LEFTWING MONSTERS: JONG IL KIM

http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/ Date: 4/19/2011 9:47:52 AM

 
Supreme leader of North Korea, possessing the titles General Secretary of the Korean Workers Party, Chairman of the National Defense Commission, and Supreme Commander of the Korean People's Army

Kim Jong Il has been the supreme leader of North Korea since taking power upon the 1994 death of his father, Kim Il Sung, who had ruled the country continuously since 1948. Kim Jong Il was born February 16, 1941 in Siberia, Russia, while his father was serving in the Soviet 88th Brigade, which was composed of Chinese and Korean exiles. Kim’s official North Korean biography, however, states that he was born in February 1942, in a log cabin on North Korea's highest mountain, Mt. Paektu -- his birth attended simultaneously by a double rainbow and a radiant star in the heavens. The elder Kim returned to the North Korean capital of Pyongyang in September 1945, after the end of World War II, and Kim Jong Il and his mother joined him there two months later. In 1949 Kim Jong Il’s mother died in childbirth.
Kim was 9 years old when the Korean War broke out in 1950, and his father sent him, for safety, to Manchuria for the duration of the conflict. In 1963 the 22-year-old Kim graduated from Kim Il Sung University and thereafter held a variety of posts in the communist Korean Workers Party (KWP). Within a few years he became his father's secretary, and in September 1973 he was named Party Secretary in charge of Organization, Propaganda, and Agitation. In 1974 Kim Il Sung officially announced that Kim Jong Il would succeed him as the ruler of North Korea when he, the elder Kim, could no longer perform the duties required of the President.
Kim Jong Il’s influence over the daily operations of the KWP grew steadily with each passing year. By October 1980, he held senior posts in the Politburo, the Military Commission, and the Party Secretariat. In February 1982 he was made a member of the Seventh Supreme People's Assembly and was the most influential individual in the nation other than his father. In 1983 South Korea accused Kim of having ordered a Rangoon, Burma bombing that took the lives of 17 visiting South Korean officials. Four years later, South Korea claimed that Kim had masterminded the bombing of Korean Air Flight 858, which killed all 115 passengers on November 29th of that year. Kim Hyon Hui, the North Korean agent who planted a bomb in Flight 858, stated that Kim Jong Il had personally ordered the operation.
In 1990-91 Kim Jong Il was named commander of North Korea's armed forces, though he had no military experience. In 1992, Kim Il Sung publicly stated that his son now had authority over all internal affairs in North Korea. When Kim Il Sung died of a heart attack on July 8, 1994. Kim Jong Il officially assumed control of the Party and state apparatus. Many insiders doubted his ability to serve as head of state, given his reputaton, according to South Korean accounts, as an impulsive, self-absorbed, heavy-drinking playboy fixated on his appearance, donning permed hair and inserting lifts in his shoes to raise his diminutive five-foot-three stature. Moreover, rumors abounded that he had frequently ordered the kidnappings of young women in Japan and elsewhere who were forced to service him sexually in several luxury villas he owned. Kim is reported to have fathered thirteen illegitimate children over the years.
In 1997 Kim was officially named the leader of the ruling KWP (the party to which 80 percent of all North Korean government officials belong). He was unable, however, to duplicate his father's status as a figure so solemnly revered by an adoring nation. The elder Kim, by means of political omnipotence and his complete control of all media, had created a cult of personality wherein he was viewed as a divine, paternal figure who came to be widely known as the "Great Leader," a title whose majesty would be assigned to him even after his death, theoretically in perpetuity. North Korea's 1998 Constitution officially declared Kim Il Sung the "Eternal President of the Republic," and the post of President was officially abolished on grounds that no one would ever again be worthy of sharing the title of so extraordinary an individual. Thus Kim Jong Il today holds several official titles -- the most important being General Secretary of the KWP, Chairman of the National Defense Commission, and Supreme Commander of the Korean People's Army -- but is not referred to as the President of North Korea. Though his countrymen's veneration of him is not of the magnitude they previously showered upon his father, Kim Jong Il has nonetheless developed a formidable personality cult of his own, and North Koreans commonly refer to him as their "Dear Leader" -- an appellation first assigned to him in the early 1980s. The state-controlled Korean media alternately characterize him as the nation’s "peerless leader" and "the great successor to the revolutionary cause."
During his reign, Kim has continued his father’s personal philosophy of Juche, a code of diplomatic and economic "self-reliance" closely related to Stalinism, which the father had instituted as a check against excessive Soviet or Communist Chinese influence on his nation.
Since assuming dictatorial power, Kim has rarely appeared or spoken publicly in his homeland. To date, his voice has been broadcast only once therein – in 1992, when, during a military parade, he shouted into a microphone: "Glory to the heroic soldiers of the people's army!"
A devastating famine struck North Korea in 1998 and 1999 as a result of decades of economic mismanagement and resource misallocation, poor industrial and agricultural productivity, the disappearance of previously lucrative markets following the Soviet Union's collapse, and the government's massive military expenditures. This famine claimed an estimated 2 to 3 million lives (out of a population of perhaps 22 million) and forced the country to rely heavily on international aid to feed its population while Kim continued to funnel all available funds into the maintenance of his million-man army.
Systematic human rights abuses throughout North Korea have been rampant and well documented during Kim's reign. It is estimated that there are some 200,000 political prisoners in the country today; there have been innumerable reports of torture, slave labor, and forced abortions and infanticides in the prison camps.
On a recent visit to China, Kim praised that nation's economic progress and hinted that he might permit some attempts at economic reforms like those carried out in China by Deng Xiaoping. In 2000 Kim held a summit meeting with Kim Dae-jung, who had been elected President of South Korea in 1997; the meeting yielded no significant agreements, however.
Kim's relationship with the United States has been extremely acrimonious. In 1994 negotiations with the Clinton administration, Kim agreed to shut down his nation’s nuclear weapons production program in exchange for two light-water (non-weapons-related) nuclear reactors (funded mostly by South Korea) plus fuel oil shipments from the United States. But in October 2002 Kim’s government admitted, when confronted with incontrovertible U.S. intelligence presented by the Bush administration, that it had violated its 1994 pledge and had in fact been illegally developing a nuclear program for several years. In late December 2002, Kim expelled UN weapons inspectors from the country and declared that he would never again abide by the terms of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, from which he officially withdrew North Korea in January 2003. Since that time, Kim’s government has vacillated between affirming and denying that it already possessed a nuclear arsenal of some kind. On July 4, 2006, North Korea test-launched a series of short-, medium-, and long-range ballistic missiles; the latter, while theoretically capable of reaching the American mainland, was unsuccessful in the test launch.
It is believed that in August 2008 Kim suffered a serious stroke. The degree of physical or mental impairment he may have suffered is not known.