Kim Jong-il may be dead, but his Korea isn’t over

2011 was a bad year for many of us. The Eurozone, students, most of Japan, anyone who dislikes compound names such as ‘merkozy’, but most of all, I think, dictators.

Imagine it: one minute you’re oppressing a nation with a corrupt police force and your covert crush on Condaleeza Rice (a woman worth obsessively scrapbooking), the next you’re up to your armpits in inexplicably angry citizens and your corpse is paraded on the street. Ce’st la vie- unless, of course, you are ‘Glorious General, Who Descended from Heaven’ Kim Jong-il, and mourned like the 11 hole-in-one scoring cinematic-genius-exhibiting war hero your propaganda office totally didn’t falsely make you out to be.

As you may have already heard, unlike most dear departed leaders the ghostly shade of Kim Jong-il (may his spiritual life be as full of socialist Godzilla remakes as his corporeal one was) has the consolation of knowing that his legacy of food shortages and being photographed looking at things will be carried forth by his son, Kim Jong-un, under the watchful eye of his uncle.
So far, so eerily similar to the plot of The Lion King. Cue the standard parade of sickipedia-sourced morbid puns. In this sense, Kim Jong Il is no different from Gaddafi or even Hitler (people are still having a good old giggle over the one testicle thing, and it’s been over 50 years). But is it all really that funny?

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good pun as much as the next amateur journalist (see title). If it’s so dark that most people throw up a tiny bit in their mouths after hearing it, so much the better. But in the weeks after Kim Jong Il’s death the amused tone of commentators as they analyse everything from the cinematic bombast of his funeral to the bizarre near-mythological propaganda of the aftermath has begun to grate.

Because we shouldn’t find the crowds of weeping North Koreans swamped by a huge military presence amusing. Nor is the nascent cult of personality around Kim Jong-un something to wryly smirk at. We should be horrified, and possibly even terrified.

Here is a country starving on its feet, in complete isolation, in the grip of a undemocratic government whose vaguely insane policies have over the years involved importing an entire British brewery brick by brick, and ostrich farming. If, by any chance, you’ve read over the history of Russia under Stalin and felt a warm self-righteous glow that, glory be, democracy has won, please do give yourself a slap. Satellite pictures of North Korea indicate food shortages and ever-larger mass graves outside gulags, the standard “re-education” camps that in Stalin’s Russia killed over a million people. Oh, and they have nuclear weapons. Does it all seem so funny now?

It is yet another inconvenient truth that the Western world generally only kicks up a righteous fuss if a) the target involved has something we want and b) it looks like we might win. Thus, despite Gaddafi’s probable involvement with the Lockerbie bombing, we only snuck in our retribution when the entire of Libya was also giving him a swift kick in the gonads. Before that it was all hand-shaking and covert kissing (shame on you Berlusconi).

Until North Korea miraculously spouts oil fields, expect more puns in the face of atrocity. And perhaps this is the only weapon we have against a dictatorship with a tight psychological grip on its people. In the face of an unbeatable (and, you have to admit, somewhat ridiculous) foe, all we can do is laugh. But let’s please stop being so smug about it.