Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il

by Michael Malice

  His face betrayed his anxiety. “Commended? War may break out at any moment!”

  I laughed, perfectly understanding the realities of the situation. “How can a man, a guard no less, stay still when others suddenly attack and try to kill him? This was an act of self-defense. Our men fought heroically. It is excellent that our soldiers had the courage to accept a challenge and to fight fearlessly no matter what the circumstances. We should award all of them high commendations.”

  “I see,” he said, not seeing at all. “But what will we do with the Americans?”

  I smiled. The US position couldn’t have been more ludicrous, and their attempts at a war provocation couldn’t have been more obvious. This was perhaps the worst-ever provocation between Korea and the US imperialists, certainly the largest since the Pueblo incident. “We will do the exact opposite of what the US imperialists want and expect. We will do absolutely nothing. We won’t be drawn into war—though they’ll certainly try their best to make that happen.”

  Sure enough, the Americans immediately put hundreds of troops with heavy arms on standby in the Joint Security Area. They then shipped many more into south Korea, both from Okinawa and from the US mainland. The men were ordered to be ready for “an emergency,” “military action” or “retaliatory action.” Finally, the US imperialists deployed several battleships and an aircraft carrier to the seas off Korea. Imagine that! The US was ready for war against the DPRK within one day of the conflict. Why, it was almost as if they’d orchestrated the whole thing!

  The Korean peninsula was plunged into a hair-trigger situation. The entire Party, the whole army and all the people prepared themselves for a showdown. I knew that all eyes were upon me, so I made sure to maintain my schedule exactly as I’d previously planned it. I was supposed to go listen to new songs from the KPA Song and Dance Ensemble, and that’s just what I did. In fact, the KPA men were baffled at how casually I seemed to be taking things.

  “You all wonder why I’m not focused on the DMZ,” I said, breaking the tension. “Why shouldn’t I do my job, why shouldn’t I listen to music, just because of the strain with the Americans? Should I be doing nothing, for fear of trouble? The Yanks are talking big, but in fact they’re afraid to fight with us. It is they—not our people—who are trembling with fear over the incident. Their frantic moves are an expression of mental derangement. They would never dare touch even a hair of our people.”

  “And if they did?” blurted out one official.

  I paused, knowing that my words would be repeated to the KPA and from there would reach everywhere in Korea. “If the US imperialists, oblivious of the lesson of history, choose to provoke a new war of aggression, if they go against the current of the times, they will perish in the flames of war once and for all. They will suffer a still greater, more miserable defeat than they suffered in the past Korean war.”

  I could hear everyone at once sighing with relief.

  A couple of days later, the US imperialists once again tried to goad Korea into war and launched the absurdly-titled “Operation Paul Bunyan.” According to insane tales that are taught to American schoolchildren, Paul Bunyan was an early American pioneer. He was also, somehow, a giant who could fell a tree with one stroke from his mighty axe. His best friend—also a giant—was an ox that was blue for some reason. The US imperialists thought that invoking Bunyan’s name to chop down a tree was patriotic. The rest of the world understood that invoking his name proved that the Americans lived in a delusional fantasyland of their own making.

  With huge numbers of forces as back-up—including, by their own admission, nuclear weapons—the US troops went up to that infamous poplar tree as they had several days before. Per my orders, the Korean guards stood aside and watched as the Americans chopped it down. The Yanks must have felt as if they were walking in the footsteps of their slavemaster first President, who had his own mythical tree-felling escapades. So brave!

  As the Americans retreated, they made it a point to leave behind the tree’s stump to demonstrate that one shouldn’t cross the United States. Any objective observer, however, would see it as evidence that Americans do shoddy work and can’t be trusted to finish what they’d started—or, if did they start something, they’d proceed to make a huge debacle out of it and then “hightail it” home.

  Diplomacy prevailed after the Americans fled to cool their jets. The US imperialists recognized that their provocations had failed and were eager to regain face, something which cost Korea nothing and we were more than glad to give them. Our diplomats proposed that the Joint Security Area be divided, with soldiers from each side prevented from going into the other’s area lest such an incident occur again. Despite south Korea’s protest, the United States and the DPRK agreed to precisely that on September 6, 1976.

  I honestly thought that the entire situation had been handled perfectly. I had successfully avoided war while not retreating an inch, and calmly and clearly laid out the Korean position at home and abroad. The courageous Korean guards were given the highest commendations, and the axe that they used in self-defense was put on permanent display at Panmunjom’s North Korean Peace Museum. So when the Great Leader summoned me to his Kumsusan Assembly Hall office, I was expecting the sort of fulsome praise that I’d become accustomed to by that point.

  The smile on my face as I was escorted into his office quickly faded when I saw his expression. He was livid. Without saying anything, he gestured for me to sit down in front of his desk. He was so angry that he was practically trembling. When he finally addressed me it was through teeth clenched, the lines on his face taut with emotion. “What have you done?”

  “Apparently I’ve disappointed you.”

  He sat there, letting the words hang in the air. “Disappointed me? Disappointed me? Forget about me. Think about Korea!”

  “I have, Great Leader.”

  “No, you haven’t!” He slammed his fist against the desk. “What is going to be the result of this abroad, eh? How is this going to play in the Soviet Union, in Japan, in the United Nations?”

  “The US imperialists have been exposed as connivers desperately seeking out war in Korea, just as they’ve been in Vietnam, just as they—”

  “They’ve been exposed as nothing of the kind! Look, you and I both know the true nature of the enemy. There are no illusions to be had here, nor in all of Korea. But abroad there are many who still buy into the myth of Americans being peace-loving champions of freedom. They will use this incident to further antagonize the two halves of Korea. They didn’t want war; they wanted distrust. And they got it!”

  I didn’t want to argue with him, but I still needed to defend my actions. “This is the same tactic that we used during the Pueblo incident.” “No, it isn’t! And since you don’t seem to understand why, let me explain it to you. During the Pueblo incident, no one was killed but for the one man during the initial firefight. Both sides were armed, both engaged in melee. Here, two innocent men were killed, chopped to pieces, by our KPA guards.”

  “But those were their axes. They were hardly innocent!”

  “Of course they weren’t innocent. But wait until the American propaganda starts. It’ll be our word against theirs. For those nations predisposed to resenting the DPRK, for those nations under the murderous wing of American hegemony, they will have yet another excuse to heap contempt upon us.”

  “Like during the Pueblo incident,” I realized.

  “Yes. But there we’d been constantly defended by their own men. We had photographs and videos of the spies to provide irrefutable proof that we were maintaining our captives in good condition. Then, it wasn’t our word against theirs—it was their own men’s words against theirs. We received a signed confession, in writing, of their crimes. But what do we have now? An axe! All this, for an axe.”

  It’s difficult to put into words how I felt at that moment. To know that the man that I respected above all others—the Great Leader who had saved Korea not once but twice—was losing conf
idence in me felt like nothing I’d ever experienced before. It was as if I were made out of sand, and as the breeze came I was slowly but definitely being scattered apart. I didn’t have any excuses. I’d done what I’d thought best and—though I still wasn’t clear on why—apparently that had been the wrong thing. If President Kim Il Sung considered it that way, then surely it was that way. “I don’t know what else I could have done,” I admitted.

  “And therein lies the problem. For the first time in my life, I’m issuing a public statement of regret for what’s transpired. I hope I can mitigate the damage that you caused.”

  I hung my head down in shame. “Yes, Great Leader.” I wanted to crawl back into my office and shut the door.

  “I think I’ve taken a back seat prematurely,” he mused. “Though maybe I’m being too hard on you and all this will blow over.” His immaculate sense of perception was fighting with his limitless sense of benevolence—but the perception was right once more.

  Things didn’t blow over at all. They actually got much, much worse. The south Korean puppet clique had been in a state of constant crisis due to its fascist ways. Plagued by sociopolitical confusion and defied by the people’s stubborn resistance, the strongmen now had a convenient scapegoat with which to justify their repression. Imperialists always use a threat of invasion as a pretext for every sort of infamy. In this case, an alleged “threat from the north” led to the deliberate spreading of a war atmosphere in the southern half of Korea.

  The US imperialists took the cue, shipping more nuclear weapons into south Korea and proclaiming it to be their “forward defense zone.” Then they inaugurated their “Team Spirit” joint military exercise, a highly public rehearsal of what an all-out strike on the DPRK and the subsequent war would look like. These war games involved not only the American forces in south Korea and the south Korean troops, but also combat units from the US mainland—far different from the previous limited-scale drills that had been held. As bad as these pantomimes of murder were from the north’s perspective—and they grew bolder and more extravagant every year—the message to the southern people was clear. Those same American guns could be turned on them just as easily, if not easier.

  But this wasn’t the worst of it.

  At the instigation of the US imperialists, the south Korean puppets built a concrete wall 150 miles long along the entire width of the military demarcation line. The wall—far longer and more foreboding than the Berlin Wall so hated by the West—was built flush with the mountainside so as only to be visible from the north. Now, for the first time in millennia, Korea was physically divided in two. It was as if the 1972 North-South Joint Statement had never happened. Everything that the Great Leader had worked for in terms of reunification was buried underneath miles of concrete—and it was my fault, at least partly so.

  All I could do was focus on my work and try to put these mistakes behind me to the best of my ability. I hoped that I could once again prove myself to President Kim Il Sung and thereby maintain my role as successor to the cause of Juche. During this entire period, my conviction in the Great Leader’s vision didn’t waver in the slightest; I just realized that it was my perception that had been off. I decided that the best thing to do was to revisit my greatest past successes: applying Juche to the arts and literature.

  One day I met with the publication department, focusing on new school textbooks. “The best method of narrating a story is to vividly convey one’s experience,” I explained to the editors. “By doing so one can effectively implant hatred and hostile feelings in the reader’s mind. Whenever the books refer to our enemies, they must use such words as ‘gangly American bastards.’ Whether it be the Japanese imperialists or the landlords who had reigned over our society in the past, we must always include a reference to their villainy.”

  The men nodded. “That’s a very good idea,” one said.

  “This need not simply apply to storytelling. Take mathematics. In a battle situation, one can’t take out a piece of paper and start doing calculations. But if the textbook examples anticipate this, then our people will be able to give the enemy a good thrashing. ‘If each student shoots five Americans a day, how many can they kill in a month?’ This teaches the arithmetic while instilling an important lesson.”

  “Excellent suggestion.”

  I went on, listing examples in every field of education, until something on the bookshelf caught my eye. “Is that French?” I said. “What is a French book doing here? I thought we’d gotten rid of all those a long time ago.” I walked over and pulled the book down to look at it. Though it was written in French, the book was on Korean history. As I flipped through the pages, I had to admit that it was very attractive. The photographs, the quality of the paper—the combined package was simply lovely.

  “We were using it as research,” one editor said. “This is what the outside world is saying about us.”

  “And what are they saying?”

  “There’s a great deal of political, economic and cultural material on Korea and her history,” he explained. “But most of the articles are incomplete and inaccurate. The worst contain distorted and blatantly false information, the kind promulgated by south Korean publications.” Now it dawned on me how I’d mistakenly played out the poplar-tree incident. This book held the key to the problem and the clue to its solution. “Why do you think this book contains so much misinformation?” I demanded.

  The editor was ready to respond. “Clearly it’s because of the author’s unfriendly political attitude towards us and our nation.”

  “That’s what I would have said,” I admitted, “even as recently as a week ago. But now I see things in a different light. We’ve done a very good job of keeping dangerous foreign ideas from infiltrating the DPRK and corrupting our people. But as a consequence of that, it’s very difficult for someone in the West to get information on our country. They have to collect scraps of it here and there, making the picture misleading at best. And when it comes to any missing elements, our enemies will surely be there to provide lies. This book is not a function of bias on the part of the writer, but a function of our inadequate external propaganda. We can’t sit quietly while our enemies speak on our behalf. We have to let the world know more about Juche Korea—and the fair-minded peoples of the world will be able to see the truth for themselves.”

  After that epiphany, I stepped up the translation of our publications into other languages. At the same time, I understood that intellectual discussions could only go so far in persuading people—especially foreigners—as to the reality of Korea. A far more effective technique would be to spread our art throughout the world. It’s easy to hate a nation that’s been slandered for decades. But it’s very hard to hate beauty, even for the hardest of hearts.

  Historically speaking, it usually took several hundred years for any period of spiritual culture to be created. But the “Twentieth Century Renaissance” in the DPRK had been achieved in a short period of ten years—and not just in one field, but in all areas of literature and art. My hope was that seeing the beautiful basis of Juche art would force people to admire Korea. At the very least, they’d have to concede that the international situation was far more complicated than the imperialist powers were letting on.

  I sent the Mansudae Art Troupe and many other troupes to countries with which the DPRK had no diplomatic relations, such as France, Italy and Great Britain. Our opera performances throughout five continents were received with wild enthusiasm. When The Flower Girl was performed at a Parisian theatre, people came from Italy, Greece, Spain, Sweden, Denmark and Finland. Some even arrived from as far away as Canada, Brazil or Mexico to see the opera.

  Whether it was Paris, Rome or Vienna, the outcome was the same: huge applause from the audience, as they stamped their feet on the floor with delight. These performances built bridges of friendship between the Korean people and people throughout the world. All the opera songs became popular and widely sung—a testament to the new musical structure tha
t I’d pioneered.

  Korean art quickly earned an international reputation. The major cities of Europe had long boasted of their flourishing arts, but now they were captivated by the spectacles presented by the revolutionary operas. Juche art awakened the true meaning of life for the audiences, as people’s hearts became inflamed with enthusiasm for revolution wherever performances were given. To this day, any foreigner who visits Korea—whether he be a politician or a social worker or a scientist or a writer—unsparingly praises the DRPK’s development into a country of art.

  THE REVIEWS ARE IN: INTERNATIONAL REACTIONS

  TO KOREAN REVOLUTIONARY OPERA

  “Sea of Blood truly is a great new opera for the people, which is quite different from the European ones which were written for feudal aristocrats and millionaires. This opera can rightly be called the comet of art and the prince of opera which will not be found anywhere else in the world. The old era of Western opera has given way to the era of a new type of opera. The people of the world must join together to cheer its arrival.” –A famous European artist

  “The British working class have existed for a long time, but we held a silent march because we have no one to lead the revolution to victory. After we saw your performances tonight, we have been convinced that there is a bright future for the British working class, too. The man who has instilled such a conviction in us is Comrade Kim Il Sung, the only leader capable of preserving the future of the working class of the world!” –British strikers

  “The discovery of pangchang is greater than the discovery of the heliocentric theory by Nicholas Copernicus.” –Italian musician “Behind great art there is always a great man, a great philosopher, a great statesman and a great aesthetician. I wanted to know who was the great leader. At last today, I have recognized the great man, the great leader. Korean art clearly tells the peoples of the world how to create real art because it is led by the respected President Kim Il Sung.” –member of the Japan Art Academy