{"id":4806,"date":"2019-07-03T08:14:20","date_gmt":"2019-07-03T15:14:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=4806"},"modified":"2019-07-03T08:14:20","modified_gmt":"2019-07-03T15:14:20","slug":"korea-blog-the-making-of-a-dictator-in-anna-fifields-the-great-successor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=4806","title":{"rendered":"Korea Blog: The Making of a Dictator in Anna Fifield’s “The Great Successor”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I first learned of Kim Jong Il at the same time I learned of the country he ruled, and for years thereafter had no image to associate with North Korea but that of the high-living, Hollywood-obsessed Dear Leader with permed hair and platform shoes. This was back in my high school days of the late 1990s and early 2000s, a time when it came as a surprise that eccentric third-world dictators still existed at all. In subsequent years Kim would become more and more an international figure of fun, a process that culminated in his appearance as a grotesque marionette in\u00a0South Park<\/em>\u00a0creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone\u2019s film\u00a0Team America: World Police.<\/em>\u00a0By the time Kim died in 2011 I had learned much more about both Koreas, North and South, but the only thing that struck me as notable about his son and successor Kim Jong-un was his having been born the same year as I was.<\/p>

Though less of an oddity than his father, Kim Jong Un has proven to be the more compelling figure, especially to consumers of news in the West. That goes even more so for producers of news like\u00a0Washington Post\u00a0<\/em>Beijing bureau chief Anna Fifield, who began her career in Asia in 2004 when the\u00a0Financial Times\u00a0<\/em>sent her to Seoul. She eventually developed a desire to \u201cfind out everything there was to know\u201d about the current ruler of North Korea, and its fruit is the new book\u00a0The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un<\/em>. Applied by Fifield herself or not, that subtitle reflects the tone of the book, many of whose chapters open with epigraphs quoting the characteristically bombastic, tortured English in which North Korean propaganda pronounces on such subjects as the \u201cmonumental edifices of eternal value\u201d built across that \u201csocialist land of bliss,\u201d the \u201cthrice-cursed acts of treachery\u201d committed a disgraced party member (Kim\u2019s uncle Jang Song Thaek, whose subsequent execution was ordered by Kim himself), and the \u201cicon of cultural efflorescence\u201d that is the city of Pyongyang.<\/p>

Few observers can resist the chance to poke fun at North Korea\u2019s rhetoric, or indeed any other aspect of how the impoverished, belligerent \u201cHermit Kingdom\u201d presents itself to the world. At the same time, the country also offers its observers an almost unparalleled opportunity to fire off high-handed pronouncements of their own, usually moral in character, on everything from the gulag-like system of prison camps made for dissenters to the enforced drabness of the clothing and hairstyles seen on the streets of the capital. \u201cMay you soon be free to follow your dreams,\u201d Fifield writes to the people ruled over by the Kim dynasty in her book\u2019s dedication, a statement neither particularly patronizing nor self-serving, which makes it quite refreshing by the standards of writing and speaking on North Korea \u2014 standards against which\u00a0The Great Successor\u00a0<\/em>measures in every way as a superior work.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I first learned of Kim Jong Il at the same time I learned of the country he ruled, and for years thereafter had no image to associate with North Korea but that of the high-living, Hollywood-obsessed Dear Leader with permed hair and platform shoes. This was back in my high school days of the late […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4806"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4806\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4808,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4806\/revisions\/4808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}