Life & Wisdom Quote by Kim Y. Sam

“I don’t think” is doing more work here than the rest of the sentence. Kim Y. Sam’s line isn’t a policy memo; it’s a controlled act of pessimism, a way to indict a government without sounding like an ideologue. The phrasing matters: “current regime” is deliberately chilly, a term more often used for adversaries than allies. It subtly strips South Korea’s administration of democratic warmth and recasts it as a self-protective machine. That choice signals not just disagreement, but distrust.

The target is also carefully framed. Kim doesn’t accuse the government of cruelty; he predicts inertia. “Deal actively” is a low bar, almost bureaucratic, implying the state could at least show procedural urgency even if it won’t show moral courage. The implication is that defectors have been reduced to a manageable “issue,” a political inconvenience shuffled between ministries, election cycles, and diplomatic calculations.

The subtext points to the quiet bargain that often shapes Seoul’s posture: defectors are human beings, but they are also walking geopolitical messages. Treat them too generously and you risk antagonizing Pyongyang or complicating inter-Korean engagement. Treat them too coldly and you betray the South’s own democratic story. Kim’s sentence presses on that hypocrisy by making passivity the scandal.

As a writer, he’s not proposing a fix; he’s staging a credibility test. If the government can’t “deal actively” with the most literal proof of North Korea’s failures, what exactly is its North Korea policy for: people, or optics?