Annyeong!

It’s really not been a good year for despotic leaders, has it? A handful of governments toppled, Hosni Mubarak jailed, Osama killed, ditto Gaddafi, and now the North Korean state-run mouth of propaganda has announced the departure of Dear Leader for that great de-militarized zone in the sky. Then again, as the saying goes in Pyongyang, one good Kim deserves another. So, as Dear Leader’s dearest son prepares to assume the mantle of power, let’s look back at some of KJI’s greatest hits.

Special delivery!

Always security conscious, Dear Leader preferred to tour around by armoured train. En route, he would have his favourite delicacies airlifted to the train on a daily basis, including fresh lobster and roasted donkey meat. In 2004, he also claimed he invented the hamburger.

(sings) “He’s so ronery!”

Kim considered himself quite the auteur. He claimed to have written six operas in two years celebrating the mighty Korean revolution and ascendancy of the mighty Korean worker. Probably not available on iTunes.

And, action!

His biggest passion, besides antagonising the West, was foreign films. He boasted a collection of over 20 000 movies, favourites being the Rambo and Friday The 13th series. In 1978, he ordered the abduction of a South Korean film director, Shin Sang-ok and his actress wife Choi Eun-hee. They were forced to make over seven films for the cinema-obsessed leader, including a knock off version of Godzilla, before escaping to the West in 1986.

“The same thing we do every night, 분홍색을 띤!”

He assumed the title of Dear Leader in 1994, replacing his father. He also allegedly preferred the title of “Central Brain”.

At least it’s quiet…

In the 1950s he commissioned the construction of an entire city called Kijong Dong, only for the purposes of propaganda. To this day, nobody has ever lived there.

(sings) “While soldiers patrolled the DMZ by night…”

He claims his birth was heralded by the appearance of a double rainbow, an evening star and the simultaneous advent of Spring. Actually he was born in a military encampment near the Russian city of Khabarovsk.

On a more serious note, though much parodied in media and entertainment circles, many political leaders and analysts considered the late Jong-il a clever and adept political manipulator, whose early climb to power was only bettered by his assiduous clinging to the Marxist-Leninist foundations laid by his father, despite international criticism of his government’s abuses, and successive famines and natural disasters in his tightly controlled regime. Always something of a mystery, he was nothing less than a singular breed of Communist crazy. What better way to send him into history than with one of the keenest tributes to his sheer lunacy.

[Source: BBC News, Youtube]