What the hell is happening in Korea?

Politics & Elections
1

The President declared martial law and apparently tried to have the leader of his own party (and much of the opposition) suspended as NK sympathizers. Does this make more sense in context?

2

Here’s 60 posts (and still adding more) on the topic with LOTS of explanations:

3

Thanks. Didn’t think to look in MPSIMS.

4

Here’s a short(ish) video explaining it pretty well. It’s still really weird though. Hard to understand what the SK leader thought he was doing and how it would work. That still seems a big question mark.

5

I use search when I’m interested in finding a thread on a topic that may or may not exist. Rather than manually trying to scan each category I can think of.

To locate that thread so I could link it for you I did [in:title korea after:2024-12-01] and there it was. Good bet any thread on this event will include “korea” in the title. And would have to date from after the event had started.

The Discourse advanced search page is very useful for controlling parameters of your search to reduce the problem of finding either nothing, or hundreds of false hits.

6

I live in South Korea. Martial law was declared late Wednesday night and countermanded by Korea’s parliament before the start of business Thursday. President Yoon is finding out the hard way that his powers have limits. Until pretty recently, all ROK presidents either died in office or were marched out in handcuffs, and Yoon looks to be returning to this standard.

If you watch The Daily Show, Ronnie Chieng showed a clip of an overnight protest of the martial law, and an unarmed protester repelled an armed soldier with some Taekwondo moves. South Korea conscripts all male citizens into their armed forces, so the average protester has had the same fight training as the average soldier. They use martial law sparingly these days, mainly for this reason.

7

I think the bottom line is that none of the soldiers wanted to to be the first to shoot, and none of the officers wanted to be the first to give the order to open fire. When the protestors realized that it was all over.

8

See here: