Memes

I'm not an expert on DPRK history, so instead I'll try and speak to the prominence of the Kims:

Think back to the enormous popularity the Kennedy family enjoyed in the US for decades. For a good thirty years, if you had a guy named Kennedy on your ticket, he was gonna win. Even Capcom, as recently as 2004, named their heroic American protagonist Leon S Kennedy, because the association of "Kennedy" with "Heroic/good/representative of America's better angels" was strong in pop culture. It's an incorrect association, but what matters is it existed.

But what did John, the one people remember most fondly, actually do to earn his reputation? Give a couple well-received speeches, have sex with a trafficked actress, propose a drawdown in Vietnam that never happened, and then get his shit blown smoove off? That's not much of a legacy when you put it on paper, but here in America our standards are very low. with that in mind, let's imagine a different history:

The Nazis win WW2. Doesn't matter how, they just do. After cannibalizing Europe to rebuild their military, they cross the Atlantic with a massive fleet and start systematically dismantling the United Stated via carpet bombing. First electricity goes, then water, then food as every farm, dam and railway is destroyed. After all the infrastructure is gone they start leveling apartment blocks and houses, and entire towns are wiped off the map with few survivors every night. The bombers never stop coming, hitting even ruins where people might be hiding, scouring nearby forests with incendiaries, and allegedly (though I believe it) dropping viral and bacterial weapons with knowledge given to them by Japanese war criminals. Somewhere between one fifth and one quarter of the population is dead, starvation and disease are rampant, every single building has been leveled, and the traumatized survivors are hiding in caves. At this moment John F Kennedy shows up, leads the military in pushing the Nazis out of the northern states with help from Canada, and organizes the rebuilding of the liberated area. When the Nazis consolidate their hold on the southern states and create a military puppet government there to serve as a foothold for invasion, he oversees preparations to drive them back again. Obviously he becomes an instant folk hero, and his descendants both enjoy great political goodwill by association and experience great pressure to live up to the accomplishments of their fathers. //End hypothetical

In the US, a place that has not been touched by war in living memory, we very easily fall into the trap of thinking of other peoples as somehow sillier and more emotional, or more prone to irrational thinking. This is the message that our corporate media has always given us, through careful implication, picture choice, orientalist framing. The unspoken message is always: look at the latest inscrutable conflict these primitives have gotten themselves embroiled in now, aren't you glad to live somewhere civilized where rule of law prevails?

Of course, the truth is that we export our instability: more than that, our stability depends on constantly destabilizing others and collapsing entire societies into nightmares from which can be easily siphoned cheap labor and resources. These aren't random conflicts: almost always, they're our conflicts, our proxy wars, our coups and propaganda drives. "Our" prosperity (mostly the prosperity of the capitalist class, but we do still get the crumbs) is inextricable from their suffering, it depends on it. If other societies are able to stand up for themselves, they can't be threatened into extortionate "free trade" deals that let western corpos make an insane markup on some tv assembled with rare earth minerals from Vassal Country A by wage slaves in Vassal Country B. That sounds random but it has to be stressed that almost every supply chain for everything in the entire "first world" is built on that relationship, all the profitability of western companies is built on that relationship, and they have before and will again kill untold millions if that relationship is ever threatened.

To tie it all together, my thesis about the apparent popularity of the Kim family (and I say apparent because I can't know for sure from outside the DPRK either way, but haven't seen any signs of internal struggles, which you know our western press would pounce on) is this:

-The US and it's co-belligerents visit an untold amount of conflict and misery on the global south as a matter of course

-Those who stand up to them are remembered fondly by their society, especially if they succeed, especially if they succeed and survive to old age

-Those who stand up are demonized in the western press, especially if they succeed, especially if they succeed and survive to old age

-The people we in the US are conditioned to view as lesser are if anything much more level headed on average than we are, and if the armageddon we made over there happened to us over here the result would probably look less like a socialist republic and more like a loose confederation of death cults

-With this in mind, and knowing that they aren't actually central to the government of the country, I cannot possibly begrudge Korean society and the Korean state their affinity for the Kim family as a national symbol

The WPK is not the only party in Korea, there's also Chondoist Chongu Party and Korean Social Democratic Party, you can also be elected a representative without party association.

All elected positions are subject to recall and that right is regularly exercised, being a member of Kim family certainly does not give you immunity to that.

On the more philosophical questions, I can recommend Roland Boer's Socialism in Power, specifically Chapter 7 talks about Korea.