It was 2019 when several photographs of Kim Jong-un crossing a snow-capped mountain on the back of a white stallion went around the world. In the West, social networks were full of memes, but in North Korea those images, full of symbolism, were taken very seriously: the supreme leader climbing Mount Paektua sacred place for many Koreans, both North and South, and full of legends invented by Pyongyang’s propaganda.
Parktu, a volcano straddling the border with China, would have been the birthplace of Kim Il-sung, founder of North Korea and grandfather of the current leader, as well as serving as a military camp where the father of the regime forged resistance against Japanese troops. Official North Korean books say that the dynasty’s second ruler, Kim Jong-il, was also born on that mountain, although historians maintain that he was born in Russia.
Many of those stories that praise the extreme cult of the Kim personality They came from the head of an official who served as propaganda chief for three generations of North Korean leaders. he, Kim Ki-namdied Tuesday in Pyongyang at the age of 94 due to multiple organ failure.
The official KNA news agency reported that this Wednesday morning (local time), President Kim Jong-un attended the funeral of a «revolutionary veteran who remained infinitely faithful to the country until the end of his days». Tomorrow, Thursday, there will be the funeral.
From Seoul, where they meticulously supervise every event that takes place in their totalitarian neighbor, they also remembered the late Kim, but to compare him, as they have done on other occasions, with Joseph Goebbels, propaganda chief of Nazi Germany. “He was widely known for his mantra: repeat a lie often enough until it becomes the truth,” claims the South Korean news agency Yonhap.
«Kim Ki-nam was a prestigious theorist and a prominent political activist, a veteran of our party and the revolution,» the North Korean media reminds him. Scholars of the dynasty of dictators attribute to Kim the author of the entire narrative that unites the leaders with «Paektu lineage» and this contributed to consolidating his exaggerated veneration.
His career began to take off in 1966 as deputy director of Pyongyang’s Propaganda and Agitation Department, which he would later head, achieving success. total control over all information circulating within the country. Analysts pointed out that he had a particularly close relationship with Kim Jong-il («drinking buddies», according to internal reports).
In the 1970s he also directed the official newspaper, the Rodong Sinmun. After the death of the country’s founder, Kim Il-sung, in October 1994, this official was the one who developed the media script for a clean leadership succession, so that all power passed without internal disputes into the hands of the ‘heir. He did the same with the sudden death of Kim Jong-il in 2011, accelerating the rise of a young Kim Jong-un, who was just 20 years old.
Kim Ki-nam retired in 2017, and his post as propaganda chief was taken over by the supreme leader’s sister, Kim Yo-jong, who then appeared in all circles as one of the strongest candidates for the future leadership of Korea of the South. North.
