Been learning more about Korea through Blowback S3 and it is heavy, learning about the Japanese colonial occupation, subsequent US occupation (which is still ongoing) and like Jeju island, how it got targeted with anti-communist violence in spite of even US forces at some point labeling it as communal and not explicitly communist in the way we would think of it politically; and when its people resisted, they were labeled communist, allusions made to support from the Soviets (which were not backed up and just taken at face value - you can see shades of this sort of thing still today, like the recent claim of DPRK forces supporting Russia in battle).

I also see shades of Palestine in it. Though it’s not exactly the same, the brutal treatment of any resistance, the calling resistance terrorists in certain contexts (like in what happened with Jeju island). Much the same brutal colonial violence on repeat, with some of the specifics changed to maximize control over whatever the specific region is. It was really getting to me with Jeju island, with how peaceful and communal they were, and were targeted anyway because they were, from what I can gather about the occupation motives and the Korean collaborators with it, too independent and too much representative of a self-determining Korea. And it makes me think of how the indigenous were treated in order to construct the US, the sheer scope of violence across the world as part of colonizing and empire, so much of which is not in the distant past and the institutions who perpetuated it have not even been dismantled or brought to justice. And then these same institutions have the gall to call themselves “freedom” and “democracy”.