North Korea is no joke

In the past weeks, North Korean state media have called the female President of South Korea a “dirty political harlot” and an “old prostitute”; the gay chairman of the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on North Korea “a disgusting old lecher with 40-odd-year-long career of homosexuality”; and, in a loathsome screed, referred to U.S. President Barack Obama as a “monkeyish human monstrosity.”

Still, North Korea’s exceptionally vile words pale in comparison to its criminal actions. … In North Korea, racism isn’t just talk. That U.N. Commission of Inquiry’s report summarizes testimony from North Korean refugee women and former border guards who say that the regime forcibly aborts or murders the babies of refugee women sent back to North Korea by China, on the presumption that the babies’ fathers were Chinese, to maintain the myth of state-mandated “racial purity.”

We should stop infantilizing North Korea and dismissing it as ridiculous. The temptation is understandable. The North Korean regime’s very weirdness causes much of the world to dismiss its invective as the rant of a regime that is merely isolated, eccentric, and misunderstood.

But North Korea is not just a bizarre abstraction … it is a murderous regime that is approaching nuclear breakout, and whose human rights violations, according to the U.N. Commission of Inquiry, “have no parallel anywhere in the world.” North Korea’s words reflect the character of its political system.

[From CNN Opinion article by Joshua Stanton and Sung-Yoon Lee]

This entry was posted in DPRK Government, Humanitarian Aid and Relief, Kim Jong Un, North Korean refugee by Grant Montgomery.