Violence begets violence. This paper explores disruptive colonial legacies in Northeast Asia. Genocidal ripples in the region refracted murder through multiple homicidal regimes, savage conflicts, and devastating humanitarian crises during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Atrocity returned again and again. This paper posits an often-hidden cause of mass violence: the shared, passed on experience of trauma itself. Drawing from cases of atrocities carried out by South Korean counter-insurgency forces during the Korean civil war (1946-54), this research explores how serving in the Japanese imperial army (1931-1945) shaped Korean soldiers' later violence against their own civilians during the civil war. Specifically, it investigates how institutional, psychological, and experiential patterns derived from the Japanese colonial project were reproduced in post-liberation Korea. It considers ways that experiencing trauma leads certain individuals and communities to perpetrate more atrocities. In retribution or release, broken survivors redirect their hurt onto others. Perpetrators repeat and refine techniques of horror. Bystanders and observers acculturate to systemic killings. South Korean experiences during and after Japanese rule sheds light on how colonial structures shape subsequent episodes of mass violence. Ultimately, our work demonstrates how killing can be learned and inherited, especially in fluid grievance-riddled colonial and post-colonial settings. This uncomfortable truth undercuts good-evil perspectives on genocidal histories, but it also serves – hopefully – as a wake-up call. Cultures of impunity embolden killers and entrench cycles of mass violence. Unless properly resolved, vicious memories may revisit communities in tragic fashion.
Please note:
This paper forms an updated version of what was accepted to MSA 2020. The title has changed and I have brought in a co-author but the core is the same. Apologies if this was wrongly submitted, please consider as a "new" submission if more appropriate.
