5·16 The coup group was armed with anti-communist sentiment and knew that a well-established anti-communist system could effectively manage the country and its people. This realization led them to focus on building an anti-communist system from the b...
5·16 The coup group was armed with anti-communist sentiment and knew that a well-established anti-communist system could effectively manage the country and its people. This realization led them to focus on building an anti-communist system from the beginning. The process of building a counter-communist system was organized into two parts: human and legal. For human organization, it was necessary to expand the anti-communist frame, and for legal organization, new laws were needed. To this end, the scope of anti-communism and mercenarism was expanded by manipulating Korean spies in Japan, and the Anti-Communist Law was newly revised and operated as a complementary system to the National Security Law.
The rise of spy in modern Korean history was an important tool in the anti-communist discourse. The history of the Korean peninsula, with its experience of colonization and division, was in many ways favorable for the manipulation of Korean spies, and as a result, the proportion of Korean spies decreased while the proportion of Japanese spies and Japanese-related spies increased. The incident that marked the beginning of the Korean-Japanese spy narrative was the Korean National Daily Choi Yong-su case. The expansion and reconstruction of the anti-communist frame, coupled with anti-communist laws, led to its internalization in the minds of the people. The coup group used anti-communist laws to monitor all areas of life, and people had to prove they were not mercenaries through self-censorship. At the slightest sign of suspicion of being a mercenary or communist, the “people” were no longer “the people. The state that the coup group created was neither free nor democratic, but rather an anti-communist state.