2w ago

TIL About the Jeju Massacre, where South Korean forces wiped out 10 percent of the island of Jeju for the crime of organizing a General Strike

en.wikipedia.org

Jeju uprising - Wikipedia

2w ago

TIL About the Jeju Massacre, where South Korean forces wiped out 10 percent of the island of Jeju for the crime of organizing a General Strike

en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Jeju_uprising

51 comments

Turns out South Korea was a brutal military dictatorship under the backing of the US way longer than you'd think
- USA and brutal dictatorships, name a more iconic duo!
  
  Russia and brutal dictatorships? They're both up there
  
  North Korea and brutal dictatorship
  
  Democracy has been a relatively recent form of government in the grand scheme of things.
- Okay, but have you heard the President of North Korea claimed he scored a perfect golf game and doesn't poop? That's pretty bad, too.
  
  Or North Korea’s imprisonment of entire generations of a family as a form of collective punishment.
  Two things can be bad, you don’t have to rush to defend one side.
  
  Here's a fun game - try sourcing that absurd claim without using any media source funded by NED/USAGM
  
  Ah, that's why he is so fat and instead of exploding, he just talks so much shit, to at least get rid of some of it
So few opportunities to use the word "decimate" literally. And now, one fewer.
- Most people don't know the historical definition of decimate, so using here it would be confusing or redundant.
  
  It would be neither. It would be appropriate.
  Can you define the word redundant for me?
hol up, Jeju island is a real place and a real massacre took place there? Doesn't that make it kinda fucked up that the manga Solo Leveling used it as a location and set a different, wholly unrelated massacre there? I just naively assumed they made up an island. There wasn't even a mention of the labor struggle in either the manga or the anime.
- Seems more lile an explicit political statement, but yeah.
  
  I've been trying to go through and see if there are any other allusions that would make it a political statement, but can't really find anything. Maybe that ants were chosen as the enemies who inhabited the island? but the "moral" of that arc was "hell yeah kill everything, even the kids" so I really hope that wasn't meant as an allusion. It's not like the manga makes any political statements in general, it's your typical generic shonen "helping people is good" and "get strong" kinda themes. I guess there's a bit talking about people trying to forget Jeju Island, but it's played entirely in-universe. Seems too strange to be coincidence though.
- Jeju Island is basically the Kenny of South Korean novels and webcomics. Place gets cooked pretty often.
The anti-socialist views of the southern government and worry about losing control to the north played more into it than the strike.
I live near one of the uncovered mass graves. They put a hauntingly beautiful memorial over it.
This is the kind of shit that either gives you a raging authoritarian boner or like in my case, radicalises you toward anarchism, because fuck the state, fuck absolute power.
Coming to NYC soon

51 comments