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Kim Jong il dead (ish)

What's happening this weekend? Hitchens, Havel, Jong-they're all dropping off the fucking perch.
 
Hitchens did a short DPRK tour. instigated a discussion on dialectics ( or was it dianetics ? ) with the party spooks that shadowed him. Great loss of face all round. liked his drink and cigarettes and especially liked the fact you could smoke everywhere 'cept in the KIS Mausuleum
 
First Gadaffi now Kim Jong,who's going to take their place as mad haired, dressed in the dark mad dictator on the World stage? :hmm:
 
Given that the leader of Korea is a front for a leadership clique what changes happen will be driven by what tendencies within the leadership take the opportunity to move things their way...
 
That's what I thought, it's all a bit 'shit better make sure everyone knows how terribly sad I am, you never know who might be watching'

Much of the public grief may be genuine. Tyrants are loved as well as hated, and dictatorships don't function without the co-operation of the people. When Stalin died, hundreds were trampled to death in central Moscow as hundreds of thousands converged on Red Square to pay their respects in scenes of mass hysteria. Not all of it will have been faked. In fact most of it won't have been-Communist rule was never as popular as when Stalin was at the helm.
 
Apparently:
“10.27am: North Koreans are so overcome with grief that they feel as though the sky is falling in, according to the latest dispatch from KCNA. "

Yeh, losing your dictator will do that .... lots of people really WEPT when Stalin died after all !

North Korea must rank as the world's most depressing regime - for socialists anyway - raises for us all the VERY tricky issue of the STATE, specifically the "Workers' State" and "The Party". Apart from Anarchism (which has its own theory problems on the state and revolution) , its hard to really point to any convincing new thinking on this vital issue for a long, long, time - other than the standard wishful thinking that "in an advanced capitalist economy with no peasants there will be no problem in the working class holding power itself - rather than via a bureaucratic intermediary". Not entirely convinced myself so far.
 
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