Behind the Bastards - Part One: Kim Jong Un and His Family of Dictators

Episode Date: July 2, 2019

In Episode 70, Robert is joined by Eli Olsberg to discuss The Kims of North Korea.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's dictating my denizens of a totalitarian regime? This is Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards, the podcast with the worst introductions in the podcasting game. Today, we are going to be talking about the Kims, the family that has ruled North Korea for three quarters of a century. My guest today is Eli Olsberg, comedian, writer, and host of the podcast Closure and Pod is a Woman.

Eli, Sophie is not there to be ashamed at me for my terrible introduction this week. Would you please react with shame and horror at my hackish ways? Is that too low key? That was perfect. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Thanks for being on. What do you think of the Kims, the Jong-Oons, and the Jong-Ils, and the Il-Songs of it all? It's funny, since that climate change report came out, I've gotten so fatalistic about all of it. For people listening, I'm sure you know what I'm talking about, but in case you don't, there was a few climate change reports that came out

that now have guaranteed that by 2050, civilization will crumble due to climate change. I feel like at this point, whatever we thought of them now, which is not necessarily great, I don't even know where to start. I'm so fucking jumbled about it, because I didn't know that's who we were going to be talking about, and I've got thoughts. Overall, I'm just like, fuck, we have 30 years left, what the fuck? I don't know whether to look at it that with more nihilism and just not acknowledge it or be more upset about it. Do you know what I mean? We're all in this situation in the modern world where there's so many garbage fires all around us.

Is it even worth putting out the one next to me, because there's this other one that's even bigger, or there's so many garbage fires that you can't even put out just one. It's just like everything around you is burning. That is a frustration. But at the same time, I think there's value in learning about these people, especially when they're people who I think have been gotten consistently wrong by mainstream reporting on it. I can say pretty clearly that the Kim family is one of the most requested subjects for an episode of this podcast, and has been since I started doing it.

And I think the reason so many people want an episode or episodes about the Kim family is because of the kind of stories that you hear about them on the news. These crazy tales of when Kim Jong-il would be like, oh, I went golfing for the first time and got 11 holes in one, and then quit the sport having mastered it. You hear these wacky claims, and you assume that an episode about these guys is just going to be one wacky fact after the other. And I also think that, you know what, it always is a thing that kind of... And the reason more people I think probably got curious, I don't think it's a coincidence that when the interview came out, I think a lot of people in America were suddenly like, oh, this is someone we should be concerned with because they're in a movie. And not only that, but they don't want the movie to come out.

Yeah, and I think that... We'll be talking about the interview some of this, because actually there's some pretty important stuff there. But I think in general, this is not going to be the episode that people who clicked on this excitedly hoping to hear a bunch of wacky North Korea stories are expecting, because I don't think the Kim family is what most people think they are. And I think in particular, Kim Jong-un, the current ruler of North Korea, is a very different person than most people expect. And I find that really interesting, and I think he's an important person to understand because he has a major role in our whole international clusterfuck at the moment. But yeah, that's what we're going to talk about today, is the history of the Kim family. And as much detail as I can reasonably give it.

Now, one of the problems about covering these particular people is that a huge amount of what we read about in the news about North Korea are lies. And they're often lies about lies. And even when... There's just so much misinformation that's out there. A lot of it's put out by the regime. Other of it is put out by sources in South Korea, sources in the United States. But actually parsing out what's real about the lives of any of the people in the Kim dynasty is really difficult to do. And I've done the best possible, I think, here.

But this is going to have, I'll say right now, this will have a higher percentage of things that 10 years from now I look at and realize, like, oh, that wound up not being true. Just because there's so much bullshit that gets put out about this family and about what goes on in North Korea. So this is a tough one. Yeah. Because I don't think that... I think anyone where there's a dictatorship where it's that heavy, where it's truly... I mean, if you really think about it, there's not even any kind of... Here's a better example, and not to...

Specifically, if you're going back to movies, if you look to certain cinema, you never hear anything heavy about North Korean cinema. That's how much of a vice is pressing down. You know what I mean? Because even within Iran, during certain periods, cinema there, movies managed to get out and not only did they get out, but they had a huge impact. And that has never happened to my knowledge of North Korea. Yeah. The biggest, the clearest way you can sort of put... You can sort of display the differences between Iran and North Korea is that...

I know a shitload of people who live in the United States or U.S. citizens and come from an Iranian background who regularly visit Iran and go back to see their family. Nobody, North Koreans who make it out of North Korea, don't get to do that. You don't get to go back into North Korea and then go live your life in the U.S. or wherever. Yeah, that's a really clear... And so that's part of why up until very recently, there's been almost no good information that you could get out of the country other than what little came out from refugees who fled. A lot of listeners will probably remember how at the end of May 2019, reputable outlets around the world reported that Kim Jong-un executed several of his envoys to the United States after failing to conclude a nuclear deal with the Trump administration.

And then five days later, evidence arose that the people who had been executed were actually alive and there were pictures of them. So it's so much of the time what we hear winds up not being true. And it's hard to say where the error came in, if it was North Korea putting out disinformation purposefully or some other power wanting there to be a disinformation. That's going to be a running theme in this episode. And it's a running theme in... Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to cut you off. I was just going to say that I think that on top of that, there's also just the misinformation that comes out with everybody trying to break a news story. I mean, that's a small percentage of it, but it's still a percentage nonetheless.

Yeah, numerous stories have been released about Kim Jong-un, who is the current dictator. There have been tales that he got so fat eating Swiss cheese that he can't see his penis. Stories that he takes snake venom to help with his erections. And most notoriously claims that he had his uncle executed by feeding him to starving dogs. And just for an example of how misinformation percolates out, that story about him feeding his uncle to dogs came out of a Chinese satirical news website, like a Chinese equivalent of the onion. And then foreign journalists who didn't know what the Chinese site was reported it as fact.

And that's not an uncommon thing. Wow. So, yeah, yeah, you get a lot of stories like that when you start digging into the old Kims. And so I want to lead this episode off by thanking a journalist named Anna Feifield, who's the author of a really good new book that I just read called The Great Successor. And it's a book mostly about Kim Jong-un. And Feifield, what impresses me about her is, number one, she's traveled to North Korea a lot of times, over the course of more than a decade.

But she also, to write this book, traveled all around the world and talked directly with people who raised Kim Jong-un when he was a kid, people who went to school with him, people who knew him as he was growing up. And so as far as like a verifiable history of this guy, I think she's done the best job that I've come across. And that's part of why I was able to do this episode, is I found her book and finally felt like I had something solid to grab onto and knew that I wasn't going to be taken in by a bunch of satirical Chinese comedy articles that got misinterpreted as real. And also a big thanks to the Kim family that will be joining us in 20 minutes. I'm just kidding. So let's get into this.

If I'm going to give people a useful history of the Kim dynasty, I think we have to start with Kim Jong-un's grandfather, Kim Il-sung. On October 14, 1945, more than 100,000 people filled the streets of downtown Pyongyang to celebrate the liberation of their country from Japanese occupation forces. Now North Korea was at that point under the protection and governance of the USSR. And on that fateful day, a Soviet general addressed the crowd and introduced them to someone who would later be the new leader of their country, Comrade Kim Il-sung. The North Korean crowd was surprised to see a heavy-set young man in his 30s take the podium and address their new nation. People were shocked by his appearance because Kim Il-sung, like I said, was kind of a heavy-set dude.

He looked like a soft, lazy government bureaucrat, which is more or less what he was. But Soviet propaganda up until this point had been sort of hyping him up to the people as a badass guerrilla fighter who'd spent years battling the Japanese in the mountains and working towards the liberation of his people. According to the South China Morning Post, quote, his real name was not Kim Il-sung, but Kim Sung-kai. He was born in 1912 into a Presbyterian family that was comfortably off. His father was a teacher and an elder in the church. In 1920, like many other Koreans, they moved to Manchuria to escape famine and Japanese rule.

His father died in 1926. He attended the UN Middle School in Jilin from 1927 to 1930 when he was arrested for subversion and imprisoned for several months. By 1935, he joined the anti-Japanese guerrilla war. His greatest moment came in June, 1937, when his unit of 200 men captured a small Japanese-held town in Korea for a few hours. By the end of 1940, the Japanese had killed his fellow commanders and many of his men, those who remained, crossed the Amur River into the Soviet Union. And that's the extent of Kim Il-sung's career as a mountain warrior. So he's billed as the guy who was responsible for orchestrating the campaign to oust the Japanese government

and sort of portrayed as being an equivalent to like Ho Chi Minh. But the reality is that he was just kind of a mid-level guerrilla leader and by the end of the fighting was just one of the only ones who was left alive. But he didn't really have much of a career actually fighting the Japanese. Not a coincidence that he comes from privilege, of course. No. And not a coincidence. He didn't spend much time in North Korea itself until he was 30. And he actually didn't speak the language very well.

He spoke Russian better than Korean. Holy shit. Yeah. When he gave his first speeches, they were actually written in Korean for him by Soviet speechwriters who knew the language better and were able to like craft it for him. Like that's how sort of... Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's exactly kind of what goes on here. So Kim, after he fled into the Soviet Union before the Japanese were kicked out of Korea, he spent most of his time on a Russian military base where he was trained as a captain in the Red Army

and remained until the end of the war. He had his first son on that army base, Kim Jong-il, in February of 1941. But that's not the history most North Koreans know. According to North Korean history books, Kim Jong-il was born in February 16, 1942, in a secret military base on the Korean mountain, Pykhtu, which is like a sacred mountain there. And the reason that they changed the date is so that his birth date would be a year that ends in two because his dad was born in a year that ended in two and they wanted it to be like... Yeah.

Yeah. That's more corporate posturing. Yeah. Yeah, it's branding. It's branding. Yeah. Now, as I stated, Kim Il-sung had not been a major figure in the Korean Communist Party prior to the country's liberation of Japan. He was like kind of a mid-level dude. And the story of how he came to rule the country anyway is a typical tale of Stalin era.

Yeah, branding would be a really good way to look at it. He started angling for the job when he was in that Russian military base, but Moscow at first felt he was too ambitious and didn't want to risk giving him the gig. So Stalin and his guys initially backed a dude named Cho Man-seek, who was a nationalist who'd run a nonviolent reformist movement under the occupation. His big inspirations were Leo Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi. But Cho wasn't interested in being a puppet of the USSR. He wanted North Korea to be an independent country.

And so the Soviets started to kind of sour on this guy more and more as the time to release North Korea as an independent nation drew closer and they realized that he didn't want to be essentially their man in Pyongyang. So Kim Il-sung sort of slid into this gap that started to form between Cho and the Soviet leadership. And the way he did this was by buying shitloads of liquor and prostitutes for the Soviet generals who were managing North Korea at this point and throwing them big raucous parties, which worked.

I mean, he's a big opportunist is what it sounds like, which is the only way you get to a place like that. I don't think there's any way you can get there by being any shred of a decent person. No, and it sounds like Cho was too honest about what he wanted for his people and what he thought was best for North Korea. Whereas Kim Il-sung was kind of the, I'm going to tell these people whatever they need to hear to put me in that job. And it worked. It worked out great for him.

The Soviets had Kim Il-sung deliver a speech test written by Soviet officials. The speech did not go well. Cho's secretary later described him as speaking in a duck-like voice with a haircut like a Chinese waiter. He was said to look like a fat delivery boy from a neighborhood Chinese food stall. Others called him a fraud or a Soviet stooge. So he was not, you know, initially it didn't look like, you know, he'd succeeded in sort of charming some of the Soviets.

But he just had zero charisma. So again, like, it looks like kind of a long shot at the start. But Cho keeps making more and more demands for real independence for North Korea as the months go on and eventually Stalin gets fed up with it and has that guy arrested and disappeared into a gulag somewhere. So, yeah, yeah, Kim Il-sung gets promoted a number of times in the last few days of the Soviet occupation. And on September 9, 1948, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea

was officially founded with Kim Il-sung as its leader. In less than a year, he adopted the title Great Leader and started having statues built in his honor. He rewrote the history book so that his first speech was written down as a tremendous success rather than him looking like an overweight waiter. By the way, I just want to say that it's always funny to me whenever these kinds of takeovers happen and they call it something democratic. Like, that's ridiculous.

Yeah, it's the same thing with, like, putting family in your political organization. There's some words that always signal that they mean the opposite. And, like, yeah, that's definitely one of them. Because, yeah, there was no democracy at work here. Nobody went to the North Korean people and was like, who do you guys, what should be in charge? And to be super fair, there was not really democracy in South Korea at this point, which is an important thing to note.

So, North and South Korea had been officially split by the US and the USSR at the end of World War II. You've probably heard of the 38th parallel, the line that divides the two nations to this day. The line was actually picked by an American colonel, Dean Rusk, and another army officer when they grabbed a National Geographic map and just sort of drew a line in a place that looked good to them. And because nobody in the Soviet Union really cared that much at the time, they said it was fine. And so, like, North Korea and South Korea were created without anybody really thinking about

why the border had been drawn where it was. Yeah, yeah, it's like a Sykes-Picot kind of story, where you just have these two powers who, like, they've got so much else on their hands after. Like, they're all focused about, like, splitting up Germany, right, the US and the USSR. Like, nobody gives a shit about Korea at this point. So they, like, they just draw, have two guys draw a line on a map. And the US says, yeah, that seems good. And the Soviets say, yeah, that seems good.

And nobody thinks any more about it. I picture it like someone just put on a blindfold and they're like, all right, just go with the marker, man. And then they were like, that's it. We got it. You know what I mean? Like, it's a weird flip of the coin story that, yeah, that's wild. Yeah, yeah, nobody, like, there's literally, like, that almost is more planning than they put into it, because at least then somebody would have had to find blindfolds. Like, there's some logistical, like, necessity and at least that.

So once he gets into power, Kim Il-sung kind of feels shaky in it. Number one, there's a lot of other people who are guerrilla leaders during the occupation, who aren't big fans of his. He doesn't really have, he's seen as maybe being sort of a Russian, you know, agent at this point, because he owes his power to them. And he feels like he needs more than statues of himself to solidify his rule. He needs a war. And the best way for him to sort of lock himself in as the leader of North Korea for life,

he thinks is to take over South Korea. So he starts pushing Stalin to let him invade South Korea and reunify the peninsula. And, you know, Stalin, at this point, North Korea is essentially under the thumb of both the USSR and China, because obviously it shares its big border with China. It was reliant on the Soviet Union for all of its food and aid and resources and whatnot. So, like, they couldn't really do anything without the approval of both countries. So Kim Il-sung goes to Stalin and is like, I want to take over South Korea. And Stalin kind of does the whole go ask your mother sort of thing and is basically like,

if Mao Zedong says it's okay, then like, well, it'll be fine. Like, then I'll sign on to it. So Kim Il-sung goes to Mao and he eventually gets both dictators on board. And on June 25th, 1950, the North Korean People's Army invades South Korea. And this is a really successful invasion at that point, because the South Korean military did not exist in a super-organized way. So within a matter of weeks, they basically conquer everything but one city in South Korea called Busan. So they come very close in the early days of the war to just knocking South Korea out as a country and unifying the Korean Peninsula. Yeah, very, very close.

The United States rushed in reinforcements and the battle of Busan perimeter was fought, leading to more than 120,000 casualties on both sides. The United States, you know, continued to send in more and more men, including the 5th Regimental Combat Team, which included my grandfather. And in a series of daring landings and offensives, they pushed the North Korean Army almost to China. Then China counterattacked and pushed the United States back down past the 38th parallel, and the Korean War turns into a big ugly shit show. A tremendous number of people died, mostly from bombing campaigns carried out by the United States. Our bombers, leveled by some counts, 85% of the structures in North Korea.

So that's not just 85% of its industry, 85% of all buildings in the country are gone. U.S. bomber commanders late in the Korean War complained about not having targets to hit, because there's just nothing left in the country. I love that it's a complaint. They didn't state it as a fact. They're like, we're running out of stuff and I'm bored. I got nothing to drop my bombs on. I'm just bombing nonsense at this point. Yeah, it was an unspeakably devastating war for the North, and obviously it ended in essentially a stalemate, not even really peace. North Korea lost at least 10% and maybe as many as like 20 to 25% of its pre-war population in the fighting. Just absolutely devastating, apocalyptic violence.

And the sheer scale of the devastation that's wrought on North Korea allows Kim Il-sung to not just hang into power, but reinforce his own power. Because number one, just the disastrous losses suffered give him like he's able to pick people who were his enemies in the Korean military to blame them for all of the deaths and like have those people executed and purged. And so by the end of the war, North Korea is about as wrecked as a country has ever been, but Kim Il-sung's power is fucking locked down. So that's where we are when the Korean war ends. What year did it end? 1953, I believe. Yeah, because I remember it being short but impactful because obviously I know the US lost a lot of men there. Yeah, we lost about 37,000 dead in that war, which is only about 20 or so thousand off from the number who died in Vietnam, which lasted more than three times as long.

So it's very short. Like for an example of how brutal it was, my grandpa was one of the first American soldiers who landed in Korea fighting in the war. He was there the whole war. He landed in Korea as a sergeant and he left as a major. Because just so many of the guys above him got killed or wounded that they were just promoting anyone like they could to fill like spaces in the leadership they needed. Which isn't a thing that really happens anymore. But yeah, it did back then. So it's an ugly war and it's ugliest for North Korea.

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Well, it hit me afterwards and I was like, ah, I was a beat too late. Man, I can't believe it took me this long to have that idea. Well, that's a shame. Anyway, so North Korea is super fucked up at the end of the Korean War. But this winds up actually being sort of a benefit to it. In the same way that like Japan, because it was so devastated after World War II, a bunch in Germany, a bunch of like foreign aid went in and rebuilt all the industry and they wound up with like brand new factories, brand new everything, and it set them up to become an economic powerhouse. That kind of happens to North Korea in the wake of the Korean War. China and the USSR flood the country with resources and they rebuild the national industries.

And this will surprise most people because we think about North Korea as dirt poor and South Korea as, you know, opulence and wealthy. But up until the mid 1970s, North Korea had a larger economy and in many ways a higher quality of life than South Korea. That's like the first 20 years of Kim Il-sung's reign. And there are a number of reasons for this. The short explanation is that North Korea contains almost all of the peninsula's industrial resources, coal and steel and fuel. All the valuable shit is in the North. The South is traditionally Korea's agricultural heartland. And for those first couple of decades, South Korea was also basically run by a dictatorship. So for a long time after the Korean War, a lot of people who lived in South Korea might have thought like,

we really fucked up by not going up North. You could have thought for a while that the people who wound up in the North of the country got a better deal. Because it seemed that way until the 70s when the trend starts to reverse itself very fucking quickly, South Korea industrializes at an incredibly rapid rate. And then their GDP, their quality of life and the level of actual, they become a functional democracy as well. Also, I just want to say that one thing that I think people forget is that even within these places, there's still an insane class divide. It's just that middle class was a more feasible thing back then maybe. But I feel like, I mean, obviously, and also resources to information and truly knowing what North Korea was like, you are only seeing what was coming in newsreels in front of movies or radio commercials. And however people got their media back then. But I think that a lot of those places still, even if people looked like they were living well,

there were still poor people in those places. Yeah, and that's part of why people in the North might have been for a chunk of this period happier than people in the South. Because the North had more resources to put into kind of a functional sort of social welfare state than the South did for a chunk of this time. But that, again, that starts to really reverse itself in the 70s. But the first 20 years or so of Kim Il-sung's reign, they're seen still today by the people who remember them as like the golden years of North Korea. And the memory of those years is the cornerstone of the power that the Kim family wields to this day. That's a big part of why Kim Il-sung is remembered so fondly even today in North Korea, whereas Kim Jong-il really isn't. And it's a big part of the reason why Kim Jong-un is like, he ties himself more to his grandpa than his dad.

He doesn't primarily bill himself as the son of Kim Jong-il. He propagand emphasizes how much he looks like his grandpa. There's even rumors that he got plastic surgery to resemble his grandfather. He dresses the same like he's very much trying to put on this, still to this day, trying to put forward this idea of like, I'm going to bring us back to the good days, you know, when my grandpa was in charge. Make North Korea great again. Yeah, make North Korea great again. He's really hearkening back to that. And it's important to understand in order to understand sort of like how things are angled to this day by the Kim regime in North Korea. So starting in the 1970s, Kim Il-sung crafted a policy for his people called Juush.

The basic idea of Juush is similar to the desire for autarky expressed by Adolf Hitler in the pre-war years. It's an ideology that the Korean people should and can be totally independent from the world outside of their borders. They don't need anything from other people. Now, Juush is not a really coherent ideology because it, for one thing, ignores the fact that North Korea was from the beginning deeply dependent on primarily food aid from the USSR and from China. Because remember, the Korean Peninsula, which had been unified for most of history, the South provides the food, the North has the industrial resources. So on its own, the North can't really grow that much food. So Juush is more of a propaganda campaign than it's an example of how North Korea actually functions because up until the collapse of the Soviet Union, they're deeply dependent on the country for food aid. And their economy is really dependent on having these other communist countries to sell to.

Juush is how Kim Il-sung wants people to think about North Korea and sort of its relationship to the world. That's, again, like a fucking brand thing there happening. Yeah, it is a brand thing. Absolutely. And it's crazy because also, I think, any country at this point, what's really wild about it is when people go for this whole concept of independence, thankfully, the more time goes on, I think people realize that's not the case with really anywhere. True independence, but again, it was that period where I think, specifically, I think until about 1980, I'll say, and that's like an estimate, but up until that point, it was so easy to pull this kind of bullshit, where you could just put a buzzword. I mean, you could still do that well into the 80s and 90s, and it's happening now, obviously, and just with memes or phrases people use.

But I mean, in terms of implementing these things on a national scale like that, it was so effortless to just be like, alright, how can we get people to whatever the keyword is? Yeah, yeah, and that's part of why he adopts this ideology is in the mid-70s and into the 80s, the South pulls way ahead of North Korea, and suddenly there's no comparing the two countries, and that's a big reason why you want, if you're Kim Il-sung, to emphasize independence and why we don't need anyone else, is because you don't want your people seeing the outside world now that it's become increasingly clear that they're doing better than you. Right, absolutely, oh my god, that's the, like, every, man, I don't even know how to articulate this, but that is, I think, the key to most, it's like trying to keep every country as blindfolded as possible until the blindfold officially comes off. It's essentially like they're making a backup plan for when that finally happens, because it's not sustainable.

Yeah, and it's normally not sustainable. One of the things that's interesting about North Korea is they're the only country of its type that has sustained something like this. Yeah, you're right, actually, that's a great point. It's still happening. Yeah, it's really, that's the most remarkable thing about this story, is that Kim Il-sung, number one, he has the goal that all smart dictators have, which is to die peacefully at home. Number two, he has the goal to pass on rule to his son Kim Jong-il, which no other, there's not a single case of another communist leader successfully passing on rule to their, like, to their own children, to their heir. Like, obviously, that didn't happen in the USSR, and in fact, like, the idea of having a cult of personality faded in the USSR after Stalin's death, and they were like, they opened up and liberalized in a lot of ways after that. You don't see that in North Korea, and the reason why is because Kim Jong-un is a masterful, does a masterful job of preparing his nation for the idea that there will be no break in continuity between the generations. So I'm going to read a quote from the great successor that talks about sort of how he goes about this process.

The 1970 edition of North Korea's Dictionary of Political Terminologies stated that hereditary secession is a reactionary custom of exploitative societies that was quietly dropped from future publications. State media started referring to the Party Center, a phrase used to obliquely refer to Kim Jong-il's activities without explicitly stating his name, and Kim Jong-il began to be promoted up the Workers' Party hierarchy. The North's allies picked up on Kim Il-sung's plans early on. The East German ambassador to Pyongyang cabled the foreign ministry in 1974 to say that North Koreans were being asked to swear loyalty to Kim Jong-il at Workers' Party meetings across the country in case something grave might happen to Kim Il-sung. So that starts in the mid-1970s, and it only escalates as the 1980s and 1990s roll along. And one of the other things that happens throughout the 1980s and 1990s is that it becomes increasingly obvious to Kim Il-sung and to Kim Jong-il that none of the other communist family dietesties are going to last.

And in fact, like I said, no other communist state successfully handed down power from father to son. So it looks like in the 80s and 90s, it looks like there's very long odds on Kim Jong-il actually taking power from his dad or staying in power once he takes it. Most experts suspect that, like, after Kim Il-sung dies, things are going to sort of fall apart, right? Which will not be the last time, quote-unquote, experts on North Korea predict stuff like this. And they ain't been right yet. So, at the Sixth Workers' Party Congress in Pyongyang in 1980, Kim Jong-il is made the official successor, and like that is announced to the entire country. He begins to accompany his father along in on-the-spot guidance tours, where the two Kims will show up at farms and factories and tell all of the people there how to do the jobs that they did every day. Workers are expected to take diligent notes as one career politician and his drunken playboy son tell them how to forge steel and plow fields, which seems like, and it's like the worst episode of undercover boss.

I was just thinking, I was like, this is the most wild thing I've ever heard in my life. And truly, you would never even catch a fucking CEO of any company going to a place and being like, okay, this is how you make a latte. And it's, yeah, it's so interesting to me that they do it this way in North Korea. Because if you read about like Saddam Hussein did the literal opposite where he would, you know, whether or not he actually did it, he made sure that there were stories of him dressing up in costume and like showing up at farmers' houses and factories to like see how people really thought about things. Like that's an old, that goes back like 2000 years in the stories of like Arab rulers is like these Arab Caliphs and stuff hiding among the peasantry and trying to see how their lives really are to learn about how they can govern more justly. And it's the opposite here. And you know what, like that, but it's a it's a relatability aspect that I bet some people are just blown away that these guys are coming here and and being, you know, having a sense of utility or whatever it is that they're, you know, very, they're like, oh, they're getting down there. And they're putting their hands in the mud and getting dirty and, you know, they're working and the fact is they're not and it's almost the same.

Like the way I think of it is the way when, you know, Trump is like, I go to McDonald's. Yeah, you know how many people his fan base must eat that up. No pun intended to be like, oh my God, he's he goes to the same place as I do. He gets it. So even though he's a billionaire, he understands us. Yeah, that was one of the it was really frustrating to me to see the way that when he fed those like the fast food to those kids, how it was handled by the media because I grew up in like the deep south. And I know that played well to a lot of his to a lot of his base. Totally.

I mean, it started with my earliest memory of it when I was in college and even a little after that in the in the last few years of the Bush presidency. I remember people still were like, this is a guy you could sit down and at least have a beer with. And I was like, that is fucking crazy that that's the takeaway in not only that, like when the economy is crumbling, then like, you know what, maybe people we should be having beers with shouldn't be running. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, and it's it's one of those things like one of them, the big like there's this emphasis on the the Kims as being in the propaganda as being perfect and is obviously is knowing better than all of their workers. But there's also this emphasis on how hard they work. Like there's a lot of stories that are put into the propaganda about them passing out from exhaustion and going without sleep for days and like where like that's like the way it was phrased when Kim Jong had died is he like he worked himself to death and his heart gave out. So it is it is clearly important for the regime that like the leaders be seen as being as invested physically in the labor of the country as like the actual people doing labor.

I have a question. Yeah. And I don't know if this came up at any point in any of the things you were doing and this isn't in regards to the interview just in general, which is that. Is there mention of what the arts are like I feel like that's actually a play a spot I realized I've never looked at which is what any because I you know I referenced that early on but I do feel like that's usually a reflection of how people perceive things there and obviously there's not a freedom of artistic choice there. Yeah, I mean there's a lot said in the great successor in particular about music in North Korea and about its role and like one like they have particular songs that they use like when they were preparing Kim Jong. To take power there's a particular song called footsteps that they would play that was like the lyrics in the song were supposed to kind of get people ready for the idea that someone was going to take over from Kim Jong Il. So it is there's not freedom of in the arts there but there is a lot of emphasis play placed on the arts. It's also worth noting that the Kim family themselves Kim Jong Il and his son and Kim Jong Un's brother his surviving brother are all huge Clapton fans.

Gigantic Eric Clapton fucking love Eric Clapton amazing which like you know he's Eric Clapton like I get it like but I honestly think those guys. I've always thought that the people who are usually at the top of the food chain like that who are who are suppressing art in any way probably consume most or I wouldn't say most because they're but a decent amount of western European cinema all that stuff and not only that. I would venture to say they probably like some of it. Oh they will talk about that a lot they huge fans of it the whole like I mean Kim Il Sung is I haven't heard anything about what he liked but Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un big fans of western cinema music art big Disneyland guys amazing. Yeah yeah it's pretty pretty cool. So in 1991 Kim Jong Il is pronounced the leader of the Korean People's Army. Now these were the waning days of his father's regime and they were not good years for communism around the world. The Soviet Union started falling apart in 1991 and it became increasingly clear that North Korea was about to be standing alone for real.

Kim Il Sung's ideas about Jewish and independence would finally be put to the test. And the country did not handle being isolated well. The collapse of the USSR met North Korea lost one of its major trading partners and its largest source of food. This coincided with a series of mudslides that wiped out huge amounts of the nation's crops and led to mass starvation and even cannibalism among the populace. As many as 2 million people may have died during this period. The government's power began to crumble and huge numbers of North Koreans started buying, selling and smuggling in direct contravention of the law. Jong Il and his father found themselves in a precarious position. Kim Jong Un knew that he would die soon and he had to find a way to guarantee a safe transition of power for his son.

But how do you orchestrate that at a time when your people are starving to death and mass? That's the big question Jong Un has to answer in the early 1990s. And the answer that he picked at least was to come up with a lurid fairy tale about his family's origins. So I'm going to quote again from the great successor. To bolster the case for hereditary succession in these challenging circumstances, the regime created a fantastical story about Kim Jong Il's provenance that borrowed heavily from both Korean mythology and Christianity. He would be leader not simply because he had been appointed by his father, but because he had some divine right. His birthplace became not a guerrilla camp, but Mount Paektu, the volcano on North Korea's border with China that has legendary status in Korean culture. It is said to be the birthplace of Tangun, the mythical half-bear, half-deity father of the Korean people.

The creature conferred a heavenly origin on the Korean people, and thanks to the story, Kim Jong Il appeared to come from heaven too. North Korea's propagandists didn't stop there. They said that Kim Jong Il was born in a wooden cabin and that a single bright star is shown in the sky at his birth. They stopped short of making the building a manger or his mother a virgin, but for good measure, they added a double rainbow spontaneously appearing over the mountain. The myth of the Holy Paektu bloodline was created. Wow, what's amazing about that is that is exactly what... The parallel of religion here, obviously that's not treated as mythical in that way, but it's the same difference as George W. thinking God picked him to be president. Yeah, and it's a classical example of the kind of thing that a regime puts out and pushes when it feels insecure.

That's when the crazy stuff starts to happen in North Korean propaganda, because you don't see as much of that with Kim Il Sung. He had a pretty wild cult of personality, but it was kind of in line with Stalin and other leaders of that era. Whereas it gets just fucking baddy with Kim Jong Il, and it gets progressively baddier, and it's because Kim Jong Il comes to power as North Korea collapses completely. So one of the things that happens in the 90s with everyone starving is that bits and pieces of capitalism enter the country, because the government can't stop people from smuggling in food and setting up rudimentary markets and stuff. And so that becomes the thing at this point in time, and they just don't have a solid enough grip on power to fight it, so instead they start pushing out ever more lurid and wild propaganda. Which is I'm sure how people got to the point of specifically American selling. They had already done this when Reagan was in office, but these anti-socialists, they treated socialism and communism as the Venn diagram being a complete circle. And I'm sure this was a great paradigm for them of how it's a failure.

Yeah, it's one of those things. There are a number of different ways to look at what's happened in North Korea. One of the best descriptions I've heard of the way that the state is organized is that it is essentially like the whole state exists to serve. It's almost organized like a corporation wherein the whole state exists to serve the Kim family, 5-10% of people who are in power, who are like the actual stakeholders in the regime. That's one way you'll see it framed. Like with the Soviet Union and stuff, there's none of what you actually saw called for in Marx's theory where workers own the means of production. That does not happen whatsoever in North Korea or in the USSR, really. What it definitely shows is that when you have a government that because of its belligerent policies doesn't trade with the rest of the world, and that government can't grow enough food to feed its people, then those people will do a better job of servicing their own needs than the government can. It's the same story that you see in Hurricane Katrina after FEMA fucked up in the first several weeks after that, where it's like the actual people who live there do a better job of taking care of each other than the government did.

It's actually almost like they took Jewish back. Yeah, it is. The lesson that they could take out of that is we didn't actually need the regime because we are capable of being independent if the regime gets out of our way. That's great, which is a really constant reminder to me of what a thin veil, most advertisements, propaganda. I'm talking politics, economics, all of it is between how people are sold things very easily and how it literally isn't that far off from... Some people talk about revolutions being idealistic or not possible. I would say this almost argues that it's much easier. It's just a matter of mobilization or being pushed so far that what happened happened. Yeah, and you do see pieces of that in North Korea. It never develops into anything that threatens the stability of the regime itself. It never goes back either. Once people get used to the idea of running their own rudimentary markets and selling some of their own crops... A lot of people would get involved in little businesses where they would harvest corn husks and make corn noodles and sell them to other people in towns that they could afford enough food to eat. Once people start doing that and independently servicing their own needs, you can't go back to the way things were beforehand. That's definitely shown here.

It's time for ads. We don't have another great lead-in for ads. It's time for your Jewish, everybody. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic, and occasionally ridiculous, deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing.

And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left offending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back and it's time we finally start talking about Kim Jong-un. Now, the boy who would retroactively be declared the latest member of the Holy Pike II bloodline, Kim Jong-un, was not born to be the inheritor of the Kim regime. Jong-un came into this world in 1984, appropriately enough. North Korean propagandists, however, later rewrote history to claim that he'd been born in 1982. So it would be in line with Kim Il-sung's real 1912 birthday and Kim Jong-il's falsified 1942 birth.

But that would come later because North Korea's current supreme ruler was born the son of his father's mistress, not the son of his father's official wife. And in fact, Kim Il-sung did not know that Kim Jong-un existed for the first several years of his life because Kim Jong-il kept his mistresses hidden from his dad and also his first kids. Now, Kim Jong-un was his father's third son, his first son, Kim Jong-nam, who was the guy who got assassinated in that airport by those women who rubbed him with poison more recently. He was also the son of one of Kim Jong-il's mistresses. Now, Kim Jong-il never married Kim Jong-nam's mom or Kim Jong-un's mother, but he did force them to divorce their other partners and move in to isolated mansions in Pyongyang. Can I just say this truly is now behind the bastard? Yeah, yeah, yeah, we're very, very behind him still at this point. The pun is truly lived up to the name.

So Kim's second two sons were with a dancer, Ko Young-hui. Jong-il moved them into a compound in Pyongyang, separate from his other family members. So he has like a couple of different mistresses and kids with each of these mistresses. And he has them all in separate walled compounds that are all around his mansion, which is walled off from the outside world, but also walled off from all of his mistresses and all of his kids' homes. And they just spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying these giant facilities, which exist to protect both Kim Jong-il and his lovers and kids from their people, but also to protect Kim from his mistresses and his children. And allow him to like lock them away in their separate little chunks of the compound if he wants. And they grow up very, very, very isolated. At best they were allowed to play with their cousins occasionally, but usually they were kept alone.

His oldest son Jong-nam was kept separate from Kim Jong-un and from his other brother. So like the brothers don't spend much time together, they don't have friends. Inside their lonely compounds, the separated Jong-il children lived lives of isolated splendor. They had 15-foot gates on beachfront compounds with amusement park rides built into them, the latest televisions in video games, pinball machines, dirt bikes, dune buggies, jet skis. Whole buildings were filled with toys for the boys and girls, just up to the rafters with Legos and stuff. The latest of anything coming out of the west was available, they had toy guns that fired realistic bullets made specifically for them. They also had plenty of real guns, like any self-respecting dictator's son. Kim Jong-un was given a.45 caliber handgun when he was 11 years old.

He was given a specially modified car that he could drive and see above the steering wheel in when he was 7 years old. Wow, this is like Richie Rich. Yeah, he grows up like Richie Rich. But he's not allowed to have friends. His closest friend as a child, as far as we know, was a middle-aged Japanese sushi chef named Fujimoto. Fujimoto is an interesting dude, he lives in Japan now and his business cards essentially say, ask me if you have questions about the Kim family, because he got hired to work for them in the 80s and 90s. His story about it, and he does have a lot of pictures with Kim Jong-un and definitely was around, is that Kim Jong-il, at a certain point, asked him to be his son's playmate since there were never any real kids around.

Kim Jong-un would listen to Fujimoto's Whitney Houston records and ogle his Air Jordan sneakers and stuff. The closest thing he had to a real friend was this kind of weird Japanese dude who took a job in North Korea because it sounded different and was willing to spend 15 years cooking sushi for a dictator. That's his best buddy growing up. Yeah, and also being his entry to pop culture. Yes, and also being his entry to Western culture. So he seems like an interesting guy. In interviews with Anna Fifield Fujimoto recalled a moment at around age 10 when Kim Jong-un got angry at his aunt for calling him little brother.

Jong-un yelled at her, don't treat me like a child. Fujimoto then suggested he go by the nickname Comrade General instead of Little Brother, which stuck. Everyone started calling him Comrade General after that. So I'm like his grandfather, Fujimoto said. Love the name. Hey, Captain Major, what is that? Comrade General. Well, this is complicated by the fact that he actually is appointed a general as a small child and has a uniform with general stars on it. When he's walking around with a gun, he's doing it in a military uniform because that's just the way it works in a dictatorship.

Yeah, that's not even an implication. It's an actual thing that's amazing. Yeah, it's pretty great. So Kim Jong-un's birthday parties tended to take place at the Kim family compound in Wansan, which is essentially North Korea's answer to Hawaii. No children were invited to his parties, and instead the aging leadership cast of North Korea showed up to celebrate with an 8-year-old boy, which had to have been super fun. I'm going to guess he didn't have a lot of competition if they played GoldenEye. Probably fucking kick their asses is odd job. I wonder if he played anyone if they were allowed to win or if they had to lose. Yeah, I feel like especially if you pick odd job, playing GoldenEye with Kim Jong-un and start karate chopping him to death, you don't last much longer after that.

That's not a good plan for you. So Kim Jong-un was known as a child for loving machinery. He was particularly fascinated with model planes, according to the great successor. Even when he was 8 or 9 and still in Pyongyang, Kim Jong-un would stay up all night doing experiments with his machinery and insisting on speaking to some expert or another even in the wee hours of the morning if he couldn't figure things out by himself. When he had questions or when something didn't function well, he would call for a nautical engineer to come and explain it to him, no matter how late it was, his aunt told me. In some ways, you could expect someone to grow up with a lot of talent doing that. If you actually have an interest in engineering and you can just force engineers to wake up in the middle of the night and explain things to you, you can see that. Here's the thing, for kids that's not that uncommon, whether you're good at it or not, or what your fascination is with them. It's probably one of the only things, let's say you were talking about how 10 years from now how much of this might still track, that part probably still does.

It sounds like an innocuous but enough thing in regards to what someone that age would be into, as opposed to wearing a general's uniform, which also obviously really happened and holding guns. I mean, when I was 7 years old or 11 years old, you'd given me a 45 and made me a general. I would have probably invaded a couple of countries and it would have gone really badly. I guess we gotta give the kid credit for some restraint there, or at least his dad. Basketball is huge in Korea, in both Koreas, both South and North Korea, big fucking basketball fans. It's something of a trope in Korean culture for mothers to tell their children to play basketball so they will grow up taller. That's a common myth. So Kim Jong-il was just like 5'2", very, very short dude. Kim Jong-un grew up to be like 5'7". So, you know, you could argue that maybe all the basketball he played as a kid helped him in fact grow up a little bit taller.

It's definite, one of the things we know to a point of certainty about Kim Jong-un is that for basically all of his life he has been absolutely obsessed with basketball. Children of rich party apparatchiks would be bust in to play games with him. Fujimoto observed, he had the ability to make good judgments with solid reasoning. He knew when to praise and when to criticize. Fujimoto noted that he seemed to particularly enjoy critiquing players, especially due to the fear this provoked in them. He learned from an early age to enjoy exercising power over people. One story Fujimoto tells is of a time he took Kim Jong-un and one of his brothers out fishing for sea bass. Every time he, Fujimoto would catch a bass, pre-team Kim Jong-un would grab the rod and shout, I caught it! So, we're getting an idea for the kind of personality that develops for a kid who grows up in this.

Yeah, he got the dictatorship crash course early on. Yeah, he grows up very comfortable with acting that way. On July 8, 1994, Kim Il-sung's heart finally gave out after decades of hard living and a harder dictating. Kim Jong-un was 10 years old and still technically a secret to the people of North Korea at the time. They were certainly aware of his father, Kim Jong-il, though, because he'd been the promised successor for many years. Kim Il-sung was hailed by the Korean Central News Agency as a man who had turned North Korea from a land where age-old backwardness and poverty had prevailed into a powerful socialist country, independent, self-supporting, and self-reliant. The rest of the 1990s increasingly put the lie to this claim as North Korea's terrible famine hit its height not long after Kim Jong-il took power.

Now, I can remember when this, like in the early 2000s when I was just starting off in my career writing for Cracked, that we had a number of popular articles run that referenced all the crazy claims about Kim Jong-il. And there was a period of years there, especially in the early 2000s, where he was the western world's favorite punching bag. Team America World Police is probably like the clearest example. Yeah, that's the biggest example of this. And there were a lot of really crazy lies told about Kim Jong-il, especially as the famine subsides in the early 2000s and things start to recover. And there's, you know, you hear stories about, he wrote perfect operas, he'd play a single perfect game of golf and then quit the game forever. There was propaganda that said he was a world fashion icon that said he'd invented the hamburger, that said he'd never used a toilet, and of course that would claim he could control the weather.

These colorful tales made North Korea's dictator fun to write about, but the lies came from a place of desperation. Things were bad in North Korea for most of this period, and the regular people knew it. Kim Jong-il's insane propaganda was the result of a desperate regime with very little to really brag about. His father's difficult early years were mostly lost on Kim Jong-un, because during this period of time, he continued to live in armed compounds, eating sushi prepared by a private chef, flying to Paris to see Euro Disney. And while his citizens were eating grass and pages from books to quell their hunger pains, the heir apparent got to enjoy the finest buffets Europe had to offer. He played in rooms full of Legos in his private palace. He and the other Kims ain't only a special rice produced for them in dedicated farms, female harvesters would select each grain by hand,

making sure they were all perfect in the same size. So this is his childhood while starvation is going on. It's really important to keep that in mind. Of course, yeah, and I think people, I don't know why this can still be a mystery to some people, but people look back on certain things like how could people let this happen, or how could people sit idly by, and all you have to do is look around now to a lot of what has happened since Trump's been in office. Which is that it's very easy for it to happen, and it's very hard for people to overthrow that in any capacity. I guess what I'm getting at more is the parts of the propaganda that are like, you know, this guy never had to go to the bathroom and he invented the hamburger. Of course, most people didn't believe it, but also it's not going to change anything in the sense that people aren't going to suddenly be like, that's a crock of shit, we need someone else here.

Yeah, there's just not room for that in the society, and part of it's just because the media is so controlled that even if people aren't buying all the propaganda, there's no room for anything else to enter into public media space. If you push it enough times, just the repetition of it, people are going to wear down to it. We'll talk a little bit more about that later too. Kim Jong-il's infamous propaganda campaigns were more of a holding strategy than anything else, while he shifted his nation to a military first domestic policy. Some people might consider it odd to focus your money and attention on more soldiers and gaining nuclear missiles while people are eating each other, but Kim Jong-il knew what he was doing, the military kept him in power. As the 1990s rolled along, Kim Jong-nam, Jong-un's older half-brother, grew increasingly estranged from his father and from the lovers of power in North Korea. He was disgraced when he and his mother were caught with fake passports trying to enter Japan in order to see Tokyo Disneyland.

The fake name he traveled under, Peng Jong, translated to fat bear, a fact which made him a laughing stock of world media. Yeah, very funny. Kim Jong-nam's fading star also came from the fact that his mother spent most of her time in Russia rather than sucking up to Kim Jong-il. According to the great successor, Kim Jong-un's mother, on the other hand, became a constant presence in Kim Jong-il's life. As his favorite consort, she planted the seeds of change from behind the scenes. Her influence came to be seen everywhere, such as in the way Donald Duck and Tom and Jerry cartoons suddenly appeared on television, dubbed into Korean. Right around the time her children would have been watching them. Around the same time, Kim Jong-il had flown into a rage when he discovered that Kim Jong-nam, who was then about 20, had been going out and drinking in Pyongyang.

For disobeying his orders, Kim Jong-il put Kim Jong-nam's household under arrest for a month, cutting off their food supplies and making them clean up after themselves. So that's the kind of punishment you get as the son of a dictator. I was just going to say, wow. You get to clean your own house. Yeah, the humanity. Where is it? Now, Kim Jong-un famously spent most of his adolescence in Bern, Switzerland. To be specific, he and his older brother, Kim Jong-chul, his other older brother, lived in the suburb of Liebfield with their maternal aunt and uncle. They lived under assumed names and no one but high-ranking Swiss security services realized who they truly were.

To their credit, the Swiss intelligence agencies knew that the children of North Korea's dictator were there, but had a policy of not really keeping tabs on them because they were kids and they felt like they deserve a chance to be children, which I think is admirable. Sure. Yeah. Now, for the most part, it seems like Kim Jong-un and his older brother were allowed to live the closest approximation of a normal life possible for the children of dictators, at least during the times when they were in Switzerland. Years later, Kim Jong-un's aunt, Ko Jung-suk, recalled, He lived in a normal home and acted like a normal family. I acted like their mother. Their friends would come over and I would make them snacks.

It was a very normal childhood with birthday parties and gifts and Swiss kids coming over to play. So, yeah, there was a brief period where he almost had a normal middle-class upbringing. You see glimmers of that in this kid's life. And it's hard to tell whether it was pushed upon him or that's what they were striving for. You know what I mean? They were striving for him to get a good education because his mom would regularly visit and chastise him for not getting better grades, and they just knew that he wasn't going to be able to get a good enough education in North Korea. Because for one thing, it's kind of hard to get a good education when the teachers are afraid you might have them shipped to gulags.

Right, exactly. So, Kim Jong-un maintained his love of model airplanes while he lived in Switzerland. He went out with his aunt and uncle on vacations to the French Riviera and to Euro Disney. Like every child of the 1990s, he and his older brother developed an intense and abiding love for the action films of Jean-Claude Van Damme. Which, you know, of course. Now we're getting really into what I'm very curious about. Because the 90s in particular, specifically for movies, is about when it became... I guess even like indie films kind of had an assembly line model almost.

You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, and it's one of the things that's interesting to me here is that he was also a huge fan of Michael Jackson. Like he really seems to be like a pretty normal... I think most of the people listening who grew up in the 90s could have had long and engaged conversations with Kim Jong-un as kids about like, you know, the Street Fighter movie. Oh yeah, I saw every single sudden impact Lionheart, Universal Soldier, Hard Target. Those are all his big early 90s movies right there. And Kim Jong-un's older brother Kim Jong-chol even included Jean-Claude Van Damme in an essay he wrote at school.

We have a quote from it. If I had my ideal world, I would not allow weapons and atom bombs anymore. I would destroy all terrorists with the Hollywood star Jean-Claude Van Damme. Everybody would be happy. No more war, no more dying, no more crying. So that's uplifting. I wonder what they thought of the... I don't know if you remember this when Universal Soldier came out at the Cannes Film Festival.

I believe it was at the Cannes Film Festival. Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lunderen had a shoving match. I didn't know that. Yeah, it turned out it was a publicity stunt for the movie. But I picture them being like, oh man, he could have owned Dolph Lunderen. Oh man, he could have really... Which is funny because Dolph Lunderen, I don't know if most people know this. He has like a PhD in I think like chemistry.

Yeah, he's a genius and also a living mountain. Yes. Yeah, Dolph Lunderen is a terrifying fellow. That's a side part. But yeah, that's very fascinating because those guys had a very specific demographic they appealed to. And it was to people that were like boys of a certain age. Yeah, Jean-Claude Van Damme is like the action figure that nobody grows up to be, but that every kid wanted to be growing up in the 90s.

Yeah. And I'm going to guess that Kim Jong-un, from everything we know, probably felt the same way that you did watching Universal Soldier. Yeah, we all like art touches us all. At eight years old, I think because that movie came out, I think I was around eight years old, my seven. And I remember there was a cheap dollar theater and I went, that's where I saw it. But you know, specifically at that age, you're going to think like, yeah, guns don't get the job done, Jean-Claude Van Damme does.

Yeah, yeah, what are guns going to do? I've watched Jean-Claude Van Damme like spin kick 30 people with machine guns to death. Like clearly the guns don't do the trick. Yeah, you got to love that foreign policy advice. Now, Kim Jong-un was at best a mediocre student. His real mother visited regularly to press him to focus more and study harder, but being the heir to a dictatorship, there weren't really any punishments for bad behavior at school. Jong-un's teachers obviously could not meet with his parents.

Instead, that role was played by a rotating cast of random North Koreans who worked in the country's diplomatic corps. The justification given was that the boy's real parents did not speak German. As a foreigner who did not speak the local language, Kim Jong-un experienced middle school and high school as an outsider. For one thing, he wore nothing but track suits. Jeans were too American and forbidden for even him to wear. He was, however, allowed to wear the latest Air Jordans. Needless to say, he stood out visually as I think any kid wearing nothing but track suits and new Air Jordans would have in middle school. This is so fascinating because I wonder to this day if he, because the basketball obsession obviously is still an ongoing thing,

so I wonder if he's a full-on sneakerhead and if he has a pair of whatever, like the Travis Scott's new Jordans shipped to him. I would be shocked if he doesn't. Right, exactly, and that blows my mind to no end because unless I'm missing something, I don't remember ever seeing him in popular media whenever you see him pictures of him on the news or anything. You don't see him wearing these things, but I bet when he's walking around the house, he is looking at his closet and he's like, which pair of high-top Jordans am I going to wear today? Yeah, he's got to have a shitload of Jordans. And I can't help but wonder, knowing that he wasn't allowed to wear jeans as a kid, if the secret to his madness might not be as simple as the fact that his mom wouldn't buy him Jinkos.

Because that was everyone's cross to bear in middle school in the 90s, whether or not you could get Jinkos. I sure did. I was able to get some. Oh yeah, I had a pair of Jinkos, abs to fucking Lutely. But tragically, Kim Jong-un did not. Now, it's time for another ad pivot, and I was going to do a Jinkos ad, but I don't know if the company still exists. So a lot of our ads are randomly slotted, and God willing, when we drop to ad break, it'll be an ad for Jinkos. Fingers crossed for Jinkos. You know, if it's dick pills, still pretty good. Still pretty good ad.

Product! Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic, and occasionally ridiculous, deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say.

For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me.

About a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science.

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. We're back. We're talking about Kim Jong-un in middle school and high school in Switzerland where he was at best a mediocre student like the host of this podcast. And your guest.

And our guest, yeah. A lot of C students in the entertainment industry. It's kind of what fuels Hollywood. Absolutely. Don't trust any A students in Hollywood. We just had a soundboard fall off of the wall. Now, Eli, I need you to make sure is the poison room still intact? Yes. Okay. Are you aware of the poison room? Has anyone told you that? Wait, wait. Is that a real thing? Yeah. There's a poison room. You see that glass balcony behind you that's walled off from the outside?

Yes. It's filled with poison because of the off-gassing of the materials they use to seal it. So if that door opens, everyone dies. Amazing. Yeah, that's the poison room. Yeah. For now, it's sealed. For now. The door looks a little off, actually.

Yeah. It's like a little bit of a sort of Damocles situation where one day we will be struck down for our hubris of having the poison room. I do like podcasting in a danger zone. In fact, that's what makes, I think, a podcast more captivating and probably what's fueling us. Yeah. Is the risk of pointless death. Yes. Yeah. He died doing what he loved. Yeah, exactly. Being next to a room filled with poison.

Yeah. So Kim Jong-un was not a great student. And as a foreigner who didn't speak the local language, he was, you know, he was kind of an outsider. He had two friends who were really like, he actually hung out with a lot and they were both kids who weren't Swiss originally, too. So they all kind of had that to bond over the fact that they didn't speak the language very well. Kim Jong-un was particularly well known for his temper tantrums, particularly when his classmates would switch from speaking high German, which he knew to Swiss German, which he could not understand. One girl who was a classmate of Kim Jong-un's reported he kicked us in the shins and even spat at us when they would start using Swiss German. And she did add that over time he seemed to thaw and get more used to dealing with his classmates as equals rather than as objects for him to abuse. Did any of them ever fight back?

Did you notice what the reaction was or what the students were, how they were told to react to it? They didn't know that he was the son of a dictator. I think they just thought that he was like, he probably would have just come across as like a mostly quiet kid who every now and then would have temper tantrums and like spit on people. And I'm sure the teacher scolded him and stuff, but like, you know, it's not like, it's a Swiss, you know, school. So they're pretty light on the discipline. Yeah, they're not going to be like hitting him and stuff. It's not going to be like when I grew up in Oklahoma and they would paddle us. Yeah, because if you spit on someone at school here, you're liable to get knocked the fuck out. Yeah, I don't think that happened to Kim Jong-un.

He might be a better person today if somebody had knocked him the fuck out for spitting on him. But I have not run into any stories of that happening. And it seems like he was kind of isolated and a little bit lonely at school, but was not like bullied or ostracized. It was more that like, because he just didn't have a super good grasp at the language, he kind of felt like an outsider. His chief love during this period continued to be basketball. He wore only the best for games, Michael Jordan replica Chicago Bulls jerseys, Chicago Bulls shorts, and of course the latest Air Jordans. According to the great successor, Kim's competitive side came out on the basketball court. He could be aggressive and often indulged in trash talk.

He was serious on the court, hardly ever laughing or even talking, just focusing on the game. When things went badly for him, he would curse or even pound his head against the wall. Sometimes, in addition to the other Asian teenagers Kim Jong-un arrived with, a couple of adults came along and set up small camping chairs beside the court, keeping score on a little board and clapping when Kim landed a basket. So, again, he's as close to normal as you can have a childhood as a dictator during the periods of time where he's in Switzerland, but it's still not normal. Right, yeah, yeah, it's still completely, oh my god. So, one of Kim's few friends at school noted that he also played basketball at home on his PlayStation when he couldn't be out on the court. They said the whole world for him was just basketball all the time.

Another of his friends, a kid named Marco Imhoff, spoke about the occasional hints he would see of the man Kim Jong-un would become. One time, he came over to Jong-un's house for dinner and their spaghetti was cold. He saw Kim Jong-un snap at the cook brutally enough that it stuck in Marco's mind 20 years later. Interviews with other classmates paint a picture of a quiet, nerdy, basketball-loving loner who absolutely avoided contact with girls and refused to share any details of his private life. One of his few good friends recalled, we weren't the dimmest kids in class, but neither were we the cleverest. We were always in the second tier. The teachers would see him struggling ashamedly and then move on. They left him in peace. He left without getting any exam results at all. He was much more interested in football and basketball than lessons.

So, yeah, that's him at school. In 1998, when Jong-un was 14, his mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. She sought treatment in France and would linger for several years, but she eventually died from the disease. Her brother and sister, who had acted as Jong-un's fake Swiss parents for years, decided that their sister's sickness was a sign that they should flee for safety. On May 17th, they went on the run with their three biological children, abandoning Kim Jong-un and his brother, and showed up at the United States Embassy, asking for asylum. They live in the United States to this day. Kim Jong-un would spend his remaining time in Switzerland with a separate set of handlers, and we just don't know anything about how that impacted him emotionally. We don't really know anything about how he felt about his aunt and uncle.

We don't know how he felt about them fleeing for the United States. In the interviews with the author of The Great Successor, they reported being frustrated at the coverage of Kim Jong-un that they saw on TV in the States and how negative it always was. So they seem to still be kind of protective towards him, but we don't really know if he took this as an abandonment or if it was just kind of water off of a duck's back. Oh man, this is what's most fascinating about it is his version is the most complex of the succession. You know what I mean? His father and his grandfather had their stories almost streamlined, whereas his has a lot of complexities to it. And I'm sure I would wager to say that it probably did affect him in the same way that he probably learned that he was the product of an affair. I don't think those things at some point or another, they're going to have some kind of impact on you.

Yeah, it's just kind of hard to say what that is. And that's part of why I'm concluding all of the Kims in two episodes as opposed to doing a two-parter on Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, is that we just don't have that much really solid fact about how the two grew up. We know enough about Kim Jong-un that you can really make him into a person in your head, which you can't with the others. In 2002, Kim Jong-un returned to North Korea full-time to attend the Kim Il-sung Military Academy, where he learned how to manage the army that he had technically been a general of from the age of about seven. Official North Korean propaganda assures us that he was instantly so good at war that he wound up teaching his instructors rather than learning from them. He would regularly keep senior military officials up late into the night, advising them on how to organize their forces and shushing them whenever they told him he really ought to get some sleep. That's, of course, the official North Korean story. Yeah, I was going to say this totally reeks of propaganda bullshit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. In 2008, Kim Jong-il's health took a major turn for the worse. He clearly realized that his time was ending and hurriedly rushed the process of making his son his official successor. That same year, he called a workers' party congress and had them vote to confirm Kim Jong-un as his successor. This was the first time many North Koreans would have heard of the boy. In Jong-il's case, that process had started in the late 1970s, giving him 20 years as a public figure in North Korea before taking the baton from his father. Kim Jong-un would only have three years before taking power. With no time.

Sorry, just one question. What is the age difference when each of them get assumed in? Again, I... Oh, let's see here. Kim Jong-un was born in... 84. No, he was born in 84 and Kim Jong-il was born in 1940 or so, like 40-41. So, he was born in 41.

He would have been like 53 when he took power in his early 50s. Right. So, clearly, obviously, he was the youngest. Kim Jong-un. Yeah. Yeah, Kim Jong-un was absolutely the youngest. By the fucking margin. It's crazy.

Yeah, he's a lot younger than his dad is when he takes power, which is largely because Kim Jong-il was an alcoholic who poisoned his body and died very young. Which, you know, if you're going to be a dictator, my preference is that you poison yourself today. Sure. Yeah, please. Yeah, I'm down with that. Not going to complain. With no time to waste, Kim Jong-il began promoting his son up the ladder like he was trying to win a sprinting award in the nepotism Olympics. The propaganda departments of North Korea began referring to Kim Jong-un as the leader comrade.

The regime printed out booklets they sent to the army, titled The Material in Teaching the Greatness of Respected Comrade General Kim Jong-un. It informed them that, at age three, Kim Jong-un had been capable of shooting out light bulbs from 100 yards away with a handgun. By the time he was eight, the book claimed, he could drive large trucks at 80 miles an hour. Shortly after publishing this, Kim Jong-un was promoted to command of the Korean People's Army, which was hereafter renamed the Kim Jong-un Armed Forces. So, that's cool. Yeah, jeez. The turnaround, also I love that a big flex for him is driving a huge truck at 80 miles an hour. Oh yeah, as a little kid?

Yeah, that is a big flex. Yeah, the military that Kim Jong-un was about to inherit would be a fundamentally different force from the one that his grandfather had built and his father had inherited. This is because, on October 3rd, 2006, the regime detonated its first nuclear device. There is some debate still over whether or not it was a successful test of a low-yield nuke or an accidental fizzle that wound up being far smaller than intended. In either case, the detonation was an actual nuclear explosion, and North Korea would only get better at manufacturing weapons of mass destruction from that point on. Over the next five years, as Kim Jong-il sickened and began to die, Kim Jong-un increasingly took up the organs of power. The pride of being the first North Korean leader to develop nukes would go to his father, but Kim Jong-un would be the first of his line to learn how to use the weapons to get what he wanted. We'll talk about that, and much more in Part 2.

Eli, you want to plug your plugables? Yes, please. Thank you so much for having me. I check out Closure, the podcast that never ends, available on iTunes, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. I have another podcast called Pod as a Woman, but I should say what Closure is about. I don't think Closure is real, and I interview a bunch of people. They tell different stories about whether or not they found Closure in certain things, and it sounds weighty, but it's also great conversations. Then I co-host a podcast with Theresa Lee called Pod as a Woman, where we do a track-by-track breakdown of Ariana Grande's most recent albums.

We have a bunch of our friends come on and talk about whether they're into it or not. Of course, you can find me online on all the socials at EliOlsberg and EliOlsberg.net for show information. Lastly, if you live in LA, I have a show called Performance Anxiety at the Pleasure Chest. It's a monthly stand-up show, second Tuesday of every month. I am Robert Evans. You can find me on the Internet at IWriteOK on Twitter. You can find this podcast at BehindTheBastards.com. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at AtBastardsPod, and you can buy T-shirts, T-public, behind The Bastards. So check those out.

Check it all out. If you listening right now are the child of a dictator who is going to school in a Western country, hiding out under an assumed name and listening to podcasts as you bide your time until gaining power, just remember, I do take bribes. That's all I have to say. I would love to write a positive podcast about you and your family, so hit me up. We could do a sponsorship, you know? Yeah, and Venmo me at EliOlsberg if you want to bide me to talk about it. You're going to start getting like Gaddafi's kids sending you cash. He's a big fan of the show.

That's it. That's the episode. We're done here. Go hug a cat or something. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science

and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.