[KS] About Park Ryol

[Frank Hoffmann]

Post Scriptum to my last post:

Actually, after posting last, I did realize that 
there is a booklet by Pak Yôl from 1948 -- in 
Japanese. (I had forgotten about it, never saw 
the full text, sorry!) In 1989 this was published 
in Korean translation by Pômu-sa in Seoul under 
the title _Sin Chosôn hyôngmyôngnon_. The first 
two chapters are also reproduced in another 
relative recent book about Pak: Kim Sam-ung, _Pak 
Yôl p'yôngjôn_ (Seoul: Karam Kihoek, 1996), pp. 
250-288. This same book, the one by Kim Sam-ung, 
also reproduces a Korean translation of his 
prison poems and his statements in relation to 
the trial.
Other than Kaneko Fumiko's text this is all very 
ideological, with very pathetic and patriotic 
overtones, not too different from what we know 
from Communists propaganda texts -- basically 
just exchanging Communism with anarchism, without 
talking about actual anarchist thought ... really 
just using the terminology. This is again a 
characteristic of Korean anarchism in general, 
both during the colonial period and afterwards -- 
that nationalism (which anarchism rejects) is so 
overwhelmingly there in the minds of Korean 
anarchists, that we can say that this is just 
another political/ideological construct that has 
been instrumentalised for the sake of Korean 
nationalism. One British anarchist who 
participated in one of the international 
conferences organized by Ha Ki-rak around 1990 
wrote a long article about the Korean anarchists 
and how shocked he was that they would actually 
call themselves anarchists.

Best,
Frank

-- 
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Frank Hoffmann
http://koreaweb.ws