May in South Korea is a time of remembrance, when the spirits of the rebels roam among the trees that turn Mudeungsan green, and bloody screams are heard in the murmur of Gwangjucheon. To this day, the souls of the martyrs are restless, and the wounds of the surviving families cannot be healed.
Nothing is forgotten.
Thousands of heavily armed soldiers from the "Martial Law Squads" carried out massacres in Gwangju under "special orders" from military dictator Chun Doo Hwan, a gangster who boasted that "up to 70% of Gwangju's citizens could be killed" in the massacre.
Bloodthirsty killers took Gwangju in two or three rings of encirclement. Here are just a few of their crimes:
- The soldiers shot the rebels, buried them alive, threw them from high-rise buildings and burned them with flamethrowers.
- In one of the houses, soldiers shot dead an infant, calling him "a member of the family of rebels."
- The storekeeper, who delivered drinks and bread to the rebels, and the driver, who drove the bloody demonstrators to the hospital, were killed by the soldiers as "accomplices in the rebellion."
- In front of her parents, the soldiers tore the clothes of a young student, cut off her chest, and threw a resisting 70-year-old woman into the sewer.
- Without hesitation, the soldiers cut open the belly of the pregnant woman and pierced her child.
As a result, Gwangju has become an unprecedented "human slaughter", a "bloodbath", a "city of death where only ghosts roam". The spectacle was so horrific that TV presenters from many countries around the world asked people with weak hearts to step away from the screen before the news report about the Gwangju incident.
More than 40 years have passed since then.
However, the pain of Gwangju did not disappear, and the aspirations of the rebels did not come true.
It's not because not enough time has passed, not because there was little evidence of murders left at the scene, and not because the people forgot the committed atrocity.
The fact is that the Yoon Suk Yeol gang, in whose veins the blood of executioners flows, is struggling to revive the era of the fascist dictatorship.
In early December last year, Yoon Suk Yeol slandered the People's Uprising in Gwangju. Moreover, far-right conservative Kim Kwang Dong, who glorified the May 16th military coup as a "revolution", is appointed chairman of the "Committee to Settle the Past for Truth and Reconciliation." Obviously, this is done in order to distort the historical truth about the People's Uprising in Gwangju and erase these events from the memory of the masses.
It is also worth noting that most of the materials related to the Democratization Movement and the Gwangju People's Uprising have been removed from the curriculum. Apparently, this was done so that the anti-US spirit of independence and anti-fascism inherent in the popular uprising of those years did not kindle the flames of struggle in the hearts of future generations.
Needless to say, all this is a deliberate move by Yoon Suk Yeol and his gang in order to glorify the military dictatorship, so that in the future, along with a new round of mass repression, to achieve the revival of the fascist regime in South Korea.
Indeed, the legacy of the military dictatorship, when Gwangju was plunged into a sea of blood, is flourishing today.
All these facts remind all sections of the populace in South Korea that if they want to fulfill their dream of building a new society and achieving a better life, they must fight more vigorously to bury Yoon Suk Yeol's gang, obsessed with promoting US policy and the revival of the fascist dictatorship, as well as the confrontation with the DPRK.
Today, the souls of the demonstrators of the Gwangju People's Uprising are calling for an unprecedented courageous struggle that will know neither hesitation nor mercy.
