October 9 just happened to be the day I realized I had no idea for this column. Luckily for me, that was also the day that Kim Jeong-il decided to test his supposed nuclear bomb. For a time, news of the North’s test dominated the world’s headlines as the world waited to see what would happen next. How would the world react? How would Kim Jeong-il react to the world’s reaction? That was also the same week that Ban Ki-moon was appointed to be the next United Nations Secretary-General. With the Korean Peninsula the centre of the world’s attention, it seemed like the topic of my column was chosen for me. I am weary of making any predictions lest I suffer the indignity of seeing my predictions not come to fruition. Instead, I’ll use as a springboard a short quote from a TV interview with a Seoul taxi driver the day after the test: “We are the same Korean people, so I feel the north won’t attack us.”

I don’t think the North will attack; I wouldn’t be here if I thought it would, and of course, there’s no way a 50-year-old border could change the ethnicity of a race of people. It sounds like I agree with the interviewee; yes, the North Koreans are as Korean as those here in the South, and yes, I don’t feel there will be an attack. I agree with both parts of his response, but it’s the “so” I do disagree with and think worthy of exploring. It’s absurd to think Kim Jeong-il has any kind of brotherly love for any Korean, whether they live in the North or the South. Given his treatment of his own people, the opposite conclusion, “We are the same Korean people, so I feel the North will attack,” makes much more sense.

Two books should be required reading for anyone living in South Korea hoping to gain any kind of understanding into Kim Jeong-il and the country he claims to so dearly lead. The first book, The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag by Kang Chol-hwan, is an important book to read not only because it is the most thorough account of a North Korean concentration camp we have at the moment, but also because what he experienced could so easily have been experienced by any South Korean if their relatives had happened to be on the other side of an imaginary line drawn on a map in 1953. Fate or simple good (or bad) luck is the difference between soju and starvation, cell phones and concentration camps, freedom and fear.

The other book, 1984 by George Orwell, is a frightening, prophetic look at totalitarianism at its most extreme. Unfortunately, while this book serves as a warning about totalitarianism, it can also serve as a blueprint for it. In fact, it’s hard to believe the architects of North Korean society didn’t refer to 1984. The two dictators share similar nicknames, Big Brother and Dear Leader, but that is just the first of dozens of similarities spread across the two books and societies. Anther example is the recent threat of war by a spokesman for the North’s Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland, which reminds me very much of Big Brother’s Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with nothing but war.

I would love to recount the horrors of Kang Chol-han’s testimony, but I don’t think I could do them justice, and his testimony is best read in full. Suffice to say that at the age of 9 he found himself, along with his 7-year-old sister, the guest of a Yodok concentration camp due to the alleged crimes of his grandfather. Instead, to show my belief that Kim Jeong-il is a person who cares for no one, let’s look at how his regime treated a person who could not have represented a smaller threat: a 13-year-old Japanese school girl.

In 2002 Kim Jeong-il admitted, after years of denials, that North Korean agents kidnapped 13 Japanese citizens during the 1970s and 80s. I was living in Japan at the time and remember being particularly shocked to learn that the youngest of those kidnapped, Megumi Yokata, was a 13-year-old school girl. It may not have been their plan; perhaps she was unlucky enough to see the North Korean spies while walking home from school. Whatever the reason, the fact remains they kidnapped a child. According to the North Koreans, she committed suicide in 1994. Who could blame her if that’s what she really did? But it’s also possible, and in my opinion more likely, that she was murdered. Kim Jeong-il claimed the kidnapping was carried out by over-zealous intelligence officers. One such officer admitted while under interrogation in South Korea that the kidnappings were ordered by Kim Jeong-il himself.

Koreans know all about Kim Jeong Il’s hobby of kidnapping people. The most famous example occurred in 1978. Kim Jeong-il wanted to improve the quality of North Korean films. His solution, although bizarre and criminal, was also coldly logical: kidnap actress Choi Eun-hee and her film director husband, Shin Sang-ok. It wasn’t brotherly love that drove Kim Joeng-il to kidnap those two South Korean citizens, rather it points to CIA analysts being correct when they identified him as having the most dangerous of all personality disorders: malignant narcissism, a disorder whose other sufferers includes such lovely people as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Saddam Hussein.

The actions of those men and the actions of Kim Jeong-il himself should always be kept in mind when considering what he could possibly do. I don’t think he will attack; I think his threats and actions are designed to bring him money which he will use to maintain control. He is no one’s big brother, and most certainly no one’s dear leader.