North Korea’s former propaganda chief, credited with masterminding the personality cult surrounding the ruling Kim dynasty, has died, state media said today.
Kim Ki Nam died yesterday due to old age and “multiple organ dysfunction”, having been treated at a hospital since 2022, the country’s official Korean Central News Agency said. He was 94.
Kim Jong Un visited the funeral hall today, paid silent tribute and looked around with “bitter grief over the loss of a veteran revolutionary who had remained boundlessly loyal” to the regime, KCNA said.
Kim Ki Nam is best known for having led North Korea’s key department for propaganda. In the 1970s, he was in charge of Pyongyang’s official mouthpiece, the Rodong Sinmun newspaper, according to the North.
He is credited with masterminding the cult of the Kim family dynasty, and Pyongyang’s state media described him as “a veteran of our Party and the revolution, a prestigious theoretician and a prominent political activist.”
Images released by the Rodong Sinmun showed leader Kim, dressed in a dark suit, solemnly paying his respects alongside high-ranking party and military officials, in front of what appeared to be a flower-decorated coffin stand.
The Kim dynasty, established by Pyongyang’s founding leader Kim Il Sung, has ruled the impoverished, isolated nation with an iron fist and pervasive personality cult over three generations.
The family are revered in the North as the “Paektu bloodline”, named after the country’s highest mountain and supposed birthplace of the late leader Kim Jong Il.
In 2015, images in state media showed the late official Kim Ki Nam, in his 80s at the time, diligently taking notes in front of Kim Jong Un, more than 50 years his junior.
Kim Ki Nam “is the North Korean equivalent of Paul Joseph Goebbels,” Ahn Chan-il, a defect-turned-researcher who runs the World Institute for North Korea Studies, said, referring to the infamous chief propagandist for the Nazis.
“It is safe to say that the propaganda and agitation strategies of the Kim dynasty all came from Kim Ki Nam’s mind.”
Kim Ki Nam’s role as the regime’s chief propagandist was eventually passed on to Kim Jong Un’s powerful sister, Kim Yo Jong, in the late 2010s.
Her arrival at the propaganda department as her high-ranking figure took place in 2018, according to Seoul’s unification ministry.
