hankyoreh

Benedict Anderson used the term “imagined community” in his analysis of “nation.” This word “nation” in English includes the meanings gukga (the state), gungmin (the people or citizenry, as in “the American people”), and minjok (a group of people or an ethnicity, as in “Apache Nation”). That which is a state, a populace, and ethnic group, is a “nation.” Anderson called this an “imagined community.” Why “imagined”? Because, while those who make up the community don’t know each other, they share an image of themselves linked together internally. “Imagined” in this context must not be misunderstood to mean simple fantasy or hallucination. Nations are substantial entities that form in the course of history and that function for real.

The term gets complicated when it enters the Korean language. Depending on the context, sometimes it ends up being translated into what in Korean means “state” (gukga), “people” (gungmin), or “ethnic group” (minjok). This can lead to a significant difference in nuance, and the biggest cause of how it feels in Korean is the unique situation that is the division of the Korean Peninsula. Within the peninsula, the “nation” was split into two “states” that divided “the Korean people.”

The booklet titled An Alternative Textbook of Modern and Contemporary Korean History (Daean Gyogwaseo Hanguk Geun-Hyeondae Sa) demonstrates something about that civil war. The publication adopts in full the historical interpretations of the book “Looking Again at History Around the Time of Liberation” (“Haebang Jeonju Sa-ui Jae Insik”), published two years ago by “New Right” scholars and received with much fanfare by conservative newspapers. The authors of these two publications reject minjok, the Korean people, and believe in gukga, the state.

The peculiar thing is that these authors invoke Anderson’s imagined community in justifying their argument. One of the professors who participated in the book “…History Around the Time of Liberation” writes in “An Alternative Textbook of Modern and Contemporary Korean History” that “ethnic people groups (minjok) are ‘imagined communities.’ So far, Korean history has been written as imaginary history with the Korean people as the subject.” In other words, minjok (the Korean people as an ethnicity) is fiction, and the state is what is for real. It’s a deliberate distortion and appropriation of what Anderson had in mind. Neither minjok nor gukga go away because you subjectively deny them.

Their motive for pushing minjok aside and putting the state first is clear in how the book was written and edited. It is an ideological effort that tries to have the forces that were behind modernization recognized as the state’s only legitimate line of descent. This is what leads them to treat those who collaborated with the Japanese as the forces of industrialization who laid the “foundations of the market economy.” Dictator Syngman Rhee is an excellent statesman who “built the liberal democratic system that is the framework of the Republic of Korea.” Park Chung-hee’s coup d’etat was a “groundbreaking change” that was “where the modernization revolution began.” The nationalist (minjok) and democratic forces that fought Japanese imperialism and dictatorship are either pushed aside to be supporting characters of history or are erased and made anonymous. The Bodo Yeonmaeng (“Protection and Guidance League”) Massacre committed by “father of the nation” Syngman Rhee is allotted but one sentence, and the April 3rd Jeju Massacre is treated as an “armed rebellion by leftist elements.”

When “nation” functions to rally and call the members of the community, you have “nationalism,” which in Korean could be either gukgajuui or minjokjuui, “isms” based on state or ethnic group. Shortened crudely, modern Korean history has been a fight between state-centered nationalism and nationalism that focuses on the Korean people as a group. It has been a process in which anti-communist and “divided” state-based nationalism suppressed, interrogated, and inflicted punishment on peace and reunification-oriented ethnic nationalism. This nationalism of the Korean people demands that we climb the walls of the Cold War and have reconciliation between North and South, and has only just recently been given full citizenship as a valid “ism” The intolerant view of history held by the New Right is riding the more conservative political and social atmosphere one sees in the emergence of the government of Lee Myung-bak. If their book really does get used as a “textbook” in the literal sense, it will be something that aggravates the wounds that have barely begun to heal and turns the peninsula back to the dictatorship years. It is scary to see signs of this happening.

The views presented in this column are the writer’s own, and do not necessarily reflect those of The Hankyoreh.