When you want a truly evil force in a piece of fiction, you don’t need to look far down history to find Hitler or Putin or Kim. Perhaps in time, we will begin to hate these people less for their discrimination and consider them heroes, as repulsive as that sounds.
If you consider it, Genghis Khan and Alexander the Great are not spoken about with the vile contempt that one normally reserves for mass murderers. Indeed, even people like Pol Pot, who murdered between 1 and 3 million out of a country of 8 million, is not spoken about with the same vitriol as He Who Must Not Be Named (For Fear of Losing by Godwin’s Law).
A lot of games and movies and TV shows of the modern age revolve around these countries being some sort of superpower that the good guy must destroy. For a short while, it was Saddam Hussein, then Bin Laden, and we would have stuck with them had they not been killed and we forced to see the innocent peoples of the countries they inhabited destroyed and killed. Korea is different, because we know nothing about it. Unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, who we understand has some lovely people who just happen to be born in a country with a despot, North Korea is some sort of black hole.
We don’t know what goes on in North Korea (unless you listen to Dennis Rodman) and it is often mentioned in fiction as being some sort of superpower. Indeed, it’s scary to imagine that they were firing missiles only a couple of years ago. Although, since the passing of Kim Jong-Il in 2011, Korea seems to have calmed down a bit, they still turn up, or at least pastiches of them do, in popular culture.
Consider Just Cause 2, which has our rugged hero Rico Rodriguez dropped into the fictional country of Panau in Maritime Southeast Asia, where the leader, Pandak “Baby” Panay is a total knobend. Baby has erected statues to himself and has dozens of military bases around the country. Oh, and he hates Americans. Oh yeah.
We don’t have to go far to imagine North Korea.
Team America: World Police has Kim Jong-Il as the main bad guy (although it explains that he is like that because of his ronr- ahem – lonliness).
In Crysis, they are alien-harvesting warlords.
Indeed, the jokes and references to North Korea could go on and on and on, however, I think for the purposes of this conversation, I should not that He Who Must Not Be Named (For Fear of Losing by Godwin’s Law) turns up in on of my favourite sci-fi books, Dune Messiah. There is a scene where our hero, Paul Atreides, speaks to Stilgar, a leader of the Fremen, and compares himself to various warlords of the modern age:
‘…What little information we have about the old times, the pittance of data which the Butlerians left us, Korba has brought it for you. Start with the Genghis Khan.’
‘Ghenghis . . . Khan? Was he of the Sardaukar, m’Lord?’
‘Oh, long before that. He killed . . . perhaps four million.’
‘He must’ve had formidable weaponry to kill that many, Sire. Lasbeams, perhaps, or . . .’
‘He didn’t kill them himself, Stil. He killed the way I kill, by sending out his legions. There’s another emperor I want you to note in passing–a Hitler. He killed more than six million. Pretty good for those days.’
‘Killed . . . by his legions?’ Stilgar asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Not very impressive statistics, m’Lord.’
(Source: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dune)
Now, I know it’s sci-fi, but it’s interesting to see that, in 10,000 years, we might look back on evil and find it… unimpressive.
Chilling.
Espressopinions 
Very chilling indeed, I hope that we never feel “unimpressed” by someone killing millions of people, but who knows how our culture will change. Really enjoyed the post, came along for the A to Z challenge.
~Mr.McLovin at Fuel For The Furnace