The World’s Most Secretive Nation | Brian O'Neel | Catholic World Report
The future of North Korea is as murky as its past is murderous
Outside of a rebellion, the death of a sitting head-of-state normally does not hold the globe’s attention for weeks on end. This is especially true when that person heads a nation whose size is roughly that of Mississippi, whose population is smaller than Ghana’s, and whose economy ranks behind Yemen, Ethiopia, and Panama.
Then again, there is nothing normal about North Korea, the most secretive state in the world, formally known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), or its recently deceased “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-il. Kim died Saturday, December 17, 2011, allegedly of a heart attack while on his special bulletproof train doing one of his famous “field guidance” tours.
President Kim’s death came only 14 days before the start of the year marking the 100th birthday of his father and predecessor Kim Il-sung, who founded the DPRK in 1948. The deceased leader had decreed this year would be year one of Kangsong Taeguk, which translates as “strong and prosperous country.”
Since succeeding the elder Kim in 1994, Jong-il regularly made news, even when he did nothing to make news. Whether it be the mixture of mismanagement and misfortune that led to a massive famine and killed approximately 10 percent of his nation’s 24 million people, the nuclear technology he either developed or sold to countries such as Iran and Syria, his devil-may-care military aggression against his US-allied enemy South Korea (ROK), his perfecting of a system of repression and secrecy unequalled in world history, the guessing game this secrecy engendered, or the murders and persecutions he condoned and even sponsored, all of it combined to make Kim one of the most intriguing, feared, and discussed leaders history has ever known.
Certainly no single politician in the last 20 years had Kim’s global impact. Nonetheless, as one confidential report obtained by CWR put it, his legacy is “a country with a broken economy and an untested young successor.”
Kim’s life
Soviet government records show Kim was born on a Russian army post February 16, 1941, where his father commanded a brigade of Chinese and Korean communists. North Koreans are told, however, he was born in a log cabin on Mt. Paekdu, a sacred Korean mountain near the Sino-Korean border, and that both a swallow and a double rainbow heralded his birth.
After his son completed college, Kim’s father, the “Great Leader,” began a slow and careful process of grooming the young man for succession. This, however, did not become overtly clear until 1982, when Jong-il became a member of the Seventh Supreme People’s Assembly.
After that point, state propaganda began referring to him as “Dear Leader,” and Kim started to amplify the cult of personality that already existed for him and his father and that would later ensure his succession. At the same time, this enabled the regime to refine its already infamous repression of all dissent. This was made possible by Jong-il’s systemization and promotion of juche (loosely translated as “self-reliance”), the quasi-Marxist/Stalinist/Christian/Confucian creed that governs everything the so-called Hermit Kingdom does.
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