Why has everything become so frightening?

Chin Jung-kwon

The author is a professor at Kwangwoon University.

The controversy began with Starbucks Korea's Buddy Week promotion, which ran from May 15 to 26. During the campaign, the company designated three themed events: "Dante Day" on May 15, "Tank Day" on May 18 and "Nasu Day" on May 20. "Dante," "Tank" and "Nasu" were simply the names of reusable tumblers offered during the promotion.

The problem was that "Tank Day" coincided with the anniversary of the Gwangju Democratization Movement in 1980. An advertising slogan also included the Korean onomatopoeia "tak," which some interpreted as a coded reference referring to the police report on the death of a student activist. Objectively, however, the first appears to have been a coincidence while the second required a considerable leap of imagination.

For my generation, the combination of May 18 and the word "tank" immediately evokes painful memories. For younger people, however, events from 46 years ago belong to history textbooks rather than lived experience. The appropriate response would have been to explain why older generations regard the date as especially sensitive.

Instead, the controversy took a stranger turn. A narrative emerged that Starbucks Korea's chairman, portrayed as a far-right figure because of his anticommunist rhetoric, had deliberately instructed employees to disguise an insult to the Gwangju uprising as a marketing campaign. Even the president publicly treated this unlikely scenario as fact, prompting a police investigation.

Prosecutors later rejected a police request for search warrants, concluding that alleged violations of the Special Act on May 18 Democratization Movement and defamation laws were difficult to establish. Since the claim that the promotion intentionally mocked May 18 rests largely on speculation, it is unlikely to withstand judicial scrutiny.

Turning an unsuccessful marketing campaign into a political scandal benefits both extremes. One side condemns Starbucks Korea for insulting the victims of May 18, while the other celebrates the fantasy that a major corporation has joined its culture war. Their conclusions differ, but both depend on treating interpretation as established fact.

Once that transformation occurred, ordinary expressions acquired new meanings. Phrases such as "Let's go to Starbucks" and "Tank day" became offensive because the controversy had already redefined them. That became the backdrop for the Paichai High School incident.

When members of the school's baseball team shouted those phrases toward players from Gwangju Jeil High School, there was an unmistakable intention to taunt and offend. Expressions once confined to fringe online communities such as the far-right Ilbe site had spread among teenagers as internet memes.

That does not mean the students themselves are equivalent to Ilbe users. A meme is a cultural unit transmitted through imitation. As repetition continues, connections to the original source weaken. What may have begun as explicitly far-right rhetoric gradually loses much of its ideological meaning, leaving little more than a game of provoking others.

The ugly implications embedded in that game are precisely what society should teach children to recognize. Unfortunately, both progressives and conservatives in Korea seem to place greater faith in punishment than in education.

Fortunately, this case reached a relatively mature conclusion. "Branding students with a scarlet letter after they have sincerely reflected on their mistakes and asked for forgiveness is not the outcome we seek," one statement declared. That was the most constructive response anyone offered.

The Starbucks Korea controversy did not end there. More recently, a television producer criticized a member of a girl group for saying "museopno," Korean for "It's scary" in the southeastern Gyeongsang dialect, claiming that the sentence-ending syllable "no" constituted an Ilbe marker.

Yet another online community, Megalia, a now-defunct radical feminist online community widely seen as aligned with the political left and as Ilbe's ideological opposite, also routinely attached "no" to sentence endings. Were its members Ilbe users as well?

Once online activists identified a target, amateur linguistic theories quickly appeared claiming to prove that the expression belonged exclusively to Ilbe. Predictably, cyberbullying followed. Must another young idol be sacrificed at the altar of May 18 before people are satisfied? I cannot regard that as an appropriate way to honor those who died during the democratization movement.

The atmosphere increasingly resembles episodes of collective hysteria from the 1970s. At that time, people claimed snack packages contained secret messages from communist spies.

Former Rebuilding Korea Party leader Cho Kuk has also contributed to this climate. In a recent television appearance, he claimed that the 50,000 Japanese who remained in Korea after liberation became the origin of the country's pro-Japanese collaborators. If anything deserves criticism, it is rhetoric that crosses the line from prejudice into racial essentialism.

Meanwhile, People Power Party Rep. Lee Jin-sook sent a congratulatory flower wreath to Paichai High School, whose entrance had already become a symbolic battleground lined with wreaths from opposing camps. The baseball players seem to have learned something from the controversy. It is unfortunate that some adults, including elected politicians, appear not to have done the same.

When two old-school forms of political frenzy collide, remaining sane without joining either camp becomes a risky proposition. That, more than anything else, is what truly feels frightening.