The citizens of South Korea sat in unrest before their TV screens on December 3, 2024, watching President Yoon Suk Yeol declare martial law at 11 p.m. in an unannounced live speech. Despite the late hour, the overnight frenzy happened in a matter of hours: hundreds of citizens gathered at the front of the National Assembly building, huddling together amidst the biting winter winds as they protested against the President’s decision. To an outsider, the decree of martial law in South Korea may appear as a quirky incident, caused by a poorly-planned scheme of the country’s president. However, this “quirky incident” has much more significance, applicable to all the democratic countries in the world: as inherent as it may seem, our liberty is highly vulnerable.
The purpose of martial law is to allow a country to act promptly and effectively during war or an emergency equivalent in severity. Therefore, martial law grants absolute authority to the president and the military, including control of the press and any type of public assemblies. It also prohibits political assemblies outside of the National Assembly building, which is the only place the members of the National Assembly could gather and vote to revoke martial law. Despite lacking a clear rationale for why South Korea was in an emergency equivalent to war, President Yoon issued the martial law order and blocked the entrance to the National Assembly to prevent its members from voting against his order. If the members had been unable to enter the building at all that night, the martial law order would have continued indefinitely, permitting President Yoon a virtual dictatorship.
Living in the United States of America, liberty comes across as a built-in structure to our society, a privilege unimaginable to be taken away. Unfortunately, as shown to us recently in Korea, liberty can be threatened as easily as a president of a democratic country making an announcement. The more horrifying truth is that the restoration of the easily lost liberty takes a thousandfold time and effort.
Most of the current middle-aged South Koreans learned the lesson the hard way in the 1980s when General Chun Doo Hwan rose to power after leading an overnight military coup. To gain back democracy, South Korean citizens had to organize multitudes of protests throughout Chun’s regime. In the notorious Gwangju Uprising, university students across South Korea gathered in the city of Gwangju to protest against Chun’s authoritarianism, to which the country responded by directing its muzzles to their youth. Countless brave citizens were arrested, tortured, and killed before the country finally retrieved democracy in 1988.
The memory and trauma of Chun’s regime persist in Korean culture, reminding Koreans of the rock bottom of an oppressed society. Strong emotions associated with this past resurfaced the night of the recent martial law order, compelling the citizens to rush out of their homes in the middle of the night to protest and even block the military from entering the National Assembly building. Those who appeared at the building risked their lives to prevent the potential dictatorship of President Yoon: at worst, they could have gotten shot by the barging soldiers following the unconstitutional order of the President. On the same night, a high-ranked South Korean government official, Ryu Hyuk, Inspector General of the Ministry of Justice, actively discouraged such injustice by not only refusing the Minister’s offer to hold a meeting about martial law but also resigning from his office. In his interview with MBC News, a leading South Korean broadcast company, Ryu explained that it is his and every Korean civil servant’s duty to defend the constitution and law. He added by claiming that civil servants are responsible for defying any unlawful orders, even if their job is to follow those orders. In Ryu’s words, any civil servant who submissively follows an unconstitutional order is the equivalent of a “wardman who runs an Auschwitz gas room.”
Defending liberty from its vulnerabilities requires participation in substantial democracy: active voicing of opinions against injustice. Substantial democracy almost always involves risk-taking and altruistic sacrifices. In the 1980s, young scholars in Korea participated in a deadly protest to cry out their disapproval of the oppressive government. In 2024, the government official Ryu Hyuk refused to work with an unconstitutional order, although he had a family to support and may have been abandoning his life-long career. As unfair as it sounds, once liberty is preserved, the fruit of the sacrifices is shared with all — even to those who were indifferent or had too much fear to make themselves heard. Consequently, we may desire to leave the sacrifice to others, believing that we aren’t needed to preserve liberty. However, upholding liberty must be a collective effort since indifference inspires corruption, and resurrecting fallen liberty is a costly endeavor. It’s in our best interest to be mindful, readily protecting liberty as a democratic citizen.
