N. Korea calls S. Korea’s president a skirt-lifting, crotch-licking whore, just as Gloria Steinem arrives in Pyongyang
Gloria Steinem must have had her first reservations about “Women Cross DMZ” when the march’s organizer was outed as a North Korean apologist, and reporters began to ask her uncomfortable questions about North Korea’s war on women. Since then, Steinem has had to duck questions about the regime’s rape and murder of female prisoners, the endemic and unpunished rapes of North Korean women by its soldiers, and the infanticides and forced abortions this regime inflicts on North Korean refugee women and their babies. Steinem dismissed calls to speak up for North Korea’s millions of vulnerable women as “a bananas question.”
Of course, things could always get worse, and so they did. After this inauspicious start, the “peace” march has been overshadowed by North Korean missile tests and a gruesome purge. Now, a lengthy sexist screed about South Korean President Park Geun Hye, published by North Korea’s official “news” service, has given Steinem a whole new set of questions to duck.
What’s interesting about this particular screed is its selective translation. I’ll give you the English version first. It’s probably one-third as long as the original, and it’s pretty standard fare for North Korea’s inimitable Korean Central News Agency:
Park Geun Hye of S. Korea Accused of Her Invectives against DPRK
Pyongyang, May 18 (KCNA) — A string of malignant invectives let loose by Park Geun Hye of south Korea is lashing all Koreans into great fury.
She is making a flurry of reckless remarks to escalate the confrontation with the compatriots in the north while making hectic trips to various countries, not content with her rigmaroles at home. This reminds people of a viper.
Shortly ago, she let loose a spate of remarks like a sleep walker that the DPRK “would collapse soon due to instability of its social system.” She blustered that “human rights issue in north Korea” should never be overlooked, jabbering that “it is impossible to implement the line of simultaneously developing the two fronts” and “it is only bringing on itself the isolation from the international community.”
Much upset by the DPRK’s successful and legitimate underwater test-fire of ballistic missile from a strategic submarine, the news of which world public heard with astonishment and envy, she drove the puppet military forces into escalating military confrontation, crying out for “prompt counteraction and resolute punishment to cope with provocations and threat.” This behavior is reminiscent of a thief crying “Stop the thief!”
She is going so foolish as to egg the UN on to take a new step for pressurizing the DPRK.
A spokesman for the National Body of Working People’s Organizations made public a statement on Sunday.
It said:
The history of division of the Korean nation knows many villains who were ill-famed for confrontation with compatriots but there has been no such wicked woman as Park Geun Hye who has gone busy slandering the fellow countrymen in the north and inciting confrontation with them round the clock and all the year round.
She is getting ever more undisguised in hurling mud at the compatriots, no more than a last-ditch effort to get rid of her worst ruling crisis.
She is living hand to mouth like a candle flickering in the wind as the fraudulent methods she employed during “the presidential” election are being disclosed one after another.
The Song Wan Jong case in which a group of her “confidants” were involved clearly proves who is the kingpin of scandals and mastermind of social evils.
She had better zip her lips, though belatedly.
Nothing is more foolish than calculating that such reckless tongue-lashing would serve as a stopgap for weathering any crisis.
She would be well advised to bear in mind that such venomous tongue-wagging would only precipitate her tragic end.
South Korea can never get rid of the present bottomless political quandary as long as Park remains in office. -0-
Earlier today, however, Prof. Sung Yoon Lee of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy pointed me to KCNA’s much longer, much nastier, original Korean version (sorry, no permlink yet). I don’t have time to translate all of this — North Korea’s colorful rhetoric is littered with nearly untranslatable proverbs, aphorisms, and metaphors — but my wife and I translated some of the most eye-watering language into English. Sorry for using image files instead of text; I’m still working on getting WordPress to recognize Korean characters.
This is historical reference to the authoritarian Yushin Constitution of her father, Park Chung Hee.
There’s more. What follows isn’t a verbatim translation, but here, the article claims that Park became a terrifying person because her personality was perverted by an abnormal childhood, namely, the deaths of her parents. (KCNA’s article does not explain that Park’s mother was shot and killed by a North Korean assassin on live TV.)
The article continues by referring to the fact that Park never married or had children, using this to deny President Park’s femininity, and unfavorably comparing her maternal instinct to that of a pregnant animal. Nice. It concludes by expressing gratitude that at least Park didn’t have a child to continue to “Yushin bloodline.” Which is an ironic thing for a dynastic state to write.
Leave aside that the organizer of “Women Cross DMZ” is a hard-left activist who answers every North Korean atrocity or act of war with justifications, denials, conspiracy theories, evasions, and whataboutisms. Leave aside the extreme rhetoric of co-marchers like Ann Wright and Medea Benjamin. Leave aside the silliness of thinking that a peace march could secure a peace treaty, or that a peace treaty would secure peace with a regime that won’t abide by an Armistice, five U.N. Security Council Resolutions, two agreed frameworks (one with Bill Clinton and one with George W. Bush), a Leap Day deal (with Barack Obama), or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Despite all of this, if Gloria Steinem would call on Kim Jong Un to end his crimes against the women of North Korea, and if she would denounce his regime’s sexism, something good could still come of Women Cross DMZ. Sadly, the opposite outcome seems likelier. The message Steinem’s silence will send to Pyongyang is that even the world’s best-known feminist can be manipulated into tacit approval of its lethal and dehumanizing war on women.