From what we've seen so far, the way it has all ended for Bashar Hafez al-Assad in Syria may represent a best-case scenario. And Assad's downfall, however confusingly , renews my literary imagining that the Kim Jong Un regime in North Korea might end without a nuclear war, with the ruler fleeing the country to escape the wrath of his own long-suffering subjects β leaving officials of what some have been calling an international Axis of Upheaval befuddled while the ruler's top subordinates shed few tears.
Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Here's the top of a bombshell news story filed by the protagonist of my novel Nuclear Blues :. The exporters painted Russian-language markings on the Russian-designed missiles in what an extremely high-ranking North Korean official described as a ploy to shift the blame to Moscow.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has plotted to create an international crisis that would undermine the creditworthiness of Russian government and corporate bonds, then cash in via insider trading in financial derivatives called credit default swaps. After that story has broken we get to the final part of the novel set in Shenyang, a major city in northeastern China:.
Mi Song picked me up outside the consulate, so excited she had to struggle to catch her breath. She was in a hurry to get somewhere and shushed me when I asked her where. She wove her Benz into a tiny gap in the evening rush hour traffic. Jong Un wanted to settle on someone to blame for that horrible indignity. To make things far worse, his aides told him that at several places around the country security forces were fighting with armed citizens who retained enough traditional mindset to see in the volcanic eruption an evil omen.
In several towns, the miners were so fed up with an accumulation of grievances that they emptied their local armories to join the struggle. Hearing this, Jong Un was boiling mad, raving mad. That was the context for his especially brutal method of executing General Ri. We must be discreet, but we can watch DPRK television here. The establishment was standing-room-only, packed with portrait-pin-wearing North Koreans.
