Thousands of South Korean unionists and their progressive supporters rallied in downtown Seoul to protest against joint US-South Korea war games planned for later this month.

The drills will be the largest in years, and follow the May election of President Yoon Suk-yeol, who has promised to take a hardline with North Korea. Union leaders worry about risks.

Oh Eun-Jung, National Teachers Union:

“The threat of nuclear war is growing on the Korean peninsula, conservative forces of Yoon Suk-yeol in South Korea and those in the U.S. are frantically conducting aggressive war drills in the sky, the land, and the sea, and are about to start large-scale military exercises, aimed at the invasion of North Korea. We must stamp out this behavior of anti-reunification forces.”

Lee Seung-Woo, Construction worker:

“We not only oppose the war exercises, but we want the U.S. Forces Korea, which is actually controlling and interfering with the Korean peninsula to leave this land. We believe that only then will the eighty million Koreans from both North and South be able to live peacefully.”

CGTN footage of protest:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOfwt9BsriU

Press TV footage and article:

https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2022/08/13/687322/South-Korean-unionists-protest-US-South-Korea-war-games

Edit: https://www.chosun.com/national/labor/2022/08/16/6N7F5YEK3VCGBJ4SFKZLKYGO5I/

This article is in Korean. Here is a machine-translated excerpt:

A YouTube video of the Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU), which contains the activities of the Unification Vanguard, is also controversial. The 2-minute and 58-second video released by the Federation of Trade Unions includes a song called [Anti-U.S. Anti-War Song] by a folk song group called ‘[Our Country]’ as the background music. ‘[Our Country]’ is a songbook known for its NL (National Liberation) tendency, and “The reality of the US Empire has been revealed. The enemy of the people of the world is the US imperialists” “The end of the US imperialists is not far off. Behold, that crazy final blow.” “Look, the burning wave of anti-Americanism. Let’s wipe out the U.S. imperialism all over the world” and “The morality of the people in this age is only anti-Americanism” and so on.

The Unification Committee also held a camp called ‘Unification School’ and lectured on ‘The History of America’s World Aggression’ and ‘The Confrontational History of the DPRK-U.S.’. At a rally on the 13th, the KCTU read a solidarity message sent by the Korean Workers’ Union, a North Korean workers’ organization controlled by the North Korean Workers’ Party, at a rally on the 13th. Article 8 of the current National Security Act stipulates that ‘a person who contacts a member of an anti-state organization or a person who has received an order through a meeting or communication, etc., shall be punished by imprisonment for not more than 10 years’.

Edit 2: The song, Anti-U.S. Anti War, and also it seems this is the video the article mentions