Free All Monsters Must Die by Magnus Bärtås

abrasive all at once. Still, it seems like Hwang Jang-yop truly believed in Juche Thought, however dubious it seemed. While under constant threat of assassination by agents from the North Korean secret police, he accused Kim Jong-il of having betrayed and corrupted Juche ideology. He recommended a rock-solid policy of ostracization against the North, saying it would lead to the collapse of the country, and suggested that he himself would be ready to take over as the leader of an interim government should such a time come.
    Privately, Hwang Jang-yop suffered greatly. His wife, whom he left in North Korea, committed suicide; one daughter died under mysterious circumstances, and his other children ended up in work camps.
    IN THE CLEANEST RACE , B. R. Myers emphasizes that Juche Thought gave North Korean suspicion and self-­reliance a loose ideological framework — and that it essentially must be viewed as a racist teaching built on notions of blood mysticism. The North Korean race doctrine may be extreme, but the idea of pure blood is strong throughout the peninsula. Even in the South, mixing blood is still seen by many as shameful and threatening. In fact South Korea cultivates the notion of being the most genetically homogenous country in the world, disregarding the “genetic influx” from China, Japan, and Okinawa. Such great weight has been placed on this idea of blood that South Korean citizens have not been allowed to do military service if they have a non-Korean parent. Their anomalous skin colour would make it hard for such soldiers to “mix with their Korean colleagues in the barracks,” said a representative from the Ministry of Defence in an article in the Korea Times.
    In Korea, the question of blood ties is linked to the violence the country experienced during the Japanese colonization that lasted until the end of the Second World War. The Japanese army had a comprehensive system for forcefully recruiting “comfort women,” which was the term used for “sex slaves.”
    Choi Eun-hee’s parents tried to marry her off very young so she wouldn’t be “recruited” as a sex slave. She was a tomboy at heart but was considered very beautiful and was, like so many other women, at risk. Her grandmother said, with a note of incantation: “You are a little girl with long eyelashes. The kind that sleeps a lot.”
    Madame’s own solution was to find work at a theatre as a teenager — work that was considered as lowly as a shaman’s, circus artist’s, or gisaeng ’s (geisha’s), but that protected her from sexual slavery. The reason was, of course, not only to avoid becoming a comfort woman, but because she was drawn to the theatre. To everyone’s surprise — she was a shy girl — she was a natural actor. Her father was opposed to it and tried to lock her up at home. But her will was too strong. She escaped to the stage.
    UNSURPRISINGLY, RESEARCHERS AREN’T in agreement about the statistics, but from a Korean perspective the Imperial Japanese Army forcefully recruited around 200,000 Korean women as sex slaves. The issue is still incredibly charged, and those who want to approach it in South Korea must do so with great care. In 2004, the TV star Lee Seung-yeon had a hit with Kim Ki-duk’s film 3-Iron . Like so many other television stars, she decided to crown her career with a pin-up calendar featuring pictures of her, scantily clad, in exotic environs. The PR company that was brought on board booked a photographer who took a few promotional shots of Lee posing as a “comfort woman” on the Palau islands in the Pacific Ocean (Palau was one of the places where sex slaves were taken during the Second World War). The photographs were presented at a press conference and the reaction in South Korea was huge. After angry protests broke out, Lee went to visit an old-age home for former sex slaves, where she begged for mercy on