Atrocities by Both Sides & Ethnic and Racial Nationalism in Korea

Kang Je-gyu’s 2004 blockbuster film, Taegukgi: The Brotherhood of War, "renarrativizes the Korean War through a remembering process of “flashbacks”" (Kim 289) and tells a story about two brothers named Jin-tae and Jin-seok who are forced to join the South Korean Army during the Korean War and who become separated and end up fighting on opposite sides.

The director, Kang, did an outstanding job by trying to depict a more balanced approach towards the Korean War than other earlier anticommunist films by criticizing both North and South Korea for committing atrocities (Kim 303). It was interesting how Kang broke the conventional norm of Korean War films, which tend to vilify the North as this evil enemy-state that invaded the South, by revealing intra-South Korean violence seen in military and right-wing militia brutality and forced separation of family by the South Korean Army’s policy of conscription (Kim 304).

One notable scene is when Young-shin, Jin-tae’s fiancée, is accused of joining the Communist Party and is arrested and taken by the anti-Communist Federation (South Korean right-wing militia group). Even though Jin-tae and Jin-seok are trying to save her and Young-shin is trying to explain that she is innocent, militia men would not listen and further accuse them of being communists. According to these men, Young-shin is a traitor for signing up for the Communist Party on June 23^rd 1950, working for the party 35 times, and participating in numerous rallies. Before she is shot and thrown in the trench where there are corpses of other  “communist” civilians, Young-shin replies by saying “I did join only for the food. I did not know what its organization was” and “We were starving to death. I needed food somehow for my family! The South Korean government gave us nothing!” 

Young-shin’s response that South Korean government has provided “nothing” is interesting because in the film, South Korean government, instead of giving food and other aids to the people like how communists did, caused family separation by forcing Jin-tae and Jin-seok to join the army, taking away men who are supposed to take care of family members including Young-shin, her siblings, and their mute mother. Actually, South Korean government has given Young-shin something: fear, grief, and tragic death.

Also the ethnic and racial nationalism during the Korean War is puzzling and ironic.Even though Koreans (both North and South Koreans) have a strong sense of identity based on a common bloodline and shared ancestry (Shin2), for example according to Shin’s survey 95 percent of the respondents agreed that “North Korean people are of the same Korean ethnic-nation” (Shin 2), somehow in the Korea War film two Koreas (or two brothers) are bitter enemies fighting to death. If Koreans are from one homogenous group called the “Han” race, how could one explain the fact that it was “Koreans” who invaded “Korea.” Perhaps, there was some misunderstanding on distinction between notions of “We are the people” and “We are one people” (Shin 15).