Kim Jong-un looks like a pudgy nerd, screams like a foolish clown and acts like a man who belongs in the “may be violent to self and others” ward of the local mental asylum. He is young, inexperienced and obviously profoundly under-educated and under-prepared to lead a scout troop, much less a nation. He seems exceptionally insecure and absurdly naïve, weak and without a shred of credibility.
Kim is also atop the largest army – in terms of raw personnel – on earth. His country has successfully tested nuclear weapons. His nation has medium-range missile capacity, which can carry a nuclear warhead to neighboring nations, massive artillery aimed at South Korea and is developing and testing rockets and missiles with the expressed intention of hitting Europe and the continental United States.
Nobody on the outsides take the little guy seriously. Nobody within North Korea doesn’t. There is one television channel in the North, and except for major news (when the telecasts begin earlier), the broadcast days begin at 9 a.m. every morning. Oh, more thing, most North Koreans see the Kim family (the deceased former leaders, father and grandfather, as well as baby boy “Un,” the 29-year-old current leader) as infallible deities. They hang on every word as if delivered from the heaven, are quick to turn in neighbors who harbor the slightest criticism of their beloved god-leader and are prepared to jump into a burning fire pit if that’s what Kim wants them to do.
Combine that television channel, throw in some radio and pictures and statues everywhere, with speeches from their leaders and audio-visual material (hokey to us in the West) that shows North Korean military power and South Korean rats and their sniveling America allies as weak and incompetent, being blown away by Northern weapons… and show it every day… and soon you will have a population that gets chills down their backs when they hear Kim speak, believing as the Gospel every word he speaks. By controlling every form of mass communications, any electronic information from the outside world, North Korean children are raised from the moment they can understand words with a notion of national hero worship like no other country on earth.
On April 12th, CNN viewers got a first-hand look at how a North Korean escapee, Chae Young, reacted to images of North Korean television and Kim’s vituperative speeches… eleven years after she left the North for freedom in the South. Her lips still trembled and her eyes filled with tears of national pride. “In the North, she experienced starvation, the brutality of the regime and fled with her daughter in hope of a better life in the free world. But as Chae watches KCTV, the North's only television channel its citizens can view, the power of the propaganda she grew up with takes hold… ‘They're God,’ she says, referring to North Korea's trinity, Kim Jong Un, his father Kim Jong Il, and grandfather Kim Il Sung.
“The tears are now running down Chae’s perfectly made up face and she chokes back a sob. ‘This is how you are brought up since birth. Even I can feel the pull in my heart. I thought I forgot about this feeling since it has been so long…. But seeing this now, I feel I’m back in North Korea. I don’t know how to express myself. He is really great and I feel we will all die without him.’…Chae stops talking and asks for a glass of water. She tries to compose herself…‘I know their sincerity,’ she says, as she watches a group of soldiers sing and sway before Kim, their faces red with emotion and streaked with tears. ‘This is not a lie. It is not an act. It is real. If anything happens, they will give up their lives. They will even jump into fire.’” CNN.com, April 12th.
We assume that Kim and his military know that the U.S. really can blow his regime to dust. The West assumes that the North Koreans are blustering. We assume he really doesn’t want to risk losing his roost, perhaps even joining his people in an incineration of his making. But what if some idiot makes a mistake and pulls a trigger at precisely the wrong moment? What if the Chinese cannot reign in this sorry excuse for a national leader?
There are 24.5 million other Northerners who, unlike Chae, have not had the benefit of a decade plus “outside” to temper their zeal. With the exception of a few “friendly states” like the Peoples Republic of China and Cuba, the world is a nasty enemy of all North Koreans. But they are smug in the belief that their army can bring any other nation in the world to its knees in minutes, particularly the South and its evil crony, the United States. They really believe this, because this is the only set of imagery they have ever seen.
If the North ever falls from pressing its luck too hard, these unskilled, under-educated masses seething with hatred for the most of the civilized world will have to be absorbed into South Korea, assuming that nuclear war doesn’t annihilate every form of life for hundreds, even thousands of miles. If…
I’m Peter Dekom, and it is difficult to believe how completely large groups of people can be convinced to believe just about anything… but we have such pockets even within our own country.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment