Towering hypocrisy right to the end...
A number of news reports coming out of North Korea today purport the American-looking cars at the head of the Kim Jong Il funeral procession to be 'Russian limos'... but the first point of note would be that such cars were only manufactured in the Soviet era: the GAZ Chaika has been out of production for decades, and truck-maker ZiL just recently cobbled-together a single old-style limousine to custom Kremlin order- an open parade-car looking nothing like the stretch-limousine above.
And as one personally familiar with all these designs (have touched and sat in every type of Russian limo), I can assure you the USSR produced no model with the appearance of the cars seen in the DPRK over the last few days- they have never even shown a prototype/concept with hidden headlights in this sort of style.
But to watch the video footage emanating out of Pyongyang yesterday, the large cars in the Kim Jong Il procession are plainly a mid-70s Lincoln -some of the largest, most indulgently over-the-top Detroit land yachts to ever hit the street. The front clip is unlike any Soviet (or other) car (large US-reg 5mph bumper, for one), yet a dead-ringer for the FoMoCo products' stance and lines in the mid 1970s.
At first I thought 'That could never be!', Uncle Henry's velour-lined, 460 V-8 luxo-barges put on front-line display at a state funeral in the mostly harshly anti-capitalist Stalinist regime on the planet... but how the hell would the average North Korean know the diff? They've probably never even heard of a Lincoln Continental. All the regime had to do is take the badges off and lie about it... just like how they claim in propaganda designed for domestic consumption that the Pyongyang Metro is 'all their own' DPRK tech when it's a common knowledge everywhere else that they bought the (outdated) trains and control systems from East Germany back in the early 90s.
But the Norks couldn't even be bothered to scrape up a couple cars not so symbolically American and loudly bourgeois...? I know they're broke in North Korea, but the Chinese make big, tacky cars- couldn't they borrow a couple of their fake-Rolls limos from the embassy? Shows you how stupid the NK elite think their own people are, and they're probably right because they made them that way: must really be giving those poor saps the mushroom treatment over there if they've never heard Hot Rod Lincoln before...
On top of all that, the old man Kim Il Sung led his final, glorious march to the mausoleum in what appeared to be a Lincoln limo as well... right down to the oh-so-Detroit-70s 'opera windows' (covered this time).... this is in all likelihood the same car, broke out of storage:
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| Kim Il Sung 1994 funeral procession |
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| Kim Il Sung 1994 funeral procession |
Compare that to the Kim Jong Il funeral procession yesterday
as shown on North Korean state television...
as shown on North Korean state television...
Pyongyang Metro BBC Yahoo The Australian FoMoCo
Kim Jong Il, xxx funeral, DPRK Lincoln Pyongyang Kim Jong Un Kim Il Sung Continental, limo