'Rogue Regime': A Marxist Sun King - New York Times

"Meanwhile his people scrounge for edible roots..."'Rogue Regime': A Marxist Sun King - New York Times: "In ''Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea,'' the veteran Asia correspondent Jasper Becker makes a powerful case for defining Kim once and for all -- not as an ordinary, if nuclear-tipped, dictator, but as an extraordinarily skillful tyrant presiding over the worst man-made catastrophe in modern history, worse than Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge or the Soviet Union in the 1930's."...

Kim does -- and he has built a stable of 100 imported limousines, as well as an entourage of women who are trained in ''pleasure groups'' to service the leader sexually. Kim imports professional wrestlers from the United States, at a cost of $15 million, to entertain him. And when he decided to build a film industry, he did what Hollywood studio heads could only dream about -- kidnapped foreign directors and actors and forced them to work for him. His wine cellars contain more than 10,000 French bottles. He flies in chefs from Italy to prepare pizza. Meanwhile, his people scrounge for edible roots...

To survive has required tenacity. Koreans are reported even to have murdered children and mixed their flesh with pork to eat. When I have encountered North Korean refugees in Asia, they look barely human -- stunted figures with sallow, terrified faces. Some North Koreans have tried to grow their own food, potentially a sign of independent thinking. But for years Kim had them stopped, though he has begun to open the economy slightly in the past three years. Those who protested were sent to an extensive gulag system, which may have resulted in the deaths of one million people. In this internal slave state, Becker suggests, tests of chemical weapons are carried out on prisoners, and pregnant women whose children were tainted with foreign blood have been forced to have abortions. Kim Jong Il has ''resisted adopting every policy that could have brought the misery to a quick end,'' Becker says, making ''the suffering he inflicted on an entire people an unparalleled and monstrous crime.''...