North Korean officials are angrily denying a report that their exalted ruler Kim Jong-Un used Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” as his leadership guide, and, according to AFP, are threatening to kill the authors of the report.
The article “North Korea looks towards Hitler and the Third Reich,” published by New Focus International, an online news portal operated by North Korean defectors, says Kim Jong-Un gave copies of “Mein Kampf” to his top officials, instructing them to study it as a leadership skills manual:
“Rumours have been spreading among the Pyongyang elite that Kim Jong-un made a close study of Hitler while at school in Switzerland, according to a second trusted North Korean source, a DPRK business representative and a frequent traveler between Pyongyang and China. Spreading rumors among the elite that reinforce a message delivered through other channels has long been a tactic of North Korea’s propagandists.”
Kim Jong-Un handed out translations of Hitler’s manifesto to officials at the time of his birthday in January, the report says, citing an unnamed North Korean official working in China.
“Mentioning that Hitler managed to rebuild Germany in a short time following its defeat in World War I, Kim Jong-Un issued an order for the Third Reich to be studied in depth and asked that practical applications be drawn from it,” the source was quoted as saying.
On Wednesday, the story was picked up by all major South Korean newspapers.
The North’s police called the report a “thrice-cursed crime” aimed at belittling the leader. The police agency then threatened to kill the “human scum” behind the article.
“We are… determined to take substantial measures to physically remove despicable human scum who are committing treasons,” it said in a statement carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency.
“Sordid human scum will never be able to look up to the sky nor be able to find an inch of land to be buried after their death,” it said.
It also vowed to launch “merciless punishment of justice” against Seoul and Washington, accusing the two nations of encouraging the defectors to defame its ruler.
It appeara that the lessons in “Mein Kampf” have been well integrated.
Hitler’s popular musings, written in 1924 while the author was vacationing in a Bavarian prison, is a must-read anti-Semitic tract for Islamists, White Power folks and, now, post-adolescent North Korean despots.