South Korean ex president Yoon Suk Yeol jailed for life for leading insurrection • Hacker News Board

Re: South Korean ex president Yoon Suk Yeol jailed for life for leading insurrection

#161

Post by n1b0m » Fri, Feb 20, 2026, 3:55 PM UTC

jjtheblunt wrote: post #157

n1b0m wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Civil War wasn't really a coup because the South wasn't trying to take over Washington D.C. or run the Federal government. A coup is usually a quick, behind the scenes power grab by a small group of people trying to unseat a leader. What happened in the 1860s was the exact opposite: it was a massive, public breakup where entire states voted to leave.

the post war assassination of Lincoln was, in a tiny sense, a delusion of coup, perhaps.

Yes that’s a good point

Re: South Korean ex president Yoon Suk Yeol jailed for life for leading insurrection

#162

Post by jibal » Fri, Feb 20, 2026, 5:50 PM UTC

somenameforme wrote: post #34

loudmax wrote: post #3

This is the correct way to handle a former president who tries to mount an anti-democratic insurrection.

It also illustrates what a real insurrection attempt looks like. [1] He declared martial law, suspended and prevented their Congress equivalent from meeting (and directed the military to enforce such), ordered the immediate arrest of numerous high level politicians with a goal of arresting hundreds, issued a declaration that all media and publications had to be approved before publication, ordered the power+water for…

> It also illustrates what a real insurrection attempt looks like.

What did you say elsewhere about "good faith"? J6 was a real insurrection attempt.

Re: South Korean ex president Yoon Suk Yeol jailed for life for leading insurrection

#163

Post by jibal » Fri, Feb 20, 2026, 5:54 PM UTC

raptor99 wrote: post #123

n1b0m wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the bipartisan House select committee that investigated the incident, the attack was the culmination of a plan by Trump to overturn the election. Within 36 hours, five people died: including a police officer who died of a stroke a day after being assaulted by rioters and collapsing at the Capitol. Many people were injured, including 174 police officers. Four officers who responded to the attack died by s…

[flagged]

Certainly none of what you wrote here about what happened is what happened.

Re: South Korean ex president Yoon Suk Yeol jailed for life for leading insurrection

#164

Post by jibal » Fri, Feb 20, 2026, 5:57 PM UTC

cthalupa wrote: post #128

frumplestlatz wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll reiterate the earlier poster’s question: > What would the next steps be that would end in them overthrowing elected leaders?

It was explicitly an attempt to influence Pence or congress to not certify the election results, attempting to allow Trump to use his fake electors to change the results in his favor. It was a naked attempt to change the outcome of the election. What are you not understanding about this?

They tried to seize the certificates ... if some quickwitted and brave staffers hadn't quickly spirited them away, they would have.

Re: South Korean ex president Yoon Suk Yeol jailed for life for leading insurrection

#165

Post by zipping1549 » Fri, Feb 20, 2026, 8:16 PM UTC

agentifysh wrote: post #71

He'll be pardoned and released by the next election cycle, remember 2 presidents were even sentenced to death at one point. 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 sit…

I think it’s unlikely he’ll be pardoned, at least for quite a long time. Lawmakers are actively concerned about this and will soon ban pardons for insurrection charges.

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.

Re: South Korean ex president Yoon Suk Yeol jailed for life for leading insurrection

#166

Post by agentifysh » Fri, Feb 20, 2026, 10:51 PM UTC

yongjik wrote: post #112

agentifysh wrote: post #71

He'll be pardoned and released by the next election cycle, remember 2 presidents were even sentenced to death at one point. 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 sit…

> Two Korean presidents were sentenced to death and were pardoned in the 90s. 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.…

> 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).

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.

Re: South Korean ex president Yoon Suk Yeol jailed for life for leading insurrection

#167

Post by yongjik » Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 12:32 AM UTC

agentifysh wrote: post #166

yongjik wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Two Korean presidents were sentenced to death and were pardoned in the 90s. 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.…

> 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). I think your comment here is very emotionally charged here but to clarify to outsiders reading, those protestors also broke into a…

> those protestors also broke into an military armory, armed themselves to the teeth, and an armed conflict broke out

Oh you are one of those people.

So when you said you were "surprised by the lack of depth of assessing Korea's history of prosecuting its presidents" you were complaining that people didn't follow your far-right revisionist history of Korea?

Talking with the likes of you is waste of my time, but just to clear the matter for others interested:

On May 18th, 1980, paratroopers were beating and arresting residents of Gwangju, not just protestors but random civilians, going into people's homes to beat up everyone and arrest anyone they didn't like. By 20th, multiple people were beaten to death, and as people got angry protests became larger and larger.

On 21st, the street of Geumnam-ro was packed with tens of thousands of protestors. On 1 pm, soldiers opened fire on protestors, with more than 50 dying. That afternoon, people started organizing armed militia.

These are all very well known and publicly available information, a google search away for anyone who can read Korean.

English summary is also available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwangju_Uprising

Re: South Korean ex president Yoon Suk Yeol jailed for life for leading insurrection

#168

Post by agentifysh » Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 3:14 AM UTC

yongjik wrote: post #167

agentifysh wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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). I think your comment here is very emotionally charged here but to clarify to outsiders reading, those protestors also broke into a…

> those protestors also broke into an military armory, armed themselves to the teeth, and an armed conflict broke out Oh you are one of those people. So when you said you were "surprised by the lack of depth of assessing Korea's history of prosecuting its presidents" you were complaining that people didn't follow your far-right revisionist history of Korea? Talking with the likes of you is waste of my time, but just…

You are purposely taking words out of context.

I'm not disagreeing with the timeline here, but the moment of breaking into an armory, handing out thousands of military grade weapons to civilians and engaging in active organized firefights fundamentally transforms a situation from a "protest" into a full-scale armed conflict.

To pretend otherwise ignores the exceptionally detailed historical record regarding the sheer level of armed action that took place. This wasn't just a crowd shouting and throwing molotov cocktails.

The citizen militia systematically raided police stations, military reserve armories in surrounding towns. They commandeered hundreds of armored personel carriers, military trucks, and jeeps to use in combat.

The citizen militia armed themselves with several thousands of M1 Garands, carbines, M16s and light machine guns with thousands of rounds of live ammunition and gernades. They even secured somewhere around like 8 tons of TNT and dynamite from local coal mines, which explosives experts among the citizens used to rig the basement of the provincial capital building which served as the headquarter for the militia.

This resulted in intense, organized urban warfare. The militia was heavily armed enough to engage in massive gun battles and physically drive the martial law troops out of downtown Gwangju for several days. In the ensuing combat, official records show 22 soldiers and 4 police officers were killed, alongside over 250 state forces wounded. Even accounting for the soldiers killed by friendly fire in the chaos, the armed citizens actively engaged, shot, and killed military personnel.

We can acknowledge that the Korean military committed atrocities AND that what followed was a highly organized, massive urban warfare between a heavily armed well organized citizens militia and the army. The two facts need not be mutually exclusive. Pointing out the severe reality of the heavy weapons used, the scale of the combat, and the casualties inflicted on both sides is what makes this complex. I'm shining a light on the complicated historical reality of how massive and violent this conflict was as an outsider looking in. I understand you are Korean and I understand this might invoke an emotionally charged take from your part.

Re: South Korean ex president Yoon Suk Yeol jailed for life for leading insurrection

#169

Post by agentifysh » Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 3:43 AM UTC

yongjik wrote: post #65

tyre wrote: post #46

One interesting firestorm that he started was over doctors. 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…

I can't believe I'm defending Yoon, but this was one issue where Yoon identified the correct problem, and all those doctors were clearly in the wrong. But because there are so few doctors, things like emergency rooms were always overfull, and doctors who worked there were always overworked, and when they said no there was nothing the rest of the country could do. So the doctors basically had the rest of the country b…

Just wanted to add some context on this in case someone reads this thread down the road. I know many doctors from Korea, and their take on it was that Yoon's populist policy to increase caps on medical students wouldn't fix the actual issue at hand, which is that nobody wants to work in a low-paid, highly stressful environment. Unfortunately, those happen to be the exact fields of medicine that are lacking in doctors.

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

Re: South Korean ex president Yoon Suk Yeol jailed for life for leading insurrection

#170

Post by DANmode » Sat, Feb 21, 2026, 4:23 AM UTC

PearlRiver wrote: post #155

yongjik wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was also a "complicated issue" for 300 lawmakers of Korea on the night of the martial law declaration, especially since they had so little information and had only hours to act. For all they knew, Yoon could be starting a war, or sending troops to murder everyone in the capitol. Those who jumped the fence on that night did so not knowing when (or whether) they could go home. Enough of them did, and that's why Yoon…

It is actually wild seeing people defend him. This insurgency was literally going to suspend democracy and lead to people getting arrested. It is incredibly disturbing so many want a dictator. It disgusts me.

You don’t think I’m defending, hopefully.