Rule of Law or Rule By Law?

The Hanky has the vapors over President Lee’s plans to let the police use a bit more force against violent protestors. The plans include detailed rules on the use of force, and plans to arrest people who engage in violence and cross police lines. To this, the Hanky reacts with hyperbolic charges of a return to dictatorship:

President Lee seemed to have been encouraging the police when he said, “If foreign television programs show the nation’s unlawful, violent demonstrators wielding iron pipes, the value of the national brand will drop and the nation’s economic activities will also be affected. Lee also urged the police to make a new beginning by setting 2008 as the year to improve the culture of assemblies and demonstrations. After Lee’s Lunar New Year’s Day speech, in which he put special emphasis on the importance of law and order, the police formed a related task force in mid-January and since then have worked on making a manual whose contents include instructions for the arrest all demonstrators crossing police lines. [The Hankyoreh]

Why, it’s Kwangju all over again! (No, they really say this.) After all, if you can’t express yourself with a Molotov cocktail or an iron pipe, how can you express yourself?

I think we’ve seen enough of the effects of unilateral restraint to see how the left’s mob violence was becoming a threat to civil order, free speech, and peaceful discourse. And it’s not exclusively the left, either. Just look what a difference some discipline, training, and a few homemade flamethrowers can make:

Mostly, however, it’s the left — unions, students, and anti-American protestors — who methodically use violence to make their points and get their way. All too often, those mobs were under the sway of people who don’t favor a democratic system of government at all.

Societies must leave room for expression, but when violent expression is allowed, non-violent expression is quickly crowded out. The events in Tibet are an example of how the banning of peaceful expression fuels, and to a degree legitimizes, violence. But a society that allows peaceful expression and self-rule must also make the streets safe for it. That will require making Korean law and society less tolerant of violence.