North Korean men, women, children, newscasters, soldiers weep openly, gnashing their teeth and pounding their fists on the ground in grief. The unthinkable has happened. Their “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong Il, is dead.
Kim Jong Il ruled North Korea since 1994 when his father, Kim Il Sung, “The Great Leader,” died leaving him in charge of the world’s last remaining Stalinist nation. Calling his 17-year regime “brutal” or “cruel” is an understatement.
North Korea under Kim has been a nation of deprivation — at least for the vast majority of North Korean people. During the mid-to-late 1990s, Kim spent so much money to build his military and to advance his quest for nuclear weapons that he had none to buy food for he people. The resulting famine killed between two and three million.
Meanwhile, in a country where the per capita annual income is $900, Kim indulged his taste for fine cigars, gourmet cuisine, alcohol and young women. He was said to be the world’s biggest buyer of Hennessey cognac, spending as much as $800,000 annually on premium bottles. When doctors told him to lay off the brandy, he switched to the prestige Bordeaux vintages at hundreds of dollars per bottle. He was fond of haut cuisine as well as lobster and pizza and had his pizzaiolos trained by Italy’s best. For entertainment Kim had a collection of more than 20,000 bootleg movies and was attended by the ladies of his “Joy Brigade.”
While indulging himself and his inner circle, Kim demanded perfect obedience. Even small signs of disloyalty could mean incarceration in North Korea’s concentration camp system for the offender and family including children. Since camp guards are instructed that they are never under any circumstances to treat prisoners as human beings, the results are predictably brutal with Christians often singled out for the worst treatment.
Melanie Kirkpatrick, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, notes in The Wall Street Journal that through the trickle of men and women who have escaped North Korea, “we have a glimpse of Kim's human legacy: a brutalized and starving people, whose access to food is controlled by the state and dependent upon their perceived political reliability; the world’s most corrupt society, where the rule of law is nonexistent; and a gulag-like system of prison camps, where some 200,000 people are incarcerated, often with three generations of their families, for such ‘crimes’ as listening to a foreign radio broadcast, reading a Bible, or disrespecting a portrait of Kim Jong Il or Kim Il Sung. Refugees frequently use the word ‘hell’ to describe their country, and it is impossible to disagree.”
Internationally, Kim allied with terrorist states while blackmailing everyone else with threats of violence and broken promises. North Korea’s nuclear weapons have been one of the world’s great worries, a worry that has escalated with Kim’s death and replacement by “The Great Successor,” his 28-year-old inexperienced son, Kim Jong Eun.
And while the world hopes for changes with the new regime, according to the Wall Street Journal, “North Korea’s new leader is depicted in U.S. intelligence assessments as a volatile youth with a sadistic streak who may be even more unpredictable than his late father, according to U.S. officials.”
