Kim Jong-un is also a divine being, with a body so efficient that he has never needed to use a bathroom. According to official myth, Kim could drive at age 3. As a student at Kim Il Sung University (named after his grandfather), Kim reportedly wrote 1,500 books and six operas in three years. North Koreans are taught that their leader is revered worldwide as one of the greatest composers ever, and his operas are “better than any in the history of music.” The first time he picked up a golf club, he recorded 11 holes-in-one and shot 38 under par.
It’s easy to laugh at this stuff (his father claimed to have invented the hamburger) but it isn’t a laughing matter, because the North Korean people believe it.
North Korea mirrors ancient monarchies in another respect: It’s a feudal society. A system called Songbun divides the population into three major classes and roughly 50 sub-classes. Whatever class you’re born into determines nearly everything important about your life, and each class is largely hereditary.
North Korea is arguably the greatest implementation of the totalitarian regime imagined in Plato’s “Republic.” Based on a series of myths that Plato would call “noble lies,” its people subscribe to the belief that they are a superior, chosen race in much the same way Nazis subscribed to potted views about Aryans. This forms the backdrop for the regime’s paranoia about the outside world.
Of course, the regime itself also operates as an extortion racket, feeding off not just its own people, but a global black market in arms, drugs, sex trafficking and counterfeiting. It has been willing to starve its own people in the pursuit of nuclear weapons, which it sees as the only guarantor of its sovereignty and its eventual destiny of reuniting the peninsula.
Negotiating with North Korea may be the right thing to do, but our negotiators should understand the monstrosity they’re dealing with.
