WORLD DECEMBER 20, 2011
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The death of North Korea’s “Dear Leader,” Kim Jong Il, marks the end of his 17 years of strict control over the starved and crumbling state. While his eccentricities were often worthy of parody—the overblown legend involving new stars and double rainbows pronouncing his birth, thousands of books penned, and one strikingly good round of golf—his reign was marked more distinctly by the extreme suffering of the North Korean people. The totalitarian dictatorship that is now expected to pass to his youngest son, Kim Jong-un, tortures its own people, has sponsored acts of terrorism, and maintains the fourth largest army in the world even as its people regularly face starvation. Here, TNR lists some of the worst crimes of Kim Jong Il.
1. Kidnapping. Before coming to power, a young Kim Jong Il had dreams of being a film producer, going so far as to write a 300-page book, On the Subject of Cinema, in which he claimed, “The task set before the cinema today is one of contributing to people’s development into true communists. … This historic task requires, above all, a revolutionary transformation of the practice of directing.” In 1978, while being groomed to inherit the state from his father, he decided to combine these paths, and orchestrated the kidnapping of the director Shin Sang-ok and his wife, actress Choi Eun-hee, a power couple of the South Korean film industry. The two were imprisoned for four years, then pulled from captivity and charged by Kim with breathing new life into the stagnant Northern cinema, giving form to his vision. They made six movies before managing to escape, after being sent to a European film festival.
2. Bombings. Also before rising to power, Kim Jong Il is suspected of organizing two major terrorist attacks against South Korea. The first is the 1983 bombing in Rangoon that was meant to kill the South Korean President, Chun Doo Hwan. Hwan was running late, thereby avoiding the attack, but several members of his cabinet were killed. Four years later, North Korean agents planted bombs on Korean Air flight 858, killing 115 people, to dissuade attendance to the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games.
3. Gulag. Imagine being sent to jail because your father was in jail. And that he was in jail because his father was. And he was in jail because… well, no good reason. That dystopia is reality in North Korea. In true Stalinist form, Kim Jong Il turned parts of the state into a giant gulag, where generations of families arbitrarily deemed enemies of the state are doomed to forced labor, starvation, and death.
4. Murder? Kim Jong Il’s murderous career may have gotten off to an early start with a particularly heinous crime: fratricide. While never proved, rumors abound that the dictator was responsible for his younger brother’s drowning death. Kim Jong Il was five years old at the time.
5. Famine. Experts disagree on the exact number, with credible estimates ranging between 600,000 and 3 million dead. What no one disputes is the fact that between 1995 and 2000, North Korea’s population suffered one of the deadliest famines ever. In 1995-96, historic flooding devastated the country’s crops and wiped out its grain reserves. But the regime’s misplaced priorities turned a natural disaster into a human tragedy of epic proportions: While Kim Jong-Il was building up the world’s 4th largest standing army and buying the world’s largest supply of Hennessy cognac, the nation starved.
6. Human Rights Violations. They live in enclosed pens. They feed on grass and plants. And according to a report by the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, an American NGO, they envy farm animals—who at least enjoy regular meals. They are North Korean refugees who fled to China, only to be captured and returned home. The unfortunates are confined to detention centers where they face hard labor, starvation, and torture. According to HRNK allegations, a particularly grisly fate awaits recaptured pregnant women: After a medically induced labor, the babies are suffocated, or simply left outside to die. “When the box was full of babies … it was taken outside and buried,” said one refugee who managed to escape.
7. Torpedo attack. It would have been a casus belli, if the two nations weren’t already at war. On March 26, 2010, the South Korean Naval vessel Cheonan sank in the Yellow Sea, killing 46 sailors on board. A team of international experts, led by South Korea, concluded that a torpedo launched by a North Korean submarine was to blame. The UN Security Council adopted a resolution strongly condemning the North’s aggression.
Matt O’Brien, Thomas Stackpole, and Jarad Vary are interns at The New Republic.
10 comments
Conrad wrote "The Horror. The Horror." Conrad saw some bad stuff and knew about some bad stuff, but humanity does not stand still and ever plunges too new depths.
- skahn
December 20, 2011 at 1:19am
Here's my favorite quote from one of your links: "A personality evaluation report on him, compiled by psychiatrists suggested that the "big six" group of personality disorders - sadistic, paranoid, antisocial, narcissistic, schizoid and schizotypal - which were shared by dictators Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Saddam Hussein were also dominant in the late North Korean leader. " It's the new Olympic competition.
- skahn
December 20, 2011 at 1:23am
The North Korean people are responsible for these monsters that are their leaders. They desperately need a sadistic Father to take care of them (and take care of them he does--torturing, mutilating, starving, and butchering them). They are natural-born slaves who will let the Father kill their children and then blame the Americans for it. They blame the Americans for everything, including when the lights go out in their flimsy, state-built apartments--a classic case of projection by a twisted, masochistic people. Of course, there are individual exceptions, but in North Korea they are few. And the few are soon taken care of by the many. I understand Kim Jong-un is even more sadistic than his father--just what the North Korean people were hoping for. They have already died in massive numbers for their Father. If they wanted to get rid of him, they would die in massive numbers to overthrow him. But they have a deep need to be slaves. Look at some of their public ceremonies where they adulate their Leader. They make the Nuremberg Rally look like a middle-school production. Surrealistic and chilling. What a creepy culture.
- magboy47.
December 20, 2011 at 1:48am
magboy, that is a bit cold. Would you rise up against that regime and face horrors far worse than just misery? For 42 years Libyans lived with the insanity that was the Gadhafi regime but it took the most unlikely catalyst to overthrow him: a Tunisian street merchant who torched himself.
- blackton
December 20, 2011 at 10:08am
Evidence of the burdens faced by the people of North Korea abounds. It's difficult to imagine all the hurdles faced by the new "Lovable Leader" to follow in the footsteps of his father.
- Doug12
December 20, 2011 at 10:18am
Point of clarification: #7 Torpedo attack was not ordered by the late Dear Leader but rather his son.
- djcho77
December 20, 2011 at 10:46am
magboy is off mark: it's not sadism but racism that drives Korean society. See also a book review by Hitchens' on this. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2010/02/a_nation_of_racist_dwarfs.html These old attitudes proliferate Northeast Asia and far beyond.
- djcho77
December 20, 2011 at 10:57am
blackton, I've been studying totalitarian states and how they come about since 1953. I'm still only a student, but I've learned one thing for sure. If a people lives for decades under a devil of a dictator, it's eventually voluntary. There is something in their cultural ideology that makes them love and want the boot heel on the neck. Partly, it's the result of their fear that, if given freedom, they themselves will unleash the devil into society. The Japanese, the Germans, the Russians, and others were like that. But they are getting away from it. The North Koreans aren't. Maybe they will in the future. Anything can happen on this strange (but often wonderful) planet. I don't know as much about North Korea as I do about some other totalitarian states, but I have read about in articles and seen on documentaries some of the monstrous things that North Koreans allow and even encourage the Father to do--like putting some of their own children out into the street and letting them starve, so that the Father can feed the soldiers that step on their necks. That's a mild one. Some of the fatal chemical-weapons experiments that whole families "volunteer" for without protest are even worse than those that the monster Mengele conducted in Auschwitz. You're right. It's hard to rise up in the face of torture and death, but when average North Koreans enthusiastically turn in their own mothers and children to the state, knowing the Boschean nightmares they will be subjected to, the People, not the leaders, are the major problem. The North Korean people are already cooperating with the Father to inflict "horrors far worse than just misery," as you phrase it, upon themselves and those close to them. There comes a time in a police state (like Tsarist Russia), when the soldiers refuse to kill everyone that they are ordered to. That's when everything turns. Someday everything will turn in North Korea. Let's hope it doesn't take six decades, like it has up until now.
- magboy47.
December 20, 2011 at 11:37am
djcho77, You're right about the extreme racism in North Korea among the people and their Father. But that is just the rationalization for their sado-masochistic behavior. Racism is the "explanation" for their cruelty toward other races and those in their own culture who aren't racist enough. The Japanese in the Thirties and Forties were like that, as were KKK members (to a lesser degree than the Japanese and Germans) in the Jim Crow south. When people have an innate need to inflict suffering upon others, one of the "justifications" they cite is their own racial superiority.
- magboy47.
December 20, 2011 at 11:49am
The idea that after a period of decades people who are oppressed must voluntarily desire their oppression is off mark. Nearly all displays of nationalism (up to around 1776) have been rooted in the spirit of ethnic or religious unity. Nationalism can be good but often is not, and it is only recently that here on the Atlantic some people have started calling out racism as a misshapen and unacceptable instinct. magboy-you should know that sadism is an altogether different, sometimes overlapping and far more virulent strain of psychological behavior.
- djcho77
December 20, 2011 at 11:09pm