From Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff
When Two Million People Lived In a Horizontal Society
Margaret talks with Mia Wong about the deep history of Korean anarchism and how it led to one of the great experiments with antiauthoritarian social structure of the 20th century.
Korea. Statement by Anarchist Yondae (Anarchist Solidarity) on the upcoming elections in Korea.
Originally published by Anarchist Yondae (Anarchist Solidarity). Translated by The Anarchist Library.
from Center for a Stateless Society
North and South Korea don’t have much in common today, after decades spent in very different political and economic systems.
However, there is one thing both sides of the DMZ have inherited: the concept of minjok, a word that translates as “people” but can refer, more broadly, to both the Korean nation and the Korean race. As such, it’s common on both sides of the Korean Peninsula to say that there is only one Korean nation, one that was divided against the will of the minjok, and that unification is inevitable.
Another commonality: the two Koreas both got the term from an early 20th-century liberal-turned-anarchist who would be appalled at how the two nations have used his idea since.