KOREAN DICTATOR OUTDOING DAD
Inside the bizarre, murderous reign of North Korea’s man-child dictator
KIM Jong-un may be a dictator with a nuclear arsenal, but when he’s not threatening to nuke the US, he behaves more like a child playing with matches.
Kim, who is 33, 34 or 35 years old, depending on what state propaganda you believe, inherited North Korea from his father, Kim Jong-il, in 2011 and solidified his power with a bloodlust that would frighten King Joffrey of “Game of Thrones” — including blowing up his uncle with a cannon.
But his ruthless acts are contrasted by his bizarre personal life in which Kim has been known to pal around with former NBA star Dennis Rodman while guzzling pricy cognac with a harem of “Pleasure Squad” women.
And the dictator has forced his weirdness onto his people, making children study history books that claim he could drive at age 3 and race yachts at age 9, and forcing men to wear only one of 15 “state-approved” haircuts.
Of course, Kim’s own gravity-defying ’do is not among them, leaving the young head of state to be the only one with his signature look.
The third generation to rule the closed and oppressive Hermit Kingdom, Kim Jong-un is the youngest of late tyrant Kim Jong-il’s three sons.
He took over after his heir-apparent half-brother, Kim Jong-nam, fell out of favor with their dad. His other brother, Kim Jong-chul, was considered too “effeminate” to rule.
To look more like a leader, Kim Jong-un is rumored to have undergone plastic surgery to help him resemble his grandfather, Kim Il-sung, founder of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Kim soon showed he planned to rule by fear, as he launched a campaign of killing his perceived political enemies.
In 2013, Kim blasted his uncle Jang Song-thaek to bits with anti-aircraft cannons after accusing him of sedition, according to South Korea’s National Intelligence Service.
“Kim Jong-un ended up killing his uncle, who even Kim Jong-il could not kill,” one defector, Lee Young-guk, told CNN a year later.
Jang was considered Kim’s guardian and had for years helped the young autocrat cement his power following the death of his dad.
But Jang installed his own loyalists in key government positions, angering Kim, who feared a coup was brewing.
So the despot assembled two of Jang’s right-hand men and forced him to watch as they were shelled with an-nti-aircraft guns. Jang thenn faced the same obliteration.
Kim has also publicly exe-ecuted 140 of his own militaryy leaders and other top gov-vernment officials since 2014,4, the South Korean Institutee for National Security Strat-tegy said in a report.
All told, he ordered thee public killing of at least 3400 people, the report found.
Among them were officials whom Kim summarily executed after claiming they did not mourn his father’s deathh zealously enough.
Korea watchers suspectt Kim was also behind the 201616 assassination of half-brother KimKi Jong-J nam, a globe-trotting black sheep who died after two women smeared his face with a nerve agent in a Malaysian airport.
North Korea has denied any role, but the Malaysian government has accused the Hermit Kingdom of plotting the hit. UT while these executions could have been lifted from any despot’s playbook, Kim brings adolescent weirdness to new levels with an array of uunique obsessions. One fixation was the 22014 comedy “The Intervview,” in which Seth Rogen and James Franco play a TV producer and hhost recruited by the CIA to assassinate Kim. The touchy totalitarian lalashed out at the movie aand unleashed a cyberaattack, with his forces computer-hacking the movie’s distributor, Sony PPictures, and leaking embabarrassing information. But Kim’s not-sosnsneaky tech nerds left ththeir fingerprints all over theth hack job, and the FBI calledlld theth breachb a blatant attempt to “suppress the right of American citizens to express themselves.” Although North Korean children are taught tall tales of Kim’s childhood feats, he actually spent much of his youth away at the tony Swiss International School of
Berne, where he was a typical millennial obsessed with video games. “He had basketball games on his PlayStation. The whole world for him was just basketball all the time,” former classmate Joao Micaelo told CNNN in 2010. The teenage future tyrant attended the school under the name “Pak Un,” claiming he was the son of a Korean diplomat even as he paraded around in an expansive collection of Nikes that no low-level bureaucrat’s family could afford. He also played hooky from the $25,000-a-year school a total of 180 days in his two years there, according to reports. And with his youthful love of basketball games, he became a fan of the Chicago Bulls. In recent years, Kim has put aside his professed hatred of America to forge a bizarre friendship with Dennis Rodman, the team’s flamboyant former forward. The retired NBA star has traveled several times to North Korea, and even serenaded the leader with an off-key rendition of the first verse of “Happy Birthday to You” in 2014 before playing an exhibition in Pyongyang. Meanwhile, the baby-faced manchild so badly needs his ego stroked that he keeps a harem of fawning girls calleded the “Pleasure Squad” to entertain him andnd his cronies. Like his fa-ther and grandfather before him,m, he report-tedly stocks the flesh retinue with girls as young as 13, plucked from school and forced to endure a battery of tests to prove they are virgins. He squandered $3.5 million on lingerie and costumes for the women in 2016 alone. G IVEN his obsessive tastes and maniacal sense of entitlement, it should be no surprise that the doughy despot drops huge amounts of cash on his own creature comforts — even while the United Nations has found that 41 percent of his citizens are undernourished.
In 2016 alone, Kim splashed out $1 million on imported booze, along with $86,000 on SSwiss cheese and $74,266 on Swiss watches — two indulgences he picked up while at school in Europe.
Switzerland cut him off in JJuly of that year in compliance with UN sanctions.
Meantime, 71 percent of North Koreans relied on government food handouts amounting to just 10 ounces of food a day, the UN report found.
And even when Kim tries to help his people out with food, it sometimes doesn’t end up well.
After finding out in 2016 that his northern border guards were malnourished, Kim ordered “improved” dietary options “so that they would not envy a Chinese person,” according to United Press International. The move backfired, and dozens of soldiers got diarrhea from “smelly” Japanese sandfish and soup stock that was full of sand. S OLDIERS he doesn’t sicken or publicly execute are conscripted to build vanity public-works projects for the boy king, such as the $35.3 million Masikryongyg Ski Resort he hoped would become an international tourist destdestination. Kim whipped his aarmy into building the resort in just 10 mmonths despite the SSwiss refusing to sell hhim ski lifts, a slight thatth the state media called a “serious human-rights abuse.” Kim staffs the resort with civilian work gangs, NBC reported in January. He also forced North Koreans to etch a 500-yard-long propaganda message into a mountain. “Long Live General Kim Jong-un, the Shining Sun!” reads the message in Ryanggang Province, printed large enough to be visible from space. Despite everything, Kim managed to win his last election with 100 percent of the vote. The “supreme leader” ran for a local seat on North Korea’s legislature in 2014 and not a soul voted against him. Of course, Kim’s name was the only one on the ballot.