The West saw him, through the lens of our media, only as the embodiment of a hateful communism, stereotyping him as an enemy to be feared, as someone who likely would have been overthrown years ago if he did not have a few nuclear bombs.
Like Havel, his views were simplified, but in another direction. He was pictured as the evil villain in a James Bond movie -- ironically, he had collected them all -- and his country was the poster child of George W. Bush's overhyped "Axis of Evil." In the end, Bush did not prevail in his attack on Kim.
In a news world of black and whites, Kim was long blamed for every problem in the country. Yes, the people there are poor, suffer from famine and underdevelopment. They do need help, but refuse it at the expense of their independence and ideology.
But have we already forgotten the many decades when South Korea had a U.S.-backed dictator who had collaborated with the Japanese war machine? He was hated by "his" people who protested for years against him, even as the Pentagon backed him and Western investors profited from the economy.
The oxymoron of Western "intelligence" was caught napping when Kim died. Fears of his son -- the "Grand Successor" -- launching a war turned out to be bogus, too. Remember the breathless reports about the U.S. and South Korean militaries "on alert?" However, the transition there went smoothly, and within a few days, we learned that his power will be shared with the country's bureaucratic military establishment. Kim #3 is on a tight leash.
That proved once again how little our media knows about the country and its history of defeating Japanese invaders and frustrating (with Chinese help) an American "police action" under the umbrella of the UN. In our official Cold War narrative, the Korean conflict was blamed solely on a North Korean invasion on June 25, 1950. In those years, the legendary journalist I.F. Stone refuted Washington's fabricated Korea War propaganda.
Since then, historians like the University of Chicago's Bruce Cumings have shown how the North Koreans were provoked and the conflict's causes were complex. The North Koreans are said to have lost a million people in that war, but the country survived.
The people there may not have the "rights" we think we do, but they certainly seem to support their government and system even as human rights abuses are legion and dissidents expose Pyongyang's policies.
So, there is more, much more, to the stories of both Kim and Havel, two men with opposing political orientations, but whose views and roles have been simplified and distorted for myth-making political purposes in our "objective" media.
Cross-posted from Consortium News
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).