The Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom

by Ralph Hassig

  The Kim regime’s ideology rests on a few key themes, some developed early on by Kim Il-sung and his ideological advisors, and others added by Kim Jong-il and his advisors. The senior Kim began with Marxism-Leninism; however, in the mid-1950s, facing the task of recovering from the Korean War and consolidating his hold on power, Kim needed a new ideology. Rather than rule as North Korea’s representative of international communism, Kim wanted to be the originator and interpreter of his own ideology. In a speech he gave to Korean Workers’ Party (KWP) propaganda and agitation workers in December 1955, Kim introduced the concept of Juche in its modern context, saying, “We are not engaged in any other country’s revolution, but solely in the Korean revolution.”3

  Juche symbolized independence from the Soviet Union and China and conveyed a determination not to let Korea fall under the influence of foreigners, as it had done so often in the past. Subscribing to Marxism-Leninism would have put North Korea’s ideology under the authority of foreign theorists, and although Kim appreciated the value of domestic unity, he was not so keen on international communist brotherhood except when he was asking for foreign aid. As North Korea’s national ideology, Juche eventually supplanted Marxism-Leninism, mention of which was dropped from the 1980 charter of the KWP and the 1992 revision of the state constitution. But Kim could not afford to separate North Korea completely from his communist benefactors in Russia, Eastern Europe, and China, although it helped that in China, Chairman Mao was also distancing himself from Moscow’s authority. The political ideologies of North Korea, China, and the Soviet Union may have diverged, but they shared the principle that the few should control the many under the guise of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

  Juche can be roughly translated as national pride and self-reliance. It prescribes doing things in a manner suited to North Korean conditions (as interpreted by the Kims) and not mindlessly imitating others, even if others (e.g., South Koreans) are more successful. A half century after Kim introduced the idea, Juche remained the guiding ideology: “Achieving the strengthening and prosperity of the country and people is an arduous task. It can never be accomplished if we abandon our style and shift to another people’s style to escape from ordeals and difficulties, or if we turn to another people for help without trusting our own strength.”4

  Consistent with Juche principles, the North Korean press routinely warns of the evil intentions behind U.S. foreign aid, which is often characterized as a type of psychological military operation: “The purpose of the United States’ ‘aid operation’ lies in the paralysis of anti-U.S., independent consciousness by creating a fantasy about the United States in people and encouraging pro-U.S. flunkeyism that depends on the United States.”5 Juche has not, however, prevented the Kim regime from soliciting billions of dollars in foreign aid over the years, including over $1 billion (mostly in World Food Program donations and compensatory oil shipments) from the American government.6 Of course, the Juche economy was a lie from the very beginning. To maintain the myth of self-reliance, considerate foreign governments sometimes pretend that aid to North Korea is a loan. North-South Korea talks about aid are called “economic cooperation talks,” and aid from the United States, when it is acknowledged by the North Koreans, is sometimes described in lectures to the people as tribute forced from the United States by the great general, Kim Jong-il. The regime also uses Juche as a propaganda weapon against South Korea by emphasizing the fact that although Chinese and Soviet troops had left the North by the late 1950s, American and UN troops remained in the South.

  In the 1950s and 1960s, conveniently overlooking his own years of service in the Chinese and Soviet armies, Kim Il-sung skillfully employed Juche to purge his political rivals by suggesting that those who had connections with South Korea, China, Japan, and Russia could not have the best interests of North Korea at heart. Hundreds of top officials, thousands of their followers, and hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens were banished to the countryside, imprisoned, or executed for words or deeds that could even remotely be interpreted as praising or imitating another country or denigrating North Korea, although the real reason for their downfall was that they were viewed as being insufficiently loyal to Kim. Following the example of Stalin, who eventually eliminated almost everyone in the upper echelons of the Soviet Union’s party, government, and military, Kim began his purges with attacks on leaders of rival political factions and then moved to purge rivals within his own faction.

  Any exposure to the outside world puts a North Korean under a cloud of suspicion. People on the street are cautious about engaging in conversation with foreign visitors. Immigrants from the North Korean community in Japan are relegated to the hostile political class. Among the top cadres, one famous example of a tainted official was Kim Dal-hyon, North Korea’s competent minister of external economic affairs in the early 1990s and a frequent traveler to foreign lands, who, after returning from an official visit to South Korea, lost his government position and spent the rest of his days out of sight as a local official. Several years later the top official in charge of external economic affairs, Kim Chong-u, failed to show up for a meeting with a foreign delegation and was never heard from again. On a broader scale, in the aftermath of what some foreigners believe was a coup attempt around 1992, hundreds of North Korean army officers who had studied at Moscow’s Frunze Military Academy were purged simply because a few of their number had participated in the coup attempt.

  Juche was revised under the stewardship of Kim Jong-il, who from the early days of his political career had shown a marked interest in ideology. One of Kim’s first jobs was in the KWP’s Propaganda and Agitation Department, where he proceeded to make Juche the ideological bulwark of the regime by enshrining loyalty to his father as the ideology’s cornerstone. In 1974 the Ten-Point Principle (Ten Principles) for Solidifying the Party’s Monolithic Ideological System became the supreme political (in contrast to legal) set of commandments. The first principle stated, “All society must be dyed with Kim Il-sung’s revolutionary ideology,” and the other nine principles merely repeated or elaborated on this.

  The collapse of European communist regimes in the late 1980s and early 1990s forced Kim to address the hard reality that socialism was not necessarily destined to defeat capitalism. North Korean propagandists had to acknowledge, “The socialist movement has not always been victorious. In the early 1990s, socialism was frustrated and capitalism restored in not a few countries.”7 Foreigners talked about the “winds of change” blowing toward North Korea, and although the North Korean people were kept largely ignorant of events in the outside world, some news of socialism’s demise trickled into the country. Kim could not completely block this news, but he could offer his own interpretation of it. In two talks he gave to party cadres in the early 1990s, he introduced the idea that the retreat of socialism in some countries was only a “local and passing phenomenon,” caused by the fact that the European socialist parties had become lax.8 “These countries neglected the work of strengthening the working-class party, weakened its leading role and the function of the unified leadership of the socialist state, adopted the capitalist relations of ownership and capitalist methods of economic management, and compromised with imperialism in an unprincipled manner, instead of fighting against it.”

  As Kim saw it, in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, there had not been enough socialism, and he vowed that there would be no shortage of socialism in North Korea. Consequently, any talk of economic reform or political opening was absolutely forbidden, and the regime redoubled its efforts at political indoctrination. “If people in socialist society do not lead political life properly in the working class party and other political organizations led by the party, they cannot preserve their socio-political integrity and even play into the hands of the reactionaries.”9 Editorials and political lectures warned that if foreign ideas were allowed to circulate, they could prove more attractive than socialist ideas. Capitalism was portrayed as a drug that paralyzes consciousness:
“Imperialists are seeking to get the normally sound mind of people in revolutionary and progressive countries to degenerate.”10

  As a mental-health measure, foreign influences must be kept out, and Juche socialism must have no competitors. These teachings have continued unabated since the early 1990s.

  Yet, it was not the decline of socialism in Eastern Europe that directly influenced North Koreans, cut off as they were from outside news, but rather the everyday trials of the Arduous March that snuffed out their socialist beliefs. People didn’t care whether they lived under a socialist or capitalist system as long as they had enough to eat. When people turned to their own self-made market economy in the early years of the twenty-first century, North Korean propagandists issued a new warning: “People who like money and goods get caught in the enemies’ evil hands without exception, and once they take the bait thrown out by the enemies, they start acting as the rascals suggest and ultimately end up as traitors and rebels to the revolution.”11 This is the socialist version of the Biblical injunction that the love of money is the root of all evil, but the message falls on deaf ears in North Korea, as it does almost everywhere else.

  Military-First Politics

  After mourning the death of their founder in 1994 and struggling to survive during the Arduous March, the North Korean people needed something to restore their faith in socialism and their new leader. During the Arduous March and then the Forced March to Final Victory, the party’s pronouncements had sounded a note of pessimism. People were assured that “the more our generations undergo sufferings and shed sweat, the happier our future generations will be.”12 They were urged to “live today for tomorrow” and even to “resolve to voluntarily choose death for the sake of the party and the leader.”13 In 1998 Kim sought to counter this defeatism by injecting some of the spirit that motivated his father’s generation when they were fighting the Japanese in the 1930s and 1940s. He also sought to recapture the economic motivation that enabled North Koreans in the 1950s and 1960s to make a rapid recovery from the war through a military-style mobilization of the workforce. Kim’s new ideology placed an emphasis on militarism and the “fighting spirit of the 1950s,” this time packaged as the “military-first” (songun) policy or politics.

  In 1995, one year after Kim Il-sung’s death, the press hailed the Korean People’s Army (KPA) as the “pillar and main force of the revolution.”14 The term songun received its first prominent use in the 1999 New Year’s Joint Editorial. Thereafter, songun sasang, meaning “military-first thought,” appeared regularly in the North Korean press. An August 2003 domestic broadcast titled “Our Republic Is a Socialist Military Power” provided a good indication of what military-first politics represents: “A country can be called a military power if it has an ever-victorious and legendary brilliant commander at the highest position of national defense; if all of its people strongly arm themselves politically and ideologically and highly modernize militarily and technologically; if its unity between the army and people is firmly achieved; if the idea of giving importance to gun barrels and military affairs becomes a social trait; and if all of its people arm themselves and it is entirely turned into a fortress.”15

  Like Juche, the military-first ideology can take on multiple meanings. At its core it means that everyone should think and act like a soldier, not expecting an easy life but instead working to make the country strong enough to resist foreign aggression. The roots of military-first thought go back to Kim Il-sung’s Four Military Lines policy, first presented in the early 1960s and subsequently enshrined in the North Korean constitution. The policy called for arming the population, fortifying the entire country, modernizing the military, and making soldiers into politically reliable communists. Kim’s total militarization policy came at a time when North Korea’s international environment was becoming “complex”—to use a favorite North Korean expression. The Soviet Union had adopted a softer domestic and international line after the death of Stalin, relations between China and the Soviet Union were becoming strained, and the United States had begun to take notice of the threat of communism in Southeast Asia. Kim Il-sung decided that North Korea needed to put greater reliance on its own military strength in this changing environment and not to count as much on its alliances with China and the Soviet Union.

  The early 1990s were likewise a time of complexity for North Korea. The Soviet Union had virtually ended its economic relations with North Korea and, along with China, had effectively terminated its military alliance; the United States, as the world’s only superpower, was flexing its military muscle against various smaller states, including Iraq. Also, as in the 1960s, North Korea was falling farther behind South Korea in terms of modern weapons, although Pyongyang’s development of a nuclear weapons capability was one way to try to compensate for the growing conventional weapons gap.

  The military-first ideology addresses both international and domestic issues. Enhanced military power helps deter North Korea’s enemies, especially the United States. Among the North Korean people, military-first politics produces a wartime mentality—a perception that they are about to be attacked and can survive only if they stick together and follow their leader’s orders. The North Korean press goes so far as to claim that military-first politics is the best policy choice for all “progressive” (i.e., noncapitalist) countries, serving as “a militant banner which humankind should uphold in the 21st century.” According to this line of thought, world peace will come “only when military capabilities are mighty.”16 This is hardly new thinking. In the United States, the Strategic Air Command and its successor, the Strategic Command, promoted the slogan “Peace is our profession,” even going so far as to print it on the fuselage of its nuclear bombers.17 The North Koreans have assured their South Korean brethren that military-first politics benefits them as well: “When all is said, the [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (DPRK)] military-first politics is a great politics of loving the nation that protects the well-being of not just the North but the entire Korean nation, as it is actually holding the United States’ war of aggression in check.”18

  To keep the tension level high and to distract the people from their troubles, the North Korean press warns that a great battle against the United States is at hand. On numerous occasions, especially in articles discussing alleged Pentagon war plans, the North Korean domestic press has warned that the United States has essentially declared war already. Nodong Sinmun claims that cases of American “military provocation” average five per hour.19 And on the first day of every month, Nodong Sinmun catalogs alleged instances of U.S. “aerial espionage” during the previous month, typically numbering between one hundred and two hundred. When North Korean writers let their imaginations run wild, they can paint a graphic picture of war during peacetime, as in this 2003 description: “There, on the front where a volley of battles between peace and war was being waged every minute of the day and where a hand-to-hand fight between life and death was ongoing, the nation’s survival and the destiny for all of us were smack in the middle of a merciless decisive battle.”20

  Military thought permeates North Korea’s media and culture. In the past, everything was supposed to be done in the Juche style—Juche poetry, Juche farming, Juche architecture, and so on. Now everything is to be done in the military way. Under military-first politics, the army serves as “a college of revolution,” as “a blast furnace of ideological training and a school of self-perfection of human beings.”21 Party and government officials are instructed to conduct their work in a “frontline style just like the People’s Army.”22

  The propagandists have come up with catchy military-first phrases, including “gun-barrel family” and the “guns and bombs family.”23 A story broadcast on North Korean radio asserts that the “Mangyongdae family” (i.e., Kim Il-sung’s family, who lived at Mangyongdae) “was industrious and diligent, but did not pass down any material assets to the next generation. … However, the Mangyongdae family possessed the most precious and va
luable inheritance, which could not be measured by or compared to anything, and that was the two guns left by Mr. Kim Hyong-jik [Kim Il-sung’s father, who was a pharmacist].”24

  Foreign economists and presumably many North Korean economists as well realize that military funding impedes North Korea’s economic recovery. To counter this idea, people are told, “If the respected and beloved general should have elected a line giving priority to light industry and agriculture by citing the reason that the food for survival comes first… our people would have degenerated into slaves of the aggressors, not just once but a hundred times by now.”25

  In a dramatic departure from Marxist-Leninist thought, which argues that the working class is the core of the revolution, the military-first policy casts the army in this leadership role. The reason given for the substitution illuminates the fragile nature of North Korean society:

  Many countries in the world victoriously carried out the socialist revolution and socialist construction with the working class as the main force. Today… the working class’s living situation is changing, and labor becomes more and more technological and intellectual. … Reactionary bourgeois ideology and culture is rampant. This strongly deters the working class’s class awareness, consciousness, and revolutionization. … The People’s Army has a firmer collectivist spirit, a higher sense of organization and discipline, and stronger power of unity than any other group in society. The whole army is perfectly harmonized with the supreme commander as its center; all act as one to the supreme commander’s order and instruction; and the soldiers’ military lives and activities are all organized and conducted according to military rules and regulations.26

  It seems then that despite his prodigious efforts to indoctrinate them, Kim Jong-il has lost faith in the working class. As it happens, the average North Korean soldier is no better socialized to communism than is the average civilian, and Kim Jong-il is probably aware of this fact, but at least soldiers are more regimented than civilians and thus easier to control as long as their officers remain loyal to Kim.