Kim Jong-il
“Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader who realized his family’s dream of turning his starving, isolated country into a nuclear-weapons power even as it sank further into despotism, died on Saturday of a heart attack while traveling on his train, according to an announcement Monday by the country’s state-run media.” NYT
Let’s dive a little bit deeper into the life of the wacky world of the cognac-fueled, nuclear weapons brandishing North Korean dictator.
NORTH KOREA’S CHOICE: COLLAPSE OR REFORM
by Andrei Lankov | Foreign Affiars | December 2011
Should Kim Jong Un succeed in establishing himself over the next few months, policymakers and analysts will express hope that he will usher in an era of reform. But as long as he wants to remain alive and in control of North Korea, he will have little choice but to continue his father’s policies. To survive, the North Korean state will have no choice but to remain what it is now — an anachronistic, nuclear-armed dictatorship whose population lives in an abject poverty.
by Michael Goldstein | The Utopian | December 2010
“You have not seen many shades of grey until you have seen Pyongyang.”
NORTH KOREA’S DIGITAL UNDERGROUND
by Robert S Boynton | The Atlantic | April 2011
To smuggle facts into or out of North Korea is to risk imprisonment and even execution. Yet today, aided by a half-dozen stealthy media organizations outside the country, citizen-journalists are using technologies new and old to break the regime’s iron grip on information. Will the truth set a nation free?
by Barbara Demick | The New Yorker | July 2010
On February 23rd, a North Korean girl just shy of her seventeenth birthday walked across the frozen Tumen River into China, becoming at once a runaway and a refugee. Song-hee (as she asked to be called) is a small, moonfaced girl with a faint constellation of acne trailing across her broad forehead. She came from Musan, an iron-mining city, where she had been in her junior year of high school. Her favorite subject was math. After graduation, she intended to go to a teachers’ college in the nearby city of Hoeryong. “I’m not the best in my class, but I have passion,’’ she told me. Although education in North Korea is nominally free, students buy their own lunches and books and are expected to provide monetary gifts for their teachers, who are so poorly paid that they cannot survive without the extra income. Song-hee’s parents had been saving money for her, since neither of her two brothers showed academic promise. “If anybody goes to college in our family, it should be you,’’ Song-hee’s father had told her.Then, on November 30, 2009, the North Korean government announced that it was devaluing its currency. Henceforth, all existing North Korean money would be worthless, and small allotments of new money would be given to each family. The life savings of members of the nascent middle class were reduced to a handful of paper, worth about fifteen dollars on the market.
by David Rose | Vanity Fair | August 2009
Office 39, North Korea’s billion-dollar crime syndicate, pays for Kim Jong Il’s missiles and cognac. Why did the Bush White House choose not to shut it down?
GULAG’S, NUKES AND A WATER SLIDE: CITIZEN SPIES LIFE NORTH KOREA’S VEIL
by Evan Ramstad | The Wall Street Journal | May 2009
With Sleuthing and Satellite Images, Mr. Melvin Fills the Blanks on a Secretive Nation’s Map.
BEHIND THE CURTAIN OF KIM JONG-IL’S REGIME
by Jonathan Watts | Mother Jones | April 2003
Where paranoia, propaganda, and poverty reigned, and an albino raccoon reassured starving North Koreans that good times were ahead. An account from one of the first Western journalists to gain access.
Monocle (subscription required)
In the first of a new series examining the possible turn of events in future scenarios, Monocle looks at how the reunification of North and South Korea might unfold.
by Scott Stossel | The Atlantic | July 2005
Dealing with North Korea could make Iraq look like child’s play – and the longer we wait, the harder it will get. That’s the message of a Pentagon-style war game involving some of this country’s most prominent foreign-policy strategists.
by Robert D Kaplan | The Atlantic | October 2006
The furor over Kim Jong Il’s missile tests and nuclear brinksmanship obscures the real threat: the prospect of North Korea’s catastrophic collapse. How the regime ends could determine the balance of power in Asia for decades. The likely winner? China.
by Philip Gourevitch | The New Yorker | September 2003
Kim Jong Il plays a canny game with South Korea and the U.S.