There is no shortage of evidence to the contrary-evidence, namely, that Kim is little more than a bad, and erratic, approximation of his canny father. In light of this, is it worth considering that the conventional take on Kim Jong Un does not come close to providing an accurate picture? (And to be sure, he did send Uncle Jang to his death.) It says something about Kim that people will believe almost anything, the more outrageous the better. The Jang-fed-to-dogs story was actually invented by a Chinese satirical newspaper, as a joke, before it began racing around the world as a viral version of truth. It is said that he has had former girlfriends executed.Īll of the above is untrue-or, perhaps safer to say, unfounded. He is reported to have a yen for bondage porn and to have ordered all young men in his country to adopt his peculiar hairstyle. He is said to have had his uncle, Jang Song Thaek, and the entire Jang family mowed down by heavy machine guns (or possibly exterminated with mortar rounds, rocket-propelled grenades, or flamethrowers), or to have had them fed live to ravenous dogs. He is said to be a drunk, to have become so obese gorging on Swiss cheese that he can no longer see his genitals, and to have resorted to bizarre remedies for impotence, such as a distillation from snake venom. In the world press, Kim is a bloodthirsty madman and buffoon.

He has been in power for a little more than three years. Kim is so easy to kick that the United Nations, which famously agrees on nothing, voted overwhelmingly in November to recommend that he and the rest of North Korea’s leadership be hauled before the International Criminal Court, in The Hague, and tried for crimes against humanity. On the great grade-school playground of foreign affairs, he might as well be wearing across his broad bottom a big KICK ME sign. He is the youngest head of state in the world and probably the most spoiled. At age 32 the Supreme Leader owns the longest list of excessive honorifics anywhere, every one of them unearned. He is the Marshal of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Great Successor, and the Sun of the 21st Century. Does anyone make an easier target than Kim Jong Un? He’s Fatboy Kim the Third, the North Korean tyrant with a Fred Flintstone haircut-the grinning, chain-smoking owner of his own small nuclear arsenal, brutal warden to about 120,000 political prisoners, and effectively one of the last pure hereditary absolute monarchs on the planet.

North korea kim jong un