Korea’s “reverse January 6th”

A dispatch from Seoul, with some observations on the thwarted coup in Korea — and what it suggests about our own fragile system

By Megan Peck Shub

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Six months ago, my family moved to Seoul for my husband’s job. After years of painstaking attention to every twist and turn for my work in political comedy, I thought I could take a break from the chaos of American politics. Fast forward to this morning. I woke up at 6:00 a.m. to a flurry of text messages. “You ok?” my friend Maya wrote. Am I okay? Well, I thought, If Kim Jong Un has launched a nuclear weapon, I do appear to have — at least momentarily — survived it.

The messages kept coming (they are still coming!) as I toggled between news websites trying to piece together facts: apparently, I’d just slept through a couple of hours of martial law. South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol had issued a late-night television address declaring martial law, ostensibly as a measure against “communism.” As far as red herrings go, that sounds awfully familiar to an American.