by B. R. Myers
North Korea’s personality cult quickly surpassed its Eastern European counterparts in extravagance. By the end of the 1940s the leading university had been named after the leader, his home village of Man’gyǒngdae had become a national shrine, and his statue had gone up in several cities. Unlike Stalin and Mao, Kim tolerated no sub-cults of the second or third in command; there was no one to compare with Beria or Lin Biao. By today’s standards, however, the cult was still rather modest, conceding both the “great” Stalin’s primacy and the Red Army’s decisive role in liberating the peninsula. Nor were Kim’s name and image quite as ubiquitous as they would later become.
Like the blood-based Japanese nationalism of the colonial era, the new Korean nationalism went hand in hand with the slavish imitation of foreign models and an often contemptuous indifference to indigenous traditions. In his speechifying Kim declared servile tribute to the USSR’s “superior” culture.28 Literary critics tossed around Soviet catchwords—“typicality,” and so on—in an effort to cut down their rivals on the cultural scene. University students scrambled to learn Russian, the new linguistic ticket to social status. Meanwhile the Soviet Civil Administration rapidly expanded the fascist command economy of the Pacific War era into a communist one.29
To outside observers, therefore, North Korea gave every appearance of being another Soviet satellite in the making. But a closer look at the official culture would have revealed a different truth. Where East Bloc propagandists dwelled on the dialectical struggle between the old and the new, their North Korean counterparts presented their half of the peninsula as an already classless gemeinschaft, unanimously supportive of Kim Il Sung, under whose protective rule the child race could finally indulge its wholesome instincts. As in imperial Japanese propaganda, the dominant dualism was one of purity versus impurity, cleanliness versus filth.30 Protagonists in official narratives were boyish young men and blushing, virginal girls. One novel of the period broke with convention by depicting the romance between a widower and the former concubine of a landowner. Kim Il Sung himself was quick to complain, saying that the widower should have been hitched up to a virgin instead. “Even an old maid would do,” he grumbled. “Everyone wants pure water.”31
A portion of a mosaic in Pyongyang commemorating the triumphant homecoming.
One searches these early works in vain for a sense of fraternity with the world proletariat. The North Koreans saw no contradiction between regarding the USSR as developmentally superior on the one hand and morally inferior on the other. (The parallel to how South Koreans have always viewed the United States is obvious.) Efforts to keep this contempt a secret were undermined by over-confidence in the impenetrability of the Korean language and the inability of all nationalists to put themselves in a foreigner’s shoes. The Workers’ Party was taken by surprise, for example, when Red Army authorities objected to a story about a thuggish Soviet soldier who mends his ways after encountering a saintly Korean street urchin—another child character symbolizing the purity of the race.32
WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION, 1948-1966
On August 13, 1948 Syngman Rhee announced the establishment of the Republic of Korea (ROK), whereupon Soviet officials in Pyongyang, abandoning hopes for a single state, relinquished power to Kim Il Sung. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) was formally established on September 9. Having flown the same yin-yang symbol as the American zone for three years, the DPRK now hoisted a communist-style flag, with a red star as the focal point. At the end of 1948 Soviet troops withdrew from the peninsula. No sooner had they gone than Kim began enlisting Moscow’s support for a military re-unification of the country. Stalin agreed to send weapons, supplies, and advisers.1 Meanwhile the DPRK’s propaganda apparatus prepared the masses for the coming conflict. The South had gone from a Japanese colonial hell to an American one, with the same treasonous elite in charge; how long would the suffering brethren have to wait for real liberation? Yi T’ae-chun and other writers wrote short stories or poems demanding violent retribution against the Yankees and their lackeys.2
On June 25, 1950 the Korean People’s Army launched what would later be called the “Homeland Liberation War” with a surprise advance across the 38th parallel.† Capturing Seoul on June 28, KPA troops rolled as far south as the Nakdong River before MacArthur’s landing in September at Inch’ŏn, a harbor city on the west coast, reversed the course of the war. As UN soldiers neared Pyongyang, the cultural apparatus joined the party leadership in fleeing north. China entered the war in October, pushing the Americans and their allies back down the peninsula. Seoul was recaptured by the communists only to fall once again to UN troops, in whose hands it remained. Kim’s writers and artists then hunkered down in a village near Pyongyang while the US Air Force embarked on a long and indiscriminate bombing campaign.
Such a war would have brought out the xenophobia in any nation, but in the DPRK, where most people had been steeped in blood-based nationalism since their colonial childhood, the mood was such that even the Chinese ally was regarded with hostility.3 Writers depicted the Americans, including women and children, as an inherently depraved race.4 There was none of the proletarian internationalism that had made Soviet propagandists draw a line between Nazis and average Germans. One writer jeered at the corpses of UN troops, while another celebrated the abuse of captured enemy pilots.5 Much sport was made of the Yankees’ Caucasian features, with a leading author asserting that they reflected an inner “idiotization.”6 The same man also penned a short story named Jackals (Sŭngnyangi, 1951) in which US missionaries murder a Korean child with an injection of germs.7 The enormous popularity of this story may well have inspired the regime in late 1951 to make formal allegations of American germ warfare.
In 1952 a war-weary Kim Il Sung called on China to help bring about a ceasefire. Mao and Stalin both urged him to stand firm.8 After the generalissimo’s death in May 1953, Moscow at last permitted Kim to enter into negotiations with the enemy. The DPRK and China signed an armistice with the United States on July 27, 1953. Pyongyang would henceforth celebrate the date as marking the enemy’s surrender, making skilful use of photographs that showed the American negotiators in weary or exasperated moments.
Now more dependent on his patrons than ever, the dictator took pains to sound internationalist notes in high-profile speeches, even asserting in December 1955 that “to love the USSR is to love Korea.”9 Domestic propaganda, however, dwelt increasingly on the virtues of Koreanness.10 The translation of foreign works was reduced, and the performance of Soviet plays forbidden altogether.11 An East German diplomat reported home that all successes were “portrayed as accomplishments of the Korean workers ‘without foreign’ assistance.”12 He also noted that the party’s educational activities were “not oriented toward studying the works of Marxism-Leninism.”13 Instead the purity of the Korean bloodline was stressed. Women who married Eastern European aid workers were accused of “betraying the race”.14 Anyone perceived to have emotional ties to the outside world became suspect. In 1956 Kim purged his party of its Yenan and Soviet-Korean factions, replacing these old communists with comrades-in-arms from his guerilla days.15
Meanwhile the regime was pushing through a collectivization of agriculture that went too far even for Moscow’s liking. In 1958 the DPRK began emulating China’s Great Leap Forward campaign of radical industrialization with its own Ch’ǔllima or Thousand-League Horse Movement, the symbol of which was a Pegasus-style winged horse.† Christians were rounded up and sent to prison camps. Such policies, executed at a time when Eastern Europe was “thawing,” conveyed to the West the misleading image of a hard-line Stalinist state. In fact they were perfectly compatible not only with North Korean nationalism, which perceives the child race as innately collectivist, but also with Kim Il Sung’s insatiable desire to maximize internal security. Whether the Soviet model would improve the nation’s standard of living was never the issue; on the contrary, Kim appears to have been wary of feeding his people too well. In a meeting
with East Germany’s Erich Honecker in 1977 he said that “ ‘the higher the standard of living climbs, the more ideologically lazy and the more careless the activity’ of the people is,” a statement that, as Berndt Schäfer has remarked, “no East German leader could have gotten away with making.”16 Balazs Szalontai notes that Kim Il Sung “consistently preferred economic ‘corrections’ that did not loosen the regime’s control over society to those which did.”17
Nikita Khrushchev and Kim Il Sung
The regime had other reasons for imitating Soviet models. It needed to distinguish itself from a far more populous Korean state which would otherwise have enjoyed a superior claim to legitimacy, and to ensure the continued inflow of economic, diplomatic and military support from abroad. East European diplomats had, however, already begun reporting home about the xenophobia in Pyongyang. Some were cursed and pelted with rocks by children on the street. Koreans who had married Europeans were pressured to divorce or banished from the capital. (Internally the East German embassy compared these practices to Nazi Germany.)18 One Soviet wife of a Korean citizen was beaten unconscious by provincial police when she attempted to travel to Pyongyang.19 In 1965, the Cuban ambassador to the DPRK, a black man, was squiring his wife and some Cuban doctors around the city when locals surrounded their car, pounding it and shouting racial epithets.20 Police called to the scene had to beat the mob back with truncheons. “The level of training of the masses is extremely low,” a high-ranking official later told the shaken diplomat. “They cannot distinguish between friends and foes.”21 This was precisely the mindset that the regime sought to instil.
FROM THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION TO KIM IL SUNG’S DEATH, 1966-1994
Relations between Beijing and Pyongyang worsened in 1966 when China’s leader launched the Cultural Revolution. Kim evidently worried that Mao fever might infect his own people, which in turn might encourage Beijing to attempt a coup or an invasion. This was no mere paranoia; Chinese troops did indeed make a few provocative incursions across the North Korean border.1 Kim’s first response was to tighten internal security even further. After a census in 1966, DPRK citizens were divided according to their family background or sŏngbun into a “core” class of high-ranking cadres and their families, a “wavering” class of average citizens, and a “hostile” class made up of former landowners and other potential subversives. People of all sŏngbun were organized into an exhausting regimen of social activities and study sessions, the latter devoted more to the fantasy biography of Kim than to his writings.
Those who ran afoul of the state faced punishment ranging from the denial of food rations to imprisonment, but the party did not build up a massive police presence, nor did the average citizen live in terror of arrest. Like the colonial government before it, the regime knew how to exploit the Korean people’s traditional tendency to conform. The personality cult also played a vital role in garnering support for the regime.2 With the young Kim Jong Il at its helm, the propaganda apparatus made sure that the cult kept pace with its Chinese counterpart. Mao’s renown as a poet, for example, inspired the DPRK’s cultural apparatus to “revive” revolutionary plays, hitherto unmentioned, which Kim Il Sung had allegedly written during his youth.3 It was also “remembered” that in the 1930s the General had taken his partisans on an Arduous March every bit as heroic as Mao’s Long March.4 And if Mao had routed the Japanese without foreign help, then by golly, so had Kim. This last claim necessitated the withdrawal of countless reference works and school books that had paid fawning tribute to the Soviet Red Army.†
Many in the West wrongly assume, as George Orwell did, that a regime cannot reinvent history without resorting to brainwashing and intimidation. One need only look at the South Koreans, who celebrate their liberation from Japan every year with nary a mention of their liberators, to see how easily nationalist mythmaking goes down even in open societies. But Korean nationalists do not seriously believe that they were never aided by foreigners. Rather, they think that because that aid was motivated by self-interest, it is not historically meaningful, nor does it warrant grateful acknowledgment.
Mao’s reputation as a thinker posed a greater problem to Kim, who had never even led the discourse of his own party.5 Scouring his speeches for glimmers of original thought, the executors of the personality cult focused on his conveniently vague use of the Marxist term “subject,” or juche (chu’che) in Korean. In a speech in December 1955, Kim had reminded propagandists that the “subject”—the agent, in other words—of ideological work was the Korean revolution; instead of merely aping Soviet forms the party needed to establish the proper “subject” in its propaganda work. This sort of toothless nationalism or “domesticism” had been de rigueur throughout the East Bloc in the 1950s, for which reason the speech had aroused no special attention either in Pyongyang or Moscow. But North Korea watchers in the West, unaware of the greater communist context, or the standard Marxist use of the word juche, had been quick to misinterpret the speech as a bold, epochal declaration of Korean nationalism. (They still make the same mistake; Kim’s line “to love the USSR is to love Korea” is invariably overlooked.6) Their impressed response appears to have encouraged the North Koreans to begin touting “the subject idea” in the latter 1960s as Kim Il Sung’s original contribution to Marxist thought.
Kim saw no urgent need to create an actual ideology to back up the cant, but one of his advisors, a self-styled philosopher named Hwang Chang-yŏp, finally persuaded the leader to entrust him with this task.7 Hwang had his work cut out for him because there was nothing in Kim’s talk of self-reliance, or of adapting Marxism-Leninism to national conditions, that Mao had not only said more eloquently, but had done a much better job of putting into practice as well. Hwang also had to be careful not to make the new ideology clear or appealing enough to distract the domestic masses from the de facto ideology of race-based nationalism (which of course could not be conveyed to the outside world). He had to come up with something innocuous, impenetrable, yet imposing, and in the end he did just that.
Hwang’s so-called Juche Thought—credited of course to Kim—revealed itself in September 1972, in the form of “an answer to questions from Japanese journalists,” as a stodgy jumble of banalities. A representative excerpt from the seminal text:
Establishing the subject/juche means approaching revolution and construction with the attitude of a master. Because the masses are the master of revolution and construction, they must assume a master’s attitude in regard to revolution and construction. A master’s attitude is expressed in an independent position and a creative position. Revolution and construction are endeavours for the sake of the masses, and endeavours that the masses themselves must carry out. Therefore, in reshaping nature and society an independent position and a creative position are called for.8
Only when talking of Juche Thought does the regime express itself in this peculiar style, which is far too repetitive and dull not to be so by design. It recalls a college student trying both to stretch a term paper to a respectable length and to discourage anyone from reading it through. Far more concise and stirring language is used to espouse the true ruling ideology of paranoid nationalism. Though Juche Thought is enshrined in the constitution as one of the country’s guiding principles, the regime has never shown any indication of subscribing to its universal-humanist bromides: “man is the master of all things,” “people are born with creativity and autonomy,” etc. I do not mean to imply that if an ideology is not lived up to, it is ipso facto a sham. (Judged by that standard, no ideology will ‘scape whipping.) But Juche is not even professed in earnest, and no wonder; its central notion of the masses’ mastery of their fate runs counter to the sacrosanct notion of a uniquely vulnerable child race in the Leader’s protective care. Koreans must thank him, after all, even for what they earn by their own labor.
The pseudo-doctrine of Juche continues to serve its purpose all the same. It enables the regime to lionize Kim Il Sung as a great thinker, provides an impressive la
bel for whatever policies it considers expedient, and prevents dissidents from judging policy on the government’s own ostensible terms. Just as importantly, it decoys outsiders away from the true dominant ideology. Instead of an implacably xenophobic, race-based worldview derived largely from fascist Japanese myth, the world sees a reassuringly dull state-nationalism conceived by post-colonial Koreans, rooted in humanist principles, and evincing an understandable if unfortunate preoccupation with autonomy and self-reliance.
The Juche Tower
But how could foreign scholars read the English-language versions of the official Juche discourse without realizing how empty it is? One answer is that by the time those texts started appearing in the 1970s, North Korea’s allegiance to the mysterious doctrine was already accepted overseas as fact. Another answer is that the very incoherence, dullness and evasiveness of Juche convey to the postmodern Western reader an impressive difficulty. Now this, he thinks, is what an ideology should look like, as opposed to the race-based nationalism espoused in the DPRK’s schoolbooks, films and paintings, which is too crude and direct to be taken seriously. Even scholars aware of the triteness of the Juche discourse assume there has to be more to it than meets the eye. The historian Bruce Cumings, in apologetic desperation, concludes that it is “inaccessible to the non-Korean.”9 As if North Koreans were not as baffled by it as everyone else! The regime’s decision not to publish a comprehensive Juche treatise under Kim Il Sung’s name turns out to have been a stroke of genius. Whatever one reads, one is always left thinking the profound stuff must be somewhere else.