Dear Leader

North Korea announced last week this latest nauseating scenario: the embalmed corpse of its former “Dear Leader,”  the late Kim Jong Il, now formally enshrined with the label “Eternal Leader,” will be put on permanent display as a macabre object of worship at Pyongyang's Kumsusan Memorial Palace, near the moldering corpse of his late father, dubbed the “Eternal President,” Kim Il Sung, founder of the Korean communist Kim dynasty.

February 16, the Dear Leader’s birthday, will now and forever hereafter be known as the "Day of the Shining Star," a supposed reference to his "military first" policy, just as his father’s birthday is called the "Day of the Sun." Statues and portraits of the Dear Leader together with "towers to his immortality"  will also be set up everywhere in the country.

The Political Bureau of the Workers' Party Central Committee declared North Korea's "unanimous desire ... to hold the great leader Comrade Kim Jong Il in high esteem as the eternal leader of the party and the revolution." His father got exactly the same cult of personality treatment when he died in 1995.

And the dynasty lives on for now in the form of the son, twenty-something year-old Kim Jong Un, who inherited a boat load of his daddy’s magnificent political and military titles with the hope that he too can impose himself and his personality on the nation’s pitiful populace with absolute power and manufactured legitimacy as well as his authoritarian father and grandfather did before him.

The never ending propaganda praising Kim Jong Il's life and works has gone up several notches since his death and the privileged class has vowed to uphold his policies in an attempt to justify the hereditary transfer of communist power to the kid.

All of this has got to be the most bizarre version of George Orwell’s Animal Farm I have ever witnessed. It is the horrible nightmare of Authority run amok. It is big government and big military completely unrestrained where the truth is far stranger than the fiction. The people of North Korea are starving; there is zero freedom; no dignity; no life, liberty or pursuit of happiness; no rights whatsoever; nothing to live for. They are beyond pity.

The life of the average North Korean is a perpetual charade in which their very being is entirely exposed, monitored, dominated and controlled 24/7 by human monsters -- humanoids deprived and devoid of empathy, bereft of sympathy, totally lacking in even the tiniest shred of human kindness, mercy or decency.

North Korea makes the proverbial Devil’s territory of Hell in the Holy Bible seem like a desirable summer vacation destination.

And now we learn that these monstrous savages are actually rounding up and punishing numerous hapless souls who fail to sufficiently exhibit sincere manifestations of sadness and despair at the death of the Dear Leader.

According to North Korean sources, the brutal regime “authorities are handing down at least six months in a labor-training camp to anybody who didn’t participate in the organized gatherings during the mourning period, or who did participate but didn’t cry and didn’t seem genuine.”

Amnesty International reports that there are about 200,000 offenders and families held in North Korean prison camps camps known as “zones,” where 40 percent of inmates in the camps will die from malnutrition and every former inmate interviewed for the report had witnessed at least one public execution while being held.

Total Control Zones, are for people who have committed “serious crimes.” People in these camps are never released. Revolutionary Zones, are camps for people who have committed less serious offenses such as making critical comments toward government policy or trying to cross the border. Sentences range from a few months to 10 years in these zones.

This is what people get when they seek a Dear Leader – when they seek Authority!