OPINION:
South Korean President Lee Jae-myung recently commanded his Ministry of Government Legislation to pursue “institutional measures to enable dissolution orders for religious foundations.”
Unfortunately, this open attempt to oppress Christianity in South Korea is merely the most immediate symptom of a larger disease and yet another sordid example of the hatred of conservatives that has become a hallmark of the Democratic Party of Korea.
The DPK’s intention to mercilessly persecute all conservative ideology and politics in South Korea has been clear since it manufactured the impeachment of the country’s former president, Yoon Suk Yeol.
The DPK has censored and oppressed all conservative political discourse and self-expression. It has denied any Koreans publicly espousing right-wing values or conservative political ideology access to fundamental human rights, such as freedom of speech and political assembly. Mr. Lee himself has equated conservative discourse with hate speech and explicitly declared that it must be severely punished because it’s a “crime that goes beyond the limits of freedom of expression” and is a threat to “the very foundation of democracy” in Korea.
Mr. Lee recently ordered various official government agencies to “aggressively crack down on hate speech” and commanded his Justice Ministry to “pursue the amendment of the country’s criminal code to that end,” a thinly veiled green light to snuff out all conservative free speech in South Korea.
The DPK has openly persecuted and terrorized a slew of conservative political actors and organizations. For instance, the party has abused the powers of its “special counsel” in order to ransack and raid the headquarters of its political rivals, the People Power Party.
The party has brutally persecuted and baselessly arrested various Christian leaders, including “Mother of Peace” Hak Ja Han, widow of Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Moon was the founder of the Unification Church, now known as the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification.
The DPK has even falsely imprisoned Mr. Yoon and charged him with leading an “insurrection.” It has kept the elderly Mr. Yoon in a tiny cell under “inhumane conditions” for more than a year. He faces the death penalty if found guilty in a trial.
Even Morse Tan, ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice in the first Trump administration, recently condemned the DPK’s flagrant purge of all conservative political actors, saying it’s like “the things done by leftist dictatorships.”
Mr. Lee has transformed South Korea’s justice system into a corrupt instrument of anti-conservative oppression and now seeks to enact legislation that will punish judges and prosecutors for “distorting legal principles or manipulating facts.” Why? So he can eliminate any aspect of Korea’s justice system that contradicts his left-wing edicts.
Throughout the Yoon era, the DPK filed a plethora of baseless impeachment motions against various senior officials, including the ministers of the interior and defense, in an effort to damage Mr. Yoon’s conservative government and hamstring the Korean nation itself.
The DPK openly manipulated South Korea’s political apparatus to impeach Mr. Yoon and immediately exploited its ill-gotten “impeachment power” to destabilize the interim government and force South Korea toward Mr. Lee’s corrupt regime. Even President Trump recently posted on social media: “WHAT IS GOING ON IN SOUTH KOREA? Seems like a Purge or Revolution” and said he had “heard bad things. … It [doesn’t] sound to me like South Korea.”
If Mr. Trump doesn’t immediately intervene and leverage the historic U.S. relationship with South Korea to quash the DPK’s attempted removal of all conservative ideology and political discourse, what remains of South Korea’s democracy will soon collapse under the weight of the party’s craven assault and the modern witch hunt for conservatives will have claimed another victim.
• William Barclay is an award-winning political theorist and policy expert, as well as one of Canada’s foremost young conservative voices. Follow him on Twitter/X @WillBarclayPCBG.
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