Sun and Moon
Extract from ‘The Second Korean War: The Key to Understanding the War on Terror’ by Bosun Choi
Sitting solemnly in a chair, contemptuously staring down every photographer looking in his direction behind plexiglass, Kim Jong Il would make the judge wait ten seconds from asking for his plea to finally answer, “Not guilty.” From that point on, for the whole trial, Kim would seemingly always carry an air of bredom during the trial. The talk of the mass child abductions, the sanctioning of mass executions, the death tolls in the millions, for each atrocity and its every abominable detail, Kim would not betray a flash, hint or even a possibility of remorse. Symbolically starting proceedings on the 29th of June 2009, the seven year anniversary of the invasion, Kim and only Kim would be the star of the show. His subordinates were either dead or imprisoned themselves, his empire was gone, his monuments existing now only in museums to be cursed at by current and future generations. The world Kim had built for himself had vanished, and now the reckoning for not just the war, not just his rule, but his whole life had come. As one South Korean politician noted, “It is not the actions of a regime that finally condemns it - it is that they finally fall. Stalin, Mao, Chinngis and Timur - though they killed, their legacy survived and they escaped true karma. Hitler, Pol Pot, these men fell to enemy hand, their legacy erased in the lands they lost, it is to these men that karma made manifest. And to that squalid band, we are glad to send Kim and Juche.”
Among the most impactful witness testimonies during the trial was from Kim Hyon-hui, the agent who had helped blow up Korean Airlines 858 under Kim’s orders. The only moment Kim showed flashes of anger was when Kim Yong Ju (Kim’s uncle and brother of Kim Il Sung) took the stand, having already been sentenced to life imprisonment. He went on to confirm that Kim had murdered a child when he was still a child himself, and that he had been born not in Korea but in the Soviet Union. Kim would fire back from behind the plexiglass that his uncle was simply jealous that he was passed up for leadership by his father, leading to his having to be handcuffed into his chair. Also confronting Kim was Hwang Jang-yop, North Korea’s highest-ranking defector, who fled back in 1997 and was credited with crafting Juche as an ideology, hence the Washington Post’s description of him as the Goebbels of North Korea. Hwang reminded the jury that Kim was not simply in violation of international law during his tyranny, but he had violated the rights laid out even in the North Korean constitution. Kim’s chef was called in to detail the dictator’s eating habits during the great famine and his knowledge of events outside along with his indifference to solving it. And of course, the Korean War itself was mentioned, with witness testimony from the Rape of Paju, testimonies of young adults who were children when they were abducted at gun point and sent to North Korean concentration camps, testimonies of South Korean soldiers who found the mass graves dating back decades from when his father sank his talons into Korea’s flesh, and the word of North Korean soldiers who deployed chemical weapons indiscriminately, with no care for even the North Korean civilians who would be affected.
It was not a complete recall of his crimes, as some people in this world have simply committed so many that a whole second life could pass by recounting the sins of the first. But it did to the Second Korean War what Eichmann did for the Holocaust. Until then, Western media that focussed on the War on Terror overwhelmingly focussed on Iran, very often due to the fact both more Americans served there. But in the early 2010s, this shifted profoundly to focussing on the Korean War to the exclusion of all else. This phenomenon dovetailed with increasing security fears of Western populations that democracy was retreating in the face of dictatorship in Europe and beyond, and led to a reevaluation of the War on Terror, minimising its mistakes and praising its toppling of the great dictatorships of the day. With the growth of Asian media in the West in the 2010s, the experiences of Koreans and Japanese who were affected by the war came to the fore. In a recent study of films about the War on Terror created by Hollywood, 60% were focussed primarily on the Korean front, 35% on Iran and only 5% on Iraq, which has increasingly been referred to as ‘The Forgotten Front’ similar to Burma in WW2. The cultural ramifications would manifest into political decisions as well.
The most important thing about the event was the impact that the trial had on Korean society. Many photographers in Seoul would get their greatest shots not even necessarily from the trial itself, but from late night bars and canteens, of South Koreans and North Koreans, sitting shoulder to shoulder, silently watching in quiet union. For many South Koreans, it was necessary to separate their feelings of Kim from North Koreans, which the trial helped to do. The trial highlighted North Korean dissent, suffering, and agency in a way that had previously been ignored by South Korean media in the rage of the initial attack. South Koreans, coupled with the need to show a united front against China, slowly began releasing their hatred of their northern neighbours. South Koreans began to increasingly support granting citizenship pathways to North Korean citizens, but now an increasing issue was popping up. The mainstream Korean Right, highly influenced by the Chaebols, did not want to surrender the immense economic potential of the North as a colony due to the ability to pay less wages for a highly educated workforce. At the same time, the dormant Korean Left grew increasingly cognizant that an ascension of North Korea into the Republic of Korea would lead to an extra ten million voters for the real winners of the rehabilitation of North Korea: the Unification Party and Church. Once dismissed as naive for their North Korea policy, the party rode the zeitgeist to become an increasingly popular presence inside the ROK.
In 2012, Unification Party was third place in the Parliamentary elections, wielding political power that was previously unfathomable. Most of the Party’s voters were not members of the Church, but felt the Church was vindicated in their treatment of North Koreans and for their strong position on China. In 2018, after having pushed long enough to get what they want, the ROK officially announced a pathway to citizenship for all North Korean citizens, and the incorporation of the territory north of the old DMZ into official Korean provinces. Though Sun Myung Moon himself would die in 2012, his party has since been taken over by his youngest son and current South Korean President, the firebrand Hyung Jin Moon, who has increasingly adopted policy platforms associated with the American Republican Party on gun ownership (which he interprets as a Biblical command), gay rights, and abortion. He was brought to power in the Presidential election of 2022 on a wave of support from newly enfranchised North Koreans (an event jokingly referred to as 'The Lunar Eclipse' to try to downplay people's concerns), who have turned the cult from a once declining group of weirdos to having taken over one of the most powerful countries on Earth along with its nuclear weapons. Many worry now if the Moonies can be trusted with nuclear weapons, and hope they are simply in it for the money and corruption over the fanaticism.Unfortunately, only time will tell. President Moon leads a country that is roughly two thirds Christian and about 25% adherent to the Unification Church, however the Moonies have an extremely high fertility rate of on average three or four children, something that greatly outpaces the stagnant birth rate of other Koreans. Many demographers predict that the Moonies may become a demographic majority of Korea in a few decades, the ramifications of which Korean society is still not sure how to grapple with. Finally alert to the threat, the remaining political parties have combined their political resources to try and contain the Church’s influence, but the Church has made many allies due to its alliance with the American Republicans, Japanese LDP and Israeli Likud Party, making international condemnation that wouldn’t be dismissed as partisan sour grapes unlikely. While the Church is only tentatively beginning its steps to ‘Christianise’ Korea, Korea remains a very de facto secular country with love hotels, a globally popular webcomic industry and a globally popular rock music scene. It remains to be seen whether these will still be pronounced in the coming decades.
It’s doubtful, of course, that Kim Jong-Il was thinking about anything that far into the future, as he blankly accepted his death sentence without saying a word. While he may have attempted to show strength, to most observers it simply came off as indifference. When he was sent to the hangman on the night of May 4th 2011 - a date chosen since Children’s Day was May 5th, and the symbolism of South Korean children never having to fear him again was potent. Kim’s reported last words were, “You can kill me, but Korea’s already dead.” In a clean, swift motion considered by many Koreans too lenient for the things he did, the most infamous killer of the 21st Century joined Hitler, Stalin and Mao in Hell. His body was incinerated and the ashes thrown into the Han River in sight of Seoul, so that his ashes would dissipate in the sight of the bright lights of the city he almost destroyed. His monuments in North Korea are gone, including on the Chinese side. While some places are nostalgic for their old dictators, North Korea is very much not one of these places. To simply own a portrait of Kim or create a ‘complementary statue’ is illegal in the ROK, with the law overwhelmingly supported by the North. As North Koreans slowly entered the ROK’s workforce, North Korean writers and artists began telling their stories of the nightmare they had survived in the decades prior.
The only place in Korea that still has portraits of Kim exist in the Pyongyang Exclusion zone, sealed behind a wall and only recently open in limited capacities to the more daring of foreign tourists, often by helicopter. Visitors are encouraged to leave everything untouched, to see the ruins that had become of the old regime, to see the odd Kim portrait daintily clinging to a rusting nail on a crumbled wall, and to ponder that somewhere beneath their feet at that very moment was the father of this madness himself - Kim Il-Sung. His body is somewhere there, likely decomposing along with whatever chemical gloop held it together. But his tomb is now inaccessible due to the WMD risk. Some fantasise of a great horde of wealth and gold resting there like Tutankhamun’s tomb, but that’s not the image that most Koreans think of. They like to think that somehow, the great writer of that calamity can look up from his tomb, through the miles of concrete and cement and see what has become of his city. To see the buildings, monuments and statues that he had so painstakingly overseen reduced to piles of broken stone and rubble. To see his empire shattered, his ideology defeated, to see his dream abandoned. This, most Koreans believe, would be a hell far more deserving, and far more torturous than any lake of fire.
The Kims represented one nightmarish version of Korea, now we just have to ensure Korea doesn’t become another, different kind of theocratic horror.
Extract from ‘The Rise, Fall, and Rise of Iran’ by Zoreh Rahimi
President Pahlavi would avail of only a single term, leaving power in 2009 and not contesting re-election. While it was a result of health concerns due to the immense stress of his role, Pahlavi had also set a precedent of not running for a second-term in Iran (despite a limit of two-terms placed in the constitution), as no one dared to exalt themself over the man who saved Iran from disintegration. It was widely anticipated that the Resurrectionists would win the election in 2009, but the world was surprised when it was the Tudeh Party that won the election under the newfound leadership of popular Iranian comic-writer Marjane Satrapi. Satrapi thus became the first female ruler of Iran in its history, considered a welcome rebuke to the era of the Ayatollah. While Pahlavi was still loved in Iran, his economic policies had brought great wealth inequality that brought further class division in the Iranian population, especially among the better-connected diaspora. The Tudehists would run with this in the campaign under the slogan, ‘Pahlavi made Iran rich, the Tudeh Party will make you rich’. While some hoped or worried Iran’s foreign policies would shift, they mostly would not. While the stated solution of the Tudehists to the Israel-Palestine dispute was a democratic one-state confederation, this didn’t stop them becoming Israel’s primary arms export destination. While they expressed concern at the BJP’s election in India, it didn’t stop them from accepting Indian investment in Tehran. But there was one country for whom the Tudehists hated with all their might, and it was one the Civil Service of Iran was more than happy to indulge in - Saudi Arabia.
The rapid return of Iran to prominence was a shock to the entire Gulf State ecosystem. Under Saudi guidance, the group had seen Iran effectively reduce Iraq to a vassal, seen by far the most secular Muslim nation in the Middle East come into being (making the Saudis look ever-more alien from the West they had to do business with), and saw their hopes of creating an Arab buffer on the side of the Persian Gulf go up in flames. Now, a confident Iran looked upon them with an urge for vengeance. Vengeance against the cruelty of Saudi and Emirati troops during the occupation, vengeance for their attempts to balkanise Iran, and vengeance for their enthusiastic support of Saddam back in the 1980s. The Saudis were seen by almost the entire Iranian population as the primary enemy of Iran, whether secular or religious, right wing or left. But the Tudehists had a more novel way of striking at the Gulf States than what the Resurrectionists had in mind. They wanted to strike them from below, specifically the underclass of the Arab world - the migrant workers oppressed under the Kafala system. The Kafala system had arranged for the transport of millions of migrant workers from the Indian subcontinent, working in slave-like conditions often for less pay than promised and after their passports were seized, trapping them in the country. This system had helped bring countries like the United Arab Emirates to near first-world status, albeit with dissimilar social practices. Sometimes 90% of these countries were foreign migrant labour with no pathways to citizenship while the small cadre of citizens repeat the bounteous harvests with some of the most expensive lifestyles on Earth.
In May 2010, inspired by Satrapi’s election in Iran and outraged by an attempt by the tech-illiterate Lebanese government to block Youtube to suppress information on the basis of upholding public morals (behind a state-sponsored paywall that you had to pay to lift), Lebanese protestors rose up in what became known as ‘The Youtube Revolution’ to demand an end to the Sectarian clan system that ran Lebanon and for the French to leave. Lebanon’s unions played a powerful role in the organisation, with unprecedented turnout across all communities. Ultimately, that July, the Lebanese Parliament agreed to a Constitutional Convention to end the Sectarian system of control and revert to a majoritarian system with a secular government and guaranteed individual rights, in many ways inspired by Iran’s changes. Notably, inspired by the Rwandan constitution, parties were forbidden from ‘Dividing national communities against each other, or against the whole, and to run in the interest of one tribe or sect, instead of the Lebanese people as a whole’. It was a massive rebuke to the old system and flat-out illegalised multiple old parties who existed solely to represent their one sect. The French didn’t mind being told to go since they were set up in the Syrian desert to help stamp out Jihadists, and so the troops simply moved there. The Pan-Lebanon Front party, a left-wing democratic-socialist force, overwhelmingly won the first election owing to its relative organisation and its being considered the successor of the protest movement. Lebanon declared neutrality in Middle Eastern affairs and fancies itself as the Middle Eastern equivalent to Switzerland. With Iranian mediation, it recognised Israel in 2013 in return for favourable splits on natural gas found in contested maritime waters between the two countries, and has been in a cold peace ever since. Lebanon has since traded in and out different governments. The Pan-Lebanon Front was eventually voted and replaced with the more Right-wing ‘Lebanon People’s Party’, under veteran politician Rafic Hariri, who ran on turning Lebanon into a financial hub. Lebanon’s troubled past has finally calmed down, and the country seems to be on a healthy track for the future, at least as of time of writing. Hariri helped turn Lebanon into a tourist hotspot like it was before the Civil War, something easy to do when there were no sanctioned terror groups in the government. Lebanon has become the most secular Arab country and has become a number one tourist resort among Gulf Arabs, especially due to its legalised gambling and tolerance to other vices, despite frequent condemnations from those same states about Lebanon’s ‘degeneracy’. Lebanese people for the first time in decades can look forward to a future in which they have hope, something not the case for much of the world.
The Youtube Revolution sparked multiple major subsequent revolutions in the Middle East, but the two most notable would be the Egyptian Revolution and the Iranian-backed Qatari Worker Revolution and the Egyptian Revolution. The former resulted in the overthrow of long-term dictator Mubarak and the ushering of democratic elections in 2011, which would be won by the Muslim Brotherhood. Mohamad Morsi ran on an election platform of rescinding the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, something that caused terror in the halls of Western powers. However, upon election, while Morsi would take a tougher line with the West, he did not follow through on his promise to torpedo Sadat’s legacy. However, this was not enough for the military, who under the direction of General Sisi planned a coup to restore military rule. However, in the midst of implementation on March 2nd 2012, Morsi was accidentally killed, sparking a spontaneous uproar across Egypt that led to the coup being foiled on the streets of Cairo, albeit at a cost of more than a thousand dead a night of chaos. The streets of Egypt came out to resist the return of the army, who had been discredited due to their silent response to Israel’s annexation of the Jordan Valley. The army and remnants of the old regime fled to the Sinai Peninsula as a base of retreat. Ever since, Egypt has been split in two down the Suez Canal, with the Islamic Republic of Egypt under ‘Guided democracy’ to its west and the military dictatorship of the Arab Republic of Egypt on the east in Sinai, with the Canal itself frequently closed when tensions between the two parties rise.
The former is recognised as the legitimate Egyptian government by most of the world, including the Europeans (worried about the refugee waves if the Egyptian economy imploded) and the Gulf Monarchies, who are increasingly leaning into Sunni identitarianism to oppose Iran as long as the Islamists acknowledge their legitimacy in their own kingdoms. The Arab Republic of Egypt is supported primarily by the US while Israel supports Sisi's dictatorship despite their government not officially recognising Israel (while closely cooperating with them in an entirely PR-orchestrated move, whereas Cairo has long since torn up the Camp David Treaty). Among other supporters is the Gaddafi regime in Libya, whose movement to the West was consolidated due to French insistence. The French even went as far as to provide intelligence that helped put down a revolt in Libya, drawing mass outrage among elements of the French Left but earning a powerful ally in the process. Gaddafi, now increasingly senile, denounced the Muslim Brotherhood and cracked down even harder on Islamists. In 2013, he officially recognised Israel and cemented his legacy one of the most complicated figures in Middle Eastern history. His regime continues through his son, leading a successful oil republic (the only one of its kind) on the back of Egyptian migrant labour to an eager European market while allowing French bases on the Egyptian border in case Cairo decides to launch an invasion. The Koreans have also proven big supporters for Sisi, specifically the Unification Church, who cooperated closely with the ‘Mount Sinai Movement’, a movement of Coptic Christians in Egypt to move to Sinai to attempt to turn Sinai into a country for Coptic Christians at the foot of the Biblical Mount Sinai. This is supported by Israel to make an organically stable ally on their border, while at the same time they are forced to dance with the Sisi military regime, which is utterly dependent on Israel despite his public distancing from the Jewish state. Roughly 30-40% of Sinai is Coptic owing to the slew of refugees from west of the Suez, but many Coptics condemn the movement as disloyal to Egyptian identity. Actually, the quickest growing opposition movement in Cairo is not Pro-Sisi or Coptic, but Pharonist, whose Egyptian nationalism is inspired by the secular nationalism of the Iranians.
Despite clickbait headlines from the likes of the Daily Mail that the Brotherhood intend to blow up the Sphinx and Pyramids, the Brotherhood have not touched the monuments as the country needs hard revenue to survive. The cutting of American support following the renunciation of the Camp David Treaty led to a terrible economic situation that Cairo is still reeling from. These monuments have served as the visual symbols of a rapidly secularising Egyptian youth, who look upon Kufu’s Pyramid, Karnak and Abu Simbel and wept to the depths of their souls at seeing the economic implosion, the hopelessness for their futures, to know they had once been so great but had fallen so far. This was the rebirth of the Pharonists, a secular nationalist movement that had been subsumed by Pan-Arabism in the 1950s but now brought back into the spotlight amidst some of the greatest turmoil in Egyptian history. With tourists to the great sites of Egypt now few and far between due to the turbulent relationship its government has with the West, Egyptians took the time to simply stare at these great accomplishments themselves, and to realise what they had always been capable of. They looked to the Iranians, and thought if one ancient civilisation could do it, why not them?
[...]
The origins of the Qatari Worker Revolution were, of all things, a dispute over the hosting of the 2022 World Cup. Iran, wanting to show the world how far they had come, proudly put in a bid for the event which they wanted to become their version of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. The bid was endorsed by the US team and many European countries. The final two countries in the running were Iran and Qatar, with Iran arguing that the World Cup could actually be held in Summer while Qatar admitting that the tournament would probably have to be in Winter but having enough money to sway the notoriously corrupt officials who worked in FIFA. Iran protested, on the basis that Qatari work conditions would lead to the deaths of hundreds of migrant workers if the construction projects went ahead down there, to which FIFA officials reportedly said, “If the World Cup Final was played in a stadium literally made from the workers’ bones, the crowd would be taking skulls home as souvenirs.” However, there was one method Iran had left, and that was to petition the workers of Qatar themself.
The Iranian intelligence services had done a good job in helping to set up covert unions across the Persian Gulf, monitoring and reporting on abuse by employers against the migrant workers, often with help from India where many of the migrants came from. The reason the workers seemingly took so much from the employers was that many were in debt to loan sharks at home, or similarly had extremely poor families whose security would be vulnerable with even a single week’s missed pay. And so, the Iranians managed to set up a compensation fund to the workers that would guarantee payments to their families even in the event of revolutionary chaos in the Gulf state. The Qataris assumed that due to their relative neutrality that the Iranians had no interest in setting up such a system in their own turf, but Iran did not view the suffering under the Kafala System there as anything separate from its results in the Emirates or Saudi Arabia. That’s why the Qataris were blindsided when what appeared to be a regular workplace accident resulting in five deaths on August 17th 2010 resulted in hundreds of thousands of workers throwing down their tools. Everyday life in Doha stopped - the airport, port and all forms of civil engineering suddenly ceased. Panicking, the Qataris sent the police and army to quickly arrest the leaders of the strike movement, before they were often simply shot attempting to break into the compounds. As roughly 80% of Qatar were migrant workers, this simply broke the Gulf economy, and it put the fear of God into the neighbouring states that something like this could happen where they lived. The Qatari migrant workers demanded among other things better living conditions, an end to the sexual abuse of female workers by their employers, and the right to keep their passport. To the Gulf states, this represented an existential threat to their economic development, and had to be stamped out as quickly as possible.
Thus, on August 19th, as cars of Qataris fled on one side of the road, columns of Saudi armed vehicles rode on the other side coming into Qatar. It was a desperate, last ditch manoeuvre which effectively led to Qatar’s diplomatic capitulation to Riyadh and its reduction to a puppet state, but it was the only choice they had if they wanted Qatar to still exist the next week. The Saudi army rode into Doha with American weapons and began one of the most appalling massacres of the 21st Century, mowing down scores of migrant workers indiscriminately, barely a fraction of whom were armed. The official death toll stood at 538, according to Saudi authorities, but based on the amount of trucks used to transport and dispose of the corpses, some believe the real figure to have been in the five figure range. It was, without comparison, the worst case of strike-breaking in history. But it also achieved what it wanted. On August 25th, the Saudis announced that operations had been ‘completed’ and that work would resume on September 1st. It worked, and on September 1st, workers with cold sweat returned to their posts in a country now occupied by the Saudi military for an ‘indefinite period’. While mostly some changes were made to increase worker safety, the impact of the Doha Massacre that had crushed the worker’s uprising, would be most acutely felt around the world.
Western relations with Saudi Arabia plummeted, and President Wellstone scored a rare PR win in foreign policy over the usually hawkish Republicans by passing a bill suspending arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the Emirates (whose troops assisted) and adopting a much more Anti-Saudi stance, especially given women’s rights. With the massacre of so many of their citizens, Indian and Saudi relations fell to their lowest point in history, while Iranian and Indian cooperation grew exponentially. Iran’s oil industry could now barely keep up with the demand from the subcontinent, and from the Europeans who were eager for respectable partners in the aftermath of Russia’s actions in Ukraine. Iranian oil production reached heights that even the 1970s could only have dreamed of, as their relatively stable domestic market made them a far more attractive place to invest than the Gulf monarchies which had been shown to have revolutionary discontent within them. However, some criticised Iran for these actions, arguing they tricked the Qatari migrant workers and ended up getting them killed to further their geopolitical ambitions. On the flip-side, Russia and China would defend Saudi actions, arguing that the internationally recognised government of Qatar was simply crushing a violent ‘revolution of foreigners.’ In thanks, the Sauds would sign a deal with China in 2012 that would further cement the Asian giant as the country’s biggest and friendliest export market. But while this was a positive development for the Gulf States in terms of finding international partners and support, they also had to accept some hits.
Even an organisation as corrupt as FIFA couldn’t ignore the massacre, and had to give the 2022 World Cup hosting rights to Iran. The Gulf states boycotted the event, something the Iranians laughed as unnecessary since they probably couldn’t qualify anyway. Despite Iran’s boasts of workers rights, its stadium construction would use massive pools of illegal migrant labour from Iraq who were escaping the corruption and instability to create a better life in the economic stability of its neighbour. However, in contrast to a hypothetical Qatar event, the show proceeded smoothly, with female and gay fans not having to suffer state-sanctioned indignities during their stay. While Iran celebrated a scrappy second place finish in their group that ultimately saw them beaten in the first knockout round, not only was that the first time they had left the group stages, but the whole tournament had been an unprecedented show of survival and strength. That twenty years ago, bombs rained down above those very stadiums, buildings turned to rubble, and it seemed Iran was finished. Now in 2022, Iran can look back at those horrors and realise how far they’ve come from those dark days, both the dictatorship and the war. While the thought of mandatory veils, repression and execution of homosexuals feels like a different world to the streets of Iran today, it was through their strength, faith and tenacity that they had pulled themselves out of the rubble and among the stars. It was no less than what they deserved. The Iranian people are at the forefront of the world again, as they always should have been.
