The Magazine  One Korea, After All  Time to undo the Kim family
regime  Jan 16, 2012, Vol. 17, No. 17 • By ROSS TERRILL Widget
tooltip Single Page Print Larger Text Smaller Text Alerts  With
28-year-old Kim Jong Eun propped up to handle Pyongyang’s
succession crisis, three facts about North Korea are salient.
Kim Jong Il, who died December 17, like his father was a tyrant
whose damage makes Qaddafi seem a choirboy. After six decades of
peaceful competition with the capitalist South, the socialist
North’s per capita GDP is 5 percent of South Korea’s. Years of
futile disarmament talks with North Korea compare with the worst
peace-effort fiascoes of League of Nations days.  Photo of Kim
Jong Eun  Kim Jong Eun   George W. Bush’s comment to Bob
Woodward, “I loathe Kim Jong Il,” was a fitter summation of this
cruel nonentity than the full-page world-historical pomposity of
the New York Times’s obituary. Kim Jong Il made but two
offerings to his people: poverty and nuclear weapons. Now, in
rituals the world takes to