The dramatic exit of Jang Song-thaek, the uncle of North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, has an almost Shakespearean flavour about it. Hauled out of a meeting of leadership cadres, dragged into court, found guilty and executed within the hour it would make great theatre at Stratford.
One could even picture Richard Branagh, as the Kim’s right hand man, declaiming those brutal accusations in court before Uncle Jang waited, quivering with fear as he felt the cold muzzle of the executioner’s gun against his temple.
“Despicable human scum Jang, who was worse than a dog, perpetrated thrice-cursed acts of treachery in betrayal of such profound trust and warmest paternal love shown by the party and the leader for him,”
We are told he has been airbrushed out of North Korean history and no doubt his family and staff are already shivering in their cells awaiting a similar fate.
Tim Stanley excuses the whole pantomime as yet another example of fratricide in a mafia state, likening the Workers Party to Cosa Nostra.
He is wrong.
North Korea with its gulags, famines, police repression and cowed populace is a classic Marxist state ruled by an elite which sees itself as a vanguard constructing a society of new humans, purged of all the detritus of the old times. Mo0dern Marxists would publicly disagree but be assured in private every one of them would dearly love to see our country governed in the same way where over two or three generations the slate could be wiped clean ready for the emergence of a “purer” society.
So let’s be clear about this and call a spade a spade. North Korea is not a socialist state that has lost its way. To call it a mafia state is using weasel words as a distraction.
North Korea is the ultimate Marxist state. It’s the full flowering of Communism.
