NUCLEAR POWERED FEUDALISM

Shin Sang-Ok, film director and abductee, died on April 11th, aged 79 (The Economist, 4/27/06) (registration required)

VIEWERS of the movie “Team America: World Police” will have gathered that North Korea's dictator, Kim Jong Il, is a mixed-up fellow. He may be brutal—he is depicted feeding Hans Blix, the former UN weapons inspector, to a shark—but he is also a sensitive, artistic soul. After murdering Mr Blix, he sings a sad song about how lonely it is being a psychotic despot. This was supposed to be outrageous satire. But, as Shin Sang-Ok could have told the directors, no fictionalised “Dear Leader” could be weirder, or nastier, than the real one.

Mr Shin was a South Korean movie director. In 1978, Mr Kim, a movie buff, had him kidnapped [and his ex-wife] and whisked to the hermit kingdom to make its revolutionary film industry less awful....

In North Korea, he was put up in a comfortable guest house, but insisted on trying to escape. One day he borrowed a car, drove to a railway station, hid among crates of explosives and crept aboard a freight train. He was caught the next day, and soon found himself in a hellish prison camp.

Even there, however, he was protected from afar. When he tried to starve himself to death, officials force-fed him through a funnel. A guard told Mr Shin that he was the first attempted suicide he'd ever seen saved—so he must be very important....

As soon as [the Shins] saw a chance to dodge their bodyguards, during a promotional trip to Vienna in 1986, they fled to the American embassy and sought asylum.

Mr Shin was at first reluctant to go home, for fear that South Korea's security police might disbelieve his fantastic tale and suspect him of communist sympathies. Fortunately, he and his wife had made, at mortal risk, clandestine tape recordings of conversations with Mr Kim. These, and the couple's memoirs, are among the most useful accounts we have of the secretive (and now probably nuclear-armed) Dear Leader's personality: charming, shrewd, quirky, malevolent.

The traditional Westphalian understanding of sovereignty says that what Mr. Kim does within his own borders is none of our concern. International law says that we can't just go in and depose him because someday he might be a threat to us. Now, is it really immoral of Americans to resist both these conclusions?

Posted by David Cohen at May 7, 2006 1:30 PM