Barbara Demick Quotes
To a certain extent, all dictatorships are alike. From Stalin's Soviet Union to Mao's China, from Ceauşescu's Romania to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, all these regimes had the same trappings ... But Kim Il-sung took the cult of personality to a new level. What distinguished him in the rogues' gallery of twentieth-century dictators was his ability to harness the power of faith. Kim Il-sung understood the power of religion.
Barbara Demick, Journalist and North Korean Expert, “Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea”, Granta, 2010
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
He and his news team were given permission to do interviews in North Korea. The ruler, Kim Il Sung, is virtually worshiped by most of the population.
Dodd, in Berlin from 1933 to the onset of WWII, was able to see first hand what Hitler and the Nazi Movement was really like, Although he for the United States and Churchill for England warned early on, the politics of the times would not allow any action to stop or curtail Hitler. America, in particular, had a strong isolationist Republican wing and in addition, a small but loud core of pro Fascist, Hitler admirers such as Charles Lindburg, Father Coughlin, and Henry Ford. America had virtually no serious military capacity at the time, and with the Depression, FDR had all he could do to just gradually build up the military. By the time the Democracies realized that Dodd and Churchill were right, it was too late to prevent WWII. Dodd died in 1940 just when it was clear that he had been right.
Soon he had the power of a dictator but he didn’t force his will on the vast majority of the Cubans. His decrees made all the wealthy and the cronies of the dictator Batista outraged and most of them left Cuba. He was a dynamic demagogue and the people handed him dictatorial powers which he did not reject. He was so popular that he was the only leader in the Americas who would give 4 hour speeches and move through the streets without any bodyguards until the United States and dissident expatriates tried to assassinate him. With all that popularity, none the less he would not allow open criticism of his regime and jailed many political opponents. So he indeed became a dictator but never needed the machine gun to maintain power.
Barbara Demick is an American journalist. She was the Beijing bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times. She is the author of Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood (Andrews & McMeel, 1996). Her second book, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, was published by Spiegel & Grau/Random House in December 2009 and Granta Books in 2010. An animated feature film based on the book and sharing the same title was planned to be directed by Andy Glynne. The project launched in 2012 and a pilot was released in 2015. Its status as of January 2018 is not clear.
