"Our Style Socialism"

According to the Christian Science Monitor North Koreans are taught to worship Kim Jong Il as a god. A cult ideology of complete subservience - that goes beyond the "Stalinist" label .

In 1990, ideology was 19 percent of North Korea's budget; by 2004 it doubled to at least 38.5 percent of state spending . It is the only category in the North's budget to increase , paying for some 30,000 Kim monuments, gymnastic festivals, films and books, billboards and murals, 40,000 "research institutes," historical sites, rock carvings, circus theaters, training programs, and other worship events.

Kim Jong Il has upgraded his deification strategies to strengthen the family cult system. Western reports often detail Korea's unique "juche ideology" - a theology of Kim worship, repeated hourly and daily, reminding Koreans they are insolubly bound to the Kim family and must erase foreign influence from their minds.

Yet juche is a sub-category of a far more encompassing umbrella of deification known as woo sang hwa, or idol worship. In North Korea, woo sang hwa contains all the aspects of cult worship. Kim broke away from orthodox communism, for example, in a program called "our style socialism." While Marxism-Leninism demands fealty to "nation," "party," and "serving the people" - Kim's "our style [Korean] socialism" does no such thing. It makes "family loyalty," with Kim at the head, the supreme good .

Concentration camps hold 200,000 inmates, a dozen intelligence units spy on the people and each other. North Korea has the world's fifth-largest army. But more importantly, North Korea uses "ideology rather than physical control" says Lee Jong Heon, who published a structural analysis of the North at Chung-Ang University in Seoul .

Along with Hugo Chavez and his "21st Century Socialism" , just how many sorts of "socialisms" do we need ? It is all smoke and mirrors to disguise the fact that real socialism is not the objective of either .