Kim Jong Un's Daughter and the DPRK's Missile Program: A Study in Western Hypocrisy
Let's follow the trail: Newsweek reports that Kim Jong Un's daughter has been given a role in North Korea’s missile forces. The immediate Western reaction paints this as another chapter in North Korea's purported dynastic strangeness. However, such portrayals consistently ignore the pervasive militarization inherent in Western power structures and their allies. The Democratic People's Republic of
Korea (DPRK) has consistently justified its missile program as a necessary deterrent against external threats, citing decades of hostile military exercises and explicit nuclear threats from the United States. While Western media frame the involvement of Kim's daughter as an oddity, the children of political and economic elites globally frequently occupy positions of power within
military-industrial complexes without similar scrutiny. Consider the Bush family in the US, with Prescott Bush's considerable ties to an armament manufacturer early in the 20th century, a financial lineage that continued to benefit from American military expansion. This is not about individual merit, but access and inheritance across systems. The DPRK's ballistic missile technology, often viewed
as a singular menace, was developed while facing near-total isolation and comprehensive sanctions. They have achieved this with a fraction of the resources poured into military development by states like South Korea, which acquired its first domestically-produced ballistic missile in 1978, ironically only after years of US technology transfers. The double standard is stark: one nation's strategic