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Can someone ELI5 if this is a huge deal (like declaring martial law would be in the west), or if this is the equivalent of a "government shutdown" when similar

Can someone ELI5 if this is a huge deal (like declaring martial law would be in the west), or if this is the equivalent of a "government shutdown" when similar budget impasses occur in the US?

alephnerd 2y ago
Massive deal. South Korea is a new democracy and sudden impositions of martial law harken back to the 1970s-80s when military rule existed. Best case, this is a blatant attempt at a self coup d'etat. Worst case, North Korea actually engaged in war.
- blitzar 2y ago
  Worst case, South Korea starts a war with North Korea so the president can cling to power.
  - etiam 2y ago
    Are you sure that's a worst case scenario? Pyongyang has clearly decided to get their troops current live combat experience and is soliciting military assistance from a larger aggressive dictatorship, which is however very busy elsewhere right now. That reason would be awful, and most likely the consequences too, but it's not readily obvious to me that the timing would be.
    - blitzar 2y ago
      The South marching north would force China into the conflict and the West would very tentitatively stand by while South Koreans were being fed into a meat grinder. Should South Korea manage to unify North & South it would bankrupt them. The North marching South would get little to no support from their allies and would be repelled rapidly before returning to the current status quo. So yes, I am sure. Neither sides allies have any desire to be the agressor. Not to mention that simply starting a war to cling on to power might be the stupidest reason there is to start a war.
      - derefr 2y ago
        > Should South Korea manage to unify North & South it would bankrupt them. What if they didn't do that (at first), but instead (as an intermediate step) annexed the north as a colony with its own economy but South Korean governorship; and then opened said colony to worldwide foreign aid? This would be very similar to the short-term arrangement negotiated between West Germany and East Germany after the fall of the Berlin wall. For analogous reasons, West Germany didn't want to immediately absorb/unify with East Germany; instead, they held political and military stewardship over East Germany until it could be built back up.
        vundercind 2y ago
        There are all kinds of stories we can come up with to get countries out of economic trouble that's basically fictional to begin with, as long as enough other states agree to believe the new stories. The actual value held by a country is the people, natural resources, and real capital. The money part's just for book-keeping, in the end.
        philistine 2y ago
        East Germany was a tenth the economic strength of West Germany. North Korea is a hundredth the strength of South Korea, and not because South Korea is far more advanced than West Germany. It's one of the richest country in the world, right next to one of the poorest. Unification in any sense at this point is suicide by the South. The misery inflicted upon the southern Koreans will be immeasurable if both countries are unified. The leaders of both Koreas know this.
        derefr 2y ago
        Isn’t the answer, then, to just give North Korea 10x as long as a “managed” colony before unification? --- Or, alternately, given that literally everything in NK would need to be rebuilt at some point... rather than "swallowing the elephant whole", they could take incremental bites: annex a few miles of North Korea into themselves; revitalize/gentrify that part; repeat. Slowly, over 50 years. (How? At the end of the war, they'd do a census, figuring out where every NK citizen lived as of the end of the war. Then, for each annexation, anyone already living in the annexed area as of the end of the war, would automatically become a South Korean citizen. Anyone who moved to the area after the end of the war would not, and would instead be required to vacate northward, with the SK government compensating them for the [very low value of the] home they're being displaced from, per eminent domain.) Of course, any NK citizen would be free to apply at any time for a South Korean visa — just like a citizen of any other country can. They wouldn't be especially prioritized. And an NK citizen would also be equally free to apply for a visa to move to literally anywhere else — possibly as a refugee. SK would probably encourage this and even assist with it.
- NewLincoln 2y ago
  If we're just blindly speculating, why limit it to a tiny window of worst case outcomes. Political stunt? Strong message being sent to NK based on some intel that isn't public? Obviously none of us know the details yet but there are clearly better possible outcomes than a full on coup.
- tootie 2y ago
  S Korea was a laggard in the years after the war and their economy was modernized by a militaristic authoritarian government. The military authority was harsh but effective and only gave way to democracy in 1988. There is still a lot of sympathy for the authoritarian era.
maeil 2y ago
Almost everyone in Korea is completely shocked, including most people who voted for him in the presedential elections. This is in a country where no one bats an eye even when sirens go off.
- tacheiordache 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > Kremlin's sawing chaos in the democratic world "President Yoon has taken an overwhelmingly pro-US policy compared to previous presidents," and his "PPP is fiercely anti-communist and advocates a hawkish policy against North Korea" [1]. With "many PPP politicians support[ing] South Korea having nuclear weapons on its own," this is not the man Pyongyang or Moscow want as dicator in Seoul. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_Power_Party_(South_Korea)#Foreign_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_Power_Party_(South_Kore...
    - notahacker 2y ago
      I don't think we can blame Moscow or Pyongyang, but I can't imagine they'd be unhappy about the leader of a prosperous wester-allied neighbouring democracy rejecting democracy with the short term outcome likely being him immediately deposed (probably taking a few fiercely anticommunist hawks down with him) or immediately ostracised by the international community
    - ANewFormation 2y ago
      I doubt this has anything to do with anybody outside of South Korea, but this is precisely the sort of man adversarial states would want. Think about what's going to happen next! You have an extremely unpopular leader trying to sieze power by force, presumably soon banning opposition parties and more. It's going to create extreme discontent at the minimum, and civil war at a maximum. And once he's eventually overthrown, his allies and interests often become anathema to the next regime, and the people. This is is like an enemy successfully carrying out a color revolution on fast forward.
diggan 2y ago
Martial law typically involves the suspension of ordinary law and the imposition of direct military control, which for a relatively fresh democracy like South Korea doesn't sound like a nothing-burger exactly. Makes me think of the Gwangju Uprising in 80s, which happened after martial law was instated, after a military dictator was put in place. IIRC, the US was also involved with the newly installed military junta.
- limit499karma 2y ago
  Any realist assessment of the power structure in SK (in general, and much more so in the military) has to acknowledge the history and presence of US military in Korea.
tokinonagare 2y ago
> President Yoon Suk Yeol declared an “emergency martial law,” Tuesday accusing the country’s opposition of controlling the parliament [...] Yoon — whose approval rating has dipped in recent months — Seems like a coup. > Yoon’s conservative People Power Party had been locked in an impasse with the liberal opposition Democratic Party over next year’s budget bill. Yeah, just like in France where the government is expected to fall within the next two days. Not a reason to attempt to force the way: the fact opposition can actually sometimes fulfil its purpose which include blocking a budget is a normal thing in democracy.
- bluGill 2y ago
  Not just link in France. France is in the midst of a government fall, but this is something built into how they do democracy and so a new one is expected to form in a few months on the backs of their democratic process. This is instead a rejection of the democratic process. I don't know enough about SK's internals to say if the democratic process is already dead because of corruption (as the leader claims), or if the leader is trying to kill the process using corruption as a scape goat - but everyone should strongly lean towards the later.
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    >Not just link in France. France is in the midst of a government fall, but this is something built into how they do democracy and so a new one is expected to form in a few months on the backs of their democratic process. The longest a French Republic has lasted is 70 years. The fifth republic is today 66 years old. The ordinary can turn into the extraordinary in an afternoon.
    - sidewndr46 2y ago
      Sure, but I seem to recall the leader of the last republic was De Gaulle. The first leader of the current republic was also De Gaulle. It was just him consolidating his political base.
      - 2y ago
ninalanyon 2y ago
[flagged]
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Is that really as true as it used to be since COVID? A number of governments enacted quite astonishingly repressive measures Zero countries in the West enacted anything resembling martial law. The only freedoms abridged were those of movement and assembly, and even then the penalty was being shut down or ticketed, rarely jail, never summary execution.
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - atomicnumber3 2y ago
      No, like five people in the west were convinced of that and they spent all their free time screeching about it on Twitter. Everyone else knew the difference between masks and literal martial law.
      - DrillShopper 2y ago
        Looking at the results from the last election I guarantee you that it was more than five people
      - wyre 2y ago
        I don't know what type of narrative you're trying to spread, but considering FactCheck.org [1] had to dubunk martial law claims in 2020 considerably more than 5 people thought martial law was coming. [1] https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/martial-law-isnt-imminent/ https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/martial-law-isnt-imminent/
        noworriesnate 2y ago
ilotoki0804 2y ago
The last martial law in South Korea was because of a coup d'état in 1979. No one can believe this is happening.
paganel 2y ago
There's a recent video with what look to be armed forces (weapons visible, to be more exact) entering a building which is labeled as the Parliament's building [1], so I'd call this a big thing. [1] https://x.com/BigBreakingWire/status/1863964015376089313 https://x.com/BigBreakingWire/status/1863964015376089313
Rapzid 2y ago
This is absolutely bonkers. South Korea is one of the most advanced countries in the world with a strong democratic track record at this point. They are very proud of the country they built over just a few generations(and really since about 1990); no way they take this sitting down.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- dmurray 2y ago
  Advanced, sure, but the leadership has always been dodgy. They've had seven leaders since 1993 (before which they really did have a military junta in power). Three of them ended up impeached or jailed for corruption or wrongthink [0], a fourth has just attempted to use the military to crack down on the opposition. This is more like what I expect from Argentina or Brazil than a fully fledged democracy with peaceful transitions of power, say France. That said, the Economist has it at #22 on its Democracy Index [1], one of the worst "full democracies" but ahead of France #23, USA #29, Brazil #51. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_South_Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_South_Korea [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
hyeonwho4 2y ago
The president attempted to block access to the National Assembly via police and military. The military administration's first order was to announce a ban on public gatherings and political activities and announce violators would be arrested without due process. This would have been a huge deal if it had been implemented even a few hours faster and the National Assembly were unable to convene.

Can someone ELI5 if this is a huge deal (like declaring martial law would be in the west), or if this is the equivalent of a "government shutdown" when similar budget impasses occur in the US?

alephnerd 2y ago

Massive deal. South Korea is a new democracy and sudden impositions of martial law harken back to the 1970s-80s when military rule existed. Best case, this is a blatant attempt at a self coup d'etat. Worst case, North Korea actually engaged in war.

blitzar 2y ago
Worst case, South Korea starts a war with North Korea so the president can cling to power.
- etiam 2y ago
  Are you sure that's a worst case scenario? Pyongyang has clearly decided to get their troops current live combat experience and is soliciting military assistance from a larger aggressive dictatorship, which is however very busy elsewhere right now. That reason would be awful, and most likely the consequences too, but it's not readily obvious to me that the timing would be.
  - blitzar 2y ago
    The South marching north would force China into the conflict and the West would very tentitatively stand by while South Koreans were being fed into a meat grinder. Should South Korea manage to unify North & South it would bankrupt them. The North marching South would get little to no support from their allies and would be repelled rapidly before returning to the current status quo. So yes, I am sure. Neither sides allies have any desire to be the agressor. Not to mention that simply starting a war to cling on to power might be the stupidest reason there is to start a war.
    - derefr 2y ago
      > Should South Korea manage to unify North & South it would bankrupt them. What if they didn't do that (at first), but instead (as an intermediate step) annexed the north as a colony with its own economy but South Korean governorship; and then opened said colony to worldwide foreign aid? This would be very similar to the short-term arrangement negotiated between West Germany and East Germany after the fall of the Berlin wall. For analogous reasons, West Germany didn't want to immediately absorb/unify with East Germany; instead, they held political and military stewardship over East Germany until it could be built back up.
      - vundercind 2y ago
        There are all kinds of stories we can come up with to get countries out of economic trouble that's basically fictional to begin with, as long as enough other states agree to believe the new stories. The actual value held by a country is the people, natural resources, and real capital. The money part's just for book-keeping, in the end.
      - philistine 2y ago
        East Germany was a tenth the economic strength of West Germany. North Korea is a hundredth the strength of South Korea, and not because South Korea is far more advanced than West Germany. It's one of the richest country in the world, right next to one of the poorest. Unification in any sense at this point is suicide by the South. The misery inflicted upon the southern Koreans will be immeasurable if both countries are unified. The leaders of both Koreas know this.
        derefr 2y ago
        Isn’t the answer, then, to just give North Korea 10x as long as a “managed” colony before unification? --- Or, alternately, given that literally everything in NK would need to be rebuilt at some point... rather than "swallowing the elephant whole", they could take incremental bites: annex a few miles of North Korea into themselves; revitalize/gentrify that part; repeat. Slowly, over 50 years. (How? At the end of the war, they'd do a census, figuring out where every NK citizen lived as of the end of the war. Then, for each annexation, anyone already living in the annexed area as of the end of the war, would automatically become a South Korean citizen. Anyone who moved to the area after the end of the war would not, and would instead be required to vacate northward, with the SK government compensating them for the [very low value of the] home they're being displaced from, per eminent domain.) Of course, any NK citizen would be free to apply at any time for a South Korean visa — just like a citizen of any other country can. They wouldn't be especially prioritized. And an NK citizen would also be equally free to apply for a visa to move to literally anywhere else — possibly as a refugee. SK would probably encourage this and even assist with it.
NewLincoln 2y ago
If we're just blindly speculating, why limit it to a tiny window of worst case outcomes. Political stunt? Strong message being sent to NK based on some intel that isn't public? Obviously none of us know the details yet but there are clearly better possible outcomes than a full on coup.
tootie 2y ago
S Korea was a laggard in the years after the war and their economy was modernized by a militaristic authoritarian government. The military authority was harsh but effective and only gave way to democracy in 1988. There is still a lot of sympathy for the authoritarian era.

maeil 2y ago

Almost everyone in Korea is completely shocked, including most people who voted for him in the presedential elections. This is in a country where no one bats an eye even when sirens go off.

tacheiordache 2y ago
[flagged]
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Kremlin's sawing chaos in the democratic world "President Yoon has taken an overwhelmingly pro-US policy compared to previous presidents," and his "PPP is fiercely anti-communist and advocates a hawkish policy against North Korea" [1]. With "many PPP politicians support[ing] South Korea having nuclear weapons on its own," this is not the man Pyongyang or Moscow want as dicator in Seoul. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_Power_Party_(South_Korea)#Foreign_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_Power_Party_(South_Kore...
  - notahacker 2y ago
    I don't think we can blame Moscow or Pyongyang, but I can't imagine they'd be unhappy about the leader of a prosperous wester-allied neighbouring democracy rejecting democracy with the short term outcome likely being him immediately deposed (probably taking a few fiercely anticommunist hawks down with him) or immediately ostracised by the international community
  - ANewFormation 2y ago
    I doubt this has anything to do with anybody outside of South Korea, but this is precisely the sort of man adversarial states would want. Think about what's going to happen next! You have an extremely unpopular leader trying to sieze power by force, presumably soon banning opposition parties and more. It's going to create extreme discontent at the minimum, and civil war at a maximum. And once he's eventually overthrown, his allies and interests often become anathema to the next regime, and the people. This is is like an enemy successfully carrying out a color revolution on fast forward.

diggan 2y ago

Martial law typically involves the suspension of ordinary law and the imposition of direct military control, which for a relatively fresh democracy like South Korea doesn't sound like a nothing-burger exactly. Makes me think of the Gwangju Uprising in 80s, which happened after martial law was instated, after a military dictator was put in place. IIRC, the US was also involved with the newly installed military junta.

limit499karma 2y ago
Any realist assessment of the power structure in SK (in general, and much more so in the military) has to acknowledge the history and presence of US military in Korea.

tokinonagare 2y ago

> President Yoon Suk Yeol declared an “emergency martial law,” Tuesday accusing the country’s opposition of controlling the parliament [...] Yoon — whose approval rating has dipped in recent months — Seems like a coup. > Yoon’s conservative People Power Party had been locked in an impasse with the liberal opposition Democratic Party over next year’s budget bill. Yeah, just like in France where the government is expected to fall within the next two days. Not a reason to attempt to force the way: the fact opposition can actually sometimes fulfil its purpose which include blocking a budget is a normal thing in democracy.

bluGill 2y ago
Not just link in France. France is in the midst of a government fall, but this is something built into how they do democracy and so a new one is expected to form in a few months on the backs of their democratic process. This is instead a rejection of the democratic process. I don't know enough about SK's internals to say if the democratic process is already dead because of corruption (as the leader claims), or if the leader is trying to kill the process using corruption as a scape goat - but everyone should strongly lean towards the later.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  >Not just link in France. France is in the midst of a government fall, but this is something built into how they do democracy and so a new one is expected to form in a few months on the backs of their democratic process. The longest a French Republic has lasted is 70 years. The fifth republic is today 66 years old. The ordinary can turn into the extraordinary in an afternoon.
  - sidewndr46 2y ago
    Sure, but I seem to recall the leader of the last republic was De Gaulle. The first leader of the current republic was also De Gaulle. It was just him consolidating his political base.
    - 2y ago

ninalanyon 2y ago

[flagged]

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> Is that really as true as it used to be since COVID? A number of governments enacted quite astonishingly repressive measures Zero countries in the West enacted anything resembling martial law. The only freedoms abridged were those of movement and assembly, and even then the penalty was being shut down or ticketed, rarely jail, never summary execution.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - atomicnumber3 2y ago
    No, like five people in the west were convinced of that and they spent all their free time screeching about it on Twitter. Everyone else knew the difference between masks and literal martial law.
    - DrillShopper 2y ago
      Looking at the results from the last election I guarantee you that it was more than five people
    - wyre 2y ago
      I don't know what type of narrative you're trying to spread, but considering FactCheck.org [1] had to dubunk martial law claims in 2020 considerably more than 5 people thought martial law was coming. [1] https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/martial-law-isnt-imminent/ https://www.factcheck.org/2020/03/martial-law-isnt-imminent/
      - noworriesnate 2y ago

ilotoki0804 2y ago

The last martial law in South Korea was because of a coup d'état in 1979. No one can believe this is happening.

paganel 2y ago

There's a recent video with what look to be armed forces (weapons visible, to be more exact) entering a building which is labeled as the Parliament's building [1], so I'd call this a big thing. [1] https://x.com/BigBreakingWire/status/1863964015376089313 https://x.com/BigBreakingWire/status/1863964015376089313

Rapzid 2y ago

This is absolutely bonkers. South Korea is one of the most advanced countries in the world with a strong democratic track record at this point. They are very proud of the country they built over just a few generations(and really since about 1990); no way they take this sitting down.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dmurray 2y ago
Advanced, sure, but the leadership has always been dodgy. They've had seven leaders since 1993 (before which they really did have a military junta in power). Three of them ended up impeached or jailed for corruption or wrongthink [0], a fourth has just attempted to use the military to crack down on the opposition. This is more like what I expect from Argentina or Brazil than a fully fledged democracy with peaceful transitions of power, say France. That said, the Economist has it at #22 on its Democracy Index [1], one of the worst "full democracies" but ahead of France #23, USA #29, Brazil #51. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_South_Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_South_Korea [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index

hyeonwho4 2y ago

The president attempted to block access to the National Assembly via police and military. The military administration's first order was to announce a ban on public gatherings and political activities and announce violators would be arrested without due process. This would have been a huge deal if it had been implemented even a few hours faster and the National Assembly were unable to convene.