North Korean Textbooks Make A Bizarre Claim About A 3-Year-Old Kim Jong-Un
Myth making is a crucial part of how fascist regimes hold on to power, as author and retired professor of history at the University of Georgia David D Roberts explains in his article, "Myth, Style, Substance, and the Totalitarian Impulse in Fascist Italy" (via JStor) Although Roberts' scholarship deals with World War II-era Italy, fascist politics are unfortunately an issue to this day. Nowhere is this more true than in the communist country of North Korea under Kim Jong-Un, or North Korea's so-called "Supreme Leader" (per Britannica).
The dissemination of such propaganda about fascist leaders can take many forms, and in Jong-Un's North Korea, one way it shows up is through textbooks (via UPI). Moreover, some of the claims made in those middle and high school textbooks might seem comical. They would probably seem even more amusing if not for the alleged rampant human rights violations Jong-Un has been accused of, as Forbes explains.
Kim Jong-Un was yacht racing by the age of 9
Some tall-tales told in North Korean textbooks about their Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un extend as far back to when he was three years old, and they only continue on from there. Kim Jong-Un raced a yacht when he was only none, or so those North Korean textbooks teach students, based on 2015 reporting from UPI. What those textbooks lack is nary a mention of North Korean history. Instead, they are largely devoted to Kim Jong-Un idolatry, as UPI goes on to report.
Other lavish praise heaped on him in those books include a reported talent for music composition and that he is an otherwise gifted artist, especially in drawing. And In case you're wondering, the North Korean "Supreme Leader" won that yacht race as a young boy against a high-ranking yacht company executive, according to those North Korean textbooks (per the Mirror.) The school subject that these points are made in is called "Kim Jong Un's Revolutionary Activities."
North Korea's Supreme Leader allegedly learned to drive a car when he was three years old
Perhaps the most ridiculous of all the accomplishments certain North Korean textbooks adopted for the 2015 school year attribute to Kim Jong-Un is that the grandson of North Korean communist leader Kim Il-sung (via Brookings) first drove a car when he was just three years old. And such sensationalist storytelling about a North Korean dictators is nothing new, as the Daily Mail also reports. Similar propagandistic legends were reportedly spun about his father and grandfather as well when they were in power.
Kim Jong-Un rose to the position of North Korean "Supreme Leader" with the death of his father in 2011, as Britannica goes on to note. He was the youngest of Kim Jong Il's three sons and, educated in Sweden, it's believed Jong-Un was groomed to be Jong Il's successor beginning in 2009. As of this report, North Korea is the world's longest dynastic dictatorship and the people of North Korea are among the world's poorest. The Kim family first came to power in 1948, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.