Autonomies

It wasn’t as though we didn’t know how overwhelmingly the army outnumbered us. But the strange thing was, it didn’t matter. Ever since the uprising began, I’d felt something coursing through me, as overwhelming as any army.

Conscience.

Conscience, the most terrifying thing in the world.

The day I stood shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of thousands of my fellow
civilians, staring down the barrels of the soldiers’ guns, the day the bodies of
those first two slaughtered were placed in a handcart and pushed at the head of
the column, I was startled to discover an absence inside myself: the absence of
fear. I remember feeling that it was all right to die; I felt the blood of a hundred
thousand hearts surging together into one enormous artery, fresh and clean … the sublime enormity of a single heart, pulsing blood through that vessel and into my own. I dared to feel a part of it.

At one o’clock in the afternoon, while the speaker in front of the Provincial
Office was playing the national anthem, the soldiers opened fire. I’d been
standing in the middle of the column of the demonstrators, but when the bullets
came flying, I turned and ran. That sublime feeling that I’d been tapping into,
that enormous heart I’d felt briefly a part of, was smashed to pieces, strewn over the ground as so much rubbish. And the gunfire wasn’t only in the square;
snipers were also positioned on the roofs of the surrounding buildings. Beside
me and in front of me people crumpled to the ground, but I kept on running.
Only when I was sure I’d left the square far behind did I let myself stagger to a
stop. I was so out of breath I genuinely thought my lungs would burst. My face a mask of sweat and tears, I sank to my knees on the steps leading up to a shop
door. Its shutters were down. A small group had gathered in the street, and I
heard them talking about raiding the police stations and reserves barracks to get guns. They were clearly made of much sterner stuff than I was. We’re sitting
ducks like this. They’ll gun us down, the lot of us. Paratroopers even broke into
the houses in my area. I was so scared I slept with a kitchen knife by my pillow.
Shooting hundreds of rounds like that in broad daylight – I’m telling you, the
world’s gone mad!

One of them jogged off to fetch his truck, and I stayed there slumped on the steps until he drove back. I thought about whether I really had it in me to carry a gun, to point it at a living person and pull the trigger.

It was already late at night by the time the truck I was riding in returned to the
centre. We’d twice taken a wrong turn, and when we’d got to the barracks we’d
found that the guns had already been looted, so it turned out to be a wasted trip. In the meantime, I had no way of knowing how many had fallen in the street fighting. All I remember is the entrance to the hospital the following morning, the seemingly never-ending line of people queuing up to give blood; the doctors and nurses striding through the blasted streets, white gowns bloodstained, hands gripping stretchers; the women who handed up stale rice balls, water and strawberries to the truck I was riding in; the strains of the national anthem, and ‘Arirang’, which everyone was singing at the top of their voice. Those snapshot moments, when it seemed we’d all performed the miracle of stepping outside the shell of our own selves, one person’s tender skin coming into grazed contact with another, felt as though they were rethreading the sinews of that world heart, patching up the fissures from which blood had flowed, making it beat again. That was what captured me, what has stayed with me ever since. Have you even known it, professor – that terrifying intensity, that feeling as if you yourself have undergone some kind of alchemy, been purified, made wholly virtuous? The brilliance of that moment, the dazzling purity of conscience.

Han Kang, Human Acts (2014)

Forty-five years on from the Gwangju uprising, we revisit an event that is only comparable, according to George Katsiaficas, to the Paris Commune or that can only be understood in what the author Han Kang calls “the ‘absolute community’ of self-governing citizens”. (Nobel Prize Lecture, 2024)

And we celebrate and mourn this event as part of the tradition of the oppressed, recalling Walter Benjamin’s words, and the more recent words of Han Kang.

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.

Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History (1940)