Kim Jong Il: a number of dubious "firsts"

The Bizarre, Twisted Cult Known as the ‘Democratic’ People’s Republic of Korea

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Kim Jong Il’s reign was a bizarre, hypocritical, Stalinistic empire. An estimated 20,000 political prisoners languished in re-education camps, and children starved in out-of-sight areas while the communist dictator annually imported $650,000 worth of Hennessy’s finest Cognac, and flew in chefs from Tokyo and Italy. His regime was a cardboard, papier-mâché empire that only allowed the free world an extremely limited glimpse of staged city areas of Pyongyang, the forbidden city, while the rest of the country was rumored to be in poverty and ruins.

Kim Jong Il: Road to ruin - The North Korean strongman led his nation through stagnation into misery

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The career of Kim Jong Il, North Korea's "Dear Leader," was marked by a series of historical firsts — most of them dubious at best. He was, to begin, the first ruler of a Marxist-Leninist state to inherit absolute power through hereditary succession from his father, "Great Leader" Kim Il Sung, founder of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, or DPRK.

He was also the first ruler of an urbanized, literate society to preside over a mass famine in peacetime: The Great North Korean Famine of the 1990s, which erupted shortly after his father's death, is believed to have killed hundreds of thousands of his subjects, and perhaps more. (Outsiders cannot know the precise toll; that figure remains a state secret.)

Since the very late 1990s, when North Korea's famine apparently subsided, the food situation in the country has remained desperately precarious: Resumption of famine has been forestalled only by humanitarian food aid, Western economic assistance and Chinese largesse. Thus Kim Jong Il also earned the lifetime achievement award for overseeing the first industrialized economy ever to lose the capacity to feed itself.

Comment: We need to pray for this country that the Gospel doors would open!