The protests against Trump and his policies evoke memories of South Korea’s April Revolution, but no outside actors look likely to step in to help

Law enforcement agencies empowered by the government to carry out the agenda of an ageing president eager to settle political scores. Politicians, media and judges facing harassment and even arrest by forces loyal to the president.

A ruling party in lockstep with its autocratic leader, unwilling to challenge him amid a combination of ideological factors but also careerism. Police forces dispatched with emergency powers into strongholds of the political opposition. Politicians associated with the opposition party murdered.

This situation describes not the United States of today but South Korea under its first president, Syngman Rhee. Following the Korean peninsula’s liberation from decades of Japanese colonisation in 1945, the national division of 1948 and then the Korean war of 1950-53, the ostensibly democratic South Korea suffered from weak institutions and established norms.

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