Kim Jong-il did not die on the run, or in a hole, or behind bars, or on the gallows. His final act of surprise was to outlast even those authoritarian peers who showed greater capacity for compromise: Qaddafi, Mubarak, and the other tin-pot potentates swept from power in this year of awakening. He died, in the words of the weeping state television announcer who delivered the news, of a heart attack, while riding a train near Pyongyang. He succumbed, we are told, to “a great mental and physical strain caused by his uninterrupted field guidance tour for the building of a thriving nation.”
There were few actual facts in the official account of his demise—no mention of the debilitating stroke two years ago that began his decline, just a cheaply dubious scene set on a train—but anything else would not have suited him. Separated by hours, and a cosmic distance beyond measuring, the deaths of Vaclav Havel and Kim Jong-il illuminated the full spectrum of possibility about the nature of truth. David Remnick wrote Sunday about Havel’s life, which provided our most eloquent explanation of why totalitarianism must be total, why it depends, at bottom, not on the number of guns and tanks at the regime’s disposal, but on the consistent denial of reality, on the mixture of fear and ritual that raise the costs for any one person to dare to acknowledge that the emperor wears nothing at all. “Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal,” Havel wrote, in 1978, in “The Power of the Powerless,” an essay that now circulates in translation in closed societies the world over. “The principle must embrace and permeate everything.”
Nobody has engineered the apparatus of universal fiction more effectively, and catastrophically, than the Kim dynasty, which maintained control of a nation that still manufactures transistor radios built to receive only a single station. Where Mao and Stalin succumbed to the sheer scale of their undertakings, Kim Jong-il, and his father, Kim Il-sung, before him, addressed a more manageable canvas and “created one giant Potemkin village,” in the words of Andrew Natsios, who visited North Korea during the the famine years of the nineties as an officer of the humanitarian organization World Vision. Later, Kim would alternately reveal or conceal parts of his nuclear arsenal for strategic effect, and he used a similar approach in matters of starvation: laying bare or disguising the death of his people depending on the tactical priority. When relief workers received tours of the countryside, they were preceded by advance teams that ensured the streets were clear of “emaciated people, abandoned children, trash or debris, and dead bodies,” Natsios wrote in his book, “The Great North Korean Famine.”
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