Despot of the Week #5 – Kim Jong II

In a world that has become increasingly uniform along the lines of democracy and free market economics (or at least the pretence of those ideals) it’s somehow comforting to know that there’s one little country out there that just refuses to toe the line. A country that adopts a policy of utter defiance towards the outside world as its number one guiding ideology. A country ruled by a gang of paranoid crazoids who’d sooner let their own people starve to death than accept any kind of assistance from foreign powers. North Korea, which uses the threat of nuclear weapons like Tony Soprano uses the threat of physical violence – to extort cash and resources from terrified foreign states.

Remember those old Asterix books that always started off with a picture of a magnifying glass highlighting a little Gaulish village, surrounded by fortified Roman camps? Y’know, the story about that one village of  indomitable Gauls that still holds out against the Roman invaders? Well that little Gaulish village is North Korea, the last outpost holding out against the evil forces of foreign capitalist imperialism. At least, that’s how the North Koreans see things. Pretty much everybody else just hates North Korea. And the reason they hate North Korea, is because it’s one of the few countries left on the planet that is genuinely scary, Freddy Krueger style. Forget the phony dangers Saddam Hussein or the Taliban were supposed to pose to Western civilisation. These guys are the real deal. Welcome to the bizarrely insular world of North Korea, where school children are taught that the Dear Leader, Kim Jong II, came down from a magic mountain to bring paradise to the people.