- P-ISSN0023-3900
- E-ISSN2733-9343
- A&HCI, SCOPUS, KCI
Vol.65 No.2
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Abstract
This article disrupts the hegemonic narrativization of the Hungnam evacuation as a self-evidently benevolent event during the Korean War (1950–1953), as depicted in public commemorations and filmic representations. By writing the evacuation into a critical history of the US military empire, this article argues that the anticommunist narrative of Hungnam as a benevolent rescue from a singular threat of violence—the communists—to a free South Korea conceals the violent conditions of anticommunist occupation—liberation—and rescue during the war. For nearly three months in the late fall of 1950, occupied North Koreans encountered and negotiated necropolitical conditions of anticommunist liberation that trace back to the violent political order that emerged in South Korea under the US military government. With China’s intervention in the war, however, the liberated friends, many of whom were Christians, found themselves becoming a refugee problem for the US military. As this article shows, the US military’s violent policing of civilian movements created the need to rescue the city’s Christians from being mistaken for bad refugees at roadblocks and checkpoints along the roads leading into the city and its port. Through a critical reading of the US military’s refugee problem in wartime North Korea, this essay also examines the formation of a refugee subjectivity that contains within it both colonial and anticommunist discourses of subjecthood in the making of a US-led free world.
Abstract
The question of enemy property (jeoksan) and its dispensation wends its way across a number of literary works in the late 1940s and 1950s. Among others, prominent writers such as Gye Yongmuk, Yeom Sangseop, Im Ogin, Chae Mansik, and Choe Jeonghui addressed this material history in varying ways, all of which find common ground in an interrogation (at times implicit) of the meaning of liberation (haebang) itself, a term closely associated with the post-1945 articulation of anticommunism (bangong) in the Republic of Korea (ROK). During the Korean War, the notion of traitorous property (yeoksan), referring to homes of communist sympathizers, gained currency. This article follows what we might call the property trail in the works of Chae Mansik (1902–1950) and Choe Jeonghui (1912–1990) from the mid-1940s through the mid-1950s, a time when the dispensation of enemy property was widely perceived as central to the newly forming socioeconomic order of the ROK. For both writers, haebang becomes something other than a marker separating past from present. Their work seeks to write history in another form, as the story of a property trail and its attendant feelings, attitudes, suspicions, desires. To follow this property trail is to approach the untoward coincidence of liberation and division of the peninsula manifest in habitation of the enemy/traitorous home.
Abstract
This article rethinks Korean and global anticommunism through an analysis of the Seosan Pioneer Corps (1961–1966), a land reclamation project and vagrant penal colony sustained for years by the delivery and misappropriation of US agricultural surpluses. In the past decade, the Seosan settlement has resurfaced in public discourse as a forgotten scandal of forced labor and marriage. This essay begins by noting a formal correspondence between recent exposés of the settlement and the Cold War anticommunist tropes that undergirded its existence, notably the unmasking of the vagrant as a communist in disguise. While contemporary narratives of burial and exhumation imply that public ignorance was a precondition of the violence, a wide reading of 1960s media points to the settlement’s remarkable visibility in popular and intellectual culture. Public knowledge and participation, the article argues, helped facilitate the mobilization of settlers to Seosan and other pioneer corps projects, a movement enabled by both an injunction to mass vigilance vis-à-vis the vagrant as potential communist and the visual inscription of this figure in a legible domestic order. Media spectacles documented this newfound domesticity in detail, disclosing not only geographical coordinates and architectural dimensions but also violence and coercion. Anticommunism, then, functioned less to obscure violence than to sever the settlement from its social and material foundations. Countering this ideological move, the article’s last section reconstructs an alternative genealogy of the settlement from a recent volume of oral histories, in which the pioneer corps appears as a continuation of wartime refuge and a structural outcome of Cold War aid flows.
Abstract
This article analyzes South Korea’s conversion policy toward leftist political prisoners under the Park Chung-hee regime, particularly following the implementation of the Yushin Constitution in 1972. The policy, which evolved into a coercive and violent apparatus, required prisoners to submit written statements renouncing their ideological beliefs. These individuals, often held in special facilities segregated from the general prison population, were subjected to systemic efforts aimed at enforcing ideological conformity. Despite the absence of any immediate political threat, the state’s emphasis on forced conversion stemmed from its desire to assert ideological superiority over North Korea. South Korea’s policy of ideological conversion can be traced back to Japan’s Public Order Preservation Law of 1925 and the Tennō system. Unlike Japan’s emphasis on reform and reintegration, South Korea employed coercion and demanded complete ideological surrender. However, this approach failed to dismantle the ideological convictions or moral stance of the political prisoners, and in many cases, served only to reinforce them.
Abstract
This article examines South Korea’s National Security Law (NSL) as a legal mechanism of thought control and repression. Despite the country’s democratic transition since 1987, the NSL has remained intact as a tool for suppressing political dissent and institutionalizing state violence. The Korean Constitutional Court has played a pivotal role in legitimizing this system by interpreting the basic free and democratic order as an ideology that merges liberal democracy with a market economy, while simultaneously restricting freedom of thought and expression. Thus, the Court’s adoption of militant democracy (jeontujeok minjujuui) has enabled the dissolution of political parties, criminalization of dissent, and reinforcement of authoritarian legal structures. The NSL, which originates from the Public Order Preservation Law of the Japanese colonial era, and its postwar function in suppressing leftist movements, unionization, and civil liberties, extends its repressive reach beyond criminal law to encompass state surveillance, coercive ideological conversion, and mass purges. This article also addresses the failure of transitional justice in South Korea, which continues to uphold the NSL, reproducing the conditions for ideological stigmatization. Ultimately, this article argues that South Korea’s legal and constitutional order must undergo a fundamental transformation. The abolition of the NSL alone is insufficient; a broader dismantling of anticommunist thought control mechanisms is imperative. Without this comprehensive restructuring, South Korea will remain trapped in a dual-state, where nominal rule of law coexists with coercive thought control.
Abstract
Analyzing intelligence documents from the Yongsan Police Station in Seoul, this study examines how the spy-reporting system functioned in South Korea under the Park Chung-hee government and its impact on urban social relations. Drawing on 115 cases of spy reports from 1973 to 1977, this research reveals how anticommunist surveillance mechanisms penetrated everyday life and shaped urban communities. The study finds that the reporting system primarily targeted three groups: frequent movers in a rapidly urbanizing Seoul, individuals with connections to Japan or North Korea, and members of the urban lower class without stable employment, such as day laborers and bar workers. While previous research has focused on fabricated spy cases and democratization movements, this study uniquely illuminates how ordinary citizens internalized and practiced anticommunism in their daily lives. The findings suggest that anticommunist practices served as a means of managing social anxieties generated by rapid industrialization and urbanization, while simultaneously allowing urban residents to engage with state power. The spy-reporting system created communities based on exclusion rather than inclusion, as suspicious persons were systematically marginalized. This research contributes to our understanding of how state ideology shaped individuals’ everyday lives during South Korea’s developmental period and suggests that contemporary social issues partly stem from this historical legacy of surveillance and exclusion.
Abstract
The present article focuses on the logic used by leftists in South Korea for exculpating Putin for his full-scale invasion of Ukraine (February 2022 to the present). An essential point of this logic is the (mis)identification of Putin’s regime as a supposedly anti-imperialist heir to the Soviet Union. Suggested by Putinist propaganda, this (mis)identification is concomitantly strengthened by a long tradition of idealizing the Soviet Union and its policies among the South Korean Left. With Putin’s Russia replacing the Soviet Union on their mental maps, some representatives of South Korea’s nationalist Left view Putin as an ally. On the practical plane, they hope that the supposed Putinist opposition to American hegemony will weaken the latter and thus give South Korea more elbowroom in its relationship with the USA. On a more general level, a salient feature of pro-Putinism in Korea is the (mis)identification of the multipolar world Russia putatively fights for, with a democratization of international relations.