The dictator's Freud

Dictators are interesting. They are fascinating. Now imagine, it is your job to psychologically analyse them. You would have a lot to tell, no doubt. And indeed, this job exists.
Psychiatrist Jerrold M. Post analysed dictators for many years for the CIA and still does so, as an external advisor for the US administration. Luckily for us, Mr Post broke his silence and spoke to one of Switzerland’s most well known weeklies, the Weltwoche.
The paper that is internationally remembered for being the first German-language magazine to reprint the Danish Muhammad cartoons published a fantastic interview with the psychiatrist. Mr Post analysed people such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bin Laden and Fidel Castro. However, he calls North Korea’s Kim Jong Il “the biggest enigma of them all.” In the interview (by Urs Gehriger) he revels some truly interesting facts about the North Korean dictator.
He says that Kim Jong Il has always been in his father’s huge shadow and can therefore only be understood through his father. Considering that his father, Kim Il Sung, has been declared God (!), it is even harder for Kim Jong Il to emerge from his father’s almighty shadow.
His inferiority complex is also boosted by his own ugliness, says Mr. Post. He is (as many dictators seem to have been) rather short. And fat. Mr Post does not only inform us about the dictator’s inferiority complex, he also tells us interesting facts about the Dear Leader:

• He spends between $450,000 - $600,000 on cognac, per year. That is five hundred (!) times the yearly average income of a North Korean.
• He has a film collection with up to 20,000 films, mainly from the US.
• He kidnapped a South Korean actress and her husband (a film director) and kept them for eight years, hoping that at some point they could revitalise the North Korean film industry.

If you want to find out what Mr Post says about other dictators you should certainly have a look at this week’s Weltwoche. It is worth it! (This is probably the first time that I say something like that about this paper, as the Weltwoche normally gets on my nerves with all it’s anti-welfare-state editorials).
Schreiber