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The Irrational Downfall of Park Geun-hye Click Here to Ask a Korean!

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President Park Geun-hye issues a public apology on October 25, 2016.

(source)

President Park Geun-hye is in deep trouble. The stories have been out for a
few days now, and even the English-language papers have caught on. Park's
confidant has been running a massive slush fund, as she extorted more than
$70 million from Korea's largest corporations. The confidant was receiving
confidential policy briefings and draft presidential speeches--all on a totally
unencrypted computer. The confidant rigged the college admission process so
that her daughter, not known to be sharpest tool in the shed, would be
admitted into the prestigious Ewha Womans University. That last bit turned
Ask a Korean
out to be the first step toward the president's ruin, as Ewha students' protest
Like Page 1.7K likes
over that preferential treatment developed into the larger investigation about
the relationship between Park and her confidant, Choi Soon-sil.
Be the rst of your friends to like this

But the English language coverage of this scandal is missing something. The
newspapers do have most of the facts, which they recount diligently. But they
fail to fully account for the Korean public's stunned disbelief. Although the
Ask a Korean
scale of the corruption here is significant, Koreans have seen much, much
21 hrs
worse. Not long ago, Korean people have seen Chun Doo-hwan, the former
president/dictator, made off with nearly $1 billion, and this was back in the Good read. https://aeon.co//what-
chinese-corner-cutting-reveals-abou
mid-1980s when the money was worth more than $4 billion in today's dollars.
Even the democratically elected presidents of Korea--every single one of
them--suffered from corruption charges. Lee Myung-bak, the immediate
predecessor to Park, saw his older brother (himself a National Assemblyman)
go to prison over bribery. Lee's controversial Four Rivers Project, which cost
nearly $20 billion, was widely seen as a massive graft project to push
government funding to his cronies who were operating construction
companies.
What Chinese corner-cutti
Your balcony fell off? Chabuduo. Vaccin
For better or worse (mostly worse,) Korean people have come to expect
corruption from their presidents. So why is this one by Park Geun-hye causing AEON.CO | BY AEON
such a strong reaction? It is not because Korean people discovered that Park
was corrupt; it is because they discovered Park was irrationally corrupt.
Koreans are not being dismayed at the scale of the corruption; they are
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shocked to see what the scale of the corruption signifies.
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ABOUT TK
 T.K. (ASK A KOREAN!)

The Korean is a Korean

American living in
Washington D.C. / Northern
Virginia. He lived in Seoul
until he was 16, then moved
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Korean refers to himself in
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Park Geun-hye's corruption scandal revolves around a central question: why BLOG ARCHIVE
would the president risk her administration for Choi Soon-sil? In fact, one of
Park's selling points as the presidential candidate was that she was less likely
Blog Archive
to be corrupt because she had no family. Her parents--former dictator Park
Chung-hee and his wife Yuk Yeong-su--were dead, and she was estranged
from her sister and brother. This argument had a modicum of plausibility,
since all the previous president's corruption involved their family in some
way. (Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung had issues with their sons; Roh
Moo-hyun and Lee Myung-bak, their brothers.)

But the lack of family did not stop Park Geun-hye from being corrupt, because
she apparently had to give money to Choi Soon-sil. But why did Park Geun-
hye, the president, even bother with Choi Soon-sil, a nobody? To answer this
question, we must look back into modern Korean history to trace the
relationship between Park and Choi.
 Choi Tae-min (right) meets with Park Chung-hee (left) and Park Geun-hye (center)
(source)

Park Geun-hye met Choi Soon-sil through Choi's father, Choi Tae-min. The
elder Choi, born in 1912, was a pseudo-Christian cult leader. He started his
adult life as a policeman and soldier, and at one point he worked at a small
newspaper and a soap factory. By 1970s, Choi was fully engaged in the
occupation for which he would be known: being a cult leader, claiming to heal
people. Choi called himself a pastor, but he never attended a seminary.

Choi Tae-min met Park Geun-hye for the first time in 1975, when Park was 23.
Park Geun-hye had just lost her mother, who was assassinated by a North
Korean spy. (The spy was aiming for Park's father, the dictator Park Chung-
hee, but missed and killed the first lady instead.) Shortly after the
assassination, the elder Choi sent several letters to Park Geun-hye, claiming
that the soul of Park's mother visited him, and Park could hear from her
mother through him. Park invited Choi Tae-min to the presidential residence,
and the elder Choi told her there that Park's mother did not truly die, but
merely moved out of the way to open the path for Park Geun-hye. This was
the beginning of the unholy relationship between Park Geun-hye and Choi's
family, which included Choi Tae-min's daughter Soon-sil.

Once the elder Choi won Park Geun-hye's confidence, he leveraged the
relationship to amass a fortune. Choi set up a number of foundations, with
Park Geun-hye as the nominal head, and peddled influence. The influence-
peddling and bribery became so severe that the dictator Park Chung-hee
summoned Choi Tae-min to personally interrogate him. In the interrogation
session and thereafter, Park Geun-hye would fiercely defend Choi, her
spiritual guide and connection to her dead mother. In a Wikileaks cable from
2007 when Park Geun-hye first ran for president, the U.S. Ambassador for
Korea noted: "Rumors are rife that the late pastor had complete control over
Park's body and soul during her formative years and that his children
accumulated enormous wealth as a result."

Choi Tae-min's high times ended on October 26, 1979, when his patron lost
her father in another assassination. (Fittingly, Park Geun-hye's own downfall
began around October 26 of this year.) The assassin Kim Jae-gyu, then-head
of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, said one of the reasons why he
decided to assassinate his boss was because of the toxic relationship between
Choi Tae-min and Park Geun-hye. Although Park Chung-hee was fully aware
of Choi Tae-min's grafting, the elder Park let it continue for the sake of his
daughter. Kim believed that this was another indication that Park Chung-hee
was losing his marbles.

For the next decade, Park Geun-hye and Choi Tae-min were removed from
politics. The assassination of Park Chung-hee led to another round of
murderous dictatorship, this time by Chun Doo-hwan, then finally
democratization in 1987. During that time, Park operated several charitable
foundations, which were in reality no more than private slush funds made up
of the money that Choi grifted during her father's reign. Park Geun-hye
became so dependent on Choi Tae-min that she would be estranged from her
remaining family, her sister Park Geun-ryeong and her brother Park Ji-man.
In 1990, Park's siblings went so far as to petition then-president Roh Tae-woo
that their sister be "rescued" from Choi Tae-min's control.

Choi Tae-min died in 1994, at which point Park Geun-hye's confidence moved
to Choi's daughter, Soon-sil. Park entered politics in 1997, winning her first
election as an Assemblywoman in 1998. She would prove to be a competent
politician, earning the nickname "Queen of Elections." She lost in the
presidential primaries to Lee Myung-bak in 2007, but came back strong to
win the nomination and eventually the presidency in 2012. Although Park's
relationship with the Choi family briefly became an issue during her two
presidential runs, she dismissed them as baseless rumors, claiming that
neither Choi Tae-min nor Choi Soon-sil was involved in her works as a
politician.

As it turned out, Choi Soon-sil owned Park Geun-hye just as much as her
father did. Peddling the presidential influence, Choi extorted tens of millions
of dollars from Korea's largest corporations. When they found a small and
profitable company, Choi's cronies would straight-up steal it, threatening the
owner of the company with the company's destruction and personal harm.
More importantly, Choi effectively controlled the presidential power. Every
day, Choi would receive a huge stack of policy briefs from the presidential
residence to discuss with her inner circle--an illustrious group that included
Choi's gigolo (no, really) and a K-pop music video director (I'm serious.) Choi
would receive ultra-confidential information detailing secret meetings
between South and North Korean military authorities. Choi would receive in
advance the budget proposal of more than $150 million for the Ministry of
Culture, Sports, and Tourism, and distributed them to her friends' projects.
Choi went around saying North Korea would collapse by 2017 according to the
spirits that spoke to her, and the Park Geun-hye administration may have set
its North Korea policy based on this claim.

For years, Park's aides complained about the mysterious off-line person to
whom the president would send her draft speeches--when the drafts returned,
the professionally written speeches were turned into gibberish. We now know
that one of Choi Soon-sil's favorite activities was to give comments on the
presidential speeches. Even the famous Dresden speech, in which Park Geun-
hye outlined her administration's North Korea policy, had a number of
markups from Choi Soon-sil. The aides who dug too deep into the relationship
between Park and Choi were dismissed and replaced with those close to Choi,
to a point that Choi's personal trainer became a presidential aide. No, really. I
wish I were joking.

TheReckoning

Choi Soon-sil's selfie from the recovered Galaxy Tab

(source)

It is entirely fitting that this sordid affair began unraveling because of a

preferential treatment that Choi's daughter received in her college admission.
If there is one thing that Koreans cared more than their lives, it is their (and
their children's) college degree. As the heat rose against Choi and her
daughter, they hightailed to Germany where they owned a horse farm.

The major breakthrough occurred on October 24, when a cable TV network

JTBC discovered a Galaxy Tab belonging to Choi Soon-sil in the office that she
abandoned. The tablet was the Pandora's Box--it had the presidential
speeches with Choi's markups, presidential briefs for cabinet meetings,
appointment information for presidential aides, chat messages with
presidential aides, the president's vacation schedule, draft designs for
commemorative stamps featuring the president, and much, much more. The
discovery of the tablet was worthy of "World's Dumbest Criminals"--the tablet
was simply left behind in Choi's office with no encryption, and the files were
available for anyone to open. And just in case Choi Soon-sil denied ownership
of the tablet, its image gallery contained her selfie.

The next day, the president attempted to stem the tide by issuing a public
apology, in which she said Choi was someone who "helped during [her]
difficult past." Although Park admitted that Choi had reviewed the draft
speeches, she said Choi only conveyed her personal impressions, and at any
rate stopped shortly after her presidential office was formed. The ensuing
tsunami of revelations showed immediately that the president was lying--one
of Choi's cronies said Choi was receiving presidential briefing as recently as
earlier this year. The president's approval rating plummeted to around 17
percent, with more than 40 percent of the respondents demanding
resignation or impeachment. Even conservative newspapers like Chosun Ilbo,
which has been reliably in Park's corner throughout her administration, has
issued daily editorials demanding the Prime Minister and the entire cabinet to
resign.

Meanwhile, Korean people's collective heads exploded. As discussed earlier, it

takes quite a bit for Korean politics to shock the Korean people. Having
survived a particularly tumultuous modern democratic history, Korean people
may be the world's most cynical consumers of politics. But this. Even the
most cynical Koreans were not ready for this.

At first, there was a tiny bit of perverse relief, as all the bizarre actions of Park
Geun-hye administration suddenly began to make sense. Why did the
president only hold just three press conferences in the first four years of her
administration? Why does the president always speak in convoluted
sentences that make no sense? Why did the president fly off the handle and
sue the Japanese journalist who claimed that she was with Choi Soon-sil's
husband while the ferry Sewol was sinking in 2014, drowning 300 school
children? Why did the ruling party randomly host a shamanistic ritual in the
halls of the National Assembly? Ohhhh, the relief went. Now it all makes
sense.

But this brief relief soon gave way to the terrifying realization: actually, it does
not make sense. None of this makes any sense.

In an ordinary case of political corruption, the politician is in it for himself. At

most, the politician is doing it for his family, or other rich people who may
end up helping him later. Obviously, corruption is bad. But this type of self-
interested corruption at least gives some measure of predictability. We all
know what self-interest looks like. Even though we would prefer that our
politicians are not corrupt, at least we know how corrupt politicians behave.

But not with Park Geun-hye. Her corruption was not self-interested at all. If
anything, her corruption was selfsacrificing in favor of Choi Soon-sil. Among
the numerous revelations, I personally found this the most pathetic: Park
Geun-hye gave Choi a sizable budget to purchase the presidential wardrobe,
and Choi embezzled most of it. Instead of purchasing the clothes that befitted
a head of state, Choi outfitted Park Geun-hye with crappy clothes that she had
her cronies made with subpar material. There is a video of Choi's staff
smoking and drinking while eating fried chicken, right next to the suit meant
for Park Geun-hye. At one point, one of the staff members handled the suit
without even wiping chicken grease from his hands, while breathing smoke
onto the clothes. Park Geun-hye would wear this suit on her presidential visit
with Xi Jinping. For accessories, Choi gave Park the cheap leather purses and
clutches that her gigolo designed. This could not have possibly escaped Park's
notice. Even assuming the unlikely possibility Park Geun-hye might not have
had the discernment to know firsthand (unlikely because she grew up in the
lap of luxury,) the obvious cheapness of Park's clothes and bags even made
the news. Yet nothing came of it. Choi Soon-sil dressed Park Geun-hye liked
an unwanted doll, and Park, thepresidentofthecountry, did not care.

Even in her apology, Park Geun-hye showed that she still might be under Choi
Soon-sil's hold. What would a self-interested politician would do, if the
corruption of one of his cronies was revealed? The politician would sell the
crony down the river, denying up and down that he ever knew or interacted
with the crony. Such denial would be cowardly and dishonest, but at least it is
predictable. But not with Park Geun-hye. She stood in front of the whole
country and admitted that Choi Soon-sil fixed her speeches. Instead of cutting
ties with her, Park reaffirmed that Choi was an old friend who helped her
during difficult times.

This is utterly irrational. Rational people can expect that a corrupt politician
may steal money for himself. They can even expect that he may steal for his
family. But no one can expect that a corrupt politician would steal
moneyforadaughterofafuckingpsychicwhoclaimedtospeak
with her dead mother. No one, not even the most cynical Korean,
expected that the president would refuse to cut ties with Choi Soon-sil, a
woman with no discernible talent other than manipulating the president and
humiliating her in the process. Koreans may expect that the president would
be corrupt, but they never could have expected that the president might be
feeble in her mind.

IntheTysonZone

Sports columnist Bill Simmons coined the term "Tyson Zone," in which
nothing you hear about a particular celebrity can possibly surprise you. Did
you hear that Mike Tyson urinated on a police officer? Of course he did! Did
you hear that Mike Tyson is attempting to breed unicorns? Of course he is!
Given what you already know about Mike Tyson, none you hear about Mike
Tyson could possibly surprise you.

With Choi Soon-sil-gate, Park Geun-hye put the entire country into the Tyson
Zone. Every insane rumor about the president--the kind that you would see
from some remote corner of the internet and laugh off--is now fair game. For
years, there have been rumors that the name of Park's political party, the
Saenuri Party, is a code name for a cult named shincheonji. Well, why not?
We already know that Choi Soon-sil was the one who actually produced Park's
inauguration, which featured numerous little multi-colored bags that are used
for shamanistic rituals. Would it really surprise you Park Geun-hye named
her party after a cult? Did you hear that Choi Soon-sil may have had a hidden
son who worked at the presidential residence? Well, why not? We already
know Choi made her personal trainer into a presidential aide--what's another
hidden son?

This much sounds like a joke, but it can easily take a terrifying turn. There has
been much speculation about the "missing seven hours," where the
president's whereabouts were completely unknown for seven hours in 2014
during the Sewol ferry disaster. Rumors are now running rampant that Park
Geun-hye was attending a memorial shamanistic ritual for Choi Tae-min, who
passed away 20 years ago on the day of the ferry disaster. The more lurid
version of the rumor says that Park's government actually sank the Sewol to
offer human sacrifice for the dead cult leader. As ridiculous as these rumors
are, Park Geun-hye's behavior forces even reasonable people to think, maybe.

Even the way forward is not entirely clear. Politically, Park Geun-hye is
finished, although it is unlikely that she would resign or be impeached. She
would not resign because she fundamentally lacks the capacity to assess the
reality around her. The opposition would not bother with the impeachment--
they would prefer to let the administration bleed with non-stop investigation,
until the presidential election comes next year.

But remember that we are now in the Tyson Zone, where everything is fair
game. Choi Soon-sil is still on the run, and she still may be able to get in touch
with the president. Even a politically finished president has a few remaining
options to short-circuit the political process, and this president does not seem
to have the instinct for self-preservation when it comes to Choi. I don't want
to actually write out what Park Geun-hye might do, because the mere thought
of them sends chills down my spine. But I cannot get those thoughts out of my
head, because they are no longer ridiculous. My worst nightmares for Korea's
democracy are now a realistic possibility. This is the shock that the Korean
people are experiencing now.

Got a question or a comment for the Korean? Email away at

askakorean@gmail.com.

POSTED BY T.K. (ASK A KOREAN!) AT 12:24 AM

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185COMMENTS:

Gaya 10/29/2016 3:35 AM

I'd been reading about this in the US-based publications, and while I
was familiar with the events, your post really helped put it all in
context, so thank you for writing this.

There is something profoundly sad about all this on a personal level,

but that's dwarfed by the scale of the ramifications to the country as a
whole. I do hope this is dealt with in an appropriate manner before
things get any worse.

That part about the MV director did pique my interest, though, would
you happen to know who that is?
Reply

Replies

Gaya 10/29/2016 5:41 AM

I had a look through the links, and it seems that it's Cha
Eun-taek?

KyurieShin 10/30/2016 1:07 AM

Yes! Not only did he direct K Pop videos, a horrifyingly
cirnge worthy promotional video for Pyungchang is also of
his creation. It's really... Really bad. It's so bad it's hard to