While North Korea’s rhetoric is routinely over-the-top, the propagandists of the ruling Korean Workers Party have really outdone themselves this time. Declaring that the North is now in “a state of war” with the South, they have produced a video supposedly depicting their plan of attack complete with special effects and appallingly bad graphics – and are even threatening to attack the continental United States!
This last threat is nonsense, of course, since even their medium-range missiles routinely crash and burn: and a recent photograph showing Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un sitting at a pretty retro-looking computer console resembled something out of the 1950s. Indeed, the photo provoked a Twitter comment from the Wall Street Journal‘s Tom Gara: “North Korea appears to have crossed a dangerous threshold and developed a fully-functioning calculator.”
In Seoul, they are so used to North Korean bellicosity that the response was practically soporific. A South China Post story headlined “Seoul Shrugs Off War Rhetoric from North Korea” reported:
“In Seoul, the Unification Ministry insisted the war threat was ‘not really new.’ The Defense Ministry vowed to ‘retaliate thoroughly’ to any provocation. The United States said it took the announcement seriously, but noted it followed a familiar pattern.”
A familiar pattern indeed: endless bombast, followed by … nothing of much consequence.
Read the entire article
