By Michael Breen
The North Korean artillery attack which pounded Yeonpyeong Island last week, killing four South Koreans, injuring others and destroying property and woods, also demolished the widely-held opinion in this country that Kim Jong-il is not such a bad chap.
Peculiar though it may appear to outsiders, Kim has been politely referred to by media and government for a long time as ``Chairman Kim.” Entertainers do not mimic him or make fun of what to the rest of the galaxy is its nuttiest regime.
His has been a different tale from that of his father. As the founding dictator, Kim Il-sung was loathed by South Koreans for starting the war, cementing the division, and keeping millions of families apart. His gross personality cult spoke for itself. Here was the starkest expression of the scourge of the 20th century, the utopian dictator who considered his own job security more important than the lives, let alone the welfare, of an entire people.
Kim Jong-il, on the other hand, was seen to have simply inherited his position. This was not entirely true, for he, it may be said, was the self-interested force behind the intensification of his father’s deification in the 1970s and 80s.
But it was how many South Koreans wanted to see him. They invested in him their hope for change.
Never was this more so than with the historic first summit in 2000 when South Koreans, and indeed the world, got their first good look at him. Incredibly, they liked what they saw. Deferential to Kim Dae-jung, his older and more austere counterpart, open, humorous, ``J.I.” embodied possibility. ``I’ll visit you in Seoul,” he said.
The empty promise survived years of zero progress and made critics in the South appear like old fashioned anti-communists.
It is testimony to the rejection of South Koreans of the propaganda they grew up with under dictatorships ― many recall being taught at school that North Koreans literally had horns ― that they could explain away J.I.’s nuclear program and acts of aggression as recently as this year’s Cheonan attack. Indeed, never in the field of peninsular conflict, to rephrase Winston Churchill, have so many been so willing to discount so much for so long.
It is also testimony to the narcotic effect of blood ties on a nationalistic people that South Koreans could hold onto this delusion despite the clear evidence of the crippling misery of life under Kim in North Korea. His state is, to borrow from what James Joyce said of Ireland, the old sow that eats her farrow.
Now a few minutes of artillery fire, the first of its kind on Korean soil since the war, has made this all clear. Whatever his actual intention, he is a man who considers his own job security more important than the lives of South Koreans. No lasting good will ever happen to North Korea until he and all those around him have gone.
That appears to be the new majority view of two post-war generations, the middle-aged South Koreans who experienced the transition to democracy and the younger generation for whom the war was back in the year 1,000 BC when granddad was young.
The question now is whether that new view of Kim Jong-il, one already widely held outside of the peninsula, will be sustained or whether the ``pint-sized dictator and his dim son,” as the British tabloids call them, can work some magic and convince South Koreans once again to believe they are OK.
Michael Breen is an author, former foreign correspondent and the chairman of Insight Communications, a public relations consulting company. He can be reached at mike.breen@insightcomms.com.
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