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
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.
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