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So if I'm remember incorrectly, and it is entirely possible, I have forgotten several coups that I've covered. I think this is the second coup that I've covered in six months that feels right. And you know, when we last left the dumbest coup I had ever seen in my entire life. We were in Bolivia and it was a truly spectacularly stupid coup. That coup ended with the army running away from a bunch of protesters who were just like yelling at them meanly. So that one had a
thing I've never seen before, which is the army. The protesters were trying to bring something up to break a barricade, and the army ran away before they could get the like anti barricade thing up to the police barricade. So
that was a disaster. Today we are talking about what I having now studied this since it was since it started, I genuinely believe this somehow is an even stupider coup than the last one, like I you have to go back to like the CIA coup in Venezuela where everyone just got that like arrested by fishermen to find a stupider coup in this it is, and even that one,
like at least they like landed guys with guns. It was over so quick, like yeah, I think the official number is that the amount of time the martial law was technically in effect before the Assembly voted to get rid of it was one hundred and ninety minutes.
Like people could have like slept through this coup, which is really funny, right, I.
Made an executive decision, right, and I was like, I'm gonna sleep in for one more hour. So I woke up at eight am, as at a seven am, and I missed like half of it because I was just I slept for one hour. So let's let's let's get into a bit about what happened here, because you know, as as dumb as this looks now, because it failed, this was for people who don't know there was an
attempted coup in South Korea. I don't know what day it's gonna be when I don't know what day it's going to be in Korea when this comes out, because yeah, but on on Tuesday Day, on our Tuesday in like the it was I think ten thirty at night there the hideously unpopular president of Korea Sokyel yun, tried to declared martial law June is. His approval rating is like half of Joe Biden's approval rating. Like his approval rating is like twenty percent. He is staggeringly unpopular. He yeah,
so yeah. Youn won one election in twenty twenty two, very narrowly in a race where neither of the candidates were particularly good. And he is a hardline far right dipshit. He's you know, I mean, one of his big things. He has this unbelievably hardline in North Korea, which is not you know, doing anything productive at all. He's also you know, and this is like, if you want to look at like, who are his twenty percent of supporters left?
He was the guy of the unbelievably unhinged Korean misogynist movement. I guess you would call them, who are some of the worst people on earth? I mean, these are guys who will just There was a court case recently that decided that you can't just like beat someone up for having short hair because you think they're a feminist like that. That's the kind of like unhinged misogynists that we're dealing with. That's that's Yuan's base. However, com a couple of things
have happened since then. One is that he's racked by like a thousand scandals. Everyone in his in his cabinet keeps getting impeached for doing corruption. There are so many different corruption scandals with him going on right now that I was considering like reading out a list of all
of them as a joke, but it's too long. One of the important ones is that he was like basically doing like a pay for play thing to like fuck with his his own parties primary process nice and this has pissed off basically his entire party, which is great, which is exactly the thing you want to be doing right before you would take the stage of coup is piss off your own political party. So all right, let's
get to the coup. He has major problem with One of his very major problems is that he hasn't been able to do anything basically since he's been in power. And the reason he hasn't been able to do anything. Is that his first sort of like off election was
this unbelievably crushing electoral defeat for his party. The National Assembly, which is their like parliament, is just straight up controlled by the opposition democratic like Liberal well okay, let me be very cific about this is controlled by the opposition Democratic Party, who are the sort of like Korean Liberal Party and also a bunch of like minor allied opposition parties, and they keep on again impeaching all of his cabinet members,
which is very funny. You know, he was trying to get a budget through and the budget got eviscerated and he hasn't been able to do it. So he's been very very angry and very frustrated, and so his plan apparently to deal with this was just to knock out the National Assembly.
This is so funny because like, because of who I am, I was talking about this at the bar last night, just completely insunderable. And the one thing I couldn't put together is like what his exact motivation was besides like rooting out like political enemies. No one knows that he like labeled us like quote unquote anti communist, right, but let's like we were talking about like how funny this all is, and like I still can't quite understand, like why he did this?
No one news like this, this is Jenny, whyey, Nobody has any idea why the fuck he thought this would work? Like the best thesis and we'll get to this a bit. The best thesis that I've seen is that she wanted to do this because he was pissed off with the fact that he hasn't literally been able to do anything his entire time in office, because he's really mad at the National Assembly and also his own party, And it's.
So funny to do that and then have that be underscored by them like be like, oh no, actually, you can't do a coup. No, no, thank you, nice try legally you cannot kou.
Me yeah, Like the I think the semi serious part of this is that it doesn't make any sense to me how this could have been done if there also wasn't a faction of the Korean military that wanted this. Right, the Korean military is I mean, most of Korea's history still to this day, but I think it's still a majority of the amount of time South Korea has been in existence has been under military dictatorships of various kinds. There's been a whole bunch of them. They were staggeringly hideous.
They killed unbelievable numbers of people, they tortured unbelievable numbers of people. They were fully backed by the United States. And the military has also always had this real chip on its shoulder about sort of liberal civilian politicians. And they have their version of like all of the conspiracy things that we have about how all democratsic communists, how
they're all like secretly yea et cetera, et cetera. So this is like they're all secretly North Korea supporters, et cetera, et cetera.
Right, And this is something I was also seeing yesterday people being like, oh wow, when did South Korea become North Korea? And they're like, oh my god, that's so that's like what a weird like orientalist racist comment. This is this is the most South Korean thing to ever happen.
Yeah, this is like military coup and then military coup being overturned by protesters is the single most South Korean thing ever, right, Like, this is just how South Korean history has been.
Having the fucking assembly you have to like break in in the middle of the night to vote. Yeah, it's so funny.
It's just it's Yeah, we're gonna get to the actual details of it a second, but I want to I want to go back to what was actually in this declaration of martial laws. So the Korean constitution does let you declare martial law, but you're only supposed to do wait, if there's like a war going on or like.
If there's like an actual crisis happening.
Yeah, instead of just like I'm mad I can't pass my budget, which she used to be. What was happening here?
You feel bad on a Monday night and you're like, oh, I guess I'll dular martial law.
Yeah, so okay, I'm going to read some I'm going to read a thing about what was going on here, about how unhinged. This was from Hawkura, which is the Korean media outlet. Quote Commander park Ensou announced quote martial law Command Proclamation number one, which, by the way, that's how you know you're dealing with people who have done this before. When when when they start doing their like decree number one, Decree number two.
Oh yeah, that's that.
That is an that is an experience the side of like very very experienced military coup people announced Martial Law Command Proclamation number one based on the contents of prohibiting all political activities of the National Assembly and local assemblies. The proclamation also included contents that controlled the press and publications and prohibited citizens assemblies and demonstrations, as well as
strikes and workstopages by workers. It is also notable that it included the content quote all medical personnel, including residents who are on strike who have left the medical field must return to their original work within forty eight hours and work faithfully, and violations will be published in accordance
with the Martial Law Act. Now it's important to note here if the thing you're trying to do is impose martial law on Korea according to the constitution, and obviously if you're in the state where you're opposing martial law, the law has kind of got out the window. But you can't get rid of the National Assembly. That is not a thing that martial law allows you to do. And in fact, very explicitly in the Korean Constitution it says that like the National Assembly can't be gotten rid
of by martial law. So this suggests to me that, yeah, this was something that was also being sort of spearheaded
by parts of the Korean military. Because if you're not someone in the army who has their own interest in doing a coup, and someone asks you to just like overthrow the parliament, which is a thing that they're not allowed to do, you just say no. Which also makes the failure of this and how un believably stupidly it was all put together even more baffling, right, because if we assume that parts of the cliqus in the army had to have been involved with this, and like we
know and this only FPR talks about Yun is like fucked right. There's no way he's holding onto power. He's screwed and he's gonna be That will make him the second Korean president in seven years to be ran out by mass protests and dream the last set of politicians who were getting read out by mass protests. The army actually started drafting like procedures for how they were going to do a military takeover to like to knock out
the protests, and they never did it. But this has been a thing that's been in the background for a long time, and the liberal the liberal establishment has been talking about how the right wants to bring back military rule for ages. This is a situation that in some ways is similar to Brazil, where the Right has always been a sort of like, we like military rule kind of thing, but nobody actually seriously thought they would do
it until they did. And you know, I'm gonna read one more thing before we go to ads here, which is he claimed that the National Assembly was quote the mastermind behind the downfall of the country, which, okay, that's pretty normal coup stuff, quote monsters and quote anti state
forces seeking to overthrow the system. Now again, he has just described the National Assembly, which is the Korean parliament as quote anti state forces seeking to overthrow the system, which now gives us the specter of the Anarco Parliament.
I do wonder how much of this type of stuff is influenced, like by Trump's victory and like the enemy within rhetoric. I'm not sure how much influence Trump has. I know he has a degree of influence like pop culture wise in like Japan, I'm not sure of his influence in South Korea, but like in terms of just like geopolitics, like that's very similar to the type of like deep state enemy within rhetoric that like Trump used to success. Yeah, I not like tie everything back to America, but like.
This like subversive shit is like stuff that you can trace back to, like the original dictatorship. Right, Like this is a very very old, long running thing in Korean politics. Okay, we will get to the coup after I guess we get to a faction that didn't back the coup, which is the Korean capitalist class. So here are some ads.
Salute to our comrades.
We are back now. I will say it is true that this whole thing folded so quickly that we'd never really got a chance to see how the Korean capitalist class would have reacted, other than the fact that all of the newspapers immediately were like, what the fuck are you doing? So it's also worth noting if you're trying to do a coup, right, there are four things that you need to do. You need to arrest your senior
opposition political figures. You need to seize the radio stations that this includes, you know today like newspapers, TV stations.
Podcasts obviously, you know streamers, you know.
Yeah, yeah, we're a vital part of the media infrastructure that must be controlled.
I show Speed or whatever his name is he has to come under your control. You gotta get Aiden Ross locked in the cage fast fast.
I think Speed would have fucking gone just gone sicko mode on their special forces guys, given how just like unbelievably their asses got kicked. You know, you have to seize the airports and you have to take the major government buildings. Right, So how many of these did this coup manage to do?
They did like zero?
Right, They sort of kind of took most of the National Assembly. Yeah, but that last and what like an hour? Yeah, yeah, well we'll get to that in a second. So it seems like what we have reporting from the Democratic Party of Korea. They claim that the military attempted to arrest the head of the National Assembly, the head of the Democratic Party, and then also the head of the PPP, which is People's Power Party, which is Yun's own party.
So he tried to have the head of his own party arrested Korean special forces and it didn't work because none of them were at their offices.
It's so funny because they kept putting out a restaurans for like like the opposition party, his own party, and the Assembly was like hyer and.
You know, they did legitimately shut down some news outlets and that was it. You know, that was sort of genuine.
I saw reporters like fucking like fighting with the military in the streets. It was sick.
Yeah, well, this is why this is such a bad idea, right, Like in the words of a football commentator whose name I'm forgetting right now, who had the greatest cast light at all of human history.
Oh, no, disaster, what a bad idea? Like I okay, just just from the logistics of this, right pretty up on the list of countries you don't want to try to hold by by military force is South Korea, and there's a lot of reasons for this one. You know, you're dealing with like one of the largest jushu bases in the world. The other thing is like this is an entire country of protesters and capitalist protesters.
Very scary.
Well, but like like everyone fucking like fucking everyone in this country either like was a protester when they were a fucking kid, or was one now to the extent were like liberal members of parliament know how to build barricades.
It's so cool.
This actually mattered enormously, Like like fucking guys who are just like random aids where and there are videos of this of the of like just like random staffer guys like holding barricades from like against like paratrooper units and like like just random staffers like shooting fire extinguishers at armored special forces units. Like can you fucking imagine that shit in the US?
Like it was very cool to see.
Yeah, they're like this is this is why this is such a terrible idea because everyone has a whole bunch of institutional memory and experience of this, right, not just because you know the Democratic Party, right, which is which is the party that this was largely targeted at most of Like the elder statesmen of this party used to be Koreans like student protesters, Like they're all veterans of
the campaigns that brought down the Milton government. And it's not just that there's like a there's a memory of it. It's like there are a protests outside the National Assembly like every fucking day, right, Like again, the last time they brought down a prime minister with mass protest was
seven years ago. This is a whole country of people who know how to do this shit, and for some reason these idiots were like, we have no popular support whatsoever, and we're just gonna be able to like roll over this entire country in one night. So I think the plan was to hold the National Assembly and prevent the National Assembly from convening so that there was nobody who could override the martial law order.
Yeah, that sounds pretty basic, right, just to keep them out of the building so that they can't do anything.
Yeah. So they failed, easy, right?
Oh oh no, they failed.
Yeah. So the thing the problem here again is that you're dealing with an entire country that has been doing this for fucking ages. Right, So they do this at like ten thirty at night, and immediately what happens is just like a bunch of drug guys in bars like show up to the National Assembly. Like the moment I knew it was doomed, was there. I was reading in the New York Times they had an interview with this
guy who showed up. This is again the part I'm not talking about this being a country protesters like these guys aren't like leftists like revolutionaries, right. This Like one of the guys they were talking to the New York Times like their journals on the ground, pulls over a random guy and he's a sixty year old real estate agent. Right, this is a guy who should be like, this should
be the base of a military coup. Right, this is a sixty year old man who doesn't real estate it and he heard about this and immediately his his life was quote this is the end. So he drove for a fucking hour at like one in the morning to show up to the National Assembly to go fight the army. There was just no way this is good to work. And so people, even though it's really late up, people
just flood out. And suddenly there's all of these protesters in front of the National Assembly and they're doing shit like there's this unbelievable video of this soldier like tries to take a guy's phone and this guy has some kind of emrtial arts trading. It just grabs his arm and just spins him around, the coolest thing. And the guy's like, so I'm just like, well, fuck, guess I'm not dealing with this shit.
And there was such like a resignation. Yeah, in the movements of that military officer would be like it's just like, well, shit, we could keep fighting, but why like what's the point, Like why am I out here? It's midnight, I should be in bed. What's going on?
And like and part of this too also and this is this is a smart decision by someone, is that these guys weren't issued with actual bullets. So when I say these guys and this is this is the you know, the actual loving part about this is that these were largely Korean paratrooper units, and Korean paratrooper units are some of the most unhinged like fascist troops in the entire world. Like, these are people who didn't just fight in the Korean War.
A bunch of these guys fought in Vietnam. Like on the American side, they are notorious as the people who the military has always used to sort of put down protests. One of the most famous examples of this is the Guandara uprising in nineteen eighty. This was a pro democracy uprising after one of the various stages of insane military coups stuff was going on in South Korean nineteen eighty and there's a large democratic uprising from sort of students
and workers. There's a bunch of strikes. They take this area,
and the paratroopers come and shoot them all. They killed probably several thousand people and a lot of the paratrooper units that were deployed to take the National Assembly were literally the same units that were sent into crushes uprising in nineteen eighty, So this was in some ways very very scary, right because these are like, again, these are the units that were sent in to shoot a bunch of fucking civilians in the streets in order to keep
military rule intact. However, this time these para units just got their shitthanded to them. So it's sort of unclear exactly what was going on in the National Assembly. It seemed like some National Assembly members were still there, but somehow, and we don't part of how this happened, which is protesters were just there's a video of I think it was like the opposition leader the protesters like pushed them up over a fence so he could break into the
National Assembly and get past the military barricades. Like one hundred and ninety lawmakers somehow like got into the National Assembly and barricaded themselves in.
This also shows a level of like dedication. Yeah that I suspect none of none of our lawmakers would do. No, they're not gonna they're not gonna break into the capital when it's surrounded by military guard.
You know, we had this with January sixth, right, and like what what what did our congress people do dream January sixth? They all ran and hid.
I mean these are slightly different circumstances.
Yeah, this is true, but like but like you know, okay, so if if you look at there's been a lot of shit talking of the of the American people's willingness to protest and stuff in the light of like watching the Korean people overturn this coup in like three hours. And I will point out that in twenty twenty, this was this was literally four years ago. Like we put the President of the United States in a bunker. People fought the Secret Service hand to hand outside the gates
of the White House. Like the police in this country lost control of the centers of several major American cities. So like Americans will fight, right, but can you imagine like Nancy Pelosi or like like Chuck Schumer or whoever was around, like trying to set up like like setting up barricades to stop the army from like marching into Like no, it's unreal. And these were good barricades too,
These were very well constructed barricades. These were barricades that like are better than a lot of barricades I've seen set up by protesters over the like can the US over the last few years. And the consequence of this was that the National Assembly just voted for the cup to be over, because they can just vote to say that the martial law is over. And then the military kind of was just like, well shit and just kind of left.
I mean they waited in the wings for a little bit. Yeah, and we were all curious to see what the president was gonna do after this. Emily was like, uh, nice, try sir, and I guess we will talk about that after another message from these ads.
And we are so back. We are so back. And it has never been more over for President UNI. That is true, it has never been more over. And so part of the weird part about this is that you just like vanishes for most of this, Like we don't hear from him until like the morning when he announces that he's going to roll back the martial law thing. But he needs his cabinet there to do the vote, so he's gonna do it later. I don't know. But the troops
have already all pulled out by this point. And like they go back to their barracks after the National Assembly, it is like what the fuck. So there's been a lot of hay made about how one hundred and ninety members of the National Assembly showed up and every single one of them voted to end martial law, and like
that's cool. But I've seen a lot of people be like, oh, look at how democratic the PPP, which is the right wing party that UN's a part of, is from, Like they voted to do it, but like, okay, yes it was, this was a unanimous vote. I need everyone to understand that there are three hundred members of the National Assembly and that means one hundred and ten of them didn't show up, and that of the people who showed up,
there were only eighteen members. Yeah, of the PPP who showed up to this now, and part of that, like it is true. It is. It was a bit difficult to get through the fucking military occupation bit with paratroopers, but everyone else you to have managed to, so you know, and you AND's own party also just hates him because again, like one of the scandals he's going down for is like fucking with their primaries and like getting a bunch of people who had safe seats like losing their safe
seats so he could put his guys in. And again he also tried to arrest the head of his own parties. So like, these people don't like him for very immediate person or reason. Is not because the PPP is somehow like a party more committed to democracy than the Republican Party is here like no, these people all suck, Like, oh god. But this leaves us with the aftermath of this, and the first thing I want to kind of go
over is what the fuck were they doing? Because again, if you look at the sequence of events here, right, there's this coup, right, the martial law goes into effect, the army backs it and tries to occupy the National Assembly, but then the National Assembly votes that the martial law
is over, and then the army just leaves. Now, what if you go back to remember when I was talking about the beginning of this, right, seizing the National Assembly is not something you were allowed to do when at a state of emergency or a martial law in position, Right, that's something explicitly the army is banned from doing. They did it anyways, which means that like probably like a bunch of generals are also going to prison for this.
But then they also immediately backed down when it became clear that you know, they were going to there was going to be resistance, and that if they were going to try to stop this, they were either wouldn't have to beat the shit out of or just like actually shoot a bunch of lawmakers in the National Assembly. And I understand that that's a bad idea, and I get why these people didn't want to do that, just put
like from the their own things politically. But if if you weren't willing to do that, why did you do this in the first place? Like, how did you think this was gonna go? Like the only thing I could think of was that they thought they could just should have. I thought it was ten thirty at night, we can just shock and awe everyone. Yeah, we'll just roll them over. But like, do you know what country you were in?
I mean, yeah, it's a massivenst calculation. That's what makes this the worst coup since Bolivia. I think it's worse in Bolivia, Oh absolutely, because it shows a complete like disconnection from understanding the country that you're in.
What were they doing?
Yeah, Like the willingness of the people to like get mobilized at ten thirty. Yeah, and the willingness of your own lawmakers to try to put like some level of resistance to this, even if it's not like physically fighting the army, which someone that ended up doing.
Which they did. They fought the army, Like, ah, what a world. And also with Bolivia too, you know, there's okay, so a with Bolivia, there's a lot of debate over where that coup is real or not. I lean towards it was. There's a lot of people think he was staged. But also if it wasn't stage, the excuse they have is that the general who was leading it was about to get fired, so he just had to go, right.
It's like, well, yeah, okay, it looked like a completely half cocked coup because it was they just they had to go before he got fired. This one, there was no time pressure. He could have just done this whenever with better planning. And I don't know, it's all very very deeply weird in terms of what's happening next. I mean, Yun was finished anyways, Like he again, he had a
twenty percent of proof of rating going into this. Coming out of this, there's immediately a democratic party is trying to impeach him, like a bunch of the PPP, who's again supposed to be his party, are also going along with it because they hate him. There was some very funny comments from PPP guys who were like his supporters, who were like, well he literally one of them said that he did this thing. Has anyone thought about like the pressure of burden placed on him, maybe someone should
have gotten to talk to him. He did this because he was lonely, which is the most insane thing I've ever heard of my life. Like, he just he just tried to Aren't you that this guy get a coup because he was lonely?
What the fuck? It's the in cell evolution. It's finally happening in South Korea.
Yeah, And like he is going to get impeached. The only way he's not going to get impeached is if the judiciary steps had to save him. And I can't imagine them trying it. After again, he just tried to do a coup. He's going to prison, Like probably his defense secretary is going to prison, like Confesse Minister's going to prison. Probably a bunch of military guys are going to prison. Like this is it's so funny. They have just effectively annihilated their own political power for a generation.
Like this faction of people who have been running the country is just gone. I mean they'll still be the PPP, right, this will be like conservatives, but like they just have obliterated themselves in maybe the most spectacular fashion I have ever seen. And you know what happens when they were sort of unclear? Is it right now? We're recording this Wednesday, Yeah,
Wednesday at like ten am. Yeah, so it's it's unclear exactly what's gonna happen in the time between when this when we record this and when this goes out, but unis finished. This is it's pretty ver Yeah, And I'm I'm hoping that we see a serious attempt to actually like deal with the fact that the army is ran by a bunch of people who tried to do a coup. We won't we might well, no, like it, here's the
thing in the US, absolutely not South Korea. Maybe there's a chance there's like a there is a slight chance that people get purged from this, right and in a similar way to like Lula kind of purging some of the army.
My South Korea Does Good Things card is already full up because of yesterday.
That's true.
I can't imagine they're gonna do more because it's South Korea.
Well, I will also say, like one of the things that's happening is Korea is like major trade union Federation is like doing a general strike until until the impeachment happens. So you know, there is a lot of pressure to clean house here. And like a lot of Korean liberalism is based on the sort of mythos of like of the student protesters, and like the protesters, you brought down the military dictatorship and trying to do a military coup and immediately failing is like the best possible thing you
could have done for them. The consequences of this for you and are going to be extremely bad. I hope we get a better Korea out of this. I hope this sort of starts to stem the tide of the unhinged right wing surge that's been happening there for a while now.
It'd be nice that this was like the tip of the bell curve. Yeah, in the global far right takeover. Yeah, I mean it's wow, it went bad. I may every single right wing attempt to do this, go this badly, because good lord, what a heartwarming tale. Yep. Well that's that's been it for us today. You're at It could happen here. Tune in tomorrow for more exciting tales of political collapse.
Yeah, and quite quite possibly, quite possibly, this is going to happen to you too. And I want everyone to understand that, in terms of military ques in the last six months, the protesters are two to zero and the armies zero and two. So if this happens to you soon, Witchie very much might go get them.
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