Loyal officials of the North Korean communist party are wearing badges bearing the face of Kim Jong-un for the first time, in an indication of the increasingly intense cult of personality that is developing around the supreme leader.
Photographs on state media taken at the plenary session of the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK), which reviews the party’s achievements in the first half of the year, show cadres wearing the badges on their left lapels.
All North Koreans are obliged to wear a badge portraying the Kims but, until this week, these were always images of Kim’s late father and grandfather: Kim Jong-il, whom he succeeded in 2011, and Kim Il-sung, the country’s founding president.
For all the energy that state media expends on glorifying the brilliance and achievements of Kim, an important element of the personality cult has always been the pretence of self-deprecation. Like his father before him, the young Kim affects humility in comparison with his even more glorious forebears. Recently there have been signs that he is casting off modesty and establishing a personal iconography.
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Most schools, homes and workplaces also display framed portraits of the two dead leaders — and in May, Kim Jong-un’s portrait was seen in media photographs displayed alongside them for the first time.
In the spring, North Korea broadcast a new song in praise of him, accompanied by a video of ecstatic citizens singing his name and praising the “bright future” that he promises. The song, Friendly Father, has gone viral on the social media app TikTok and has been banned in South Korea, where North Korean propaganda is illegal.
Meanwhile, the country’s foreign ministry denounced three days of joint military exercises held last week by South Korea, the United States and Japan.
“As Nato stages annual joint military drills in all spheres including land, sea, air and cyberspace, the US, Japan and the Republic of Korea [South Korea] decided to regularly stage tripartite multi-domain joint military drills,” read the statement on the official Korean Central News Agency. “This means that the US-Japan-ROK relations have taken on the full-fledged appearance of Asian-version Nato.”
