DJ Kim: The Epitome of the National Disgrace

DJ KIM: The Epitome of the National Disgrace
October 11, 2002

When Koreans were asked to name one who was the most shameful, disgraceful, dishonorable, and disreputable person in their history, they do not hesitate to pick one of mandarins in the last days of Lee Dynasty in early 1900, Lee Wan-Yong who had sold the country to Japan.

Not any more!

I bet my ass that they would have to begin renaming DJ Kim a.k.a. the second Lee Wan-Yong, when he steps down from the Presidency in early next year.
Painting him a national disgrace has already begun in an overdrive mode in the ad hominem attack that there were backhanded deals and wry conspiracies both in his life-time ambition of the Sunshine Policy and in the resultant acquisition of the Nobel Peace Prize.

During the past four and half years of his Presidency, his regime has been mired into an enchilada of corruption, bribery, conspiracy, backroom dealings and sleazy machination that only the Sicilian Mafia dare to execute in their Machiavellian strategy to yield power and getting rich.
His cohorts were such a hungry banditry of wig-salesman, gangster, confidence man, ne’er-do-well, and street urchin that he had to shuffle his cabinet ministers as often as his mom had changed his diapers.

His neo-liberal policy has left the Korean economy totally contingent on the fluctuation of the Wall Street wavelength and the stage was now set for another outbreak of a financial crisis, forcing him to rob a cookie jar of the national pension funds in order to prop up the falling stock prices.
He has poured hundreds of trillion Won in restructuring the financial institutions, in which process half of the public funds have disappeared into the pockets of thieves, speculators, his two sons, his wife’s relatives, and his financial mandarins.

It is sad to see a populist goes to pot…it all started when he was greedily and arbitrarily engaged in the legacy-building scheme that most of Korean politicians love to accomplish in their lifetime.
As a mere high school graduate from the unknown family background, he wanted to become a president, a national hero, and an international celebrity.
He has succeeded to become a president through a sleazy machination, which inspired him more audacious and illusive scheme of national unification that brought him a Nobel Peace prize.

The rub here is: he was such blinded by his ambition of legacy building that he did not care the means to achieve the ends…he became a Machiavellian fox, a political snake-oil salesman, and a prodigal confidence man in order to leave his name in the Korean history.
As his days are numbered, the whole shebang appears to be falling apart in high pitch and the dam to hold his legacy building starts to crumble under a heavy deluge of political scandals, money launderings, and backroom conspiracy.

There was a press report that he was building his retirement home with the price tag over 3 billion won (eight rooms with seven bathrooms and a sunken garden).
It is a townhall talk whether he could enjoy, after the retirement, the luxury of his palatial residence, or he would end up joining his two sons in jail or he would hurriedly step aboard the plane supplied by the US Ambassador to an exile as the reward for his role as a poster-boy for globalization.

After all, he has accomplished one thing: he leaves an indelible notoriety of being a corrupt and sleazy politician in the Korean history that no one matches him in its shameful disgrace, inflicting more harm on the national integrity and international pride than Lee Wan-Yong of the Lee Dynasty. (Lee was only a signatory of the treaty as a diplomat, following the King’s order to cede the Korean sovereignty to Japan.)
He is definitely not a “Korean Mandela” but a “Korean Papa doc Duvalier” whose dynasty plundered the national treasures of Haiti into the bankruptcy and his profligate son Jean Claude was exiled to Paris.
Oy! Pity the nation, the South Korea!