North Korea a joke? Kim off it.

[Blackleaf]

NORTH KOREA A JOKE? KIM OFF IT

16 October 2006

The Mirror

Tony Parsons

North Korea

Kim Jong-il is a dictator that definitely DOES have WMD.

LAUGHING at dotty despots is all very well but it will never be a substitute for annihilating them.​

Charlie Chaplin poked merciless fun at Hitler but his biting satire probably had less to do with Adolf's decline than the Normandy landings, fire-bombing the fatherland and the Red Army smashing their way into Berlin.​

So it is with Kim Jong-il.​

Until a week ago, the North Korean nutter was a joke in the West, best known for his role as arch villain in the puppet movie Team America: World Police.​

Now Kim Jong-il is a joke figure who has exploded a nuclear bomb.​

We are still laughing at Kim Jong-il. And, frankly, it is difficult not to.​

THE thinning Alvin Stardust haircut. The built-up shoes. The ludicrous posturing of Communism's first hereditary leader (dad was in the dotty despot racket, too).​

Best of all is the little man's publicity machine. North Koreans are told that the Dear Leader - as he likes to be known - allegedly scored the lowest round of golf in human history, 38 below par with no less than five holes in one. Nice going, Dear Leader!​

What a joke. What a laugh. But then we were laughing at Hitler as he was rounding up the Jews and sending them to the camps. We were still chuckling about Der Fuhrer and singing songs about his testicles, or lack of them, when Jewish children were being shoved on to trains to Belsen and Auschwitz and Treblinka.​

The Dear Leader's thoughts on Hitler are unknown, but one of the largest labour camps in his slave state, the notorious Camp 22, pays homage to the Nazis by performing executions in gas chambers.​

The reason the image of Kim as a mad Dr Evil-style puppet has such an impact is because it is not very far from the truth. The little man is a cliche dictator right down to his bad haircut.​

While North Koreans starve, the Dear Leader indulges in passion for luxury goods, fancy cars and the ladies. How can they refuse him? While North Koreans live like slaves and die like flies, forbidden to listen to anything other than cretinous state propaganda, reduced to eating tree bark, unable to feed their children, this jumped-up little fool has presided over the build-up of the fourth largest army in the world, with troops numbering well over a million.​

North Korean children starve while their leader gets a stiffy by playing with nuclear weapons. Perhaps you have to laugh, because it is too heartbreaking to do anything else.​

Sooner or later the Dear Leader is going to have to be confronted. Sooner or later, someone is going to have to do serious damage to the Dear Leader's bouffant.​

Perhaps, after Iraq, the West will simply not have the guts or the will for the job. Perhaps North Korea's great allies, the Chinese, will have to do it.​

But UN sanctions and satire are almost certainly not going to be enough. Because this one really does have Weapons of Mass Destruction. Beyond our smug Western laughter, Kim Jongil is a truly evil man, rotten to the core.​

Like most dictators, the mountain of misery he has inflicted has largely been upon his own people.​

Now he is playing with some very dangerous toys and has become impossible to laugh off. Sooner or later, and the sooner the better, someone is going to have to give the Dear Leader a bad hair day like he wouldn't believe.​

As for the nuclear club, I am all for keeping out the riff-raff. We have got the big one - they haven't. Let's keep it that way. There are too many members in the nuclear club already.​

I can't understand the argument that we have the bomb so every nutcase on the planet should have the bomb.​

You don't give a burglar a knife just because you have one and he doesn't, do you?​

If the likes of North Korea and Iran are allowed to join the nuclear club, then soon the club will face slipping standards, not to mention the destruction of the human race.​

North Korea: Facts and figures​

Area - 120, 540 km sq (almost exactly the same size as England or almost exactly half the size of Great Britain)​

Official Name - Choson Minjujuui Inmin Konghwaguk (Democratic People's Republic of Korea)​

Flag​

Coat of Arms​

Motto - Prosperous and Great Country​

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For previous Tony Parsons columns see our website at www.mirror.co.uk​