Part One: Kim Jong Un and His Family of Dictators

In Episode 70, Robert is joined by Eli Olsberg to discuss The Kims of North Korea. 

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hmm, what's Dick Taton? My denizens of totalitarian Regime? This
is Robert Evans hosted Behind the Bastards, the podcast with
the worst introductions in the podcasting game. Today we are
going to be talking about the Kims, the family that
has ruled North Korea for three quarters of a century.

(00:21):
And my guest today is Eli Olsburg, comedian, writer and
host of the podcast Closure and Pod is a woman. Uh, Eli,
Sophie is not there to be ashamed at me for
my terrible introduction this week? Would you please react with
with with shame and horror at my my hack is? Ways?
Is that is that too low key? Just? That was perfect?

(00:42):
That was perfect? That was perfect. Thank you so much,
thanks for having me. Yeah, thanks for being on. How's
your Uh? What do you what do you? What do
you think of the Kims, the jong Uns and the
jong Ills and ill songs of it all? Uh? Well,
you know It's funny is recently since that climate change
the report came out, I've gotten so fatalistic about all

(01:03):
of it. Uh. And for people listening, I'm sure you
know what I'm talking about. In case you don't. Uh,
there was like a few climate change reports that came
out that like now have guaranteed that by civilization will
be will like crumble due to climate change, and so
I'm like, man, I feel like at this point, everyone's
just gonna whatever we thought of them now, which is
not necessarily great. Uh the amount of you know, I mean,

(01:25):
they're obviously I don't even know where to start. I'm
so fucking jumbled about because I didn't know that's what
we're gonna be talking about. And whoo, I've got thoughts, um,
But overall, I'm just like, funk, we have thirty years left.
What the fuck? I don't know whether to look at
it that with more nihilism and just not acknowledge it
or be more upset about it. Do you know what

(01:47):
I mean? Well, yeah, I mean we're all in this
situation in the modern world where there's there's so many
garbage fires all around us. It's like it is even
worth putting out the one next to me because there's
this other one that's even bigger, or like there's so
many garbage fires that like you can't even put out
just one. It's just like everything around you is burning. Uh.
That is a frustration. Um. But at the same time,

(02:13):
I think there's value in learning about these people, especially
when they're people who, um, I think have been gotten
consistently wrong by sort of mainstream reporting on it. I
can say pretty clearly that the Kim family is one
of the most requested subjects for an episode of this podcast,
and has been since I started doing it. And I
think the reason so many people want an episode or

(02:35):
episodes about the Kim family is because of the kind
of stories that you hear about them on the news,
These like crazy tales of when Kim Jong Il would
be like, oh, I went golfing for the first time
and got eleven holes in one and then quit the
sport having mastered it. And like you, you hear these
wacky claims, and you assume that an episode about these
guys is just gonna be like one wacky fact after

(02:56):
the other. Um and so like yeah, And I also
think that you know what, it always is a thing
that like kind of and the reason more people I
think probably got curious. I don't think it's a coincidence
that when the interview came out. I think a lot
of people in America were suddenly like, Oh, this is
someone we should be concerned with because it's Uh, it's
because they're in a movie, and not only that, but

(03:18):
they don't want the movie to come out. Yeah, and
I think that we'll be talking about the inner view
summon this because it's actually there's some pretty important stuff there.
But I think in general, um, this is not going
to be the episode that people who clicked on this
excitedly hoping to hear a bunch of wacky North Korea
stories are expecting, because I don't think the Kim family

(03:40):
is what most people think they are. And I I
I think, in particular, Kim Jong un, the current ruler
of North Korea, UM, is a very different person than
most people expect um. And I find that really interesting,
and I think he's an important person to understand because
he has a major role in our our whole international
clusterfuck at the moment um. But yeah, that's what we're

(04:01):
gonna we're gonna talk about today is is the history
of the Kim family in as much detail as I
can reasonably give it now. Like, one of the problems
about covering these particular people is that a huge amount
of what we read about in the news about North
Korea are lies, and they're often lies about lies. Uh,
and even like when there's just so much misinformation that

(04:24):
that's out there, A lot of it's put out by
the regime. Other of it's is put out by like
sources in South Korea, sources in the United States. But
like actually parsing out what's real about the lives of
any of the people in the Kim dynasty is really
difficult to do. And I've done the best possible I

(04:44):
think here, but this is gonna have I'll say right now,
this will have a higher percentage of things that ten
years from now I look at and realize like, oh
that wound up not being true, just because there's so
much bullshit that gets put out about this family and
about what goes on in North Korea. So it's this
is this is a tough one, um I because like
I don't think that, uh, I think anyone where there's

(05:06):
like a dictatorship that where it's that heavy, where it's
like truly, I mean, if you really think about it,
there's not even any kind of like like here's a
better example, and not to specifically with like if you're
going back to movies, if you look to certain cinema,
you never hear anything heavy about North Korean cinema. That's
how much of a vice is pressing down you know

(05:28):
what I mean, Like you because even within Iran during
certain periods you know, cinema there still movies managed to
get out and have not only did they get out,
but they had a huge impact. And you know that
has never happened to my North Korea. You know. The biggest,
the the clearest way you can sort of put like
you can sort of display the differences between like Iran

(05:49):
and North Korea is that I know a shipload of
people who live in the United States or US citizens
and come from an Iranian background who regularly visit Iran
and go back to see their Hamley family. Nobody North
Koreans who make it out of North Korea don't get
to do that. You don't get to go back into
North Korea and then go live your life in the
US or wherever. Like yeah, Like that's a really clear

(06:12):
and so that's part of why up until very recently,
there's been almost no good information that you could get
out of the country other than what little came out
from like refugees who fled um. A lot of listeners
will probably remember how at the end of May nineteen,
reputable outlets around the world reported that Kim Jong un
executed several of his envoys to the United States after

(06:33):
failing to conclude a nuclear deal with the Trump administration UM,
and then five days later, evidence arose that the people
who had been executed were actually alive and there were
pictures of them. So like, it's it's so much of
the time, like what we hear winds up not being true,
And it's hard to say if it's like where the
error came in, if it was UM North Korea putting

(06:55):
out disinformation purposefully or the uh, some other power wanting
there to be a disinformation. That's going to be like
an running theme in this episode, and it's a running
theme in Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cut
you off. I was just gonna say that. I think that,
like on top of that, there's also just the misinformation
that comes out with everybody trying to break a news story. UM.

(07:15):
I mean, that's a small percentage of it, but it's
still a percentage nonetheless, you know. Yeah, numerous stories have
been released about Kim Jong un, who is the current
dictator UM. There have been tales that he got so
fat eating Swiss cheese, that he can't see his penis,
stories that he takes snake venom to help with his
erections uh, and most notoriously claims that he had his
uncle executed by feeding him to starving dogs. Um. And

(07:38):
just for an example of how misinformation percolates out, that
story about him feeding his uncle to dogs came out
of a Chinese satirical news website, like a Chinese equivalent
of the Onion um and then foreign journalists who didn't
know what the Chinese site was reported it as fact.
And that's not an uncommon thing. Um wow. So yeah, yeah,

(07:59):
you get a lot stories like that when you start
digging into the old Kim's um And so I want
to lead this episode off by thanking a journalist named
Anna Fifield who's the author of a really good new
book that I just read called The Great Successor UM
And it's a book mostly about Kim Jong Un and
Fifield what impresses me about her is number one, She's

(08:20):
traveled in North Korea a lot of times over the
course of more than a decade. But she also, to
write this book, traveled all around the world and talked
directly with people who raised Kim Jong un when he
was a kid, people who went to school with him,
people who knew him as he was growing up. Um,
and so as far as like a verifiable history of
this guy, I think she's done the best job that

(08:41):
I've come across. And like, that's part of why I
was able to do this episode is I found her
book and finally felt like I had something solid to
grab onto and knew that I wasn't going to be
taken in by a bunch of satirical Chinese UH comedy
articles that got misinterpreted as real. Yeah, and also big
thanks to the Kim family that will be joining us
in monument. I'm just kidding. Yeah. Yeah, So let's let's

(09:05):
get into this. If I'm going to give people a
useful history of the Kim dynasty, I think we have
to start with Kim Jong UN's grandfather, Kim Il sung.
On October fourteenth five, more than a hundred thousand people
filled the streets of downtown Pyongyang to celebrate the liberation
of their country from Japanese occupation forces. Now, North Korea

(09:25):
was at that point under the protection and governance of
the U s s R. And on that fateful day,
a Soviet general addressed the crowd and introduced them to
someone who would later be the new leader of their country,
Comrade Kim Il Sung. The North Korean crowd was surprised
to see a heavy set young man in his thirties
take the podium and address their new nation. People were

(09:48):
shocked by his appearance because Kim Il Sung, like I said,
was kind of a heavy set dude. He looked like
a soft, lazy government bureaucrat, which is more or less
what he was. But Soviet propaganda up into this point
had been sort of hyping him up to the people
as a badass guerilla fighter who had spent years battling
the Japanese and the mountains and working towards the liberation
of his people. According to the South China Morning Post quote,

(10:12):
his real name was not Kim Il Sung, but Kim
Sung Kai. He was born in nineteen twelve into a
Presbyterian family that was comfortably off. His father was a
teacher and an elder in at the church. In nineteen twenty,
like many other Koreans, they moved to Manchuria to escape
famine and Japanese rule. His father died in nineteen twenty six.
He attended the un Middle School in Jilan from nineteen
seven and nineteen thirty when he was arrested for subversion

(10:32):
and imprisoned for several months. By nineteen thirty five, he
joined the anti Japanese guerilla war. His greatest moment came
in June nineteen thirty seven, when his unit of two
hundred men captured a small Japanese held town in Korea
for a few hours. By the end of nineteen forty,
the Japanese had killed his fellow commanders and many of
his men. Those who remained crossed the Amor River into
the Soviet Union. And that's the extent of Kim Il

(10:54):
Sung's career as a mountain warrior. Um. So he's billed
as the guy who was responded stable for orchestrating the
campaign to oust the Japanese government, and sort of portrayed
as being an equivalent to like Ho Chi minh Um,
But the reality is that he was just kind of
a mid level guerilla leader and by the end of
the fighting was just one of the only ones who

(11:15):
was left alive. But he he didn't really have much
of a career actually fighting the Japanese, not a coincidence
that he comes from privilege of course, no, uh no,
and not a coincidence like he didn't he didn't spend
much time in North Korea itself until he was thirty
uh and he actually didn't speak the language very well.
He spoke Russian better than Korean. Um So yeah, yeah, yeah.

(11:40):
When he gave his first speeches, they were actually written
in Korean for him by Soviet uh speech writers who
knew the language better and were able to like crafted
for him. So that's how sort of yeah, yeah, yeah,
that's exactly kind of what goes on here, um So Kim.
After he fled into the Soviet Union before the Japanese

(12:00):
were kicked out of Korea, he spent most of his
time on a Russian military base, where he was trained
as a captain in the Red Army and remained until
the end of the war. He had his first son
on that army base, Kim Jong il uh, in February
of nineteen forty one. But that's not the history most
North Koreans know. According to North Korean history books, Kim
Jong ill was born in February sixteenth, nineteen forty two,

(12:22):
in a secret military base on the Korean Mountain h
Pike two, which is like a sacred mountain there. Um.
And the reason that they changed the date is so
that his birth date would be a year that ends
into because his dad was born in a year that
ended into and they wanted it to be like, yeah, yeah,
that's more, that's more corporate posturing. Yeah, yeah, it's branding.

(12:44):
It's Brandon Yeah yeah. Now, as I as I stated,
Kim Il sung had not been a major figure in
the Korean Communist Party prior to the country's liberation of Japan.
He was like kind of a mid level dude, and
the story of how he came to rule the country
anyway is a typical tale of of all in era. Yeah,
branding would be a really good way to look at it. Um.
He started angling for the job when he was in

(13:05):
that Russian military base, but Moscow at first felt he
was too ambitious and didn't want to risk giving him
the gig. So Stalin and his guys initially back to
dude named Schoman Seek who was a nationalist who'd run
a non violent reformist movement under the occupation. His big
inspirations were Leo Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi. But Cho wasn't

(13:26):
interested in being a puppet of the U. S s R.
He wanted a North Korea to be an independent country. UM.
And so the Soviets started to kind of sour on
this guy more and more as the time to release
North Korea as an independent nation drew closer and they
realized that he didn't want to be you know, essentially
their their man in Pyongyang. UM, so Kim il sung

(13:48):
sort of slid into this gap that started to form
between Chow and Uh the Russian or the Soviet leadership. UM.
And the way he did this was by buying shiploads
of liquor and prostitutes for the Soviet generals who were
managing North Korea at this point and throwing them big
raucous parties, which worked, you know. I mean he's a

(14:09):
big opportunist, is what it sounds like. Which is the
only way you get to a place like that. I
don't think there's any way you can get there by
being any shred of a decent person. No, And it
sounds like Cho was too honest about what he wanted
for his people and what he thought was best for
North Korea, whereas Uh Kim Il Sung was kind of
that I'm going to tell these people whatever they need

(14:29):
to hear to to put me in that job. Uh.
And it worked, It worked out great for him. The
Soviets had Kim Il Sung deliver a speech test written
by Soviet officials. Uh. The speech did not go well. Um.
Show's secretary later described him as speaking in a duck
like voice, with a haircut like a Chinese waiter. Uh.
He was said to look like a fat delivery boy

(14:51):
from a neighborhood Chinese foodstall. Others called him a fraud
or a Soviet stooge. So he was not. You know,
initially it didn't look like uh, you know, he he'd
succeeded in sort of charming some of the Soviets, but
he just had zero charisma. Um. So again like it,
it looks like kind of a long shot at the start. Um.

(15:12):
But Show keeps making more and more demands for real
independence for North Korea as the months go on, and
eventually Stalin gets fed up with it and has that
guy arrested and disappeared into a gulag somewhere. So yeah, yeah,
Kim Il sung gets promoted a number of times in
the last few days. Of the Soviet occupation, and on
September the Democratic People's Republic of Korea was officially founded,

(15:35):
with Kim Il sung as its leader. In less than
a year, he adopted the title Great Leader and started
having statues built in his honor. He rewrote the history
book so that his first speech was written down as
a tremendous success rather than him looking like an overweight waiter. Um.
But by the way, I just want to say, that's
always funny to me whenever, um, these kinds of takeovers

(15:56):
happened and they call it something democratic. Yeah, like that, Yeah,
that's ridiculous. Yeah, it's the same thing with like putting
family and your your political organization. Like yeah, there's some
words that always signaled that they mean the opposite, and
like yeah, that's that's definitely one of them. Um, Because yeah,

(16:16):
there was no there was no democracy at work here. Um,
there was no nobody went to the North Korean people
and was like, do you guys, uh, what should be
in charge? And to be super fair, uh, there was
not really democracy in South Korea at this point, which
is an important thing to note. So North and South
Korea had been officially split by the US and the

(16:38):
USS are. At the end of World War Two, you've
probably heard of the thirty Parallel, the line that divides
the two nations to this day. The line was actually
picked by an American colonel Dean Rusk and another army
officer when they grabbed a national geographic map and just
sort of drew a line in a place that looked
good to them. Um. And because nobody in the Soviet
Union really cared that much at the time, they said

(17:00):
it was fine, um And so like North Korea and
South Korea were created without anybody really thinking about why
the border had been drawn where it was. Um. Yeah, yeah.
It's uh, it's like a Sykes Pico kind of story
where you just have these two powers who like they've
got so much else on their hands after like every
they're all focused about like splitting up Germany, right, the

(17:21):
U S and the U s s are like, nobody
gives a shit about Korea at this point, so they
like they just draw, have two guys draw a line
on a map, and uh, the US says, yeah, that
seems good, and the Soviets say, yeah, that seems good,
and uh, nobody thinks anymore about picture. Like someone just
put on a blindfold and they're like, all right, just
go with the marker man. And then they were like
that's it, we got it, you know what I mean,

(17:42):
Like it's a weird flip of the coin meant story
that uh yeah, that's wild. Yeah yeah, nobody like that.
There's literally like that that that almost is more planning
than they put into it, because at least then somebody
would have had to find blindfolds. There's some logistical uh
like uh necessity and in at least that. UM. So,

(18:05):
once he gets into power, Kim Il sung kind of
feels shaky and at number one, there's a lot of
other people who are guerilla leaders during uh the occupation
who aren't big fans of his um he doesn't really have.
He's seen as maybe being sort of a Russian you know,
uh agent at this point because he owes his power
to them, and he feels like he needs more than

(18:26):
statues of himself to solidify his rule. He needs a war,
and the best way for him to sort of lock
himself in as the leader of North Korea for life,
he thinks, is to take over South Korea. UM. So
he starts pushing Stalin to let him invade South Korea
and reunify the peninsula. UM. And you know, Stalin at

(18:48):
this point in North Korea is essentially under the thumb
of both the USSR and China because obviously it shares
its big border with China. It was reliant on the
Soviet Union for all of its food and aid and
resources and what so like, they couldn't really do anything
without the approval of both countries. So kim Ilson goes
to Stalin is like, I want to take over South Korea,

(19:09):
and Stalin kind of does the whole go ask your
mother sort of thing, and it's basically like if Mao
z Dung says it's okay, then like, well it'll be fine,
like then I'll then I'll I'll sign onto it. So
kim Ilson goes to mal and he eventually gets both
dictators on board, and on June nineteen fifty, the North
Korean People's Army invades South Korea UM. And this is

(19:31):
a really successful invasion at that point because the South
Korean military did not exist in a super organized way.
So within a matter of weeks they basically conquer everything
but one city in South Korea called Boussan UM. So
they come very close in the early days of the
war to just knocking South Korea out as a country

(19:53):
and unifying the Korean peninsula. Yeah, very very close. Uh.
The United States rushed in reinforced mints and the Battle
of Pussan Perimeter was fought, leading to more than a
hundred and twenty thousand casualties on both sides. The United States,
you know, continued to send in more and more men,
including the fifth Regimental Combat Team, which included my grandfather UH,
and in a series of daring landings and offensives, they

(20:15):
pushed the North Korean Army almost to China. Then China
counterattacked and UH pushed. The United States backed down past
the thirty eight parallel, and the Korean War turns into
a big, ugly ship show. A tremendous number of people died,
mostly from bombing campaigns carried out by the United States.
Are bombers leveled by some counts, eighty five percent of

(20:36):
the structures in North Korea, So that's not just eighty
five percent of its industry. Eight of all buildings in
the country are gone. US bomber commanders late in the
Korean War complain about not having targets to hit because
there's just nothing left in the country. I love that
it's a complaint and not a not They didn't state

(20:56):
it as a fact or like we're running out of
stuff and I'm and I'm bored, I got nothing, i
got nothing to drop my bombs on. I'm just bombing
nonsense at this point. Yeah, it was an unspeakably devastating
war for the North and obviously it ended in essentially
a stalemate, not even really peace. North Korea lost at
least ten percent and maybe as many as like twenty

(21:18):
of its pre war population in the fighting. Just absolutely devastating,
um apocalyptic violence, and the sheer scale of the devastation
that's wrought on North Korea allows Kim Il sung to
not just hang into power but reinforce his own power
um because number one, just the disastrous losses suffered give

(21:40):
him like he's able to pick people who were his
enemies in the in the Korean military to blame them
for all of the deaths and like have those people
executed and purged. And so by the end of the war,
North Korea is about as wrecked as a country has
ever been. But Kim Il Sung's power is fucking locked down.
So that's where we are when the Korean War ends, uh,

(22:06):
nineteen fifty three. I believe, yeah, because I remember being
short but impactful, because you know, obviously I know the
US lost a lot of men there. Yeah, we lost
about thirty three thousand or thirty seven thousand dead in
that war, which is you know, only about twenty or
so thousand off from the number who died in Vietnam,
which lasted more than three times as long. UM. So

(22:28):
it's very short. Like for an example of how brutal
it was, my grandpa was one of the first soldiers who,
like one of the first American soldiers who landed in
Korea fighting in the war. He was there the whole war.
He landed in Korea as a sergeant and he left
as a major um because just so many of the
guys above him got killed or wounded that they were

(22:48):
just promoting anyone like they could to fill like spaces
in the leadership they needed, um, which isn't a thing
that really happens anymore, but yeah, it did back then.
So it's it's a it's an ugly war, and it's
ugliest for North Korea, Like they get hit by far
the hardest and our listeners are about to get hit

(23:09):
the hardest by some ads for products and services. This
is a really bad ad plug or the greatest ad
segue in the history of ads. I don't know which one. Yeah,
let's let these ads destroy eighty five of the buildings
in your heart. I don't know how to. I don't

(23:30):
know how to. I should have picked a different point
to lead us into ads from, but this is where
we are. You can't can't go back now. You look,
you're bombing them with capitalism. Yeah, we're bombing them with
capitalism by by our beautiful Dick Bills products. We're back, boy.

(23:50):
Those those nothing like some products and services to to
get you back into talking about the world's most uh
successful and long lived communist regime. The next sideway should
be And speaking of dictatorships, here's our You know damn it,
you're right, there's right in the name. I'm so frustrated

(24:11):
that it took you mentioning that for me to realize
there was a Dick Pills dictator. Well, it hit me
afterwards and I was like, I was a beat too late, man,
I can't believe it took me this long to have
that idea. Um, well that's a shame anyway. So, uh,
North Korea is super fucked up at the end of

(24:33):
the Korean War. UM, but this winds up actually being
sort of a benefit to in the same way that
like Japan, because it was so devastated after World War Two. UM,
a bunch in Germany, a bunch of like foreign aid
went in and rebuilt all the industry, and they wound
up with like brand new factories, brand new everything, and
it's set them up to become an economic powerhouse. That

(24:53):
kind of happens to North Korea in the wake of
the Korean War. China and the USS are flood the
country with resources and they rebuild the na fational industries.
And this will surprise most people because we think about
North Korea as dirt poor in South Korea, as you know,
opulence and wealthy. But up until the mid nineteen seventies,
North Korea had a larger economy and in many ways

(25:14):
a higher quality of life than South Korea. That's like
the first twenty years of Kim Il Sung's reign. UM.
And there are a number of reasons for this. Uh.
The short explanation is that North Korea contains almost all
of the peninsula's industrial resources coal and steel and fuel.
All the valuable ship is in the north. The South
is traditionally Korea's agricultural heartland, and for those first couple

(25:36):
of decades, South Korea was also basically run by a dictatorship.
So for a long time after the Korean War, a
lot of people who lived in South Korea might have thought, like,
we made it. We really fucked up by not going
up north. Um like it that you could have. You
could have thought felt for a while that like the
people who wound up in the north of the country
got a better deal, um, because it seemed that way

(25:59):
until the events when the trend starts to reverse itself
very fucking quickly, South Korea industrializes at an incredibly rapid
rate uh. And then their g d P, their quality
of life and the level of actual like they they
become a functional democracy as well. And also I just
want to say that one thing that I think people
um forget is that even within these places there's still

(26:21):
an insane class divide. It's just that middle class was
a more feasible thing back then. Maybe, but I feel like, uh,
I mean obviously, and also resources to information and truly
knowing what North Korea was like you were only seeing
what was coming in newsreels in front of um movies
or radio commercials. And you know, however, people got their
media back then. But I think that like a lot

(26:42):
of those places still um, you know, even if people
look like they were living while they were still poor
people in those places. Yeah, and that's part of why
that that like, that's part of why people in the
North might have been for a chunk of this period
happier than people in the South because, uh, the North
had more resources to put into kind of a functional

(27:04):
sort of social welfare state than the South did for
a chunk at this time. Um. But that again, that
starts to really reverse itself in the seventies. But the
first twenty years or so of Kim Il sung's reign
they're seen still today by the people who remember them
as like the golden years of North Korea, uh, and
those the memory of those years is the cornerstone of

(27:25):
of the power that the Kim family wields to this day.
And that's a big part of why Kim Il sung
is remembered so fondly even today in North Korea, whereas
Kim Jong il really isn't, and it's a big part
of the reason why Kim Jong un is is like
he ties himself more to his grandpa than his dad.
He doesn't primarily bill himself as the son of Kim

(27:46):
Jong ill he uh propaganda emphasizes how much he looks
like his grandpa. There's even rumors that he got plastic
surgery to resemble his grandfather, Like he dresses the same,
Like he's very much trying to put on this um
still to this day, trying to put forward this idea
of like I'm going to bring us back to the
good days, you know, when my grandpa was in charge. Yeah,

(28:07):
make North Korea great again. He's he's really hearkening back
to that um. It's important to understand in order to
understand sort of like how things are angled to this
day by the Kim regime in North Korea. So, starting
in the nineteen seventies, Kim Il sung crafted a policy
for his people called Jewish. The basic idea of Jewish

(28:27):
is similar to the desire for autar key expressed by
Adolf Hitler in the pre war years. It's an ideology
that the Korean people should and can be totally independent
from the world outside of their borders. They don't need
anything from other people. Um. Now, Jewish is not a
really coherent ideology because I, for one thing, ignores the

(28:47):
fact that North Korea was from the beginning deeply dependent
on primarily food aid from the USS are and from China.
Because remember the Korean peninsula, which had been unified for
most of history. The South provides the food, the North
as the industrial resources. So on its own, the North
can't really grow that much food. Um, so they don't
They're they're Jewish. Is more of a propaganda campaign than

(29:09):
it's an example of like how North Korea actually functions
because for up until the collapse of the Soviet Union,
they're deeply dependent on the country for food aid, um,
and their economy is really dependent on having these other
communist countries to sell to. You know. Jewish is how
Kim Ilsong wants people to think about North Korea and
sort of its relationship to the world. That's again like

(29:32):
a fucking brand thing there. Yeah, it is a brand thing, absolutely,
and it's crazy because like also I think, uh, any
country at this point. What's really wild about it is
like when people go for this whole concept of independence.
I Thankfully, more time goes on, I think people realize
that's not the case with really anywhere, uh true like

(29:54):
true independence. But again, it was that period where like
I think specifically the I think until about I'll say,
and that's like an estimate. But up until that point,
it was so easy to pull this kind of bullshit,
like where you could you could just like put a buzzword.
I mean, you can still do that well into the

(30:14):
eighties and nineties, and it's happening now obviously, and like
just with memes or people phrases people use, but I
mean in terms of like implementing these things on a
on a national scale like that, it was so effortless
to just be like, all right, how can we get
people to you know what whatever the key word is? Yeah, yeah,

(30:35):
And that's uh like that's part of why he adopts
this ideology is you know, in the mid seventies and
into the eighties, the South pulls way ahead of North Korea,
and suddenly there's no comparing the two countries. And that's
a big reason why you want, if your Kim il
sung to emphasize independence and why we don't need anyone
else is because you don't want your people seeing the

(30:58):
outside world now that uh, it's become increasingly clear that
they're doing better than you. Right, absolutely, Oh my god,
that's the that's the like every man, I don't even
know how to articulate this, but like that is I
think the key to most like it's like trying to
keep every country as um blindfolded as possible until the

(31:21):
blindfold officially comes off. That it's essentially like they're making
a backup plan for when that finally happens, because it's
not sustainable. Yeah, and it's you know, it's normally not sustainable.
One of the things that's interesting about North Korea is
there the only country of its type that has sustained something. Yeah,
you're right, Actually, that's a great it's happening. Yeah, it's

(31:43):
really That's the most remarkable thing about this story is
that Kim il sung number one, he has the goal
that all smart dictators have, which is to die peacefully
at home. Um number two he has the goal to
pass on rule to his son, Kim Jong ill um,
which no other There's not a single case of another
communist leader successfully passing on UH rule to their like,

(32:09):
to the to their own children, to their heir. Like obviously,
that didn't happen in the U S s R. And
in fact, like the the idea of having a cult
of personality faded in the U S s R. After
Stalin's death, and they were like they they opened up
and liberalized in a lot of ways after that. You
don't see that in North Korea. And the reason why
is because Kim Jong un is a masterful does a

(32:31):
masterful job of preparing his nation for the idea that
there will be no break and continuity between the generations.
So I'm going to read a quote from the Great
Successor that talks about sort of how he goes about
this process. The nineteen seventy edition of North Korea's Dictionary
of Political Terminology stated that hereditary secession is a reactionary
custom of exploitative societies that was quietly dropped from future publications.

(32:55):
State media started referring to the Party center, a phrase
used to obliquely refer to Kim Jong il's activities without
explicitly stating his name, and Kim Jong ill began to
be promoted up the Workers Party hierarchy. The North's allies
picked up on Kim ilsung's plans early on the east.
German ambassador to Pyeong Yang cabled the Foreign Ministry in
nineteen seventy four to say that North Koreans were being

(33:16):
asked to swear loyalty to Kim Jong Ill at workers
Party meetings across the country in case something grave might
happen to Kim Il sung. So that starts in the
mid nineteen seventies, and it only escalates as the nineteen
eighties and nineteen nineties roll along. Um. And you know,
one of the other things that happens throughout the nineteen
eighties and nineteen nineties is that it becomes increasingly obvious

(33:38):
to Kim Il Sung into Kim Jong Ill that none
of the other communist family die anasties are going to last.
And in fact, yeah, like I said, no other communist
states successfully handed down power from father to son um.
So it looks like in the eighties and nineties, it
looks like there's very long odds on Kim Jong Ill
actually taking power from his dad or staying in power

(33:59):
once he takes it. Most experts suspect that like after
Kim Ill Song dies, things are gonna sort of fall apart,
right um, which will not be the last time quote
unquote experts on North Korea predict stuff like this, UM,
and they ain't been right yet. Uh. So at the
sixth Workers Party Congress in Pyongyang in nineteen eighty, Kim

(34:20):
Jong ill has made the official successor UH and like
that is announced to the entire country. He begins to
accompany his father along and on the spot guidance tours,
where the two Kims will show up at farms and
factories and tell all of the people there how to
do the jobs that they did every day. Workers are
expected to take diligent notes as one career politician and
his drunken playboy's son UH tell them how to forge

(34:43):
steel and plow fields, which seems like and it's like
the worst episode of undercover. But I was just thinking,
I was like, this is the most wild thing I've
ever heard in my life, Like this is and truly,
you would never even catch a fucking CEO of any
company going to a place and being like, Okay, this
is how you make a latte. UM, And it's yeah,

(35:05):
it's so interesting to me that they do it this
way in North Korea because if you read about like
Saddam Hussein did, the literal opposite where he would he
would you know whether or not he actually did it.
He made sure that there were stories of him dressing
up in costume and like showing up at farmers houses
and factories to like see how people really thought about things,
which like that's an old that goes back like two

(35:25):
thousand years, and the stories of like Arab rulers is
like these Arab collapses and stuff, hiding among the peasantry
and trying to see how their lives really are, to
learn about how they can govern more justly. And it's
the opposite here, and you know what like that, but
it's a it's a relatability aspect that I bet some
people are just blown away that these guys are coming
here and and being you know, having a sense of

(35:47):
utility or whatever it is that they're you know, very
that they're like, oh, they're getting down there and they're
they're putting their hands in the mud, uh and and
getting dirty and and you know they're working and and
the fact is they're not. And it's almost the same.
Like the way I think of it is the way,
um when you know Trump is like I go to McDonald's.
Do you know how many people his fan base must

(36:08):
eat that up. No pun intended to be like, oh
my god, he's he goes to the same place as
I do. He gets it, so even though he's a billionaire,
he understands us. Yeah. That was one of the It
was really frustrating to me to see the way that
um when he fed those like the fast food to
those kids, how it was handled by the media. Because
I grew up in like the Deep South, uh, and

(36:30):
I know that played well to a lot of his uh,
to a lot of his base totally. I mean it
started with my earliest memory of it when I was
in college, and even a little after that in the
in the last few years of the Bush presidency, I
remember people still were like, this is a guy you
could sit down and at least have a beer with.
And I was like, that is fucking crazy that that's

(36:50):
the takeaway. And not only that, like when the economy
is crumbling, then like you know what, maybe people we
should be having beers with shouldn't be run Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Well and it's uh, it's one of those things, like
one of the the big like that there's this emphasis
on the Kims as being um in the propaganda, as

(37:14):
being perfect and is obviously is knowing better than all
of their workers. But there's also this emphasis on how
hard they work, Like there's a lot of stories that
are put into the propaganda about them passing out from
exhaustion and going without sleep for days and like where
like that's like the way it was phrased when Kim
Jong ads he like he worked himself to death and
his heart gave out. So it is it is clearly
important for the regime that like the leaders be seen

(37:37):
as being as invested physically in the labor of of
of the country as like the actual people doing labor. Question. Yeah, uh,
And I don't know if this came up at any
point in any of the things you were doing. And
this isn't in regards to the interview, just in general,
which is that, uh is there mention of what the
arts are like? I feel like that's actually a place

(37:57):
a spot I realized I've never looked at, which is
what andy, because I you know, I referenced that early on.
But I do feel like that's usually a reflection of
how people perceive things there and obviously there's not a
freedom of artistic choice there. Yeah, I mean there's a
lot said in The Great Successor in particular about music
in North Korea and about its role and like UM

(38:19):
one of like they they have particular songs that they used,
Like when they were preparing Kim Jong n to take power,
there was a particular song called Footsteps that they would
play that was like the lyrics in the song were
supposed to kind of get people ready for the idea
that someone was going to take over from Kim Jong Ill.
So it is there's not freedom of in the arts there,
but there is a lot of emphasis placed on the arts.

(38:40):
It's also worth noting that the Kim family themselves, Kim
Jong il and his son and Kim Jong UN's brother, Um,
his surviving brother, are all huge Clapton fans, gigantic Eric
clapp fucking love Eric Clapp um, which like you know,
he's Eric Clapton, Like, I get it, like, but I
honestly think those guys, I've always thought that the people

(39:01):
who are usually at the at the top of the
food chain like that, who are who are suppressing art
in any way, UM probably consume most or I wouldn't
say most, because they're there, but a decent amount of
Western our Yampean cinema, all that stuff, and not on
a ton of it. I would venture to say they
probably like some of it. Oh they look they We'll
talk about that a lot. They're huge fans of it

(39:23):
the whole. Like I mean, Kim Il sung is. I
haven't heard anything about what he liked, but Kim Jong
ill and Kim Jong oon big fans of Western cinema,
music art, big Disneyland guys. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty pretty cool.
So uh. In one Kim Jong ill is pronounced the
leader of the Korean People's Army. Uh. Now, these were

(39:45):
the waning days of his father's regime, and they were
not good years for communism around the world. Uh. The
Soviet unions started falling apart in nineteen ninety one, and
it became increasingly clear that North Korea was about to
be standing alone for real. Kim Ill Song's ideas about
juice and independence would finally to be put to the test,
and the country did not handle being isolated well. The
collapse of the USSRM at North Korea lost one of

(40:06):
its major trading partners and its largest source of food.
This coincided with a series of mud slides that wiped
out huge amounts of the nation's crops and led to
mass starvation and even cannibalism among the populace. As many
as two million people may have died during this period.
The government's power began to crumble, and huge numbers of
North Korean started buying, selling, and smuggling and direct contravention

(40:27):
of the law. Jong Il and his father found themselves
in a precarious position. Kim Jong un knew that he
would die soon, and he had to find a safe
way to guarantee a safe transition of power for his son.
But how do you orchestrate that at a time when
your people are starving to death and mass like That's
the that's the big question Jong Un has to answer
in like the early nineteen nineties um and the answer

(40:50):
that he picked at least was to come up with
a lurid fairy tale about his family's origins. So I'm
gonna quote again from The Great Successor to bolster the
case for hereditary succes session in these challenging circumstances, the
regime created a fantastical story about Kim Jong Ill's providence
that borrowed heavily from both Korean mythology and Christianity. He
would be leader, not simply because he had been appointed

(41:10):
by his father, but because he had some divine right.
His birthplace became not a guerrilla camp, but Mount Pike to,
the volcano on North Korea's border with China that has
legendary status and Korean culture. It is said to be
the birthplace of Tangun, the mythical half bear, half deity
father of the Korean people. The creature conferred a heavenly
origin on the Korean people, and thanks to the story,
Kim Jong ill appeared to come from heaven to North

(41:32):
Korea's propagandists didn't stop there. They said that Kim Jong
ill was born in a wooden cabin and that a
single bright star shown in the sky at his birth.
They stopped short of making the building a manger or
his mother a virgin, but for good measure, they added
a double rainbow spontaneously appearing over the mountain. The myth
of the Holy Pike to bloodline was created. Wow. What's
amazing about that is that is exactly what the parallel

(41:56):
of religion here. Obviously that's not treated as um ethical
amount way, but it it It's the same difference as
like George W. Thinking God picked him to be president. Yeah,
and it's uh, it's a classical example of the kind
of thing that a regime puts out and and pushes
when it it feels insecure. Like that's why that's that's

(42:18):
when the crazy stuff starts to happen in North Korean propaganda. UM.
Because you don't see as much of that with Kim
il sung, Like you, he had a he had a
pretty wild cult of personality. Um, but it was kind
of in line with Stalin and other leaders of that era. UM.
Whereas it gets just fucking batty with Kim Jong Ill,
and it gets progressively battier. And it's because Kim Jong

(42:40):
ill comes to power as North Korea collapses completely. Um. So,
like one of the things that happens in the nineties
with everyone starving is that like bits and pieces of
capitalism into the country because the government can't like people
are starving and things are so bad, the government can't
stop people from from smuggling in food and setting up

(43:00):
rudimentary markets and stuff, and so like that becomes the
thing at this point in time, and they just don't
have a solid enough grip on power to fight it,
so instead they start pushing out ever more lurid and
wild propaganda, which is I'm sure how people got to
the point of like specifically Americans selling I mean they

(43:20):
had already done this when when Reagan was in office,
but you know, these like anti socialists, they treated socialism
and communism as like the ven diagram being a complete circle. Yeah,
and I'm sure this was a great paradigm for them
of how it's a failure. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it's
one of those things, like it's uh, there are a

(43:42):
number of different ways to look at what's happened in
North Korea. UM. One of the best descriptions I've heard
of the uh the way that the state is organized
is that it is essentially like the whole state exists
to serve Uh. It's it's almost organized like a corporation
wherein the whole state exists to serve the Kim family

(44:03):
who are in like they're the like the couple of
people who are in power, who are like the actual
stakeholders in the regime. UM. That's that's one way you'll
see it framed. Like there's there's not a lot of
like with the Soviet Union and stuff. Um, there's none
of what you actually saw called for in like Marxist theory,
where like workers own the means of production, like that

(44:26):
does not happen whatsoever in North Korea or in the U.
S s R. Really, um so it's yeah, the uh
what it definitely shows is that, uh, when you have
a government um that, because of its belligerent policies, doesn't
trade with the rest of the world, and that government
can't grow enough food to feed its people, then those

(44:50):
people will do a better job of servicing their own
needs than the government can, which is like the same
story that you see out of It's the same story
that you see in a hurricane countr arena after like
FEMA fucked up in the first several weeks after like that,
where it's like the actual people who live there do
a better job of taking care of each other than
the government. It's it's actually almost like they took douche back. Yeah, yeah,

(45:14):
it it it is. It's like the actual people. Um.
Like the lesson that they could take out of that
is like we didn't actually need the regime because the
regime like we like we are capable of being independent
if the regime gets out of our way, which is
a great Yeah, which is a really constant reminder to
me of what a thin veil most advertisements, propaganda, like anything,

(45:38):
I'm talking politics, economics, All of it is between how
people are sold things very easily and how it's it
literally isn't that far off from because that's some people
talk about like revolutions being idealistic or not possible. I
would say this almost argues that it's much easier. It's
just a matter of mobilization or being pushed so far

(46:00):
that what happened happened. Yeah, and you you you do
see like pieces of that UM in North Korea never
develops into anything that threatens the stability of the regime itself. UM,
but it does alter like the it never goes back either.
Like once these once people get used to the idea

(46:21):
of running their own rudimentary markets and selling some of
their own crops, and like one of the like you know,
a lot of people would get involved in like little
businesses where they were like harvest like corn husks and
make corn noodles and stuff and then sell them to
other people in towns that they could afford enough food
to eat. And like once people start doing that and

(46:41):
independently servicing their own needs. You can't go back to
the way things were beforehand. And that's like that that
that's definitely shown here. Um, it's time for ads uh.
We don't have another great lead in for ads uh,
but time for It's time for your everybody. Yeah, it's
time for you to be independent by buying the products

(47:04):
and services advertised on this show. Yeah, we're back, and
it's time we finally start talking about Kim Jong un. Uh. Now,
the boy who would retroactively be declared the latest member
of the Holy Pike to bloodline, Kim Jong un was

(47:26):
not born to be the inheritor of the Kim regime.
Jong Un came into this world in nineteen eighty four,
appropriately enough. North Korean propagandists, however, later rewrote history to
claim that he had been born in nineteen eighty two,
so it would be in line with Kim Il sung's
real nineteen twelve birthday and Kim Jong ills falsified nineteen
forty two birth um. But that would come later because

(47:48):
North Korea's current supreme ruler was born the son of
his father's mistress, not the son of his father's official
wife uh. And in fact, Kim Il sung did not
know that Kim jong un existed for first several years
of his life because Kim Jong Ill kept his mistresses
hidden from his dad and also his first kids. Now,
Kim jong Un was his father's third son. His first

(48:09):
son Kim jong Nam, who is the guy who got
assassinated in that airport by those women who like rubbed
him with poison. More recently, like, he was also the
son of one of Kim Jong Il's mistresses. Now, Kim
Jong Il never married Kim jong Nam's mom or Kim
Jong UN's mother, but he did force them to like
divorce their other partners and move in to isolated mansions

(48:30):
in Pyongyang. Can I just say this truly is now
behind the bastard. Yeah yeah, yeah, We're we're very very
behind him. Still at this point, pun It truly lived
up to the name. So Kim's second two sons were
with a dancer k Yong Hui. Jong Il moved them
into a compound in Pyongyang separate from his other family members.

(48:52):
So he has like a couple of different mistresses and
kids with each of these mistresses, and he has them
all in separate walled compounds that are all around his mansion,
which is walled off from the outside world, but also
walled off from all of his mistresses and all of
his kids homes. UM. And these are they just been
hundreds of millions of dollars buying these giant facilities which

(49:12):
exist to protect both Kim Jong Il and his his
lovers and kids from their people, but also to protect
Kim from his mistresses and his children UM and allow
him to like lock them away in their separate little
chunks of the compound if he wants, and they grow
up very very very isolated UM. At best. They were

(49:34):
allowed to play with their cousins occasionally, but usually they
were kept alone. His oldest son, Jong Nam, was kept
separate from Uh Kim Uh jong un and from his
other brother, so like the brothers don't spend much time together,
they don't have friends UM. Inside their lonely compounds, the
separated jong Ill children lived lives of isolated splendor. They

(49:58):
had fifteen footgates on beach friend compounds with amusement park
rides built into them, the latest televisions in video games,
pinball machines, dirt bikes, dune buggies, jet skis. Whole buildings
were filled with toys for the boys and girls just
up to the rafters with legos and stuff. Um. The
latest of of anything coming out of the West was available.
They had toy guns that like fired realistic bullets made

(50:21):
specifically for them. They also had plenty of real guns
like any self respecting dictator's son. Kim Jong un was
given forty five caliber handgun when he was eleven years old.
He was given a specially modified car that he could
drive and see above the steering wheel in when he
was seven years old. Yeah, he's he he grows up

(50:42):
like Richie rich um, but he's not allowed to have
friends like that's that's uh. Like his closest friend as
a child, as far as we know, was a middle
aged Japanese sushi chef named Fujimoto Um and Fujimoto is
an interesting dude. He lives Japan now, and his like
business cards essentially say like ask me if you have

(51:04):
questions about the Kim family because he got hired to
work for them in the eighties and nineties and was
like his story about it, and he does have a
lot of pictures with Kim Jong lun and definitely was around.
Is that Kim Jong ill at a certain point asked
him to be his son's playmate, since there were never
any real kids around, and so Kim jong Lun would
listen to Fujimoto's Whitney Houston records uh and like augle

(51:28):
his air Jordan's sneakers and stuff, and uh you know
they would uh the like that was his The closest
thing he had to a real friend was this like
kind of weird Japanese dude who took a job in
North Korea because it sounded different, um, and was willing
to like spend fifteen years cooking sushi for a dictator.
That's his like best buddy growing up. Yeah, and also

(51:50):
being his like entry to pop culture, yes, and also
being his entry to Western culture. Um. So he he
seems like an interesting guy. Um. In interviews with and
A Fifield, Fujimoto recalled a moment at around age ten
when Kim jong un got angry at his aunt for
calling him little brother. Jong Un yelled at her, don't
treat me like a child. Fujimoto then suggested he'd go

(52:13):
by the nickname Comrade General instead of little brother, which stuck.
Everyone started calling him Comrade General after that. So I'm
like his grandfather, Fujimoto said, so I love the name. Hey,
Captain major, what is that? That is ridiculous? Comrade General. Well,
this is complicated by the fact that he actually is
appointed a general as a small child, uh and has

(52:35):
a uniform with general stars on it. And you know
when he's walking around with a gun, he's doing it
in a military uniform. Um, because that's just the way
it works in a dictatorship. Yeah, that's not even an implication,
it's an actual thing. That's amazing. Yeah, it's it's it's
pretty great. So Kim John LUN's birthday parties tended to
take place at the Kim family compound in one Soon,
which is essentially North Korea's answer to Hawaii. Uh. No,

(52:58):
children were invited to his parts, and instead the aging
leadership cast of North Korea showed up to celebrate with
an eight year old boy, which had to have been
super fun. Uh. I'm gonna guess he didn't have a
lot of competition. If they played Golden Eye, um probably
probably fucking kick kick their ass as his odd job.

(53:18):
I wonder if I wonder if the other if he
played anyone, if they were allowed to win or if
they had to lose. Yeah, I feel like if you pick,
like especially if you pick odd job playing Golden Eye
with Kim jong Un and start like karate chopping him
to death, Like, you don't last much longer after that, Like, yeah,
that's not a good good plan for you. Uh so.

(53:39):
Kim jong Un was known as a child for loving machinery.
He was particularly fascinated with model planes. According to The
Great Successor, even when he was eight or nine and
still in pyong Yang, Kim jong un would stay up
all night doing experiments with his machinery and insisting on
speaking to some expert or another, even in the wee
hours of the morning. If he couldn't figure things out
by himself, when he had questions or when something didn't
function well, he would call for a nautical engineer to

(54:01):
come and explain it to him, no matter how late
it was. His aunt told me, so, he's like in
some ways, like that sounds like it could. Uh you
could expect someone to grow up with a lot of
talents doing that, Like if you actually have an interest
in engineering and you could just force engineers to wake
up in the middle of the night and explain things

(54:23):
to you, Like sure, I mean, let's see that. Yeah,
any any like and that's here's the thing for kids
that's not that uncommon either whether you're good at it
or not or what what what your fascination is with them?
So I wonder it's it's probably one of the only things.
Like let's say you were talking about earlier, how like
ten years from now, how much of this might still track?
That part probably still does. It sounds like an innocuous

(54:45):
but enough thing in regards to what someone that age
would be into, as opposed to wearing a general's uniform,
which also obviously really happened. Uh, and holding guns. I mean,
if you when I was seven years old or eleven
years old, you'd given me a forty five and and
made me a general, I would have I would have

(55:06):
probably invaded a couple of countries and it would have
gone really badly. Uh yeah, yeah, So I guess we
gotta give the kid credit for some some restraint there,
or at least his dad. Now. Uh. Basketball is huge
in Korea, in both Korea's both South and North Korea,
big fucking basketball fans, and it's something of a trope

(55:26):
in Korean culture for mothers to tell their children to
play basketball so they will grow up taller. That's a
common myth. Uh. So Kim jong ill was just like
five ft two, very very short dude. Uh, Kim jong
un grew up to be like five ft seven. Um.
So you know, you could argue that maybe maybe all
the basketball he played as a kid helped him, in
fact grow up a little bit taller. Um, It's it's definite.

(55:49):
One of the things we know to a point of
certainty about Kim jong un is that for basically all
of his life he has been absolutely obsessed with basketball. Uh.
Children of rich party opera chicks would be bust in
to play games with him. Fujimoto observed he had the
ability to make good judgments with solid reasoning. He knew
when to praise and went to criticize. Fujimoto noted that

(56:11):
he seemed to particularly enjoy critiquing players, especially due to
the fear that's provoked in them. He learned from an
early age to enjoy exercising power over people. One story
Fujimoto tells is of another time as of a time
he took Kim jong un and one of his brothers
out fishing for sea bass. Every time he Fujimoto would
catch a bass. Pre team Kim jong un would grab

(56:31):
the rod and shout, I caught it. So we're getting
an idea for the kind of personality that develops um
from a kid who grows up in this Yeah. Yeah,
that's uh, that's uh. He got the dictatorship crash course
early on. Yeah, yeah, he grows up very comfortable with
acting that way. On July, Kim Ill soong's heart finally

(56:54):
gave out after decades of hard living and a harder dictating.
Kim Jong un was ten years old and still technically
a secret to the people of North Korea at the time.
They were certainly aware of his father, Kim Jong ill, though,
because he had been the promise successor for many years.
Kim Il sung was hailed by the Korean Central News
Agency as a man who had turned North Korea from
a land where age old backwardness and poverty had prevailed

(57:15):
into a powerful socialist country, independent, self supporting, and self reliance.
The rest of the nineteen nineties increasingly put the lie
to this claim, as North Korea's terrible famine hit its
height not long after Kim Jong il took power. Now,
I can remember when this like in the early two thousands,
when I was just starting off in my career writing
for Cracked that we had a number of popular articles

(57:37):
run that referenced all the crazy claims about Kim Jong Ill.
And there was a period of years there, especially in
the early two thousands, where he was the Western world's
like favorite punching bag. UM. Team America World Police is
probably like the clearest example. Yeah, that's the biggest example
of this. Um. And there were a lot of really
crazy lies told about Kim Jong Ill, especially as the

(57:58):
famine subsides in the early two thousands and things start
to recover. Um, and there's you know, you hear stories
about uh he he wrote perfect operas, He'd play a
single perfect game of golf and then quit the game forever.
There was propaganda that said he was a world fashion icon,
that said he'd invented the hamburger, that said he'd never
used a toilet, and of course that would claim he

(58:19):
could control the weather. Um. These colorful tales made North
Korea's dictator fun to write about, but the lies came
from a place of desperation. Things were bad in North
Korea for most of this period, and the regular people
knew it. Kim Jong iills insane propaganda was the result
of a desperate regime with very little to really brag about.
His father's difficult early years were mostly lost on Kim
Jong un because during this period of time, he continued

(58:41):
to live in armed compounds, eating sushi prepared by a
private chef, flying to Paris to see euro Disney. Uh
And while his citizens were eating grass and pages from
books to quell their hunger pains, the air Apparent got
to enjoy the finest buffets Europe had to offer. He
played in rooms full of legos in his private palace. Uh.
He and the other him ain't only a special rice

(59:02):
produced for them in dedicated farms. Female harvesters would select
each grain by hand, making sure they were all perfect
and the same size. So this is his his childhood
while starvation is going on. It's really important to keep
that in mind, of course. Yeah, And I think people, UM,
I don't know why this can still be a mystery
to some people, but like you know, people look back

(59:24):
on certain things like how could people let this happen?
Or how could people sit idly by? And um, all
you have to do is look around now, um to
a lot of what has happened since Trump's been in office,
which is that like you know, all of the it's
it's very easy for it to happen, and uh, and
it's very hard for people to there's overthrowing that in

(59:44):
any capacity. That's I guess what I'm getting at more
is the parts of the propaganda that are like, you know,
this guy never had to go to the bathroom and
he invented the hamburger. Um, you know, I'm of course
most people didn't believe it. But also it's not gonna
change anything in the sense that people aren't gonna suddenly
be like that's a crock of ship. Let's uh, we

(01:00:06):
need someone else here, you know, I mean, yeah, yeah,
there's just there's just not room for that, um in
this society. And part of it's just because like the
media is so controlled that like even if people aren't
buying all the propaganda, there's no room for anything else
to enter into like public media. And if if you
push it enough times, just the repetition of it, people

(01:00:26):
are gonna be are gonna wear down to it in
any Yeah. Right, we'll talk a little bit more about
that later too. Um So Kim Jong Il's infamous propaganda
campaigns where yeah, more of a holding strategy than anything else,
while he shifted his nation to a military first domestic policy. Uh.
Some people might consider it odd to focus your money
and attention on more soldiers and gaining nuclear missiles while

(01:00:49):
people are eating each other, but Kim jong Ill knew
what he was doing in the military kept him in power.
As the nineteen nineties rolled along, Kim jong nam, jong
UN's older half brother, grew increasingly a strange his father
and from the lovers of power in North Korea. He
was disgraced when he and his mother were caught with
fake passports trying to enter Japan in order to see
Tokyo Disneyland. The fake name he traveled under, Pong Jong,

(01:01:12):
translated to fat bear, a fact which made him a
laughing stock of world media. Yeah, very funny. Kim jong
Nam's fading star also came from the fact that his
mother spent most of her time in Russia rather than
sucking up to Kim Jong Il. According to The Great Successor,
Kim Jong UN's mother, on the other hand, became a
constant presence in Kim jong Il's life as his favorite consort.

(01:01:32):
She planted the seeds of change from behind the scenes.
Her influence came to be seen everywhere, such as in
the way Donald Duck and Tom and Jerry cartoons suddenly
appeared on television dubbed into Korean right around the time
her children would have been watching them. Around the same time,
Kim jong il had flown into a rage when he
discovered that Kim jong Nam, who was then about twenty,
had been going out and drinking in pyeong Yang for
disobeying his orders. Kim Jong Ill put Kim jong Nam's

(01:01:53):
household under arrest for a month, cutting off their food
supplies and making them clean up after themselves. Um so
that's that's the kind of punishment you get as the
son of a dictator. You got to clean your own house. Yeah.
The humanity, where is it? Yeah? Now. Kim jong un
famously spent most of his adolescence in burned Switzerland. To

(01:02:14):
be specific, he and his older brother Kim Jong Chol
his other older brother, lived in the suburb of lead
Field with their maternal aunt and uncle. They lived under
assumed names, and no one but high ranking Swiss security
services realized who they truly were. To their credit, the
Swiss intelligence agencies like knew that the children of like
North Korea's dictator were there, but had a policy of

(01:02:34):
not really keeping tabs on them because they were kids
and they felt like they deserve a chance to be children. Um,
which I think is admirable. Um yeah. Now, uh, For
the most part, it seems like Kim Jong un and
his older brother were allowed to live the closest approximation
of a normal life possible for the children of dictators,

(01:02:55):
at least during the times when they were in Switzerland.
Years later, Kim Jong UN's aunt, a Young suck recalled,
we lived in a normal home and acted like a
normal family. I acted like their mother. Their friends would
come over and I would make them snacks. It was
a very normal childhood with birthday parties and gifts and
Swiss kids coming over to play. So that's that's yeah, yeah,
there there was a brief period where like he almost

(01:03:18):
had a normal middle class upbringing, like you see, you
see like glimmers of that in in this kid's life,
like they and it's hard to tell whether it was
like pushed upon him or that's what they were striving for,
you know what, items he's like they were striving for
him to get a good education because his mom would
regularly visit and like chastise him for not getting better grades.

(01:03:40):
And they just knew that he wasn't going to be
able to get a good enough education um in North
Korea because like, for one thing, Um, it's kind of
hard to get a good education when the teachers are
afraid you might have them shipped to Goo logs. Yeah. Yeah,
so Kim john Un maintained his love of model airplanes
while he lived in Switzerland. He went out with his
aunt and unk on vacations to the French riviera and

(01:04:01):
to euro Disney. Like every child of the nineteen nineties,
he and his yeah yeah, he and his older brother
developed an intense and abiding love for the action films
of Gean Claude van Damn, which you know, of course. Yeah.
What I'm very curious about because the nineties in particular,
specifically for movies is about when it became I guess

(01:04:26):
when even like indie films kind of had an assembly
line model almost you know what I mean. Yeah, yeah,
And it's one of the things that that's interesting to
me here is that, uh yeah. He was also a
huge fan of Michael Jackson. Um, Like he really seems
to be like a pretty normal, Like I think most
of the people listening who grew up in the nineties
could have had long and engaged conversations with Kim John

(01:04:48):
and his kids about like you know the Street Fighter
movie or oh yeah, I can't. I I saw every
single Sudden Impact, Lion, Hard, Universal Soldier, Hard Target. Those
are all his bigger and these movies right there, and
Kim Jong UN's older brother, Kim Jong Chol even included
John Claude van Damon an essay he wrote at school,
and we have a quote from it. If I had

(01:05:09):
my ideal world, I would not allow weapons and Adam
bombs anymore. I would destroy all terrorists with the Hollywood
star Jean Claude van dam everybody would be happy. No
more war, no more dying, no more crying. So that's
a uplifting I wonder what they thought of the I
don't know if you remember this when Universal Soldier came
out at the can Film Festive. I believe it was
at the Can Film Festival, um John Claud van Damon

(01:05:32):
Dolph Londron had a shoving match. I didn't know that,
Yeah it was, it was. It turned out it was
a publicity stunt for the movie but I picture them
being like, oh man, he could have owned Dolph Londron.
Oh man, he could have really uh, which is funny
because Dolph Londron, I don't know if most people he
has like a PhD. And I think like chemistry. Yeah,

(01:05:53):
he's a genius and also a living mountain. Yes, yeah, yeah,
Dolph Longern is a is a terrifying fellow. Um that's
a sidebar, but yeah, I I just that's very fascinating
because they those guys had a very specific um demographic
they appealed to, and it was two people that were

(01:06:16):
uh like these like boys of a certain eight. Yeah. Yeah,
that that's like John Claude Van Damn is like the
action figure that nobody grows up to be, but that
like every kid wanted to be growing up in the nineties.
Yeah yeah, And I'm gonna guess that Kim Jong un
from from Everything We Know probably felt the same way

(01:06:38):
that you'll you did watching Universal Soldier. Um, yeah, we
all we all like Art touches us all um. Eight
years old, I think of that movie came out. I
think I was around around eight years old, my seven
and uh, I remember there was a cheap dollar theater
and I went that's where I saw it. But I
what you know, specifically at that age, you're going to think, like, yeah,

(01:06:58):
guns don't get the job done. John Claud van Dam does. Yeah, yeah,
what what are what are guns gonna do? We I've
watched John Claud van Dam like spin kick thirty people
with machine guns to death, Like, clearly the guns don't
do the trick. Yeah, you gotta love that Foreign policy advice. Now,
Kim Jong un was at best a mediocre student. His

(01:07:19):
real mother visited regularly to press him to focus more
in study harder, but being the heir to a dictatorship,
there weren't really any punishments for bad behavior at school.
Jong UN's teachers obviously could not meet with his parents. Instead,
that role was played by a rotating cast of random
North Koreans who worked in the country's diplomatic corps. The
justification given was that the boy's real parents did not

(01:07:39):
speak German. As a foreigner who did not speak the
local language, Kim Jong un experienced middle school and high
school as an outsider. For one thing, he wore nothing
but track suits. Jeans were too American and forbidden for
even him to wear. He was however, allowed to wear
the latest Air Jordan's. Needless to say, he stood out
visually as I think any kid wearing nothing but track
suits and New Air Jordan's would have in middle school. Um,

(01:08:03):
this is so fascinating because I wondered to this day
if he because you know, the basketball obsession obviously is
still on an ongoing thing, So I wonder if he's
like a full on sneaker head, and if he has like,
you know, a pair of whatever, like like the Travis
Scott's New Jordan's shipped to him or like I'm I
would be shocked if he doesn't right right exactly, And

(01:08:25):
that blows my mind to no end, because you don't
unless I'm missing something, I don't remember ever seeing him
in popular media whenever he's you see him, pictures of
him on the news or anything him wearing these things.
But I bet when he's walking around the house, he
is like looking at his closet and he's like, which
pair of high top Jordan's am I gonna wear today? Yeah,
he's got to have a shiploaded Jordan's. And I can't

(01:08:47):
help but wonder knowing that he wasn't allowed to wear
jeans as a kid, if the secret to his madness
might not be as simple as the fact that his
mom wouldn't buy him Jenkos. You know, that was everyone's
cross to bear in uh in in in middle school,
whether or not you could get Jenkos. So I sure did.
I was able to get some. Oh yeah, I had

(01:09:07):
a pair of Jenkos abs a fucking lutley um. But
tragically Kim jong Un did not. Now it's time for
another ad pivot, and I was going to do a
Jinkos ad but uh, but but I don't know if
the company still exists. So a lot of our ads

(01:09:27):
are randomly slotted and God willing. When we dropped a
ad break, it will be an ad for Jenkos, you know,
if it's dick pills, still pretty good, still pretty good
ad products. We're back. We're back. We're talking about Kim

(01:09:49):
Jong un in middle school and high school in Switzerland,
where he was at best a mediocre student, like the
host of this podcast and uh most of its and
our guest. Yeah, a lot of see students in the
entertainment industry. It's kind of kind of what fuels Hollywood. Absolutely, yeah,

(01:10:10):
don't trust any a students in Hollywood. We just had
a soundboard fall off of the wall. Now, Eli, I
need to see student move I need you to make sure.
Is the poison room still intact? Yes? Okay are you?
Are you aware of the poison room? Has anyone told
you that room? Is that a real thing? Yeah, there's

(01:10:31):
a poison room. You see that glass balcony behind you
that's walled off from the outside. It's it's filled with
poison because of the off gassing of the materials they
used to seal it. So if that door opens, everyone dies.
That's the poison room. Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, for
for for now, it's sealed for now. Look at Yeah. Yeah,

(01:10:55):
it's it's like a little bit of a sort of
Damocles situation where where one day we will be struck
down for our hubris of having the poison room. I
do like podcasting um in a danger zone. In fact,
that's what makes I think a podcast more captivating and
probably what what's fueling us. Yeah, is the risk of
pointless death. Um yeah, knowing what he loved, Yeah, exactly,

(01:11:20):
being next to a room filled with poison. Uh. Yeah,
So Kim jong un was in not a great student
um and uh as a foreigner who didn't speak the
local language. He was, uh, you know, he was kind
of an outsider. Uh. He had two friends who were
really like he actually hung out with a lot, and

(01:11:41):
they were both kids who weren't Swiss originally to um,
so they all kind of had that to bond over
the fact that they didn't speak the language very well. UM.
Kim jong un was particularly well known for his temper tantrum's,
particularly when his classmates would switch from speaking High German,
which he knew, to Swiss German, which he could not understand.
One girl who was a classmate of Kim Jongan's reported

(01:12:03):
he kicked us in the shins and even spat at
us when they would start using Swiss German, and she
did add that over time he seemed to thaw and
get more used to dealing with his classmates his equals
rather than his objects for him to abuse. Did any
of them ever fight back? I'm curious what the reaction
was or what the students were they were told to
react to it. Um. You know, they didn't know that

(01:12:25):
he was the son of a dictator. I think they
just thought that he was like he probably would have
just come across as like a mostly quiet kid who
every now and then would have temperate trantrams and like
spit on people. And I'm sure the teachers scolded him
and stuff, but like, you know, it's not a it's
not like it's a it's a Swiss you know school.
So they're they're they're pretty light on the the discipline. Yeah,

(01:12:46):
they're not going to be like hitting him and stuff.
It's I'm gonna be like when I grew up in
Oklahoma and they would paddle us. Yeah, because if you
have But also like if you spit on someone at
school here, you're liable to get knocked the funk out. Yeah,
I don't think that's I don't think that happened to
Kim Jong n. He might be a better person today
if somebody had knocked him the funk out, But I
have not run into any stories of that happening. And

(01:13:08):
it seems like he was kind of isolated in a
little bit lonely at school, but was not like bullied
or or ostracized. It was more that like because he
just didn't have a super good grasp at the language,
he kind of felt like an outsider. Um. His chief
love during this period continue to be a basketball. He
wore only the best for games, Michael Jordan, replica Chicago
Bulls jerseys, Chicago Bulls shorts, and of course the latest

(01:13:31):
air Jordan's. According to The Great Successor, Kim's competitive side
came out on the basketball court. He could be aggressive
and often indulged in trash talk. He was serious on
the court, hardly ever laughing or even talking, just focusing
on the game. When things went badly for him, he
would curse or even pound his head against the wall. Sometimes.
In addition to the other Asian teenagers, Kim Jong un
arrived with a couple of adults came along and set

(01:13:52):
up small camping chairs beside the court, keeping score on
a little board and clapping when Kim landed a basket.
So again, he's as close to normal as you can
have a childhood as a dictator during the periods of
time where he's in Switzerland. But it's still not normal,
it's still completely so. One of Kim's few friends at
school noted that he also played basketball at home on

(01:14:14):
his PlayStation when he couldn't be out on the court. Um,
they said, the whole world for him was just basketball
all the time. Another of his friends, kidnamed Marco Imhoff,
spoke about the occasional hints he would see of the
man Kim Jong Un would become. One time he came
over to Jong UN's house for dinner and their spaghetti
was cold. Uh. He saw Kim Jong Und snap at
the cook brutally enough that it's stuck in Marco's mind.

(01:14:36):
Twenty years later, Interviews with other classmates paint a picture
of a quiet, nerdy, basketball loving loner who absolutely avoided
contact with girls and refused to share any details of
his private life. One of his few good friends were
called We weren't the dimmest kids in class, but neither
were we the cleverest. We were always in the second tier.
The teachers would see him struggling ashamedly and then move on.

(01:14:57):
They left him in peace. He left without getting any
exam results. Of all, he was much more interested in
football and basketball than lessons. So yeah, that's him at
school um In. When jong Un was fourteen, his mother
was diagnosed with breast cancer. She sought treatment in France
and would linger for several years, but she eventually died

(01:15:17):
from the disease. Her brother and sister, who had acted
as jong UN's fake Swiss parents for years decided that
their sisters sickness was a sign that they should flee
for safety. On May seventeenth, they went on the run
with their three biological children, abandoning Kim Jong un and
his brother, and showed up at the United States Embassy
asking for asylum. They live in the United States to

(01:15:38):
this day. Kim Jong un would spend his remaining time
in Switzerland with a separate set of handlers, And we
just don't know anything about how that impacted him emotionally.
We don't really know anything about how he felt about
his aunt and uncle. Um, we don't know how he
felt about them fleeing for the United States. They in
the interviews with the author of The Great Successor They Like,

(01:15:59):
reported being frustrated at the coverage of Kim Jong un
that they saw on TV and the States and how
negative it always was. So they seemed to still be
kind of protective towards him. But we don't really know
if he took this as an abandonment or if it
was just kind of water off of a duck's back.
Oh man, I I'm this is what's most fascinating about
it is his version is the most um complex of

(01:16:21):
all of the succession, you know what I mean, Like
his his other his his father and his um his
grandfather had much more like their stories are pretty you know,
like almost streamlined, whereas his has a lot of uh
like complexities to it. And I'm sure I would wager
to say that it probably did affect them in the

(01:16:42):
same way that he probably learned that he was the
product of an affair. I don't think those things at
some point or another, they're gonna have some kind of
impact on you. Yeah, it's just kind of hard to
say what that is like. And that's part of why
I'm concluding all of the Kim's in two episodes as
opposed to doing a two partter on Kim Sung and
Kim Jong ill is that, like, we just don't have

(01:17:02):
that much really solid fact about how the two grew up.
We know enough about Kim Jong un that you can
really make him into a person in your head, um,
which you can't with the others. And two thousand two,
Kim Jong un returned to North Korea full time to
attend the Kim Il sung Military Academy, where he learned
how to manage the army that he had technically been
a general of from the age of about seven. Official

(01:17:25):
North Korean propaganda assures us that he was instantly so
good at war that he wound up teaching his instructors
rather than learning from them. He would regularly keep senior
military officials up late into the night, advising them on
how to organize their forces, and shushing them whenever they
told him he really ought to get some sleep. That's,
of course, the official North Korea yea I was going
to say, propaganda, Yeah, yeah, yeah. And two thousand eight,

(01:17:48):
Kim Jong il's health took a major turn for the worst.
He clearly realized that his time was ending and hurriedly
rushed the process of making his son his official successor.
That same year, he called a Workers Party Congress and
had them vote to confirm Kim Jong un as his successor.
This was the first time many North Koreans would have
heard of the boy and Jong Il's case, that process
had started in the late nineteen seventies. Given him twenty

(01:18:09):
years is a public figure in North Korea before taking
the baton from his father, Kim Jong un would only
have three years before taking power. No, sorry, just one question,
what is the age difference when each of them get
assumed in again, I I let's see here. Kim Jong
was born in uh No was yeah, yeah, he was

(01:18:30):
born in eighty four, and Kim Il sung or Kim
Kim Jong il was born in uh nineteen forty or
so like, Um, so he's born in forty one. He
took you'd been like fifty three when he took power
in his early fifties, so he, I mean, clearly obviously,
uh he was the youngest Kim Jong Yeah, yeah, yeah,

(01:18:52):
Kim Jong was absolutely the young but like a margin,
like it's crazy. Yeah, he's a lot younger than his
dad is when when he takes power, which is you know,
largely because Kim Jong ill was an alcoholic who poisoned
his body and died very young. Um, which you know,
if you're going to be a dictator, my preferences that

(01:19:12):
you poison yourself to So yeah, I'm down with that.
I'm not gonna complain. Um. With no time to waste,
Kim Jong Ill began promoting his son up the ladder
like he was trying to win a sprinting award in
the Nepotism Olympics. The propaganda departments of North Korea began
referring to Kim Jong Un as the leader comrade. The
regime printed out booklets they sent to the army titled
the Material in Teaching the Greatness of Respected Comrade General

(01:19:35):
Kim Jong Un. It informed them that at age three,
Kim Jong un had been capable of shooting out light
bulbs from a hundred yards away with a handgun. By
the time he was eight, the book claimed he could
drive large trucks at eighty miles an hour. Shortly after
publishing this, Kim Jong un was promoted to command of
the Korean People's Army, which was hereafter renamed the Kim
Jong Un Armed Forces. So it's cool. Yeah, she's the

(01:20:00):
the turnaround. Also, I love that a that a big
flex for him is driving a huge truck at eight.
Oh yeah as a little kid. Yeah, that is a
big flex. Yeah. Now, the military that Kim Jong Un
was about to inherit would be a fundamentally different force
from the one that his grandfather had built and his
father had inherited. This is because on October three, two
thousand and six, the regime detonated its first nuclear device.

(01:20:22):
There is some debate still over whether or not it
was a successful test of a low yield nuke or
an accidental fizzle that wound up being far smaller than intended.
In either case, the detonation was an actual nuclear explosion,
and North Korea would only get better at manufacturing weapons
of mass destruction from that point on. Over the next
five years, as Kim Jong ill sickened and began to die,

(01:20:43):
Kim Jong un increasingly took up the organs of power.
The pride of being the first North Korean leader to
develop nukes would go to his father, but Kim Jong
un would be the first of his line to learn
how to use the weapons to get what he wanted.
We'll talk about that and much more in Part two. Eli,
you want to plug your plas? Yes, please, thank you
so much for having me. I uh check out Closure,

(01:21:05):
the podcast That Never Ends, available on iTunes, Spotify, wherever
you get your podcasts. And I have another podcast called
pot as a Woman. But I should say what closures about.
I don't think closure is real. And I interview a
bunch of people they tell different stories about whether or
not they found closure in certain things, and uh, it
sounds weighty, but it's also great conversations. And then I
co host podcast Theresa Lee called pot as a Woman

(01:21:25):
where we do a track by track breakdown of Orianna
Grandie's most recent albums and we have a bunch of
our friends come on and talk about whether they're into
it or not. And of course you can find me
online on all the socials at elio Olsburg um and
Eli Olsberg dot net for show information. And lastly, if
you live in l A, I have a show called
Performance Anxiety at the Pleasure Chest. It's a monthly stand
up show second Tuesday of every month and I am

(01:21:48):
Robert Evans. You can find me on the internet at
I Write Okay on Twitter. You can find this podcast
at Behind the Bastards dot com. You can fight us
on Twitter and Instagram at at Bastards pod. Uh, and
you can buy t shirts t public Behind the Bastards,
So check those out. UM, check it all out. If
you listening right now are the child of a dictator

(01:22:10):
who is going to school in a Western country, hiding
out under an assumed name and listening to podcasts as
you bide your time until gaining power. Uh, just remember, uh,
I do take bribes. That's That's all I have to say. Um, Sam,
I would, Yeah, I would, I would love to write
a positive podcast about you and your family, so so

(01:22:32):
hit me up. Um we could, we could do a sponsorship,
you know, yeah, and Venmo and me at Eli Olsburg
if you if you want to invide me to talk
about if you're gonna start getting like the Kadafi's kids
sending new cash. He's a big, big fan of the show. Um,
that's it, that's the episode. We're done here, go go

(01:22:55):
hug a cat or something.