The Holy Twattery. This from The Australian.

Fuck, you've got to laugh ain't you. Couldn't happen in the west though, could it?
"THE Dear Leader's son will be treated as a god in North Korea.
WHEN Kim Il-sung (the Great Leader) anointed as successor his son Kim Jong-il (the Dear Leader), North Korea's official party newspaper left no doubt that this was no mere act of succession, but a religious epiphany.

"People of the world, if you are looking for a miracle, come to Korea," the paper exhorted, specifically identifying the Kims as reincarnations of the Father and Son in the Holy Trinity. "Do not believe in God. Believe in the Great Man."

Thirty years later, a similarly pseudo-religious coronation is under way, as Kim Jong-un, the Dear Leader's youngest son, emerges as heir apparent to one of the nastiest tyrannies. The latest Kim is expected to be appointed head of the unmistakably Orwellian Organisation and Guidance Department, which monitors senior officials - in effect the regime's high priest.

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Dictators, like toxins, come in various strains: what makes the North Korean version so virulent and immune to antidote is its unique amalgam of Stalinist autocracy, feudal history, deliberate mystery, spectacular brutality and fake religious symbolism.

Many communist dictators have sought to transfer power to their children, but only the Kims have succeeded in holding on through two, and now, it seems, three generations. While nepotism thrives under Stalinist rule, the dynastic principle usually fails.

In traditional societies, the church usually acts as the principal arbiter and authenticator of hereditary succession. The evil brilliance of North Korea's dictators has been to merge religion and politics into a uniquely powerful brew, both opiate and stimulant. They have not just refashioned and harnessed religion; they are religion.

The belief system that underpins the North Korean regime is a peculiar mixture of animism, Confucian patriarchal tradition, pseudo-Christianity and the national ideology of Juche, which is usually translated as "self-reliance", but might be defined as xenophobic national solipsism.

"Personality cult" is the term often used to describe the regime, but this does not quite do justice to the divine status manufactured by and for the Kims, and the sheer weight of religious imagery that surrounds and protects them.

These are no mere mortals: pilgrims visiting the mausoleum of Kim Il-sung must be cleansed by mechanised blowers and automatic shoebrushes to remove all traces of polluting dust from their clothing and preserve the sanctity of the shrine.

For 500 years Korea was ruled by a single dynasty. The hereditary principle is sacrosanct and the Kims enjoy a divinity and reverence similar to that of Emperor Hirohito in pre-war Japan. The traditional Confucian emphasis on the deference owed to father by son has been adapted to the relationship between ruler and ruled. Obedience to higher authority is not a political act, but a semi-religious obligation.

All independent religious activity has been eradicated under the Kims. In 1997 North Korea withdrew from Christian time, replacing it with the Juche calendar, which marks the beginning of history as 1912, the year of Kim Il-sung's birth. Yet Christian imagery suffuses the regime, merging with an ancient Korean tradition of priestly kings and messianic saviours sent to deliver the country from evil.

Kim Jong-il was actually born on a Siberian army base where the elder Kim (whose parents were devout Christians) was serving in the Soviet army during World War II. The official version, however, describes how the son was born in a humble log cabin on Mount Paektu, the sacred mountain and birthplace of the Korean people's mythical divine ancestor. At the moment of his birth, of course, the sky was beautifully illuminated by a shining star.

Ordinary North Koreans are almost wholly ignorant of how the ruling dynasty lives. What little evidence leaks to the outside world suggests self-indulgence on a scale that earlier despots would have envied: even Nero did not send his personal chef to buy caviar from Iran, bacon from Denmark or bluefin tuna from Japan.

It is easy for the West to mock the trite but chilling refrains of the Kim cult - "Adore Kim Jong-il with all your heart" - and revolutionary anthems with such catchy lyrics as "We rally around the 20 principles". But these are the sinister catechisms and rote-learned hymns of a brutal religious orthodoxy.

Already the icons and songs of praise for a new, deliberately mysterious deity are being manufactured by Pyongyang. Almost nothing is certain about Kim Jong-un. Some 10 million photographs of the "Young General" are being manufactured to hang alongside the Great and Dear Leaders in every public place. When the moment is right, 24 million lapel badges depicting Kim Jong-un will be distributed, so that every inhabitant of the country can exhibit the devotion that is universal and obligatory.

The West has often tried to understand North Korea as the devil we know, a defiant rogue state like Iran or a traditional communist regime. Instead it is far closer to a medieval absolute monarchy with 21st-century nuclear technology, a dynastic despotism fuelled by racial fear and backed up by a brutal state religion, where the penalty for heresy is death.

The Kims have achieved something unique and uniquely horrible in modern history: a vicious fusion of Eastern and Western brands of tyranny, and a subspecies of communist religion that has nothing to do with genuine belief and very little to do with communist ideology. In 1980 as Kim Jong-il joined the Politburo as the anointed one, the party paper went into paroxysms of messianic fervour: "Christians, do not go to Jerusalem. Come rather to Korea!" Even now, the brainwashed massed choir is preparing its hosannas, to welcome the latest of the Unholy Trinity: Kim the Father, Kim the Son and, in an astonishing feat of religious manipulation, Kim the Grandson.

The Times