I'm reading the comments here and surprised by the lack of depth of assessing Korea's history of prosecuting its presidents and most of you are just regurgitating what's reported in mainstream news that is echoed by Korean mainstream news which cannot give you a neutral impartial view on the situation.
Two Korean presidents were sentenced to death and were pardoned in the 90s. another two Korean presidents were jailed for decades and were released after a few years. All of this is just a quick pandering to voters for whichever side gets hold and I am willing to wager that the current and last President will also see the insides of a jail cell.
I point that democracies like American politics even when it gets ugly to the point do not engage in such tit for tat against the President to the point of sending them to jail, for obvious reasons.
The important context is that these two presidents were Chun Doo-hwan and his successor Roh Tae-Woo, who led the military coup of December 12th (1979), seizing power, and then sending paratroopers to murder hundreds of civilians to quash public protest in the uprising of Gwangju (1980).
They weren't your garden variety corrupt politicians. They were mass murderers, and by 1995 when they were arrested, they and their military cabals were still posing a credible threat to Korea's democracy. Their arrest and subsequent death sentences, accompanied with a sweeping purge of their military cabal by president Kim Young-Sam, marked an important inflection point in Korea's decades-long struggle toward democracy: before that the threat of a military coup was a constant factor in politics. After that the threat was gone, and since then, the Korean military never even pretended they had any political ambitions.
So mock their later pardons if you want to, but you can't deny it marked an important and necessary step in Korea's history. It also shows sending your ex-presidents to prison only to pardon them later is still better than not bothering with it at all.
* Also, the "obvious reason" that American politics sent zero ex-presidents to prison is that Biden chickened out. So, there's that.
Don't forget Ford deciding to protect his political allies (by pardoning Nixon). And George HW Bush doing similar (preventing Iran-Contra scandal investigation by pardoning participants who could have fingered Bush or Reagan)
I think your comment here is very emotionally charged here but to clarify to outsiders reading, those protestors also broke into an military armory, armed themselves to the teeth, and an armed conflict broke out. It's still not clear as to who fired the first shot and by all definitions can be viewed as armed insurrection not a mere "public protest".
Also during this time protests were spreading not just in Gwangju but in other large cities. The Gwangju incident is still a very contested and heavily debated historical event one that has been constantly politically weaponized to silence opposition.
> So mock their later pardons if you want to, but you can't deny it marked an important and necessary step in Korea's history. It also shows sending your ex-presidents to prison only to pardon them later is still better than not bothering with it at all.
I am mocking South Korea's political arena because pardoning Presidents after charging them with treason/corruption/insurrection only reinforces that laws are selectively applied and some are still above its law and constitution. Better would've been to refrain from the tit for tat kangaroo courts altogether to placate whatever direction the country's leaning towards in that election cycle.
> Also, the "obvious reason" that American politics sent zero ex-presidents to prison is that Biden chickened out. So, there's that.
Post-watergate scandal, it was President Ford that stated going after Nixon would bottleneck national interest decision making with partisan legal/political factionalism , something that South Korea has become today and it will not stop.
In my personal opinion that's what the US is heading towards to right now, so might give you a hint on how to prevent it.
It’s also a heavy burden to let a political figure die in a cell, but given how things are going, I’m fairly sure he’s going to spend a long time there.
Yoon Suk Yeol did the basic math of “if our population isn’t having babies and people are getting older, how much medical capacity will we need?”
The results—due to artificial caps on medical students (like the AMA does in the US)—mathed out to: “oh, shit.”
He decided to raise the caps by a lot. The medical establishment freaked out, since that would lower salaries, and went on strike. Doctors, residents, and medical students didn’t show up for months. He had to call in doctors from the army to fill in.
Was a hostile takeover and subversion the right response to frustration over political obstacles? No. But he ran into some very real and frustrating realities (or collective refusal to admit to them.)
Not sure he needed to table-flip into full autocrat, though.
It will forever grate me that those assholes of Korean Medical Association could say "You see how hard we're working for all of you guys? That's why there should be no more doctors!" with a straight face and will never face any consequences for that.
(Of course, it didn't help Yoon that he attacked this problem with the finesse of a bulldozer, with disastrous consequences. But still.)
In fact, what they warned would happen is that it would just increase the number of new graduates heading towards highly lucrative, unregulated medical fields like dermatology and cosmetic surgery, and would only exacerbate the gaps in essential areas like pediatrics, OB/GYN, and emergency medicine, which face real shortages.
The root of the problem is twofold: First, South Korea's National Health Insurance heavily regulates and caps the prices for essential and lifesaving care, sometimes setting reimbursement rates so low that hospitals lose money on them. Meanwhile, non essential aesthetic procedures have no price caps.
Second, South Korea has an unusually high rate of prosecuting doctors criminally for medical malpractice. Doctors in high stakes environments like the ER or surgery face massive legal risks and the threat of actual prison time for unavoidable bad outcomes. Conversely, opening a skin clinic carries almost zero legal risk, no night shifts, and much higher pay.
The doctors' frustration was that Yoon's policy relied on a trickle down theory of medicine, the idea that if you simply flood the market by increasing the quota by a massive 65% overnight, the overflow of graduates will eventually be desperate enough to take the punishing essential jobs. While the medical association's optics and PR were undeniably terrible, their core grievance was that Yoon's draconian approach was a political bandaid that completely ignored the structural rot driving doctors away from saving lives in the first place
They’re very much not over those players.
He didn't and so he had everything stripped away which sent a very clear message to Government and the police that he was there for the taking.
In my years watching sports coaches are almost always the first one to be made the fall guy and I've witnessed plenty of situations where I can't really say they're the one at fault. There are two simple reasons in my opinion. Teams invest WAY more money in players so they have to try to commit to them even if the player is potentially not good enough and owners are never going to go "wow I made some bad decisions I should sell the team". All of this is to say coaches are the cheapest and easiest ones to pin the problems on.
But he's not the chaebol, he's just a tool for people walking away unscathed to try again at a more opportune time.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_South_Korean_martial_law_...
> He declared martial law
Trump has sent federal troops into states that voted against him.
He’s also frequently talked about “the enemy from within” to describe American citizens.
And then there’s ICE…
> suspended and prevented their Congress equivalent from meeting
Trump has shut down the government twice already.
The press just like to blame Democrats despite the fact that it’s the Republicans who are refusing to negotiate.
> ordered the immediate arrest of numerous high level politicians with a goal of arresting hundreds,
To be fair, Trump hasn’t gone that far (yet). But he has fired lots of people from government roles that should have been non-partisan and filled them with his own loyal supporters. Even when those people are clearly not qualified to be doing their new found appointments.
He’s also freed lots of criminals because they either supported him, or paid him.
> issued a declaration that all media and publications had to be approved before publication
Trump has been removing press from the White House and replacing them with publications that support him.
> ordered the power+water for a news broadcaster be cut
Trump hasn’t done that either. But he has sent the FCC to shutdown shows he dislikes. And sued the others into compliance.
What did you say elsewhere about "good faith"? J6 was a real insurrection attempt.
People go to prison for attempted murder every day.
Royalty in name vs royalty in practice.
I assume that otherwise they would have less of an issue. It’s not like he married someone slight off-white, that would be real grounds for excommunication.
But the trickling of Epstein news is why he's out-of-favor, isn't it?
Took a long time though.
Obviously this guy went off his rocker. His own party had to step in and oppose him.
I do wonder, it doesnt seem like he was trying to install himself as dictator; it seems to me like he may have just had a mental health break. Being a major world leader has to be immense stress.
We really just need to get humans out of the loop. Direct democracy where you vote on everything, or assign your vote to a trusted representative.
Every South Korean president who has served a prison sentence has ultimately been pardoned.Canada's PM Carney spoke recently about the Power of the Powerless essay and the shared lie, when the Green Grocer puts up the "Workers of the world unite" sign. And I kind of fear that shared reticence to speak plainly is causing an even larger inability to talk about the matter at hand than trying to approach it delicately around the edges to convince those who are so hard to communicate with.
In the US, federal prosecutions are ordered by the in-group via public social media posts, rather than by professionals dedicated to the law deciding if there's enough evidence to support a case. Currently, federal prosecutions will never be pursued against the in-group, no matter the evidence.
I'd like the US to return to it's prior stance on what the law means and how it can be used.
We wouldn't have Apple, Netflix, or so many other Bay Area giants without the equal application of law.
I applaud South Korea for pursuing this conviction and achieving a suitable penalty for the breakdown of law at the highest levels. It's quite admirable, as admirable as the UK charging the King's own brother with crimes this morning.
When law breaks down against the powerul, billionaires turn into oligarchs, and all those startups that would have created the next big creative disruption in the economy get squashed, and we all lose out. Inequality of power is a massive risk for any economy.
That has nothing to do with startup and economy. Equality in front of the law is one of the most basic property of any decent democracy.
It is even the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
I would contend that a startup economy can not exist without decent democracy. It's not an either/or as you frame it.
Yes, as the saying goes, the law equally forbids and punishes the poor and the rich if they sleep in the park or under a bridge.
>We wouldn't have Apple, Netflix, or so many other Bay Area giants without the equal application of law.
US has nowhere near "equal application of law", and yet it has these companies.
In fact, if it did have "equal application of law", those companies would have dead, as they get away with things that, if a smaller company or private business did, they'd have the book thrown at them.
We wouldn't have Apple, Netflix, or so many other Bay Area giants without the equal application of law.
It’s the same for dictators, and well pretty much any singular leader.
The factions may fight back and forth, and counting coup by imprisoning the figurehead for one of them certainly has some attraction - but the pendulum swings, and nobody wants to end up really getting punished at the end of the day when it swings away from them.
That’s how you get murderous resistance instead of (relatively) sane transfers of power.