Who Is Running South Korea?

end the martial law, and then it stopped. Extremely bizarre in baffling series of events. And you know, when we last left our intrepid heroes, the people of South Korea, they had just successfully overturned a coup. No one quite knew what was gonna happen. In the aftermath, we knew, and impeacha vote was coming, a vote to impeach President Yun.

The reason we're coming back to this, though, is that the aftermath of all of this has been absolutely baffling, and I think this has all been lost in the news cycle because about a trillion things are happening right now, But the situation in South Korea has been unbelievably weird, and so we're now going to take a look at the actual impeachments of President Yun and the unbelievably bizarre path that led to it, because oh my god, the more I talk to people, the more I realize that

people don't know how unbelievably unhinged everything has been since since the military coup, because everyone has moved on. So we're going back. So immediately after the coup, there was this whole wave of military guys going like, we didn't know we were taking part in the COUU, We're totally innocents, Like, oh, they just let us out of the trucks and suddenly we were at the National Assembly.

and taking names. I saw you getting your ass kicked by a guy just like blowing your ass up with a fire extinguisher and like not being able to break a bunch of very well constructive barricade set up by like fucking Senate aids. So that's been extremely funny. So you like vanished for the entire time this coup was going on, and like nobody knew where he was and no one had seen him, and things were kind of fiasco e.

social order. Now this this is going back to the thing you know he did at the time, Right, he has this thing where he keeps calling the Parliament which is controlled by the Democratic Party, which is like the liberal opposition party. He kept calling the parliaments like opposition anti state forces, and like, my brother in Christ, what the fuck is a legislative dictatorship? I mean, like, you know, you could be really strictly anarchist about it and be like, well, yeah,

all legislatives are dictatorships. But my dude, you are not living under a dictatorship because the parliament that your country elected hates you and refuses to pass your dogship budget because no one likes you. That is simply not what

the word dictatorship means. It reminds me of this thing where like, you know, if you go back and you read like people in the eighteen hundreds talking about or like like seventeen hundreds too, you'll read them talking about monarchies, right, and they'll be like, ah, if the king can like overrule the will of the nobles, we would be living in a peer dictatorship. It's like, what the fuck are you talking about? Like Suri, you live under a monarchy,

like you are already in a dictatorship. You are also like part of the authoritary and apartans of the dictatorship, and this is just like the inverse of that, where it's like, ah, the legislature won't let me do whatever the fuck I want, so this is now a dictatorship and so like, you know, that's simply not what the word dictatorship means, and you can't get away with that shit as much in a country where people like in living memory, have lived through an actual military dictatorship and

understand what that's like. The parliament refusing to pass your terrible budget, that's not an excuse to institute martial law and try to shut down the legislature. So this was not received well as you would expect from whatever unhinged speech that was. He did apologize for imposing Marshall Law, which is a very funny place to end up, is like you try to do a coup and then you have to go on TV and apologize for trying to do the coup and also try to argue you didn't just try to do a coup.

don't have quorum. But if you don't have a quorum is like there's like a minimum number of members that has to be in attendance for for whatever you're doing to be legal to stop like two people from showing up in the middle of the night and being like, aha, I am the parliaments. We've just passed this like order that makes me dictator or whatever. And again, the entire PPP just walks out and they leave, and the vote fails because the PPP managed to whip basically its entire

membership into into trying to keep union power. And here begins the what the fuck is going on part of this episode, because A all reports we have suggest that Yun was planning to have the leadership, but the PvP arrested and b he just literally tried to do a

coup and they're still backing him. And see we stumble into a very very thority question that I saw from people in Korea, Like the moment after all this stuff happens, but didn't really hit the western press until later, if at all, and didn't really hit like the mainstream consciousness. And this question will become a parent in a second. So here's from the Guardian. Senior PPP politicians have claimed you can continue as president while delegating his powers to the Prime Minister.

we don't want to impeach our presidents. But also he just tried to do a coup, so is said, we're going to take his powers away and give it to the Prime minister so he can still serve withou us impeaching him like that, that's not a thing you can't do this. There's no mechanism for this. The Democratic Party

people are just completely correct here. But because for some reason the Guardian feels it, I mean, it's the Guardian right like, but they feel it necessary to sort of both sides again, a fucking coup.

kicked out of office. And we're gonna get to this later, but you get kicked out office and the Prime Minister gets put into power, and this happens until this pre court decides whether whether whether your impeachment should go through

or not. Right, So, like there's a mechanism for this, but the PvP doesn't want to like impeach un but they also don't want him seemingly running the country because he appears to be like absolutely unhinged and just again declared martial law and tried to knock off the legislature. So you have this, You have this whole sort of steaming mess of a situation where the PvP is trying to like have it both ways of like not having union power but also not impeaching him. But this also

begs one very important question. Hula fuck was running the country between the first.

been extremely chaotic. So you know, we covered in the last episode that like a bunch of ministers were resigning, right because you know, they had just taken part in a coup and they were like, well shit, the ex defense minister, who's one of the people who's been sort of implicated as being like saying that he's to a large step behind the coup like is true.

the police. A bunch of testimony also has come out from the National Assembly investigation, which I'm not covering much of the testimony from the National Assembly investstigation because it's really unclear exactly how reputable all this stuff is because a lot of people are just saying shit, right, and some of it may be real. Some of it maybe some of the people have you know, obtained their sources, but some of it's probably not. But like to get a sense of like the kind of stuff that is

coming out in this investigation. One of the big claims was from I think it's some like a TV host who claimed he got texted it by a guy in the army. But apparently he was saying that the plan by union the army, the plan was to have the head of the PPP killed and then drop a North Korean uniform nearby to like do a false flag and implicate North Korean special forces. Now this is unbelievably unhinged, right,

what the fuck? And it probably isn't true, but you know, the source isn't great, But like who knows, right, we don't actually know if they're playing to do this and fucked it up, or if they weren't playing to do this, or if this person is this person just lying, this person did get this text, but the person was misinformed. We don't know if this is just like misinformation that's being spread around. This is a good demonstration of what

the sort of chaos of this moment has been. And you know, and there's been a lot of other stuff that I think in any other time and place probably

would have been like front page news. So one of the things that happens in this whole process is that the South Korean police tried to raid the house of the president, and you know, like as part of their investigation, there's a whole thing where Union's been ordered by like the investigatorial services to not leave the country because he's just actively under investigation for this military coup being illegal

by just like the regular ass police. And so South Korean police like try to raid his house and they can't do it because the South Korean equivalent of the

Secret Service stops them from doing the raid. And this in and of itself is something that like again would be a giant news headline at any other point in time, and it's just been completely lost, and it's like it's not sort of clear right now how this is all sort of going to play out, and whether the police are going to be able to do this and you know, what's actually gonna happen to you And after he presumably leaves office, I mean, I guess the Streme Court could

save him, but like, you know, there's there's a real chance that he and we're going to get into this morning a second, there's a real chance that he just like fucking goes to prison, right And unlike the last president who was going to move from office, like, I can't imagine him getting pardoned by the next administration because that was merely an unhinged corruption scandal involving the president of South Korea being under the influence of a shaman

and doing a bunch of corruption that did a bunch of horrible shit. But this is, you know, this is like he tried to do a coup, right, So it's sort of unclear if he's going to get saved from that. It does seem very likely that he's going to face a bunch of charges for this because everyone is unbelievably pissed off. Here's from dw On Monday, former head of Special Warfare Command Kwak Jung Gwyn and former head of the Capitol Defense Command Lie Jin Wu were arrested on

charges of deploying military personnel to the parliament. Former chief of the Defense Counterintelligence Command Yo En hung has been accused of orchestrating the implementation of marshal law, and Army Chief Park Ensiou has been suspended from his role. Yun's former Defense Minister Kim Yong yun, who stepped down immediately following the board in martial law declaration, and former Interior

Minister Lee Song min also face investigations. So what we're seeing here effectively, right, is the house cleaning of the ranks of the Korean military who've been involved with this whole thing, right, And they're going through a lot of different people. This is also clearing out some of like the clicks in the military who've been sort of backing you and and who people have suspected have been a bunch of the people behind a lot of this stuff,

And this is a good and necessary process. The entire time this has been going on, everyone has been terrified of the possibility of a second coup, and the only way to avoid that in the short term is to remove the senior leadership with the military and get them away from their troops. They don't have the ability to sort of plan anything, and sometimes this can make people just go for it, right like that that's what happens

in Bolivia. It looks like where the failed Bolivionque was a product of you know, people trying to do house cleaning and get rid of military guys before they did a coup, and so that this makes them go off half cocked, and like, you know, that's a bad situation for I mean, it's that situation for everyone that says that there's a coup happening. But it's a bad situation, especially for the military because they don't have their coup preparations in place, so it's easier to knock them off.

But what's interesting about this too is to a large extent, we're seeing other parts of the Korean state like really go after the military, right, and this I don't know, I mean, like I'm hoping this kind of like has a precedent inside of the sort of Korean like liberal democratic societal norms that like, you can't let this just unhinged military do all of this stuff that the precedent of this sort of like military house cleaning, I think

is a good one. Right, this is going to be a rare, a rare Mia agrees with the people who founded the US moment because oh my god, those people suck shit like a bunch of slave owning, gedicidal bassards.

But you know, one of the things that they were right about is the political danger to any democratic system of having a standing army, right, and especially when you have a standing army that's like permanently on a semi war footing the way the South Korea is is there's always a real political risk that they attempt sees power and you have to fucking stop them from doing that. And ideally you just fucking acts as much of it as you possibly can, right, I mean, I think you

should act. You acts the entire political system to make sure this doesn't happen. But you know, this is a

this is hopefully a good first step. I also want to mention that the specific charge of insurrection is being thrown at a lot of these people and also at Un himself, and like he absolutely did it right, Like there's not much of a dispute that he did in fact do uh An insurrection under under sort of Korean law, and this technically like carries the death penalty, but I don't think they're gonna kill him, but you know, this is the sort of severity of this stuff under the

Korean legal system. And Okay, so, like all of this fucking chaos happening, right, and eventually there's a second impeachment vote, and this time the public pressure is enough that the PvP stays in the chamber to vote no, and only about a dozen, like per MPR, only about a dozen tpp lawmakers actually vote to impeach the guy who just tried to have their fucking parliament disbanded.

And that's a really really grim and depressing thing. And part of the reaction to this has been from the South Korean trade Union Movement, which has been calling for just to straight up the disbanding of the PPP as a political party, right, And that's something that I think is extremely reasonable. Again, if your party's president tries to do a military coup, I think I think you shouldn't

be allowed to have a party anymore. This is the liberal opinions, right, Okay, So like eventually this vote does go through, and the stage that we're at right now is that. Okay, So once you get impeached by the National Assembly, you're suspended from all your duties and the Prime Minister takes power. So it's happening right now is he doesn't have any power formally, but we're still in

this sort of holding period. We're waiting for the Supreme Court to weigh in and either like approve the impeachment or not. And that's kind of where things stand now. After an unbelievably unhinged wee get a half of just everything being extremely unboud two weeks, I guess everything being just unbelievably extremely weird. And yeah, but I think I think there is a mild hopeful note, which is that like, if you fight back against these people, they can be defeated.