Far-right meme politics shows how strong anti-democratic forces remain.
There is no date more solemn in South Koreaâs political calendar than May 18. On that day in 1980, Chun Doo-hwan, who had just seized power, ordered the massacre of hundreds of unarmed protesters in the southwestern city of Gwangju. For most, it is remembered as one of the worst tragedies in modern South Korean history.
For Starbucks Korea, however, the occasion was a joke. On the 46th anniversary of what is now known as the Gwangju Uprising, Starbucks Korea released a new branded tumbler while celebrating âTank Dayâ and said that the tumbler can just be âslapped on the tableââboth of which are unsubtle references to far-right memes that mock the victims of the massacre.
The advertisement sparked immediate outrage and a âvery significant drop in sales,â according to one employee of Shinsegae, the group that owns Starbucks Korea. South Korean President Lee Jae-myung sharply rebuked the campaign, calling it âcompletely out of line.â Although Starbucks Korea pulled the advertisement and issued an apology, the incident highlights the troubling degree to which anti-democratic sentiments have become normalized in South Koreaâs right wing.
On its own, the advert might be read as just an unfortunate coincidence. But the South Korean far right has a track record of using specific distasteful memes like this. Among them, âTank Dayâ is a celebratory reference to the Gwangju Uprising, cheering for the tanks that massacred the protesters. âSlap the tableâ is a reference to student activist Park Jong-chul, who was killed at a black site after having been waterboarded for hours in 1987. To explain Parkâs death, the Chun dictatorship infamously claimed that Park had âjust dropped dead when the police slapped the table.â The slapdash lie incensed the South Korean public, sparking a massive nationwide protest movement now known as the June Struggle, which ended the military dictatorship and helped South Korea transition to a liberal democracy.
Sneaking in anti-democratic memes has been a hobby of South Koreaâs far right for more than a decade. The fountainhead of this trend is a website called âIlbe,â a contraction of ilgan best jeojangso, which means âdepository of the daily bests.â Established in 2010, Ilbe was the online watering hole of South Koreaâs emerging young right wing, who entertained themselves by exchanging photoshopped images and GIFs, and voting to choose the âbestâ material of the day.
In a trend that presaged the alt-right and incel politics in democracies around the world, Ilbe usersâtypically, young menâtrafficked in self-loathing nihilism and hate directed at women and democracy activists. To them, Chun, nicknamed âChun Tankâ on Ilbe, was a hero to be celebrated. Their greatest enemy was Roh Moo-hyun, a famous human rights lawyer and democracy activist who became president in 2003. By late 2012, Ilbe was one of the largest websites in South Korea and an emergent force in the countryâs conservative politics, which increasingly came to see women, liberals, and democracy itself as the enemy.
Ilbe users made a sport out of creating high-quality images that subtly included far-right memes and pushing them onto mainstream outlets. A typical pattern is to take the logo of a prestigious university, insert the word âILBEâ into it, and bait television shows into using the doctored logo. Celebrations would break out on the website when such images were spotted on television, as the Ilbe users basked in the juvenile glee of making a respectable outlet unwittingly carry its message.
By the late 2010s, emboldened Ilbe users began taking their antics outside, which caused a backlash. A major turning point was the 2017 âgluttony strike,â during which Ilbe users gorged on fried chicken and pizzas in front of hunger-striking parents who lost their children in the Sewol ferry disaster, which killed 250 school children. Following public outrage to the most offensive political theater that South Korea had ever seen, the Ilbe website faded in popularity in the following years.
But the ethos of Ilbe did not disappear. As author Kim Hak-joon noted in The Age of Everyday Ilbe, the nihilism and misogyny of Ilbe were not limited to the social misfits who disappeared together with the website. Rather, they simply became a part of mainstream right-wing culture. Ilbe-style toxic misogyny catapulted the young conservative pundit Lee Jun-seok to leader of the People Power Party (PPP), South Koreaâs main right-wing party, in 2021.
In an odd projection, Lee led an online witch hunt against advertisers that showed a finger-pinching gesture, convincedâwithout any basis in realityâthat the gesture was a secret code among women who were mocking the small genitals of right-wing men. Fueled by gender-based grievances, young men in South Korea vote overwhelmingly in favor of conservatives while young women vote overwhelmingly in favor of liberalsâa split that does not appear with any other age group.
Starbucks Korea is hardly the first major brand to traffic in far-right memes. In 2019, Musinsa, a fast fashion company, issued a public apology after posting on Instagram that its socks âdrop dry if you slapped them on the desk.â But in this case, the publicâs outrage was compounded by the fact that Starbucks Korea is operated by the Shinsegae Group, a retail-focused chaebol group led by Chung Yong-jin.
Chung, 57, is notorious for posting far-right memes on his Instagram. In 2021, Chung repeatedly posted a message that read âIâm sorry, and thank you,â accompanied with photos of seafood, apparently mocking the message that former President Moon Jae-in offered to the drowning victims of the Sewol disaster. Leading up to South Koreaâs presidential election in 2022, he repeatedly posted the hashtag myeolgong (âdestroy communistsâ), to which the presidential candidate (and eventual winner) Yoon Suk-yeol responded by publicly shopping for groceries at Shinsegaeâs Emart.
This time, however, Chung was quick to offer a public apology, saying that Starbucks Korea âengaged in inappropriate marketing that caused deep pain and anger among many.â Chung pledged that the Shinsegae will âremember the history and sacrifice of our society,â and Strengthen internal controls and risk management.â
Regardless of Chungâs apology, South Koreaâs right wing cheered on Starbucks. The PPP defended the company, as the partyâs leader, Jang Dong-hyeok, argued on the campaign trail for the recent local elections that âthe president is trying to control the brand of coffee people drink.â Far-right websites and message boards filled with calls for supporting Starbucks, which is ironic considering that, back in Ilbeâs heyday, the young far-right considered Starbucks to be the fancy and overpriced coffee that women demanded men buy them on dates.
Chungâs apology shows that there still is a line of decency and democratic norm that South Korean society will enforce. But the implications from this controversy are nevertheless troubling. It was only a year and a half ago that the countryâs democracy had a near-death experience, as Yoon declared martial law and sent paratroopers to the legislature to arrest his political adversaries. Although the public overall fiercely resisted the attempt and eventually put Yoon in prison, a significant portion sincerely desires the end of liberal democracy and to turn the power of the state against liberals and women.
In the recent elections, the liberal Democratic Party made a strong showing, capturing the mayoral and gubernatorial offices of 12 out of 16 large cities and provinces as the PPP struggled to distance itself from Yoonâs insurrection. But in a stunning upset, the PPP managed to hold Seoul by a razor-thin margin, in part because more than 75 percent of the men in their 20s voted for the conservative incumbent, Oh Se-hoon. Most of South Korea believes that attempting to end democracy is disqualifying. But for South Koreaâs right wing, it is a cause for support.
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