Police guard the entrance to the National Assembly. BBC/Reuters.
South Korea's President Yoon Suk-yeol declared martial law in an early morning address before being overruled by Parliament. BBC. Yoon mentioned threats from North Korea and communists but it was clear that it was more due to his own domestic issues with his opposition party. The declaration was not popular with even members of his own party opposing the measure. Despite the presence of police and military, the opposition party was able to get into Parliament and vote down the measure, which President Yoon respected. Martial law has not been declared for 50 years. Yoon has been unpopular due to being a lame duck president and having several corruption scandals involving his wife. It is unclear what will happen next but Yoon is likely to be impeached.
My Comment:
Fairly shocking development out of South Korea. I had no idea that they could have what was essentially a failed coup. And have no doubt, this was a coup. There was no real reason for Yoon to call for martial law and whatever he was trying to do here has failed pretty miserably.
North Korea had very little to do with this. Yoon is a lame duck and is extremely unpopular and has had several scandals. His party lost in a landslide during the last election which shows his people are tired of him. And he is very limited in what he can do. He was probably going to be impeached before this happened. And he absolutely is going to be now.
This was probably a coup but it was a very poorly planned one. He should have made sure that the military was on board to actually do something against the members of parliament couldn't actually vote. Had he done so he could have shut the country down, but he did not and now he's probably going to be impeached and even imprisoned.
Would the country be better off if he had succeeded? I am not sure. Yoon is on the right and the political left in South Korea is especially loony. They are very far to the left by Asian standards and I don't think they are good people. But that being said, there was nothing they were doing that justified a coup. And that would have meant that any regime that Yoon had come up with would have been considered illegitimate by almost everyone.
I tend to see South Korea as being dysfunctional. This is not the first major scandal the country has had recently. There was the incident in 2016 with their first female president, Park Geun-hye, who was dominated by an actual cult. That incident brought down their government and caused a huge embarrassment for the country.
And South Korea has some of the worst gender relations in the world and a horrible birthrate. South Korean men and women hate each other and that's not an exaggeration. Many women there are full of misandry and can't stand South Korean men and the feeling is more than mutual, many South Korean men see South Korean women as nothing more than feminist weirdos. Remember the 4b movement, where women in America were going to boycott sex? South Korea is where it came from, and unlike the folks here, they were actually serious about it. Both sides of the debate there deserve a lot of criticism, the level of hatred they have for each other about biological sex is almost beyond parody.
All of this added with the coup attempt appears to show that the country is not at all stable. Indeed, it's probably less stable than North Korea, there is no question who is in charge there. But in South Korea things are different. Though this situation is likely to be resolved peacefully, who knows what will happen next time? It's not a good sign for one of our largest trading partners and major ally in Asia...
