North Korea’s formerly powerful number two, the ill-fated Jang Song Thaek, was very publicly and brutally executed, along with key aides — either as part of leader Kim Jong Un’s plan to consolidate his unrivalled power; as retaliation for fomenting a military coup against the boy leader; or as punishment for simply “not clapping with sufficient enthusiasm” (as mentioned in the litany of charges against him).
The state’s propaganda organs were in rare form when they denounced him: “Despicable human scum Jang, who was worse than a dog, perpetrated thrice-cursed acts of treachery,” pronounced the official news agency. “Every sentence of the decision served as a sledgehammer blow brought down by our angry service personnel and people on the head of Jang, an anti-party, counter-revolutionary, factional element and despicable political careerist and trickster.”
The problem with closed, totalitarian states is that we cannot truly know why things happen. Jang’s sentence was handed down perhaps because of some combination of the above – or it could have been because the “Great Successor” (as Kim Jong Un is occasionally called, to remind all of his lineage) did not like the look in his eye during a sideways glance at a military parade. This macabre exhibition both appals us and draws us to look more closely: how is this Asian hybrid of Hobbes and Orwell even possible in 21st century northeast Asia, the veritable cockpit of the global economy?