Note: couple edits here and there to tweak semantics and such :)

Greetings comrades and hello to my lovelies! I apologize for having been incredibly inactive despite my promises to continue posting my silly little essays onto this platform. I’ve been recovering from an intensely sexually abusive relationship with my ex-boyfriend, but I wanted to come out and write this short piece as the struggle of Venezuelan diasporic socialists spoke to me very heavily.

As I’m sure many comrades here have witnessed, our mainstream media in the imperial core is being flooded with Venezuelan diaspora who are celebrating the US kidnapping of Maduro and intervention. The ruling class here is attempting to manufacture consent for imperialist endeavors in Venezuela by citing these voices as the voice of Venezuela, attempting to portray a demonized depiction of Maduro, socialism in Venezuela, and the Bolivarian Revolution.

As a political organizer in the belly of the beast, I have spoken to many diasporic Venezuelans at our demonstrations, venting their frustrations with how the media is portraying Venezuelan public opinion and the US forced regime change. I wanted to write a word of strength to these comrades and reassure my comrades directly in the Global South that a revolutionary diaspora of oppressed peoples exists, for I am proof in the flesh.

First and foremost, let us establish a truth: as we speak, Venezuelans have flooded and will continue to flood their streets in vigilant opposition to the United States’ illegal kidnapping and overthrow of Maduro. This is the narrative and the facts that the mainstream imperialist media will not show to the public here, but as many comrades here have uploaded and as you can follow on the social media of the PSUV (Venezuela’s socialist party), you can bear witness to the truth: the Venezuelan revolution is a people’s revolution.

Secondly, what on Earth could my Korean heritage have anything to do with what is happening in Venezuela?

I am a Marxist-Leninist, a communist, in the Korean diaspora. On my mother’s side, I am descended from the last of the Korean ruling class aristocracy, those who collaborated with the Japanese imperialists, those who refused to yield to the DPRK’s people’s revolution. On my father’s side, I am descended from the farmers who have worked the soil of Korea. I am the first in my entire lineage to be born outside of Korea, in the United States.

I grew up on anti-communist, anti-Korean (anti-DPRK) propaganda, just like every other child in the diaspora. What I find so intriguing about anti-DPRK propaganda is that it is not simply annoyingly liberal jokes in poor taste, it is incredibly, explicitly, unbelievably racist. Virtually all portrayal of the DPRK, our decolonial revolutionaries, and people is a depiction of yellowface; every single propaganda lie told about the DPRK is not only inaccurate but clearly Orientalist.

This is an idea that I could and likely will flesh out much more deeply at some other time: being raised in the Korean diaspora, under the wing of anti-DPRK propaganda, was being raised to hate ourselves. In learning to hate the DPRK, we were learning how to hate ourselves. In learning to hate communism, we were learning how to hate ourselves.

“North Korea” was a very scary word for me growing up. The Korean diaspora is ironically some of the most eager to perpetuate, diffuse, reiterate, and further anti-DPRK jokes, not realizing that we are essentially making crude jokes about our own faces, our own features, our own heritage, our own history, our own people.

I grew up around white people. Growing up in predominantly white Evangelical churches, I also had a fair share of religious trauma. I cried at the thought that the will of God saved me and birthed me into a devout family, and by extension, I cried in awe at the thought that I had been born into Korea of democracy and paradise, not the Korea of “authoritarianism” and hell. Anxious to please my white church, the vastly white community, and my anti-DPRK parents, I grew into an uncomfortable, oppressive, and restrictive box, the same box that the imperial core forces all the children of Asia to climb into at our expense. We must be smaller, and smaller, and smaller. I find it a hilarity looking back on it now, the white people convinced me that my own country’s history was too complex for me to understand! That war is war, and our people went feral as all the peoples below the white man do at one point or another. I used the slurs white people used against my people, not out of reclaimation, but out of spite for my own people and my own self, as the majority of the Asian diaspora has done at one point or another. Being Korean was such an agonizing reality, yet the pain was not searing. It rotted in the back of my psyche as a static and dulled pain, as if a hammer had been rammed into me until I became numb. Unable to even confront this pain in my consciousness, I, like many diasporic Koreans, learned to live with the pain that came with no explanation and no pinpointed location on our bodies.

Although “North Korea” was a scary word for me, oddly enough, communism was not. Socialism was not. Before I had ever read a word of Marx, I thought of him as quite a wise man. My elder brother, a Marxist from a young age, left his copies of Das Kapital lying around, of which I skimmed a few pages when I was in elementary school. I was young, but I knew that something was being hidden from me by the empire I grew up in.

This self-hatred that the imperialists fester in Korean souls, in the diaspora, and in the occupied ROK, it’s a simply awful contradiction that contradicts the very soul and history of our people. It’s a bitter thing, something that creates a burning sensation in our arteries, that lingers and burns until many of us die under imperialism. Colonialism is poison to the mind. There is nothing more poisonous to the Korean soul than capitalism.

Even after I had taken on the label of a communist, I still knew little about the colonization of my homeland. It wasn’t until I learned of a nation named Palestine that I, after fifteen years of life on this earth, learned the truth about imperialism, and thus, the truth about my homeland.

“The truth shall set you free.” Palestine set me free.

I have become quite a vocal Korean, especially when it came to anti-Zionism. I think the shock that an Asian girl who had previously been known only as a fourteen-year-old exotic removed, as the rumors gossiped about me after a series of unfortunate assaults, was suddenly a booming political voice that stopped at nothing to diametrically defy orders from authority, who was decolonial, anti-imperialist, and communist, well I think that shock caused quite some offense for many.

The disgust from white folks was amusing to me, but never caused me dismay. What truly broke my heart, what was the greatest heartbreak of my many lives, was the fact that my peers of the Asian diaspora, the Korean diaspora in particular, treated me just as horribly as my white peers did. Many found my vocality for Palestine repulsive; they saw my communism as a monster, and they saw me as a national traitor. I can firmly recall many times where I held back my bitter rage and contempt when Korean peers of mine claimed to be opposing my politics out of a concern for human rights or whatnot when they were the same people who angrily abandoned me when I prevented Zionist politicians who line the pockets of the Israeli military from speaking at our school, at the expense of a bullet point on their college applications.

The Korean diaspora is incredibly anti-communist. I cling to the writings and speeches of the few communist diasporic Koreans I have found over the years. I anger very quickly when I hear the racist lies about my people’s self-determination, and I get angrier when I hear that it is faces of my own people egging on the sons and daughters of imperialism.

Colonialism is violent and all-pervasive. The oppressed masses cannot truly be free unless we also decolonize our minds, decolonize at the psychological level. At every point in our socialization in the diaspora, we have been taught how to hate ourselves, how to hate our liberation, to submit to the claustrophobic boxes that the empire forces us into.

Over my radicalization as a communist Korean, I have become familiar with struggling and fighting with, as well as feeling betrayal from my own people. I have become familiar with being a first-hand witness to what the poison of imperialism and capitalism does to the mind. I have become familiar with facing an entirely falsified depiction of your people’s revolution and anti-imperialism. I have become familiar with the communities immediately around you (in the imperial core), being so pathetically uninformed about your people and acting as if a blanket anti-Trump or anti-empire statement while simultaneously invalidating your people’s resistance is close to enough.

The reason why I find myself so incredibly angry with the mainstream media’s portrayal of Venezuelan opinion and reaction to the United States’ illegal intervention is that it strikes a chord very near to my heart. It elicits an emotion I am painfully familiar with.

Oh Venezuela,

You have my heart in this very moment. Although much of the imperial core does not know the true heart of your resistance and revolution, you have my ears and my set of eyes and my heart. Rest assured that there is a wing of the diaspora of the colonized masses in the imperial core that is radical, that seeks revolution, that is decolonial, that are scientific socialists and Marxists.

I understand your pain and suffering. I understand how the empire’s media will misportray our voices. I see the brave children of the revolution on the streets. I will be one of your many witnesses. Our martyrs fly high and live onwards, the communist Korean diaspora loves you so, and you have our hearts.

In revolution, in resistance,

Your comrade of the radical Korean diaspora.