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With the enormous over-exposure of Korean pop music last year, a fitting preparation for the over-exposure to Korean nuclear fallout this year, it made me dwell on the ‘dear leader’, dead old Kim Jong Il.
I thought it might be a good idea to clear up some of the misconceptions that have been floating around the media and which have continued to surround this homicidal hobbit.
1. No Fox News, he did not have a magical birth (and for God’s sake please start producing some news on foxes). Multiple sources state that he was born in a quaint log cabin inside a totally secret base on Korea’s most sacred mountain, Mt. Paekdu. At the moment of his birth, a bright star burst up in the sky, the seasons spontaneously changed from Winter to Spring, and 2 rainbows appeared (double rainbows apparently, WOAH). Unsurprisingly this actually isn’t the case as he was in fact born in a guerilla base in Japan. I think that’s just as well though as he might have been sued by the Catholics for nicking their story.
2. He did in fact wear 4 inch platform heels. 4 inch. 4 INCH.
3. His state media says the world loves him. No we don’t. Although we do like to see pictures of him looking at things. Just google Kim looking at things if you don’t know what I’m talking about and have a jolly good half an hour clicking ‘older posts’
4. Due to him banning American influences in his country he was able to claim as FACT that he invented the hamburger. Despite it being clearly being named after its birth region Hamburg. So he renamed it… Double bread with meat. Catchy.
5. He claimed in golf that he played 18 holes in 25 shots which, if true, would actually make him the single greatest golfer of all time.
6. He gave people drug addictions. Yep! He fell off a horse and had to go on semi-addictive drugs…but he didn’t want to feel left out. So he ordered that his staff be injected with the same drugs so he wouldn’t be alone. Now there is team spirit.
7. He kidnapped a film maker and his wife and forced him to make a Communist propaganda version of… Godzilla. Yeah that one baffled me too.
8. He performed ethnic cleansing by moving disabled and small people (pot kettle black eh Kim?) to previously uninhabited islands. Not funny. Just true.
9. In the early 90s he was the world’s largest buyer of Hennessy spending $850,000 in one year on it. Nice to know when the average North Korean makes $1000 a year to live on. If you can call it living.
10. He created an ornamental city. Trust me… I know this is a long point but really worth reading. Kijong-Dong is a propaganda city that was originally built in the 1950s by Kim Jong Il’s father right on the border, this was to display the North’s superiority to the South and also to encourage people to defect. It has no actual residents, but an extensive effort has been put forth to simulate a functioning city, including lights on set timers, and street sweepers to create an illusion of activity. The use of modern telescopes has revealed that the units lack window glass, and some buildings are just concrete shells that don’t even have interior rooms. The city also houses the world’s largest flagpole, complete with a 300lb North Korean flag.
However as morally corrupt as he is, if someone offered me his sunglasses… I’d still wear them.
It is a sad thing when so many leaders of government want to rule all instead of helping all. I feel deep down we all want to help each other. We would rather all of us live in happiness than in sorrow, it is too tiring to hate people. Why do you think Ann Widdecombe has aged so badly? We can now travel and see the world for less and less and get there faster and faster and yet as we journey there we shut ourselves off. We shut ourselves within ourselves and see others in our world as mere players, or perhaps inconveniences.
Cleverness should be there to grant freedom but too many times you see gifted individuals becoming harder and less forgiving to those who make their mistakes for the first time. There is a pressure to work and think and earn rather than feel and laugh and live. We are perhaps becoming more like the machines we have created rather than the great humans who created them. How have we created technology like the internet and plane which seems to cry out for unity. Even this, my blog, could reach almost anywhere in the world and yet it is still a world full of suffering men, women and children. Victims of their societies torturing them, and abusing them, raping and murdering them. Kim might have been funny for us to look at from a safe distance, but he and all other dictators work by freeing themselves from any restraints. This can only be done by them being allowed to impinge on others’ rights. Yet as we saw, dictators die. So long as these dictators die, there will always be hope.