Fireworks Popped on the Han as Explosions Rained Down on Gaza, Lebanon, Syria
On October 5, 2024, fireworks burst over the Han River as bombs rained down on Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria. Hanwha Group, the organizer of the annual Seoul International Fireworks Festival that has taken place at Yeouido Hangang Park since 2000, is complicit in the bombings of Palestinian civilians. Though the ongoing genocide in the West Bank might appear to have little to do with South Korea, in 2021, Hanwha Systems, a subsidiary of Hanwha Corporation and an affiliate of Hanwha Group, signed an MOU with Israeli defense companies ELTA Systems and Elbit Systems promoting “technology cooperation” and “new export opportunities” between South Korea and Israel. ELTA, a subsidiary of Israel Aerospace Industries—directly owned by the illegitimate state of Israel—provides radar technologies and electronics to the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF), conducts experiments featuring unmanned bulldozers to raze Palestinian villages, and exports hundreds of millions of dollars in equipment to countries like the Czech Republic and Italy, where ELTA drone exports recently came under fire for enabling Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign. Elbit Systems supplies a majority of ground equipment operated by the IOF and aids in maintaining the apartheid wall in the West Bank. One day before the Fireworks Festival and two days shy of a year since October 7, Hanwha Systems signed another MOU with Elbit Systems and military aircraft manufacturer Korea Aerospace Industries to fortify UH/HH-60 special operations helicopters for the South Korean military.
The MOU signing took place at the 2024 Korea Army International Defense Industry Exhibition (KADEX), held in Gyeryongdae in South Chungcheon Province, echoing the signing of the 2021 memorandum at the Seoul International Aerospace & Defense Exhibition (ADEX), KADEX’s international counterpart. Participants in KADEX 2024, which ran from October 2 to 6, included Korean and Korea-based weapons, technology, and research development companies with explicit ties to the arms industry. This year, a contingent of anti-war activists from Daejeon and Seoul gathered in Gyeryong city to peacefully protest the hosting of yet another weapons fair on Korean territory. Including members from World Without War, PEACE MOMO, BDS Korea, and the Korean Cultural Alliance for Palestine (KCAP), organizers picketed outside the fair while holding signs highlighting Hanwha’s complicity in Israel’s settler-colonial occupation of Palestine and the acceleration of climate disaster by military emissions (the US Department of Defense, after all, is the largest institutional producer of greenhouse gasses in the world). Yet this was only after being strongarmed by KADEX security; even prior to the organizers’ arrival, security awaited the activists in the fair parking lot, proceeded to police them, and tried to restrict their protest to the spatial margins of the fair. The intensity of fair organizers’ efforts to curb dissent expose the anxious currents that undergird militarism’s ever-defensive posture.
Antiwar organizing and adjacent activities have long been subjected to surveillance by the South Korean state. Yet the anticommunist tenor of domestic conservatism, dating back to the outbreak of the Korean War, has been further fueled by current Yoon administration, whose members’ warmongering interest in growing South Korea’s military budget and its attendant participation in the global arms trade have transformed the nation from an importer to a major exporter of military weaponry. While the United States remains the world’s largest arms exporter with a 42% share of global arms exports as of 2023–compare this to the second-largest exporter, France, which holds an 11% share of the market–last year, South Korea hit a historic record for arms sales when it became the eighth largest exporter of arms in the world. As many have pointed out, this fortification of the Korean weapons industry and its military, did not begin with Yoon: During Moon Jae-in’s tenure in office, South Korean arms exports jumped from $1.2 billion (2011-2015) to $3.8 billion (2016-2020) in value, reaching markets in Poland and Australia. Yoon has taken up the torch of his predecessor, declaring at last year’s ADEX that he dreams of South Korea’s transmogrification into the fourth-largest arms exporter in the world.
Known as “K-bangsan,” or K-defense, the government’s plan to brand South Korea as a world-class arms dealer sounds nearly endearing, evoking previous state-sponsored efforts to cultivate a global taste for Korean commodities ranging from pop music to beauty products to dramas. Critics of the K-prefix have called it a capacious but empty signifier, capable of bestowing cultural capital upon various commodities with little in common other than their Korean origins of manufacture. Perhaps, however, the K-prefix is less a meaningless additive and rather, as Joyhanna Yoo argues, an instructive morpheme–the smallest unit of language that contains meaning–and a method for political analysis. The extension of the K-prefix to military equipment raises a range of questions: What do K-commodities of various types–fireworks, contemporary art, bomber jets–have to do with one another? How might considering such diverse exports together shape our understanding of warfare as the stuff not only of defense departments, but also of entertainment, aesthetics, and leisure? And what new ways of seeing, sensing, and organizing both within Korea and from Korea in solidarity with other geographies and movements might emerge from serious contention with the dialectic between South Korea’s “soft” and “hard” power? Behind each inquiry is the more fundamental question of Palestine, guiding us through these questions in reverse.
Into the Belly of the Chaebol as Cold War Behemoth, from Korea to Vietnam to Palestine
On October 5, 2024, fireworks burst over the Han River as bombs rained down on Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria. The fireworks teams that facilitated Hanwha’s festival were not only from South Korea, but also included teams from Japan and the United States–the three players in the newest Asia-Pacific security pact known by the Frankenstein name of JAROKUS (Japan-Republic of Korea-United States), which formally institutionalized the three countries’ commitment to each other’s “protection” against North Korea and China. Yet this alliance bears the uneasy traces of the past as South Korea remains quite literally sandwiched between its former colonizer and an active imperial power. Japanese and US imperialisms were and remain co-constitutive, as the United States interrupted regional reckoning with Japan’s imperial violence following World War II by co-opting the terms of redress for international war crimes, which it further secured with the threat of military force consecrated in its usage of the atomic bomb. The Korean War not only bore the scars of this deferral, but also became to Japan and to the United States one of the largest business opportunities in the history of both nations, producing surges in military supply production and arms spending. In US assistant secretary for Far Eastern Affairs Dean Rusk’s own words, “The Korean War saved us.” It is worth recalling that Kim Chong Hee originally founded Hanwha in 1952 as the Korea Explosives Company, skyrocketing to notability after becoming the first Korean company to domestically produce dynamite in 1957. The company proceeded to sign supply contracts with the US military and slowly expanded into industries from petroleum to securities to plastics and hotels at the height of cold war industrialization. In other words, it was the cold war that propelled Hanwha’s expansion into one of the nation’s most prominent mega-corporations.
Underwriting the growth of K-bangsan with Hanwha and Hyundai as key players are the legacies of the ongoing Korean War and the rapid industrialization that drove South Korea’s postwar development under a series of military dictatorships. Fueled by hundreds and thousands of dollars in US aid, many chaebols, many of which were inspired by the structures of colonial Japanese zaibatsu, have their roots in the postwar period of the 1950s as unregulated corruption and the Syngman Rhee government’s extension of favorable loan terms to those who already owned production facilities cultivated the rise of a distinct domestic elite class. A decade and a half later, chaebols would become the crux of Park Chung Hee’s relentless militarized developmentalism. As Peter Kwon charts, with its Heavy Chemical and Industrialization Plan and the Military Procurement Law of 1973, Park’s regime facilitated the transformation of select chaebols–including Hanwha and Poongsan–into full-blown defense manufacturers, aiming to indigenize ammunitions production with an eye to North Korea. As a result, factory workers were forced to labor under hazardous conditions, facing exposure to toxic chemicals and losing limbs in explosives accidents.
State-driven cold war economic developmentalism often operated, in plain terms, as biopolitics: the management of who deserves to live and who deserves to die. Park’s policies illustrated biopower in the bloodiest of terms—not yet by exporting weapons, but rather, by exporting over 300,000 Korean soldiers to Vietnam in exchange for US subsidies. Kwon argues that the financial failures of this exchange incited the Park administration to turn to domestic defense manufacturing, in addition to causes like rising North-South tensions and Nixon's announced US troop withdrawal. However, Jin-kyung Lee reframes the troop dispatch as a core example of marginalized working-class labors of the era, including domestic sex work and military prostitution, that were in fact not marginal at all but essential to South Korea’s modernization. Lee illustrates how the marginalization of such work could only occur in structural relation to the “mainstream industrial labors” of, for example, factory work, with those associated with soldiering or sex work rendered the most disposable among the laboring population. In their transformation of “sexuality and race into labor power,” such labors also illustrate, powerfully, the dependence of South Korean modernization upon being yoked into the imperial orbit of the United States. The Vietnam War, in other words, marked a shift of South Korea’s global position from a US neocolony to what some have called a subimperial power, perpetuating violence against not only its own people, but also the people of Southeast Asia.
Today, Vietnam is one of the most popular destinations for Korean tourists, who make up nearly a third of all foreign visitors to Vietnam. If we understand this juxtaposition as less coincidence and more correlation, akin to the settler colonial entanglements throughout the Pacific, from Hawaiʻi to Guam, where economies of tourism and leisure have been built upon the infrastructural scaffolding of US and Japanese imperial warfare, how might the contemporary circulation of Korean goods and bodies to and from Vietnam register as symptom of state-sponsored violence, and an absence of reckoning with it as such? In a piece for World Without War, Kwon Hyun-woo identifies the national forgetting of Korean war crimes in the Vietnam War as the defining condition of K-bangsan: “If Korean society had thoroughly reflected on the Vietnam War, it would not have continued its history of sending troops overseas, such as the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War, nor would the current shameful reality occur of taking pride in earning foreign currency by taking advantage of other countries’ wars as business opportunities. Only in a country unashamed to make money by sending its people to war could there be enthusiasm about earning foreign currency from arms exports.” Framing the rapid growth of Korea’s defense industry as an extension of the nation’s participation in the United States’ forever wars, Kwon’s piece not only underscores Korean complicity in imperial warfare but also proposes a way forward for redressing this participation—by committing to refusing its repetition. From Vietnam to Palestine, from the arms industry to the art world, South Korea has an opportunity now to reconsider its role in the perpetuation of US warfare and Israel’s ethnic cleansing of millions of Palestinians, whose deaths continue to constitute the world’s first live-streamed genocide.
From Palestine to Korea of Past, Present, and Future
On October 5, 2024, fireworks burst over the Han River as bombs rained down on Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria. From Vietnam to DMZ tourism; to fireworks shows and national security day parades; to public weapons expos and war memorials, the distinction between warfare waged on so-called cultural terrain and that which is waged on the battlefield has always been tenuous. The historical partnership between regimes of military occupation and cultural institutions is spelled out nowhere more clearly than in the guidelines for Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, or PACBI, launched in 2014. The principles of PACBI, a founding member of the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement national committee, are based in an understanding that cultural objects and intellectual labor, and the institutions that facilitate their creation, are not independent of systems of power but exist within them, capable of actively and passively furnishing the ideological support required to normalize systems of oppression like the Zionist occupation. Inspired by the cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa of the 1960s, PACBI calls on artists, academics, cultural workers, and critics to refuse to participate in “artwashing” by allowing their art and intellectual labor to legitimize and distract from the settler colonial extermination at the heart of the Israeli regime.
As South Korea increasingly turns to cultural diplomatic strategies to amplify its global standing, PACBI urges Koreans and the Korean diaspora to remain attentive to the powers that structure new partnerships made in their name. Though ostensibly a business conglomerate, in March 2023, Hanwha Group followed in the footsteps of other Korean chaebols, who are behind several of Seoul’s most prominent art galleries, when it announced that it had signed an MOU with the Centre Pompidou in Paris to open the latter’s first branch in Seoul at the 63 Building in 2025. To be christened as the Centre Pompidou Hanwha Seoul, the museum will be operated by the Hanwha Cultural Foundation, slated to receive 60 billion KRW from Hanwha affiliates for the purpose with over one-fifth of the pot coming from Hanwha Systems and Hanwha Aerospace. In August, KCAP, with the support of BDS Korea, World Without War, PEACE MOMO, Heung Coalition, BDS Japan Bulletin, and Network for Art Students in Resistance launched a global petition calling for the boycott of Hanwha Corporation until the company agrees to end its business with Israeli genocide. With over 1,000 signatures, the petition will remain open until hitting its goal of 3,000 signatures worldwide, upon which it will be submitted to Hanwha Group.
Hanwha is only one among a plethora of Korean institutions complicit in using art to apply a gloss over its complicity in genocide. Hyundai Motor, for example, has built partnerships with global art institutions ranging from LACMA to the Venice Biennale; while affiliate HD Hyundai has come under fire for supplying construction cranes used by Israeli settlers to steal and raze Palestinian homes. This past September, the Seoul government began promoting the capital as a “global ‘Art City’” ahead of hosting its second-ever “Korea Art Week,” held in conjunction with two major international art conventions, Kiaf SEOUL and FREIZE SEOUL. As tens of thousands of visiting art dealers, buyers, and makers poured into the city, copies of “2024 Korea Art Festival: Anti-Genocide & Solidarity Guide,” drafted by KCAP, began to circulate over social media, detailing the complicity of Kiaf and FRIEZE sponsors in the Israeli genocide. Earlier this month, pro-Palestine organizers in Korea won a partial victory after staging a protest at the Busan International Film Festival that stalled a talkback with the director of Israeli film Of Dogs and Men, funded by the Israel Ministry of Culture, the Malmonides Fund, and other institutions invested in upholding Israeli foreign policy interests. KCAP, BDS Korea, and the Korean Green Party have also launched an awareness campaign against the Gwangju Biennale’s inclusion of an all-Israeli pavilion by another name, the CDA Holon Pavilion, under the pretext that the funding for the Pavilion comes from an Israeli metropolitan, rather than national, government—all this despite one of the Pavilion’s sponsors, American-Israeli manufacturing company Stratasys, possessing deep ties to the global military-industrial complex and operating factories in ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages.
On the same day as the Fireworks Festival, the largest protest for a free Palestine in South Korean history took place in the heart of Seoul at Bosingak Bell Pavilion. Marking nearly one year since October 7, 2023 and organized by BDS Korea and the Palestine Urgent Action Committee, the protest gathered 1,500 people to march from Bosingak, rebuilt after it destroyed during the Japanese colonial invasion of Korea; through Myeongdong, one of Seoul’s most popular tourist districts, teeming with tanghulu stalls and cosmetics shops; and, finally, the US and Israeli embassies, blatant reminders that, far from an unfolding “over there,” the Israeli genocide of Palestinians has deep entanglements in South Korea. The case of Palestine is not a so-called tragedy in isolation but a key that unravels into the past—into the long-repressed histories of South Korea’s participation in US imperial wars from the so-called Global War on Terror to the war in Vietnam—the present—shaped by the deferral of reckoning with the legacies of colonialism and postwar intervention that condition Korea’s contemporary economic success—and the future, asking of the world whether bearing witness to genocide is enough.
It is, quite simply, not enough. Sign every petition. Make sure involved politicians will never know peace. Boycott corporations for which death begets profit. Though “we are trying to stop what already happened,” refuse to see the total destruction of empire through, now and forever. Talk to your neighbors about building collective power. Talk to older organizers who witnessed the wins and losses of organizing against imperial warfare in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq. Talk to your colleagues about wielding your labor as a weapon. We are in for the now and for the long haul. To quote the Art Not Genocide Alliance’s Palestinian Pavilion manifesto, drafted earlier this year in protest of the Venice Biennale’s Israeli Pavilion, Palestine is the world in its future tense. From the river to the sea. Palestine is freeing us all.
/SM Downer
They write and research, living between the United States and South Korea. They are working on dissertation about US militarism, memory, and culture in Korea.
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