- cross-posted to:
- world@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- world@lemmy.world
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Damn in the US you can attempt to over throw the govt and stay in congress
Maybe that’s why I struggle to understand why this man was jailed… in my country, 68 year old men make openly seditious statements and they get put into government.
Oh, the irony. Even the democratic South Korea will act fascist and won’t allow freedom of speech.
Easy to say when you’re not in a nation sharing a huge border with an actual fascist state that you’re still at war with
The article says the poem is about yearning for a united Korea where Koreans don’t have to pay for education and healthcare and aren’t committing suicide over debts.
Hardly seems worth sending a 68 year old man to jail for over a year.
Lee Yoon-seop advocated for unification in his piece that was published in the North’s state media in 2016, South Korean media report.
He wrote that if the two Koreas were united under Pyongyang’s socialist system, people would get free housing, healthcare and education.
You omitted the key point here, the poem advocates for all of Korea to be united under the North Korean regime.
Ah, of course that changes everything. Throw the old men in jail
Jail is a bit extreme. True.
Personally I don’t agree with the charge but I can understand South Korea for not allowing glorification of the north. Anyone that thinks North Koreans have access to universal healthcare and quality eduction are lying to themselves.
I wouldn’t go as far as defending the poem, but going to jail over it is just stupid
South Korea was the more brutal dictatorship of the two up until the ~90s.
Damn. NGL I’m a bit ignorant.
If you feel like crying, watch https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_of_May . Alternatively just read https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwangju_Uprising
tbf, part of being democratic means your people get to decide for themselves what they will and won’t allow, they have that overriding freedom. We, for instance, could amend our constitution to remove our 1st amendment, if we so wished. It’s a power we have.
That does not make them militaristic, aggressive, hyper-patriotic states though, which is something different.
True, democracy =/= freedom, though they usually (used to) go hand in hand
No. Rights cannot be voted away, they are too important. South Korea is infringing on his right to free speech.
I hear this often, but it’s fundamentally ideological. If the founders wished them to be more permanent, they would have made them so.
Instead, different people can do things in different ways. And reality, not ideology, can show us what works and what doesn’t. We do not need to force other people to agree with us, we can let them have freedom too. Live and let live.
So where do these rights come from, if not the laws? I wonder if you may be taking free speech as a right as a given because of the time you grew up in. You speak of it as an absolute, but where does that belief come from? You say “rights” as if they’re something enshrined in our souls by a god, but like, how do you know that? Where does this information come from?
This is purely a philosophical question. I’m on the free speech wagon here. But realistically, Who gets to decide what’s actually an inalienable right that everyone has vs. rights that are encoded in laws?
No if they take away the restriction of the government to suppress free speech they will in fact be able to suppress free speech.
You should be free to praise North Korea if you wish without fear of imprisonment. I can’t put it more bluntly than that.
Removed by mod
Freedom of speech is when you’re allowed to say things that don’t go against government policy.
Seems like that’s the new global definition of “freedom” in general
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A South Korean court has sentenced a 68-year-old man to 14 months in jail for praising the North in a poem.
He wrote that if the two Koreas were united under Pyongyang’s socialist system, people would get free housing, healthcare and education.
He was convicted under a law that prohibits public praise of North Korea.
Lee had been jailed for 10 months in the past for a similar offence, The Korea Herald reported.
In its ruling on Monday, a Seoul court said he “continued to generate and disseminate a considerable amount of propaganda that glorified and praised the North”, the Korea Herald said.
South Korea’s National Security Act outlaws the praise and promotion of “anti-government” organisations.
The original article contains 204 words, the summary contains 116 words. Saved 43%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Dude wrote a poem for the North Korean state media advocating for the unification of Korea under the ‘Pyongyang’s socialist system’. Considering that the reason for the entire Korean war and the ongoing conflict between North Korea and South Korea is that both claim to be the only legitimate government of all Korea, I can see why they would find this seditious.
I don’t know how anyone can defend tossing a person in jail over a poem
Jail is a bit extreme. But he is the proponent of fascist dictatorship and write poems praising it. I don’t feel much sympathy for fascists.
Idk man, if people got jailed for being openly treasonous there’d be less idiots running their mouths.
I see you don’t like freedom of speech, at least not for people who disagree with you
At least the nortg is honest that u dont have freedom. Then again they are technicaly still at war.
