Sharing a grave with evil
aplenty
By Wesley Pruden
PrudenPolitics.com
History loves irony, as Prof. Gingrich could (and no
doubt will) tell us. Two men renowned for their
deeds die more or less on the same day on opposite
sides of the world. The bad guy gets the big
headline, the good guy makes the front page one last
time as a footnote to the times.
Kim Jong-il, the pudgy maximum leader of the Hermit
Kingdom, will now share a grave in a gaudy memorial
in downtown Pyongyang with evil aplenty, and the
ghosts of many thousands of his countrymen whom he
starved and otherwise brutalized into early death.
Kim, a Michelin Man in a badly tailored leisure suit
on elevator shoes with big hair that looked as if he
trimmed it with a chain saw, never missed a session
at the dinner table while his subjects were left to
survive on thin soup of bark stripped from scrawny
trees. Kim, who was 69 at his death, looked more
like an unemployed circus clown than the aging
supremo of an emerging nuclear state.
Thousands of miles away, Vaclav Havel, the man
regarded as “the dissident soul of the Czechs” died
at 75 at his country home in northern Bohemia,
mourned as the principled man who eloquently
articulated the moral power of the poor and
powerless. Shy and sometimes polite to a fault, the
acclaimed author of plays was a man who walked the
walk, spending five years in Communist prisons and
emerging to inspire a counterrevolution that toppled
an evil empire.
Kim Jong-un would be the Great Young ‘un, as his
grand- father was “Great Leader” and his father
“Dear Leader”.
Mr. Havel is mourned quietly as the author of “the
Velvet Revolution” that liberated the millions on
the wrong side of the Berlin Wall, which itself was
leveled by the forces of light that Mr. Havel set
against the Soviet legions. The mourning for Kim
Jong-il smelled more like the cheaply manufactured
stuff.
Chinese state-run television networks showed videos
of hundreds of North Koreans flooding into the
streets to weep under the direction of cops of
various kind. North Korea’s official news agency
reported that people in the streets were “writhing
in pain” from the loss of the man who succeeded his
father, Kim il-Sung, “the Great Leader” who by fiat
is “the eternal president” of North Korea. Synthetic
immortality is all that accompanies a despot
dispatched to justice in what Sen. John McCain calls
“a warm corner of hell.”
Kim Jong-un, Kim Jong-il’s favored young’un,
the officially designated successor, is the only
source of solace for the weeping millions in North
Korea. “We have esteemed Comrade Kim Jong-un,” the
state news agency reported. North Koreans from all
walks of life “are in utter despair but finding
comfort in the absolute surety that the leadership
of [the young’un] will lead and succeed the great
task of revolutionary enterprise.”
He has a hard act to follow. The newly dead Kim was
quite a bit of piecework. His teachers insisted that
as a child he taught them more than they taught him.
“He is a challenge for a teacher,” one of his
professors told me when I visited North Korea
several years ago. “There is nothing that he does
not already know.” When he took up golf, Kim shot
four – or maybe it was five – holes-in-one on his
first round. He modestly promised to do better when
he grew accustomed to the game.
But Kim Jong-il and his regime did one thing well.
They kept the Hermit Kingdom insulated from the
outside world, so efficiently done that when I was
there with four colleagues from The Washington Times
we were astonished to discover how little the North
Koreans we met knew of that outside world. Many had
not heard that a man had walked on the moon.
Kim Jong-un, who would be the Great Young’un in the
tradition of his grandfather (the Great Leader) and
his father (the Dear Leader), won’t have much time
to establish himself as the Great Intellect or the
Great Duffer. The North Korean generals probably
have other ideas about who should rise to the top of
the Great Ant Heap. The generals may have concluded
that since both George W. Bush and Barack Obama have
demonstrated they have no appetite for getting tough
with Pyongyang they can push the young’un aside and
consolidate a military dictatorship free to make
mischief at home or abroad.
If there’s a Vaclav Havel waiting in the wings, no
one has seen him. The outside world is right to be
wary and, like the Koreans in Seoul, on high alert.
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The
Washington Times.