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Kim Jong Il Dead

Good riddance to him. Any bets on who will actually run the place now?

It’s hard to imagine that anyone can fill the psychological void he leaves. It doesn’t matter that most North Koreans undoubtedly despised him. He was still a tremendous, terrible presence that no one else can be.

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[KCNA, Reuters]

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[Reuters, Kim Kyung-Hoon]

Update: Here are some posts that seem freshly relevant:

– Boldly, I had predicted that Kim Jong Il would die. But we could see this coming two years ago, and here, I prognosticated at greater length about the post-Kim Jong Il era.

– As if preparing for his own death, Kim Jong Il spent his last years purging old comrades. See also.

– A reminder of how little we really know about Kim Jong Eun, who would be a figurehead at most, and who is probably even more despised than his father.

– South Korea’s military is on high alert.

– As of 11:36 p.m. Washington time, KCNA has nothing on this. [Update: But just look at it now.]

Some other quick thoughts:

Who will take over now? Superficially, we’ve seen some recent signs that the regime was accelerating Kim Jong Eun’s deification, suggesting that it knew Kim Jong Il’s health was declining rapidly. Behind the scenes, it will be a collective leadership. Some people to watch are Kim Jong Il’s sister Kim Kyong-Hui, her (possibly estranged) husband, Jang Song Thaek, and master counterfeiter O Kuk Ryol.

Is diplomacy now a real possibility? No, but with Kim out of the way, an internal power struggle could soon commence, the result of which could create the conditions for that. Watch who comes out on the reviewing stand, and watch how the regime behaves. There won’t be a Pyongyang Spring anytime soon. The next weeks will either feature complete governmental paralysis or an unscheduled broadcast, followed by a series of unscheduled military deployments. One piece of good news is that the latest reports of a diplomatic “breakthrough” will come to nothing now, which is a much faster and cheaper way of achieving exactly the same thing.

It is a depressing thing to see a man who caused so much death and misery die untried and unpunished. It makes me want to believe that there is a hell, other than the one thatNorth Korea itself became because of Kim Jong Il’s necrocratic misrule. Here is a man who belongs alongside Pol Pot as one of the most destructive men who ever lived, one who would belong in the same category as Hitler or Stalin if he had ruled a country with a larger population or GDP. The legacy of Kim Jong Il will be of the millions he starved for his own profligacy and megalomania, and of the hundreds of thousands more who perished in the cruelest system of prison camps on this earth since Stalin died in 1953. When men like this die in their beds, the very idea of justice dies a little, too.

Update: The BBC has video of the announcement on North Korean state television.

Update: Here’s what I’d written about Kim Jong Eun for the New Ledger last year:

Not much else seems remarkable about Kim Jong-Eun, the new Porcine Prince of Pyongyang. It’s unlikely that he’ll be as much a successor to Kim Jong-Il as a figurehead for a junta of his septuagenarian minions. If we were speaking of any place but North Korea, it would count as remarkable that we know so little about him. We think that he is somewhere between 26 and 28, and that his mother was the actress Ko Young-Hee, whom Kim Jong Il expropriated from her then-husband but never married, and who later went mad and died in Moscow. Kenji Fujimoto, who spent part of North Korea’s Great Famine making sushi for Kim Jong-Il, says Jong-Eun inherited his father’s appearance and his narcissistic personality traits. Maybe he studied in Switzerland, and then again, maybe that was his younger brother Kim Jong-Chol, the one who possibly likes Eric Clapton, has a hormonal imbalance, and acts “like a girl.” It wasn’t until January of 2009 that Japanese and South Korean media first began to report on the regime’s campaign to deify him.

Our first look at Kim Jong-Eun has answered a few important questions. For one thing, we may have just found where all our food aid went. With all that we don’t know about North Korea, I’m confident in my disbelief that this is a face starving people will accept as a legitimate ruler and benefactor. South Koreans certainly were quick to poke the elephant in the room. As the British scholar Aidan Foster-Carter put it, “He sure looks like he gave up basketball.”

Of course, Kim Jong Il wore his own kleptocratic girth until his stroke in 2008, but even the dictator of a starving nation can survive if he wears his corpulence with confidence. Kim Jong Il had spent the decades before his father’s death cultivating relationships with his father’s generals. Now look at Jong-Eun’s eyes. There is cruelty and arrogance in them, but it’s the fear I see. That’s the sort of face a suburban sex offender wears to the exercise yard at Pelican Bay. No matter how many icons of him are placed in living rooms, classrooms, or lapel pins, he will spend the rest of his life stepping warily within a nest of vipers. The real power will stay with Kim Jong Il’s old comrades and relatives: Kim Young Il; Jang Song-Thaek, whose portfolio includes North Korea’s political prison camps; General Ri Yong-Ho; General O Kuk-Ryol, whose family controls the counterfeiting rackets; and Kim Jong Il’s sister (and Jang’s wife) Kim Kyong-Hui, who is said to have pushed hard for North Korea’s disastrous currency redenomination and confiscation last year. As a partial consequence of that, refugees report finding the night’s toll of the dead lying around the train stations each morning. That is why any hopes that this transition is a harbinger of reforms are probably false. The state isn’t interested in reform, and Kim Jong-Eun’s coronation won’t change that, because it is a sham. But that doesn’t mean that the regime can stop change forever.

Until public opinion polling becomes possible in North Korea, we will have to rely on anecdotal reports, clandestine cell phones, and defectors to gauge the reaction of the people to a medieval succession in a nominally socialist state. What reports we do have are overwhelmingly unfavorable for Jong-Eun, whose function is, after all, to be a genetic vessel for the legitimacy of a deiocracy once their god finally dies. If so, Jong-Eun may have outlived his usefulness. One defector claims that North Koreans openly call Kim Jong-Eun “an immature little bastard” who is “more savage than his father” and “a scoundrel who relies on his father’s power to do whatever he wants.” Students in Pyongyang and other cities criticize the feudal dynastic succession from father to son and call it “a betrayal of socialism.” Some North Koreans blame him for exhausting mass labor mobilizations and last year’s disastrous currency confiscation. Kim Eun Ho, a former North Korean policeman and now a correspondent for a Seoul-based radio station that broadcasts to North Korea, says, “For general citizens, Kim Jong Eun is vastly unpopular …. People cannot take him seriously, in reality. He just suddenly appeared, and he’s too young.” This discontent, by itself, is less consequential than the fact that North Koreans express it openly to fellow citizens, at least to the ones they trust.

It will have occurred to you by now that North Korea’s next mid-term election has yet to be scheduled, and that there is no effective opposition to its system. That is all true, and North Korea’s only hope is that these things should change. We can only hope — they can only hope — that somewhere in the outer provinces, a Madame Defarge works patiently at her knitting. At the confluence of desperation and hope, an organized opposition will eventually coalesce. The thought of trying to survive until the end of Kim Jong-Eun’s natural life should supply ample desperation.

It suddenly strikes me that the gathering of crowds for choreographed mourning ceremonies will be a volatile moment. If the clandestine reporting is accurate, Kim Jong Eun inspires loathing, but the regime has had little opportunity to deify him. I doubt that he inspires anything like confidence or respect (maybe “awe” is the word I’ve been searching for) in the minds of most North Koreans. To them, the idea of being ruled by this third-generation tyrant for the rest of their lives must be almost unimaginably dreary.

More updates, 19 Dec 2011:

First Bin Laden, then Khaddafy, and now Kim Jong Il. Overall, 2011 had more joyous obituaries than any year I can remember. It’s plausible to hope that Bashar Asad, Ayman Zawahiri, and Kim Jong Eun will be the most likely joyous obituaries of 2012.

Psychologically, so much has changed in North Korea. The regime was not really ready for this day. Its deification of Kim Jong-Eun has been uncharacteristically halting, even timid. The regime understands how volatile a moment this is. The Daily NK reports that it has closed its border with China, closed all markets, imposed a near-curfew, and filled the streets of at least one city with armed soldiers. This is not the reaction of a state that expects its subjects to erupt in spontaneous grief.

North Korea isn’t sending a conciliatory message to the outside world, either. Shortly after it announced Kim Jong-Il’s death, it tested a short-range missile off its east coast. South Korea is halting all visits to North Korea by its citizens, except at the Kaesong Industrial Park.

Updates:

Say what? It’s Lee Myung Bak’s birthday? That’s just too much.

Also, video from Pyongyang. Faking or not? In such a place as North Korea, it can’t be hard to find reasons to cry real tears.

Some reactions:

Bruce Klingner: “Kim Jong-un is a pale reflection of his father and grandfather. He has not had the decades of grooming and securing of a power base that Jong-il enjoyed before assuming control from his father. [He] may feel it necessary in the future to precipitate a crisis to prove his mettle to other senior leaders or deflect attention from the regime’s failings.”

Joshua Trevino: “I’d like to think God let Havel and Hitchens pick the third.” It’s a nice thought, but I suspect Hitchens would still be (is?) insisting to God that He doesn’t exist.

Robert Kaplan’s 2006 discussion of regime collapse in North Korea is worth rereading.

It seems appropriate to reprise two pieces by Christopher Hitchens. The first one is also the source of my masthead image; the second is a review of Brian Myers’s “The Cleanest Race.”

I would add: the story of Kim Jong Il’s misrule was best told by Barbara Demick, but the story that hasn’t been told is the story of how the free world lost its conscience in the face of Kim Jong Il’s crimes against humanity. For various reasons — nationalism, partisanship, Chinese malevolence, political expediency — the consciences of the Human Rights Industry, South Korea, America, and the U.N. were all paralyzed as U.S. and South Korean taxpayers were conscripted into the vile work of prolonging Kim Jong Il’s misrule through aid that was too easily diverted. Kim Jong Il’s misrule was terminated by more-or-less natural causes because of the banality of diplomacy.

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37 Responses

  4. I am concerned that Junior will try and test his chops to show he’s the new “dear leader” – as Tiberius said of Caligula, “I am nursing a viper in Rome’s bosom”….

  5. With Havels death, an interesting contrast the universe has given us, eh? A man of arts and freedom versus a phony “artist” of film who was one of the worst oppressors of freedom the world has seen in modern times. Kim will not be missed. His twenty something fatass son must be pissing his pants right now. Going to be interesting to watch if the military makes a move towards a regime like Burma….. My prayers are with the South Koreans who must deal with this mess north of the DMZ.

  9. When I first heard the news I could not believe it. Then disbelief gave way to happiness and hope. 2012 will be an interesting year for the Korean people and I hope that the North Korean people’s long nightmare will soon come to an end.

  10. I’m supposed to go home in a couple of months….

    You could write a dozen highly different predictions – throw a dart at a dartboard covered with them – and be as close to a reasonable guess as anybody.

    Should have taught in Cheju this time around…

  11. It is time for China to finally put some pressure on this country to join the living. Yes, purge away inside of North Korea, but end this total isolation.

  14. We are witnessing history in the making. With Kim Jong-Il’s death, a window of opportunity that over 20 million oppressed people have been waiting for decades has been miraculously suddenly opened…but will need further catalysts, strategic actions, prayers, and incredible breakthroughs on many levels in NK and elsewhere in the near-term for positive changes to take place, for the NK people to be ultimately freed and liberated from the concentration camps and from Juche ideology, and for the long-term promises and potential of this entire peninsula to be fulfilled.

  15. O Kuk Ryul was purged already. You seemed oddly confident in your dismissal of Kim Jong Un having any real power. You tell us how little we know about him but then tell us he probably won’t be running the show?

  16. Is there any chance that the people of South Korea can finally access North Korean Media and experience why the whole World including Chinese Han are fed up with North Korea? South Korean Media outlets should allow un-censored North Korean State Media to be broadcasted in Seoul. The People of South Korea have a right to know why the entire Earth thinks North Koreans are insane. They should have the right to view their insane twin with accuracy and not censorship.

  20. Some balance to the loss of Christopher Hitchens and Vaclav Havel.

    Now, don’t just stand there, Brian, let’s go to a stoning.

    ~alec

  22. It is indeed disappointing when dictators die of old age, nevertheless they are still dead dead dead despite their delusions of godhood and immortality. I feel pure joy when I see the scared eyes of a sick old dictator. “I killed everyone opposing me, why am i still dying? Why? Why is my son so pathetic?”.

    Har har har har

  26. Since China knows more about the state of politics in North Korea, regime change will be signalled by the closure of Jilin and Liaoning provinces to all foreigners without exception — so that an uninterrupted military build-up can ensue. Until that happens, China will have determined that the Kim Family Regime remains in power.

  27. North Korean Refugees Respond:

    http://campaign.r20.constantcontact.com/render?llr=ygqdspbab&v=001SZ1qw1gWteQDeLMjAracOMA2Cnqnq2225CVqfmauyPKoVgPHLmEcY6WxCJ14Gc-HicBeCGDThRshA7zTVRVB8uZC0gNk0eYNg4CUJf9coMNuLX4vc82SvNq6Fp0aByD5fqJHGMvR1dh9BATU4atZTHSqLotsdAmIz7gkuG-C0McTAiEi3GZhyZTOvSE4v3QuBUPzNBNmdnhOeYFjw920RoLK6rZlkeC4MRKBO8S8-NYr13WNvUP2fqVf3SNIfVcNMqLnqUFGEuqtNVEGuTjzsXRqxmU7Germ-MIhH7DI0Al6-WY-z70_tw%3D%3D

    —
    Oh crap. I hope that link works. It came in an email from LINK.

  31. I felt like a f*-ol predicting by 2012 he would be dead by now. I fell less today. We still have one month in this year to see if Beijing acquistions the DPRK for default Land and Kingdom rights… If Beijing does not order a Mandate to secure the DPRK formally then I will acknowledge my fo*lishness. However I predict that they will, and in such a Corner shall they be pushed by the World. (China) that is.

  32. Nicely done, Joshua.

    I just received a note from an intern at Democracy Now containing the following bracketed paragraph from their press release, which I am certain will interest you and your readers:

    [“There is a kind of reverence for Kim Jong-il by the people, because the North Korean people have a deep sense of needing sovereignty and independence,” [Korea Policy Institute Executive Director Christine] Ahn says, noting that North Koreans recall 35 years of Japanese occupation and were proud of “joining the nuclear club” in order to prevent what they perceive as U.S. military occupation and the division of the Korean Peninsula.]

    http://www.democracynow.org/2011/12/20/the_death_of_kim_jong_il

    On the side of analysts who don’t equate Kim Jong Il with reverential treatment, there is this wildly sprawling and occasionally coherent piece by Adrian Hong which advocates the US pull out of the Six Party Talks, secure “full compliance and sanctions by China” on North Korea, “cut a deal” with the Chinese, magically transport all the refugees to Mongolia, and then have South Korea tell China “stability will not be a problem.” http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/12/19/how_to_free_north_korea?page=0,1 Hey, why not?

    I was about to thank God that someone finally has the moral terpitude to finally stand up to the Chinese, but then I ran across Victor Cha’s latest audition piece in the New York Times, which really speaks for itself: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/20/opinion/will-north-korea-become-chinas-newest-province.html?_r=2 Absolutely, if the PRC were to turn North Korea into a province, the Chinese would encounter no opposition whatsoever! The Austrian Anschluss of 1938 all over again.

    In the meantime, back in reality, the Chinese government is, at least to its own people, trumpeting China’s praiseworthy role in protecting North Korea’s political system: http://sinonk.wordpress.com/2011/12/20/protecting-north-koreas-freedom-of-choice-huanqiu-shibao-lead-editorial/

    Actually in the midst of all of this, it would appear the failures of South Korean intelligence are pretty severe: no particular advance notice on Kim’s death, and no idea whatsoever about the 8 border guards you wrote about earlier (assuming the latter story was reliable; unfortunately I have not been in that county for more than four months and am as dependent on DailyNK as everyone else, unless Spelunker has a clue).

    [“tur·pi·tude /ˈtÉœrpɪˌtud, -ËŒtyud/ 1. vile, shameful, or base character; depravity; 2. a vile or depraved act.” You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. – Joshua]

  34. “Absolutely, if the PRC were to turn North Korea into a province, the Chinese would encounter no opposition whatsoever! The Austrian Anschluss of 1938 all over again”

    Cynically, that might be regarded as a win win for almost everybody. The north koreans get some improvements in living standards, the PRC gets some raw materials and markets and South Korea does not have to deal with the north antics or the prospect of a sudden reunification. Obviously it would have to be an informal takeover to work, not an Anschluss proper, korean nationalism seems just too strong for that.
    As far as I have read the majority of south korean have little enthusiasm for short term unification and those who still do it is because they are not aware of the rather unpleasant socio-economic issues it would raise; everything seem to point in the direction of it turning into a giant mess. Privately, politicians must be aware of that too.
    Anybody with better knowledge might perhaps chime in.

  37. Thanks for the correction as response, Joshua; it’s “temerity” I mean. Implying that it somehow takes guts. I didn’t check your YouTube link, as that site is illegal in my present location, but I do appreciate your attention to detail.

    I also very much admired, amid the onslaught of new posts, your sentence: “These are not the biographies of reformers.” Particularly interesting is General O, who is young enough to have engaged in rather a few cross-border shenanigans (I hope I am using that word correctly) back before Eisenhower was President.