SEOUL, South Korea — In only a few days, South Korea’s biggest scandal in years has done what six decades of diplomacy and bloodshed couldn’t. It has united the rival Koreas, at least in one area: indignation against South Korea’s leader.
North Korea’s propaganda mavens have never been shy in calling South Korean President Park Geun-hye an incompetent, power-hungry clone of her late dictator father, Park Chung-hee — and that’s when they’re pulling their punches.
Inconceivable a week ago, many South Koreans now seem to be reaching Pyongyang levels of fury over an investigation into whether Park allowed a longtime confidante with no official government role to manipulate her administration from the shadows.
The North’s fondness for vicious threats is generally missing in the South, but the anger over the scandal — sometimes partisan, mostly spontaneous on the part of many South Koreans, but more violent and somewhat canned in the North, where carefully cultivated outrage is a state commodity — often seems to be in lockstep.
For instance, in wording that North Korea would be right at home with, Ahn Cheol-soo, a lawmaker from a small South Korean opposition party and a potential presidential candidate, recently said of Park: “You no longer have the authority to destroy the constitution. You no longer have the authority to stomp on the pride of our people.”
Here’s how a similar sentiment looked when North Korea’s main newspaper recently attacked Park: “It’s deplorable that the South’s politics have become the joke of the world and its economy and people’s livelihoods are left in shreds.”
To be clear, the expressions in South Korea, even at their sharpest, are still a long way from the odious linguistic swamp of violence and sexism that characterizes much of North Korea’s propaganda. The North, for instance, has called Park a “dirty prostitute who licks her master’s groin,” an “aging witch,” a “female dog” and an “American parrot.” Pyongyang has also repeatedly called for her death.
But there has been an uptick in both rage and sexism in the South, especially online, where Park and her confidante, Choi Soon-sil, have been called “crazy bitch,” “chicken head,” a slur meant to attack their intelligence, and “stupid Gangnam ajumma,” a term often used to insult middle-aged women living in affluent southern Seoul.
People have also declared that South Korea will never again vote for a female president or trust a woman’s leadership.