Kim Ki-nam, a key architect of the propaganda machine that glorified North Korea’s ruling Kim family dynasty for decades, has died at the age of 94.
A philosopher and powerful member of the country’s leadership circles, Kim Ki-nam played an instrumental role in crafting the supreme personality cult around North Korea’s founder Kim Il-sung and his successors. His writings provided the ideological underpinnings for the totalitarian family dictatorship’s claims to power and its draconian controls over the population.
For over 60 years until his retirement in the early 2000s, Kim Ki-nam helped propagate the idea of a sacred bloodline unique to North Korea’s Kims that demanded absolute obedience from the populace. He expounded on the “Juche” idea of self-reliance that became a guiding principle of the isolated authoritarian state.
“Comrade Kim Ki-nam made an immense contribution to the strengthening and development of the Korean revolution by providing a profound philosophical foundation for the Juche idea,” the state’s official Korean Central News Agency said in announcing his death on Monday.
Born in 1929, Kim Ki-nam studied philosophy at Kim Il-sung University in Pyongyang and joined the ruling Workers’ Party after graduating. He soon gained prominence as an influential ideologue loyal to Kim Il-sung, going on to head the party’s powerful Propaganda and Agitation Department.
In that role, he spearheaded efforts to mythologize the Kim family into a quasi-religious cult of personality, crafting an origin story that claimed Kim Il-sung sparked the anti-Japanese resistance as a young man and personally led guerrilla forces to drive out colonial occupiers in the 1930s and 1940s.
With Kim Ki-nam’s ideological guidance, state propaganda relentlessly promoted Kim Il-sung, referred to as the “Great Leader,” as an infallible figure whose revolutionary exploits and profound thoughts made him a deity-like figure to be revered by the masses.
After Kim Il-sung died in 1994, the propagandists turned to elevating his son Kim Jong-il as the “Dear Leader” who would continue the sacred lineage. When Kim Jong-il died in 2011, the cult smoothly transferred to his son Kim Jong-un, the current “Supreme Leader.”
Kim Ki-nam’s works required study materials that laid the philosophical foundations for absolute loyalty to the ruling Kim family. He penned influential books like “The Juche Idea is an Original Revolutionary Philosophy” that provided ideological justifications for totalitarian one-man rule.
In one recurring propaganda theme, Kim Ki-nam espoused the idea that the Kim family comprised “Heaven-sent” spiritual leaders to be followed unconditionally, playing a central role in perpetuating the mythology at the heart of the regime’s personality cult.
“There will never be a force that can overturn our socialist system centered on the popular masses as long as we uphold the leadership of the party and leader,” Kim Ki-nam wrote in one book that captured his lifelong fealty to the ruling dynasty.
