Update: Report that the President may have backed down and will cancel martial law. Amazing.
The President of South Korea has declared martial law.
The legislature voted 190 to 0 to end the martial law, which is their right under the constitution, but the President has declared it will continue and the military command has said they will not end it till he says so. Even members of the President’s own party voted to end martial law.
I’m no expert on South Korea, but what I do know that the people with the guns have the final say. Back during the Arab Spring I noted that until the Egyptian army chose its side (it wound up choosing itself) nothing had been won.
The question, then, is the high command is unified and if lower officers and the rank and file will obey orders. So far the coup hasn’t been entirely competent: the military should have never allowed the legislators into the building to take such a vote.
There are unconfirmed reports that arrest warrants have been issued for leaders of opposition parties.
South Korea is America’s second most important ally, right after Japan. It has the highest science production per capita in the world and is a major industrial power.
One of the topics on the right hand side of the blog is “the age of war and revolution”. Coups are a type of revolution. This sort of instability will continue. Some nations will re-align against the declining West, others, in the core, as the decline continues, will become more and more unstable and serious political realignments will occur. The age of neoliberal ideology is also coming to an end (Trump’s tariff threats are as anti-neoliberal as it gets) and the global economy is being upended in ways it hasn’t been since the industrial revolution, as the core moves from a Western country to China.
Be prepared for much more instability.
Curt Kastens
that twist was shorter than a tootsie roll.
Nate Wilcox
Wow. What a day. None of this makes any sense. What was he thinking?
NR
I guess the president must have figured out that the military wasn’t going to support him. There were reports that the soldiers who were ordered to the government buildings didn’t have any bullets in their weapons. So it doesn’t seem like they were on board with the coup and were just going through the motions.
I can understand why it went down that way. Yoon (the South Korean president) has a 17% approval rating and, crucially, military service in South Korea is compulsory, so the opinions of rank-and-file soldiers probably mirrored the general population, at least mostly. It’s not a situation like in other countries where right-wingers self-select into the military and it becomes dominated by them, making the military much more supportive of strongman dictator types.
South Korea did have a period of martial law in the 80s, and by all accounts that was a scary time, so hopefully it’s been avoided this time around.
Feral Finster
The State Department’s relative silence was deafening.
While I personally doubt they were behind the coup attempt (too farcical), Blinken and Sullivan probably would not have minded if it had been successful, as Yoon was aligned with the US neocons and was all in for supplying Ukraine, while the parliament much less so.
Mark Pontin
Ian: ‘The age of neoliberal ideology is coming to an end … as the core moves from a Western country to China’
Yup. The neoliberal Ponzi is beginning to bust apart. France looks not far behind South Korea, and Germany not too far behind France.
So we may be entering the second phase of Hemingway’s “How did you go broke? Gradually, then suddenly” process in Western-affiliated nation-states. Also, of Lenin’s “There are weeks when decades happen.”
I’ll confess I had a certain amount of perhaps delusional hope a couple of years back when I moved to London from the SF Bay Area that, as in 1848 when the UK’s earlier Chartist reforms acted as something of a pressure valve so the revolutionary unrest that overturned several of Europe’s nations didn’t happen in the UK then, the fact of Brexit having already occurred here now might vent enough of the pressures of global neoliberal collapse that this place would be comparatively stable during the ‘interesting,’ perhaps outright catastrophic 2020s-2030s.
We will see. I’m going to visit Vietnam and Thailand and scope them out next year, just in case.
In the meantime, maybe I’m a fantasist. But while many UK towns outside London are genteel third-world places now, London itself seems be getting richer, as more of the internationally wealthy buy safe-houses here and stash some of their wealth via the City. Needless to say, among the wealthy currently arriving are a wave of rich Americans fleeing Trump.
mago
“Be prepared for much more instability.”
Amen brother.
Please pass the butter.
someofparts
Someone described the Trump administration as the last round of looting. That sounded like the best description of things to me.
I once felt bad for Ed Snowden that he was obliged to seek refuge in Russia. These days I consider him fortunate and feel bad for all of us who are stuck here.
Watching Breaking Points this morning and it looks like Saagar has become insufferable since the Trump victory. Unfortunately his perky energy does not serve him well when he talks about foreign policy where his ignorance is only rivaled by his hero Trump.
Jessica
This is the second time that South Korea elected a right-winger, then had buyer’s remorse. The last one was impeached.
I was in Seoul in 1980. You could see the bunkers with machine guns. Pointing south into the city, not north to North Korea. (The border is quite close.)
People would quietly come up to me and tell me that the death toll from the military’s massacre of miners in Kwangju a few months before was in the 1000s, not the 100s.
The word on the backpacker circuit was that Americans of Asian descent needed to stay away. If a Chinese-American or Japanese-American or Korean-American with even slightly long hair showed up in Seoul, the police would beat them up and shave their heads.
My partner and I were so pleased when Koreans won their democracy in the late 1980s. The brutality of the South Korean government to their own people until then is one piece of what is left out of the West’s propaganda about Korea.
someofparts
From where I sit there is a real lack of good sources of information about South Korea that let us know what is really going on behind the propaganda wall.
Tallifer
I lived in Korea for over twenty years. They “are not going back.” Vigorous democracy, robust industry, fast and universal internet, outstanding education, efficient health care, strong military with universal male service and world-renowned culture: not the poverty-stricken, benighted dictatorship as so well depicted in M*A*S*H.
Purple Library Guy
The point about the military having potentially a lot of political power reminds me of Hugo Chavez. The coup against Chavez failed, but most people (who even know about the coup) don’t realize one of the key reasons it failed. Yes, the people came down from the hills in huge masses to support him. But also, the army didn’t support the coup. It was mostly the palace guard (literally, the guys in charge of guarding the Presidential Palace) and the air force. The actual ground army didn’t help Chavez, but they basically stayed home and didn’t go cream the protesters.
Why didn’t the army support the coup? Because the rank and file soldiers supported Chavez. They supported Chavez because he was one of them, a military man from the sticks himself, and because he had for the previous three years set the army to tasks that made them closer to the people–he’d been putting them to work on helping in the barrios, on construction projects, on distributing the largesse from social programs, stuff like that. So there the army guys were, being reminded of their own background, interacting with a public that was grateful for the help. They knew that maybe some other unit was doing the same for their own family, and they knew Chavez was the guy responsible for that. No way were they going to follow their officers in a coup against that man and their own people.
After that first coup, Chavez was able to dump a lot of the old line generals and move in people loyal to him and to the left, and through all the attempts by local compradors and the US since then to get something going, the Venezuelan armed forces have never helped them in the slightest.
So. Chavismo won and kept on winning in part because Chavez brought the army on side. Something other leftist groups that gain power should keep in mind.
Meanwhile, as to the attempt in South Korea . . . It really helps if you can at least pretend there is a crisis other than “Looks like I’m going to lose the next election”. But as far as I know South Korea is doing pretty much like usual, give or take whatever crappy policies made this guy unpopular. Of course even his own party didn’t back him, all those legislators are doing fine with the status quo and he was offering a gratuitous shock to that status quo. Like, a much bigger shock than just losing the next election. As to the military, even they probably have more to lose than to gain from any change. As things stand they’re doing great–they got respect, they got compulsory military service, they got an endless standoff with the neighbour that keeps them powerful without actually ever having to fight and die. Backing a coup comes with lots of downside possibilities and nothing much on the up side.
bruce wilder
Korea has a highly authoritarian culture, which carries with it good quality control in manufacturing, a propensity for problem drinking and a politics that struggles to escape corruption in high places. Lots of past Presidents ended up in jail or worse. Their birth rate is minuscule.
The government of France has fallen in a no-confidence vote.
And, the U.S., facing a crisis of public and private debt, is ushering into power crypto maniacs.
GrimJim
The US government fell last month and is in crisis.
The German government fell last month and is in crisis.
The South Korean government had a failed coup on December 3rd and is in crisis.
The French government collapsed on December 4th and is in crisis.
The UK government is continually in crisis.
The Syrian Civil War heated up and Assad lost the capital of Aleppo.
Cities are in ruin from Lebanon through Gaza on both sides.
It is Open Season on sub- Elites in the streets.
Main Street Business are already shrinking due to expected costs of tariffs and unknown developments in regulations. No effect on Wall Street, of course, which lives in Fantasy Land.
Things are heating up…
How big of a meltdown will we have globally before Trump even takes office?
Things will really hit the fan when Trump pulls a Reagan and just fires all Union Federal Employees on Day 1 right after he sends a list of enemies he wants arrested to the DOJ.
Everyone will see that all bets are off at that point.
In quick succession they will wind down the IRS (gotta get out those last refunds), then kill Education, Social Security, and all their various pet peeve departments.
Anyone want to start a pool on when we will see the first US food riots?
GrimJim
The Trumpists are going to take a chainsaw to the rickety, ramshackle government system that keeps the American Empire running.
No Empire, no economy. The US economy under the Empire allows the citizens to thrive on an average of five times the resources it normally would on a per capital basis.
The rich are not going to lose out when the economy fails. That’s going to be everyone else, the 99% less the few percentages they need to keep their circumstances going.
Within a year, if you are lucky, you’ll be surviving on 20% of the resources you have today.
If you are lucky.
If you survive to that point.
Any bets on when the US military will perform its coup?
With the Trumpists salivating to try a bunch of senior military officers over the Afghan Debacle (that was Trump’s in the first place), I’m not sure we won’t see a military coup even before he takes office…