25
Jan
Were North Koreans expressing genuine grief over Kim Jong-Il’s death?
“Most of us seem to have assumed that the tears were fake, produced on command—an interpretation backed up by one of the best books recently to appear on the subject of North Korea, Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy, which describes manufactured public grief in 1994 after Kim Il-sung’s death. But in an article dissecting the phenomenon for Time magazine, Bill Powell noted that some of the public tears might have been authentic: the fact that North Koreans are brainwashed into believing that all they have comes from the Dear Leader means that they can understand their lives no other way.”
—Ruth Franklin, “The True Lies of Totalitarian North Korea”
Photo courtesy of Getty Images.
