The World is Quiet Here: On South Korea’s Martial Law, Silence, and Solidarity

Protests Against Yoon Suk Yeol’s Martial Law Declaration // Photo Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons

It was nearing the end of my philosophy lecture last Tuesday when the President of South Korea, Yoon Suk Yeol, announced an emergency martial law. 

Emergency martial law can be declared in a time of crisis or national emergency comparable to wartime. Yoon’s accusation that the oppositional party’s activities are “anti-state” in nature, thus legitimising the use of martial law against “North Korean communist threats”, do not even warrant debate. His speech is yet another addition to the long-standing tradition of South Korea’s local strand of McCarthyism, where politicians use the ‘red scare’ to frighten, intimidate, and control its people. 

Yoon’s decree banned any and all political activity, from that of the National Assembly to civilian protests. It claimed control of the press and outlawed strikes, even by medical professionals, threatening violators with “decisive punishment.”

I spent the next three hours on the verge of a panic attack as I continuously refreshed my X (formerly known as Twitter) feed. Needless to say, I remember little of what was taught in the lecture and the subsequent seminar—sorry, Joe. 

Frenzied tweets—confused, angered, informed, misinformed—flooded my screen. I texted my parents: they were safe, yes, but for how long? Contrary to the perception of my country as a stable democracy, South Korea’s democratic history is remarkably short and fraught with blood. 

We suffer from a collective trauma—partly forgotten, but latent. Those who died under the last military regime were just one generation prior. The last time martial law was enacted in South Korea, the military came in and massacred, mutilated, and raped the peaceful protesters of Gwangju. They kidnapped and tortured student protestors. My own parents spent their youth running from tear gas and riot police. 

We know with frightening clarity what ‘our’ government, ‘our’ military, is capable of doing to the very people they claim to protect. 

As the spectre of state violence materialised in front of the National Assembly—as they barricaded the MPs from entering, as they stood opposite citizens who had gathered in the middle of the night, as we all held our trembling breaths—I stumbled out into the familiar surroundings of Gordon Street; the seminar had finished. Students were walking to and from class, typing away on their laptops with a cup of coffee by their side in the Student Centre. Friends huddled in corners, chattering with a scarf around their neck to fend against the chill. 

It was a thoroughly normal, ordinary, unremarkable day. Of course—what else would it be? Yet as I waded through the midst of it all, I couldn’t help but think: the world is quiet here.

That was the most harrowing part of it all. 

When we stand in solidarity, when we choose not to support a corporation that is complicit in a genocide, or when we share posts about a distant injustice, we sometimes face the question: What is the point of it all? Each of our individual contributions seem to make no significant difference. Or at least, the difference is so negligible that our actions hold no moral weight.

Since last Tuesday, I have started to formulate my own tentative answer to that question: Our individual capacity perhaps lies not in the tangible outcomes of our actions but in their ability to break the quiet. For members of a diaspora facing violence and injustice, silence is isolating; solidarity is our refusal to let the quiet be. It is the choice to dis-quiet, to let ourselves be disturbed, to live with discomfort.  

Here, thousands of miles from South Korea, the world is quiet. 

But it does not have to be.