A Nation of Personality

» Posted by Matt Hartman on Jan 12, 2012

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North Korea is a country often discussed under the pretext of evil: heir to Stalin’s communism, hoarder of nuclear weapons, threat to our civilized world. But the death of Kim Jong Il leads us to re-think that definition–or at least it should. The future of North Korea will not necessarily right itself now that Kim has died. He tied North Korea into an ideological apparatus difficult to escape and the nation’s future will depend not only upon how the international order can interact with Kim Jong Un–who has taken over after his father–but also upon how the North Korean people respond to Kim Jong Il’s death.

Political leaders have often given meaning (of some sort) to their people, becoming pseudo-mythical beings whose loss set the nation reeling. JFK was the man who saved the world from nuclear war, who tied together the ends of American ideology in the Cold War era. Stalin, on a much larger scale, turned himself into a persona that held together the straining Soviet Union, acting as a lynchpin for everything behind the Iron Curtain.

Kim Jong Il did the same on an extraordinary and terrifying level. He may even surpass Stalin’s cult of personality, creating an ideological system so grand that any discussion of it invariably turns into black humor. Kim Jong Il turned his existence into a piece of propaganda which he then used to define the political existence of the North Korean people.

The examples are startling. According to official records, Kim Jong Il’s birth was marked by the appearance of a double rainbow and the birth of a new star. His divine origins are matched only by his (officially reported) achievements: walking at three weeks old, speaking at eight, authoring 1,500 books, and shooting 11 holes-in-one in the only game of golf he ever played. And then, of course, there is the fact that he does not defecate.

Perhaps North Koreans find Kim Jong Il as absurd as the rest of the world. (Perhaps that would have loved Trey Stone and Matt Parker’s depiction.) But it seems many North Koreans take Kim quite seriously, even adopting his peculiar fashion sense. Even if his official biography is not taken literally within North Korea (and for my sanity, I choose to believe it is not), Kim Jong Il’s efforts have created an ideological apparatus that refuses to allow any sort of modern politics to be undertaken by the North Koreans.

This is demonstrated by another strange fact. In response to mass famine, Kim Jong Il decided that giant rabbits would be the best way to feed his nation. But the dozen rabbits gifted to North Korea to breed their new food supply served only as the main course at Kim Jong Il’s birthday party.

The audacity of the above tells the whole story. For the official records of a nation to claim anything like what they do about Kim Jong Il, there must be an immense power structure keeping order. The fact that the North Korean government can still claim any of these ridiculous facts is proof of the power they wield over the North Korean people.

What’s more, the poverty that follows from Kim Jong Il’s rule is well-known, and the suffering that his rabbit-solutions and subsequent rabbit filled feasts cause are obvious. Of course a leader as megalomaniacal as Kim Jong Il misuses funds and drags his nation into the third world. Satellite pictures of Korea at night show a brightly lit South, but a sharp line at the 38th parallel leaves the North in darkness, save for Pyongyang and a handful of small blips.

The result for North Korea is a nation whose entire political existence has been the rambling programs of a self-obsessed, self-fashioned demi-god. And, tragically, it is an existence that lacks the resources to combat their leader. Obviously North Korea needs, first and foremost, food, literacy programs, infrastructure, and the rest of the basic necessities denied by Kim Jong Il’s rule. Obviously Kim Jong Un must be coaxed, if possible, into the international order in a way his father never was.

But none of this will be possible without approaching the ideological prison created by Kim Jong Il. The ideological matrix he created siphoned power to his person and handicapped the people. As long as that matrix exists, the people cannot begin to gain any power. Kim Jong Un has already begun to build his own myth–now as the official Supreme Commander of the military. This shows, above all, the extent to which North Korea has been made dependent upon their ideology. There isn’t much of another option in a land where Kim Jong Il is Eternal President even in death.