this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2024
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The only reason their law was upheld is because Parliament voted against their president’s call for martial law.
The same system exists in the US. Unfortunately, we voted as a nation to fill Congress with Trump loyalists.
There’s no point in having laws if no one will hold leaders accountable to them.
It's a bit more complicated than that. The people's power party has supported Yoon much like the Republicans have supported trump, this was just the straw that broke the camels back.
If the parliament didn't immediately deal with the situation, there would have been a massive riot. Koreans have a pretty long history of rioting against the government, and even the extremist among the right wing politicians didn't want to catch that smoke.
The biggest difference between the US and Korea is that the US police state is filled with conservatives who yearn to do violence against their fellow citizens. While the Korean police state is mostly made of everyday normal people who are just doing their mandatory service.
There was a moment last night where the military could have stepped in and enforced the president's will, but chose not to. I think if it had been America, the woman who grabbed a soldier's rifle pointed at her head and scolded the dude, would have been killed or at very least beaten severely.
Umm, why are we whitewashing the military's role in this? Let's not forget that the military tried to stop the vote of the National Assembly to end martial law. They had to defend the Assembly using fire extinguishers and couch barricades to stop the military breaking in. And that the military continued enforcing the martial law provisions everywhere other than the Assembly even after the National Assembly had voted unanimously to end it, not standing down until 3 hours later when President Yoon declared it over.
Constitutionally I have no idea what's up. Whether the initial declaration was lawful, whether the Assembly's motion to end it had legal effect, whether the President's word was needed to end it. But at the very least from an outsider perspective, it certainly looks like the military was attempting to enforce the President's will and was taking advantage of the opportunity to be as authoritarian as it could.
Okay but you also need to acknowledge they rolled out with all of their gear. If they truly supported this then some staffer with a fire extinguisher would not have stopped them. This has all the energy of malicious compliance.