So the story that Jong-un is in a coma is blowing up, and a basically identical story blew up several months ago, both times it was also reported how Kim Yo Jong took over.

This time it’s coming from especially bad sources like NY Post, and other similar places.

Bigger and more credible news outlets aren’t reporting the coma story right now, but they’ve been reporting that Kim Yo Jong has been getting more power delegated to her and all kinds of profiles about her.

Anyone has a clue what’s going on with this whole thing?

I have a feeling like there’s some truth to Jong-un’s poor health, and that this is some kind of effort to sabotage Kim Yo Jong as his successor or something.

Like, constantly reporting on her “growing influence” and how she “takes power” after Jong-un is incapacitated makes me feel like it’s done in a way to make her look power-hungry and opportunistic or something and maybe hurt her standing with NK leadership.

I don’t know if that makes sense honestly, cause why would anyone inside NK care what some news outlets in the west were saying, but I don’t know what else could be the reason for this many stories about this topic – maybe just pure clickbait bullshit with no agenda? IDK

  • RandomSovietKid
    1·
    4 years ago

    OK, thanks. I looked at the Guardian article. I think that it’s just designed to consolidate westerners’ image of the DPRK government that it is a corrupt monarchy; and Kim Yo Jong is a convenient pretext for making such statements. (She has had some media attention since the 2018 Olympics already, and if social media is any indicator, some westerners have indeed taken interest about her.) The article doesn’t seem to have anything discrediting about Kim Yo Jong in particular, but makes claims like (emphasis mine):

    “The North Korean regime is a family business, and Kim Jong-un appears to place trust in his sister,” said Leif-Eric Easley, associate professor of international studies at Ewha University in Seoul

    […]

    “But she also has a signalling role because messages from Kim Yo-jong carry more weight than those of an imminently replaceable North Korean official.”

    So, looks like just another pretext to discredit the DPRK.

    I also went to look at the NPR article (I hope it’s fine if I don’t look at the other two, I don’t want to look at western propaganda all day long.) Basically the same, except for more allegations about the DPRK being a “patriarchal society” with a “bias against women in power”.

    Also, the NPR article also talks about Kim Jong Un’s alleged bad health… Interesting. They make the conclusion by comparing how many public appearances he did in a time period vs. how many in last year’s same time period. Someone please tell these guys that correlation is not the same as causation. If this isn’t just bad reporting, it may be intentional to imply that the DPRK is unstable somehow…