Source AT
My guess is that he was chosen precisely on that account. You have to be a mean son of a bitch to be a dictator in the Kim family mold. If, in fact, he’d been a secret reformer, Kim had time after his father’s 2011 death to show that. I’ve seen little evidence that he differs significantly from his father, who never could pull himself far from the policies instituted by his own father, the first-generation head of the dynasty, Kim Il-sung. We cannot know for sure how a true reformer would be greeted domestically. Still, I think it’s reasonable to assume that military/security hardliners would resist a major turn away from the militarism that the eldest Kim unveiled with the 1950 invasion of the South, and then developed further from the 1960s on.
Categories: Asia, North Korea