Karl Popper still had all his work before him with the follow-up problem of ‘how should we best structure a democracy?’… Continued in part 2.

Israel Folau and the Problem of Future Knowledge

It is all a lot more fundamental than it sounds – it’s a question of how knowledge accumulates in the world.

There is an unnecessary focus on details here, but they do need restating: Israel Folau is a hulking – and once much loved – Australian rugby player who takes his religious faith seriously. So serious in fact, that he is now willing to risk his career and reputation over the question of whether or not gay people are going to hell. He thinks they are, and that they can still be saved if only they repent and reform. Australian Rugby thinks differently, and so seemingly parochial questions of offense, freedoms, and contractual responsibilities are being arbitrated in strangely public ways.

This is only because – despite Karl Popper solving the issue a century ago – most people still don’t understand how it is that we can know anything; how it is that knowledge develops, and with it how progress – moral or technological – is ever possible. It is not an overstatement to say that we have forgotten the most important lesson that our species could ever learn.

The details of what was said, what was breeched, who was offended, and what freedoms are protected, just don’t matter when it comes to the question of what should be done about Israel Folau. The improvement in gay rights over recent decades is undoubtedly a positive, and not something that most people would want to wind back. But though the attachment to this progress is charged with heavy emotion, the only reason that it isn’t reversed, is one that is cold, impersonal, and above all, explanatory.

It has always tended to lag behind technology, but moral progress is happening all around us, all the time. But that doesn’t mean that the growth of moral knowledge (and knowledge in general) is linear. All theories that claim to start from a foundation are not only false, but cruel. The idea that something is known for certain, carries the imputation that questioning that certainty deserves punishment. Because only someone who is deliberately malicious dares to criticise what they know to be true.

It is unsurprising then, that for most of human history the permanent state of things has been stagnation and suppression. Every time we discover new knowledge, the next question can always be ‘why that way, and not another’. A foundation doesn’t allow this – and without questioning of this kind we cannot discover problems, let alone solve them. And so until the enlightenment and the scientific revolution, in the course of any given human life nothing ever really improved. The world you were born into was the world you died in; almost entirely unchanged.

For these people, the problem wasn’t bad ideas – because bad ideas are the general state of things – but rather ideas about the world that discouraged change. New ways of organising political institutions, health care, marriage, or even new ways of understanding what constitutes a good life for example, weren’t just dismissed as wrong, but silenced as heretical. The problem here is the issue of fundamentals – people believed that knowledge came from authorities, and that this knowledge was also self-evident.

With this bug in our thinking, a large chunk of philosophical thought was dedicated to questions of ‘who should rule’ or ‘how do we get the best people into power’. The question itself was wrong. Instead of asking who should rule, Karl Popper turned it over and wanted instead to know ‘how do we best remove bad leaders’. What he had stumbled on was an understanding that the natural state of things is error, and that the truth is never obvious. So what is needed is not authorities, but constant error-correction and a tradition of criticism – a commitment to rapid change and recursive improvement.

This doesn’t mean that no one can ever say that a particular moral theory is better than another, but rather that moral progress is available to us only because no one has a claim – as they did for most of our history – to understand the future growth of knowledge. We have come a long way, and every piece of that progress was fought tooth-and-nail by people claiming to know what was always beyond them (and always an obvious tautology): tomorrow’s knowledge, today.

This also applied to the advocacy of gay rights. At every step people were saying not just that homosexuality was immoral and therefore should be illegal or limited, but also that this would remain true into the future. You only have to go back fifteen or twenty years and the consensus in every country – no matter how enlightened – was against gay marriage… at a minimum. This was – at the time – as foundational a moral principle as that of murder or theft being wrong.

It was only by embracing Karl Popper, and the acceptance that no truth is so incontrovertible that it cannot be questioned, that gay rights advocates ever got a hearing, and then slowly managed to snowball those early noises into broader acceptance, and eventually social change.

The change happened by explanation. By the open challenge of one set of ideas, by a better set of ideas. People were not shamed or coerced into changing their minds, they were convinced. This is how knowledge works: most of us have this strange impression that knowledge is literally transferable, that it can be downloaded from one person to another. This is wrong in so many ways – it can’t possibly exist like this. When someone changes their mind or gains some form of new knowledge, they have in fact given it to themselves – acquired only, and always, through that individual’s creative engagement with it.

The set of problems that got Karl Popper motivated here, was that of induction and empiricism. Essentially the claims that we comprehend the world through our senses, and that our experienced reality resembles unexperienced true theories. Popper again turned this over – our thoughts about the world only come to us through long chains of conjecture; reality is always theory laden, and so it is always deceptive. 

People listened, they thought about it, and finally they came to understand that the gay rights movement was not just championing moral change, but moral improvement. Arguments against this were less credible, were built on bad explanations, and so proved to be less convincing over time.

Popper exposed the messiness of our enterprise here. There is no hierarchy to knowledge, and what feels like truth or progress might be revealed as false, or as regression, at any moment. Any claim to the contrary is a claim to understand what is impossible – the future growth of knowledge. Considering how far we have come in recent years, or indeed how the morality of only a few hundred years ago now seems abhorrent to us, the only reasonable thing to project is that our moral standards will continue to improve. And our descendants in a hundred years will look back on us with the same – if not greater – level of disgust, and in ways that we cannot yet imagine.

This is as sure as anything that we understand in science or philosophy – prophesy is not available to us. All we can know is that moral improvements are coming our way – if we play our cards right. Just what those improvements are likely to be, we can never know until we have the explanations.

The lesson here – and particularly for people wanting to protect gay rights – cannot be clearer: it is always a mistake to try to silence opposition and criticism, no matter how upsetting those arguments may be. If we allow institutions to impose today’s moral values by coercion, then we must also accept that this would have mandated that those early gay rights advocates – openly challenging accepted norms and offending the standards of their day – be silenced also. It may feel like the compassionate thing to do, but protecting feelings also means that soon enough the immoral, the barbaric, and bigoted, will also have that tool in their arsenal.

Forget gay marriage, forget legalisation of homosexuality at all for that matter. If the values of our predecessors had been immune from criticism – in the same way that certain people now want to be immune from Israel Folau’s criticism – then we would still have those old values today. Women would still be second class citizens, racism would be the norm, and the thought of allowing gay men and women a voice would be a great blasphemy.

The second half of Popper’s equation – after conjecture – is refutation. It is not that we adopt theories as true, but only that we don’t discard them as false if they survive in the face of criticism. Without this second step, we are only ever guessing blindly at truth – rigorous testing knocks down bad ideas, leaves good ideas standing, and only then is progress possible.

So it is always a mistake to allow anyone to wall-off their truth claims. And we should not respect anyone who – once they have achieved the small piece of salutary progress that matters most to them – would then seek to shut down all criticism of that progress. Having benefited from Popper’s open society, and their freedom to speak their mind without limit, they would seek to burn the bridges behind them, and again claim to be the final arbiters of truth. If silencing people by the moral standards of the day were appropriate, then we would still be living in the dark ages. 

Truth has a rare property that separates it from falsehood: it is strengthened by criticism and not weakened. It doesn’t need to be shielded, or protected – the more people are allowed to hammer away at it, the clearer it becomes. Israel Folau, if he could, would turn back the clock not just on gay rights but also on (in his own words) “drunks, adulterers, liars, fornicators, thieves, atheists, idolaters”. We have a choice: to challenge him and let his arguments fail on their own grounds, to prove him wrong; or to simply – and dangerously – insist that he shuts up.

Israel Folau might lose his court case, and if so it will be on the principle that employers have the right to impose their moral values – or the consensus values of society – upon their employees. This is a loss for everyone involved. It means we are again in the business of outsourcing our truth claims to authorities, of empowering those people with the ability to silence dissent, and so we are also in the business of locking in the values of today against future change. Instead Karl Popper would have us meet Israel Folau’s challenge head on, test his understanding of gay rights against our own, and break him down only with argument. Popper knew, as so many people seem to have now forgotten, that the source of all tyranny comes from the idea that the truth is manifest…

Seizing North Korean Ships

It might all feel like a dramatic escalation, a potential act of war – really it is just the first time that America, or any other country, have taken their own sanctions of North Korea seriously.

Detained in Indonesia, the inappropriately named ‘Wise Honest’ is now the property of the United States government, and the “first-ever seizure of a North Korean cargo vessel for violating international sanctions” according to U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman.

This “sanctions-busting ship” had been in regular violation of international law since 2016, for smuggling coal out of North Korea and heavy machinery the other way. What scratched most invasively at the U.S. Department of Justice was the use – or misuse – of American banks to orchestrate cargo payments and maintenance work on the vessel.

North Korea are banned from conducting any form of business in the United States, and yet beyond this obvious transgression the payments are also – unless there has been an unlikely miscalculation here – in contravention of multiple United Nations resolutions

Just what the Trump administration has in mind for the Wise Honest, or the 25,000 tonnes of coal on board, is an open question – and perhaps a little irrelevant now – but the civil forfeiture that has been underway for months is an insight into both the limitations of sanctions, and a realisation of how they can be made more effective.

Until 2016, the restrictions on trade with North Korea were narrow and poorly enforced. A spider’s web of broader sanctions began to emerge at this time, with United Nations Security Council Resolutions 2270, 2371 and 2375 complimented by a range of domestic regulations from significant UN member states.

Cross-border trade with China bore the most immediate impact. Trafficking of goods in large quantities is hard to camouflage, so instead smaller traders – making lighter yet more regular journeys – picked up as much slack as they could. But the total volume was seriously reduced nonetheless. Backlogs of this kind tend to find release valves – and for anyone with a grasp on ocean navigation, it was not surprising that the managed chaos of the open seas became this.

What can’t be driven, can easily be shipped. And once out of North Korean ports, flags can be changed, documents forged, and location broadcasting transponders – mandated for use under international maritime law – can simply be turned off. The Wise Honest did all these things, flying Sierra Leone colours, not properly disclosing the origin or destination for its cargo, and transiting around South East Asia for years without ever announcing its geolocation.

And can you blame them? The sanctions hurt (as intended), and the messy process of hunting illegal vessels is one that no country is very interested in doing.

The prohibitions now in place require United Nations member states to inspect all goods coming out of, entering, or even transiting through, North Korea. And that is everything, from the contents of freight liners to the handbags of tourists. Vessels flaunting these regulations must be refused entry into ports, and business of any kind with them is prohibited. This is not a passive obligation: any ship suspected of carrying cargo of North Korean origin or destination, must be boarded.

The list of contraband items entering or exiting North Korea hits at every conceivable industry – worthy of the name – that they have. Of course, any hardware that can be used in chemical, biological, nuclear or missile programs is particularly targeted here, but the whole North Korean military is under heavy scrutiny now. As are all luxury goods and all exports of any significance – iron ore, rare earth minerals, nickel, copper, lead, silver, zinc, iron, textiles, seafood, and of course coal.

The level of imposition here should be increasingly apparent – not on North Korea, but on the global community charged with enforcing the particulars of these resolutions. The seizure of related funds is also mandated, as is the charging of those companies that continue to do business with Pyongyang, as well as the third party agents who connect buyers with sellers. We’re not done yet: assets must be confiscated, as must the actual vessels in question, and anything beyond that must be destroyed or disposed of.

Yet through all this, the Wise Honest is reported to have stopped-in at multiple international ports, conducted regular ship-to-ship on-water transfers (something highlighted for particular concern in the language of the new sanctions regime), on one occasion actually conducted business with a South Korean company, and even pulled anchor at the South Korean city of Busan.

In truth, the Wise Honest was unlucky. The authority to board, search and confiscate in accordance with international law is something that no-one really wants to do. It takes too long, often requires military force, carries a high degree of risk, and then only blocks-up a single leak in what is an overwhelming cascade.

If anyone were serious in fulfilling their commitments here, they would have to execute a naval blockade of all major North Korean ports, and start patrolling the Yellow Sea to deter Chinese merchants from conducting the daily ship-to-ship transfers.

The spin-offs from this – legally and morally – would be huge. Sanctions would be enforced for the first time and the full scope of their intended pain finally felt, but what else? The intensity of civil conflicts in places as far away as Syria and Zimbabwe would be limited without North Korea selling them military hardware, the worldwide movement of drugs and counterfeit currency (a long term source of hard currency for the Kim dynasty) would dip, and if implemented years ago the routine kidnapping of Japanese and South Korean citizens would have been impossible.

Naval interceptions of this kind would increase the economic pressure on Pyongyang, deter international facilitators, appease the most hawkish of foreign governments, and offer some long overdue grit to an increasingly powerless United Nations.

But this will never happen… and it hasn’t happened here.

The Wise Honest was detained in port, and the near year long legal wrangling over its confiscation only adds another layer of caution to those few countries who are genuinely interested in fulfilling their international obligations. 

On the same day as the seizure, South Korean president Moon Jae-in announced that he had agreed to send more humanitarian aid to North Korea, with a senior Blue House official saying: “Nothing has been decided yet, and we still need to discuss everything, including what we’re going to send, how we’re going to send it, and how much we’re going to send. What we do know is that the two UN organizations have said that [North Korean] children and families need help to get through this difficult time.”

North Korea are living in a culture of international impunity, and they know it. No matter what their behaviour, there is always a significant portion of the world clamouring to forgive them before an apology is ever offered.

We focus on the nuclear issue because we don’t have the energy for more pressing humanitarian questions, there is a chronic refusal to pay the world’s single greatest – and longest running – human rights disaster any concern until a missile is fired, we insist on the use of sanctions against a regime that gains its legitimacy through military, and not economic, success, only then for there to be a near complete unwillingness to enforce those sanctions with any attention or coordination.

It feels like every problem with North Korea at the present moment, is a problem of our own making. Unless of course, the seizure of the Wise Honest is the unlikely start of an unflinching strangulation of the North Korean regime from outside its borders.

Losing Your Alliance: Risking an American Withdrawal from South Korea

There is an understandable tendency to look at South Korean President, Moon Jae-in, as a kind of hesitant mother, watching nervously from her front door as her ordinarily level-headed teenage daughter (America) is being led away for a date (summit diplomacy) by a clearly unpleasant and poorly intentioned older boy (North Korea). Helpless to stop them, the mother is stuck watching-in from the fringes, hoping that it all ends before her daughter gets too damaged by the whole experience.

As onlookers we might rightly sympathise, but how long should that concern last after we notice the mother encouraging her daughter to apply more make-up before each date, to hike-up her skirts and show more leg, to wear lower-cut tops, and when that all fails filling up her daughter’s purse with condoms when she isn’t looking. The daughter, now walking away into the night – arm in arm with her new boyfriend – hears her mom shout a reminder (loud enough for the boy to hear) to “do whatever it takes to keep him happy, and coming back for more”. How long after seeing this should we hold our judgement, watching the mother sell-out her closest relationship for the brief adrenaline of a vicarious, and ill fated, love affair?

How long before the daughter becomes resentful of her mother’s willingness to take liberties with her, and risks on her behalf, and moves out permanently? Never to return!

In 2012, when Moon Jae-in was confident of winning the presidency – and so no longer in need of grand political gestures – he publically committed himself to achieving a North-South confederation before his term was finished. He wasn’t pandering so much as expressing his deepest convictions, and indeed lifelong hope. This was not the first time Moon had made this explicit pledge, just the first time during the campaign.

As a young advisor Moon had watched former presidents from his side of politics talk this way (Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun), and yet leave office without anything to show for it. This perceived lack of urgency is something Moon has been conscious of avoiding. And no better way of doing this, and of signalling your intent to Pyongyang than by appointing Im Jong-seok as Chief of Staff. Im comes from the same stock as those people who protested against authoritarian rule in the 1980’s (the 386 Generation), but was always considerably more upfront about –and willing to act upon – his belief that North Korea was the more legitimate of the two countries. While leading an explicitly pro-North group, Im campaigned for reunification under Kim Il-sung – effectively hoping for the destruction of his own republic.

During this period, Im Jong-seok was in direct contact with the regime in Pyongyang, and eventually served time in prison for this. Yet when elected to the National Assembly, and despite the end of authoritarian rule in the South, Im still had a near single-minded focus on furthering North Korea friendly policies. One such success was the enforcement of royalties upon the use of North Korean media in South Korea. So now every time a network chooses to air images or films of Northern origin (even propaganda), they have to pay a copyright charge directly to Kim Jong-un, all thanks to the second most powerful political appointee in South Korea.

An isolated case? No! The new Unification Minister, Kim Yeon-cheol, has publically championed a diplomatic approach even more chummy and forgiving than Moon Jae-in has dared, has begun pushing for an exemption to sanctions, and has even spoken about reunification being the solution to the nuclear crisis, not just as a downstream benefit. Other key positions have been filled – without shame – by people with similar pro-Northern resumes, the National Intelligence Service (NIS) is no longer enforcing its own security laws regarding North Korean agents, school textbooks have been edited favourably (removing mention of military incursions), the word “free” was removed from the constitution in regard to the nature of a future reunified peninsula (reversed only after public outrage), and the conservative media has been censored in its criticisms of the current policy direction through an abuse of libel laws.

The day after the Hanoi Summit collapsed, Moon Jae-in was already calling for deeper inter-Korean economic cooperation; in other words permission to violate international sanctions and United Nations Security Council resolutions. Rather than question how serious Kim Jong-un actually is following his paltry diplomatic offer, Moon immediately launched back into the role of match-maker. This despite Kim Jong-un in his speech to the 14th Supreme People's Assembly belittling the South Korean President as a “nosy mediator” rather than “the one who protects the nation's interest”.

This is North Korea giving their patron the hurry-along – as with the recently announced test of a “tactical guided weapon”. The whole discussion defies logic: if North Korea were serious about wanting sanctions relief to walk hand-in-hand with denuclearisation, then they never would have developed the weapons in the first place. The sanctions only exist – and became steadily more imposing – due to the presence of the nuclear program, and now we are asked to believe that North Korea will give it all up in order to wind things back down to zero. All that pain and sacrifice for nothing. Besides, does anyone – no matter how critical of America’s role in the world – think for a moment that Washington are a flight risk here? That they might turn delinquent and back out of their bargain if North Korea verifiably relinquishes their weapons first. It is unlikely that even the regime in Pyongyang has this concern.

There is a not-too-subtle game being played out. As Moon Jae-in has his sights on the North, Kim Jong-un has his on the South. Fresh from trying to coax Donald Trump back into the fold, and playing the role of messenger between the two parties, Moon is now talking up the need for another inter-Korean summit (this would be the fourth of his presidency): “Now is the time to begin the preparations in earnest for an inter-Korean summit”…“I hope the two Koreas will be able to sit down together, regardless of venue and form, and hold detailed and substantive talks on how to achieve further progress that goes beyond the previous two summits between Chairman Kim and President Trump.”

Lost in this is an understanding of American interests, and the fragility of alliances. Who knows where it may lie, but at some point there will be an end to Washington’s patience and commitment. Unreciprocated in Seoul, the American desire for denuclearisation as a precondition for improved relations is eventually going to force a decision. South Korea can behave the way they are, and gamble on the well-meaning intentions of Kim Jong-un, only because their alliance with, and the presence of, American troops remains as a failsafe to a second Korean war.

But with their goals noticeably diverging, and with the Moon Jae-in administration’s outreach to Pyongyang done so with the intention of bypassing weapons talks and alleviating sanctions pressure regardless, how long before Washington comes to see Seoul as part of the problem here? That, if only implicitly, Kim Jong-un’s bellicosity and obstinance is being encouraged by every meeting, every statement, and every policy from South Korea. The only real incentive at the moment for Pyongyang is to dig their heels in, to ride out the pressure, and have South Korea hand-deliver the reunification that they’ve always wanted. Donald Trump’s impulsiveness contributed to it of course, but the sight of the U.S. Marine Corps undertaking its annual Korean-American exercises in Hawaii and not South Korea should – but likely won’t – terrify Moon Jae-in and his administration.

Or to put it differently: soon the daughter grows tired of her dangerous boyfriend, the infatuation wears off, and she stops answering his phone calls. Increasingly irate, he stakes-out her house, and shouts abuse whenever the opportunity arises. Through this, the girl’s mother seems to be primarily concerned with reconciling the relationship; excusing the boy’s behaviour and even blaming her daughter for leading him on and being a tease. Eventually her mother’s manipulation and duplicity become too much to bear, and so the daughter packs her bags and moves out.

Alone in the house for the first time, the mother answers the door late at night and finds the young man standing on the porch. Drunk and aggressive, he says that with her daughter out of the way the mother can now get what she’s always wanted – they can finally be together. With nothing between her and this dangerous young man, her attitude changes instantly. The flirtatious predisposition is gone – all she feels now is vulnerability and fear. In a panic she tries to slam the door shut, but the young man already has his foot in the way; he steps forward contemptuously and pushes her aside….

Sudan’s Brief Moment of Freedom?

If this were only pre-2010, there would be a lot more jubilation in the air. A lot more talk about ‘people power’, ‘self-determination’, ‘watershed moments’, and the ‘irrepressibility of the human spirit’. Omar al-Bashir’s three-decade rule of Sudan is over – decades full of oppression, starvation and a lethargic, but unyielding, genocide in Darfur – and yet for anyone testing the winds of international sentiment, the overwhelming feeling has been a kind of exhausted fear. A popular uprising against an unpopular leader –of dubious legitimacy – ought to catch the throat, if only a little. The yearning is all-inclusive, the courage is rare and wishful; and so the people on the streets should become instantly cosmopolitan, and every witness a participant in their mind - “Ich bin ein Sudanesischen”.

The change here has nothing to do with Sudan at all. Al-Bashir came to power in 1989 when, as a brigadier in the Sudanese Army, he orchestrated a military rebellion against the democratically elected Prime Minister Sadiq al-Mahdi. Al-Mahdi was widely unpopular at the time, but the act of heresy that pushed al-Bashir and his mutineers over the edge was the opening of peace negotiations with southern rebel groups. The new military regime banned all political organizations, purged the army, shut down independent newspapers, imprisoned opposition leaders, and significantly – after allying itself with Hassan al-Turabi – began implementing a form of Sharia Law so repressive that Osama Bin Laden migrated there for safe haven after Saudi Arabia could no longer tolerate his fundamentalism.

But it was with those southern rebels that al-Bashir crossed a line of, at least symbolic, importance. The epicentre of the crackdown naturally became the untapped oil fields of Darfur, where al-Bashir sold off the excavation rights to newly seized land so quickly that the state-owned Chinese National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) literally began following the violence, so that it could begin construction of the necessary mining infrastructure without delay. This hasty sale of national resources might seem a little reckless, but it allowed the government in Khartoum to dramatically increase its imports of arms. As the conflict thundered forward, and the world became increasingly outraged by the atrocities on the ground, Sudan managed nonetheless – through leveraging access to its oil fields – to increase its military purchases 13,700 percent from 2001 to 2006. And also, when desirable, use the civil infrastructure being developed in its wake as a launch pad for further incursions.

Omar al-Bashir’s decision for war with southern separatists resulted in the deaths of 400,000 people, the forced displacement of three million, the collapse of diplomatic relations with neighbouring countries who were forced to deal with the refugee flows, and almost the entire Darfur region in need of urgent humanitarian assistance. This wasn’t a conventional war with an achievable military aim (the pacification of rebel groups); this was a genocide. The Sudanese were open in their objectives – the cleansing of the non-Arab population from Darfur. Language like this comes with significant legal obligations, and so the international community are often hesitant to apply such labels or talk about the need for intervention. Yet watching Darfur, few people were under any allusions as to what they were seeing.

In 2004, American Secretary of State Colin Powell, testified before the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “genocide has been committed in Darfur”. In 2005, the British Parliament announced that “if the responsibility to protect means anything, it ought to mean something in Darfur”. And Kofi Annan saw symmetries in the violence with the most scarring moment in modern humanitarian history: “we had learnt nothing from Rwanda”. But Al-Bashir had bet everything on the unwillingness of those concerned governments to actually risk anything on the ground, especially if he could make a defence – no matter how tenuous – in the same language in which the accusations were being made – human rights, independence and international law.

The brief momentum of history was at his back, with Algerian President, and then President of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), Abdelaziz Bouteflika, championing the absolute right of non-interference in the affairs of other states as “our final defence against the rules of an unjust world” in 1999. And then Nelsen Mandela announcing in 2000 that the protective mandate and intervention in Kosovo set a precedent that was “more dangerous to world peace than anything that was currently happening in Africa”. Omar al-Bashir had his battlelines, and so quickly began taunting the world with its own principles of justice: “we will not accept colonial forces coming into the country”. United Nations sanctions condemning Sudan came and went, and talk of the need for a military intervention was never short of those willing to champion it, and yet even when a peacekeeping mission was authorized, no member state was willing to back-up their words with actual material support (12,000 to 20,000 properly equipped troops).

And inexplicably, the Sudanese attempt to twist international law and best moral practice worked, with the United Nations – even after authorising an intervention – hinging everything on permission and support from the government in Khartoum, with Security Council resolution 1706 seeking “the consent of the Government of National Unity”. Having successfully called the international communities bluff, al-Bashir got back to his killing, observed at every step, but almost entirely unchecked. In March 2009, the International Criminal Court (ICC), made al-Bashir the first sitting president ever to be indicted under their jurisdiction. The charge sheet detailed a guided campaign of rape, mass killings and forced expulsions; in other words, genocide, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. This was, of course, tokenistic. A man unwilling to stop a mass atrocity under foreign pressure, is unlikely to then suddenly accept the supremacy of international law and wilfully hand himself over for prosecution.

And yet patrons of the International Criminal Court are still unlikely to have their moment of satisfaction. Al-Bashir was removed – reluctantly – by his own military, only after months of street protests showed no signs of falling away. Surrounded by Sudanese flags, Defence Minister Ahmed Awad Ibn Auf, made the announcement on state television, while also crushing any hopes of a democratic handover. Instead, the military will rule for the next two years, with no transition plan in place.

Most insightful of all has been the kid-gloved treatment of the disposed dictator. Al-Bashir is under house arrest – an unbelievably luxurious type of confinement (completely unworthy of the name ‘imprisonment’ based on the riches of the property in question) – and the bloodlessness of the coup likely speaks to a negotiated retirement, rather than an actual arrest and punishment. And on that question of punishment, no sooner was the overthrow of Al-Bashir’s thirty year rule announced, than the defiance of the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction also continued. The seventy five year old ‘prisoner’ will face court in Khartoum rather than The Hague. Not necessarily a problem in itself, but the chances of achieving judicial independence while military rule is still in effect is next to zero.

So with their constitution in tatters, and their revolution stolen, it is back to those people on the streets, and a test of their conviction. The protests started –just as those in 2010 during the Arab Spring – in response to epidemic levels of corruption, poor management and economic stagnation. How willing are protestors going to be to risk it all again for the principles behind, and not the material of, their original grievances? The Arab Spring laced the world with hope, as they watched a once politically comatose region shaking itself awake. Soon enough that hope was replaced by fear, as those champions of democracy showed themselves instead to be theocrats in their own right, or alternatively unable to gather the same broad support against their newly emerging enemies.

Omar al-Bashir came to power in an act of rebellion against a peace accord with southern rebels. With his own limitations forced back upon him, in 2011 al-Bashir oversaw the division of his country with the formal independence of the Republic of South Sudan. The absence of principles here matters – if for nothing else than to show the malleability of once held ‘best’ intentions. There is no shortage of countries who, once willing to help al-Bashir defy his international arrest warrant, would likely now offer him – and his personal wealth – asylum if his prosecution ever becomes a little too authentic. In the meantime, the Sudanese people have likely just replaced one tyrant with another.

25 Years Since Rwanda: International Blame for the Genocide

In April 1994, the world was understandably dialled-in to the theatre of South African elections. The last remaining pillar of apartheid – and the symbolic end of racial hatred in South Africa – was finally coming down under enormous fan-fare and hope. And so few people even noticed the event that sparked the collapse of Rwanda, and with it the entire African Great Lakes region.

The surface-to-air missile that hit Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane on his return to Rwanda, ought to have caught the international eye more than it did – it was, after all, the assassination of a sitting President. But soon enough it no longer mattered, there were more important things to worry about – within hours, roadblocks were constructed, refugees crowded toward the borders (250,000 refugees arrived in Tanzania alone within 48 hours of Habyarimana’s death), the police and army morphed into vigilantes, neighbours hunted each other in the streets, and ten thousand people were being killed each day – hacked down with machetes – in the fastest moving atrocity the world has ever been witness to.

Responsibility for the assassination remains in dispute, but it was accepted at the time to be the actions of an ethnic Tutsi rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). The ethnic majority Hutus saw this as the first open attack in an idle, but simmering, civil war, and so began circulating ‘kill lists’. Suddenly the two communities, living side-by-side, intermarrying, speaking the same language, and largely indistinguishable from each other, were demarcated in plain sight; one side targeted for murder, the other duty-bound to do the murdering.

Violence and unrest in Africa was not a surprise at the time, but the scale and willingness to participate was. Tutsis sheltering in churches were often killed or informed on by their own priests, and Hutu husbands began killing their Tutsi wives (failure to do so before the mob arrived would result in both of their deaths – one for being Tutsi, the other for sympathising with the enemy).

Rape became a tool of war in newly sadistic ways, with thousands of aids patients released from hospitals and conscripted into ‘rape squads’; charged with the single purpose of infecting as many Tutsi women as possible. Three months later when the violence eased, as many as half a million women had been raped, upwards of a million people were killed, seventy percent of the Tutsi population murdered (as well as ten percent of the Rwandan population as a whole), and fifty percent of the entire country were displaced.

These are the type of numbers that don’t straightforwardly process in the human mind. What was easier to comprehend was the risk – when the violence came there was already UN peacekeepers in place monitoring the Arusha Accords (a tentative power sharing agreement and peace settlement). These forces, the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) Led by Canadian Major-General Romeo Dallaire, were reporting to anyone willing to listen that, “Time does seem to be running out for political discussions, as any spark on the security side could have catastrophic consequences.”

But no one – at least in the necessary positions of power – needed to be told this. In the years before the violence, ‘death squads’ were openly roaming the streets in pre-skirmishes, and in the three months before the genocide erupted the CIA had been reporting on the likelihood of this happening, and even predicting half a million people would die as a result.

World leaders like American President Bill Clinton would look back on Rwanda and call it their ‘greatest regret’, and perhaps the speed and cruelty of the violence caught them off guard. But what nagged at their consciences was something a little more deliberate and calculating. In 1993, as the build-up to genocide was unmistakably underway, South Africa, Egypt, Russia and France were fighting-out a battle of their own – trying to outbid each other in order to supply arms and military hardware to the Rwandan government’s increasing needs.

As late as 1994, France continued to make illicit weapons sales to Rwanda, in strict violation of a United Nations arms embargo. Human Rights Watch then later reported South Africa, China, the Seychelles, Zaire (DRC) and France for further arms embargo violations, for resupplying the Rwandan military. This allowed, even as the violence eased-off at its epicentre, for a regional contagion of killing. With the genocide crossing borders at will, soon 150,000 people were killed, and over a million displaced in neighbouring Burundi. A year later, as people and their grievances crossed into the Congo, what was soon to be known as Africa's First World War broke out. The conflict rumbled forward for the better part of a decade, with 3.8 million people dead.

At its peak, the Rwandan genocide sucked-in nine neighbouring countries, and twenty different armed groups. The literal heart of Africa was burning to the ground, and this was only possible because foreign governments couldn’t resist the opportunity to make a little profit.

More immediately, Major-General Romeo Dallaire, on the ground as this all unfolded, has maintained since that he could have halted the genocide in its early stages, saving millions of lives, with as little as five thousand properly equipped, and mandated, United Nations’ troops. This might have a touch of hyperbole to it, but long form studies have concluded, on multiple occasions, that at least twenty five percent of the deaths could have been avoided under a ‘realistic military intervention’.

Newly freed from the shadow of the Cold War, and with a fresh hope for humanitarian cooperation and morally guided decision making, the proper place for international action was the United Nations. And yet when the debate came before the Security Council, they inexplicably chose to adopt resolution 912 which rather than increasing the peacekeeping presence on the ground, actually reduced troop numbers from 2558 to 270. With the obligations inherent in the Genocide Convention looming in people’s minds, these debates turned near-comical as member-after-member carefully avoided any reference of the term “genocide”.

Instead an obfuscating language was introduced to the world, as the same countries that would champion the Genocide Convention – before and after Rwanda – talked about a million deaths as “sporadic violence” and as only isolated “acts of genocide”; watering things down just below the threshold of where they would be legally-bound to intervene.

Meanwhile on the ground, the UNAMIR troops that remained – hopelessly understaffed – were also under-resourced and only mandated in a ‘monitoring’ capacity. Meaning as long as the genocidaires didn’t threaten them directly, they simply had to watch as the killing continued around them. And in the moments when they were attacked (once significantly alongside Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana) they chose not to respond for fear of inciting a larger response.

On 19 June, the French government announced Operation Turquoise, a military intervention in Rwanda under a United Nations mandate. The Hutus, against whom the tide of conflict was starting to turn, saw this – based on previous military and governmental support from France – as the arrival of allies, not enemies. So on the edge of retreat, the radio broadcasts inciting violence returned with a new vigour, and a new offensive was launched.

The United Nations requisitioned ‘Report of the Independent Inquiry into the Actions of the UN during the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda’ diplomatically saw it to be "unfortunate that the resources committed by France and other countries to Operation Turquoise could not instead have been put at the disposal of UNAMIR II”. A nice way of saying things would have resolved a lot quicker if France didn’t actively prop-up the Hutu government.

The genocide in Rwanda officially ended in July 1994, not because international outrage grew too loud to ignore, but rather because a Ugandan-backed Tutsi force of rebel troops fought their way into the Capital Kigali, and removed the Hutu government by force. They were led by current President Paul Kagame.

Set up to prosecute those involved in the killings, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) was established in November 1994. In a country that almost to-a-person became either perpetrator or victim, only ninety people have been convicted. A problem evermore pronounced by the near-complete lack of non-governmental aid agencies inside Rwanda at the time, limiting the real-time reporting of these crimes. 

The United Nations post-mortem shifted its sights to the global community, blaming the escalation of the violence on a “lack of resources and political commitment”. The sad truth about Rwanda is that it ought to have been expected. The record of the United Nations, and of individual member states, when it comes to intervening in mass atrocity crimes, is incredibly poor.

Five months before the genocide started, eighteen American soldiers were killed in the Somalian capital, Mogadishu. The withdrawal of all U.S. troops was almost immediately underway… a year later the United Nations followed suit. Left behind was a decades old civil war, a country razed of infrastructure, 1.5 million people on the brink of immediate starvation, and 4.5 million people requiring emergency humanitarian aid in what United Nations Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar described as “the most serious humanitarian crisis of our day”.

More alarmingly, the will of the international community was exposed as fragile. And so the genocidaires in Rwanda had a guide post before them: the language of the international community is unlikely to correspond to actions, the expressed moral outrage of foreign governments will always be dwarfed by their fear of their own soldiers dying in defence of that concern, and when things turn messy domestic political considerations will take precedence with United Nations members near-universally lacking the stomach for difficult conflicts.

In Rwanda the international community was not caught flat footed as the theory goes, but simply betrayed by their own reversion to habit. Somalia offered encouragement for those planning genocide in Rwanda – since then this incentive to violence has only increased in moments when those charged with addressing international mass atrocities have preferred to watch as the killing rolls on. Sure outliers exist, but for every Kosovo and Libya, there is also Uganda, Sudan, Iraq, Iran, Indonesia, Guatemala, Timor, Bosnia, Cambodia, Burundi, the Congo, Ethiopia, El Salvador, Sri Lanka, China, Algeria, Angola, North Korea, Syria, Georgia, Yemen, Kurdistan, Guinea-Bissau, Central African Republic, Lebanon, Egypt, Eretria, Mali, Chechnya, Kuwait, Bahrain, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Kenya…….

Fighting North Korea Outside Its Borders

Screams from a terrified woman… in a public street… in a foreign language… running from armed home invaders. Neighbours alert the police, and one of the criminals in question casually answers the door. He says he doesn’t know anything about the break-in, the beatings, the interrogations, nor the temporary imprisonment (as the woman’s complaint, then being translated from Korean into Spanish, alleges). But no! The police officers are not welcome to enter the property and see for themselves; it is a question of sovereignty – North Korean sovereignty. The house is, after all, a converted embassy. 

A few hours later the perpetrators simply drive away – watched anxiously by the same gawking neighbours – leaving behind a traumatised staff, bound, gagged, and slowly wriggling free. The police return on cue, and despite the obvious assault and theft that had just occurred, no one is interested in filing an official complaint, let alone pressing charges in the event of an arrest.

From all directions, there is an air of mobsterism: a brazen, daylight crime; the calm, authoritative, legally nuanced dealings with the police; the scene of eight brutalised victims refusing to cooperate in any way; and the sense that justice – if ever possible (or desirable) – will only come through reciprocal violence.

The ‘criminals’ – a group known as Free Chosun (formerly Chollima Civil Defense) – first came to any real public attention in the aftermath of Kim Jong-nam’s assassination in Malaysia, for apparently spiriting Nam’s son, Kim Han-sol, (and other family members) away into safe keeping. The motivation for the rescue – all the way down to the public thank you message by the 21 year old Han-sol – felt more along the lines of grooming an heir-to-the-throne, than that of international witness protection.

It all seemed a touch ad hoc, a fortunate enterprise rather than a diligent calculation. And Free Chosun’s website (https://www.cheollimacivildefense.org/) – still with its former name in the title – is a backyard effort if ever there was one. A single scrolling page… with plenty of donation links. Which is why this latest raid feels so different. The planning and execution has a near military finish to it, including how they adapted so impressively to their own missteps (so much so, that it was originally suspected to be a CIA operation). Their amateur days are seemingly over.

It is that idea of a growing – and now efficient – organisation that would likely worry North Korea. Washing purposefully around the global community of defectors for decades, the formation of a North Korean government in exile has strangely never managed to take hold. Likely due to the focus on securing leadership as a prerequisite. For many years, people hoped Hwang Jang-yop, a key author of Juche literature, and the defector with the most immediate name-brand recognition (and of greatest former importance to the regime in Pyongyang), would be this figurehead.

The expectation was too much, and poorly conceived. Escaped North Koreans tend to want what most people do: freedom, a peaceful life, and the safety of their family and friends. They don’t want to end up like Kim Jong-nam… and who could blame them. Because people don’t tend to gather around anonymous political forces, this first hurdle toward an exiled government was also the last.

It is in the nature of this escalation in Madrid, that Free Chosun are fashioning a solution. Exactly what they got from the robbery is open to be guessed, but they were deliberate in what they went after: computers, hard drives, cell phones. Rebel movements over the centuries have always targeted – by necessity – the weak points of their enemies (outposts and regional infrastructure). When you can’t fight, you frustrate.

This was not that. Free Chosun wanted information from Pyongyang, not anger. North Korea uses its embassies for the illegal transiting of goods, money laundering, and covert operations, such as that against Nam in Malaysia. Counting their loot from the Madrid raid, the robbers will be hoping for contact lists, emails, bank accounts, trading partners, sympathisers, and spy networks. The tactic here, is a much deeper assault on the Kim regime. By interrupting North Korea’s cross-border operations, maybe Free Chosun can make their actions felt back inside the palaces of Pyongyang.

North Korea are a hard target: legally protected both inside its borders, and inside its embassies. But this immunity only extends so far: the behaviour of embassy staff can be enough to get them expelled; and prosecutions, the seizures of funds, and the public airing of dealings, can be enough to permanently dissuade foreign enablers. This is certainly the goal anyway.

So this all begins to smell a little more like a preliminary assault, than a one-off attack. And perhaps most significant, are the self-made claims that Free Chosun are being assisted in their actions by foreign governments, having tipped their hat to Taiwan, Holland and America following the rescue of Kim Han-sol; and in the lead-up to Madrid posting cryptically on their website that they had “received a request for help from comrades in a certain Western country”, with a “highly dangerous situation”.

Much of this stretches credulity. So far, their public successes certainly have a feel of high-level planning, financing, and operational experience to them. But none of it demands an explanation on the level of global conspiracy. Still, this is a careful game, and if Free Chosun can start making actual changes, improvements, even symbolic grand gestures like harbouring dissidents or picking deliberately at the weak links in a regime, then they might be able to embody something that looks like a government in exile. So a little hyperbole – if indeed that is what is happening here – can perhaps be excused.

What is certain, is that the attack in Madrid would now have Kim Jong-un’s attention, and in that, a strange, immoral satisfaction can be found. I challenge anyone concerned about North Korea’s international harassment – even assassinations – of journalists, publishers, film makers, and particularly South Korean politicians and North Korean defectors, to not gain a little morbid pleasure here.

For someone who has, for so long, exploited the difficulties of applying international legal principles, Kim Jong-un is learning that he is vulnerable in the same way. It is not a high minded, nor a morally grounded sentiment, but where judicial systems fail, extrajudicial ones are likely to take over. Criminality becomes the cause for celebration, and retributive justice the only means of satisfaction… my only fear is, that none of this will make any substantive difference.

The Retirement of Dictators: Chun Doo-hwan in Court

If the passing of time is reason enough to forgive someone, then what about age itself? If not forgiveness, then how about a considered disregard? A decision to leave behind what cannot be changed – to simply get on with things.

Chun Doo-hwan is old (88), and as he walked into court this past week, shuttled along by his wife, it was – for anyone looking in on the scene from a position of neutrality (difficult in this case) – an alarming spectacle. There was a very real sense of physical danger to things. A frail, disorientated old man surrounded by – what is too common a display outside South Korean courts – an overly excited crowd of pawing media, pushing aggressively past visibly desperate, and overmatched, police officers.

This slight expression of concern would be too much for most people. Chun is also a former dictator and military leader, who ruled through coup d'état, and the last man at the scene of the crime – still fighting against the coming wave of South Korean democracy. In a country that struggles with the legacies of its former leaders, Chun rarely has this problem. He is the monster of Gwangju, a dictator without an upside, and germane to his current day in court, almost entirely unrepentant for his crimes – I don’t think it is a stretch to say – against the Korean people as a whole.

On trial again, Chun is now accused of ‘defaming the dead’, an odd charge in itself; also one with ‘criminal’ ramifications in South Korea. The deceased victim, a priest, Cho Bi-oh, claimed to have seen helicopter gunships fire upon protesters during the 1980 Gwangju Uprising. In 2017, Chun published his memoirs, and responded by calling the priest a “shameless liar unworthy of the ecclesiastical title” and a “masked Satan”.

The charge itself hinges around technical details concerning the helicopter. There is enough in the historical record now to show that such firing upon civilians (from helicopters) did occur. But Chun doesn’t have to fight this. He merely has to show that such an incident did not likely happen at 2 p.m. on May 21, 1980 (the time Cho Bi-oh claimed to have witnessed it). Beyond this, Chun can, and according to his lawyers will, assert the defence (quite reasonably) that his “memoir was based on his own memory” and so there was no ‘intent’ to defame Cho.

But all this has very little to do with Cho Bi-oh. Adding to the theatre of the day, large crowds camped outside the courtroom, and sang old protest songs of the 1980’s. Returning to Gwangju (under subpoena) for the first time since the uprising, for many of the people waiting this was a chance to finally confront Chun, and express 39 years of built up anger and grief. For them this was about the commemoration of a massacre.

When interviewed they seemed to all return to a single theme: Chun Doo-hwan has never apologised for ordering the military crackdown. Instead he has always maintained that he acted in defence of the republic, against a “revolt caused by North Korean military intervention”. It is here that the real problem with Gwangju can be found. In recent years, the declassification and release of American documents has helped shed a little light on events, but it is still a clouded moment in history.

The North Korean question is often entertained as a slur against the memory of those fighting Chun’s authoritarian rule. But there is also the testimony from North Koreans defectors to consider. Some of whom have claimed that there were indeed Northern agents on the ground in Gwangju. What we know for sure, is that during this period Pyongyang had managed to embed thousands of spies inside South Korean society. It is unreasonable to believe that at least some of them did not head to Gwangju to help stoke things along, and ferment unrest, once the word got out. The impact they had was almost certainly next-to-zero, but to deny their likely presence altogether is unhelpful, and conspiratorial in its own right.

It couldn’t have helped ease Chun’s belief that three years later he narrowly escaped an assassination by North Korean agents whilst on a state visit to Rangoon, Burma (17 people were killed, including Korean cabinet ministers). Not the sort of thing that encourages someone to become a little more nuanced and open-minded.

On the stand, again Chun showed no remorse; but maybe a little dementia. Significant neurodegeneration from Alzheimer's disease was one of the reasons Chun’s legal team tried to have him excused from appearing in person at the trial; and recent sightings of Chun golfing don’t disprove his poor health, as so much of the media have tried to claim. Almost as soon as the hearing was underway, the judge carefully informed Chun of his right to refuse testimony. Chun replied, “I don't understand what you mean.”

By any reasonable measure, those outside the courtroom will never receive satisfaction. But their ire does feel a little narrow. For his eight years of authoritarian rule, Chun was convicted and sentenced to death in 1996; the specific charges being ‘mutiny’ and ‘corruption’. An appeals court commuted this to ‘life in prison’, and then President Kim Young-sam (acting on the advice of President-elect, Kim Dae-jung), pardoned both Chun and his successor Roh Tae-woo, under the guise of ‘political reconciliation’.

South Korean prison sentences just aren’t what they seem. Political leaders and the heads of the large Chaebol (family owned conglomerates) have a revolving door relationship with the justice system. They are regularly convicted, given exorbitantly large prison terms, and are then released on appeal, or pardon, after only a couple of years when the heat has died off. Lee Jae-yong, the de facto head of Samsung, is already free and back in charge of the company, despite being sentenced to serve five years in 2017; and in recent weeks thousands of conservative protestors have been demonstrating for the early release of his partner in corruption, former-President Park Geun-hye, sentenced to 24 years.

It is a strange targeting of anger to condemn Chun Doo-hwan, but not the men – nor the system – that excused him from his punishment.

If convicted of defaming the dead, Chun will face two years in prison, or a maximum fine of five million Korean Won (approximately US$5000). Based on the track record of such courts, and Chun’s age/health, it is unlikely to be the former. If the latter, then it can simply be added to the near-200 billion Korean Won he still owes from earlier court decisions (money he clearly doesn’t have, and will never earn).

Symbolic prosecutions are not entirely without value, but they do rely on the process being the punishment – an institutional sickness in itself, and a contemptuous attachment to the principle of judicial fair treatment. The only satisfaction being gained here, is that of inconveniencing Chun’s retirement. Soon the case will pass, the moment will wash-by, and left behind will be the Gwangju crowds; still hoping for an apology that will never come, as a replacement for the grief they can’t be free of.

The crimes of Gwangju will never feel normal, and apologies rarely fill the moral void that people imagine they will. What if Chun Doo-hwan, at his next court appearance, offered a full-throated repentance? Apologised, sobbed and grovelled approvingly in front of those watching. Would the Korean public suddenly forgive the man for whom so many of their historical scars are blamed? Chun will always be hated, and perhaps that is appropriate, but it should be so for what he did, not for his continued presence in society.

The victims of Gwangju, and Korea at large, are much like the technical victim in this particular case. From beyond the grave, Cho Bi-oh can hardly feel wronged, and as a priest, I wonder how comfortable he would be as a proxy for so much externalised pain and loathing. Forcing history back into the light cannot change it.

Behaving like the old soldier he is, Chun is firmly dug into the conviction that as he ordered the troops into Gwangju, he was fighting an existential enemy. If feels like nothing will change his mind on this, and coercion is not the answer. If you insist on people expressing contrition, then you are simply asking to be lied to. It may be abhorrent, and insulting to those personally affected, but in a free and open society Chun is entitled to question the history of Gwangju, regardless of how established a fact it is.

Korean libel laws are notorious for missing the point. They focus on offence and not truth. Truth only becomes so, as Karl Popper showed, through defending itself against criticism; intellectually, not legally. Through the court system, the media eye, and draconian laws, there is a risk of making Chun look like a victim (beyond this, what are the chances of him getting a fair trial in a city like Gwangju?). It is surely a mistake to campaign against authoritarianism, with the tools of authoritarianism. Either way, so much for Kim Dae-jung’s ‘political reconciliation’.

Kim’s Summit Victory?

The Hanoi Summit is now in the hands of the South Korean Left.

It is a strained mental image: Kim Jong-un slowly rattling his way back to Pyongyang, through the eastern heights of Chinese industrialisation; from light to dark. The smatterings of information, second-hand reports and occasional image of Kim smoking on a platform, becoming less-and-less frequent, and reliable, as the sixty hour journey moved further away from Hanoi, then disappearing completely across the Yalu River into North Korea.

The sense outside of Kim’s bubble was one of defeat and miscalculation. He overplayed his hand, asked for too much, and stood too strongly over his convictions. Inside the bubble, things would have been different.

The only people paying any real attention to Kim – or indeed North Korea – during that leisurely train ride are called – and call themselves  – ‘Pyongyang Watchers’. It is a strained piece of language, and one I have never liked, but it does speak to the nature of North Korean studies (or what often passes for North Korean studies) in many academic circles.

These Watchers, with the world’s spotlight shifting elsewhere, are soon back to the grind of their daily work: picking through satellite images, market prices, imports and exports, and the presence – or absence – of regime members in official media broadcasts. From this, infer away! Try to divine intentions, new policies and indeed, national sentiment. What you get are plausible, yet nearly completely unfounded claims, about the internal cogs grinding away north of the DMZ.

A much more solid science is that which runs the other way, and which no-one seems to give much heed to. If the world is full of Pyongyang Watchers, then Pyongyang is also full of Seoul Watchers. Not Washington Watchers, London Watchers, Berlin, Moscow, or even Beijing. Kim’s game is the same one that his grandfather, Kim Il-sung, and father, Kim Jong-il, were committed to playing. And it has nothing to do with joining the nuclear club, self-defence or even sanctions relief (which is, of course, derivative of the first two).

It is often by taking Pyongyang at their word, that we get our talking points about a nuclear deterrent and a country fearful of attack. And a Libyan Model/Fear of disarmament, collapse, invasion and presidential assassination.

The trouble is, North Korea have never behaved like an externally insecure regime; just the opposite in fact. Only one of the Koreas has ever had to fight off military incursions, political killings, terrorism, and full scale war from the other. Besides, what type of nervous, fearful regime spends its time in bellicose threats and intimidation towards the world’s most powerful military? Or indeed, doing the one thing that has been a redline for conflict and intervention elsewhere: the construction of a nuclear arsenal.

If nuclear weapons and the accompanying missile technology were the only thing capable of holding back an American attack, then the corollary must run that America would never have let them achieve it. That Pyongyang’s slow-motion nuclear build-up escaped a surgical strike or two along the way, is all the proof needed that North Korea’s conventional forces were always deterrent enough.

Which brings us back to the Hanoi Summit, and the question of what this is all about. Decades of long-term internal propaganda (intended for North Korean ears only), stretching back to the founding of the state under Kim Il-sung, gives a very clear answer. It is, and always has been, all about South Korea.

Reunification. Or as it is known in the North, ‘The Final Victory!’

The ‘victory’ connotation is important. It fits with Songun (North Korea’s ‘Military First’ policy), and should (but never does) echo as a permanent threat to the South Korean republic. Kim’s reunification is reunification under the Northern flag – the consumption of one state by another. North Korea will continue, enlarged and stronger; South Korea the necessary sacrifice.

It is here, and only here, that America is of any interest. 20,000+ American troops stationed in South Korea represent a unique problem for Kim. Any Northern absorption will be in steps: confederation, deeper political integration, a greater will for the fight within the North Korean citizenry, and at some point – preferably early in the process – the removal of American troops.

It is this hinge that the regime in Pyongyang are most concerned about, and rightly so. Edging the South toward capitulation is a lot more certain a proposition once they have first stepped away from their military and political alliances with America; a friendship consummated instantly with the American victory over Imperial Japan, which was in turn the liberation of Korea.

The Americans stayed around, invested, defended, and became Seoul’s deepest military ally. So how, if you are Kim, do you break this marriage up? First you spend a year (2017) making sure that both countries are paying very close attention to how badly things could go. Despite the desire for reunification in South Korea, it is often muffled into silence by an understandable fatigue and related apathy. Nuclear tests and missile launches are enough to wake anyone up.

Then you offer a rapidly escalating peace – an uncomfortably fast courtship. But coming out of the shadow of conflict, one that seems too good to ignore. You push for cooperation, the binding together of economies, policies and institutions; something Moon Jae-in and his government have been all too eager to commit to (trying to fulfil an election promise to complete the process before the end of his term). Pushing toward confederation at such an uninhibited speed, that extraordinarily the nuclear issue has fallen into the margins.

Except for the Americans, for whom nuclear weaponry is still the looming concern, and the only reason for talking to Pyongyang at all. So Kim asks for something he knows Washington cannot reasonably agree to, both parties walk away, and Kim watches carefully for Seoul’s reaction.

South Korea’s conservatives cheered Trump’s resolve, but they are a near irrelevant political voice these days, having still not recovered any sense of identity following the Park Geun-hye scandal. And elsewhere, Kim would have been happy. Boundless amounts of editorial space in leading newspapers were quick to accuse America of being too ‘negative’, ‘obstinate’ and ‘lacking consideration for the plight of the Korean people’. Then there were the voices of important public figures such as former Unification Minister Jeong Se-hyun, saying: "I believe the breakdown was intentionally brought about by the U.S. side”.

The remedy: “An inter-Korean summit should be held”…“the government should move fast."

Imagine the smile on Kim’s face: his battle being fought for him, and by none other than the people he intends to victimise next.

Large-scale anti-Americanism of the past is unlikely to return. But those moments in history do offer a look into just how fragile the U.S.-South Korean alliance might be. The two most infamous cases involved the accusation that U.S troops deliberately ran down two school girls from their military transport, and that Korea was to become the dumping ground for diseased American beef. Both factually wrong, both formed with an obvious air of conspiratorial thinking, and yet both drawing large scale street protests.

Taking the political wind inside South Korea, Kim Jong-un must be sensing his opportunity. A very real chance to convince his divided brothers and sisters that the only real barrier to peace and reunification is the American troop presence. A troop presence that Donald Trump has just strong-armed them into paying more to house and maintain.

And if things begin to fall silent in Seoul, and if that fatigue begins to re-emerge, Kim only needs to fire up a missile site or two, and dust off a few launch pads. Reminding South Koreans how badly things could go if they don’t play their part in pushing for reunification of the peninsula; at all costs, and in a manner that the regime in Pyongyang approves of.