http://sg.news.yahoo.com/030216/1/37t1u.html
Sunday February 16, 10:30 AM
Birthday boy Kim is god, philosopher king, rock star rolled into
one
North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, celebrating his 61st birthday, is
a god, philosopher king and rock star rolled into one in his home
country.
To the nation's 22 million people, the chubby, curly-haired head of
the Korean Workers' Party is an infallible genius giving
on-the-spot guidance on everything from military strategy to
industrial production.
"We're able to face the US superpower and the hostile US policies
because of our brilliant commander, Chairman Kim Jong Il," said Ryu
Sung Rim, a senior foreign affairs official. "He is a thinker on a
par with Marx and Lenin."
People in Pyongyang got up before daybreak last week to prepare
sidewalks and public parks for the grand birthday festivities
Sunday, while state television beamed lengthy reports of even Kim's
tiniest activities.
"Long Live the Sun of the 21st century, General Kim Jong Il," reads
a wide red banner greeting passengers as they descend escalators to
the "Prosperity" metro station.
"Our country is one big family, and our father is Kim Jong Il,"
said a translator assigned to foreign visitors.
This metaphor hits a particularly soft spot with North Koreans,
whose government has never tried to break up traditional family
ties the way the leaders of China did in the early decades of
communist rule.
At a Pyongyang exhibition, dozens of government departments and
army units are competing to produce the most splendid arrangements
of the Kimjongilia, a brand of Begonia allegedly invented by a
Japanese admirer.
"I love flowers," Pyongyang housewife Ri Sang Mi told the Pyongyang
Times. "Among them I like Kimjongilia best because it is not only
beautiful, but also bears the name of the great leader Kim Jong Il
who works hard to bring joy to us."
Foreign observers have few doubts that after 55 years of constant,
monotonous propaganda, the large majority of North Koreans really
do have genuine feelings for their dictator.
"Ordinary people have been on a one-way track to this kind of
brainwashing and have been roboticized into believing in this
nonsense, said Dong-bok Lee, a senior associate with the Center for
Strategic and International Studies.
For all its pumped-up magnificence, the Kim Jong Il personality
cult is strangely devoid of a person at its center.
Contrary to the ubiquitous statues of his father Kim Il Sung, who
died in 1994, images of Kim junior are mostly absent from the
streets.
As the regime has built up expectations over the past week for the
lavish birthday bash, Kim Jong Il has instead been represented in
the streets by posters of the Begonia that carries his name.
It could suggest that Kim's main attraction is the reflected glory
of his later father.
"Kim Jong Il said, 'Don't expect any change from me, we will uphold
the policies of Kim Il Sung'," said a Pyongyang resident as if he
were reciting words of deep wisdom.
Nowhere does the adoration of Kim senior become clearer than at his
mausoleum on the outskirts of Pyongyang, where thousands pay their
respects every day.
Visitors are given headphones in which a trembling voice describes
how the entire nation was struck by grief at Kim's demise, but goes
on to say consolingly that he "will be with us in all
eternity".
As the long rows pass slowly by the embalmed remains of Kim, every
other woman breaks into tears, an illustration of how the emotions
of an entire population can be manipulated.
With access to no news from abroad, nearly all North Koreans are
unaware that Kim Jong Il is widely seen overseas not as a savior,
but as a main source of his country's desperate economic
predicament.
Rather, preparatory committees have been hard at work from
Tajikistan to Poland to mark Kim's birthday, while seminars on his
feats have been held as far away as Mexico and Austria, the state
news agency KCNA claimed.
No official wants to speculate what life in the impoverished nation
will be like after Kim Jong Il dies, and all questions of his
succession are immediately put to rest.
But according to reports, officials are now planning to create a
new cult around Kim's second son, Kim Jung Chol.
The question is how long North Korea can remain isolated from the
outside world, and its people kept unaware of how unusual their
extreme hero-worship is, foreign experts said.
The well-educated may be the first to abandon the Kim cult,
according to Lee of the Center for Strategic and International
Studies.
"When it comes to the elite, it's entirely different from what it
used to be some years ago," he said. "Some of the elite have been
exposed to the outside world, and have some capacity to question
and to feel curious."
