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Satire and ridicule “are effective, inexpensive instruments of psychological warfare,” J. Michael Waller, vice president of the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., wrote in the September-October edition of Army University Press.
“They require few resources and little infrastructure,” he said.
Kim Jong-Un, Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan are some of the most notable thin-skinned heads of state on the planet.
“Dictators, terrorists, and totalitarian ideologues, almost by definition, cannot tolerate being laughed at,” Waller wrote. “Nor can anyone with an inflated ego and thin skin. Ridicule is their Achilles’ heel. And, humor is a robust underground phenomenon in any society.”
The totalitarian family dynasty of North Korea has been riddled with satire and ridicule. After the 2004 release of the “South Park” puppetry of Team America: World Police, “rumors circulated in Washington that North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il ordered the assassination of producers and directors Trey Parker and Matt Stone,” Waller wrote.
“Team America’s vulgar humor did no damage to American power and prestige, even though it satirized what was then the Global War on Terrorism. But, it pierced the choreographed imagery of Kim’s propagandistic persona and turned him into a global object of ridicule.”
When Kim Jong-Un was introduced to the world as the successor to his ailing father Kim Jong-Il, South Koreans derided him as a “fat pig” and a “Teletubby.”
The chubby North Korean dictator also “appears intensely conscious about his hard-to-control weight.,” Waller wrote.
In 2016, the Chinese government censored websites that called the 275-pound tyrant “Kim Fatty the Third.” When U.S. Sen. John McCain referred to Kim as a “crazy fat kid,” the North Korean government called the comment “a provocation tantamount to declaration of war.”
Martin Luther, a leader in what would become the Protestant Reformation, said that “The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear Scorn.”
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