Who’s next in line to lead DPRK?

North Korea’s Supreme Leader, 36-year-old Kim Jong-un, is reported to be clinging to life after undergoing cardiovascular surgery.

And people say there’s no good news in the world these days.

The report came from the Daily NK, a web-based news service in South Korea which tries to make sense of the byzantine comings and goings of the North Korean power elite. Jong-un’s absence was noted on April 15, the hermit country’s most important public holiday – Sun Day, the birthday of Jong-un’s dead grandpa, Kim Il-sung.

According to the Daily NK, Jong-un underwent surgery three days prior to the biggest propaganda exercise in the DPRK calendar where military parades and mass ritualised celebrations are the order of the day. Jong-un was nowhere to be seen.

The South Koreans don’t make a habit of commenting on matters on the other side of the DMZ, so it was unusual for a government spokesman to come forward in an attempt to scotch rumours that Jong-un was set to fall off the branch. Jong-un was believed to be, the South Korean spokesman said, “in another part of the country” and as far as they could tell nothing especially unusual was going on.

As with all matters North Korean, the answer is there somewhere stuck in a mire of misinformation and deliberate deceit.

Right or wrong, the news has been taken seriously enough for US intelligence and defence agencies to game scenarios of transitions to power in a post-Jong-un DPRK.

The DPRK is the ultimate family business. Should the grossly obese, chain-smoking, hamburger-scoffing five-star PlayStation general put his cue in the rack, the Kim dynasty will be short another Kim on an already short Kim list.

Jong-un’s oldest brother, Kim Jong-nam was assassinated at Kuala Lumpur International Airport three years ago. Jong-un’s only surviving brother, Kim Jong-chul, four years his senior, was overlooked for the title role. Jong-chul is a huge Eric Clapton fan, having been spotted at Clapton concerts throughout South East Asia in recent years. He is said to live a quiet life in Pyongyang and plays in a band. A rock and roll hippy leader of the Hermit Kingdom? I don’t think so.

There are two sisters. Daddy’s girl, 45-year-old, Kim Sol-song was routinely seen glad handing the military at Kim-Jong-il’s side when he was still in the vertical. While she continues to hold senior positions in the Korean Workers’ Party, she largely slipped from view with Jong-un’s ascendancy.

The youngest of the Kim Brady Bunch is Kim Yo-jong who possesses the sort of overtly sweet, cherubic face that could launch a thousand death camps. Various human rights agencies have described her as having committed serious human rights abuses. In brutality at least, she ticks a lot of Kim Dynasty boxes.

But Stalinists don’t do gender theory and the Confucianist background predominant in North Korea where deference to older males is the cultural norm, makes either Sol-song or Yo-jong’s rise to power unlikely.

Jong-un has three children of his own, but they are all a long way from adulthood.

Esoteric as the argument might be, the Kim Dynasty does not fit accepted theories of political science. The country is often described as Stalinist which it certainly was back in Kim Il-sung’s day, but the dynastic nature of transitions of power have more in common with militarist fascist rulers in Africa.

This brings to mind the recent squabbling over where Hitler and the Nazis appear on the political spectrum. The uninformed point to nomenclature, the party’s political name, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, fixating on the second word but not the first and similarly ignoring the fact the Nazis fought pitched street battles with members of the German Communist Party all the way to Hitler seizing the Reichstag in 1933.

The real evidence comes from an analysis of the NSDAP’s performance in German elections. In 1928, the Nazis polled less than one per cent of the vote. By the 1930 election, they had 18 per cent of the vote almost all of it coming from the collapse of centre right parties, like the People’s Party and to an extent the Catholic Centre Party. The July 1932 election was the Nazi high watermark where it won 37 per cent of the vote (the election in November later that year would reduce Nazi support to 33 per cent) which occurred at the expense of moderate right and centrist parties most of whom splintered or disintegrated.

The right or left brouhaha is a pointless distraction. While the Nazis were certainly an extreme right-wing party, the real lesson of political science is what happens to an otherwise civilised democracy enduring times of great tumult when the centre all but disappears and extremism on the left and right is normalised.

The best description of Nazism is neither left or right but that it was a thug regime that relied on the economics of rolling conquest, transnational theft and mass murder to stay in power.

Both Nazism and the Kim Dynasty in North Korea highlight the limitations of a linear political spectrum. Extremes on the left and right have more in common than those who identify with the moderate centre.

Now in its third generation, the Kim Dynasty relies on continuity, from one Kim to another propagated on the propaganda lies of the dynasty’s supernatural powers.

If Jong-un dies soon, he will die without a clear successor. For the DPRK, the wall to wall, meat and drink propaganda will be harder to sell. The rise of a fourth member of the dynasty would appear to be unlikely, leaving the prospect of a massive power vacuum in a nuclear armed rogue state.

This column was first published at The Australian on 22 April 2020