Recently, the streets of Seoul, South Korea, rang with a bizarre chant: “We are Charlie Kirk.” Young conservative men, waving American flags and donning MAGA hats, claimed solidarity with a U.S. culture warrior most Koreans had never heard of until recently.
On the surface, it looks like global conservatism spilling across borders. But if you know South Korea’s history, it is absurd. Almost insulting.
The Forgotten Wounds of Kijichon
For decades, South Korea’s U.S. alliance came with a hidden cost. Around American military bases, whole kijichon, “camptowns” were built to service U.S. soldiers. Thousands of Korean women were forced or pushed by poverty into sex work.
These women were not just exploited by individuals, but by a system. The government called them “dollar-earning patriots.” Military police patrolled their lives. Some were even locked up in disease-control centers nicknamed “monkey houses.” Their children, often mixed-race, grew up facing discrimination.
What makes this more bitter is how rarely it is talked about. South Korea has built its global image on tech, K-pop, and soft power, but this chapter of history is pushed into silence. Many young men chanting Charlie Kirk’s name today likely don’t even know their country’s women were once sacrificed at the altar of the U.S. alliance. That ignorance is not an accident, it is the product of deliberate forgetting.
It was one of the ugliest chapters of the U.S.– Korea relationship. And its scars remain.
Idolizing the Wrong Man
Now picture those same streets, decades later, filled with men chanting the name of Charlie Kirk. A man who represents an America of grievance politics, misogyny, and Christian nationalism.
They call him a hero. But he is the inheritor of the same America that once treated their grandmothers and aunts as disposable bodies around U.S. bases. The irony is almost too much to process.
And let’s be real, Charlie Kirk wouldn’t lift a finger for South Korea if it didn’t serve his brand. His career is built on stirring outrage, not solidarity. The fact that young Koreans are chanting his name shows just how hollow this borrowed ideology is: they are raising someone else’s banner while forgetting their own wounds.
This isn’t pride. It’s borrowed anger. Borrowed masculinity. These rallies aren’t Korean at all, they’re cosplay versions of American conservative rallies, complete with chants and hats.
A Hollow Chant
When South Koreans shout “We are Charlie Kirk,” they are not showing strength. They are showing how easily history can be buried under noise.
Because South Korea doesn’t need Charlie Kirk. It doesn’t need to kneel at the altar of an American culture warrior. It needs honesty about its own past, including the pain of the kijichon.
To chant his name is not just ironic, it’s pathetic. A cruel joke on themselves, and a slap in the face to the women whose lives were destroyed in those camptowns.
South Korea has built a miracle from nothing. It doesn’t need to borrow slogans from across the Pacific. What it needs is to remember.
