Views expressed in Opinion articles are exclusively the authors’ own and do not represent those of NK News.

On April 30, amid a storm of international speculation about North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s health, the recently-elected South Korean lawmaker Ji Seong-ho announced that there was a 99% chance that Kim was dead.

On May 2, Kim Jong Un, alive and well, appeared in public, proving Mr. Ji wrong. He has since apologised.

Ji is not your average lawmaker, of course. He is one of two representatives in the current National Assembly who was born in North Korea.

The second of these defector-politicians — Thae Yong-ho – also made a questionable statement about the possibility of Kim Jong Un’s uncle taking over the North – but, to his credit, he never stated this as a fact. Ji has no such excuse.

This brings us to the question of the responsibility of elected officials for their statements. The reason why Ji’s statement was widely repeated by the media was because of his status, as an MP in the National Assembly.

Many lawmakers have access to government intelligence and other classified information, and as such their statements carry a lot of weight. When one of them makes a statement, which is very quickly disproved, it undermines the credibility of all of them.

However, with Ji Seong-ho the problem is even bigger: he also speaks as a North Korean escapee, and as such his statements hurt others like him. 

It is no secret that there are many people who see escapees as biased and do not trust their stories about the North. 

Yet for so many years the community has managed to stay remarkably clean: people told the world what really had been happening in the DPRK.

Cold War-era arrivals like An Myong-chol or Choe Kum-hee, who fled later, these were overwhelmingly honest people.

The situation changed sometime in 2010s when the community produced some crooks and opportunists, – people who would outright lie about North Korea to attract fame or money. Of course, their success is based on damage done to others.

Each time Shin Dong-hyok – or another person like him – invents a fake story about concentration camps, it would backfire against honest people like Kang Chol-hwan, who had been actually imprisoned in such camps and told the truth about them.

Every time a prominent North Korean escapee says a lie – especially an easily refutable one – it casts a shadow on the entire community.

HOW PARTISANSHIP HURTS POLICY

There is one more aspect to this story. Ji Seong-ho is not a fool. It is highly unlikely that this man would willingly make a statement which would bring him two days of attention and will make him look enormously embarrassing afterwards.

Unlike, say, Shin Dong-hyok, what we have here is probably not a fabricated story, but rather a case of self-delusion. Of course, the point made in the previous sections still stands, and it is going to hurt the reputation of escapees in general.

The question, however, is, why would a lawmaker from a mainstream party do such an irresponsible thing?

This author would suggest that the problem of the contemporary South Korean politics is the radicalization of the mainstream right.

When in 2016 the parliament was fiercely debating the impeachment of the then-President Park, the then-ruling conservatives were split between those who thought that the party’s values were more important than the president and those who said that either we support our president unconditionally or the country is doomed.

Sadly, the second faction emerged more prominent, which greatly hurt both the right and the country.

The result of this is a proliferation of conspiracies among conservatives in South Korea. Instead of criticizing the President along the lines of “he appoints unqualified people at top positions and his economic decisions are unwise,” they say Moon Jae-in is an evil traitor working to subvert the Republic of Korea from within and surrender it to the North.

You’d be surprised how often this nonsense has been repeated over and over by the South Korean right in recent years. The pro-Park faction locked itself in such informational isolation that they began to perceive rumours even as crazy as that one as legitimate stories.

Readers from the U.S. know what this kind of partisanship sounds like: not so long ago, it was not that hard to find reports that “Barack Hussein Obama” was a Kenyan-born Muslim Communist with a fake birth certificate.

Meanwhile, these days it’s not hard to find people talking about the ascendant tyrant Donald Trump – a KKK sympathizer and simultaneously an obedient servant of the Kremlin, elected solely because Moscow rigged the elections in his favor.

To an outside observer, this talk looks like an exercise in insanity unbefitting the world’s leading nation, but inside the community of the far left or the far right, these were and are actually quite common. 

The problem with South Korea is that as of now, the right-wing type conspiracy theories are not limited to extremists – or rather, that rather extremist views have become far too influential.

In the recent weeks, media similar to those promoting gibberish like “Moon will form a confederation to surrender the country” have barraged readers with the news that Kim Jong Un is probably dead or in a coma.

If you and most of your friends and associates read this stuff – you are likely to believe them, even if you are a powerful figure.

The moral of the story is very simple: partisanship is getting in the way of good North Korea analysis. Let’s hope this saga teaches everyone a valuable lesson.

Edited by Oliver Hotham