Kim Jong was Ill

A stroke accelerated the inevitable death of a very sick Dear Leader, and whether the sobbing/ wailing in the streets is genuine (to many it is, because their only view of the world and their leader is totally controlled) or induced by self-inflicted pinching enhanced with onion juice doesn’t matter… Dear Leader is dearly departed. His cult status is no longer relevant anymore. But as a resident of the North, would you really want to be seen in public with no sign of emotion… or worse… the slightest hint of elation? Kin Jong-un, his son (pictured above), has succeeded to head of this grotesque Stalinesque communist regime, where millions of impoverished citizens have perished from starvation. We are informed that South Korea, the United States and China are coordinating strategies to keep this area from destabilizing… even as the North continues to test missiles to prove its continued bravado.

To get a really good idea what North Korea is really like, look at this nighttime satellite photo of the entire peninsula; the lights of a thriving nation at the bottom represent South Korea… the black hole above those light is North Korea. That should tell you exactly what kind of isolation surrounds the poor folks in the north.

Yet, the deification of the North Korean leadership is still difficult for us to understand: “For more than six decades, the Kim family, starting with Kim Il-sung, ruled the country as if it were one extended family. People called the Kims ‘father’ and ‘parent.’ Propaganda murals show North Korean soldiers clinging to the Kims as children do to their parents. Newlyweds pay homage at the nearest Kim Il-sung statue. As filial children take religious care of a parent’s tomb in traditional Korean culture, citizens sweep around the Kim monuments, some each morning.

“‘So they do really feel as if the head of the nation has been cut off,’ said Brian R. Myers, an expert on North Korean ideology at Dongseo University in South Korea. ‘Naturally, that makes people feel a certain shock or trauma regardless of whether they really felt a strong personal affection for Kim Jong-il.’ … Mr. Myers said a critical failure in the West’s understanding of North Korea was the tendency to underestimate the cult of personality and the importance of state loyalty there. In the North, he said, ‘nationalism and state loyalty are mutually reinforcing,’ so that even when people are displeased by their country’s direction, they identify strongly with the state.” New York Times, December 20^th.

But we learned of Dear Leader’s death from the official government pronouncement, not from our embedded clandestine spies… probably because we probably don’t have any such spies. Intelligence is generally a function of access to someone with information with the ability to get that information out of the country. But there are virtually no telephones or Internet, and everyone knows everyone… a new face in any community would stick out like a sore thumb.

The ability to learn what goes on behind closed Northern doors is at best speculation. North Korea plays us like a violin, rattling its nuclear saber, engaging in nasty war games, shooting up South Korean vessels in international waters… and then backs down to extract concessions from the inevitable economic sanctions that we impose (sanctions which the leadership easily overcomes when it comes to personal consumption). They repeat the cycle, and the only real moderating influences are Russia (which never does anything good for the USA) and China, which shares an active trading border with the North even as it is often embarrassed by their actions.

Still, it is not entirely clear that Kim Jong-un remotely has the trust and support of the generals who currently seem to surround him as he makes his way in public as the anointed heir. Indeed, these generals were subject to heavy negotiating by Dear Leader to place the young man at the helm, a courtship that had the North testing nukes and parading violently in a show of force. Is the young heir in fact in charge? We really do not know, and given our limited intelligence within the Northern government, we are unlikely to find out until something to the contrary just happens.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the real black hole is our intelligence on this mega-dangerous nuclear power.