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For some good reason but to no good effect, North Koreans haven’t been at the heart of most conversations about North Korea. The face of the country has alternately been something to be mocked or something that is menacing, which limits our ability to provide support to North Korean people.

On the one hand, the Supreme Leader is really weird. His Hitler-youth haircut is weird. His Days of Our Lives-esque relationship with a North Korean pop star (Are they or aren’t they dating? Did he or did he not have her executed?) is weird. His friendship with Dennis Rodman is, on the face of it, not completely weird, for each weird man has at last found his kindred spirit, but still—it’s pretty weird. Pictures of him commanding a boat? Weird. Pictures of him surrounded by screaming female soldiers? Weird. Invective against James Franco? Common, but so very weird.

On the other hand, everything about the man that isn’t funny is frightening. His talk of annihilating the traitorous South Korea and the oppressive United States is manic bluster. But it’s unnerving manic bluster. It would be much less so if North Korea’s nuclear capabilities hadn’t been periodically tested and if Sony Pictures hadn’t just been hacked; but they have been, so it isn’t.

Kim Jong-un’s war against fashion, Hollywood and the Free-ish World have successfully deflected attention away from his regime’s war on the North Korean people. But thanks to the prospect of an ICC case, the world may increasingly talk about North Korea’s true scandal: not the regime’s outlandish but inconsequential posturing or its angry but hopefully inconsequential fulminations; rather, the systematic murder, torture, segregation and starvation of the 25 million North Korean people.