The first article
I'd ever read about the succession in North Korea was on TNR.com on
September 29, 2008. It was written by Sahil Mahtani, one of this year's
crop of research-reporters, who has now gone off from a place that
valued him very much to Mumbai where he will cover financial
institutions for The Wall Street Journal. He has listened, he wrote me
last week, to "the hoofbeats of the horse of history." Indeed, he has.
Imagine a greater contrast than the one between Mumbai and Pyongyang.
The only truly modern contrivance in Kim Jong Il's communist state is
its well-armed and soon-to-be-nuclear military. The rest is almost
primordial with poverty that is an echo from the plague years, except
that it goes on and on...and on. I suppose its torture chambers--this
is a country in which all sorts of torture are routine--may also be
up-to-date. But its rules of succession are not.
Papa anoints one of his progeny, excluding his daughter, of course, to
become the Maximum Leader. Sahil was the first to notice that his young
son (no one seems to know how young) was his favorite. Two others were
disqualified. One was a thug. Why would that disqualify him from the
inheritance? Well, he is an unserious thug. The second, the father
thought too "girlish," which either means gay or not thuggish enough,
thuggish in a serious way, that is: he wouldn't kick the b'jesus out of
anyone.
So Kim Jong-un it is. But not until 2012 by which time Secretary Gates
will either have left office or stopped reassuring Seoul that there's
nothing to worry about from its northern abutter.
I wrote a blog post, "Dynastic Delusions," last week about
Kim's family and the other inheritors of power. (I left out Fidel and
Raoul, which doesn't seem to bother the remnant leftish fans of the
regime.) And there was another blog post on The Plank by Jason Zengerle.