North Koreans started the new year in an old way. On Jan. 1, their newspapers informed them that they “will become human bulwarks and human shields in defending Kim Jong Un unto death.” Just three days earlier, Kim Jong Un was declared the “Supreme Leader” of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Already, he is conscripting his countrymen as his bodyguards.
Any country that can afford nuclear weapons but not food has problems, and — in North Korea — problems are never solved but are simply inherited. Kim Jong Un is a problem child with lots of problems.
Still in his 20s, he is young and inexperienced. But as the son of the son of North Korea’s eternal president, he is sure to make the world’s worst country worse.
“He is the Supreme Leader who inherits the ideology, leadership, courage and audacity of Comrade Kim Jong Il,” said Kim Yong Nam, president of the North Korean Parliament. It’s not often that having the same qualities as a psychopathic dictator is a positive. But in North Korea, bloodlines are what count.
Ideologically, the DPRK is grounded in what B.R. Myers, author of “The Cleanest Race,” calls “paranoid, race-based nationalism.” Since the 1940s, the regime has perpetuated the myth that North Koreans are a unique and superior race, though not an invincible one.
As Myers explains, North Koreans believe their “childlike purity” makes them “so vulnerable to the outside world that they need a Parent Leader to survive.” The result is a toxic medley of superiority and inferiority complexes, which makes hating foreigners as natural as never seeing one.
Racial self-glorification goes hand in hand with xenophobia: The more unique you think you are, the more isolated and insecure you are likely to feel. In North Korea, these feelings are expressed collectively and embodied in each of the Kim leaders.
All totalitarian rulers try to foster a sense of interdependence between the masses and themselves. In a speech to his storm troopers, Adolf Hitler proclaimed, “All that you are, you are through me; all that I am, I am through you alone.”
Hitler was laying out the fundamental principle of totalitarianism: the absence of individual existence.
A totalitarian society is merely a cluster of atomized individuals shorn of all private attachments, personal interests and family ties. The Leader is your only representative, to whom you owe anything and everything.
This is why official propaganda casts the Leader as a parental figure. The dictator becomes both Mom and Dad, nurturing his people and punishing them at the same time.
According to a 2003 bulletin from the (North) Korean Central News Agency, the DPRK is “held together not by a mere bond between a leader and his warriors but by the family tie between a mother and her children, who share the same blood and breath.”
The same bulletin referred to Kim Jong Il as “Our Great Mother.” At his funeral last month, soldiers chanted, “Father, Father!” The slogan “We Cannot Live Away From His Breast” was featured at a parade not long before he died.
These slogans are not entirely empty, either. Faced with the insignificance of their own lives, people sometimes seek what the social anthropologist Ernest Becker called an “immortality project,” a way to prove their worth by sacrificing their lives.
From the moment they are born, North Koreans must be “ready to die in order not to get killed,” as Eric Hoffer once phrased it. When dying for the Dear Leader is the only permissible reason to live, it’s no surprise that the most inhumane regimes supply the most human shields.
Windsor Mann is editor of “The Quotable Hitchens: From Alcohol to Zionism.”
