Han Kang speaks during a press conference in Seoul in November 2023. (©Yonhap/Kyodo)
Many ethnic Koreans, at home and abroad, rejoiced when, on 10 October 2024, Han Kang became the first Korean, and Asian woman, to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel Committee lauded her "intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas." For example, from Japanese colonialism in Korea (1910-1945), which inspired The Vegetarian (2007). And also by anti-communist, authoritarian governments in Gwangju (1979) (Human Acts, 2014) and Jeju (1948-49) (We Do Not Part, 2021).
Han herself was born in Gwangju (1970), although her family moved to Seoul before the 1979 military crackdown.
The 2024 Nobel Prize marks the global ascendance of a Korean cultural progressive narrative. It highlights the traumas of capitalism (Parasite, Squid Game), anticommunist regimes (Jiseul, Taxi Driver), and Japanese colonialism (Pachinko, Exhuma). This narrative diffuses globally, thanks to US-based media and streamers.
However, its creators and proponents at home threaten to become another moralistic, authoritarian elite that censors dissenting viewpoints.
Censoring Dissenting Views
The Syngman Rhee regime enacted South Korea's 1948 National Security Law to enforce its Manichean, often uncorroborated narrative that pro-North Korea communist agents infiltrated the political opposition. Progressives today enforce an opposite, but equally Manichean, narrative that North Korean agents were nonexistent in South Korea's democratic movements.
On February 13, 2020, the Seoul Central District Court sentenced commentator Jee Man-won to two years in prison for defamation. He had claimed that North Korea helped direct "rioters" during the 1980 pro-democracy movement in Gwangju.
In December 2020, the progressive Democratic Party passed the "May 18 Distortion Punishment Act." That law allows sentences of up to five years in prison and/or a maximum fine of $42,000 (₩50 million) for "the denial, distortion, fabrication, or dissemination of false facts" regarding the 1980 democratization movement.
Civic groups currently lobby for legislation to criminalize claims that North Korea was involved in the Jeju uprising. At that time, tens of thousands of residents were killed as alleged communists.
Progressive activists even target creative fiction. In 2021, they pressured Korean corporations to drop their sponsorship of the Disney Plus television show "Snowdrop." The reason was its fictional portrayal of a North Korean spy during South Korea's democracy movement in the 1980s.
Rush to Use 'Conspiracy Theory' Labels
US-based media have supported such activists, by labeling claims about North Korean involvement as "conspiracy theories."
Citing United States intelligence reports, independent (nonpartisan) scholars, such as Kookmin professor Andrei Lankov, reject Jee Man-won's claim that hundreds of North Korean special forces were in Gwangju. They also reject the credibility of a small number of defectors who support such claims.
Still, they are more tentative in refuting any theory of North Korean involvement, given the documented history of North Korean espionage and the regime's secrecy. In the 1970s and 1980s, left-leaning scholars rejected "conspiracy" theories that North Korean agents were kidnapping Japanese citizens. However, in 2002, then-North Korean leader Kim Jong Il abruptly acknowledged such abductions. One should wait to access the Kim regime's files before making a final evaluation.
Contrasting Views on the Comfort Women Issue
One need not wait on the debate over Japanese colonialism. The postwar, democratic government in Japan has already opened its files. In the 1990s, Tokyo officially investigated claims of human rights violations, specifically that the military forcibly abducted comfort women, and declared them to be largely unsubstantiated. In Japan, academics, journalists, and ordinary citizens actively debate and research this issue.
Historian Yoshiaki Yoshimi argues that the comfort women system was largely sexual slavery and a war crime. Meanwhile, Ikuhiko Hata reports that Korean comfort women were largely willing prostitutes, with no direct involvement by the Japanese military. Both professors remain gainfully employed, although the government endorses Hata's findings. To explain the uncorroborated testimonials of abduction, one academic (Shaun O'Dwyer) suggests manipulated or false memories, rather than deliberate lies.
The claim that most Korean comfort women were voluntary prostitutes is a mainstream academic argument in Japan. It is also officially endorsed by the government. However, the same argument exposes one to economic and legal jeopardy in South Korea.
Perils in the Absence of Debate
On April 26, 2017, a Sunchon National University professor ("Song") lectured to his class that some Koreans "probably" volunteered to be comfort women. The university terminated Song's employment, and a court sentenced him to six months in prison. Other professors have been prosecuted, fined, and forced into early retirement.
In the absence of open debate, historically-inspired books, comics, television, and movies ― fiction and (supposedly) nonfiction ― vigorously promote the narrative that Japanese colonialism surpassed the brutality of the German Nazi regime and is the root of modern-day evils. Even as progressive activists reject the uncorroborated claims of North Korean defectors, they embrace and disseminate that of former comfort women.
One English translation, disseminated as a graphic comic, reads: "Then, some soldier beheaded one of the girls…The soldiers put the severed head in a large kettle and boiled it…and made us drink the broth'"
Losing Balance in Single-Issue Focuses
Moreover, by focusing exclusively on one set of human rights violations, the progressive narrative ignores other violations. That includes comfort women for the US military in post-1945 South Korea. It also includes the 93,000 thousand ethnic Koreans (Zainichi) and Japanese lured to North Korea through false promises.
In the 1970s and 1980s, nationalist-minded media in South Korea and conservative media overseas praised the real economic accomplishments of the anti-communist regime, even as they ignored its censorship. Today, nationalist media at home and progressives abroad similarly cheer the accomplishments of the Korean cultural establishment. Yet they do so even as those who criticize Han Kang face potential criminal prosecution.
On October 21, 2024, a South Korean civic group filed a criminal complaint against a local writer, Kim Gyu-na. The group claimed Kim allegedly defamed Han Kang and violated the May 18 Distortion Punishment Act.
Standing Up for Individual and Academic Freedoms
Liberal minded journalists and academics should not be ethno-nationalist or ideological cheerleaders. Rather, they should be independent critics who question any and all restrictions on individual freedom.
They should remember, as George Orwell wrote in Animal Farm, that the formerly oppressed can easily become the new oppressors. And they should heed [US Supreme Court] Justice Learned Hand's 1944 warning about ideological certainty. "The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right," he famously wrote.
Those journalists should also ask South Korea's cultural elites, including Nobel laureates, to critically discuss all human rights violations in the Korean peninsula. That includes the current suppression of open discourse.
RELATED:
- Great Minds Don't Always Think Alike: What Happens When a Harvard Professor Challenges the Status Quo
- Complex Truths on Korean Comfort Women
- Lew Seok-choon Secures Crucial Victory for Academic Freedom
Author: Joseph Yi
Joseph Yi is an associate professor of political science at Hanyang University (Seoul) and a founding member of Hx East Asia Community, a community of Heterodox Academy. Yi was also born in Gwangju, Korea.
