Merrill Newman’s back home, so I guess it’s safe now to say that his apology sounded totally phony.
Newman’s the 85-year-old Californian, a Korean War veteran, who went on a package tour in North Korea, was grabbed off the plane at the end, and detained for six weeks on charges of spying.
His captors videotaped him making a confession and apology. (North Korea has the potential to be a reliable source of material for SorryWatch.)
Newman says his troubles may have begun when he told North Korean tour guides that he’d like to meet veterans from the area where he had trained partisans during the war.
Merrill Newman in North Korea, declaiming his iniquity.
“The North Koreans seem to have misinterpreted my curiosity as something more sinister.”
Merrill Newman knows more about Korea than me, but he was more naïve than I would have been, because I always worry about being flung in jail for no good reason. I was nearly jailed once for trying to put on my coat during a mass jaywalking citation. It was the LAPD, and they are famously mean, so I’m lucky they didn’t shoot me on the spot. (Hi, LAPD! Aren’t you sorry now you didn’t book me then?) But I think the North Koreans are even meaner and wackier than the LAPD. (Hi, LAPD! Please don’t take that last statement as a dare.)
In the fitful, fragmentary video of confession & apology released by the North Koreans (accompanied by the text), Newman seems as if he’s delivering someone else’s words.
From “living in California, USA” to “I will tell the true features of the DPRK” it’s full of phrases an American would be unlikely to use, even if they’d been soaking in North Korean propaganda.
“As I gave 300 people with barbarity gone to the South who had ill feelings toward the DPRK from Chodo military education and guerilla training they later did attack against the DPRK although the armistice was signed.”
“In the process of following tasks given by me I believe they would kill more innocent people.”
“Shamelessly I had a plan to meet any surviving soldiers and pray for the souls of the dead soldiers in Kuwol Mt. during the Korean war.”
That’s from the text of Newman’s statement, not the video itself. Maybe that’s why the video is so patchy – they cut out the most unconvincing parts.
Here’s the apology part:
I realize that I cannot be forgiven for my offensives but I beg for pardon on my knees by apologizing for my offensives sincerely toward the DPRK government and the Korean people and I want not punish me.
Please forgive me.
I will never commit the offensive act against the DPRK Government and the Korean People again.
I glad they not punish him further.
Sinister reconnaissance vehicle, standard North Korean tour bus, or friendly caterpillar?
On his return, Newman confirmed that he was under pressure to confess to what they said he had done, and to apologize. “In fact, the North Korean interrogator repeatedly made the following statement to me: ‘If you do not tell the full truth, in detail, and apologize fully, you will not be able to return to your home country. If you do tell the full truth, in detail, and apologize fully, you will be able to return to your home country — someday.’ Under these circumstances, I read the document with the language they insisted on because it seemed to be the only way I might get home.”
Newman’s verbatim reading of the statement had the desired effect. People were skeptical that it was something he wrote himself.
I think this is related to some less dramatic apologies we see in daily life, when a person who doesn’t really want to apologize parrots the language of an offended person.
Offended person: “You humiliated me in front of my whole family, including cousin Fifi and that creep she married!”
Nonremorseful person: “I’m sorry you felt humiliated in front of your whole family, including cousin Fifi and that creep she married.”
Sometimes they copy the language to be openly defiant. (Singsong delivery: very bad sign.) Other times they hope it will pass as an apology, but let them secretly preserve their pride.
Don’t do this. It is the offensive act.
Someday we need to hear more about the coat and the jaywalking, but until then, note to self: No Vacationing In North Korea. Ever. I Mean, Seriously.
Bless his heart. He really was naive. If you’re going to visit there, keep your mouth shut, it’s a Communist country and they its government is kind of hair-trigger twitchy against Capitalist Americans, duh.
Merrill Newman is a very good friend of my Aunt. I had dinner with him in 2009. He is a scholarly gentleman, wise and learned about many things. Naive is not a word I, or my aunt, would ever use to describe him.
When we saw the video of his “apology” it was painfully evident that it was not his own words that he was speaking.
We are very grateful that he has returned home safely.
Thank you for posting, Patrick. It’s a good reminder that someone we read about (or in my case post about) is a real person. I think just about everyone is grateful that he was allowed to come home safely. I certainly am.
I think all of us, no matter how learned, no matter how wise, and even no matter how experienced, have areas in which we are naive. (I certainly do.) No one can know everything, and we focus our attention on the areas we find the most worthy.
I don’t know if this applies to Merrill Newman, but I know from my own family that the (occasional) innocence of the deep scholar — as in the image of the “absent-minded professor” — has a strange charm.
As he said after his return home, “I’ve… come to the conclusion that I just didn’t understand that, for the North Korean regime, the Korean War isn’t over and that even innocent remarks about the war can cause big problems if you are a foreigner.” He might call himself naive.
But his revised comprehension of the situation is evident in his remark, “To demonstrate that I was reading the document under some duress, I did my best to read the ‘confession’ in a way that emphasized the bad grammar and strange language that the North Koreans had crafted for me to say. I hope that came across to all who saw the video.” And so it did.