Really? North Korea called President Obama “a wicked black monkey”? (Update: It’s worse than that; Update 2, now with full translation)
Oh, yes they did:
Park made waste water-like reckless remarks slandering the DPRK’s line on simultaneously developing two fronts after inviting her American master reminiscent of a wicked black monkey to visit south Korea on April 25….
The people are unanimous in deploring the fact that there is no remedy for curing Park’s mental disease as she has gone so mad with hurling mud at the nuclear deterrence of justice which the fellow countrymen in the north have had access to prevent the outside forces from imposing a nuclear disaster upon them.
Worse still, she is making a new ploy so called “human rights issue in the north” aimed at hurting and slandering the fellow compatriots. This is also part of her confrontational hysteria. [Korean Central News Agency]
Dennis Rodman was not available for comment. Hat tip to Alastair Gale on Twitter.
Regular readers will recall that North Korea recently called the female President of South Korea a “whore” and a “political prostitute,” and called the openly gay Chair of a U.N. Commission of Inquiry, which found evidence of crimes against humanity in North Korea, “a disgusting old lecher with 40-odd-year-long career of homosexuality.” KCNA is also notorious for threatening journalists who criticize North Korean government policies.
A friendly reminder: In 2012, the Korea Central News Agency, or KCNA, signed two memoranda of agreement with the Associated Press, the contents of which remain undisclosed, but which allowed the AP the exclusive right to open a bureau in Pyongyang, to exhibit North Korean propaganda in the United States, to embed two North Korean “journalists” in the AP’s bureau who would write the occasional “news” story, and generally, to show you North Korea just as Kim Jong Un wants you to see it.
Because the terms of those MOAs haven’t been disclosed, I don’t know whether the AP is providing any financial compensation or support to KCNA. Maybe Paul Colford, the AP’s Director Media Relations, will tell you what he wouldn’t tell me.
North Korea’s words, as offensive as they are, are still just words. North Korea’s crimes against humanity are a far greater outrage. Want to get involved in fighting them? Here’s how.
Update: There’s more. Professor Sung-Yoon Lee of Tufts University writes in with a link to a separate article — a long, poisonous, racist screed against President Obama in Korean, also published by KCNA. Based on my skim, it will translate into something as noxious as anything you’d find in a Stormfront comment thread. Not even KCNA translated it, but I will. Here’s a taste of it, as forwarded by Professor Lee:
This piece in Korean is directed entirely at Obama. They take racism to another level, with really unspeakable vitriol: “Obama’s gut-wrenching, revolting facial features,” “monkey climbing up this and that tree and scrounging up fruits on the ground,” “it’s certain that Obama has slipped out of the body of a monkey,” “he should live as a monkey in an African natural zoo licking the breadcrumbs thrown by spectators,” etc.
It’s not translated into English. The White House should translate it and see the North Korean regime as it is: a vile, despicable lot beyond reason and beneath the consideration of civilization.
This goes on for paragraph after paragraph. My poor, suffering wife promised to help me translate the whole thing over the next day or so, unless one of you would like to take this on. Needless to say, I’d never print anything like this if it didn’t have substantial public interest value. The fact that a foreign government would allow its official news service to publish this is a matter of global public interest.
For those who reject the word “evil,” I want to challenge that rejection. Remember, to the government of North Korea, racism isn’t just talk. It’s what some live by, and others die by.
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Update: Welcome, Washington Post readers.
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Update: As promised, here’s a translation of the complete article. Some of the North Korean vernacular is virtually untranslatable, so we did our best to capture the meaning, but left some particularly difficult phrases in the original Korean. Our hope is that a few of you may offer upgrades to this translation.
On the device of quoting a North Korean citizen, we saw the same device used as the North Koreans started to warm up their sexist attacks on President Park. But then, I suspect that Mr. Kang is about as authentic as Comrade Ogilvy, or at best, Comrade Stekhanov.
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Doesn’t seem to be being picked up on much yet. But in other news, North Korea has signed some kind of agreement with Nigeria.
http://www.nknews.org/2014/05/north-korea-and-nigeria-sign-cooperation-agreement/
Check out the photo. You can imagine the editorial team discussing that day’s layout.
“What do you think? Carry the Nigeria story on the same page as the stuff about Obama?”
“Nah. Better spread international news over two pages today…”
Seriously though, wonder if these recent hyper sexist, homophobic and racist remarks would have warranted a sideways mention in the UN’s Human Rights report.
Drudge has linked this article through Washington Post. Millions of people will now see it!
The Google Translation is incoherent but it does seem to convey some of the flavour.
Kim Jong Un is Denis Rodman’s lifelong friend. Has Denis seen North Korea’s monkey comments on Obama?
So when it comes down to it, it wasn’t an employee of the state ran news station, rather it was an Op/Ed from a professor.
Nice attempt at trying to pin this on NK government.
I mis read the article. disregard my previous post
I think the US Govt. will impose stiffer sanctions now…Kim Jong Un will be forbidden from ever buying an NBA team.
Please stop trying to reach Rodman for comment. He just might agree with them.
I guess the anti-slander deal is really, really, dead. We’ll have to settle for Agreed Anti-Slander Framework II, instead.
How is North Korea’s racism any different from America’s? How are his comments about Obama any worse than comments made by American conservatives? Maybe America should concentrate on fixing itself.
America is fixed. There are occasional flurries of incredible stupidity here, of course, but a country with a black president, Hispanic, Jewish, Cambodian, English, Irish, Chinese, Japanese, American Indian representatives, a completely integrated military (including legal protections for homosexuals) and a wholly racially and educationally integrated workforce including many millions of freely visible illegal immigrants seeking a better life in a capitalist world, sustained by the power of the absolutely amazing First Amendment cannot be compared in any way at all ever with the DPRK, except to the utter consternation of the DPRK.
So is all the attention linking to this rather than the immediate threats to peoples’ lives some grim parody of the NBA guy and the reaction to his comments vs the reaction to his history?
Because if that’s what you meant, internet, you succeeded.
Its just words now but it has a purpose: to whip up DPRK people to support war with USA
I disagree with Delano – Dennis Rodman absolutely must be interviewed about these remarks. As much as the media fawned over his “basketball diplomacy”, they can’t ignore this evidence that it has failed to improve North Korean attitudes about race.
This is one of my frustrations with mass media; they’ll shove a stupid non-story like Rodman down your throat for months, and then NOT cover it when something actually newsworthy happens.
So it’s a racist press release that’s supposed to finally convince us that North Korea is an evil regime, and not the repression, murder, torture, gulags, etc.? Strange world we’re living in.
I don’t know jack about the Korean language, but it’s more accurate to say “ape” than “monkey”. Anyway, I agree with your point that the world should now see the Pyongyang regime for what it is.