Great leaders

A good friend of mine once pointed out that the entire point of voting in a democracy is to elect someone who can be selfish on your behalf.  Although that might sound like a cynical way of putting it, you can't deny that the whole point of "representative government" is that the government should carry out the wishes of the people and provide for their needs. Basically, you are electing someone to be selfish for you.  If you look at that on a grander scale, then it's easy to see that the government of each nation really exists to look after the people of that nation, and only that nation.  George Washington once said, "It is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind that no nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its interest."  I agree, and I believe there can be no such thing as a noble government or an altruistic government.  There are, however, good governments and bad governments.  I would simplistically define these as follows.  

A Good Government: One which is selfish on behalf of the nation and the people of that nation.
A Bad Government: One which is selfish on behalf of the people running the government. 

Now, maybe Jesus wouldn't be proud of either one of these, but you've got to admit, living in a country with a somewhat Good Government (say, the United States) is way better than living in a country with an indisputably Bad Government (looking at you, North Korea).  And of course, it would be a lie to insist that any government, the USA definitely included, is completely a Good Government.  There will always be people in every government who abuse their power for their own personal ambitions and desires.  There are certainly plenty of those in the United States government, and I know our country is in a mess right now; but, all things considered, I still think the U.S. is more in the Good Government camp than the Bad Government camp.  I hope it stays that way. 

But I digress.  What I really wanted to talk about here is South Korea.  Not the South Korea of today, but the South Korea of the 1950's, '60's, and '70's--the South Korea of Rhee Syngman and Park Jeong-hee.  

Rhee and Park are really interesting people.  I don't think anyone would say that they were kind or moral people.  One look at their human rights records would dispel any uncertainty about that.  But they did accomplish great things.  They were dictators, but not the kind who use the country purely as their own personal playground.  No, they wanted to make something out of it--and make something they did.   

Rhee obstinately blocked American objectives to build up the Korean economy solely as a support for a greater economy in Japan.  "Korea again to be the hand-maiden of Japan's growth?  Better to be 'another Japan' than a dependency" (Cumings, p. 307).  He set the stage and acquired the props for Korea's industrial take-off.  

"Rhee and his successors [...] wanted a full-blown, self-reliant industrial base with steel, chemicals, machine tools, and the electric energy to run them." (Cumings, p. 305)

Park took power with a coup d'etat in 1961.  "철은 국력(Steel = national power)," he said, and he made it so.  Both Rhee and Park invested hugely in infrastructure and technology.  They sucked in American cold war money for all it was worth (an official total of $12 billion from the America Treasury between 1945-65) and built factories and shipyards.  They insulated Korean companies from foreign competition and allowed them to grow and flourish until they became major world exporters.  

With their consecutive efforts, Rhee and Park industrialized Korea faster than almost any other nation in the history of the world.  South Korea went from a war-torn third world country to being a first world country in barely three decades.  They now have some of the world's fastest internet, best public transportation, astonishingly cheap, yet high-quality health-care, and the world's 12th largest GDP.  Imagine if Rhee and Park had squandered all those resources instead of using them to build up the nation.  Many dictators do simply squander all the gifts they're given--it's no small thing that Rhee and Park chose not to.   (Look at Africa, with its abundant natural resources and pervasive poverty, crime, and violence.  What are their dictators doing with all those resources?)  Rhee and Park make the point that sometimes, dictatorships get more done than the democracies, and that's not always a bad thing.  

But were Rhee and Park good dictators?  Were they running Good Governments?  They jailed and killed thousands of people.  They massacred peaceful protesters.  They brutally oppressed opposing viewpoints.  Their governments were cesspools of corruption, nepotism, and bribery.  So, in many ways, no.  They definitely were not Good Governments.  But if we're going to be totally honest, we have to admit that, in other ways, they were Good Governments.  Whatever their motivations really were, they did use their power to enrich the nation and give South Korea a stronger place in the world.  They got the Korean people out of desperate poverty, and they did it in a fiercely independent way.  I am not pardoning or justifying all the terrible things that Rhee and Park did during their regimes, but at the same time, if Korea had to go through a period of dictatorship, at least they got dictators who accomplished something.  At least, once they finally became a democracy, Korea was left with the fruits of several decades of incredible advancement and ingenuity.  In that regard, South Korea is so much luckier than many, many other countries in the world. 


Sources of inspiration for this post:


Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History, by Bruce Cumings 
(Most of the historical information in this post came from this book.)

The 2012 presidential race in Korea and the election of Park Jeong-hee's daughter, Park Geun-hye.  

Talking with Koreans and hearing the extremely mixed opinions that people still have about Park Jeong-hee.  

My friend, Paul.