The

He who can destroy a thing controls a thing.

Episode 4

Red Island

The

1948 would be the year that the Republic of Korea, the half of Korea, south of the 38th parallel,

sprang into existence.

That same year, President Shingman read declared a national emergency, the decree through which his dictatorship

would kill, imprison, and torture anyone it wanted.

All it had to do was make sure to call them Communists.

And the label Communists could apply to many in South Korea.

There were those who were self-identified Communists, like the Soviet Allied Revolutionary

Government shaping up in the North.

There were Communists in the South, without many ties to the North, some with no ties to the USSR.

And there were the Koreans who practiced an older, yet still communal, life that didn't identify as Communist,

capital C.

And then there were people who didn't particularly identify with any of this at all.

People who happened to know someone, or know of someone, who was a Communist.

The government of Shingman re, backed by the United States, would punish them all the same.

House by House, village by village, re's government, and his cronies across South Korea,

snatched people away.

This campaign kicked up a guerrilla war in the South, culminating in an uprising in a place called Jeju Island,

...