I’m Korean Australian but I’ve always had a bit of an interest in Korean history and while I’m not that knowledgeable about it, I was always under the impression that Kim Gu was pretty well respected over there and that any controversies about him were about him being associated with 백의사 and other far right groups.
A few months ago though I was talking to two Korean classmates and when the topic of Korean history was brought up one of them said something along the lines of Kim Gu being a communist and supporting Kim Il Sung? I was really confused and thought he was talking about someone else but they both insisted that Kim Gu wanted Korea to be communist and that I was educated wrongly about the topic because there’s ‘no evidence’ that Kim Gu participated was right wing and that he’d worked with China (not even modern communist China pretty sure but anyways). I asked my mum and she basically told me that I must have been talking to some crazy people that support the PPP and that no one believes that in real life.
I’d left it there but recently on Instagram I saw a reel from some historian guy that was talking about the independence movement and even there in the comments there were a bunch of people insisting that Kim Gu was communist was working for Kim Il Sung with some other pretty crazy takes about Japanese colonisation being better and stuff like that. Obviously Instagram reel comments are the worst place to gauge what the average person believes and many other people were calling those people crazy in the comments too but they were still well liked comments and there were a fair few people with those beliefs which I was pretty dumbfounded by so I was wondering if there are actually people who believe stuff like this and whether this is some sort of recent phenomenon??
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