Pyongyang state media has recently referred to South Korean president Park Geun-hye as a "bitch" and an "old cat groaning in her sick bed". Not wanting to let the rhetoric lose its bite, North Korea has just launched its most offensive assault yet, in a series of unbelievably racist comments about the US President.
While English-language articles published last Friday by the Korea Central News Agency (KCNA) refer to Park as an "old prostitute" and Obama as a "monkey" once, the Korean-language counterparts feature offensive comments toward Obama of unprecedented levels.
The Korean article features the purported opinions of four "average North Korean citizens". One, an ironworks worker named Kang Hyuk, said: "“How Obama looks like makes me disgusted. As I watch him more closely, I realize that he looks like an African native monkey with a black face, gaunt grey eyes, cavate nostrils, plump mouth and hairy rough ears."
“He acts just like a monkey with a red bum irrationally eating everything – not only from the floor but also from trees here and there…Africa’s national zoo will be the perfect place for Obama to live with licking bread crumbs thrown by visitors,” Kang thoughtfully concluded.
Another commentator, Jung Young Guk of the DPRK Ocean Management Office, shared Kang's sentiments that Obama resembles a monkey, adding that his visit to Seoul was untimely due to the recent ferry sinking.
The piece also quoted a citizen claiming that South Koreans were talking “shit’ about Obama “behind his back,” pointing out that he was nothing more than a “paper tiger”.
The comments have naturally been widely criticised in Western media, with North Korea watcher Christopher Green describing the remarks as "beyond the pale" and even expressing sympathy for the 'journalist' tasked with the writing the article.
"I also struggle to envision a political framework within which it was felt to be necessary to publish such a thing,” Green added.
Frank Feinstein, who runs KCNA Watch, noted the importance of the more offensive article only being published in Korean, explaining that it is "less likely to be commented on by international media.” Sadly for the KCNA, humans have possessed the ability to translate one language into another for many years.
Although North Korea often reports on cases of racism and xenophobia if they appear in foreign media, the nation has a strong culture of promoting the Korean race above all others.
Dr Andrei Lankov of Seoul's Kookmin University explains this kind of behaviour is borrowed from the Soviet bloc, who put on a show of protecting "blacks against the imperialists", when in fact the popular opinion of Africans during Soviet Union was "patronizing or even disparaging".
Christopher Green says that although the comments about Obama are "vitriolic, abusive rhetoric", they remain just that, and should not draw attention away from the horrific human rights abuses experienced by North Koreans on a daily basis.
“Needless to say, I’d still far rather be Barack Obama or Park Geun-hye than any one of the many thousands of people suffering very real abuses in North Korea today, and I’d rather people work on changing that reality than focusing their ire on the kind of boilerplate junk that North Korea passes off as news,” he said.
[Image via Wikipedia]
0 User Comments