North Korea: The Movie
Kim Chong Il, the diminutive leader of North Korea, is a cinema fan extraordinaire. He is reported to have upwards of 20,000 videos in his collection. His favorite movie is reported to be “The Godfather,” which may also be the model for his leadership style. (Interestingly, “The Godfather” is also the favorite movie, and training manual, of his fellow member of the axis of evil, Saddam Hussein.)
A pet project of Kim Jong Il’s has been the development of a North Korean movie industry. Fancying himself to be a highly creative personality, in 1978 Kim Jong Il orchestrated the kidnapping of Choe Un-hui, his favorite South Korean actress, and her husband a noted movie producer. They were taken to North Korea where they were held for eight years, to teach him how to make movies. When Kim, who is extremely self conscious of his stature—he is 5’2”, wears four inch lifts in his shoes, and was called “shorty” in the village in which he grew up— first met the South Korean star, he reportedly asked, “Well, Madame Choe, what do you think of my physique? Small as a midget’s droppings, aren’t I?” He is apparently very concerned with appearances and prefers to stay out of the public eye as much as possible, and has often been described as a recluse. In contrast to his father who seemed at ease with large crowds and comfortable with people, Kim has been likened to the Wizard of Oz, “remaining out of sight, pulling levers from behind a screen.”
While Kim reportedly watches CNN and scans the internet for several hours a day, a critical question concerns how accurate his perception of political reality. To what degree is Kim’s view of the West shaped by Hollywood? To what degree is he now writing, directing and starring in “North Korea: The Movie?”
One cannot understand the personality and political behavior of Kim Jong Il without placing it in the context of the life and charismatic leadership of his father, Kim Il-Sung, North Korea’s first leader. One of the difficulties in assessing the personality and political behavior of Kim Il Sung has always been discerning the man behind the myth. The gap between the facts that scholars have been able to piece together and the hagiographic portrait presented to the people of North Korea is staggering. This extends to the gap between the facts of the life of Kim Jong Il and the mythic public presentation. Of the hundreds of political personality profiles of world leaders I have developed over the decades, his father, the God-like Kim Il Sung and Kim Chung Il stand out as the most extreme examples of the gap between image and reality, between myth and man.
A striking aspect of this discrepancy is that it was the ever creative Kim Chung Il who was actually in charge of the creation of the myth, who in fact was the chief script writer, for he was Director of the Bureau of Propaganda and Agitation at age 30 and was responsible not only for creating the cult of personality that surrounded his father, Kim Il Sung, but also for stressing the continuity between Kim Il Sung , “Great Leader,” and his chosen successor, “Dear Leader”, Kim Jong Il.
The world history has not recorded such a son of guerrillas who was born between brilliant commanders of guerillas in Mt. Baekdu, the sacred mountain of the nation. So Kim Jong Il's birth is said to be an unprecedented birth out of a remarkable family. Therefore, a believer in Chondogyo said in a charm that Marshal Kim Jong Il's birth itself is great and he was born with the mission of savior.
It was certainly much
more suitable for the future leader of North Korea to have been born in the
sacred mountain of the nation, Mt. Baekdu, than in the Soviet Union.
But in contrast to his father, Kim Chung Il was not a guerilla fighter, was not a nation builder, was not the creator of his nation’s ideology. If succeeding a powerful father presents a daunting psychological challenge, succeeding a towering charismatic figure of God-like stature presents an overwhelming challenge. That Kim Chong Il did not assume all of his father’s positions, but named his father Eternal President, suggests how giant are the shoes of his father,. and the perceived inadequacy of Kim to fill those shoes.
To avoid facing the monumental failure of his leadership, Kim has created for himself and his cronies a veritable fairy kingdom in Pong Yang, his own self created “The Truman Show.” His country is starving, with the death of 2,000,000 to famine. Kim calls on his people for sacrifice in pursuing the twin goals of reunification and juche (self-reliance.) Yet he does this while living a remarkably self indulgent, indeed hedonistic life style with his cronies in Pyongyang. He lives in a seven story pleasure palace, recruits comely young virgins with fair complexions in junior high school each July for his “joy brigades” to provide relaxation to his hard word working senior officers.
In addition to his penchant for Western movies and beautiful women, the eccentric and self-indulgent Kim Jong Il has a known penchant for French cognac. It is estimated that thousands of bottles of Paradis are shipped to North Korea annually. One of the world’s oldest commercially available cognacs, Paradis sells for $630 a bottle in Seoul. Hennessy, the maker of Paradis cognac, has confirmed that Kim is the biggest buyer of the cognac, with Kim maintaining an estimated annual account of $650,000 to $800,000 since 1992. The Dear Leader annually spends 770 times the income of the average North Korean citizen ($1,038) on cognac alone!
The degree to which Kim recognizes the dire conditions of his people is not entirely clear. When he goes out for “surprise” inspections, there is enough advance notice so that resources are borrowed from neighboring cantons, food, clothing, weapons, etc. to present an exaggeratedly up-scale picture, a Potempkin village for internal consumption. What is clear is that he is not overly concerned with the suffering of his people. Kim Jong Il reportedly acknowledges only one occasion where he disobeyed The Great Leader:
Only once have I disobeyed President Kim Il Sung.
The President said, “can you shave off some defense spending and divert
it for the people’s livelihoods?” I
responded, “I am afraid not. Given
the military pressure from the U.S., the Korean people must bear the hardship a
little longer.” How much pain I
felt at my failure to live up to the expectations of the President who is
concerned about raising the living standards of the people!
Note Kim Jong Il speaks about his father’s concerns for raising the living standard of the people, a concern he apparently does not share. In confronting North Korea’s famine, saving lives has not been a top priority, and early in the famine cycle Kim cut off nearly all food supplies to the four eastern provinces and denied these provinces access to international aid. Large numbers of deaths also occurred when, between 1997 and 1999 on Kim’s orders, several hundred thousand people displaced by the famine were herded into camps where conditions allowed few to survive. Moreover, according to the testimony of eyewitnesses, Kim has ordered the systematic killing of babies born in North Korea’s camps for political prisoners.
Kim’s bold confrontational language seems to be inspired by the classic Western flick, “High Noon.” Standing tall against the bad guys in a duel to the death , Kim seems to be modeling himself after Gary Cooper’s character, lawman Will Kane. (Now if the readers have trouble likening the short and pudgy Kim to the lean and lanky Cooper, they apparently lack the creative imagination of Kim Jong Il.) While the European press has derided President Bush for having a “cowboy” mentality, it pales by comparison with that of Kim “Fast Draw” Jong Il, who, armed with his nuclear six-shooters, seems to be playing out “The Gunfight at OK Corral” against the Clanton gang of the United States.
Kim’s technique for extracting financial support from his neighbors and the West was apparently inspired by the classic Peter Sellers movie, “The Mouse That Roared.”
This mouse, however, has 1.2 million under arms, 70% of which are massed at the border, and has several nukes, with the ability to rapidly expand his nuclear arsenal. This is assuredly the most extreme of the current rash of Reality TV shows. The degree to which Kim Jong Il understands the reality of the crisis he has precipitated, and how his latest movie script could go awry with tragic consequences is a matter of extreme concern.
Jerrold Post is Professor of Psychiatry, Political Psychology and International Affairs and Director of the Political Psychology Program at the George Washington University. He is the editor and author of the forthcoming The Psychological Assessment of Political Leaders, With Profiles of Saddam Hussein and William Jefferson Clinton, Univ. of Michigan Press.