It’s been a popular story for the last week or so that Kim Jong-un has been giving out copies of Adolf Hitler’s “classic” tyrannical early-years gob-shite autobahnahnarography, Mein Kampf, to his officials to celebrate his birthday like they were paper hats and party poppers. While it’s a story that the North Korean government has wholeheartedly refuted, it does sort of highlight how far out of touch the nation is, which will continue to see it languishing in a stilted, distopian stasis until it starts to adopt some genuinely impressive forward thinking.
The story broke through a news website published by runaway North Koreans who claim senior officials had been given the text as a lesson in how to rebuild a country. However, KCNA, the national, state-controlled news organisation for North Korea, were quick to refute the claim, indicating that the writers were running a smear campaign against their former country, while at the same time calling them, “HUMAN SCUM” (insert ludicrous Private Helga Geerhart accent).
There are essentially a number of possibilities behind the truth of the situation. First, as has so vehemently been attested by the KNCA, the story could be an absolute pack of lies written as an attention grabbing headline filler (if so, we’re just as hooked as everyone else). However, if this is the case the North Korean’s didn’t do themselves any favours in making a convincing response. Statements along the lines of “Ve vill rremove them physicaLLY!” and the human scum comment above meant that they ended up sounding about as gastapo as is possible without being Herr Flick himself.
The second option is that is did happen, but it was all meant in the best possible taste (insert Kenny Everett for best effect), but they just didn’t want to openly admit to it in public. They could just have been looking for practical examples of rapid industrial success in what happened to Germany during the interwar period, as opposed to the eventual military failure of the Third Reich.
If this is the case, again they aren’t doing themselves any favours in convincing the rest of the world with such a dictatorial response. It also means that we might see a boom in North Korean automotive manufacturing, improved engineering skills and a significant increase in the speed limit on their bigger motorways. However, if this is the case they’d probably be better looking at the more enlightened sense of practicality, productivity, innovation and liberalism that started to take hold in Germany following the end of WWII.
Finally, and most worryingly, the allegations could turn out to be true, harbouring the intention to mobilise troops, ramp up military production and start sending big red arrows roaming around the vicinity of East Asian maps. If this turns out to be true, then the Hitler-like zero tolerance response will be fooling no one. Or will it. It could be a double bluff, or a triple axis reverse looped flosby flop bluffing tactic (or something similarly silly).
Either way, and whatever the truth is, the situation just highlights how little the country seems to be able to process lateral thinking. Germany’s economic might isn’t a derivative of war, it’s a product of a purposeful, serious and industrious mind set. Admittedly, war was the catalyst for some of this, but that doesn’t mean that it is the how and why the country achieved its turn around.
Germany endured a hundred years of upheaval before it emerged as the great nation that we now know, love and tease so much. It too was divided, but only in union has it come to be seen as the GDP powerhouse that it is. Whether Kim Jong-un was handing out copies of Mein Kampf like lollies is neither here nor there, the reality is that the whole nation needs to read a bit more about the 1990s, rather than the 30s and 40s, to see how cool things could really become.
