S Korea’s impeached president fans communist fears and conspiracies

On a frosty January day, a young store student, Shin Jeong-min, waited uneasily outside South Korea’s Constitutional Court, as the government’s suspended leader arrived to combat his impeachment.

She sang along with thousands of his angry and enraged supporters, who have been supporting him always since his unsuccessful attempt to impose martial law. ” Transfer him then. Cancel his impeachment”, they shouted.

According to Jeong-min, “our land will become one with North Korea and Kim Jong Un” if the leader is impeached and the opposition leader is elected, according to Jeong-min, citing a concept that is well-known to the most ardent supporters of President Yoon: that the left-leaning criticism group wants to unite with the North and make South Korea into a socialist nation.

Jeong-min, 22, stands out from the horde of seasoned Koreans who have long hated and distrusted the North and make up the majority of those who hold these far-right secretive ideas.

That era of Koreans, who are now in their 60s and 70s, endured the Cold War and is deeply fond of the agonizing effects of North Korea’s war in the 1950s.

He fabricated these doubts to support his strength seize when Yoon declared martial law in the first few days of December.

He claimed that” North Korean socialist causes” had ingested the opposition group and were attempting to overthrow the nation without providing any evidence. They needed to be “eradicated”, he said, as he moved quickly to ban political action and put the troops in demand.

Two decades on from his failed revolution, an anti-communist panic is gripping Yoon’s followers, young and old.

Even those who had not given North Korea or socialism much consideration are now convinced that their vibrant democracy is about to fall into a communist dictatorship and that their president had no choice but to revoke people’s political rights in order to shield them from both Pyongyang and Beijing.

One office worker in his 40s who had slipped out of his job to join the court protest said,” This is a war between communism and democracy.”

Another 30-year-old man vehemently argued that the president needed to be in office as soon as possible. ” He’s going to arrest all the North Korean spies”, he said.

These dangers were once very real. During the 1960s and 70s, spies would regularly attempt to infiltrate the government.

A group of North Korean commandos attempted to assassinate then-President Park Chung-hee in a 1968 cross-border operation. The bullet-strikes that erupted for nearly two weeks on Seoul’s Bugak mountain are still visible on a tree that is atop the mountain.

In the 1980s, during the final years of South Korea’s violent military dictatorship, a radical far-left student movement began to praise Pyongyang for its” superior” political system. They were labelled regime” sympathisers”.

Authoritarian leaders frequently claimed that their political adversaries were North Korean conspirators.

” Anti-communism became the dominant ideology of South Korea’s military dictators, who used it to control society and justify restricting people’s freedom”, said Shin Jin-wook, a sociology professor at Chungang University.

Today, these threats have dissipated. You would struggle to find anyone in South Korea who wants to imitate life in the North due to Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and advanced cyber-hacking abilities, which pose the greatest risk. The political left and right are merely divided over how to deal with their troubled neighbor.

The left-leaning Democratic Party prefers to engage with Pyongyang, believing that the two nations can peacefully coexist. While Yoon’s conservative People Power Party’s strategy has been to try to threaten the North into submission with military superiority.

The president is accused of stoking people’s fears, according to history. Yoon is the first president to use this anti-communist ideology so flagrantly since Korea became a democracy in 1987, according to Mr. Shin, and his rhetoric almost completely matches that of previous dictators.

Not only has Yoon accused the parliament, led by the opposition Democratic Party, of being riddled with Pyongyang sympathisers, but he has dangled the idea that North Korea, with help from China, rigged last year’s parliamentary election.

According to one Democratic Party lawmaker, Wi Sung-lac, Yoon “made up fake news” to demonize the opposition and use it to justify his totalitarian behavior.

” We have fought for democracy and freedom in Korea for a long time. He referred to opposition politicians who pushed past troops and climbed over the parliament’s walls during the period of martial law to reject the motion as they were able to thwart Yoon’s attempt to end Korea’s democracy.

According to Lee Sangsin, a polling expert at the Korea Institute for National Unification, extreme conservative groups had previously pushed these ideas.

” These groups were isolated. People didn’t take much notice”, he explained. ” But because Yoon is the president, his words carry weight, and many people have accepted what he said”.

One of the pro-Yoon weekend rallies we attended last month demonstrated this. Far from being die-hard conspiracy theorists, nearly everyone we spoke to said Yoon had changed their thinking.

” At first I didn’t support Yoon, but martial law opened my eyes”, said Oh Jung-hyuk, a 57-year-old musician, there with his wife. ” We can see how deeply leftist forces are in our society,” he said. One woman in her 40s told us that while she had previously been skeptical about Chinese voter rigging, she had “realized” it when she had done some research on the subject.

Yoon’s supporters frequently draw comparisons to actual events, such as how Moon Jae-in, the former leader of the Democratic Party, met Kim Jong Un to try to broker a peace deal, and how Lee Jae-myung, the current leader, is being held accountable for aiding in the sending of millions of dollars to North Korea, to provide support for a bigger plot.

The sociology professor, Mr. Shin, said,” This far-fetched conspiracy theory that China rigged the election is becoming more and more popular. The premise of fair and free elections is one of the most fundamental consensuses in a democracy, and people now disapprove of it. This is very extreme”.

As Yoon’s unsubstantiated claims have taken root, his support seems to have grown. Although the majority of people in South Korea still want him permanently removed from office, the number has fallen. Last week it stood at 57%, compared to 75% in the week after the martial law declaration.

Through his anti-communist rhetoric, Yoon has also effectively tapped into a simmering distrust of China. Fearing China also means being wary of North Korea right now.

Many supporters had recently exchanged their trademark” Stop the Steal” election fraud placards for ones that read” Chinese Communist Party OUT” at a recent rally in Seoul.

” I believe China is interfering in all South Korea’s political affairs. It’s pulling the strings behind the scenes”, said 66-year-old Jo Yeon-deok, who was holding one of the signs.

According to Mr. Lee, a polling expert,” a growing majority of the populace now thinks China wants to create some sort of vassal state.”

For those in their 20s and 30s who have never experienced real danger from North Korea, China is a more believable threat. Last year the Pew Research Centre found that South Korea and Hungary were the only two countries where the young had a more negative view of China than the old.

But contrary to the information they are being fed, young people’s fears have nothing to do with communism, said Cho Jin-man, a political scientist at Duksung Women’s University.

Until recently South Koreans felt their country was superior to China, Mr Cho explained – but as Beijing has become stronger and more assertive they have started to see it as a threat, especially since the US started treating it as such.

On top of that, young people have a lot of grievances: they’re struggling to find work or afford a home, and feel resentful when they see their universities catering to Chinese students.

Communism, Mr Cho believes, is being used as a convenient catch-all bogeyman to stir up fear and hate. Far-right YouTube channels, which are particularly well-known among young men, amplify this message.

” North Korea and China are my biggest concerns”, said Kim Gyung-joo, a 30-year-old IT developer, who came alone to one of the rallies. He used to be left-wing like his friends, he said, and was initially very critical of the president’s martial law order. However, he realized martial law was “unavoidable” after conducting an investigation on the subject on YouTube.

” If I’d been in the president’s position, I’d have declared it too”, he said.

Nonetheless, Wi Sung-lac the opposition politician is not concerned about his party losing support. ” Even though these extreme views are spreading, they will be limited”, he said. The majority of people are aware of who we really are, and they yearn for a return to normality.

Polling expert Lee Sang-sin is less sanguine, likening Yoon’s supporters to” a fast-growing cult”. The president’s move was “very divisive”, he said.

It “is going to have a lasting effect on Korean society,” the statement read.

Hosu Lee and Leehyun Choi provided additional reporting.