Orbituary: Roh Moo-Hyun

Roh Moo-Hyun is a former president of South Korea, a country currently torn by corruption and oppression. He was considered very radical because he was an anti-corruption president, and also he came from the populace, starting as a peasant who made his ranks through law school and political campaigning. In office, he made many enemies with businesses, bureaucrats, and other politicians, as he overtly denounced grafts and tried to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor.

Beyond his distinctive, and tumultuous tenure as president, it was his personality and character that caught my interest. It seems like he didn’t have the mind of a typical president, yet he continued to strive to better Korea through his term. He admitted that he felt “incompetent” coming into office, and treated those who did attend university with disdain, as he was not able to. He was also diplomatically and socially awkward, packing his own instant noodles on diplomatic trips. However despite his insufficiencies, he never swerved in his condemnation of bribery and political corruption; in the end, it was his family that accepted bribes, and even with those, there are mixed views of whether these monetary transactions were truly bribes or donations. It seems that, though unknown to him at the time they occurred, his family bribes became his downfall; he felt like he had betrayed the people and left office a broken man. This eventually led to his suicide off a hill above his hometown of Bongha, although the suicide is also viewed with skepticism, many believing that he was assassinated.

I skimmed through several other obituaries, although I chose this one because I had heard a bit about the controversy of his death already and wanted to read more about both his life and death. His entire history is unique, because he started off as a peasant and worked his way up to presidency, had a very tumultuous term although kept to his principles, and then returned to peasantry to retire, jaded and disliked by his people. It is also interesting that after his suicide, there was a sudden shift in his perception, as if the population suddenly changed their dissatisfaction towards him to reverence. To me, this shows how unaware the people were about their own president and the state of things around them. At the time of his term, the population was criticizing him because his actions were radical and created much friction between the bureaucracy, however they did not credit him for sticking to his principles. It was only postmortem that the population decided to turn an auspicious eye, and that was brought about by pity.

Roh Moo-Hyun can be a model because despite the futilities of his term, he continued to stay with his principles and never fell prey to the bureaucrats around him. Also, he demonstrates perseverance and diligence because he started as nothing and worked to raise himself to a position where he could create change. However, I would not follow Roh Moo-Hyun in that I would not try to enact my aims in such a radical way. I know my limits and I feel that I would better achieve my ambitions with small steps, creating gradual changes to control the consequences.