Salvific Violence: The Hungnam Evacuation and Anticommunist Rescue in US-Occupied North Korea

This article disrupts the hegemonic narrativization of the Hungnam evacuation as a self-evidently benevolent event during the Korean War (1950–1953), as depicted in public commemorations and filmic representations. By writing the evacuation into a critical history of the US military empire, this article argues that the anticommunist narrative of Hungnam as a benevolent rescue from a singular threat of violence—the communists—to a free South Korea conceals the violent conditions of anticommunist occupation—liberation—and rescue during the war. For nearly three months in the late fall of 1950, occupied North Koreans encountered and negotiated necropolitical conditions of anticommunist liberation that trace back to the violent political order that emerged in South Korea under the US military government. With China’s intervention in the war, however, the liberated friends, many of whom were Christians, found themselves becoming a refugee problem for the US military. As this article shows, the US military’s violent policing of civilian movements created the need to rescue the city’s Christians from being mistaken for bad refugees at roadblocks and checkpoints along the roads leading into the city and its port. Through a critical reading of the US military’s refugee problem in wartime North Korea, this essay also examines the formation of a refugee subjectivity that contains within it both colonial and anticommunist discourses of subjecthood in the making of a US-led free world.