Since September the rumor had been circulating that President Yoon intended to declare martial law in December. No evidence was provided, and the notion that he would quietly plan months in advance for something that could be justified only as a last-ditch response to a national crisis struck most people as implausible. Needless to say, the rumor turned out to be correct. This leaves us to wonder what on earth Yoon was thinking, and why something that had been in the works for so long should have been handled so ineptly.
Like another careerist and intellectually lazy ex-prosecutor I can think of, Yoon has no firm political principles. We can discount the possibility that a man who served as the pro-North left’s attack dog for years, showing special prejudice toward defense and intelligence officials, is now seriously worried about “North-obeying” forces bringing down the state.
Nevertheless, I have a hard time believing that the defense minister was the driving force behind the fiasco. A former military man himself (unlike the president), Kim Yong-hyun would have known that the average ROK soldier, who in the old days was a hardbitten, class-resentful son of the proletariat or peasantry, is now a university student or graduate trained from childhood to oppose military intervention in politics. This is the last army one could have expected to help impose martial law even if circumstances had called for it, which they didn’t.
In any case the final decision was Yoon’s to make. He is a known drinker, but picking a date well in the future for an irrational action without bothering to prepare for it is behavior suggestive of his other reputed pastime: the consultation, either directly or through his wife, of practitioners of folk religion. If true this would make it the second disastrous decision he has made on such advice, the first having been his refusal to move into the Blue House, the only true republican symbol here that appealed to right and left alike.
It was obvious from the start that a high-functioning Boris Yeltsin in billowing trousers, a directionless man whose idea of centrism was to oscillate between angering the left and angering the right, would have a hard time serving out his term in a country that had recently impeached a much better president. “What demographic,” I asked in 2022, “does he expect to prop up his poll numbers when the candlelight theatrics take off?” The protests will get well and truly underway now, but I can’t talk of theatrics when the case for impeachment is as strong as it is this time.
There will still be plenty of cant to feel nauseated by. Much of it will come from Western journalists who, having spent the past few months calling for more restrictions on online speech (and ignoring Britain and Germany’s slide into soft authoritarianism), will now applaud South Korean democracy for passing “its biggest test” — as the WSJ has already put it.
UPDATE: 5 December 2024:
According to an article in today’s Chosun, top officials knew nothing of the plan to declare martial law until Yoon, in a state of agitation, sprang it on them on the night of the 3rd, whereupon they tried in vain to talk him out of it. I take this to mean that although they’d heard the relevant rumor last summer, they’d dismissed it as far-fetched – much as Yang Sang-hun, a columnist writing in the same issue of the paper, regretfully says he did. After a long list of the president’s rash blunders (starting with the relocation of the presidential offices I mentioned above), which did much to bring about the opposition majority that has paralyzed his presidency, the columnist writes:
President Yoon is not rational, but extremely emotional, thoughtless and impulsive. He does not recognize the wisdom of patience, and reacts impulsively and immediately. He has little sense of how others will feel about what he does, and he doesn’t want to know. He has no respect for others.
Note: This is different from the standard complaint about South Korean presidents – which often comes from thwarted lobbyists — that they listen only to a tiny inner circle.
As a result he lives in his own insular thoughts, oblivious to the current state of the world and of public sentiment. When I look at President Yun’s martial law declaration, I feel like I’m back in the 1970s. It’s true that there are anti-state forces in our society, and that the opposition’s behavior has crossed the line, but although it should have been obvious that those are not sufficient reasons to declare martial law, and that citizens would not tolerate it, Yoon did not realize this. As one State Councilor said, “It’s like an unrealistic fantasy movie.”
The two points which the columnist concedes are of course largely ignored by the globalist Western press, which is back in its 2022 mode of a) attributing to Lee Jae-myung only vague “legal troubles,” and b) treating all talk of pro-North forces here as paranoid McCarthyism.
These are in many cases the same outlets which, on far flimsier grounds, see Russian agents at work throughout American and European politics. A comparison of the Guardian’s coverage with the Korea Times’ shows why you’re better off following this story in the local press.
UPDATE: 7 December 2024: Yoon and the Blob
Note to Westerners: showing concern for South Korea is all well and good, but can you quit looking down on it as if from a higher point on Mount Democracy? As bad as the martial law business was, most South Koreans slept through the declaration and woke up after it had been rescinded. It thus had much briefer and milder consequences than most Western governments’ response to the COVID pandemic. Your own rights are yet to recover fully from the restrictions then imposed. In many ways South Korea is a more democratic country than yours are.
In Germany, for example, the new Catholic holidays are Maria Denunziata and Mariae Haussuchung. No, that’s a Nazi-era joke in need of revival, but in actual fact a working-class German pensioner recently had his house searched by police after he publicly referred to Vice-Chancellor Habeck as an idiot. That would have been unthinkable in this liberal democracy, the health of which so many Westerners now presume to cluck over. If South Koreans never lecture us on such matters, it’s because they prefer to fix their own problems first.
I say this apropos of an article in yesterday’s SK Pro that takes Beltway tankies to task for not criticizing Yoon harshly enough. It was written by Chad O’Carroll, the founder of SK Pro and NK News, whom I don’t remember complaining in 2019 when the Beltway ignored Moon Jae-in’s forced repatriation of two North Koreans with a constitutional right to South Korean citizenship. NK News itself later carried a trivializing op-ed under the callously flippant headline “So what?” Yet that was certainly a more consequential (as in deadly) act of authoritarianism than Yoon’s decision the other night.
But I began this post to take issue with Chad’s uncritical quotation of two men who each attribute to the Blob a disgraceful support for Yoon on account of his having a) sung a song for Biden and b) shown a readiness to work with Japan. I don’t want to get ad hominem here, but I find it relevant that the two in question are themselves fixtures on Deep State-sponsored panels and op-ed pages, Karl Friedhoff being a member of the Gates-funded Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and David Kang a dovish Pyongyang watcher who in 2017 likened Kim Jong Un to a “good CEO” in the Blob organ Foreign Affairs:
A new CEO needs to motivate his employees, explain to them where the company is going and why, and regularize processes of performance and evaluation so that expectations are clear. He needs to do this while also culling the ranks and eliminating dead weight and petty factionalism in the ranks of middle management. An effective leader identifies the malcontents, fires, sidelines, or motivates them, and rewards and promotes those who share his agenda and can move his vision forward. In short, a good CEO is able to get everybody marching in the same direction. These are precisely the steps that Kim is taking.
Friedhoff and Kang’s pretense at standing outside the Blob and looking critically at it in a spirit of anti-authoritarianism is in fact the continuation of a long Blob tradition of preferring South Korea’s left to its right.
I’ve discussed this before. To recap: In South Korea’s occupation period the US State Department famously considered Yeo Un-hyeong a better person to work with than Syngman Rhee. Yeo’s party was getting funds from Pyongyang at the time. (Speaking of Rhee, he not only held presidential elections in wartime, as Zelensky balks at doing, but also allowed a Comintern veteran to run against him.)
Rhee was forced out of power in 1960 less by street protests — which our embassy clearly had a hand in — than by direct pressure from Washington. In 1979 the CFR-dominated Carter administration made clear to Kim Jae-gyu that it wanted Park Chung Hee gone; not long thereafter the KCIA chief literally pulled the trigger. And you must have a very inflated assessment of this country’s sovereignty if you think the parliamentary right turned collectively on Park Geun-hye in 2016 without a green light from you-know-where.
In contrast the Deep State and its mouthpiece media and think tanks were never happier with the Blue House, counter-intuitively enough, than when pro-Chinese, pro-North, Russian-gas-desiring Moon Jae-in occupied it. I posted here and here on the fawning coverage that continued in the NYT, TIME, the Economist, etc, even after Moon praised Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang for standing up to US sanctions.
It was already common Beltway knowledge in 2022 that the conservative party and its presidential candidate Yoon were much less anti-Japanese, therefore more open to trilateral military cooperation, than Lee Jae-myung and his party. Blob-loyal media, tankies and academics rooted for Lee regardless, despite his comparison of Yoon to Zelensky. That’s right: Lee invoked the example of the “novice politician” in Ukraine who had “provoked” Russia as a warning to South Koreans against electing a former prosecutor. American and European politicians get branded as Russian assets for less than that.
All this must be seen in the context of our government and media’s conspicuous reluctance to mete out equally harsh criticism to Putin and the Good CEO. Clearly, the Deep State shares with Donald Trump, just as it did in his first term, a strong desire for some sort of friendly arrangement with Pyongyang. The difference is that Trump’s ultimate goal is to reduce or eliminate our military presence here, while the Deep State’s, it would seem, is to bring North Korea down from within, in the hope of someday seeing US soldiers ranged along the Yalu and Tumen.
Hence the Blob’s perennial enthusiasm for ROK-left proposals that appear likely to make the regime in Pyongyang lower its guard or “take off its coat,” to borrow the language of that Aesop fable which (at an American’s prompting) inspired Kim Dae Jung to come up with the disastrously honest term Sunshine Policy. Which put his more intelligent counterpart in Pyongyang on high alert.
Needless to say, though, Japan does indeed have a part to play in the long-term encircling project. So long as Yoon is in power, the Blob might as well work on that.
PS. I forgot to mention the part of Chad’s article that gives the lie to the rest of it:
To his credit, Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell publicly criticized Yoon’s martial law decision as “badly misjudged,” “deeply problematic,” and “illegitimate.” This refreshing display of diplomatic candor puts the Beltway’s Korea policy elite to shame.
As if the State Department weren’t the core of that elite!
UPDATE: 10 December 2024: US media’s Lee puffery resumes
The Wall Street Journal:
South Korean opposition leader Lee Jae-myung credits a coup and stretch of military rule more than 40 years ago—during which soldiers opened fire on pro-democracy protesters in the southwestern city of Gwangju, killing many—with propelling him into politics.
Propelling implies nearly immediate causation. Lee seems to have put things a little differently:
Two years later, after passing a special exam to enter college, Lee learned from fellow students and others the truth about Gwangju: The citizens who rose up against military rule weren’t rebels, Lee said, but victims shot by the military first. He said the realization spurred him to eventually seek public office. “I decided to dedicate myself to creating a world where such things couldn’t happen,” Lee said. That is part of the reason why Lee sprung [sic] into action Tuesday night.
Back to our corporate media’s Lee puffery of 2022, I see. One would have to be ignorant (or feigning ignorance) of the most basic details of his biography to let this stand. The most striking thing about the years that followed Lee’s alleged dedication to creating a new world is his lack of participation in the student protest movement, at a time when virtually everyone was in it. Many who are now on the right of the parliamentary aisle did more to oppose military dictatorship than Lee did. Which is the very reason why he was never part of the protest-movement faction at the core of the Minjoo Party, and had to work so hard to win it over. (As I said in 2022, “Winning the full trust of the nationalist left without having done prison time for National Security Law violations is like becoming a made man in the Mafia without Italian heritage.”)
Again, readers: stick to South Korea’s English-language press.
UPDATE: 13 December 2024: Yoon’s speech falls flat
Yesterday the president did a good job of explaining how the main opposition party has been undermining the rule of law over the past year or so.
[It] has sought to impeach dozens of officials since our government began. Impeached officials are suspended from office for an extended period of time from indictment to verdict, even if they have done nothing wrong…. The overuse of impeachment has paralyzed the government. They have impeached ministers, the chairman of the Communications Commission, and others, as well as auditors and prosecutors who investigated their misconduct, and intimidated judges…. If this isn’t the paralysis of state affairs, if it isn’t a state crisis, what is?
Much less wisely, Yoon also complained about the opposition’s cuts to the national budget. Some of these are indeed astonishing, but last April the Minjoo won a clear mandate to do as it sees fit on that front. More relevant to the declaration of martial law was the following part of Yoon’s speech. It starts with a reference to extensive nepotism in hiring by the body in question:
When the Election Commission’s massive recruitment fraud scandal broke, leading to audits and investigations, it stepped back to allow an inspection by the National Intelligence Service. However, only a small part of the entire system equipment was inspected… When the NIS employee tried to hack in, he was able to manipulate data at will, and there was virtually no firewall. The passwords were also very simple, like ‘12345’…. If the computer system that manages elections, the core of democracy, is so shoddy, how can the people trust the election results?
Worrying, certainly. I can imagine how Western media would respond if such a system were to hand a win to a European party as sympathetic to Russia as the Minjoo is. But the Chosun reports that vote-tampering isn’t as easy as all that, and there’s no hard evidence of its having taken place last time.
In any case, nothing Yoon described seems to justify the decision made on December 3rd. By downplaying it as martial-law lite, emphasizing that the soldiers’ guns carried no live bullets, Yoon implicitly downplayed the crisis that he claimed had actuated it. Either there was a real emergency or there wasn’t. Obviously he never believed the state to be in great immediate danger.
As I’ve already said, Yoon’s background as left-wing scourge of security-minded intelligence officials and non-compliant judges is another reason to doubt that he acted in good faith. History affords many examples of leftists turning hard right, but a genuinely conservative president would have had prosecutors focus on the Moon Jae-in faction’s alleged North-related misdeeds, instead of on such things as Lee Jae-myung’s wife having once illegally invited Minjoo lawmakers’ wives to lunch in party-primary season.
Emotions are running high on both Youtube sides of the current division on the South Korean right. The prominent pro-Yoon lawyer Kim So-yeon, an excellent public speaker whom a smarter party would have nominated to run for a seat last spring, shed tears on her live broadcast. Meanwhile Yoon’s pose as guardian of the judiciary prompted an angry outburst by former newspaper editor Jeong Gyu-je, who’s been warning against him for years.
Yoon Seokyeol’s the guy, isn’t it, who once went into the Supreme Court, and searched through the Chief Justice’s desk! Who’s he to now wring his hands about the judiciary?
UPDATE: 15 December 2024: The measure passes
As I’m sure you know already, the National Assembly has voted to impeach Yoon, despite last-minute rumors that the necessary 2/3 majority might not be reached until next weekend.
If you imagine the next few months as a Gantt-type project-management chart (something that stared down on me in my bus-factory days), there are three horizontal bars to keep an eye on: 1) the Constitutional Court’s deliberations on impeachment, 2) the police investigation into Yoon, and 3) the ongoing prosecution of opposition leader Lee. These processes are bound to affect each other, and CC, police and the judiciary are equally well-known for being sensitive to public opinion. This means Yoon has very little chance of ever returning to power.
Only slightly more doubt attaches to the question of Lee’s fate. Considering that prosecutors needed 5 years of focused effort to put former Justice Minister Cho Kuk behind bars (for gaming the college-admissions system on behalf of his daughter), it should be child’s play for Lee’s legal team, whose forte is trial postponement, to slow the wheels of justice long enough for him to run successfully for the presidency this spring.
He’s fortunate that acting president Han Duck-soo (who until yesterday was the prime minister) is the last person who could restore the right-wing’s pride and morale. Yoon’s appointment in 2022 of this unprepossessing ex-lobbyist and veteran of the neoliberal left — who had served as minister under one Sunshine Policy president, and PM under another — was one of the initial announcements which disillusioned the amnesiac conservatives who’d voted for him.
I erred the other day, readers, in telling you not to bother with Ignorarium coverage of South Korea. I still read it myself, though in much the same frame of mind as that in which I’ve long read North Korean sources: not for news content, of course, but to monitor a propaganda line and reflect on the strategy behind it. To quote from Victor Klemperer’s diary of life in the Third Reich: “One must at least know what the lies are.” (Man muss wenigstens wissen, was gelogen wird.)
This morning the Ignorarium’s main British outlet sought to convey the impression that the hardcore Lee supporters who’d gathered outside the Assembly spoke for the people as a whole. Neither of the journalists who teamed up for the superficial piece thought fit to mention the enormous and ultimately tearful demonstration which filled downtown Seoul yesterday, although it would certainly have interested readers. (An investigative journalist might have taken the opportunity to discuss a certain Protestant church’s role in mobilizing many of those conservatives. It has been accused by the anti-Yoon right of having signed up enough brand-new People Power Party members to swing the primary vote Yoon’s way in 2021.)
We can take this sort of coverage as an early indication that the Ignorarium will overlook whatever measures the next government undertakes to intimidate and silence the right, just as it overlooked such things during the Moon era. No, that’s not a statement of the obvious. When it comes to globalization, loyalty to the US military’s expansion project, hostility to Russia, and even the issue of immigration, the Ignorarium thinks more like South Korea’s parliamentary right than like Lee and his party. The North Korea angle I’ve already discussed is what matters here.
PS. The BBC’s segment on the news was much more balanced; a pleasant surprise.
UPDATE: 15 December 2024: More from the Guardian
From Raphael Rashid‘s new article:
There were early warning signs of authoritarian tendencies. Despite repeatedly championing “freedom” in his speeches (39 times in his last Liberation Day speech), Yoon’s administration launched aggressive attacks on press freedom, raiding media offices and journalists’ homes over unfavourable coverage, and launching a torrent of defamation suits.
His government issued an official warning over a political cartoon, one drawn by a high school student depicting him as a runaway train ….
All this happened, and deserves to be strongly criticized.
But worse excesses of the same sort either happened or were attempted during Moon Jae-in’s rule, as Rashid should be well aware, though I don’t remember him complaining at the time. Nor do I expect the Seoul correspondent to complain should Lee carry on the dismal tradition in office.
Far worse things now go on in Britain and Germany, with nary a critical peep from the Guardian or any other Ignorarium outlet. In Germany, for example, where the courts consider it permissible “satire” to refer to the popular opposition politician Alice Weidel as a “Nazi whore,” Youtuber Tim Kellner (aka the Love Priest) was fined 11 000 euros for calling Nancy Faeser, the Minister of the Interior, a “bloated steam dumpling.” Authoritarian tendencies much?
PS. See here for more on the Minjoo Party’s reluctantly abandoned “Media Punishment Law,” as it was informally called in 2021.
UPDATE: 15 December 2024: Constitutional revision rears its head again
Since the start of this year there has been a sharp and orchestrated-seeming rise in the number of articles, in the traditional-progressive and conservative press, that rail against the institution of the “imperial presidency.” (This as opposed to seeing the personalities or parties involved as the main problem.) There is thus increasing worry among some of Lee’s supporters that the non-Lee or pro-Moon left may now be colluding behind the scenes with the PPP to use the current crisis to push concertedly for constitutional revision, in other words, for a shift to a semi-parliamentary system. (As I have discussed here, here and here, the political elite has long dreamed of this, while the public has always rejected it as being little more than a trough-widening scheme.) Such a plan would naturally entail dragging out Yoon’s departure as long as possible, perhaps even long enough for Lee — who is no supporter of such a constitutional reform anyway — to be finally convicted and taken into custody. No doubt we will find out in the next few weeks whether Lee supporters’ fears are justified.
[Sorry to make you all scroll down so much; there will be no more updates to this thread. — BRM.]
