DIPLOMACY HITS KIM
Kim Jong Il never lets us down. When President Bush, reacting
to the nuclear test, announced that he would seek further
sanctions against North Korea, Kim replied that he would
interpret any such move as an act of belligerency warranting a
declaration of war against the United States. This would be opera
bouffe, the equivalent of Monaco announcing that it would bring
down the Federal Reserve -- except for the item that calls Kim
Jong Il to the world's attention, namely the possibility that he
has a nuclear warhead gestating or even actualized.
Understandably, curiosity about this man, though frequently
appeased in years gone by analysts and newsmen, has been renewed.
An Australian paper speculates that it is inconceivable that Dear
Leader would actually drop the bomb, for two reasons: One, that
such an act would bring on a terminal devastation of Pyongyang;
the other, that he would then be without any repertory left to
arrest the attention of the world.
We have been told for many years that Kim is obsessively vain.
But I had not remembered the document of September 1997 from the
official government news agency. Reproduced here are the last few
sentences of the paean, which serve our purposes. The official
document concluded:
"The General is the mental pillar and the eternal sun to the
Korean people. As they are in harmonious whole with him, they are
enjoying a true life based on pure conscience and obligation.
They are upholding him as their great father and teacher, united
around him in ideology, morality and obligation. So their life is
a true, fruitful and precious life without an equal in
history."
In North Korea such tributes as these substitute for food,
which does not exist, at least not enough to feed the country's
21 million people, 10 percent of whom died of starvation in Kim's
first half decade in power.
It is widely noted that for all that he thinks of himself as a
leader with a divine afflatus to bring to his people and the
world the fruits of Juche (the North Korean variant of Leninism,
with a little Ayn Rand mixed in), he is himself a man of total
self-indulgence, devoted to porn, Scotch and Daffy Duck
cartoons.
The recounting of details of this kind serves no purpose
except as it is helpful in illuminating his special madness. It
is that, but observers note that he is expert in the single
discipline that matters, which is his ability to stay in absolute
command of his country. Continued... |