Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty

by Bradley K. Martin

  Bai said that every North Korean voluntarily wore a badge with Kim’s picture. Even if someone happened not to be wearing a badge on a particular day, that did not mean he or she failed to respect the Great Leader. The person simply had forgotten—perhaps had failed to switch the badge while changing clothes.

  Son-hui departs for scenic Mount Kumgang, where working people on vacation admire the magnificent view of Nine-Dragon Falls. They chant praises of their country, its beautiful mountains and limpid streams. They extol their Leader. “We shall live with Him forevermore,” they sing. “The garden of bliss blooms in His sunlight.” Son-hui joins vacationers in singing: “Our happiness blooms in our Leader’s care. How glorious to live in our socialist paradise. Let us sing of our socialist nation, of our earthly paradise free from oppression.”

  Vacationing teachers laud the school system: “As soon as you are born you are received by a nursery, then led through a flowery gate to eleven-year education.”

  Indeed, officials told me, mothers were entitled to seventy-seven days of maternity leave before turning their babies over to public day nurseries, or in some cases full-time nurseries. “Home education has an important meaning in a society-where private ownership of the means of production is predominant,” Kim Il-sung had said in a 1968 speech. “But it has no important meaning in a different, socialist society.”7 The state, taking over much of the parental role, had been training youngsters to worship Kim. “Our Great Leader is the Supreme Leader of revolution, its heart and the only center,” said one official policy statement. “We have to inculcate in our future generations the absolute authority of the Leader, the indisputable thoughts and instructions of the Leader, so that they may accept them as faith and the law of the land.”8

  Schoolbooks portrayed Kim in his heroic roles. Their illustrations were drawings in the style of children’s biblical literature in the United States. Some pictured Kim’s exploits, whether real or imagined, as a child and as a young guerrilla commander. Others depicted a mature Kim, sometimes surrounded by children in tableaux reminiscent of the Sunday-school pictures that illustrate the words of Jesus, “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” A sort of aura or halo was affixed to the Great Leader’s head in those pictures.

  The training and peer pressure that reinforced such images had intensified over the years. Thus, the young people I met struck me as more fanatical than North Koreans aged forty or older, whose indoctrination had not been as thoroughgoing.

  I was suspicious of the notion of total unanimity and said as much to Bai. “Of course, we have people who dissent; that’s why-we have police,” he replied with his characteristic bluntness—and with a trace of-what may have been irritation that I had put him on the spot. But Bai insisted that simple disagreement with policy didn’t equate to punishable dissent. For example, he said, when office workers met to decide whether to help out on farms or in factories, voices against the idea could be heard—but once the group decided to volunteer, everyone in the unit had to go along.

  I had heard repeatedly during my stay of measures to guard against “impure elements.” On a night drive from the east coast, for example, my driver pulled up at a floodlit guard post. When I asked for whom the guards were searching, the answer was “impure elements.” Nobody would tell me just what these impure elements were. “You know,” said one North Korean, peering at me like a disciplinarian schoolteacher waiting for me to confess my guilt. “You know who they are.” Actually I did not know. When I pestered Bai, he finally grew impatient enough to spit out an unadorned definition. Impure elements, he said, “are spies, people trying to destroy the system. We shoot them.” It seemed, then, that “impure elements” were South Korean or American agents, including the saboteurs against whom rifle-toting soldiers were posted at high-way and railway bridges.

  “We are free from exploitation,” the happy vacationers sing, “free from tax or levy, completely free from care for food or clothing. Our socialist system, which our Great Leader has built, is the best in the world.”

  Although rather severe food shortages had affected at least some parts of the country since the mid-1970s, North Koreans evidently believed that much of what they had was indeed the best in the world. Kim Il-sung told them so, and few had any basis for comparison. Almost none traveled outside the country. Those who did were trusted officials. The foreign news North Koreans got was carefully selected, with little from the industrialized West. Radios were built so they could be tuned only to the official frequency. “Newspapers” were propaganda sheets that filled their pages with Kim Il-sung’s speeches. Articles told of foreigners gathering abroad to celebrate the brilliance of Kim, who had “wonderfully adorned human history in the twentieth century”9 —and whose ideas clearly-were the answers to the problems of the underdeveloped world.10

  Son-hui and a photographer tour Mount Paektu, “the holy mountain of revolution,” and the battlefields of Kim Il-sung’s anti-Japanese struggle. They sing of Kim’s feats in “repulsing the one-million-strong Japanese army. Each tree and flower seems to relate the days of struggle against the Japanese. On long marches through blizzards He mapped out today’s paradise … our blissful land of today.”

  An image of Mangyongdae, the president’s humble ancestral home, appears in the background. A red sun, another symbol of Kim Il-sung, is projected onto the image. The Korean audience applauds as women soldiers onstage remove their hats and bow to the image.

  Kim Il-sung could legitimately claim a genuine guerrilla background. He had fought hard against the Japanese colonialists. That gave him impeccable nationalist credentials in a country where it had been all too common for capable and ambitious people to serve the Japanese masters. With that starting point, his publicists over the decades of his reign had inflated his image. North Koreans did not credit the U.S.-led Allied defeat of the Japanese in the Pacific for their national liberation. All young North Koreans had learned that it was Kim Il-sung and his anti-Japanese guerrillas (with help from the Soviet Army in some versions—but in other versions with no acknowledged help at all) who had liberated Korea from the Japanese. The Americans got only blame, for spoiling the liberation by occupying the South and dividing the country.

  Son-hui visits Kangson, an iron-and-steel center, and gathers reporting materials on “the proud life of the smelters, who are performing miracles.” The shop manager, played by a full-throated bass, exhorts his workers: “Comrades! Let’s fulfill our quota ahead of time!”

  The “miracles” at the Kangson complex had begun in 1956, my guide told me. That year Kim Il-sung visited a Kangson rolling mill that was considered to have a capacity of 60,000 tons a year. The country needed 10,000 additional tons, the Great Leader said. The managers replied that such an increase would be “very difficult”—-which, in Korean terms, means just about impossible. Kim appealed directly to the workers, who assured him there was no need to limit the improvement to 10,000 tons; they would produce 30,000 extra tons for a total output of 90,000 tons the following year. Indeed, my guide said, the workers responded so enthusiastically to Kim’s exhortations that their output doubled in 1957 to 120,000 tons.

  Son-hui hears steelworkers sing a rousing number reminiscent of the “Anvil Chorus”: “In His warm loving care we are blessed. … We are highly cultured under the new policy.”

  The regime had produced literature, museums and public art aplenty under the policy that North Korean culture “must not depart from the party line and its purpose of benefiting the revolution,” as Kim Il-sung had instructed one group of artists and writers.11 In practice that meant that, regarding books, for example, a North Korean could read anything he or she wished as long as it glorified Kim Il-sung.

  Many of the museums showcased nothing but gifts the Great Leader had sent for the edification of the masses. Some of those were objects that might better have been used instead of displayed, such as overhead projectors and pencil sharpeners proudly shown to visitors in a shrinelike room at a Pyong
yang primary school. Others, however, were true relics—stuffed birds and animals and pickled fish, trophies from the Fatherly Leader’s hunting and fishing trips. Kim Il-sung University showed off a hunting dog sent by the Respected and Beloved Leader. It, too, was stuffed. Reportedly it had died a natural death.

  As for publicly displayed art and sculpture, most of what I saw depicted Kim Il-sung. A Japanese newsman, in Pyongyang to cover the table tennis tournament, was sent home early after he filed an article reporting that the gold coating on a sixty-five-foot (twenty-meter) bronze statue of the Great Leader had been removed. His article cited a rumor among foreign residents in Pyongyang that Deng Xiaoping, during a visit not long before, had suggested to President Kim that a golden statue might be a bit too extravagant a display for a socialist country seeking Chinese economic aid.

  Son-hui arrives at the village where, following her wartime rescue from a burning house, she spent her childhood. She is deeply moved to see the village now becoming a model cooperative farm. It is harvest time, and “the rice stacks rise mountain-high,” the farmers sing. “Let us boast of our bumper harvest to the whole world.” The farmers are grateful to the Great Leader: “For many miles around He gave us water and sent us machines to ease our heavy toil. Let us sing, let us dance, let us sing of our Leader’s favors for thousands of years.”

  Bowing deeply, the farmers sing: “Heaven and earth the Wise Leader tamed, repelled the cold front and brought in the best harvest.”

  After a couple of weeks in North Korea, believe it or not, a visitor could catch himself starting to get used to such extravagant tributes. Outside observers had long remarked the romantic propensity of Koreans, north or south, for excess. Besides, one could reason, the extreme reverence for Kim Il-sung no doubt reflected Korean history. Like China, North Korea had married traditional Confucianism—patriarchal and authoritarian—to Stalinist dictatorship.

  Prior to 1910, native dynasties fashioned more or less on the ancient Chinese model had ruled the country. Then, during the 1910–1945 colonial period, Koreans had been Japanese subjects, required to worship the emperor in Tokyo pretty much as North Koreans later came to worship their Great Leader12. “Mansei!” (Long life!)—the Korean equivalent of the Japanese “Banzai!”—-was the cry I heard issuing from the throats of thousands of North Koreans who assembled on May Day, 1979, in downtown Pyongyang’s Kim Il-sung Square, to praise Kim for having built a workers’ paradise.

  My guide, Kim Yon-shik, gave every appearance of sincerity when he explained to me that the people had suffered for so long under “flunkeyism”— meaning subordination to surrounding great powers Japan, China, Russia and the United States—that they were grateful to Kim Il-sung for bringing them out of it.

  That might have seemed a plausible account of how Kim Il-sung became a god. However, around the same time such explanations started to come easily to the mind, so did a small voice suggesting that it was about time to end the visit—before I might start giving thanks to the Great Leader at the beginning of each meal, as North Koreans were taught from nursery school to do. Any day now I might forget that this was 1979, with just five years to go before the end of the current seven-year economic plan and … 1984.

  The voice urging me to flee grew particularly strong on a day when the American reporters were taken to the Demilitarized Zone. The DMZ, as it was abbreviated, divided north from south. We arrived at a visitors’ parking area adjoining the truce village of Panmunjom. As I was stepping out of the car that had brought me down from the city of Kaesong, I took care to remove my passport from my bag and place it in my pocket—just in case I should feel the need to make a break. Hit by a fit of temporary madness such as sometimes possesses Western visitors to the Earthly Paradise, I briefly visualized myself sprinting across the DMZ. At the moment we were not yet within sight of the border, but I had visited Panmunjom several times from the Seoul direction and thus had a clear mental picture of the layout. I could visualize the rifle-toting North Korean and American soldiers facing each other just a few feet apart. If I made a dash to the other side, I fantasized, I could then produce the passport as my admission ticket to the considerably Freer World.

  However, when I got to the truce village I looked across at the outsized GIs, soldiers handpicked for their ability to project an intimidating presence. I saw that they were glaring, with looks of unbridled ferocity, at me and at my fellow Western correspondents. To look menacing and unwelcoming was their job, of course, but they did it so well that the moment of madness instantly passed and with it my fantasy of leaving North Korea by other than orthodox means.

  Finale in Pyongyang: The people dance, joyously singing of their happiness. The searchers have learned that the reporter Son-hui is the dead soldier’s daughter, and she has received her father’s hero medal from the Great Leader. She joins the crowd in facing the red sun to sing a powerful, ecstatic, spine-tingling hymn of praise and faith: “Oh, unbounded is His love. We shall live forever in His kind care. His grateful love has given us eternal life. … We shall relate His everlasting love age after age. Oh, we shall be loyal to Marshal Kim Il-sung, our Leader, our Great, Fatherly Leader.”

  When I asked what the country would do after the death of the president, a party member replied: “If he dies—I mean, when he dies—-we’ll find another leader.” Kim Il-sung’s choice for the job was his son, Kim Jong-il, then a chubby thirty-seven and running the secretariat of the Workers’ Party. The younger Kim had disappeared from the public view in the late 1970s. Rumors had said he was dead, or had been injured in an automobile collision and “was a “vegetable.” By 1979, it was known that he was alive and healthy but still his name was hardly mentioned publicly. Rather, he was referred to by the code term “the Party Center” or, often, “the Glorious Party Center.”

  Many Pyongyang-watchers figured that his curious anonymity had to do with efforts to buy time in which to get rid of elements opposed to such a reactionary phenomenon as a hereditary succession, unknown elsewhere in the communist world. A Soviet newsman stationed in Pyongyang told me the opponents included military men. But the Russian added that Kim Jong-il “has power in the party. He’s a strong man, groomed for power and pushing to take over.”

  Indeed, the younger Kim’s days in the political wilderness, if such they had been, appeared to be ending. In September 1978, he had made one highly visible appearance, at the celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the North Korean republic, where he had met foreign guests. By 1979, a visitor could see his likeness alongside that of his father in a few of the portraits of the Great Leader that decorated entrances to buildings. Watching television one night I saw a film of the elder Kim, in wide-brimmed felt hat, giving “on-the-spot guidance” to peasants and factory-workers. The Glorious Party Center was along, too, and several times the camera focused on him.

  Curtain. Standing ovation. Flowers for the prima donna playing Son-hui.

  My guide, Kim Yon-shik, was an official whose regular job was arranging North Korean participation in international sporting events. One of the few North Koreans permitted to travel abroad, he had been in Guyana in the fall of 1978 around the time of the notorious Jonestown massacre, in which members of an American religious cult died in a gruesome murder-suicide spectacle. Kim Yon-shik asked me what Americans thought of the incident. I could not resist framing my reply in terms that might strike very close to the bone for him. “Most Americans see Jonestown as a case of fanaticism,” I told him blandly, “people blindly following one leader.”

  Kim Yon-shik was in his forties, old enough that he would not have been brought up completely in the current system, and he usually demonstrated a good sense of humor. Yet he showed no sign of appreciating the irony in my reply.

  “Does the People’s Temple sect still survive?” he asked me.

  “It’s hard,” I replied, “for a cult like that to continue for long after its charismatic leader has died.”

  Kim Yon-shik still sh
owed no sign of recognizing the barb. “Don’t you think the CIA was involved in that incident?” he asked me.

  TWO

  Fighters and Psalmists

  Concocting a mythology around the nation’s founding father is by no means a North Korean monopoly. Think of George Washington’s fictional confession to having chopped down his father’s cherry tree: “I cannot tell a lie.” But while Americans and Europeans in the second half of the twentieth century moved in the opposite direction, gleefully felling the mighty North Korea’s official hagiographers carried to previously unknown heights the art of building up the leader.

  Western and South Korean historians have despaired of being able to separate historical truth from the Pyongyang regime’s innumerable distortions and fabrications about Kim Il-sung’s life, especially his childhood and youth. Lacking verifiable facts beyond the most basic, they have tended to dispose of Kim’s first two decades with a few sparse paragraphs before moving along quickly to the events of his adult life—for which, at least, there are sources such as contemporary newspaper accounts and the records of foreign governments.

  However, in the years immediately preceding his death in 1994, Kim produced several volumes of memoirs that offer a somewhat franker, more down-to-earth account than his sycophantic writers had provided in earlier official biographies.

  To be sure, many exaggerations and distortions remain even in the newer volumes. For example, whatever quantity of disbelief the reader has managed to suspend may come crashing down at an account of bandits capturing Kim’s father and two companions. While the bandits smoked opium in their camp, Kim wrote, one captive put out the lamp and helped the other two escape before “attacking the rascals, some ten in all, with skillful boxing. Then he made off from the den of the bandits.” It was, enthused Kim, “a truly dramatic sight, resembling a fight scene in a movie.”