I introduced the premise of the series in the previous entry. The thesis was, in short, that modernity is defined, politically, by civil wars between two types of Platonic states for supremacy, with fortunes veering one way or the other at any given time.
The first kind of state is an Atheist spookocracy, which is what is commonly depicted in all dystopian films and literature — so, it should be familiar to us all. Everyone is in plain clothes of white or black, and there is a secret police monitoring thoughts and private conversations, with literally everything being tightly regulated.
And the second form of dystopia/utopia is a religious state, which is structurally the same, but simply assumes a dumber caste of rulers and ruled. The rulers are not capable of being true Statesmen i.e., those possessing true understanding of rules and also disregarding them if necessary to effect the end goal.
As an analogy, imagine a true martial arts master — one who has progressed to the level where they can innovate and flow and adapt to the situation in real time.
And the second best method of rule is the strict dogmatic approach, for when true Statesmen/Kung Fu masters are lacking and priests have to pick up the slack in their place. The strict following of orthodoxy creates a rigid system that is more brittle than the ideal one. Less adaptable. Easier to overthrow, or take down to the mat eventually.
The Two Platonic States of Korea
Now, the story of how we got two Koreas is a great example to draw out the dichotomy that I am referring to.
First, for almost a century prior to the American intervention into Korea which created a divided peninsula, American Christian missionaries were laying down the groundwork for subversion. Sent over by American churches, as part of a kind of informal, proto-CIA, these protestant groups had succeeded in converting upwards of ±30% of the Korean population by the time of the Japanese invasion.
Pyongyang, the then-capital of a united Korea was dubbed “the Jerusalem of the East” as a result.
It should come as little surprise then that Kim Il Sung was raised in a Presbyterian family and educated in Christian schools. The transition from Christianity to Communism was quite easy. This happens over and over again in the history of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and yet it goes studiously unremarked on. Hell, even the opposite transition, or regression, happens all the time too. Just think of Communist Russia ruled by the KGB becoming Christian Russia ruled by the FSB.
To the political layman, there is a vast gulf between Christianity and Communism.
To the initiated though, there is only a technical, semantic difference. One of these Platonic systems is superior to the other, but the other is a safe fallback option that the overarching system of control allows for as well.
But back to Kim.
This is what he had to say on the matter of his conversion to Communism much later in his life:
Religion is not banned in north Korea and freedom of religious belief is guaranteed by law. Men of religion should be brought to understand clearly that they are free to believe in a religion or not. By the way, to ensure freedom of religious belief does not mean that religious activities against state policy should be allowed. Such activities cannot but be regarded as betrayal of the interests of our people. Infringement on the interests of the country and the people should be thoroughly denounced.
Since our people led a wretched life as colonial slaves without a state for nearly half a century in the past, quite a few had a tendency to put religion first.
However, they should not have such backward ideas when we are building an independent, sovereign and democratic state after defeating the vicious Japanese imperialists and liberating our Korean nation. From now on, everyone should actively participate in building a rich and strong, independent and sovereign state with the true patriotic idea of fighting for the interests of the country and the people.
The foreign missionaries living in Korea in the old days were the espionage agents of the imperialists. Only the imperialist countries dispatch missionaries in order to invade other nations but there can be no such a thing in the democratic world today.
Harsh of him to denounce his own family and friends and fellow generals like that.
But I suppose Kim was angry about having been deceived … and possibly even circumsized.
Religious people should abandon the wrong idea of worshipping foreign missionaries. From now on, religion should also be subjected to the interests of the state and the people and should be for the sake of our nation. This is the only religion Koreans can believe in.
We are of the opinion that some Christians at present are inclined to place certain hopes on the US military government and its stooges in south Korea but that this will have no political effect of any consequence on the coming elections. We believe that Christians are first of all Koreans and that, if they really love Korea and want the country’s independence and sovereignty, they will take an active part in these elections of great significance in the history of our nation.
— Kim Il Sung, Works, vol. 2, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Pyongyang 1980, pp. 442-443.
In fact, you would be hard-pressed to find even one of the Korean independence leaders who wasn’t raised or educated as a Christian. They all got their organizing start and education so that they would lead an anti-Japanese resistance network on behalf of the Americans. This they did indeed end up doing, but only after abandoning Christianity as an organizing principle. Kim Il Sung hints at the reasons why they did that above, but more on that in a bit.
For their part, the Japanese feared Korea would be used as a launching pad for future invasions of Japan, and had sought to conquer it sporadically for centuries. Korea, originally, was a very similar culture to Japan’s in that there was an elite that was “high-Sino” in culture, ruling over a folk that had no access to this elite culture.
To counter this, the Christian missionaries promoted the adoption of the common Hangul language and literacy in it, to create a modern Korean identity that had nothing in common with China or Japan. Furthermore, the Japanese had expelled Christianity centuries ago, and had even expelled Buddhism later on, choosing instead to re-adopt a nativist form of Shinto. Both were sound decisions for a nation that was attempting to establish itself as a powerful nation-state on the world stage.
It was in no small part because of this long-standing grudge that Christians held against Japan for its dogged pagan resistance that they encouraged the Koreans to rebel against Japanese occupation.
As a result, the Christian-Korean resistance effort was entirely Biblical in its ideological rhetoric and imagery, and framed as a holy war against Paganism, and the evil rule of “Pharaoh” or “Rome”, as represented by Japan. In short, Koreans were recast in the role of the Jews of the Old Testament in the Christian missionary propaganda.
How original.
That is also why they began to circumsize themselves … although that was adopted en masse later, in the Christian South, under Judeo-American occupation.
…
Now, when the Japanese took over Korea, Christians were targeted for punishment, but this was both justified and morally commendable on the part of the Japanese.
Their version of Shinto was very similar to the Roman concept of an Imperial religion of state. The Emperor was divine and most of the religion was just ritualized showing of loyalty to the Emperor, not the promotion of any kind of theocratic worldview. Christians in Korea, however, denied the divinity of the Emperor, created guerrilla networks of partisans and attacked pagan shrines. For that reason, Japan was harsh in its crackdowns against Korean Christians, who simply doubled down on their foreign religion and declared that they were facing the End Times.
The Christianity to Communism Pipeline
So why did Korea’s Christian rebel anti-Japanese, American-created nu-elite begin to transition to Marxism from Christianity then?
Several reasons.
The first is that Christianity is a religion for cuckolds and slaves, and no armed nativist resistance is possible within its ideological framework … unless you lean into the Old Testament stories about the numerous Jewish revolts against gentile rule. Either way, you have to leave out the hippy Jesus crap about rendering unto Caesar the respect that is his due and focus instead on charity and the rewards of the afterlife instead of on temporal political or military resistance to foreign rule.
Also, while Christians vehemently deny this, it was common knowledge at the time that Marxism was nothing more than the economic realization of Christian social teachings. After all, Marx had literally been commissioned by an organization of Christian socialists to map out a truly Christian economic blueprint for a Christian society.
“You will own nothing but be happy rewarded in the afterlife,” is the key message of Christ’s ministry, and Paul’s besides. Marx comments on this, and is lambasted for the actually truthful and self-apparent stuff that he said, while most of the deleterious and myopic social and economic ideas have been quietly adopted by everyone.
Theologically, the anti-private property message in the religion comes about because of a clear apocalyptic strain in Judeo-Christian literature, anticipating some sort of End Times situation that would render capital accumulation fruitless.
But the End Times that Jesus and Paul prophesied came and passed with no one the worse for them. Or, they occurred and we simply live in the aftermath, as modern-day Pauline Pretorists believe.
1 Thessalonians 4:15–17
“We who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died…”
1 Corinthians 10:11
“These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the ends of the ages have come.”
Either way, no point in hoarding stuff or starting families if you expect a Doomsday or suspect that you missed the second coming and got left behind. The exhortations and parables against property ownership also remained in place post-Doomsday. This is a very important detail for understanding modern-day South Korea, as we will see shortly.
But all of this is not something that only I see or believe in — no, this was being commented on all over the place and time by the intellectual heavy-weights of Europe.
This argument is so simple to understand, and so logical, that it is little wonder how so many Christians transitioned to Marxism in that time. Like, you can get mad at me for claiming that Christianity easily transitions into Marxism … but that’s, literally, exactly, just what happened once Marx’s arguments were made. People heard these arguments and said, “yeah, that makes sense”, and went with it. A good summary of the Marxist pitch to Christians can still be found on their websites.
Hell, the pre-Soviet Russian Orthodox Church (the synod) which is supposed to be “trad” and “based” came to the same realization and endorsed Socialist revolution in Russia against the Tsar as well, remember?
Even Dostoevsky understood how strangely compatible the ideals of the revolutionaries and the Christians’ mission was, which he explores in his book Devils.
But the best example of revelatory literature on the topic Zyamatin’s We though, where a cabal of Christians and revolutions conspire to implement the Platonic utopia-state.
And, finally, the man who most succinctly explained the Christianity ===> Socialism pipeline was Bruno Bauer. He simply looked at the implicit economic program presented in the Bible for Christians:
Abolition of social hierarchy (all equal in Christ)
Negation of private wealth (a rich man can’t get into heaven)
Communal sharing of everything (Acts of the Apostles)
Christ’s moral attack on property as a concept (for Christians)
Universal human community replacing ethnic or civic divisions
But, crucially, organized Christianity refused to realize any of this materially or politically. Instead, upon taking power, it deferred this ideal state of affairs to the afterlife. Organized Christianity cynically moralized the state of poverty as a sign of a happy afterlife to come and it encouraged the masses to simply endure their earthly punishment, while the priests lived lavishly at their expense.
So for Bauer, Christianity was literally just utopian communism that had been displaced theologically into heaven. Basically, the Church made heaven a Communist utopia and told people to just suffer until they reached it. All that Marxism did was imbue people with the motivation and vision to try and achieve that state while still on Earth.
A kind of Christianity without having to wait for Christ.
Nothing more, really.
And now back to the harrowing tale of Korea.
Christian “Nationalism” v Marxist “Nationalism”
Most explanations of the history of the Korean independence effort and the subsequent split along North and South lines will not mention Plato. They will mention Marx and Christianity, and maybe even some Confucianism.
A few words on Confucianism then — it was part of the lingering “high-Sino” culture of the elites that bore more than just a passing resemblance to Platonism itself. I’ve talked about how it was the Platonism of the East before.
Here:
But the Christian Nationalist state in the South and the Marxist Nationalist state in the North are a near perfect case study of two competing Platonic systems. The North adopted The Republic as their model, and the South adopted Laws as theirs. They did this through the proxies of Communism and Christianity. Scratch past the veneer of Communism and Christianity and you will find The Republic and Laws.
As for the reasons behind why the Korean independence guerrillas hiding out in Manchuria abandoned Christianity, well, they explain in their own words why they did that as well.
Here is Kim Il Sung again:
