by Ralph Hassig
Religious Beliefs
Before the communists came to power, Confucianism was the most popular belief system in Korea, although unlike Western religions, Confucianism is an elaboration of principles about the conduct of human affairs rather than the worship of a supreme being. Buddhism was introduced into Korea in the fourth century and Christianity in the nineteenth century, around the same time that Chondoism (Chondokyo) emerged as an indigenous religion. Shamanistic practices and beliefs were, and to some extent still are, popular in the countryside.49
When Korea was liberated from the Japanese, a survey conducted in the northern half of the peninsula found 1.5 million practicing Chondoists, 375,000 Buddhists, 200,000 Protestants, and 57,000 Roman Catholics.50 The first North Korean constitution, dating to 1948, declared, “Citizens have the freedom to engage in religious activities,” but it was Kim Il-sung’s typically communist opinion that “religion is a counter-revolutionary and unscientific view of the world. Once they indulge in religion, people come to have their class-consciousness paralyzed and will be deprived of the desire to carry out revolution. Religion can be compared to opium.”51
Following the 1959 publication of a booklet titled “Why Should We Oppose Religion?” the Kim regime began to actively discourage the practice of religion by imprisoning religious leaders and forcing their followers to recant. In the late 1960s, with the completion of the nationwide political classification of the people, Protestants, Buddhists, Catholics, and Confucians were assigned their own subclassifications in the “hostile” class. The South Korean government estimates that virtually all North Koreans who openly practiced religion were killed or imprisoned between the end of the Korean War (when an estimated one hundred thousand Christians fled to South Korea) and 1970, effectively wiping out the public practice of religion.52
The 1972 DPRK constitution guaranteed freedom of religion, along with the freedom “to engage in anti-religious propaganda activities.” The 1992 constitution took a more favorable position on religion, stipulating, “Citizens have freedom of religious belief. This right also guarantees the right to construct buildings for religious use, as well as religious ceremonies.” But the constitution warned, “No one may use religion as a means by which to drag in foreign powers or to destroy the state or social order,” a provision that effectively prevents the practice of religion. In his landmark 1995 text on ideological indoctrination, Kim Jong-il pronounced religion to be antithetical to North Korea’s official ideology of Juche: “The religious and idealist views have been defined as if the people’s activity is restricted or their destiny is determined by a mysterious supernatural being. Science has already proven the unreality of the religious and idealist view.”53
In 1972, at a time when the two Koreas enjoyed a brief period of rapprochement, the Kim regime revived several defunct religious organizations so they could participate in the united front campaign against South Korea, whose religious organizations were largely opposed to the dictatorial military governments then ruling the South. The Korean Buddhist League reappeared in 1972, the Korean Christian Federation in 1974, and the Central Guidance Committee for Korean Chondoists in 1974. The Korean Catholics Association was established as a separate organization in 1988. The KWP Central Committee’s United Front Department controls all these associations. Representatives of North Korean religious groups travel to international meetings, where they promote their government’s political positions, especially calling for Korean reunification according to the DPRK’s political formula.
After a half century of repression, most North Koreans seem no more interested in religion than in politics, and it is difficult to know what place religion would play in their lives if the authorities permitted it. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the Bongsu (Pongsu) Methodist Church, the Chang-chun Catholic Church, and the Chilgol Church were built in Pyongyang. Their congregations consist of a few party and security agents and a small number of religious believers who have somehow been permitted to practice their faith. Interestingly, the Chilgol Church is said to be built on the same spot as the church that the young Kim Il-sung and his parents attended in the days when Pyongyang was a center of Western religion in Korea. On his 2003 trip to Russia, Kim Jong-il got the idea of building a Greek Orthodox church in Pyongyang, which opened in August 2006 with a delegation of Russians attending, including the Russian ambassador and the metropolitan of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, who consecrated the church, known as the Jongbaek Church.
In addition to serving a political motive, controlled religion in North Korea has brought in hard currency. Most of the Pyongyang churches seem to have been built with foreign donations, and foreign (mostly South Korean) religious organizations have been generous humanitarian donors to North Korea. For example, between 1995 and 2006, the South Korean Catholic community sent $38 million in aid—certainly enough money to warrant the regime’s toleration of one small Catholic church in Pyongyang.54 Pyongyang’s handful of churches also serve as a place of worship for the small community of foreign residents. The sponsorship of religious organizations and toleration of churches are also means to parry international criticism of the Kim regime’s antireligious policies.
An unknown number of “house churches”—perhaps as many as several hundred throughout the country—hold services, sometimes with the knowledge of local officials. Worshippers meet in groups of a half dozen or fewer (more than that attracts notice and increases the chance that one of the worshippers is a spy), usually in someone’s home. Children, who might be induced to report on their parents, are excluded from worship. People caught worshipping or found to possess religious literature can receive prison sentences of ten years or more for antisocialist activities, which often amounts to a death sentence. Koreans caught in China and returned to North Korea are vigorously interrogated, and if they confess to having been in contact with South Korean or other foreign religious organizations, they are sent to prison. A survey of 755 North Korean defectors published in 2008 found only ten who said they had participated (secretly) in church services while in the North, forty-three who said they had known of others who participated in church services, and thirty-three who said they had seen a Bible.55
Communism as Cult
In a number of respects, North Korea presents the appearance of a large cult, and to the extent that the parallel holds, the study of cults (the politically correct term is new religious movements) can provide some understanding of North Koreans and their belief system.56 In cults, the selfishness of the individual ego is seen as separating members from the group and from their “true” nature, just as egotism and individualism are supposed to be enemies of the North Korean community. In a cult, the most menial tasks are valued as necessary and significant parts of a divine plan, providing members with motivation and giving them a sense of self-worth. In North Korea, the press praises the work of “hidden heroes,” and citizens are urged to “silently defend their outposts, regardless of whether they are recognized or not.”57
After cult members are indoctrinated with the group’s beliefs, they have trouble assessing the extent to which their values are realistic or moral. One reason they hold on to their new beliefs is that they have already committed themselves to the cult with their effort, time, and possessions. The North Korean people have likewise sacrificed much in their journey toward a socialist paradise, and it will be difficult for them to admit they have been traveling the wrong road and following the wrong leaders for over half a century. When cult followers find something about their new belief system hard to accept or at variance with reality, they often blame their lack of understanding on limited knowledge and doubt their own judgment. In North Korea, only Kim Jong-il is said to have a clear vision of the future; it is the role of the people not to think but to obey Kim and have faith in his superior wisdom. Cult members are taught to be suspicious of the outside world, just as the North Korean media routinely disparage foreign countries. When a cult falls under the control of a dominating leader,
as is usually the case, that leader tends to exploit members for his or her advantage. The obscene wealth enjoyed by Kim Jong-il is made possible by the work of millions of ordinary Koreans who will never enjoy the fruits of their labor and cannot begin to imagine the luxurious lifestyle their leader enjoys.
After they have left the cult, former members often recognize that they have failed to accomplish what they set out to do by joining and are often confused about what their next step in life should be.58 They may discard some aspects of the cult’s belief system but retain others. Likewise, North Koreans who arrive in the South are usually confused about what to do next. The transition to life outside the DPRK is much more difficult than the transition former cult members face because, except for those who have spent some time in northern China, defectors have no previous experience of the outside world. Moreover, defectors have usually left behind family and loved ones and lack close family members to support them in South Korea.
Once free of the cult, former members often reminisce about the more positive aspects of their cult experience, such as the community support they received, and they sometimes question the wisdom of having left the group. Likewise, North Korean defectors often ask themselves whether defecting was a good idea. In a 2004 survey of one hundred defectors, 69 percent said they would prefer to leave their difficult life in South Korea for another country such as the United States or Canada, and 33 percent said they would return to North Korea if they could (although to do so would almost certainly mean lifetime imprisonment).59 By leaving their homeland, defectors exchange one set of problems for another, although most of them believe that by defecting they made the correct choice under very difficult circumstances.
Belief and Consequences
People are generally reluctant to abandon the values, beliefs, and attitudes that have guided their lives—even if their lives have not been very satisfying or successful. It is interesting to note that defectors often hold on to their positive attitudes toward Kim Il-sung even after learning how much he lied to them and how much damage he did to North Korea. A growing number of Koreans in the North can see that they have been given the wrong road-map for life, but they do not know where to get a more accurate one. In contrast, a (dramatically shrinking) number of North Koreans maintain implicit faith in the mapmaker (by whom they usually mean Kim Il-sung, not Kim Jong-il) and believe that by following his teachings they will eventually make it to a socialist paradise.
The mental life of North Koreans is as bankrupt as their material life (we refer here to their beliefs about the economy, politics, and the world outside their country, not to their beliefs and emotions about self and family, which they hold in common with people of all cultures and countries). The Kim regime has failed in its effort to create a “new man” who is a Kim loyalist and a committed communist. Although most North Koreans no longer believe in socialism, that doesn’t mean they like or understand capitalism. One of the great attractions of communism—but also an important reason why it does not succeed in the long run—is that people do not have to take personal responsibility for their life choices; they only have to follow the commands of the party. After defectors arrive in South Korea, most of the responsibility for their success or failure rests on their shoulders, and they find this experience troubling.
Surely one can find no other post–Cold War society where such a wide gap exists between propaganda and reality, between what one is supposed to do and what actually works. In particular, the North Korean elites, who know more about their country and about the outside world than ordinary North Koreans, confront a serious contradiction. On the one hand, their leader and his media say that North Korea is the best country in the world to live in; on the other hand, they know that domestic conditions are bad and that conditions outside North Korea are much better. Do the elites tolerate this contradiction in their minds, or do they somehow resolve it? Citizens of the former communist regimes in Eastern Europe faced a similar dilemma.
As one of Mikhail Gorbachev’s aides recounted, “Gorbachev, me, all of us, we were double-thinkers, we had to balance truth and propaganda in our minds all the time.”60
In our first North Korea book, written in the late 1990s, we concluded that the North Korean elites were indeed double-thinkers, although most of the time they did not dwell on contradictions. It appears that over the last several years, double-thinking has spread to the majority of North Koreans. As the saying goes, they are “daytime socialists and nighttime capitalists.” People are still forced to attend political indoctrination sessions and hang portraits of the Kim family on their walls, but their thoughts are about the market economy. North Koreans lead a double mental life in another respect. In the narrow world of their personal experience, they have developed rudimentary knowledge about how to survive within the constraints of a ruined economy, but they are ignorant of the larger sphere of economics and politics. As a consequence, their newfound beliefs can guide their dayto-day affairs but cannot help them address the underlying macroeconomic and political problems that restrict them to the pursuit of a kind of precarious cottage capitalism. They do not know how things could be better; nor do they have the opportunity to protest against the way things are now.
How does a North Korean respond if socially prescribed means of success—such as going to work at a factory and joining the party—do not lead to a better life or to any life that is tolerable? Sociologist Robert K. Merton studied what people do when society’s norms conflict with social reality.61 In Merton’s terminology, those who do what society dictates, even when aware that they are failing to achieve the goals that society promises, are conformists. Ritualists are those who follow the rules without even thinking about what goals they are trying to achieve. Innovators employ socially unacceptable (e.g., illegal) means to reach socially approved goals, while retreatists reject both the means and goals that society prescribes in favor of alternative lifestyles. Rebels also reject both means and goals, but like the early communists, they actively try to change society. In North Korea, many of the conformists and ritualists didn’t survive the hard times of the 1990s. A relatively small number of retreatists fled to China. No one has rebelled. The majority, after years of conforming, have become innovators who are stealthily building a new economy and culture.
The anthropological work of James C. Scott, who studied how Indonesian peasants responded to the oppression of their employers and their employer-friendly government, suggests a somewhat similar way to describe how North Koreans have responded to the widening gap between what they are taught and what they must do to survive.62 Scott observed that the Indonesian elites (like the North Korean elites) shaped the official ideology, and the Indonesian peasants (like North Korean workers) made no attempt to dispute that ideology or to rebel, even though their experience told them that the official ideology was false, and its promised goals were unobtainable for them.
Like the powerless in many places and at many times in history, the Indonesian peasants used the “weapons of the weak” to protect their interests and protest against conditions. These weapons included malingering at work, lying to superiors, and pretending to be ignorant of their duties. Peasants also resorted to pilfering and absenteeism, and in extreme cases, they committed sabotage and arson. None of these responses openly challenged their superiors or the government authorities; all of these responses are found today in North Korea. North Koreans occasionally grumble or, in recent years, even raise their voices at local meetings, but for the most part each person takes care of his or her own business, with the collective result being a kind of silent rebellion that holds back the socialist economy and makes a mockery of the regime’s politics.
Like the Indonesian ruling class in Scott’s study, the North Korean cadres pretend that everything is working. They hesitate to report crimes or failure to achieve economic goals because to do so would show them in a bad light to their superiors in Pyongyang. Instead, they send up rosy reports, and the people at the top d
o not ask questions because they do not want to be held accountable for failure either. At the very top, Kim Jong-il may be partly aware of how rotten North Korean society is, but there is little he can do about it, short of instituting the kind of reforms that would threaten to disrupt a half century of Kim family rule. And while the propagandists continue to grind out editorials and political lectures that fall on deaf ears, the people go about constructing their own reality—not a coherent ideology or world-view but a rough-and-ready guide to everyday survival.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Law, Political Class, and Human Rights
The Kim regime’s poor treatment of its people is a key element of its governing style. It is not a symptom of “system malfunction” or the “collapse of discipline and lack of control by the central government,” as one South Korean professor has suggested.1 Just as a democracy cannot exist without free elections, a dictatorship cannot exist without political oppression. The individual liberties fundamental to the Western concept of human rights confer power on the people that directly competes with the power of a leader. Simply put, the Kim regime is built on the violation of human rights—and not only the right to individual liberties but also the right to food, work, and safety. Only Kim enjoys the freedom to eat what he wants, live and travel where he wants, and read what he wants. North Koreans are granted these rights by the constitution, but in practice anyone who tries to exercise them will end up in prison.
North Korea is a society with many laws, but it is not a society of law as liberal democracies define it: “Rule by law basically refers to the use of law as a tool to communicate and enforce the will of a powerful subset of a society on the remainder of the society. Rule of law, on the other hand, refers to the concept that not only individual citizens but also the government itself is subject to and is limited by the law, and that certain human rights are protected by the law against infringement by other individuals or the government itself.”2 In an apparent attempt to convince the international community that it is a lawful society that protects human rights and the rights of foreign business enterprises, the government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) now publishes many of its criminal and commercial laws.3 In August 2004 the government published a collection of 112 laws, including the Law on the National Flag, the State Funeral Law, the Fruit Culture Law, the Library Law, and the Law on Fish Breeding.4 As the titles indicate, most of these laws are state and party guidelines for how things are supposed to be done, with the added bonus for the regime that more laws are available to punish people for political mistakes.