Kongfucius said:
Mr Khan said:
The military would just put one of their men in there directly. The Kims have leaned very heavily on the military as their support base (since theirs was not an organic "revolution" in the beginning, so they don't have the kind of grass-roots basis that Bolshevism had in the USSR or has in China. They were basically foreigners, hiding out in Manchuria and the Russian Maritime Provinces, Korean by ethnicity but not by birth, and armed and sent in by the Soviets after the Japanese retreat from Korea). Il-Sung and *especially* Jong Il gleaned their legitimacy (such as it was) from military support, and supposedly military veterans (especially survivors from the Korean War era) are the biggest supporters of the regime domestically.
If the Kim line died off and it didn't mean the end of the DPRK as a whole, it would be a Generalissimo of some sort who got the helm. |
Quoted for correctness, whoever kept the loyalty of the military would have no competition, whether they were a Kim or not, same as most oppressive dictatorships ultimately depend on their leaders's control of the army - many a dictator has come to power in a military coup, albeit sometimes a bloodless one (Saddam Hussein, for example)
Good point about the Kim's as well, Kim Jong-Il was actually born in the USSR if Soviet records are correct
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How does that fit into the whole ideology though? Aren't the Kims seen as Gods?
