North Korea is looking more and more like a poor man's version of South Korea. - Brian Reynolds Myers

What must be acknowledged is that Kim Jong Il has evinced a genius for propaganda ever since managing the efflorescence of his father's cult in the 1960s. Even so, he cannot cover his lack of charisma completely; it's as if Hitler died and left the Third Reich to Goebbels.

In fact, as I said before, North Korea is a far-right ultra-nationalist state and therefore its personality cult is very different from the personality cult that you had in the Soviet Union or in China. The cult of Mao Zedong; Stalin and Mao were essentially teacher figures because the whole point of Marxism-Leninism is to instill political consciousnesses into the spontaneous masses. As you as you may know, Marx believed that revolution was pretty much preordained, that it was going to come about as a result of the contradictions in capitalism and Lenin came along and said "No, that's not really so easy. That's not how it happens because when the proletariat starts to get angry, the capitalists fob them off with raises and, and they strike and they get an increase in their wages and they call back into the capitalist trap." So the whole point of a communist party was to basically turn the childlike proletariat into thinking adults, politically conscious adults. So Stalin and Mao Zedong were both teacher figures and Stalin was of course a smiling figure but he wasn't a particularly approachable one and the focus of his personality cult were his eyes because his eyes seen as the windows to his perfect grasp of this omnipotent science of dialectical materialism.

You don't prove a point with nationalists; you cannot make nationalists happy.