The Three Battles of Wanat by Mark Bowden
Author:Mark Bowden [Bowden, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780802190666
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2016-06-11T16:00:00+00:00
The Bright Sun of Juche
Published as “Understanding Kim Jong Un, the World’s Most Enigmatic and Unpredictable Dictator,” Vanity Fair, March 2015
Does anybody make an easier target than Kim Jong Un?
He’s Fatboy Kim the Third, the tyrant with a Fred Flintstone haircut; the grinning, chain-smoking owner of his own small nuclear arsenal; brutal warden to about 120,000 political prisoners; and the last true hereditary monarch on the planet. He’s the Supreme Leader, nay, Great Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), Heaven-Sent Brilliant Commander—I am not making these titles up—and Marshal of its military (which includes the fourth largest standing army in the world), general secretary of the Workers Party of Korea (the only outfit in play north of the thirty-eighth Parallel) … a man who at age thirty-two owns the longest list of excessive honorifics anywhere, every one wholly unearned. He is the youngest head of state in the world, and probably the most spoiled. On the great grade-school playground of world affairs, he might as well be wearing across his broad bottom a big “Kick me” sign.
Kim is so easy to kick that even the United Nations, which famously agrees on nothing, voted overwhelmingly in November to recommend that he and the rest of North Korea’s leadership be hauled before the International Criminal Court in The Hague and tried for crimes against humanity.
In the world press, Kim is a bloodthirsty madman and buffoon. He is said to be a drunk; to have become so obese gorging on Swiss cheese that his genitals have shrunk; and, having so far produced no male heir, to use bizarre remedies for impotence—like a distillation of snake venom. He is said to have had his uncle, Jang Song Thaek, and the entire Jang family mowed down with heavy machine guns (or possibly exterminated by mortar rounds, rocket-propelled grenades, or flamethrowers) and then fed to ravenous dogs. He is reported to have a yen for bondage porn and to have ordered all young men in his country to adopt his peculiar hairstyle. According a frenzy of global speculation after he had minor surgery on his ankle last summer, he was at death’s door and had already been ousted by his younger sister, Kim Yo Jong, who is now secretly governing the country, or, no … by the Ministry of Information, which is actually governing and using her as a prop, or … maybe the real power is now the nation’s defense minister, Hyon Yong Chol.
All in the preceding paragraph is untrue, or, perhaps safer to say, unfounded. It is a testimony to media’s timeless talent for making things up. The story that Jang was fed to dogs was actually invented by a Chinese satirical magazine, as a joke, before it began racing around the world as a viral version of truth. In light of this, is it too much of a stretch to consider that our take on Kim is all wrong?
What if, despite the well-documented horrors of the Stalinist regime he inherited
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