I’m in the middle of watching two horrible documentaries on North Korea on the history channel. It is a commercial break now but we have just been told that “the story goes that” Kim Jong Il murdered his brother while they swam together in a river as a child. While described as a “story” the very next statement made by some former CIA guy they interviewed was basically that murdering his own brother had a “psychological impact” on Kim which helped set the tone for his murderous career. This of course sets the tone for the remainder of the second documentary, entitled, “The Real Dr. Evil.”
While filmed in the dramatic “unsolved mysteries” or “inside report” kind of documentary style to help accentuate the eeeevvviiilll of North Korea and Kim Jong Il, it is as if someone ran an “IMPORT SCRIPT” command on the old South Korean anti-communist education system. I’m not suggesting that Kim Jong Il is a warm and fuzzy loving guy, but these dramatized shows (also very popular in Japan) accomplish nothing but to set up the DPRK as the demons they are portrayed as in old Korean textbooks.
Update: I finished watching the show. Well, I’m all fired up now to despise that cold blooded Dr. Evil Kim Jong Il and his “precious” nuclear weapons. I wonder what it must be like for these interviewees in such documentaries to have things they say get woven into these shows and whether they feel like their “main point” is getting through. In the case of one of the few “scholarly” types interviewed, Selig Harrison, who is the author of Korean Endgame and is a DPRK expert with very moderate positions currently at the Center for International Policy I am not sure he did. I found a nice article written by him for the Nation in which he reviews several recent books on Korea, including works by Cumings and Armstrong.