Democratic Party lawmaker Park Jie-won [Photo = Yonhap News]

I recently posted and then quietly deleted an article highlighting the blatant destruction of evidence by the Gwangju Gwangsan Police Station. I felt it was petty to use this boiling issue—an incident where officers were caught covering up a murder committed by a fellow officer's son—as a pretext, fearing it might be misconstrued as an attack on an entire region.

However, after reading the grand narrative lamenting the grievances of the Honam region, which bears the burden of a victim mentality, the switch for the objective, fact-based critique I had cooled down was flipped back on.

When politicians are incompetent, the local residents suffer

I would like to ask Representative Park Jie-won, bluntly: Since when did pointing out objective statistics and the reality of shameful administration turn into "hereditary harassment" of the region?

Do you honestly believe that spending billions in tax revenue to build a memorial park for Zheng Lücheng, who composed military anthems for North Korea and the Chinese Communist Party—forces that once pointed their guns at the Republic of Korea—could have happened anywhere other than Honam?

Whose work is this "Galapagos-style" administration, which has stubbornly refused the entry of large-scale shopping malls under the pretext of protecting local 5-day markets and traditional merchants, all while disregarding the consumer convenience of citizens? That is the true state of the "sacred ground" you claim is being harassed.

These extraordinary administrative farces do not end there. From the lack of drinking water due to severe drought, to a power infrastructure so inadequate that it cannot support Jeong Dong-young’s solar power projects—which were launched as a family livelihood business despite clear conflicts of interest—the insistence on attracting a high-tech semiconductor cluster despite these glaring realities is a dark comedy.

The sky-high rates of "fake patients" and insurance fraud, the Saemangeum Jamboree disaster that squandered tens of billions of won in taxes while forcing Scouts from around the world into mudflats during a heatwave, the Yeosu World Island Expo that is faltering due to poor preparation despite massive budget allocations, the bizarre waste of taxes on a "K-pop themed street" that looks like a ghost town, and even the mismanagement of compensation funds for bereaved families of the Donghak Peasant Revolution—I could list more if you wish.

All these disasters and absurdities I have enumerated are not malicious smears or "fake news" intended to target specific political groups. They are merely the painful outcomes produced by the insularity and incompetence of a leftist political cartel that has turned the region into its private fiefdom for decades.

How long will you continue to manage your voting base?

Yet, whenever the festering sores of regional administration are exposed, these people pull out a convenient cheat code: the invincible narrative of the "persecuted Honam." Using this as a shield, they silence even reasonable criticism by claiming, "You are hating and harassing us."

A society that suppresses the ability to call facts by their names can never heal itself. Putting a scalpel to failed administration and corrupt cartels is not "vile harassment"; it is the only vaccine that can pull a system—stagnating in the past—into the future.

The true culprits insulting Honam for generations are not the citizens pointing out the facts. It is the politicians who, in order to manage their own narrow voting base, have reduced the region's past wounds and victimhood into a bulletproof vest to cover up their own corruption and incompetence.

The more you insist that objective factual criticism is harassment and try to stir up tears, the more that place will remain an isolated island, held hostage forever by the business of outdated politics.

◆ Park Ju-hyun, Author

A composer, music director, columnist, and essayist. They actively express opinions on political, current, and social issues on Facebook, garnering sympathy from many. They are the author of the essay collection, "Crossing the Sea of Storms."