Kim, the sun king without a crown
Kim Jong-un styles himself ‘‘The Sun of the 21st Century’’. Supreme Leader, Marshal of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Commander of the Army, Chairman of the Workers’ Party, the chain-smoking, podgy potentate with the bad haircut and the nuclear arsenal is both a joke and a menace. He is widely seen as the last truly dangerous dictator.
Though not formally crowned, he is really King Kim III, a hereditary absolute monarch in the 17th-century mould, unconstrained by written laws, customs, or legislative bodies. In the vast prison camp that is North Korea, he is the sole focus of judicial, executive and military authority. He exercises the power of life and death over his people, to whom he is a living god. He rules by inherited divine right.
To understand Kim Jong-un we should look not to examples of modern tyranny, but to Louis XIV. North Korea’s Sun of the 21st Century, like France’s Sun King, can declare: ‘‘L’etat, c’est moi’’ (‘‘I am the nation’’).
The North Korean regime has all the strengths of an absolute monarchy, but also some of its weaknesses. For Kim is a historical anomaly, a throwback to an earlier age of monarchical power and the cult of kingship – once that is understood, he becomes less preposterous, perhaps more containable, and more vulnerable.
Absolute monarchy is a delicate balancing act, as Louis XIV knew, and Louis XVI did not, to his cost. Charles I believed he ruled by divine right, until Parliament demonstrated his mortality.
Kim’s repressive techniques are Stalinist, but his style of despotism is from an earlier age. Like Louis XIV and every other absolutist ruler, Kim uses symbolic display and the icons and hereditary semi-religious rituals to cow and impress his subjects: Parades of weaponry, synchronised waving and joyful weeping, and orchestrated demonstrations of public affection.
He cultivates the mystique of kingship, deliberately concealing his personality, surrounding himself with eminences grises – faceless, fawning men in identical uniforms, the better to stand out as the supreme being.
But like most absolute sovereigns, Kim is also exceptionally isolated, friendless and alone on his throne. He has no advisers or confidants, let alone critics, merely dispensable yesmen and courtiers.
Stand too close to the Sun and you get burned – or in North Korea, it is said, fed to wild dogs or tied to an artillery gun and blown to shreds. His uncle and brother have both been liquidated. The humiliation and execution of an enemy, rival or relative was a favoured technique of absolute monarchy.
Kim is also spoilt, as only a pampered princeling risen to the throne can be. While ordinary people comprehend, from the age of about 5, that they are not the centre of the universe, the absolute ruler never does.
The only people Kim meets are there to serve him and execute his will. Immune to criticism inside his country, he is almost certainly unaware of the mockery that swirls around him outside it.
The life he has led, the society he has grown up in and now rules, has produced exactly the sort of person one might expect: Paranoid, ignorant, self-indulgent and entirely believing the myth on which his supremacy rests.
Kim Jong-un is a pure product of absolutism: Supremely powerful, but absolutely isolated from reality – brutal and insecure. If absolute monarchy is the key to understanding how North Korea works, it may also offer a clue to its future. Absolute monarchies crumble when the Sun King ceases to dazzle, when education undermines the myth, when hunger becomes more pressing than reverence. For Louis XVI, the beginning of the end came when the women of Paris marched on Versailles demanding bread and laughing at the king.
One day the citizens of North Korea, like Europeans in the past, will look on the glittering apparel of Kim’s absolute rule and see that the emperor has no clothes.
The Times