Culture | A dynasty of tyrants

Is North Korea’s propagandist-in-chief also its dictator-in-waiting?

As Sung-Yoon Lee explains in “The Sister”, Kim Yo Jong is not merely Kim Jong Un’s sibling

Kim Yo Jong, the sister of North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un
Lady in waitingImage: Reuters

Communists are fond of vitriol. Karl Marx called Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, the “insipid, pedantic, leather-tongued oracle of the ordinary bourgeois intelligence of the 19th century”. Vladimir Lenin said that Georgi Plekhanov, a Russian philosopher, had “set a new record in the noble sport of substituting sophistry for dialectics”, a brutal put-down in the lexicon of Marxist jargon.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Granddaughter of the revolution”

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