Word: sung
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Which is the big, potentially fateful trouble. North Korea has been organized so tightly into a pyramid of power with Kim Il Sung at its apex that the possibility of a cataclysmic social implosion cannot be ruled out. Not that many years ago, Pyongyang still confidently spread the word that Kim's homeland was a paradise on earth and that South Korea was a brutally poor, miserable place under Uncle Sam's bootheel. "The game is finished," observed one South Korean official. Not only is the South's economy 14 times stronger than the North's, he pointed...
When Kim Il Sung's firstborn son came into the world on Feb. 16, 1942, he was given the Korean name Jong Il. He was also called Yura, which is Russian. After all, he was born in Khabarovsk, in the Soviet Far East. North Korean mythographers prefer to obscure that unpatriotic nativity, claiming that their Dear Leader first saw light on sacred Mount Paektu -- the site, according to legend, where Korean civilization sprang into existence 5,500 years ago. Such official obfuscations have ensured that Kim Jong Il remains mostly myth himself, even as he succeeds his father and becomes...
...stillborn infant just a year after her husband was anointed leader of North Korea by Stalin's regime. The Korean War then engulfed the peninsula, and Kim Jong Il spent its duration in northeast China. Back home, he transferred from school to school before graduating from Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang in 1964. His thesis: an analysis of his father's ideas on socialist agriculture. Still, the young Kim complained in private that his father -- who had remarried in 1963 and started a new family -- was too busy being the Great Leader to spend time with...
...Jong Il's transfiguration was startling. Until 1975 Kim Il Sung's younger brother Kim Yong Ju was heir apparent. Then, suddenly, Jong Il was publicly hailed as the "party center"; soon afterward, he became Dear Leader to his father's Great Leader. He also became culture czar, producing movies and lecturing on the art of opera. Kim Il Sung spared nothing to burnish his son's reputation. The younger Kim was credited, years after the supposed incident, with saving his father from a 1967 coup attempt. He was named General Secretary of the Workers' Party. Though without military training...
...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...