Home  >  Kim Jong Il / Propaganda / WTF?

KIm Jong Il’s Funeral Ride Was in an American Made Car

//nkleadershipwatch.wordpress.comSource: KCNA via NK Leadership Watch

Well if this doesn’t take the cake!   I suspected it, but then thought twice about it — surely even the North Korean higher-ups wouldn’t go against their own propaganda for an event to be watched into perpetuity by every one of their subjects.  Yet commenter Thomas was the first here to come out and say it, and now ABC News Radio says it’s true:

…But a curious detail was that the boxy black hearse that crept through the light snow was a vintage Lincoln Continental.

The choice of a U.S.-made luxury car seems odd for a country that preached a belligerent self reliance, reviled America and was put on President George W. Bush’s Axis of Evil list.

Experts at Edmunds.com put the year of the Lincoln at 1976, making the 35-year-old vehicle older than North Korea’s 28-year-old new leader Kim Jong-Un.

Ford, the parent company of Lincoln, did not respond to telephone and email requests for comment.

The choice of an American luxury car for his final ride is consistent with Kim’s tastes, despite his regime’s propaganda depicting the U.S. as evil, dangerous and violent, and his history of antagonizing numerous American administrations with threats of war and nuclear weapons.  [Joshua Cohan, ABC News Radio]

I don’t know about you, but this fact would seem to be ripe to float into North Korea by balloon — say, for the new dictator’s birthday on January 8th.

Update:

Car Buzz also says it was a 1976 Lincoln Continental and has some nice photos and says something that would make Korean car makers smile.

I wonder what cars were used for Kim Il Sung’s funeral?

Update 2:

For the answer to that and more, see this NY Times article.

“The Lincoln Continental in the old Asia was considered to be a solid, robust, powerful car,” said Kongdan Oh, a senior researcher at the Institute for Defense Analyses who has written on daily life in North Korea, where her parents were born. “They are a time capsule. North Koreans are living still the 1970s life.

She said the cars were probably chosen because they were previously used in the funeral of Kim Il-sung, who was Kim Jong-il’s father and the founding president of North Korea and who died in 1994. “Whatever they did in the past, they are very comfortable repeating that, especially this Kim family dynasty,” she said of the North Korean leadership. “They probably didn’t even think twice about using this car. For them, it’s a very natural choice.

Very interesting.  I wonder if the average North Korean would know about this old belief in this American car, and what they think about it being used in the state funeral.

2 Responses

  1. What was more important to the shaky Kim Jong Eun regime: emphasizing the lineage from Kim Il Sung, or making sure (for no particular domestic reason) that nothing American was in use on funeral day? Can we find a North Korean civilian inside North Korea who can tell us that this was an American car? Quite probably not, and so; does it matter who made it? Professor Oh was right.

    By the by, that article in the NYT strikes me as classic (and not in a good way) off-the-cuff punditry. It became abundantly clear down the years that Kim Jong Il didn’t “hate” the USA at all; indeed, he admired its power and reach and, at times, sought strategically to work with it. There is no space in international politics for hate, for hate is irrational and unproductive, and this is something I would imagine Kim was well aware of.

    Equally, “It was not clear how the cars were obtained by North Korea, which is subject to economic sanctions by the United States and other world powers, and analysts said that they might have been bought decades ago.” It’s just lazy.