Bingo! The writers “felt inspiration taking hold of them.” They rushed into their rooms and started writing. Soon they came up with these lyrics:
Every moment our leader’s life is devoted
To bringing a fuller, richer life to the people.
Our happiness is great; our ardor knows no bounds.
You take us to your heart with never-failing love.
To the distant ends of the earth we’ll follow you.
Till the sun and the moon grow cold we’ll stay with you.
Your kindliness is great, we’ll sing forever.
We’ll always remain loyal to you, great leader.
That you may live long in good health, our leader, our father,
Is the wish of the people in our joyous land.
The tune was “immeasurably gentle and echoed the thoughts of the words.” Kim Jong-il pronounced the hymn “flawless” and had it circulated to the public even before the big day. The New Year arrived and the singers went on stage at the banquet hall, excited that they were about to sing it for the first time in Kim Il-sung’s presence.
To grasp what followed, it is important to understand that Koreans tend to be emotional people, given to public displays of grief and hysteria. In South Korea, by way of illustration, Protestant Christian evangelicals with their emotional confessions of faith have made major inroads; the fastest-growing Christian group of all in the South has been the extremely demonstrative Pen-tecostals, known for “speaking in tongues.” In North Korea, with proselytizing for other religions forbidden, the promoters of the official faith, Kimilsungism, sought to appeal to that same emotional streak.
Now let us resume the story of the New Year’s Day banquet as related by one of Kim Jong-il’s official biographers.
The performers stood to sing, and followed the soft orchestral opening by singing the first few lines of the song. But then, overcome by emotion, the singers went out of tune with the orchestra and gradually stopped singing. The singers tried to start again but could not, they were sobbing so hard.
Both the conductor and the orchestra were similarly affected and everyone at the banquet gave way to tears. Dear Comrade Kim Jong-il, who was in the audience, called in several other singers and had them resume the interrupted song. Soon the song was resumed but the voices of these singers also faltered and the audience, who were standing up, began to join them, singing between their sobs. The whole house plunged into a whirl-wind of excitement. It overflowed with the hymn praying for the good health and long life of the fatherly leader—-which was a song from the hearts of the whole nation, which was a paean of the loyal people. Soon afterwards the song ended but those present did not sit down; the sound of-weeping could be heard everywhere. The fatherly leader put a handkerchief to his eyelids and, taking hands of veteran fighters who were standing beside him, said: “Thank you, thank you. Come, don’t cry, sit down, sit down.” The eyes of Kim Jong-il, as he heard his words and looked at him, also glistened.56
Indeed. That brilliantly outrageous display of showmanship on New Year’s Day launched a year of sixtieth birthday tributes during which the junior Kim proved himself flatterer—or “loyalist,” in the regime’s term—beyond compare. At one of the celebrations, Kim Jong-il unveiled the new magic acts that he had pressed the Pyongyang Circus’s previously lackluster magicians to perfect. They produced a basket of flowers hung with a streamer whose inscription wished long life and good health to the Great Leader. Doves flew out of the basket and circled it. When Kim Il-sung praised the magicians, “their sight went blurred.” Kim Jong-il told them to keep improving until they could “take the lead in world conjuring.” After further work, they went on to win top prizes in the International Modern Magic Festival, including “Magic King of the World.”
Kim Jong-il was credited with an “original theory” of the leader. In the spring of 1965, he supposedly related his theory to another Central Committee official in these words:
The question of the leader is the core of the revolution. The desire of the masses of the people alone is not sufficient for a revolution. There should be the ideological and theoretical brain, the center of unity, to give ideas and work out strategy and tactics and unite the masses. And that is the leader. To win in the revolution without the leader is like waiting for a flower to bloom without sunlight.
The masses of the people were required, in his theory “to be firmly united with a single idea.”57
Whether or not the twenty-three-year-old Kim Jong-il single-handedly devised that theory there is no doubt that as the years passed he became its chief promoter and enforcer. “Kim Jong-il had a correct view of how to revere the leader,” we are told. “To be loyal to the leader was the purpose of all his efforts and his life itself.”58
Scholars debate the extent to which Western and traditional East Asian models influenced North Korea’s exaltation of the leader’s role. “For sustained institutionalization of personal rule,” argues Australian diplomat/historian Adrian Buzo, “only Stalin’s system at its height can remotely compare with the authority exercised by Kim Il-sung from 1967 to his death in 1994.” The Korean political tradition offers no antecedents for the “cult of the fatherly leader, reliance on charismatic leadership and cult of personality in politics,” not to mention “militarism, executive activism and pervasive government intrusion into what was previously the highly self-regulatory realm of clan and family life,” Buzo writes. “They are, however, features of Stalinism.”59 In Buzo’s analysis, the North Korean system melded generic Stalinism with “the tastes, prejudices and experiences of the Manchurian guerilla mind-set—militaristic, Spartan, ruthless, conspiratorial, anti-intellectual, anti-bureaucratic and insular.”60
On the other hand, Hwang Jang-yop, who studied in Stalin’s Moscow to prepare for his ideological duties in Pyongyang, argues that North Korea— with Kim Jong-il in the lead—turned Stalinism and Marxism-Leninism on their heads by reverting to Confucian notions. “Stalinism acknowledged the necessity of dictatorship of the highest leader, but maintained that the highest leader had to serve the party, working class and people,” Hwang writes. Stalin’s system “was an extension of Marxism, which emphasized the need for dictatorship of the working class,” and thus Stalin’s “orders and instructions were not considered coming from an individual but from the working class.” In North Korea, “things work the other way around. The Great Leader does not live for the people. It is the people who live for the Great Leader.”
In Hwang’s view, the Pyongyang leadership “used the feudalistic idea of filial piety to justify absolutism of the Great Leader. Filial piety in feudalism demands that children regard their parents as their benefactors and masters because they would not have existed without their parents. Taking care of your parents, the people who gave you life—in other words, being dutiful children—is the ultimate goal in life and the highest moral code. The state is a unity of families, and the head of all these families is none other than the king.” Hence the role that the leadership devised for Kim Il-sung: father of the people. In the same way that a person’s physical life came from his parents, his sociopolitical life came from the Great Leader. And the regime maintained that this sociopolitical life was far more precious than mere physical existence, which even animals possessed.
Whatever future historians might end up concluding about the system’s antecedents, according to Hwang there was one point in particular where the regime’s propaganda agreed with the truth: The new way of looking at the Great Leader “was the work of Kim Jong-il rather than Kim Il-sung himself.”61
Among the differences between what happened in North Korea and China starting in the mid-1960s and ’70s, the most important is that in China the Cultural Revolution and related movements were a spent force after little more than a decade. Jiang Qing was arrested in 1976, shortly after Mao’s death. I was in Beijing covering the proceedings at the end of 1980 and the beginning of 1981 as she and her infamous Gang of Four were tried and sent
enced. Their chief target, Deng Xiaoping, triumphed. Red Guards, having spent their youth revolting instead of studying, came to their senses and faced the bleak reality of their stunted careers and wasted lives. Jiang Qing had her fun at the trial, spitting out her contempt for her accusers and judges even as they derided her as a “white-boned evil spirit.” But after her death penalty was suspended, in deference to the memory of her late husband, she found life in prison not to her liking. In 1991, she hanged herself in her cell.
North Korea’s version of the Cultural Revolution, on the other hand, would rage on for decades with its original leader, Kim Jong-il, in charge. In 1972, the year when the junior Kim feted his father’s sixtieth birthday, a new constitution legally enshrined unlimited personal rule by the Great Leader. Gone was any chance of nagging interference by such institutions as legislatures and courts.
By the late 1970s, when China was dismantling the Mao Zedong cult, discussion of the Great Leader was in terms such as these, from the issue of Nodong Shinmun for his birthday, April 15, 1977:
All through the passage of time since men came into being and history began on this earth, no one has equaled Comrade Kim Il-sung, an eminent hero revered by all people; he is the greatest genius in ideology, the genius of leadership and the driving force for revolution who distinguished himself by his exceptional intelligence, the genius of philosophical thought and theoretical activity, scientific insight, invincible art of military campaign, infinite dedication to the task of liberating mankind, vigorous revolutionary prowess, lofty virtues, and fervent love of man. He erected a shining and immortal tower of history for assiduously promoting the Korean revolution and world revolution with unprecedentedly broad scope and depth to embody all of these assets of his.62
It is no exaggeration to say the Kim Il-sung personality cult operated as a religion. People were encouraged to sob, “like children,” at the merciful kindness of the Leader, just as at a Protestant Christian revival meeting the penitents give tearful thanks for their salvation. The regime’s stories about Kim constantly told of people shedding tears upon learning of some kindness or another.
A European who served for many years as a diplomat in Pyongyang, with postings there off and on from the 1970s into the 1990s, likened North Korea to a Catholic state in the Middle Ages. He estimated that around 90 percent really believed in the regime and its teachings—-while the other 10 percent had no choice but to pretend that they believed. As opposed to other communist countries, where jokes about leaders such as the Soviet Union’s Brezhnev and East Germany’s Erich Honecker were a staple of conversation, there were no jokes about Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il, the diplomat said.63
Kim Il-sung was hooked on adulation, and it was Kim Jong-il’s job to keep it coming. As the elder Kim would write in his memoirs: “A man who enjoys the love of the people is happy, and a man who does not is unhappy. This is the view of the nature of happiness which I have maintained throughout my life.”64 He gloried in all his tributes, seemingly never tiring of sycophancy. Unlike Hitler, who refused to allow growers to name giant strawberries for him or proud parents to name their baby daughters Hitler-ine,65 Kim happily became the namesake of a flower, developed by a foreign botanist, called “kimilsungia.”
Further generations of children would undergo Kim Jong-il’s indoctrination programs in the new orthodoxy. Memorizing Kim Il-sung’s life story and thoughts, they would follow orders and hymn the praises of Kim the father, Kim the son and the holy spirit of juche —all this at dreadful cost to an economy that desperately needed new ideas and a decentralization of decision making. Every Korean suspected of being a closet Deng Xiaoping would be vanquished.
FOURTEEN
Eyes and Ears
Propaganda alone, of course, was not sufficient to enable Kim senior and junior to gain and maintain unprecedented control over their subjects. The police state apparatus was modeled on the Soviet one, with similarities to that of the Imperial Japanese. But it became—thanks in part to North Korea’s compact and homogeneous population—even more pervasive and thorough.
According to Hwang Jang-yop, the former party secretary who defected to South Korea in 1997, armed police at the beginning of that decade numbered about three hundred thousand. Those were divided between the regular police force, under the Ministry of Public Security, and the secret police of the Ministry of State Security. The police were considered so important to regime maintenance that they were kept outside the cabinet’s administrative control. Both Public Security and State Security belonged directly to the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party.
Agents from both ministries were “stationed at every level of the administrative agencies, right down to the lowest level,” Hwang wrote. “They are in charge of monitoring the movements of the residents, especially those under special surveillance. Even the smallest act that is out of the ordinary is a cause for arrest,” and people attracting the authorities’ attention “become sacrificial lambs in the agents’ overzealous urge to show off their accomplishments.” Agents at the post office intercepted and inspected letters and packages. Bugging and wiretapping were used to keep tabs on even high-ranking officials. People of common sense knew “not to voice their innermost thoughts, even at home.”
Hwang offered as an example the police infiltration of Kim Il-sung University, of-which he had been president for a time. Each of the police organizations had established there a branch equivalent in size to a county government organization, he said. Each police unit at the university “had dozens of agents under its command, and the agents in turn were put in charge of supervising and monitoring all the university departments and administrative units.” For leverage, they persuaded students to watch one another. Public Security “organized small groups among the students and controlled these groups.” Mean-while, “one out of every five students was a secret agent of the State Security branch.”1
Chong Ki-hae, a Japanese-Korean whom we met in chapter 6, had not wanted to repatriate in 1960. He had studied Korean at school in Japan but, intent on fitting in like any other youngster, he had seldom spoken his parents’ language outside. Discrimination against Koreans living in Japan had eased after the war, and “the whole idea of a motherland didn’t mean much to me,” he told me. Besides, the family’s fortunes in Japan had changed for the better, thanks to an elder brother who owned pachinko —Japanese pinball— and other successful businesses. But his parents, fired with bitter nationalistic feelings, were adamant that the family would move.
Sent to a small, rural North Korean community, Chong sorely missed the bright lights of Tokyo. But “I had no choice,” he recalled. “I had to go where they sent me.” He had dreamed of a career as an entrepreneur like his successful brother. He laughed as he confessed to the unreality of the notion of himself at seventeen—-with no skills but only aspirations—starting a business in a country whose economy was centrally controlled and highly collectivized.
When I met Chong he was wiry and tanned. I inquired about that and he told me his skin color was not the result of nutritional deficiency. He had cultivated a tan after moving to South Korea. He came to the interview wearing a sharp glen-plaid suit, white-on-white shirt and figured tie, an Yves St. Laurent buckle on his belt. He said he had not even wanted to “touch the clothes” in North Korea. “I don’t want to brag, but people from Japan are more fashion-conscious and like nicer fabrics.” In his decades in North Korea he never had come to believe in communism, never had grown to worship Kim Il-sung. “For someone like me, who’s had a taste of capitalism, it’s difficult,” he said. “I could never be one of the ordinary people. They have no access to information, so they believe they’re in a paradise.”
Because the Chongs had brought with them knowledge of a better life abroad, “Public Security had spies planted in the neighborhood, always watching us. When I first got there, someone would come by twice a month.
At first I didn’t know who they were. Neighbors said they were from Public Se
curity. They just chatted about how our life in North Korea was turning out. After I told them about my disappointments, they would say ‘But look, Kim Il-sung has done this, this and this for the people. It would be ungrateful of you to feel disappointed.’ The whole community all the neighbors, watched each other. Even I watched the people next to me.”
Chong used to travel from his rural county to Pyongyang, where he could use his Japanese money to buy delicacies such as ham or sausage in the hotels. There he met some other returnees from Japan. Seven returnees took to meeting for casual discussion of the problems they encountered living in the North. They agreed that they did not want to stay there forever but would like to return to Japan. In 1965 Chong was arrested and jailed for four months. It turned out that one member of his group had been a police spy. The spy had given the authorities a record of all of Chong’s meetings and contacts. While he was in jail the authorities asked Chong to spy on his neighbors. “They figured I would be pliable, since they had me on charges,” he said. Although he could not reject the request, “in fact I just decided not to talk to other people so I wouldn’t be in a position to get them into trouble.” From the 1965 incident, “I realized I should trust no one, talk to no one. I only concentrated on my studies.”
In 1982, Kim Il-sung turned seventy and the authorities used the occasion for a crackdown. “From March 15, for one month, people who were politically incorrect were supposed to confess or be reported,” Chong told me. “I was reported again by Public Security for my 1965 crime and was classified as a ‘traitor to the people.’ I decided to volunteer to move to a more rural area. At that time I was very sick. The place I suggested going to is very mountainous and no one who went there ever returned. So they thought there was no problem sending me where I asked to go.”
Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty Page 39