On April 14, Kim Jong Il, North Korea's numero uno, bumped 100 generals up the career ladder. The North's official news agency described the move as a noble gesture to mark the birthday of Kim's deceased father, Kim Il Sung. It was the biggest group of senior officers he has promoted in 13 years.
So why would he do a thing like that?
North Korea has been changing a lot over the past few years. The North is no longer quite as cut off from the rest of the world as it is used to be; flourishing trade with China, and a corresponding inflow of goods and information, has seen to that. And, as some discerning experts have shown, over the decades North Korea's reigning ideology has moved ever further away from communism toward the intensely ethnonationalist "military first" worldview of Kim Jong Il -- which turns out to look a lot more like Japanese World War II emperor-worship than the thought of Karl Marx.
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