What the world can learn from South Korea’s struggle to defeat dictatorship

South Korea remains in crisis, now reeling from a horrific attack on one of the bedrock institutions of liberal democracy, the independent judiciary.

On 19 January 2025, in a scene disturbingly similar to the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol building, mobs of rioters ransacked a municipal courthouse in western Seoul to hunt down a judge. Just moments earlier this judge had validated the legality of a previous court order to arrest the impeached president, Yoon Seok-yeol.

As is now well known, on the night of 3 December 2024, amid mounting evidence of wrongdoing by Yoon and his wife and stifled by the opposition party’s control of the National Assembly, Yoon attempted to take dictatorial control through an absurd declaration of martial law. For this, he was impeached by the National Assembly. He now faces two trials, one by the Constitutional Court to confirm this impeachment and remove him from office, and the other by the criminal justice system pursuing charges of insurrection, the most serious of crimes given the country’s troubling past.

The widespread fallout from the coup attempt continues to highlight South Korea’s particularities, but the root cause of this terrible moment is the all-too-familiar phenomenon that continues to destabilise countries and regions around the world: the petty tyrant.

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Anti-corruption investigators have begun a second attempt to arrest South Korea’s impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol after his attempt to impose martial law in December. Yoon is under investigation on charges of insurrection. #YookSukYeol #yook #SouthKorea #president #politics #martiallaw #news #7NEWS

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Conflicting legacies

Yoon Seok-yeol has revealed himself a cowardly aspiring dictator, drawing from a deep wellspring of authoritarian sentiment and legacies among a small but vociferous segment of the South Korean population.

Like a dormant virus that regains its destructive force when triggered, this autocratic strain in the South Korean body politic has now infected even the majority of MPs in the president’s ruling party, who are determined to exploit the spreading disorder to hold onto power – rule of law be damned. Whether this contagion is contained or grows into a cancer that kills democratic South Korea remains to be seen over the upcoming months.

The outcome will depend on which of the two main tracks of modern Korean political history prevails – the traditionally authoritarian or the resistantly democratic. That this remains an open question, nearly four decades after South Korea’s liberation from dictatorship and subsequent development into a boisterous democracy, testifies to the power of the country’s specific experiences.

The new public discourse

Likely the most interesting manifestation of South Korea’s standing as a hyper-technological, internet-driven society is the domination of YouTube in public discourse. YouTube channels, whether run by major news organisations or much smaller enterprises, have overtaken in influence the legacy broadcast and newspaper outlets, who themselves have become increasingly attuned to the new market dynamics by focusing on YouTube viewership. This has created conditions for the explosion of conspiracy-pushing, largely individually-operated YouTube channels that expand through compounding algorithms, profiteering and ever-outlandish paranoia.

Whether senior citizens or angry young males, large chunks of major demographic sectors have fallen into YouTube rabbit holes.

One of these individuals appears to have been Yoon himself. Among his preposterous defences for the coup attempt, has been the go-to conspiracy theory among wanna-be strongmen seeking to take control of democratic societies – rigged elections.

But the complete lack of evidence for this charge, as verified by the highest courts, has proven to be merely an inconvenience in the pursuit of personal pampering and corruption by Yoon the president, the sordid details of which have been increasingly revealed since his impeachment.

The continued struggle for democracy

This takes us to the opposing, more hopeful prospects for South Korea, given its past struggles and ongoing societal trends: the irrepressible freedom of information and investigation presented by the same internet culture that cultivates conspiracy theories.

This unrelentingly probing press, including citizen journalists, proved instrumental in bringing to light the extraordinary scale of corruption of the preceding two conservative presidents , both of whom were jailed for their crimes.

That Yoon thought he could actually carry out his mutiny over the long term, which would have required strict censorship over the open internet in South Korea, shows the scale of foolishness that accompanied his venality. The ultimate salvation of democratic South Korea may come from its citizens’ refusal to sacrifice their digitally-connected lives of freedom.

One final dominant factor in this crisis that both resembles what has happened in the US and reinforces South Korea’s specific historical conditions is the role of popular and folk religion. Koreans’ propensity toward fringe religious movements has been closely tied to their longstanding vulnerability to leadership cults, whether from charlatan strongmen like Yoon or demagogic clergymen.

This most basic religious behaviour, that of searching for prophetic guidance and falling for its self-proclaimed practitioners, has been a longstanding challenge for the secular state in Korea, dating back centuries. Its current manifestation and influence in the turn toward autocracy by Yoon and his supporters, too, will eventually become more fully known, but already there are damning details.

Whatever open channels of information and investigation reveal in the weeks and months to come, the attempted imposition of martial law in early December and the continuing efforts to overturn the rule of law in South Korea present another example of that deeply dangerous reality across the globe: rising authoritarianism. After climate change, dealing with the threats of dictatorship, which inevitably brings about war and destruction, presents the most urgent challenge facing the world.