Word: ils
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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With his high-heeled shoes and cumulus-cloud hairdo, Kim Jong Il displays a taste for the gaudy that is at odds with his country's spartan ways. He surrounds himself with the scions of his father's wartime comrades, a new generation of revolutionaries who call themselves the Loyal Warriors and whose cars carry license plates emblazoned with the Dear Leader's birth date. Mercurial and erratic, Kim Jong Il rarely meets foreign dignitaries. Defectors have told tales about his huge film collection, his penchant for Portuguese oranges and -- though he is reportedly married with two children -- a weakness...
...Il Sung was a nobody when he arrived at the port of Wonsan on Sept. 19, 1945, at the end of World War II and the beginning of chaos on the Korean peninsula. He had lived the previous five years in obscurity in the Soviet Union and returned to his native land dressed in the uniform of a Soviet army captain. Some people did not even believe he was who he claimed to be. Kim Il Sung? Wasn't that the name of a famous guerrilla? Didn't he die fighting the Japanese in Manchuria years before? Could this fleshy...
...revolution: Mangyondae, an idyllic spot southwest of Pyongyang. The family had settled there after Kim's great- grandfather, a tenant farmer, was assigned by his rich landlord to keep up the owner's family graves. Those plots have been replaced by shrines to the genius of Kim Il Sung, as much of Kim's youth has been replaced by legend. At the age of 17, for example, he was supposedly teaching fourth-graders the basic doctrines of Marx and dialectical materialism. Little is said about his family's move to Manchuria, which was then occupied, like Korea, by Japan...
...Il Sung got his chance to refashion himself when he fled Manchuria for the Soviet Union in 1939 or 1940, as the Japanese Imperial Army was trouncing the Chinese guerrillas. He was assigned to the Khabarovsk Infantry Officers School and given a captain's commission along with command of the Soviet-led ethnic Korean battalion. In Khabarovsk he married Kim Chong Suk, who had joined Kim Il Sung's guerrillas in 1935 and had followed him into exile. After the Soviets entered the war in 1945 and occupied Japan's northeast Asian territories, Kim and 66 fellow officers were sent...
Conventional wisdom blames either Moscow or Washington for turning Korea into the first hot conflict of the cold war. Kim Il Sung, however, had reason to want such a war. He had always preached that war was the only way to unify the peninsula and drive out the U.S.-backed regime of Syngman Rhee in Seoul. Furthermore, it would bolster his stature against other Korean communists who were urging different ways to unite the country...