Korea analyst B. R. Myers. And that childlike purity necessitated an education system that propagated a perpetual state of crisis to keep the dangerous and polluting outside forces at bay. The guerrilla wars of the Japanese occupation and the total war of the Korean conflict against the United States were replayed with zeal. Nevertheless, their independence should not be taken for granted, as the external threats continued to loom, given the presence of U.S. troops just miles away along the Demilitarized Zone separating the two Koreas.
To young Kim Jong Un, his grandfather was a hero for the ages. By the time Kim Il Sung died, his ten-year-old grandson no doubt already recognized to some degree his part in North Korea’s destiny. As famine loomed and millions faced starvation, no expense was spared for the pomp and circumstance of a pricey funeral—the embalming by Russian specialists alone reportedly cost $1 million, with an additional $800,000 per year for maintenance costs. For young Jong Un, a direct descendant of the Sun of Korea, heir to the anti-Japanese, anti-U.S. struggle, raised in a culture of paranoia, violence was a part of his grandfather’s legacy. He would benefit from a political system that his grandfather designed and his father reinforced, placing him at the pinnacle of the social pyramid, with all of the accompanying entitlements. The country’s survival—and the Kim family’s legitimacy—depended on Jong Un’s embrace of this reliance on violence and inherited privilege, for only then could this young guerrilla become a little god in service of his founder.
In 1992, at his eighth birthday party, Kim Jong Un dressed up not as Batman or Superman, as boys in the United States might, but as a little general in a uniform decorated with one star. Real generals wearing real uniforms with real stars bowed to him—something that a typical boy certainly would never expect. “It was impossible for him to grow up as a normal person when the people around him were treating him like that,” his aunt Ko Yong Suk said in an interview with The Washington Post years after she and her family defected to the United States.
We don’t know who gave Jong Un the made-to-order general’s uniform. Perhaps it was a gift that Kim Jong Il bequeathed to all of his sons—he had at least three we know of, the other two being Jong Un’s half-brother, Jong Nam, and his full brother, Jong Chol. Or perhaps it was a deliberate move by his ambitious mother, Ko Yong Hui, one of Kim Jong Il’s favorite mistresses, who was probably seeking to elevate her two sons amid the likely jockeying for position behind the scenes. After all, by the time of this birthday celebration, Kim Jong Il had long been designated as his father’s successor and it would have been a prudent move for Ko Yong Hui to position Jong Un and Jong Chol as the potential future heirs and assert their status above the generals.
But while Jong Un lived a life of privilege and ease in one of the Kim family’s many villas and mansions, replete with servants, amenities, and toys, the country’s future and Kim Jong Il’s success as the new leader of North Korea were anything but guaranteed. North Koreans were no strangers to adversity, but in the early 1990s, Pyongyang faced economic, humanitarian, and security challenges, while its aging leader was planning for a potentially destabilizing succession of power to his eldest son. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc deepened North Korea’s isolation even as it needed a continuous infusion of economic assistance. Its traditional allies and primary benefactors, Moscow and Beijing, were looking to strengthen ties to Washington and Seoul. South Korea had emerged by then as an economic powerhouse, having hosted the 1988 Olympics. North Korea’s dire food situation was well on its way to disaster; in just a couple of years, a famine would kill between six hundred thousand and one million people, or 3 to 5 percent of the population, the result of decades of the regime’s mismanagement of the economy and callous disregard for its people, exacerbated by extreme weather. Adding yet another dimension to this challenging environment was the brewing confrontation with the United States over North Korea’s covert nuclear weapons program.
The child Jong Un would not have concerned himself with these problems. It was up to his father, Kim Jong Il, to learn how to play on this new strategic chessboard. Luckily, he had two decades