Hatred and Contempt: The South Korean Far-Right’s Mobilization of North Korea and the Reorganization of Affect

This article analyzes how South Korean far-right political forces have mobilized North Korea as a core political resource since the national division, with a focus on the dimension of affect. The dominant affective form directed at North Korea has been reorganized in accordance with shifting historical conditions: “hatred” (chŭngo) served as the primary affective medium during the Cold War and wartime period, while “contempt” (hyŏmo) assumed that role in the post-Cold War and neoliberal era. During the Cold War, the far-right embodied anti-communism at the popular level through an array of legal, institutional, and cultural mechanisms ― including the National Security Act, anti-communist education curricula, oratory competitions, and animated propaganda films. In this process, North Korea was constructed as an absolute evil to be annihilated through animalized representations, and conservative Protestant forces sacralized anti-communism as a matter of faith, endowing hatred with metaphysical legitimacy. From the 1990s onward, the dissolution of the Cold War order and the neoliberal transition reinforced the image of North Korea as a “declining other,” prompting the far-right to reorganize its affective strategy away from the grammar of hatred toward a mockery-based contempt rooted in a sense of superiority. The chongbuk (“pro-North”) frame, in particular, functioned as a mechanism for articulating anti-North Korean affect with misogyny, homophobia, and anti-immigrant sentiment. Since the 2010s, the digital media environment has enabled the everyday circulation of “softened contempt,” further popularizing the far-right’s politics of affect across wider publics. This article demonstrates that the historical variation between hatred and contempt represents not merely a strategic choice on the part of the far-right, but a political formation shaped by the structural condition of national division ― a terrain that Korean society as a whole shares.