Not Much Hope for Change as Kim Jong-il Prepares to Ascend His Double Rainbow Back to Baekdu Mountain
He was portrayed as a cockroach in the movie Team America. He was portrayed as a drunken lecher by his former sushi chef. And much less convincingly, Kim Jong-il has been portrayed as a brilliant and benevolent leader whose travels are often accompanied by miracles in the natural world. This week, as expected, his son Kim Jong-un was awarded various official titles by the Workers' Party of Korea and seems destined to become third and final dictator of the world's last remaining Stalinist regime. Will we miss the Kims?
It is difficult to imagine the world without its parallel universe--a version of reality that has fascinated me ever since I heard my first North Korean propaganda while living in China in the early 1990s. Every day I tuned my shortwave radio to pick up the afternoon broadcast with its excoriations of fascist cliques and puppet regimes, all delivered in clipped, colorful English. A song called "Women are Flowers" would be followed by a report that black Americans live in concentration camps where they are shot at random. A report on the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea would be followed by a brass band playing "Death to the Aggressors!" It was irresistible.
But if the regime's depiction of the world was a bit hard to believe, its actions were even more improbable. Submarines abducted children from the coasts of Japan and spirited them off to North Korea to help train spies. Tree pruners in the Demilitarized Zone were murdered with their own gardening tools, while below the surface workers dug at least four giant tunnels, each capable of passing an entire emaciated infantry battalion per hour under the border to South Korea.
Farther from home, North Korean bombs killed South Korean officials in Burma and blew a Boeing 707 into the Andaman Sea.
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