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The Koreas

The anti-Americanism and pro-North Korea tendencies of South Korea’s Candlelight Action protest movement

Lawrence Peck
Protesters rally against then-President Yoon Suk-yeol in Seoul, calling for his removal [image: Yonhap News Agency)

By Lawrence Peck

After President Yoon Seok-yeol took office in May 2022, there was immediately a rebirth of the so-called candlelight protests which had targeted and led to the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye five years earlier.

This revival by those on the Korean left who sought to remove Yoon from office was not surprising. 

These new candlelight protests originated in September of 2021, six months before Yoon was elected, under the name “Candlelight Action Solidarity for Prosecution Reform,” but were renamed “Candlelight Action” (CA) and officially launched as a civic group in April of 2022. By August, CA was holding weekly protests demanding Yoon’s resignation.  

The extremist nature of the CA protests against a president whose term had hardly begun, and in particular the openly anti-American rhetoric and pro-North Korean tendencies often exhibited at the events and in statements by its leaders, have been shocking and deeply disturbing.

Also very troubling was the active participation of supposedly mainstream Korean politicians and other important figures in CA protests, and the eventual transition to what were at first clearly de facto, and in later cases official joint protests held by that group together with the major opposition Democratic Party of Korea (DPK).  

As a writer for the Joongang Ilbo noted, aside from the official joint protests which the CA later held together with the DPK, already by February of 2023, CA was holding joint protests with the DPK in a de facto manner. Those earlier protests of the two entities, while officially separate, clearly overlapped in terms of their locations, times, and participants. In one particular case as shown live on the TV news network JTBC, in order to promote the fiction that such protests were separate, as a CA protest was about to end, the CA banner on the main stage of the rally was pulled away to reveal underneath a banner for the DPK protest, which started just minutes later, obviously at the same spot and with the same people in attendance.

From early on, one of the top CA leaders, its “standing co-representative” who has served as one of its primary spokesmen, was former university professor, clergyman, and journalist Kim Min-woong. A far-left radical who despises the U.S. and Israel, he is the brother of DPK National Assemblyman Kim Min-seok, who served time in jail along with other radicals for occupying the U.S. Cultural Center in Seoul. Along with other DPK lawmakers, Kim Min-seok has been a speaker at his brother’s CA protest rallies. The DPK’s presidential candidate Lee Jae-myung also attended joint protests which his party held with the CA, at which Lee and other top leaders could be seen sitting beside Kim Min-woong in spite of the fact that Kim had said of Yoon, “We must cut off the tyrant’s head.”

Kim, who apparently claims a Nostradamus-like ability to see into the future, declared “When Candlelight Action was launched, it was before the Yoon Seok-yeol administration began its term, but we believed that the destruction of democracy and mismanagement were inevitable given the nature of the prosecution regime.” 

Using Marxist-tinged terminology about “contradictions,” Kim implied that it was not merely Yoon that CA wanted out, but that they had far broader objections to the Republic of Korea (ROK). “The Yoon Seok-yeol government is the culmination of contradictions that have built up over 70 years,” he said. 

For decades, Kim has engaged in vitriolic denunciations of the U.S. In his 2001 book Invisible Colony, he condemned free market capitalism and parroted North Korean propaganda by claiming that the U.S. was the “colonial master” of the ROK. In 2005, he signed a statement accusing the U.S., not North Korea, of being responsible for the proliferation of nuclear weapons and criticizing North Korea human rights legislation. In a 2006 interview he denounced what he termed “American imperialism,” claiming the U.S. seeks “to establish a device to completely dominate the Korean peninsula militarily, economically, and culturally.”  

Demonstrating an adherence to Marxist nonsense, in 2010 Kim laughably claimed that the U.S. entered World War Two to increase corporate profits. He also campaigned against the deployment of the U.S. THAAD anti-missile system in the ROK, which protects the country from the threat posed by North Korea. In October 2023, he stated that “the ROK-US-Japan war alliance is fundamentally the reality of a policy of aggression against the North.” In January 2025, at the height of his CA protests, Kim participated in an anti-American protest in front of the U.S. Embassy, featuring signs demanding “U.S. should immediately stop interfering in our internal affairs,” and again parroting North Korean propaganda by condemning joint U.S.-ROK military drills as “war exercises that put the lives of young people at stake.” Kim’s view of the Korean War is an  illustrative and damning aspect of his worldview. He has outrageously stated that it was “an aggressive war targeting China to stabilize the U.S. imperialistic ruling system.”

Kim’s deep anti-Americanism is matched by his virulent hatred of Israel and his shocking defense of the atrocities committed by Hamas in its massacres of October 7, 2023. Only a couple of days after that premeditated slaughter of innocents, Kim remarked that the emerging media reports of Hamas’s savagery were “nonsense,” yet he openly defended the attacks, euphemistically characterizing the atrocities as merely an “offensive” by Hamas which “has thrown arrogant Israel into chaos.” He denied that Hamas was a terrorist group and likened it to Korea’s fighters for independence from Japan, an outrageous insult to those Korean patriots. Kim didn’t bother to engage in the usual rhetorical deceptions of other Hamas supporters in the ROK, the U.S. and elsewhere, preferring instead to openly express his support for them and the barbaric acts they committed on October 7.

The far-left extremism and anti-Americanism of CA are certainly not limited to Kim Min-woong.  CA has demonstrated that it is anti-American to its core and has also exhibited pro-North Korea tendencies. In the aftermath of the 2022 Itaewon tragedy, CA adopted and promoted at its protests the slogan “Resignation is a memorial,” meaning that a fitting memorial for those who perished would be Yoon’s resignation. It was later disclosed by ROK intelligence agencies that this exact slogan, which was also used by the overseas branch of CA in protests in Los Angeles, was one which the North Korean regime had issued directives to its sympathizers to use. The official YouTube channel of CA also posted a conspiracy theory video denying that the ROK warship Cheonan was sunk by North Korea.  

A constituent organization of CA is the Korean University Student Progressive Federation (Daejinyeon), a violent pro-North Korea and fanatically anti-American group whose activists have been arrested for breaking into the U.S. Ambassador’s residence in Seoul and attempting on several occasions to storm into the U.S. Embassy. Leaders of Daejinyeon were speakers at CA protests. 

During visits to the ROK, pro-North Korea and leftist activists from the U.S., such as Mira Kim, a leader of the U.S. branch of the pro-North Korea group previously known as the 6.15 Committee, were also speakers at CA protests. Kim has also participated in pro-Hamas events in the U.S.  

Sitting beside the America-hating Kim Min-woong at a CA protest in Seoul was another visitor from the Los Angeles area, Choi Kwang-chul (Casey Choi). Choi leads the leftist Korean American Public Action Committee (KAPAC), which is intensively lobbying the U.S. Congress, apparently in conjunction with the DPK and along with pro-North Korea groups, for a dangerous, concession-filled, no-preconditions “peace agreement” with North Korea, deceptively misnamed the Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act. Choi was recently appointed by DPK presidential candidate Lee Jae-myung as his campaign’s “special advisor for diplomacy.”

Kwon Oh-hyuk, the co-representative of CA and comrade of Kim Min-woong as one of the group’s top leaders, has been convicted several times of violating national security laws relating to North Korea. In 2020, Kwon condemned North Korea human rights activists and insulted North Korean defectors as “pet dogs” of the U.S. Kwon has also reportedly given lectures promoting the late North Korean dictator Kim Il-sung’s Juche ideology. On May 17, 2025, Kim and Kwon led a CA protest in front of the U.S. Embassy, and at a CA protest that same day, Kwon groundlessly accused the U.S. of interfering in the internal affairs of the ROK, seeking to attack China, using Koreans as “cannon fodder,” and perhaps most preposterously, ranted that the commander of the U.S. military in the ROK sent a “signal” to Korean conservatives to “rise up” and “assassinate Lee Jae-myung.” At an event in January of 2024, he reportedly expressed the view that if North Korea achieved a permanent peace by launching and winning a war of unification against the ROK, then the people of the ROK should accept that.

Of the many expressions of anti-Americanism at CA protests, three stand out. At a July 2023 CA protest, a far-left, anti-U.S. military activist, Ko Eun Kwan-soon, told an applauding crowd of her upcoming protest against the main U.S. military base in the ROK, which she and her comrades planned to surround with a human chain. She also condemned the North Korea human rights movement. Another speaker at a 2023 CA protest, attended by members of the DPK, listed a series of “crimes” he claimed the U.S. had committed against the ROK, and chanted “Let’s not trust America!” to the applause of the crowd. At a January 2025 CA protest, which was also attended by members of the DPK, a speaker who sounded as if he was a North Korean propagandist, declared, “I give a stern warning to the United States….We will not tolerate any power that goes against our will,” and “We condemn the U.S. for pro-Japan and anti-North Korea policies.”

As an editorial in the ROK’s largest daily newspaper Chosun Ilbo put it in November of 2024, “This [DPK] alliance with organizations accused of harboring pro-North sentiments is deeply troubling.” In an interview with Yonhap TV News in July 2024, Korean attorney Seo Jeong-wook rhetorically asked how it was possible that an ROK political party such as the DPK could make common cause and participate in events with pro-North Korea groups and activists, referring to CA and its leaders. That is certainly a question which, in light of the reprehensible nature of CA and its top leaders, many Koreans and Americans should also ask. It is a question that one hopes mainstream media in the ROK and the U.S. will finally ask.  

With the upcoming ROK presidential election, perhaps the most relevant and important questions are these: Why has candidate Lee Jae-myung participated in protests with these hateful extremists, literally sitting beside them? Why have Lee and his DPK have clearly chosen to engage in a united front with them? Why haven’t he and his party disassociated themselves from such fanatics?

Lawrence Peck
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