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Amid such dependence, Kim proclaimed his hubristic and autarkic doctrine of Juche, or self-sufficiency. In fact, in the '60s, Kim's North Korea outraced the South economically. By the next decade, however, Juche philosophy ran out of steam as inefficient Stalinist state planning and the drain of immensely heavy defense spending took their toll. Juche also imposed a national solipsism that Kim refined into a virtual assumption of divinity, one copied from Stalin's and Mao's cults of personality but developed well beyond those extremes. Kim's image was everywhere. Massive statues of the Great Leader, or Wiedeahan Suryong Nim as Kim was known, were erected all over the country, including a gold-plated gargantuan one in Pyongyang. He eventually named his son Kim Jong Il as his heir, and together they went about the country building monuments to each other and other members of the Kim family.
The result, not unexpectedly, was a national politics of the grotesque. Kim Il Sung once uttered, for example, his belief that an extract of frog liver would be good for his health. Volunteers from his People's Army then collected 5,000 frogs from around the country and sent them off to the presidential palace. The strange and futile effort was worthy of a bygone emperor, and in the end, it was another of his fabulous and terrible falsehoods.