Tearful Kim Jong Il Apologizes to Starving Subjects for Blowing Their Kids’ Lunch Money on Missiles

I did not make this up, and I have the link to prove it:

North Korea’s state-run media reported Tuesday that Kim Jong-Il shed tears of regret during the country’s controversial rocket launch because he could not use the launch funds to provide aid to his people, the AFP reported. [….]

Kim “felt regret for not being able to spend more money on the people’s livelihoods and was choked with sobs,” AFP quoted ruling communist party paper Rodong Sinmun as saying. [Fox News]

This is one of the hazards of blogging about North Korea — sometimes, satire can’t top the real thing.

As noted previously, launching this missile probably cost much more than a year’s supply of international food aid. Apparently, this point isn’t lost on the people of North Korea, either. I wonder whether North Korea would have produced propaganda like this ten years ago. B.R. Myers has written about the maternalistic character of North Korean propaganda, and its tendency to infantilize the people as objects of the Leader’s attentive doting. Since the famine, regime propaganda has acknowledged starvation and suffering in the North, but the official reaction to this used to be much more stoic, reenforcing self-sacrifice to keep the Yankee hordes at bay. North Korean propagandists may seem unsophisticated to us, but they probably operate on a much higher, more subtle level to a North Korean audience. Clearly, they see the potential for popular discontent about how the nation’s resources are being expended. This is the first tacit acknowledgment I’ve seen of that potential.