Kim Jong Un appears live on Nork TV for 1st Time
before thousands of goose-stepping soldiers
The younger Kim's appearance in front of 20,000 troops, heavy weaponry, and huge crowds came two days after a senior official appeared to confirm that he would be the secretive state's next leader: "Our people are honoured to serve the great president Kim Il-sung and the great leader Kim Jong-il. Now we also have the honour of serving the young general Kim Jong-un." he was quoted as saying on Friday.
The presence of senior Chinese officials and rarely-invited foreign media at the weekend-long celebrations further confirmed that Kim Jong-un was being anointed in public.
Until a few months ago, Kim, the third and youngest son of Kim Jong-il, was all but unknown, both to the outside world and inside his secretive homeland. But with his ailing father, who is believed to have suffered a stroke in 2008 and who now walks with a pronounced limp, desperate to ensure that a third generation of the Kim family succeeds him, the Swiss-educated Kim Jong-un, has risen rapidly in North Korea's hierarchy.
Last month, he was appointed as a 4-star general and as vice-chairman of the Workers Party's central military commission. Despite Kim Jong-un's lack of experience in government, his succession seems to have been approved by China, North Korea's only true ally, which fears instability in the DPRK will lead to a flood of refugees across its borders.
Those poor bastards better hope this kid did something other than ski and chase blondes in Switzerland, because the mess he's about to inherit is a decrepit economic basket-case ten times worse than East Germany ever was.
And despite the rhetoric, the South Koreans want little or nothing to do with fixing this penniless Stalinist hell- they couldn't afford to absorb it even if they wanted to. East Germany bled the West white, and it's still just limping-along. And South Korea is no Germany, either... hard to see how reunification will ever work there, really-