Meet South Korea’s red-busting Buddhist monk

SEOUL, South Korea — “Before, my mission was to rat out communists in the temple,” explained Chung Han-yeong, who is not your typical Buddhist monk.

“Now, I rat out communists everywhere!” proclaimed the 56-year-old, who speaks to a sizable crowd of followers, and writes treatises under the adopted monastic name “Sung-ho.”

He points to an encampment of left-wing hunger fasters rallying across the street. “This is the communist infiltration of our nation!” he declares. The demonstrators are demanding a parliamentary investigation into the extent to which alleged corporate and government back-scratching contributed to the tragic Sewol ferry sinking last March, a national tragedy in which more than 300 South Koreans died.

Sung-ho has embarked on what he calls a godly red-busting campaign, vowing to restore the patriotism of the young. His mission is vital, he argues, to smothering any North Korean sympathies, and protecting the integrity of the US-South Korean military alliance, before it’s too late.

He calls himself a “warrior monk,” and swears his pregnant mother had a prophetic dream portending his arrival in the earthly realm.

Ironically, when he’s not staging counter-protests against the country’s liberals — whom he likens to “supporters of Kim Il Sung” and “enemies of the USA” — Sung-ho meditates, reflecting on the peaceful teachings of the Buddha and writing calligraphy that his group hands out to passersby.

He signs off his writings as the “Supreme Patriarch of Ilbe,” using a religious honorific in Korean reserved for the uppermost leader of a Buddhist order.

In reality, Sung-ho holds no such formal title with any Buddhist sect. He rather claims this venerable status under the banner of a far-right web forum called “Ilbe” (pronounced Eel-bae, shorthand for “Best Daily”), a 4chan-like corner of the web, albeit amped up on conservative rants and minus the leaked celebrity nudes.

Originally a community of manga and camera hobbyists, in recent years the forum has stirred up public attention with its irate and vitriolic conservative commentary — often in response to bouts of North Korean aggression, first gaining steam on a predecessor website with the 2010 sinking of a naval corvette, the Cheonan, which killed 46 South Korean sailors.

Not of all of its web forums are full of political bluster, but Ilbe has nonetheless built a reputation for its anti-communist witch hunts, flagrant language, and free-spirit rebellion against the rigid, top-down hierarchies of South Korean society. Its online attacks can get so vindictive and humiliating that several Koreans, including mainstream conservatives, tell GlobalPost that they feel uncomfortable speaking publicly about it. Ilbe is frequented in large part by young men, with a third of all users aged 21 to 25, according to a self-reported poll last year.

Offline, an untold number of fringe right-wing contingents — many of whom have members affiliated with Ilbe — emerge in the country’s seemingly never-ending protests with satirical spectacles and taunts. In a stunt that went viral last month, a crowd of about 100 people, including Ilbe netizens, feasted on a pizza and fried chicken delivery in front of an encampment of hunger-fasting activists in central Seoul, sparking controversy across the nation.

In a country where politics can be fractious, petty and peevish, the odd stable of activists across the conservative spectrum has found an unusual degree of unity.

Take, for instance, the elderly men of the Korea Parent Federation, who have burned effigies of Kim Jong Un and have earned the nickname “gas-tank grandpas” for showing up to demonstrations with wooden sticks and, on at least one occasion, a portable gas tank and fire extinguisher.

Even in the US, a few geriatric tough-guys dressed in military fatigues have been known to get rowdy at universities that have large Korean populations, including at least one episode that required police intervention at Yale University.

Yet another collective, the Northwest Youth Association, has taken the brunt of the left-wing Korean press for using the same name as a historical, anti-communist militia that massacred residents of the South’s Jeju Island following an uprising in the late 1940s.

Of course, that level of anti-red violence no longer rattles South Korea, a powerful and wealthy democracy that was once a dictatorial backwater. Nowadays, pretty much all hysteria comes in the form of rhetoric with occasional punches thrown.

A decade ago, the picture was entirely different. The political left took the floor with messages of peace and unification with North Korea — and, by proxy, a tougher stance on the US military presence. At its most extreme end, a few socialists praised the Pyongyang regime’s ideology of self-determination, known as Juche, citing it as a model for resisting American imperialism.

These days, Ilbe users argue that reconciliatory gestures towards North Korea, which culminated with a landmark 2000 summit between the liberal South Korean president and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, had the unintended consequence of sustaining a blackmail regime with easy cash and political legitimacy.

They abhor anything that could be construed as anti-American, showering praise on Gen. Douglas MacArthur and South Korea’s former dictators for saving the country from North Korean domination from the late 1940s to 1980s. Mainstream political opponents — including the mayor of Seoul, and celebrities who promote social welfare — are really just pinko wimps and “leftist zombies” who don’t appreciate these sacrifices, to use Ilbe parlance.

As Sung-ho tells it, pinkoes similar to these have spent the past decade infiltrating the Buddhist clergy, and it wasn’t until he uncovered the excesses of gambling and drinking inside the order that he discovered a slew of communist rats, he claimed.

The Buddhist sect to which Sung-ho was ordained, the Jogye Order, tells a different story.

After too much rabble-rousing with his fellow clergymen, the self-proclaimed warrior monk was defrocked in 2012, according to monastic labor relations chief Yang Han-ung, who had joined the progressive camp across the street.

In 2012, Sung-ho received a suspended prison sentence of one year and six months for misusing temple funds and assaulting a monastery clerk, but hasn’t served jail time thanks to good behavior on a probationary period. He sued the order for wrongful disciplinary measures, claiming some $100,000 in damages, but the case was thrown out.

“As you can see, Sung-ho does not follow the true teachings of peace and tranquility in the Jogye Order,” Yang said. But that hasn’t stopped this spiritual warrior from galvanizing followers for some good old red-busting.

Max Kim contributed reporting.

The article was originally published in PRI’s The World