MAKING OF A MONSTER
Kim Jong-un’s secret pampered youth revealed
NORTH Korea’s bloodthirsty tyrant Kim Jongun, who murders rivals, starves his people and threatens the U.S. with nuclear war, wasn’t a monster as a kid — he was a nerd and slow learner at his exclusive Swiss schools.
Author Anna Fifield argues Kim, 38, who had his uncle and half-brother assassinated along with other political rivals, would have been a mildmannered loser if he hadn’t returned to North Korea.
“Kim’s years in Switzerland, during which he was enrolled in both a tony private school and a small German-speaking public school, would have taught him that if he were to live in the outside world, he would have been entirely unremarkable,” says Fifield, who declares he would’ve been “a nobody.”
Before he became North Korea’s murderous dictator, Kim Jong-un was a slow learner and would have grown up to be “a nobody,” says an author
Kim was 12 when he arrived in Bern, Switzerland, in August 1996 using the protective name Pak Un and holed up with his aunt Ko Yongsuk, her husband, Ri Gang, and their three children and his older brother.
They lived as a normal suburban family in a $4 million apartment building owned by the North Korean government. His best friend João Micaelo, son of Portuguese parents, recalls Kim having difficulty speaking German at their public school and being put in classes for “weaker” students.
Later, he attended the
International School of Berne, a private English-language school for the children of diplomats with a tuition of more than $20,000 a year.
He returned to North Korea at 16 and was groomed to be a brutal dictator by Army Gen. Hyon
Chol-hae before assuming god-like power at 27 when his dad, Kim Jong-il, died.
But instead of turning his country into a modern democracy, enjoying the freedoms of western Europe as a teen only convinced him to continue the tyrannical system of North Korea, where killing, torturing and crushing people “turned him, his father and grandfather into deities,” writes the author.