I have somewhat the same kinds of feelings about these two figures.
Although there is little in their political philosophies that I can
agree with, I get totally disgusted with how the mass media has framed
them. In the first instance, we found the word "angry" pinned to him in
over 868 different articles prior to the Iowa primary like a tail on a
donkey. At that point, voting for him would have been almost tantamount
to voting for a serial killer.
Kim Jong Il gets the same kind of treatment. A week can not go by
without some ludicrous charge about how he is preparing some super-bomb
to blow up the planet while feasting on $5000 per ounce caviar. If Ian
Fleming had come up with a character that was so one-dimensional as
this, his editors would have told him to go back to the drawing board.
Last week I wrote about the charges made in a BBC documentary that
relied heavily on the testimony of Soon Ok-lee, a figure associated with
Christian Solidarity Worldwide. On their website she is quoted as
saying that Christians "were not allowed to look up to heaven because
they believed in God and had to always have their necks at a ninety
degree angle, making them disfigured". She also claims that on one
occasion in an iron foundry, the guard "ordered eight Christians to
recant and when they refused, he had molten iron poured over them to
kill them."
Today I dropped in on Denis Dutton's Arts and Letters website (a press
digest informed by the sensibility of the neoconservative New Criterion
mixed with spiked-online--perfectly dreadful in other words) and found a
link to an article by Kenji Fujimoto that appeared in the Jan/Feb
Atlantic Monthly, a neoliberal magazine.
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/01/fujimoto.htm)
This is Kim Jong Il's former sushi chef who wrote an exposé that charged
him with a fondness for $600 bottles of cognac, dog stew (don't you know
that these things go together on any gourmet table) and naked exotic
dancers. Fujimoto apparently was drawn into an intense discussion with
the dictator about whether North Korea should develop nuclear weapons.
He advised against it (probably in between slicing up tuna belly and
yellowtail).
I should add that Fujimoto's publisher is best-known for whitewashing
Japan's war atrocities and has urged the ministry to erase the "comfort
women" issue from high school textbooks.
For an antidote to this kind of over-the-top Orientalism, I'd recommend
Kevin Y. Kim's article in the latest Village Voice titled "The Devil You
Don't Know". (http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0407/essay.php). He writes:
>>Last September, Philip Gourevitch published a New Yorker story about
North Korea without ever visiting the disturbing land that was his
subject. At 15,000 words, it is the longest such piece in recent memory.
But by restricting his sources to U.S. officials and North Korean
defectors and propaganda, Gourevitch falls into a narrow hermeneutic
circle, driven round by the eloquent rage of his democratic passions.
"The crimes of North Korea," he writes, "stand out as the most . . .
unrelieved expression of what can only be called savage Communism."
Curiously, his intrepid research, covering well-known North Korean lies
about its modern history, overlooks the virtually forgotten cataclysm
that baptized this horrid garrison state, shaped its leaders'
worldviews, and inured its citizens to incessant air-raid drills and
"military-first" policies: the U.S. Korean War bombing campaign that
leveled most major Northern cities, killed millions of civilians,
destroyed huge irrigation dams, and forced survivors to live in caves.
He doesn't mention that the North, for decades, has received more U.S.
nuclear threats than any other country—or that the counterpart to his
blistering catalog of North Korean terrorism is the far less publicized
South Korean terrorism that left 5,000 spies dead or missing in the
North and 2,200 living in the South under government surveillance
(according to Time, a small team, including death-row inmates, trained
to assassinate Kim Il Sung for three years). An American exceptionalist
view of history—relying on glaring omissions instead of bald-faced
lies—precipitates Gourevitch's failure to comprehend the North as the
world's preeminent garrison state, buttressed by 50 years of threats
from the world's preeminent military power and its Korean ally. North
Korea is instead, he writes, a "concentration camp" solely arising,
presumably, from its leaders' Hitler-like cruelty.<<
--
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