Such torrential downpours, from loyalists and dissenters alike, often follow the deaths of notorious and long-ruling dictators—Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Saddam Hussein. And from the outside, this display of emotion might seem confusing, or easy to dismiss as a performance for the state or the media. Take the epidemic of crying after the North Korean leader Kim Jong Il succumbed to a heart attack in 2011. Crowds of hundreds with their heads lowered bawled loudly in unison; others fell to the ground and shook in their grief. Did they love the man who starved them and trapped them like rats in a cage? Were they acting for one another in order to avoid suspicions of disloyalty? Or were they really mourning? And if so, for what exactly?