Stupid White Men-- and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! - Michael Moore [80]
NORTH KOREA
Here’s the thing about North Korea’s ruler, Kim Jong Il: he’s a huge movie buff, with a home collection of more than fifteen thousand videos. Maybe he’s been looking to all those movies for guidance on how to save the oppressed and starving people of his country. But since his favorite films (in addition to pornography) apparently include American westerns, Elizabeth Taylor movies, and the Friday the 13th series, it just may be that he’s looking at the wrong movies.
The dictator/film fan has also written a book on the art of the cinema, and even founded a film school. “Kim Jong Il watches every single film made in North Korea,” said Kim Hae Young, a North Korean actress who defected to the South. “He gives comments on acting, directing, and everything else. If he compliments some actor, he or she suddenly becomes a star.”
He shares an appreciation of the whimsical world of entertainment with his eldest son, Kim John-nam, who recently flew to Japan, desperate to visit the new Japanese Disney World. He used a fake Dominican Republic passport (sure, he looks Dominican!) to try to gain entry to the country. When immigration realized who he was, they called his daddy and had him sent back to his room in North Korea.
Kim Jong Il reportedly receives blood transfusions from young virgins on a regular basis “to slow the aging process.” He is also an avid sports fan, and fully understands the difference between zone and man-to-man defense in American basketball. He wears platform shoes to increase his height, and is rumored to be the largest individual purchaser of Hennessy Cognac in the world.
The problem is, millions of people are starving to death in North Korea, mostly because Kim Jong Il is also a dictator who spends 25 percent of his country’s GNP on the military. Now you can get away with that if you’re an American—I mean, we’ve got a lot of amber waves of grain, so we won’t (all) starve giving the majority of our money to the Pentagon. But in North Korea, a rocky peninsula with lots of snails, you just can’t operate from that scenario.
Since 1948, when the Korean peninsula was divided into the Communist North and capitalist/fascist South, the citizens of both Koreas have endured harsh conditions. They’ve lived through the Korean War, which never officially ended (we’re still in “ceasefire” mode), decades of repression and isolation (which for South Korea ended with the pro-democracy movement of the 1980s, but for North Korea continues today), economic deprivation, floods, and famine. North Koreans have only been allowed reunions with family members from South Korea twice in more than fifty years: in 1985, just fifty people from each side were allowed to meet with their relatives, and in August of 2000, one hundred more were permitted reunions.
Kim Jong Il, referred to in North Korea as “Dear Leader,” has a reputation for being an eccentric, irresponsible playboy. “The assessment a couple of years ago was of a drunken kook who didn’t understand the world around him,” a former senior Clinton official has said. After he succeeded his father—who ruled the country from 1948 to 1994—as the country’s official leader, Kim was accused of being responsible for the bombing deaths of several members of the South Korean cabinet, and for the explosion of a South Korean civilian airliner. He has a huge army, and is even suspected of having the atomic bomb.
In the past two years, though, Kim Jong Il has begun showing signs of a change of heart, signs that he’s emerging from the shadows. When the famine began in 1995, Kim refused to allow foreign aid workers free access to the countryside, and had some food aid diverted to the army. But last year he allowed almost 150 representatives of international governmental organizations to set up camp in North Korea.