Editor’s note: This is the second in a two-part series on the North Korean killing of Lee Seung-bok and the battle over his memory in South Korea. The first part can be found here.

“I hate the Communist Party.”

Thanks to that short sentence, a nine-year-old boy born into a poor farming family transformed from just a tragic victim of a North Korean military operation gone wrong into a useful symbol of anti-communism for a South Korean government locked in a Cold War struggle.

DPRK soldiers killed Lee Seung-bok following a failed attempt to spark an uprising in the