The eldest son of recently deceased Kim Jong-il, famed dictator of North Korea, has recently been kicked out of a casino in the Chinese territory of Macau for having no money to pay off his gambling debt.
Kim Jong-nam, who was not chosen as the next leader of the troubled state of the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea, has been long known as a party boy and a gambler.
Reports seem to suggest it was this tendency for hedonism that led his father to choose his younger half-brother, Kim Jong-un, as his successor. Recent reports seem to indicate that the new political power in Pyongyang has opted to cut funding for Kim Jong-nam’s extravagant spending sprees and trips to casinos.
The amount spent so far is of course, unknown, but we can fairly safely say that this one man may have sucked funds away from a population that needs all it can get. Perhaps it is justice at last? Or an angry half-brother trying to control a public image?
The 1990s saw a decade-long famine that gripped the people’s lives in North Korea, during which up to 3.5 million people died, out of a population of 22 million. This disastrous event caused by political mismanagement and economic blunders is known as the Arduous March.
To this day, the economy of North Korea is known to be in no shape at all to have such leeches suck it dry. While the state officially endorses the “Juche Idea”, a philosophy of self-reliance, the country is ironically heavily dependent on its economic powerhouse neighbour, the Peoples’ Republic of China. It also receives food aid to this day from China, Pakistan, Japan, the United States, and in a further twiste of fate, their hated rivals, South Korea.
Suffice it to say that this man was literally taking the food out of people’s mouths. Hopefully a few more hungry people will get something to eat now. Given that this is North Korea we’re talking about, though, that is unknown.
