North Korea was created by the old Soviet Union in 1945 with the installation of a Korean Communist, Kim Il-Sung, as the liberating leader. This founder of North Korea died in 1994 and his son, Kim Jong Il, born in Vyatskoye, Soviet Union, 1941, served as the leader of the nation until his death last weekend.
As leader, Kim Jong Il continued the policy of using concentration camps to deal with the slighest dissent among the people. If a questionable statement was made, or an inconvenient counter-revolutionary question was asked, an entire family was sent to a camp. Seldom did any return to the community.
Kim Jong-Il
Kim Jong Il himself lived a luxurious life, enjoying at one time the status of being the largest customer of French cognac. He also had a film library of western motion pictures. The money for these luxuries came from a state-run counterfeiting operation. The phony American bills were flown by private jet to Asian money centers and converted into the cash used to buy personal luxuries for the leader.
Though North Korea was mismanaged to the point of public starvation in the early 1990s, Kim ruthlessly pursued a nuclear weapons program, even though people were cooking seaweed in order to have something to eat. Even the huge, white elephant showplace palatial hotel being built in the capital city had to be shelved for lack of money, especially since no money was forthcoming from Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed
and Boris Yeltsin was elected. But the nuclear program continued unabated.
How can such rampant and inhuman dictatorship survive? A rock steady totalitarian system without an underground was maintained due to the universal North Korean concept of "juche."
Juche
"…There is a reason why the regime of the Kims survives while, all around it, the Soviet bloc disintegrated and the Chinese opened up and reformed. The North Korean regime's ideology, called juche, is often simplistically defined as Korean self-reliance and ridiculed in the West. But to the North Korean elites, juche is still a powerfully intoxicating brew of traditional Korean xenophobia and nationalism, Confucian respect for authority and utopian Marxism-Leninism. The party embodies all of these ideals--nationalism, filial respect, utopia. Exploiting this confluence of philosophies and experiences, Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il created "an impermeable and absolutist state that many have compared to a religious cult," wrote longtime Korea observer, Don Oberdorfer in his 1997 book, "The Two Koreas."
"Hence it hasn’t broken down, long after other regimes have, despite a smorgasbord of Western policies ranging from tough sanctions to occasional freezes in aid…"
-- http://nationaljournal.com/nationalsecurity/the-death-of-dr-evil-20111219
Wikipedia has an article on Kim Jong-Il that includes these observations:
Personality
Like his father, Kim has a fear of flying and always travels by private armored train for state visits to Russia and China. The BBC reported that Konstantin Pulikovsky, a Russian emissary who traveled with Kim across Russia by train, told reporters that Kim had live lobsters air-lifted to the train every day.
Kim is said to be a huge film fan, owning a collection of more than 20,000 video tapes and DVDs. His reported favorite movie franchises include Friday the 13th, Rambo, Godzilla, Hong Kong action cinema and any movie starring Elizabeth Taylor. He is the author of the book On the Art of the Cinema. In 1978, on Kim's orders, South Korean film director Shin Sang-ok and his actress wife Choi Eun-hee were kidnapped in order to build a North Korean film industry. In 2006 he was involved in the production of the Juche-based movie Diary of a Girl Student – depicting the life of a girl whose parents are scientists – with a KCNA news report stating that Kim "improved its script and guided its production".
Although Kim enjoys many foreign forms of entertainment, according to former bodyguard Lee Young Kuk, he refused to consume any food or drink not produced in North Korea, with the exception of wine from France. His former chef Kenji Fujimoto, however, has stated that Kim has sometimes sent him around the world to purchase a variety of foreign delicacies.
Kim reportedly enjoys basketball. Former United States Secretary of State Madeleine Albright ended her summit with Kim by presenting him with a basketball signed by NBA legend Michael Jordan. Also an apparent golfer, North Korean state media reports that Kim routinely shoots three or four holes-in-one per round. His official biography also claims Kim has composed six operas and enjoys staging elaborate musicals. Kim also refers to himself as an Internet expert.
US Special Envoy for the Korean Peace Talks, Charles Kartman, who was involved in the 2000 Madeleine Albright summit with Kim, characterised Kim Jong-il as a reasonable man in negotiations, to the point, but with a sense of humor and personally attentive to the people he was hosting. However, psychological evaluations conclude that Kim Jong-il's antisocial features, such as his fearlessness in the face of sanctions and punishment, serve to make negotiations extraordinarily difficult.
The field of psychology has long been fascinated with the personality assessment of dictators, a notion that resulted in an extensive personality evaluation of Kim Jong-il. The report, compiled by Frederick L. Coolidge and Daniel L. Segal (with the assistance of a South Korean psychiatrist considered an expert on Kim Jong-il's behavior), concluded that the "big six" group of personality disorders shared by dictators Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Saddam Hussein (sadistic, paranoid, antisocial, narcissistic, schizoid and schizotypal) were also shared by Kim Jong-il—coinciding primarily with the profile of Saddam Hussein. The evaluation also finds that Kim Jong-il appears to pride himself on North Korea's independence, despite the extreme hardships it appears to place on the North Korean people—an attribute appearing to emanate from his antisocial personality pattern. This notion also encourages other cognitive issues, such as self-deception, as subsidiary components to Kim Jong-il's personality. Many of the stories about Kim Jong Il's eccentricities and decadent life-style are exaggerated, possibly circulated by South Korean intelligence to discredit the Northern regime. Defectors claim that Kim has 17 different palaces and residences all over North Korea, including a private resort near Baekdu Mountain, a seaside lodge in the city of Wonsan, and a palace complex northeast of Pyongyang surrounded with multiple fence lines, bunkers and anti-aircraft batteries.
Finances
According to the Sunday Telegraph, Kim has US$4 billion on deposit in European banks in case he ever needs to flee North Korea. The Sunday Telegraph reported that most of the money was in banks in Luxembourg.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Jong-Ill
The Ryugyong Hotel
Emblematic of this regime has been an enormous white elephant of a hotel, originally approved and partly constructed by the "founder" of North Korea, Kim Jong-Il’s father, Kim Il-Sung, in 1987. The Ryugyong Hotel construction began in 1987 under the "Great Leader"for a 1989 youth exhibition. After a 1,000 foot high steel frame was built, construction was abandoned as the nation nearly starved in the early 1990s. Under the "Dear Leader," the recently deceased Kim Jong Il, construction resumed. The facility may actually open as a multi-use hotel in 2012. There are reports that the elevator shafts are crooked. The quality of the concrete in the building has also been questioned.
The Orascam Group of Egypt, a telecommunications firm, is apparently completing the construction, though some have denied this connection.
Wikipedia reports: "Even though the Ryugyong dominates the Pyongyang skyline, official information regarding the hotel and its status have proven difficult to obtain. Though mocked-up images of the completed hotel had once appeared on North Korean stamps, the North Korean government denied the building's existence for many years. The government manipulated official photographs in order to remove the structure, and excluded it from printed maps of Pyongyang. The alleged problems associated with the hotel led some media sources to dub it "The Worst Building in the World","Hotel of Doom" and "Phantom Hotel".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryugyong_Hotel
As leader, Kim Jong Il continued the policy of using concentration camps to deal with the slighest dissent among the people. If a questionable statement was made, or an inconvenient counter-revolutionary question was asked, an entire family was sent to a camp. Seldom did any return to the community.
Kim Jong Il himself lived a luxurious life, enjoying at one time the status of being the largest customer of French cognac. He also had a film library of western motion pictures. The money for these luxuries came from a state-run counterfeiting operation. The phony American bills were flown by private jet to Asian money centers and converted into the cash used to buy personal luxuries for the leader.
Though North Korea was mismanaged to the point of public starvation in the early 1990s, Kim ruthlessly pursued a nuclear weapons program, even though people were cooking seaweed in order to have something to eat. Even the huge, white elephant showplace palatial hotel being built in the capital city had to be shelved for lack of money, especially since no money was forthcoming from Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed
and Boris Yeltsin was elected. But the nuclear program continued unabated.
How can such rampant and inhuman dictatorship survive? A rock steady totalitarian system without an underground was maintained due to the universal North Korean concept of "juche."
Juche
"…There is a reason why the regime of the Kims survives while, all around it, the Soviet bloc disintegrated and the Chinese opened up and reformed. The North Korean regime's ideology, called juche, is often simplistically defined as Korean self-reliance and ridiculed in the West. But to the North Korean elites, juche is still a powerfully intoxicating brew of traditional Korean xenophobia and nationalism, Confucian respect for authority and utopian Marxism-Leninism. The party embodies all of these ideals--nationalism, filial respect, utopia. Exploiting this confluence of philosophies and experiences, Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il created "an impermeable and absolutist state that many have compared to a religious cult," wrote longtime Korea observer, Don Oberdorfer in his 1997 book, "The Two Koreas."
"Hence it hasn’t broken down, long after other regimes have, despite a smorgasbord of Western policies ranging from tough sanctions to occasional freezes in aid…"
-- http://nationaljournal.com/nationalsecurity/the-death-of-dr-evil-20111219
Wikipedia has an article on Kim Jong-Il that includes these observations:
Personality
Like his father, Kim has a fear of flying and always travels by private armored train for state visits to Russia and China. The BBC reported that Konstantin Pulikovsky, a Russian emissary who traveled with Kim across Russia by train, told reporters that Kim had live lobsters air-lifted to the train every day.
Kim is said to be a huge film fan, owning a collection of more than 20,000 video tapes and DVDs. His reported favorite movie franchises include Friday the 13th, Rambo, Godzilla, Hong Kong action cinema and any movie starring Elizabeth Taylor. He is the author of the book On the Art of the Cinema. In 1978, on Kim's orders, South Korean film director Shin Sang-ok and his actress wife Choi Eun-hee were kidnapped in order to build a North Korean film industry. In 2006 he was involved in the production of the Juche-based movie Diary of a Girl Student – depicting the life of a girl whose parents are scientists – with a KCNA news report stating that Kim "improved its script and guided its production".
Although Kim enjoys many foreign forms of entertainment, according to former bodyguard Lee Young Kuk, he refused to consume any food or drink not produced in North Korea, with the exception of wine from France. His former chef Kenji Fujimoto, however, has stated that Kim has sometimes sent him around the world to purchase a variety of foreign delicacies.
Kim reportedly enjoys basketball. Former United States Secretary of State Madeleine Albright ended her summit with Kim by presenting him with a basketball signed by NBA legend Michael Jordan. Also an apparent golfer, North Korean state media reports that Kim routinely shoots three or four holes-in-one per round. His official biography also claims Kim has composed six operas and enjoys staging elaborate musicals. Kim also refers to himself as an Internet expert.
US Special Envoy for the Korean Peace Talks, Charles Kartman, who was involved in the 2000 Madeleine Albright summit with Kim, characterised Kim Jong-il as a reasonable man in negotiations, to the point, but with a sense of humor and personally attentive to the people he was hosting. However, psychological evaluations conclude that Kim Jong-il's antisocial features, such as his fearlessness in the face of sanctions and punishment, serve to make negotiations extraordinarily difficult.
The field of psychology has long been fascinated with the personality assessment of dictators, a notion that resulted in an extensive personality evaluation of Kim Jong-il. The report, compiled by Frederick L. Coolidge and Daniel L. Segal (with the assistance of a South Korean psychiatrist considered an expert on Kim Jong-il's behavior), concluded that the "big six" group of personality disorders shared by dictators Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Saddam Hussein (sadistic, paranoid, antisocial, narcissistic, schizoid and schizotypal) were also shared by Kim Jong-il—coinciding primarily with the profile of Saddam Hussein. The evaluation also finds that Kim Jong-il appears to pride himself on North Korea's independence, despite the extreme hardships it appears to place on the North Korean people—an attribute appearing to emanate from his antisocial personality pattern. This notion also encourages other cognitive issues, such as self-deception, as subsidiary components to Kim Jong-il's personality. Many of the stories about Kim Jong Il's eccentricities and decadent life-style are exaggerated, possibly circulated by South Korean intelligence to discredit the Northern regime. Defectors claim that Kim has 17 different palaces and residences all over North Korea, including a private resort near Baekdu Mountain, a seaside lodge in the city of Wonsan, and a palace complex northeast of Pyongyang surrounded with multiple fence lines, bunkers and anti-aircraft batteries.
Finances
According to the Sunday Telegraph, Kim has US$4 billion on deposit in European banks in case he ever needs to flee North Korea. The Sunday Telegraph reported that most of the money was in banks in Luxembourg.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Jong-Ill
The Ryugyong Hotel
Emblematic of this regime has been an enormous white elephant of a hotel, originally approved and partly constructed by the "founder" of North Korea, Kim Jong-Il’s father, Kim Il-Sung, in 1987. The Ryugyong Hotel construction began in 1987 under the "Great Leader"for a 1989 youth exhibition. After a 1,000 foot high steel frame was built, construction was abandoned as the nation nearly starved in the early 1990s. Under the "Dear Leader," the recently deceased Kim Jong Il, construction resumed. The facility may actually open as a multi-use hotel in 2012. There are reports that the elevator shafts are crooked. The quality of the concrete in the building has also been questioned.
The Orascam Group of Egypt, a telecommunications firm, is apparently completing the construction, though some have denied this connection.
Wikipedia reports: "Even though the Ryugyong dominates the Pyongyang skyline, official information regarding the hotel and its status have proven difficult to obtain. Though mocked-up images of the completed hotel had once appeared on North Korean stamps, the North Korean government denied the building's existence for many years. The government manipulated official photographs in order to remove the structure, and excluded it from printed maps of Pyongyang. The alleged problems associated with the hotel led some media sources to dub it "The Worst Building in the World","Hotel of Doom" and "Phantom Hotel".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryugyong_Hotel
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