Unreality Check: From Kim to Kim in North Korea

North Korea is among the poorest nations in the world, enduring government mismanagement that emphasizes military spending, which leads to repeat famines and manipulated relief efforts. With the announcement of Kim Jong Il’s death, North Koreans engaged in a massive display of rote grief, orchestrated, filmed and released to western media and analyzed by Philip Gourevitch for the New Yorker. “To the outside world, it has always been easier to mock North Korea’s craziness than to fathom its horror, even as an estimated two to three million people died there of starvation in the late [1990s], and a generation of children were stunted by extreme malnutrition,” Gourevitch writes. Like members of a cult or abused children, North Koreans have every reason to grieve, he concludes, because the irrational regime continues under a new Kim, with military support, and the most powerful countries in the world are helpless, standing by to speculate and watch. Ending the Stalinist-style regime and the suffering would carry great cost. – YaleGlobal