Internationally, preparing for the post-Covid-19 era starts from clarifying the responsible party for the Covid-19 disaster. The Covid-19 pandemic proved that the information cover-up and clinging to one’s incumbent power by a totalitarian political group can instantly drive the entire world to a crisis. To prevent second and third global crises in a world where all nations are interconnected as a global community, clarifying the international responsibility of the totalitarian power is of utmost importance. The U.S. government along with the governments and NGOs of the E.U., Australia, India, et al. asking for the Chinese government’s responsible answer goes beyond the dimension of transforming China into a responsible state and on to establishing a new principle for the survival of the mankind as one community.
It is surprising that the South Korea, which has been recognized as a model country realizing liberal democracy, is now in the completion stage of totalitarianism. It is a scary fact that such rapid regime change has been proceeding while the global community was unaware of it. Totalitarianism is completed by seizing the executive mechanism and judicial branch. As a matter of fact, South Korea started as a bridgehead for preventing the spread of totalitarianism in East Asia, and its history began as the two bastions upholding western liberal democracy, judicial independence and transparent election, were rigorously established. There is a famous anecdote that symbolizes judicial independence. When the first president of South Korea, Syngman Rhee, pursuing an imperial power, accused the adjudication that his amendment of the constitution for his re-election was unconstitutional, the chief justice of the supreme court rebutted, “Appeal through due steps if you feel you’ve been injusticed.” The “May 15 Corrupt Election” (of 1960) that brought about the fall of the First Republic was concluded by the suicides or the execution of the responsible. In this context, South Korea was started and maintained that way, showing the pride of anti-totalitarianism that judicial independence and transparent election are above any power or agenda.
The bridgehead that was established 60 years ago even during the time when politcal climate was gloomy in all facets is now crumbling down altogether. The key reason is the political power that has held hands with the Chinese totalitarianism. Given any opportunity, President Moon’s government has been saying that China’s difficulty is our difficulty and that they will stand on China’s side. This is not a matter of Chinese Dream vs. pragmatic diplomacy. In the process of establishing a new paradigm for the post-Covid-19 era, South Korea is going downhill making itself the public enemy in the global society.
From January 26, 2020, the medical communities including Korean Medical Association, Korean Society of Infectious Diseases, Korean Society for Healthcare-associated Infection Control and Prevention, and Korean Society for Antimicrobial Therapy have asked the South Korean government several times that entry of people coming from China into Korea must be banned to deal with the Covid-19 situation. Even during the situation when the number of confirmed was exploding, the government assumed the strange logic that we should not block them so that they would not reciprocate by blocking our entry into China. We still do not know the reason behind the logic — whether it was that the government naively believed the crooked information from the Chinese government, a diplomatic wrapping of not wanting Xi Jinping’s Korea visit to be affected, or some pragmatic reasons related to the April 15 general election.
In the April 15 general election of 2020, the ruling party that had won an overwhelming support of the people in their early votes ended up occupying 180 seats out of 300, where it is being revealed that it was a systematically corrupted election assisted by the China’s intervention. That facts that Korean texts not proper by Korean grammar were printed, and that coarse and non-standard voting ballots were discovered in volume supported the inference that ballots were printed in and imported from China in bulk. Suspicions have been posed that Chinese programmers intervened in the communication between the ballot sorting machines and the server computer of the National Election Commission (NEC) to influence the results of the early votes. Also an incumbent congressman’s press conference poses that traces of wrongful manipulation that resembles the Chinese Communist Party’s slogan are hidden within the resulting statistical figures of the vote.
The fact that NEC took trouble to hire quite a few Chinese people as ballot counters is also a mystery. At this point, what kind of link the “Covid-19 politics” provided between the Korean and Chinese leaders, and how it is related to the corrupted election need to be clarified. The worst scenario that the South Korean government’s embracing of Chinese Dream has at least played the role of a pathway for spreading the coronavirus to the world, and that such embracing has solidified the power of the incumbent government through the corrupt election is becoming the reality.
Now the front-line evidences of the origin of the coronavirus and Korea’s corrupt election are being revealed one by one. An ordinary female scientist at the University of Hong Kong exiled to the United States even parting with her husband to publically inform that coronavirus is a biological weapon that the China’s People’s Liberation Army has developed, that the Chinese government provided a false genetic sequence listing to the World Health Organization to cover up their fault, and that the Chinese government in the early stage of the spread covered up even when they knew the danger of spread among humans. Specific evidences of fowl play in the Korea’s corrupt election are already inundating the Korean social networks. For instance, in the early votes, the ruling party candidates consistently outperformed by 11% and the 1st opposition party candidates were lower by 11% in terms of the difference in the percentage of votes between early-voting and election-day voting throughout numerous townships and their respective electoral precincts across the country, giving ruling party candidates 22% advantage on average.
The crux of the problem was not in the difference between the early votes the two parties received, but the fact that the difference was consistent across almost all precincts. Even though a “torrential rain” favoring the ruling party could have come during the early votes, such statistical homogeneity across almost all precincts is a smoking gun for human manipulation that defies statistical common sense. It was already in May the same year that foreign and domestic experts of corrupt election and statistics have concluded a corrupt election on a massive scale based on voluntary analysis of the statistical data announced by NEC. There have been almost 40 precincts where there were more voters than the constituents, ballot sorting machines could be accessed via Wi-Fi, and high-performance computers could be attached to the machines.
The ballots voted on No. 2 candidate of the opposition party being sorted as No. 1 candidate of the ruling party were videographed many times, the ruling party knew in advance that 180 seats would be secured by postprocessing of the early votes result, and there was even a precinct where the average voting time per person was only 4.7 seconds. There was also some ballot count locations where the observers could not monitor the ballot counts as the ballot count workers would hurl profanities at them. It is also the fact that some official ballot storage box specifications were compromised, that the ballots were carried in snack boxes with holes and cuts, and that the ballot paper that must be folded were found in bulk unfolded as unused new ballots would be.
There were many cases of the seals of the ballot storage boxes looking very suspicious, and some being resealed were captured on CCTVs. NEC instructed that all early voting places’ CCTVs be blinded, some ballots’ cut states were not neat, and many ballots were stuck together that a ballot count worker had to manually separate them, which were all videographed. Some precincts’ counted ballots were stamped by another precinct’s stamp, some early vote ballots were found shredded, and there have been consecutive fires at warehouses where ballots suspicious of foul play were suspected to be stored. As an independent group of citizens and attorneys performed a total inspection on the early mail votes, among the total of 2,725,843 mail votes, there were 1,012,976 problematic ballots including ones without the received date, ones that were not delivered, ones of cancelled registrations but re-registered, and ones with impossibly short delivery times.
Not to mention multiple citizen groups, but also the 6000-member Professors’ Solidarity for Freedom and Justice issued statements several times asking all pertinent state agencies to immediately come forward to perform a complete inspection and examination, as there were very specific and reasonable suspicions of a corrupt election. Recently there has been an international criticism that an “imperial system” of Xi Jinping style has killed all critiquing functions, and spread the Chinese totalitarian monitoring system like a virus. Even inside China, the Communist Party’s elders are reconsidering entrusting to a person, who has been accused of hiding the source of coronavirus and the fact that the virus is infectious, the 1.4 billion people’s present and future. Also international evidences are being revealed that China influenced other countries’ elections possibly with a team of comments-posters and manipulation of the voting process and ballot-counting.
Actually the countries where rigged elections are happening are in an intimate relationship with China’s “One Belt, One Road” project, and, starting from the October, 2017 when China’s Communist Party’s Unification Front Business Department was expanded on a large scale, the cases of comments-postering team and rigged elections in foreign countries kept happening. In this vein, China’s organized intervention into other countries’ elections is awaiting international investigation.
In this situation, President Moon’s government is continuously pursuing Xi Jinping’s visit to Korea, is reinforcing the irresponsible and dangerous diplomacy line of solidifying a common-destiny alliance with the totalitarian regime, which has been accused of committing a grave crime, is ratifyng all kinds of socialistic laws, and is also completing the take-over of the press and the judiciary. They are replacing the high-ranking positions of the prosecution, the courts and public sectors with people from specific regions in Korea, who are ideologically slanted, and they are exerting pressure on the public media’s leadership to form a common interest system, to form a common destinity system so that those would be sharing the destiny with the ruling power.
As a result, despite there being more than 100 corrupt election-related cases, the judiciary did not even begin any full investigation or deliberation, and the press did not even consider them as any coverage item. While the ruling party is hushing everyone, opposition parties, who are after the people’s delegation of sovereignty to them, have been caught in a near-sighted and self-centered criterion such as whether raising the issue of investigation would be in their political interest. And the voluntary movements by the students, scholars and overseas Korean to investigate the election have been accused as political scheming.
As the “Black Rallies” against the rigged election spread, the large-scale press agencies such as JTBC and MBC propagated the political scheme theory by abruptly buoying April 15 corrupt election related broadcasts, edited in malicious intent. The supreme court, which has been postponing the hearing of the election suits, is only now signaling the start of the hearings to save its face. According to the public office election law, 6 months is only the maximum period within which these cases should be ruled and furthermore it is stipulated that the pertinent court is obligated to “give priority to these cases over other matters so as to promptly hear and adjudge them.” Yet the supreme court has violated the public office election law by postponing the recount of the ballots even when there has been no special circumstances for the delay.
On the other hand, how the opinions of the parties interested in the time schedule and investigation method should be reflected is not specified but infinite discretion is given to the recount of the ballots. The Gangnam area of Seoul is globally famous for Psy’s Youtube video “Gangnam Style.” When ordinary students, office workers, housewives and even children gathered almost everyday to rally against the government for the past 4 months, there is a reason for it. The famous horse dance of Psy’s song has been forgotten on them; their “black rallies,” all dressed in black and holding black umbrellas, signifies the death of the truth. If anyone has the basic knowledge of statistics and analysis through Excel, he or she can investigate the publicly available data on how many votes each candidate received in the early votes and witness the strong suspicion that the election was manipulated.
Even when one reviews all kinds of direct and indirect evidences of corrupt election that Youtube is pouring out with a grain of salt, the suspicion on rigged election only becomes reinforced. As such strong suspicion is intentionally evaded or attacked by the press, intellectuals and the political parties, the young ones are taking the issue to the streets. This is of a different dimension compared to the past dispute raised in the political sphere. This time, after the politically neutral and analysis-savvy young ones notice something is wrong, the domestic and overseas intellectuals and citizens voluntarily participate and fiercely debate the issues among themselves, performing a self-verification process. When they see a Columbus’ egg standing up, yet the political sphere calls it lying down, they cannot but abandon their trust on the politicians.
An energy of political transformation, analogous to the Hong Kong’s “Umbrella Revolution,” is building up centered around the “Black Rallying” young generation. The Black Rally protesters are continuing their protest through rigged election material exhibition, bumper stickers, black masks, black manicure/pedicure, black tour bus parade, etc. and the movement is becoming nationwide. As intellectuals with conviction and courage are rooting for these, this is developing into a nationwide freedom fighters movement. During his college days, President Moon Jae-in hosted rallys against the military dictatorship, which led to his imprisonment and expulsion from school. Yet, he and the activist group who is now ruling are tearing down the democracy and freedom of speech that they accomplished through so much pain, regressing back to an era of totalitarian societal control comparable to the military dictatorship 30 years ago.
Recently the government has attributed the virus spread only to the religious groups and the protestors who raged anti-government rallies, scrutinized all the rally participants, and forced virus tests on them, manifesting even some base maneuvers of gutter politics. There are quite a few incidents where those whose government-run coronavirus test results were positive but subsequent test results were negative when immediately retested at some civilian hospitals. This is a country where the group who promised to catch the “monster” has become a bigger monster once they seized power. During their reign, they are using the totalitarian techniques they suffered from the dictatorship. That is who the incumbent South Korean government is and who the ruling group is.
The South Korean government’s embracing of the Chinese Dream even by happenstance resulted in playing the role of a pathway to spreading the coronavirus to the world, and the fact that such embracing is interconnected with firming of the incumbent government’s power by the corrupt April 15 election is making the South Korean government the global community’s worst public enemy that needs to be eradicated. Yet, Moon’s government is making South Korea the target as the public enemy. As Italy’s Mussolini dreamed of a new European order just before the Second World War and allied with the Nazi Germany to form a united totalitarian ruling system called “Axis Powers,” Axis Powers is being formed in East Asia now. Therefore, the Black Rallying voluntarily done by Korea’s freedom fighters to prevent the spread of the totalitarianism virus is setting a crucial example for the people of the world that has become the touchstone to establish the relationship and principles between the state and the citizens based on liberal democracy in the post-Covid-19 era.
