'Anna Fifield’s 'The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un' is required reading to fully appreciate Trump’s bizarre bromance with the young tyrant,' writes BobDrogin
Both make endless false claims, blame others for their mistakes and have been lampooned — and vastly underestimated — by their critics.
Admittedly, the first serious English-language biography of Kim is less playful than its title suggests. The veteran Washington Post correspondent has produced a macabre portrait of a ruling dynasty that has inexplicably survived for seven decades — nearly as long as the Soviet Union before it imploded.
The idyll ended when he was ordered home to attend Kim Il Sung Military University, named for his grandfather and founder of the totalitarian state. Needless to say, he graduated as the top student. In 2009, when he was 25, his ailing father named him successor, and propaganda organs quickly spun a personality cult around him. It was the first time most North Koreans knew he existed.
Foreigners mocked his ballooning girth, high-fade haircut and attire “fashionable only in Communist holdover states,” as Fifield puts it. In China, North Korea’s closest ally, he was ridiculed as “Kim Fatty the Third” despite Chinese censors’ efforts to erase the nickname from the internet. He gave himself a slew of obsequious titles, including my personal favorite: “best incarnation of love.”
In February 2017, Kim’s older half brother was assassinated in a busy airport terminal in Malaysia, garnering global headlines. Kim Jong Nam died, in terrible pain, barely 15 minutes after two women had rushed up and rubbed two chemicals on his face that, when combined, formed the deadly VX nerve agent.
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