And today’s Great Purge victim is …
Kwon Ho Ung, who served as North Korea’s chief delegate to inter-Korean talks with the ATM known as Roh Moo Hyun from 2004 to 2007. Today’s winner will receive one execution, presumably by firing squad. Via Sonagi, here’s a blog post that provides a little more information about him.
A lot of North Korean officials must be very, very worried right now. I suppose we’ll continue to hear reports like this right up until the big September party conference. Speaking of which, the excellent North Korea Leadership Watch already has some of the graphically beautiful and ideologically repulsive propaganda posters advertising the event.
OP:
As I wrote here, this type of thing has to be inducing “checking for the exits” disloyalty, especially at a crucial juncture when a critical mass of nomenklatura may realize they’d rather not spend another few decades at the whim of a hereditary figurehead with no limits on his political power, where saying or doing the wrong thing — or even the right thing at the wrong time — can lead to their own demise.
In democratic societies, politicians worry about the polls…in totalitarian societies, its firing squads.
If high-ranking nomenklatura can no longer rely on the system to serve their interests, then we are on the threshhold of an endgame.
Jeffery Hodges
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How many people have now been executed or died in mysterious circumstances since this purge began?
Also, has the KCNA made any mention at all yet of Kim Jong-Un?
In “The Blue Max”, the handsome protagonist offends his aristocratic lover, and his downfall is quite literally swift. Did our handsome Chief Delegate Kwon happen to get an influential somebody’s nose out-of-joint, so that “Huh, that kid?” slipping out over an excess round of soju in the late hours meant a burst door before breakfast?
At the very least, fear of this ilk at this point has the (rare in the North Korean context) capacity to compel some pretty high ranking individuals to group together, and such groupings could, please read again “could”, lead to some form of critical mass and the birth of an underground political movement. It being unclear from their perspective what this could possibly achieve is one thing going against it, of course.
In addition, of course, purges by necessity don’t last forever; it would have to be a long term thing (and five months or so is really not long enough, especially when it seems highly targeted) to generate the kind of movement I am talking about. After all, even Stalin’s most inspired purges didn’t result in his overthrow, and he was a very, very competent purger.
I am dimly aware, though, that what is happening is that an ever-increasing number of relatively affluent people are trying to get their own children out of the country, nominally for educational purposes. Removing the blood line from the firing line, as it were.
But some historians believe that it did result in his death by poisoning.
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Stalin was no Rasputin.
Died from a little poison?
Wimp.