On the 50th anniversary of its founding in September, North Korea officially
declared Marshal Kim Jong Il as its "Great Leader," symbolically lifting
him to the position held by his father, Kim Il Sung, the founder of North
Korea, who died in 1994. Little is likely to change as a result, however,
as the younger Kim had already been running the country since the death of
the patriarch. Kim the Elder is revered as a deity, a fact symbolized by
a constitutional amendment passed this year proclaiming him to be the nation's
"Eternal President."
Kim Jong Il presides over a nation with no independent press and a population
kept in isolation from news of the outside world. Information about North
Korea is extremely difficult to obtain. The handful of foreign journalists
allowed to visit are kept on a very tight leash by government minders, and
the few North Korean websites offer a highly filtered view of the country,
mostly proclaiming the triumphs of socialism and the evils of capitalist
South Korea, with whom the North is in a perpetual state of war.
Occasionally, the tightly controlled press provides a note of inadvertent
comic relief. The official Korean Central News Agency informed its readers
in June that Korean military leaders invented a flying car 400 years ago
and used it to combat enemies. According to Master O Myong Ho, a researcher
at the History Institute of the Academy of Social Sciences, the flying car,
equipped with "flexible wings" and "jet propulsion," repelled Japanese aggressors
in 1592. |
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