On a late-spring afternoon, hundreds of people raised their banners and pickets at the center of Seoul. They marched to the Israeli embassy, to the US embassy, then to the Blue House, the South Korean presidential palace. The gathered people chanted in one voice: “Hands off Iran! Hands off Lebanon! Free, free Palestine!”
Read MoreA few countries have done relatively well in responding to COVID-19, and they all approach health care and public health very differently from the United States, even if their economies are capitalist. I focus now on one of those countries that I know best: South Korea. I then move the focus to that other mysterious, noncapitalist country on the same peninsula: North Korea.
Read MoreGangnam is the beating heart of South Korean capitalism and in a country that South Koreans sometimes wryfully call “Samsung Korea,” Samsung’s massive skyscraper complex is, naturally, at its center. Beneath the shade of its towers in the middle of a Gangnam intersection one worker stands on top of a CCTV tower, defiant, for over 250 days. Another sits inside an occupation tent.
Read MorePreviously, in Nov. of 2018, the South Korean constitutional course ruled that a conscientious objector must be provided with an alternative form for fulfilling their military service.
