Martial Law Commander Felt Gwangju Uprising Threatened to Communize South Korea

This doesn’t seem to be anything new from this document release that most people didn’t already know:

The martial law commander at the time of South Korea’s 1980 pro-democracy uprising warned the then-U.S. ambassador that the country could end up a communist nation like Vietnam unless the revolt was quelled, declassified U.S. documents showed Friday.

The commander, Gen. Lee Hui-sung, also tried to justify the martial law’s expansion during the meeting with Ambassador William Gleysteen on the day of the revolt, claiming the growing influence of communist thinking spreading amongst young students was posing threats to South Korea’s security, according to the documents.

It was when Gen. Chun Doo-hwan was effectively in control of South Korea after taking power in a military coup following the assassination of strongman President Park Chung-hee the previous year at the hands of his own spy chief.

On May 18, 1980, citizens in the southwestern city of Gwangju rose up against Chun, and his military junta sent paratroopers and ruthlessly cracked down on the nine-day revolt, leaving more than 200 people killed and 1,800 others wounded. 

“He justified expanded martial law as necessary to deter a danger which had become an unacceptable threat to the survival of the ROK,” Gleysteen said in a telegram to the State Department, referring to South Korea by its official name, Republic of Korea. 

“The rampant growth of communist thinking among students and radical tendencies within the student movement posed the likelihood of massive disorders which the government could not control without undermining the country’s external security,” he said. “If they were not controlled, Lee feared the ROK would be communized in a manner similar to Vietnam.” 

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but this document release just further validates that the Chun Doo-hwan government was trying to make the case to the U.S. that the uprising was a threat to the external security of the government. Whether the uprising really was an external security threat is still hotly debated to this day.