Is North Korea a Monarchy?

"...North Korea is not a monarchy of any kind. The fact that the country has been ruled by father, son and grandson in turn no more makes them a monarchy than the fact that the Pope is elected makes the Vatican a republic. There is actually no hereditary succession in North Korea. Most people do not realize this. Kim Il-Sung was the first President of North Korea. His son, Kim Jong-Il, never succeeded to that office, nor has his son. Confused yet? Well, you should be because this is how far into never-never land North Korea has fallen. Kim Jong-Un and Kim Jong-Il were never President of North Korea because Kim Il-Sung (who died in 1994) is STILL the President! There is no “The King is dead, long live the King” in North Korea. Nope, living or not, Kim Il-Sung is the “Eternal President” of North Korea and always will be. Kim Jong-Il was “Supreme Leader”, he gave the orders and he was in total control, but he was not the President. The President of North Korea, for the last 18 years, has been a dead man. Christopher Hitchens once described North Korea as a “necrocracy” for this reason.

A monarchy is something that grows up naturally, over time, in a certain place in accordance with the culture of that place. The communist regime in North Korea was something totally alien that was imposed on the country, suddenly and had to be hammered into place by brute force. Korea, of course, had been a monarchy. Immediately prior to the division of course it had been a colonial appendage of the Empire of Japan and prior had been a vassal kingdom of Imperial China. However, it had also, briefly, been an independent empire of its own but that had grown out of the much older and well established Kingdom of Korea that existed previously. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has nothing, whatever at all in common with that Korean Empire which had reigned during the last period of united independence on the peninsula. It was the most radical break imaginable to that old and glorious tradition. The prior Korean kingdom and empire had been a place of highly advanced Confucian learning, progress and prosperity to a degree that caused even their powerful Chinese and Japanese neighbors to look on them with a degree of envy. Today, Japan looks on North Korea with great concern or worry and China regards them as a rather ill-behaved and embarrassing child they are obliged to support. To put it succinctly, we know what a Korean monarchy looks like and the DPRK is certainly NOT that."

"Everyone who has ever visited North Korea has been shocked that such a place could possibly be real. Every journalist I have ever seen interviewed after visiting North Korea has said the same exact thing, that it was an Orwellian nightmare brought to life."

"Keeping that in mind, far from being understandable as a monarchy, North Korea does, in a way, represent the ultimate in “republicanism”. It is the example of what happens when a political-economic doctrine is taken to the ultimate extreme, of throwing out history, tradition, morals and values and making the political machine, the “State” the ultimate authority, the ultimate guardian and the ultimate religion. North Korea, in that way, is a shining example of what results from all those who would trust political ideologies to solve their problems and ever bigger governments and government programs to take care of everything for them."

Read more at: http://madmonarchist.blogspot.com/2012/05/classifying-north-korea.html