The Controversies on Fascism in Colonial Korea in the Early 1930S

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The Controversies on Fascism in Colonial Korea in the early 1930s

0.  The concept of “Fascism” seems to belong to the most indefinable notions in the world of social sciences. While Mussolini’s and Hitler’s regimes are commonly referred to as “benchmarks” of fascism, the problems persist in marking clear borders between those ideologies and modes of political behaviour that predated “classical” fascism and heavily influenced it without fully merging with it, and with marking the ever vague boundaries between what may be judged as coming closest to the “classic” Italian and German models and what should be possibly categorized as “semi-fascist” or “fascism-influenced” regimes and/or movements. It was commonly recognized already in the 1930s that fascism developed out of the modern European nationalist tradition, Fichtean ideas on the “national struggles” as the primary content of history and Carlyle’s “hero worship” being the intellectual legacies on which fascists were successfully capitalising[1]. It is also quite clear that the nationalist cult of war and war sacrifice dating back to the Napoleonic wars, “militarised masculinity” of the 19th century European middle classes reinforced by the romantic cult of adventure and the late 19th century youthful revolt against the bourgeois respectability, as well as the legacies of the “volkish” thought with its emphasis on the “Bund” of the males and racism furnishing the “Volk” with a tangible enemy both within and without, all contributed in a variety of ways to the formation of the distinctive élan of the “fascist revolutions” of the 1920-30s in Central and Southern Europe[2]. However, it is obvious as well that it will be only too teleological to regard the 19th century “hero worship”, racism, Social Darwinism and the “militarised masculinity” as “fascism in embryo” – after all, Britain, the country which perhaps contributed most into the formation of assorted race-related and Social Darwinist discourses, did not develop into a fascist regime in the end. It may be safer to say that, while the late 19th century nationalised vision of the world laid a fundament of sorts for both “fascists” and a variety of other right-wing movements and regimes of the 20th century, the maturation of “real” fascism and its coming to power depend upon a complex combination of both domestic and international factors, among which the failures – both real and perceived - of one’s country in the “survival struggle” for acquiring colonies and resources may be considered the most decisive. Thus, despite the obvious dissimilarity of the cultural and historical background and obviously stronger role of the established bureaucracies in comparison with the fascist movements “from below”, war-time Japan still may be classified together with Germany and Italy as a “have-not” nation, which developed the ideologies and forms of the social mobilisation truly “fascist” in content if not always in name[3]. However, to which degree the right-wing ideological developments in the early 1930s Korea – reduced by that point to the status of a Japanese colony and obviously in no position to independently mobilise itself for a “fight for Lebensraum” – may be connected to the world-historical phenomenon of the 1920-30s “fascist wave”?

While it is obvious that the colonised or semi-colonial periphery of the capitalist world-system did not provide the needed type of environment for the formation of the regimes coming close to the “classic fascist” model, it is equally obvious that the ideological fashions of the world-systemic core could be quickly seized upon by the peripheral elites and sub-elites seeking to further a variety of their own agendas, often not very much dissimilar to that of the “classical fascists” (rabid anti-Communism is a case in the point)[4]. Of course, inasmuch as the agendas of the various peripheral fascist movements and regimes were formed both by the influence of the European examples and precedents and by the concrete local circumstances – Chilean fascists of the 1930s were, for instance, avowedly Catholic and anti-imperialist, in strong difference with their German and Italian mentors, but otherwise just as fond of violence, anti-individualism, anti-Marxism and “corporatist state” ideas – they never become the exact copies of their core prototypes, but this, however, does not necessarily mean the lack of the ideological authenticity on their part. At least in the case of many Latin American fascist movements and fascism-inspired “corporatist states” of the 1930s-1940s, the difference lied rather in socio-economic circumstances than in the tone of the aggressively militaristic, statist and emphatically anti-liberal and anti-individualistic ideology[5]. While European fascism hardly could be a realistic model to closely imitate for the nationalist anti-colonial movements in the colonies - there is little sense in attacking liberalism and democracy under the colonial regimes which usually exclude both anyway, and “nation as the highest and only value” may ring hollow in the places political nations are still to be built – the “fascist spirit” undoubtedly influenced the right-wing mass mobilisation movements in the most politicised colonies in the 1920s-1930s, India’s Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteers’ Union), founded in 1925 with the stated aim “to serve the nation and its people in the form of God – Mother India” being one good example[6]. In fact, the latter creation of Keshava Baliram Hedgewar (1889-1940), being a mass-based grassroots movement with strong emphasis upon the strictly authoritarian mode of organization and enemy picture of “Muslims” as essentialised “threat” against “Indian identity and culture”, might, to a certain degree, fall into the same category as the fascist and fascist-influenced mass movements of Europe or Latin America of the 1920s-30s, the limitations put upon its activities by India’s colonial situation notwithstanding.

However, the case of Korea’s right-wing intelligentsia of the 1920s-1930s seems to differ cardinally even from India. While the – mostly Communist – left made by the early 1930s considerable progress in penetrating even the rural districts of the country in the form of “red” peasant unions and associations[7], the ideological influence of the bourgeois right-wing was relatively limited: its newspapers and journals were, from 1923-24, calling Gandhi a “saintly hero” (sǒngung) and admiring his ability to mobilise the population for a disciplined political action[8], but they were neither able nor willing to exercise any comparable influence upon Korea’s own masses. The goal of many right-wing nationalists was “self-strengthening” (sillyǒk yangsǒng), and that made them willing to collaborate with the colonial masters rather than oppose them as much as the colonialism adapted a “developmental” colour and was seen as an agent of “civilization”. Thus, instead of attempting a political mobilisation of the masses in service of the anti-colonial cause, the fascism-influenced Korean right-wingers of the early 1930s were more interested in demobilising them politically – that is, in checking and counteracting the leftist grassroots movements - and in channelling the energies of the lower-ranked and/or younger intellectuals (teachers, petty civil servants, students, etc.) into the field of culture and identity, be that veneration of Korea’s historical “heroes” (Tan’gun, Yi Sunsin, etc.) or mass literacy campaigns. Unlike the situation during the wartime period (1937-1945), when the absolute majority of the prominent right-wing intellectuals, not always completely willingly, had to publicly identify Korean nation as a part of the greater “Yamato” (Japanese) “race”, the fascism-influenced nationalism of the early 1930s still remained “Korean”; but it was formulated in the ways abstract and de-politicised enough not to be judged “dangerous” by the Japanese authorities. The focus of the fascism-influenced writings was on the “reconstruction” of the individual and society, or/and on the evils of individualism and cosmopolitanism, but not on the political mobilisation of the Korean nation in any way independent of the Japanese authorities. In this aspect, the contemporaneous left-wing critics might have been right in speaking about a “fascism with a colonial deformation” – that is, about an attempt by a hopelessly dependent and weak colonial bourgeoisie to emulate much stronger capitalist classes of the independent nation-states. As the Korean fascism of the early 1930s was definitely an intellectual tendency rather than a political or social movement, it possibly will not qualify as a “fascism” in a narrower, classical meaning of the world. But the fascist fashion of the early 1930s is still important: seen with a benefit of hindsight, it brought to many Korean bourgeois intellectuals a stronger sympathy to the actions of the extreme nationalists and militarists of Germany, Italy, and Japan, as well as much stronger hostility to Marxism and Communism, and these attitude were important in inducing the voluntary cooperation with the wartime Japanese propaganda of the 1937-1945 period. Then, the injection of the anti-liberal and anti-individualist values Korea’s educated society received in the 1930s may have influenced the post-colonial developments in the society and culture of both North and South Korea.

1.  The controversies on fascism that swept Europe and reached Japan very soon after the “March on Rome” in October 1922 handed the power in Italy into the hand of Mussolini, were relatively late to reach colonial Korea. True, Mussolini’s rise to power was duly reported – the émigré Tongnip Sinmun, published in Shanghai by Korea’s nationalist and anti-Japanese “Provisional Government”, duly reported in November 1922 on the “success of Mussolini’s politics of naked force, characterizing Mussolini’s policies as “extremist” and his party as “extreme right-wing”[9]. Among the newspapers inside Korea proper, Tonga Ilbo was quick to report on the clashes between the Communist and fascist forces around whole Italy and particularly in Rome[10], and then gave a detailed report on Mussolini’s overtaking of power, somewhat exaggerating the strength and influence of the fascist forces[11]. After this, however, most of Italy-related reporting in colonial Korea’s newspapers was concentrated upon Mussolini’s foreign policy, while the domestic socio-political situation was being rather overlooked. The reporting on the moves by the German fascists was very scarce until the very end of the 1920s[12]. It does not seem that the significance of the events in Europe, where the extreme right was rapidly capitalizing on the fears of Bolshevik-led “world revolution”, and traditional democracy was entering a period of general retreat, was duly understood in the Korean intellectual circles until the end of the 1920s. Especially the beginning of the 1920s was the time when the rise of the socialist (communist) and anarchist thought on the more radical flank of the socio-political spectrum was matched mostly by the heightened interest in democracy and individualism among more conservative intellectual public. Korea’s national bourgeoisie and the intellectuals closely attached to it were keenly aware that they had to present Korea’s image to the world where the supposedly “democratic” and “liberal” states of Western Europe and USA had just won a victory over the Central European empires; and they were putting sincere hopes upon the democracy proponents in Taishō Japan, some of whom, like Yoshino Sakuzō (1878-1933), were seriously proposing a sort of “home rule” for the colonized Korean peninsula[13]. For example, one of the central Protestant activists in Korea at that time and the man, who was to play an important role in the importation of the fascist ideas to Korea afterwards, Sin Hǔngu (Cynn, Hugh Heung-wo: 1883-1959), was praising in one of his English writings of the early 1920s, aimed mostly at the Christian public in the USA, the role of Christianity in Korea in the following terms: “If a man is at all sincere, he cannot be a Christian and at the same time not be democratic in spirit. (…)Liberty is there when one is told to gain freedom from self and make one's righteousness exceed that of those who fulfil only the letter of the law. (…) Christianity recognizes the personalism of individuals. Man is not merely a part of a mass of humanity, but he has his own peculiar personality distinct from any others, and that personality is in the final analysis solely responsible to the Supreme Being. Every person has his worth, his rights, and duties. This is a mighty germ for liberalism and democracy. This helps one to find one's own place in the world scheme of things, and it compels one to recognize and respect the personality of others.”[14]

Even those on the right-wing, who continued to adhere to the Social Darwinist collectivist ideals of the “individual sacrifice for the sake of national/state survival”, largely inherited from the “enlightenment” discourses of the 1900s-1910s, were often carefully balancing their appeals for the strengthening of the collective cohesion with the paeans to what was counted as liberalism and democracy’s symbols. For example, Yi Kwangsu’s (1892-1950) seminal Minjok Kaejoron (Treatise on National Regeneration, first published in Kaebyǒk, May 1922) contrasted the semi-eternal “longevity” of the “collectives” (nations, churches, etc.) to the brief lifespan of the “individuals” and exhorted utmost self-sacrifice for the sake of Korean nation’s “reform and survival” – and at the same time idealized the “national qualities of the Anglo-Saxes”, first and foremost their “love of freedom”, and “practical and enterprising spirit”. Yi understood “Anglo-Saxon constitutionalism” as a fruit of gradual, non-revolutionary development, fully based upon “pragmatism” and ideally balancing the respect towards “individuals’ privacy” with “the spirit of service towards both states and various communities and voluntary groups”[15] – in full accordance with the commonplaces of the conservative liberalism of the day. Social Darwinism remained very much the “hard core” of the right-wing nationalist discourse throughout the 1920s, but it was de rigueur to put it under some liberal dressing. The extreme-right discourses were not much welcome onto such a milieu – so far. It is not that Korea’s right-wing nationalist “moderates” were not alarmed by the growing popularity of communist and anarchist ideas among the educated youth and their influences upon the workers’ and peasants’ movements; but in colonial Korea of the 1920s, were the underground communist cells were thoroughly hunted down by the Japanese police and denied any right to the lawful public representation anyway, the local bourgeoisie was much less interested in the militant anti-Communism than its counterparts in many European countries. In fact, even among the Korean Christians directly challenged by the communist anti-religious propaganda, the dominant response was rather interest in the moderate “Christian socialism” and “social gospel”, as well as in the middle-of-the-road on the establishment of the basic welfare provisions for the workers and “cooperation of the capital with the labour”, than any surge in confrontational anti-Communism[16].