South Korea’s President Park signals shift by invoking threat of ‘regime collapse’ against North Korea
North Korea regularly condemns Park in sexist and violent language, including recently saying that she lives upon “the groin of her American boss”.
Don’t believe in the power that words hold on the edgy Korean Peninsula? Consider, then, how many verbal red lines South Korea’s president stomped across when she let fly at North Korean leader Kim Jong-un yesterday.
Park Geun-hye warned, in the bluntest possible way, of the authoritarian North’s worst nightmare – “regime collapse”. She invoked the North Korean leader’s “extreme reign of terror”. Park even used Kim’s name three times, which she usually avoids.
These words signal a tough new stance from the South in an already anxious stand-off that began with North Korea’s nuclear test last month.
Park’s nationally televised parliamentary address was meant to defend her decision last week to shut down the Koreas’ last major cooperation project, a jointly run factory park in Kaesong.
The brusque tone of Park’s comments directly challenge the powerful, ubiquitous North Korean propaganda machine’s portrayal of the dictators who have run the country since its founding in 1948 as infallible.
Such high-level talk of regime collapse by the conservative president of rival South Korea – and by the daughter of one of the North’s most hated enemies, late South Korean dictator Park Chung-hee – would likely have been received by Pyongyang as fighting words.
The harsh rhetoric cuts both ways. North Korea regularly condemns Park in sexist and violent language, including recently saying that she lives upon “the groin of her American boss”.
