Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il
Page 38
But there would be more than simply Kyong Hui supporting Kim Jong Un. The entire DPRK leadership was there for one reason. They weren’t there because they were the most experienced; many had worked for far longer. They weren’t there because they were the most intelligent; many of our foes were admittedly extremely crafty. The one attribute that maintained them in their positions was their loyalty, both to myself personally and to my Songun politics.
Not being Korean, some in the West are unable to comprehend the ineffable beauty of the Juche idea. They assume that our Party officials simply repeat things that they don’t believe for the sake of retaining power. They forget that the leaders of the WPK are constantly watching one another for signs of faithlessness. Faking allegiance under such scrutiny for such extended lengths of time would be absolutely impossible even for the best of actors. These men and women aren’t cynical power-seekers. No, they are true believers. I knew that they would never be agents of change.
I considered the worst of scenarios. I supposed that, for whatever reason, some Party official changed his point of view. He no longer regarded the Juche idea as the most impressive concept ever put forward by the greatest leader of our time or any other. How would this play out? If he voiced such concerns publicly, then he would immediately be removed from any position of power.
Then I took things one step further. What if he was discreet and quietly persuaded some of his comrades to join with him? There was no need to speculate as to what would happen then. This sort of thing has occurred in Korea before. A group of Party members who were opposed to the current leadership had gathered together—the definition of a faction. Everyone in the DPRK knows how we handle factions: we liquidate them. The Party officials know it particularly well, as they’d all taken part in such purges themselves. For any Party member to join a faction is to endanger every single one of their family members, friends and associates. All would put under suspicion, and there’s little room for suspicious activity in a nation dedicated to a monolithic ideological system. Those who can effect change never would, and those who would effect change never could.
The Great Leader said that we must “desiccate the seedlings of counterrevolution and pull them out by their roots,” that “class enemies must be actively exterminated to three generations.” So when we punish wrongdoers, we don’t simply punish the individual. We do not believe in individualism. We agree with those US politicians who say that “the family is the basic unit of society.” But unlike the hypocritical Americans, we apply this idea thoroughly, sincerely and consistently. Our punishment comes via yongoje, the “family purge.” When someone is identified as a hostile element, it is three generations of his family that are punished. This is why the Korean people say, “Misspeak once, kill thrice.”
As we have construction “in our way” and books “in our way,” so too do we have justice “in our way.” There are no “show trials,” where the criminal is publicly paraded, accused and denounced in front of his entire country. Nor is there “sentencing” or “charges” or “time served”; these are all bourgeois ideas. We don’t tell class enemies what they’ve done wrong, giving them an opportunity to feign innocence. Instead, we take the class enemy and his family in the middle of the night and send them to our “enlightenment centers.” No one else knows what has happened to them—and no one ever asks. As far as they’re concerned, a social problem has miraculously vanished overnight.
At any given time, there are well over one hundred thousand class enemies in these enlightenment centers. We never refer to the inhabitants as “political prisoners”; therefore, we don’t have any “political prison camps” or “concentration camps.” What we have are villages under the control of armed guards, surrounded by barbed-wire and/or electrified fences.
In the DPRK, we believe that labor is the best mechanism for rehabilitation and for instilling Juche consciousness. Our class enemies are encouraged to work as much as possible to achieve enlightenment in the shortest time possible. They work in mines, they farm, they manufacture. There is no shortage of possibilities for them to give back to the nation that they’ve betrayed. We provide them with food—a handful of corn or so per day—and with shelter, an undeserved kindness that must be also repaid in labor. Except for the national holidays, they work for at least twelve hours every day until they work off their debt to society. Should one commit suicide, then their family members must fulfill their work quota. Again: the family is the basic unit of society.
Increasingly, these enlightenment centers are being used as a pretext to label the DPRK as a “human rights abuser.” We do believe in human rights in Korea—but only “in our way.” Our enlightenment centers are, as the Great Leader put it, “a legitimate measure to protect the country from impure elements who have attempted to destroy our socialist system.” Juche human rights do not include the “right” to oppose socialism or to violate the interests of the people. No nation, even the United States, recognizes a “right” to treason. Rights are not granted irrespective of the state and society, but are rather guaranteed by the state and society. Imprisoning hostile elements without trial in isolated locations means that we are protecting human rights, not violating them.
Since any rights are only guaranteed by sovereign states, any talk of “human rights” must begin with national sovereignty. For a nation to interfere in another’s internal affairs, to infringe on its sovereignty, to impose its will and not respect the other’s system, is itself a violation of human rights. The US constitution enshrines the “right” to bear arms. The DPRK constitution protects the right to housing and health care—two rights that American bourgeois politics do not recognize. That doesn’t give DPRK the right to impose our values on the United States. Nor does America have the right to impose its values on Korea simply because it’s stronger. Might doesn’t make rights.
Our philosophy is clear and explicit in north Korea. Our beliefs are no secret. We discuss them so constantly and openly that the West dismisses them as propaganda. I have personally and repeatedly put into writing our perspective that the most valuable thing for a man’s survival as a social being, his sociopolitical life, is conferred to him by the Leader— and what is given by the Leader can also be taken away.
Anyone who sets himself against his nation, his mother Party, or his Leader has thereby rendered his sociopolitical life worthless. Such an abnormal, inferior man lives counter to his intrinsic nature and is no better than an animal. This is why any disagreement over “human rights” is irrelevant when it comes to class enemies. Class enemies, the enemies of the Leader, are not human beings.
This is not simply a philosophical perspective. This has been the reaction of anyone who has ever seen one of our enlightenment centers. Once they’ve been removed from the broader society, our class enemies reveal their true beastly nature. They eat anything they can get their hands on: weeds, leaves or rats. They dress in filthy rags, even in winter, and fail to bathe for months or even years at a time.
After years of work, the class enemies physically transform into animals. Their backs grow hunched. They lose toes and fingers, or even hands and limbs, just like lizards. If a work-unit misses its quota, they leap upon one another like wild dogs. They inform on their neighbors— delivering them to certain public execution—simply for the reward of one additional meal. (Though this, of course, is something even an animal wouldn’t do.) This is the life that their choices have brought them, in the glorious Juche paradise of the DPRK.
It is true that my criticism of the US imperialists is unremitting, and it might be easy to reject my perspective as biased and inaccurate. But facts are much harder to dismiss. In the relationship between the United States and the DPRK, nowhere are the facts more damning than with regard to human rights. All the American presidents knew what was happening in Korea, and none of them ever did anything—and none of them ever will.
Harry Truman said nothing when his mentor FDR brought concentration camps to American soil, s
omething now regarded more as a historical footnote than as a source of horror.
Dwight Eisenhower personally oversaw the liberation of the Nazi camps, ordering them to be documented as much as possible so that history would never forget. But about the Korean camps he said not a word.
John F. Kennedy stared down the Soviet Union and brought the world to the brink of nuclear war over what was happening in Cuba. But over the Korean incarcerations he challenged no one.
Lyndon Johnson was prepared to fight the DPRK for the sake of one ship, Pueblo, and her crew of eighty-two Americans. But about hundreds of thousands of Koreans he did nothing.
Richard Nixon established relations with Chairman Mao, guiding China into a more liberal direction. But he never engaged with the far-weaker President Kim Il Sung, and never asked Mao to engage either.
Gerald Ford almost went to war with Korea because of a tree. Because of a tree! He made sure that it was struck down, while doing nothing about dismantling hundreds of yards of barbed wire.
Jimmy Carter personally visited Pyongyang several times, and based his entire post-Presidential career on advocating for human rights. But when it came to the DPRK, he kept silent.
Ronald Reagan told Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall, and wore a bulletproof vest as he visited the Bergen-Belsen camp. But he never spoke of tearing down the DMZ, or freeing those on the other side.
George H. W. Bush had been director of the CIA, privy to more intelligence than any other President before or since. But he never made any of his information public, nor did he act on it in private.
Bill Clinton sent his Secretary of State to Pyongyang. As a child, the Jewish-born Albright fled the Nazi occupation of her native Czechoslovakia. But rather than helping the children in the Korean camps, she raised a glass of wine in my honor.
George W. Bush included north Korea in his imaginary axis of evil and publicly said that he loathed me. But his primary concern was that we were seeking nuclear weapons, not interning hundreds of thousands of our people.
Barack Obama won a Nobel Peace Prize after a campaign touting the audacity of hope. Yet for the prisoners in our camps, there is no hope possible. Should north Korea ever be invaded, all of them will be immediately executed before the camps are razed to the ground. The hostile elements know this with every fiber of their being, because the guards constantly and explicitly remind them of this fact.
There’s a Western expression that “all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” What an absurdity! A “good man” will always at least attempt to do something, by definition. It can’t be said that the American people themselves don’t care. They do care—so much so that the DPRK is constantly discussed in the news. No other foreign leader is as much the subject of American curiosity as myself. By contrast, how many in the United States can name the current President of south Korea? How many can name any President of south Korea? Yes, the Americans care—but they care about the spectacle, and not about the people.
Dear reader, while students in your schools wring their hands, wondering how the Nazi camps could have been allowed to happen, children in our enlightenment centers are being clubbed to death in front of their peers for stealing grains of corn. While ladies in your stores complain about the fit of their clothes, women in our enlightenment centers are having their legs amputated for submitting to rape—and then using tires to push themselves to report to work. While men in your offices stress over their workload, men in our enlightenment centers are sent to mines that they will knowingly die in, literally never seeing sunlight again. There’s nothing you can do about it, and there’s nothing that your leaders—or any world leaders—will do about it.
Let me be perfectly clear: North Korea is no joke, and I am no buffoon. While you’ve been reading this book, laughing and rolling your eyes, twenty-four million people have been living their lives with every moment of their day accounted for and accountable to the government for every action they take. They will never be granted any sort of “human rights”—and they know it. They know that no one is coming to their aid. They understand that the only people with the power to help them are the very ones guaranteed to never do so.
Such is the greatness of the Juche idea.
Our philosophy is a source of pride, not shame. We advocate it constantly and explicitly. In fact, nothing fills me with as much glee as recalling what I’ve done with the DPRK and its people. So take a second and glance at this book’s cover once again. Look at my beaming face, the same face that everyone in my country sees on their wall every single day. I smile whenever I think of north Korea.
Do you?
KIM JONG IL’S
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