{"id":71267,"date":"2016-02-24T05:55:15","date_gmt":"2016-02-24T10:55:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=71267"},"modified":"2016-02-24T05:55:15","modified_gmt":"2016-02-24T10:55:15","slug":"with-woman-running-s-korea-norths-insults-get-uglier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2016\/02\/24\/with-woman-running-s-korea-norths-insults-get-uglier\/","title":{"rendered":"With woman running S. Korea, North\u2019s insults get uglier"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"South<\/a>
South Korean President Park Geun-hye (Photo courtesy of the Korean Culture and Information Service)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

SEOUL, South Korea \u2013 North Korea\u2019s description of South Korea\u2019s president as an \u201cold, insane bitch\u201d destined for violent death may take the rivals\u2019 hateful propaganda battle to a new level of hostility, which is saying something for neighbors with such a long, bloody history of hating each other\u2019s guts.<\/p>\n

The North called President Park Geun-hye\u2019s predecessors traitors and even rat-like, but the invectives it throws at the South\u2019s first female president tend to be uglier, often casting her relationship with her American allies in crude sexual terms.<\/p>\n

Carved in two by the Soviets and Americans at the end of WWII, the halves of the Korean Peninsula fought a vicious war in the early 1950s, and have spent much of the years since then promising, and sometimes trying very hard to engineer, each other\u2019s destruction.<\/p>\n

North Korea, even as it builds a nuclear arsenal, has in recent decades been outgunned diplomatically, economically and militarily by the richer South; it has therefore relied more on words as a weapon. It has been especially likely to do so under conservative South Korean leaders such as Park and her immediate predecessor, Lee Myung-bak; before Lee took office in 2008, nearly a decade of liberal leaders pushed for cooperation with Pyongyang and sent huge shipments of aid northwards.<\/p>\n

Investment Week<\/strong><\/p>\n

The North\u2019s attacks may be meant to \u201creduce hopes for unification, which the North Korean elite really doesn\u2019t want, because there\u2019s no way they\u2019d keep their privileges on the other side,\u201d says Robert Kelly, a political scientist at Pusan National University in the South.<\/p>\n

North Korea\u2019s overwhelmingly male-dominated culture may have something to do with it as well. Kelly says Pyongyang may not understand that sexist language disgusts many.<\/p>\n

Brian Myers, an expert on North Korean propaganda at South Korea\u2019s Dongseo University, suggests that young North Korean leader Kim Jong Un may either not remember or not care that his country once carefully tailored its propaganda to influence millions of potential leftist sympathizers in the South.<\/p>\n

Myers says that could be bad news for the near future. If it becomes impossible for a South Korean party devoted to accommodation to come to power in Seoul, he says, \u201cI\u2019m afraid we could see the North shift more and more toward outright bullying and intimidation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a look at North Korea’s long history of insults:<\/p>\n

\u201cMurderous demon\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

In perhaps its lengthiest and harshest verbal attack on Park since she took office in 2013, the North\u2019s official Korean Central News Agency on Saturday called her a \u201ctailless, old, insane bitch,\u201d a \u201csenile old woman\u201d and a \u201cmurderous demon\u201d destined to meet \u201ca sudden and violent death.\u201d<\/p>\n

This was likely a response to her reaction to the North\u2019s recent nuclear test and rocket launch. She closed a jointly run factory park, started missile defense talks with Washington and mentioned the potential for a \u201cregime collapse\u201d in Pyongyang, something North Korea\u2019s dictator is extremely sensitive about.<\/p>\n

KCNA wrote that Park complains about North Korean nukes, but \u201ctakes much pleasure and even throws out her underwear in welcoming the murderous nuclear war devices brought in by the American Yankees.\u201d<\/p>\n

North Korea previously called Park a \u201cprostitute\u201d and said she lives on the \u201cgroin of her American boss.\u201d It has frequently questioned her womanhood because she has no children, which the North labels as an \u201cobligation\u201d for women. North Korea also frequently refers to the \u201cswish of her skirts,\u201d a Korean phrase used to describe women seen as overly aggressive.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe swishes of Park Geun-hye\u2019s skirt, created by her American boss, are so unpredictable they\u2019re dumbfounding,\u201d an unnamed spokesman of the North\u2019s Joint National Organization of Working People said in a statement last year published by the KCNA. \u201cThis is all because the United States\u2019 black, hairy hands reach deep into Park Geun-hye\u2019s skirt.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cRat-like\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

The North\u2019s propaganda writers spent years attacking Lee, Park\u2019s predecessor, by saying he looked like a rat.<\/p>\n

In a statement against Lee during his final days as president in January 2013, the North\u2019s Committee for Peaceful Reunification of Korea compared Lee and his \u201ctreacherous group\u201d to rats five different times, saying that they should be \u201cbeaten (to death) in time\u201d and \u201ccompletely exterminated.\u201d<\/p>\n

In July 2012, KCNA said the \u201cdeath-bed frenzy\u201d of Lee\u2019s \u201cgroup of traitors reminds one of the rat-like hoodlums being dragged to gallows.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lee drew Pyongyang\u2019s anger by departing from the rapprochement policies of his two liberal predecessors and slapping the North with broad trade sanctions in 2010 following the sinking of a South Korean warship that killed 46 sailors and which Seoul blamed on a North Korean torpedo attack.<\/p>\n

\u201cFascist dictator\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

North Korea has described Park Geun-hye as a worse \u201ctraitor\u201d than her dictator father, Park Chung-hee, who ruled South Korea for 18 years until his assassination by his spy chief in 1979.<\/p>\n

The North attempted to assassinate the elder Park by sending a team of 31 commandos across the border in 1968, but they were stopped near Park\u2019s presidential mansion in Seoul.<\/p>\n

Shortly after his death, the North\u2019s official Rodong Sinmun newspaper called Park a \u201ca truculent fascist dictator\u201d who \u201cplunged South Korea into a sea of blood, arresting, imprisoning and brutally murdering (those)… who called for the democratization of society and the reunification of the country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Slaps against U.S.<\/strong><\/p>\n

North Korea often extends its insults to the presidents and other key officials of the United States, which Pyongyang labels as an imperialist aggressor and puppet master of the Seoul government.<\/p>\n

The North hurled racist insults at U.S. President Barack Obama more than once, with Pyongyang\u2019s powerful National Defense Commission calling him a \u201cmonkey in a tropical forest\u201d in December 2014 over the hacking row involving the movie \u201cThe Interview,\u201d a comedy that depicts Kim\u2019s assassination.<\/p>\n

The North\u2019s state media has called U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry a wolf with a \u201chideous\u201d lantern jaw, and his predecessor, Hillary Clinton, as a \u201cfunny lady\u201d who sometimes \u201clooks like a primary schoolgirl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping.\u201d<\/p>\n

Former U.S. President George W. Bush, who in 2002 bracketed North Korea with Iran and pre-war Iraq as part of an \u201caxis of evil,\u201d was labeled as a \u201cworld dictator,\u201d and a \u201chooligan bereft of any personality as a human being.\u201d His vice president, Dick Cheney, was described by the North in 2005 as \u201cthe most cruel monster and bloodthirsty beast as he has drenched various parts of the world in blood.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SEOUL, South Korea \u2013 North Korea\u2019s description of South Korea\u2019s president as an \u201cold, insane bitch\u201d destined for violent death …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":71268,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,17],"tags":[1080],"class_list":["post-71267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","category-news-w","tag-ap","mauthors-foster-flug","mauthors-kim-tong-hyung","mauthors-the-associated-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71267\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/71268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}