Lucy Steigerwald on the Death of Kim Jong-il
On December 28, North Koreans bid a formal farewell to Kim Jong-il with a massive, regimented display of ritualized grief. As Lucy Steigerwald notes, photos and video of bawling mourners flooded the state-run media, usually the only source of images from inside the Hermit Kingdom. Western observers were intrigued: Was all this hysteria over the death of one of the world's worst totalitarians the product of fear, social pressure, or—perhaps most confusing of all—sincere grief expressed according to Korean tradition?