🎧 Podcast: The Barracks State & The Boy Who Refused to Bow (Yu Si-min’s History Part 2)

Hello, everyone.
Last week, we stood at “Ground Zero.” This week, we enter the “Barracks State.”
In this week’s newsletter (Part 2) (yoonjiwon.substack.com/p/korea-barracks-state-…), we covered the history of the 1960s and 70s—the economic explosion, the dictatorship, and the tragic death of Jeon Tae-il.
But in this podcast episode, I want to go behind the text. I want to talk about the emotional and psychological weight of living in a country that tried to turn its citizens into soldiers and machines.
I talk about Park Chung-hee’s “Barracks State,” why so many people accepted that level of control, and how the slogan “Let’s live well” powered the economic miracle while grinding down real human bodies. We also spend time with two people who shape the way I read this history: Yu Si-min himself and a young garment worker named Jeon Tae-il, whose final cry was, “We are not machines.”
This episode is not just an audio version of the article. It is meant to complement it. The newsletter gives you the structure, photos, and key quotes; the podcast lingers on the emotions, the contradictions, and the questions I could not fit on the page.
🔗 Read the full Part 2 essay here:Two Desires, One Nation, Part 2: The Barracks State and the Boy Who Wouldn’t Bow (yoonjiwon.substack.com/p/korea-barracks-state-…)
If you are new to this series, you might also want to start with Part 1 for the origin story of our “twins”:Part 1: The Twins Born in the Ruins (yoonjiwon.substack.com/p/two-desires-one-natio…)
Thank you for listening, and I hope you will enjoy reading the piece and then hearing the story unfold in your ears.

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