was a dancer born in Japan, his martial experience was nonexistent in a society that glorified “military first” and perpetuated a war mentality, and he had spent several years in Europe, where he played video games while hundreds of thousands of people back home ate rats and tree bark to survive. Moreover, the temporal distance from the war and Kim’s young age made it impossible to place him at the center of the narrative of the North Korean state.
Therefore, Kim’s April 15 speech was heavy on history, especially that of the Korean People’s Army, to show his mastery of the subject. Subsequently, the regime began “with…new urgency” to commemorate the Korean War, as Adam Cathcart, an astute observer of North Korean propaganda, and several other experts have pointed out. Suzy Kim, a professor of Korean history, noted that Kim renovated the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum in 2013, in time for the sixtieth anniversary of the armistice. The regime declared that it was intended to serve “as a base for anti-U.S. education as it equips service personnel, working people and youth and students with the Juche idea, the anti-imperialist revolutionary ideas, outstanding commanding art, and military strategies and war tactics of President Kim Il Sung.”
Jean Lee, who was the Associated Press Korea bureau chief based in Pyongyang from 2011 to 2013, visited another Korean War museum in Sinchon—where North Korea claims U.S. troops massacred civilians during the war—that Kim enlarged and refurbished in 2014. What had once been “a simple building on a grassy knoll was replaced by a palatial museum that is a veritable house of horrors, with room after room graphically bringing to life the gruesome atrocities attributed to the Americans.” Lee observed, “A visit there is like walking through the set of a horror movie; visitors can walk right up to the tableaus and can practically smell the blood and hear the screams. In one tableau…a life-sized American soldier yanks the hair of a young Korean woman tied to a tree as another American sinks a knife into her heart. In another room, suffused in red light as though drenched with blood, American soldiers drive nails into a Korean woman’s head. Rabid glee distorts their faces.” As Suzy Kim pointed out, “In North Korea, the Korean War is relived continually, not just through museums and memorial sites, but also through the constant reminder of continued conflict with the United States.”
For Jong Un, the invocation of Korean War history, including the documented and imagined American atrocities and the North Korean triumph over the U.S. imperialists, as well as his own heredity, of course, all serve to connect him to his guerrilla ancestry. He has harnessed the nostalgia for the era before the 1990s. “This is a man comfortable within the folds of this history,” Cathcart has observed, “to the extent that he does not appear to mind imitating his grandfather’s stately strolling pose or that the central massive statue in the Korean War Museum appears to look more like Kim Jong-un than the man who began the Korean War.” During his frequent public appearances, Kim can be seen giving guidance at various economic, military, and social and cultural venues, as his grandfather and his father did, but he is more like the former than the latter in the way that he has allowed himself to be relatively transparent and accessible. He hugs, holds hands, and links arms with men, women, and children, seeming comfortable with young and old.
Yet while basking in the glow of his grandfather’s omnipresence among his people, Kim doesn’t seem content with just reliving history—though it serves to legitimize him—but wants to propel the country forward toward a new modernity.
A “SOCIALIST FAIRYLAND”
While the outside world looks askance at the young dictator, Kim Jong Un appears determined to make his youth a virtue as he reinforces the impression that he is young, vigorous, and on the move—qualities that he attributes to his country as well. Rather than giving static guidances or merely standing in stately observance while his entourage dutifully takes notes, Kim is yanking weeds, riding roller coasters, pulling the lever at the lubricant factory, navigating a tank, and galloping on a horse. The pictures of Kim during his routine visits to various locations seem almost spontaneous, with children at a nursery falling over him, tugging at his sleeve, or with women aviators who are holding on to his arm as they walk forward together toward the camera. Speaking directly to the people