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Hiatus . . .

Asia Exile will be in hibernation until the second week of May. But please post your comments, and I will put them up on my return.

Happy Golden Week to everyone.

Understanding the supervillain: Kim Jong Il's poignant evil

 

[My op-ed on yesterday's North Korean missile launch ran here in today's newspaper. I originally wrote it for Saturday, but it wa sheld over - so here below is the slightly variant version which would have run then.

There's an analysis piece in a different vein here. For a different view, see the piece in last Friday's International Herald Tribune by the brilliant Brian Myers of South Korea's Dongseo University (I can't find it Online - cananyone help?). The best things I read on the whole silly affair were the report by the International Crisis Group and this piece by Tim Brown on GlobalSecurity.org.]

Twenty years after the demise of the communist Evil Empire, the world has begun to struggle when it comes to credible international super villains. Robert Mugabe? Horrible, certainly, but also rather pathetic. Vladimir Putin – sinister, perhaps, but hardly foe to all humanity. Even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran lacks the edge somehow, and it’s been far too long since Osama bin-Laden put in an appearance. In the global obnoxiousness rankings there is only one serious contender, leagues ahead of anyone else: the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il.

He’s got the bizarre personality cult (“Dear Leader”, “Lodestar of the Twenty-First Century” etc). He’s got the crazed haircut and Dr Evil pantsuit. He’s got the devastating superweapons (about half a dozen nuclear warheads, by most estimates). And sometime in the next few days, puny mortals will quail in terror as his latest evil scheme streaks across the sky – the firing of an intercontinental rocket high in the atmosphere above Japan.

This, if the previews are anything to go by, is the most dastardly act of villainy since the days of Goldfinger and Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Britain, the US and South Korea have sternly warned the North Koreans to put down their rocket and step away from the launch pad. Sanctions have been threatened in the UN Security Council. The Japanese military, which has never fired a shot in anger since the Second World War, has ambitiously announced that it will shoot the rocket down if it strays near its own territory. But this near hysterical reaction, and the crude caricaturing of Kim Jong Il, serve only to distract from the reality of North Korea as it confronts the world, and to blind us to the very few feasible solutions.For Kim Jong Il is neither a madman nor a fool. Understood on his own terms, his actions have a logic and even a warped wisdom, and have seen him through a decade-long emergency which would have put paid to a lesser leader. No one could ever reasonably defend the North Korean regime, which competes with the worst in history for its cruelty and absurdity. But it is time for the rest of the world to try a bit harder to understand Mr Kim’s actions, as well as condemning them.