this post was submitted on 10 Dec 2024
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It's not because they (possibly )knew that they necessarily wanted it to happen though ?
Just that if they ever knew about something so secret, then they probably didn't say "no", and more something like "it's your responsibility" instead ?
For what it's worth : if they instigated something like that, it'd probably not come without a formation of the korean citizen's mindset first, and we(sterners) would probably have felt this preparation at home as well.
Well, on the other side coups were apparently quite frequent in the 50s-80s, so my guess is as good as yours.
Good to remember by the way that, as you know, like Hong-Kong and Taiwan, these countries were among the western-backed dictatorships, so their history books are different than ours :
There are many countries in the region, but Myanmar is special since it only stopped being a dictatorship in 2011, after 49 years, yet they went back in 2021.
We also supported Suharto until its disappearance from 1967 to 1998, the Philippines from 1965 to 1986, etc.
And it's probably worth mentioning the authoritarian South Vietnam as well(, 1955-1963), due to the similarities with Korea.
And we'll remember the Khmer rouge, but not the authoritarian and western-backed Lon Nol.
We(sterners) also supported the military regimes in Thailand, anything but communism.
Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore was also considered authoritarian.
I don't think that there are a lot of countries in Africa, South America, or South-East Asia, who escaped (western-backed )dictatorships, but it'd have been worse if freedom wasn't among our most important "universal" values(, after anti-communism, anti-islamism, and anti-'whatever influent ideology survived the colonization'), let's say that we(sterners) were "forced" and that we couldn't possibly live peacefully with commies&others, for a reason i've yet to fully grasp since we could probably live in peace while staying capitalists with the right measures/protections, guess they preferred the cold war rather than taking the risk.
I can't see something like that being carried out without a green light from the US. So, at the very least they were willing to look away. Yoon is precisely the kind of dictator the US would want to install, he's rabidly anti China and pro Japan. Biden admin isn't exactly known for their competence or subtlety. It does seem like they misjudged public backlash here.