Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader
Page 37
Hwang Jang-yop, who worked from 1958 to 1965 as Kim’s ideological secretary, seems to have found himself eclipsed in ideological work as the junior Kim’s star ascended. While continuing to rank as one of the country’s leading intellectuals, Hwang was shifted to a number of often less important jobs before he defected, in 1997, to South Korea.
Hwang was relatively fortunate in that he survived. After his defection he told of Baek Nam-woon, who, although “respected as the father of left--wing scholars, was purged by Kim Jong-il at the end of the 1960s. I heard Kim Byeong-ha, then Minister of National Security, boast that his men had taken Baek to the [concentration camp]. … As a scholar, Baek had not participated actively in the campaign against Kim Il-sung. He probably made a few comments that were picked up through wire-tapping and construed as complaints. Baek died in the concentration camp.”27
More than is the case with the often fanciful-sounding accounts of his birth, childhood and youth, in my reading stories officially told about Kim Jong-il’s deeds following his university graduation tend to have the feel of being based on actual incidents. It appears that his hagiographers went out in the late 1970s or early 1980s and interviewed people he had been in contact with earlier, asking them for accounts of the meetings. Perhaps the original tellers— and certainly the sycophantic retellers—made any necessary adjustments so that the accounts would conform to the formula established earlier, in which the young man invariably left his listeners scratching their heads at their own stupidity and carelessness but full of admiration for his genius and his great love for the people.
A gut reaction to such stories is that most of the people involved must have been at least normally intelligent folk. Some of them probably were smarter than he was. But it seems likely that either they felt at the time that they must play dumb in the actual meetings or, later, they allowed themselves to be portrayed as fools in order to flatter the leader’s eldest son.
To someone raised on the United States’ unceremonious, no-nonsense egalitarianism, it is numbing to read volume after volume of accounts such as one that describes Kim Jong-il’s summoning of officials in charge of scientific and educational work. When they arrived at the meeting he let them know they were there to resolve theoretical questions, regarding which “opinions varied in the academic world at that time.” He did the talking, of course. As the twenty-five-year-old rambled on, “the officials wrote down every one of Kim Jong-il’s words in their notebooks.” They “felt their mental horizons broadening.” When he had finished, they felt confident that the academic controversies he had addressed “had come to an end.” They believed that “they could open the eyes of anyone who was confused on the subject. … When Kim Jong-il finished his explanation, all the officials rose to their feet. ‘He’s truly a genius of ideas, and genius of theory!’—This is what every one of them felt. Greatly moved, they expressed their infinite respect for Kim Jong-il.”28
Indeed, according to Hwang, Kim Jong-il “tends to dominate meetings and conferences and to lead all discussion to conclusions congruent with his own.29 My guess is that those poor officials whom the biographers describe really did abase themselves to some such depth of fawning servility, feeling they had no other choice. Eventually the official stories had been repeated so often inside the country that many younger North Koreans—never having heard him utter more than a phrase, and having no source of information about him except the regime’s teachings—truly believed that Kim Jong-il was an exalted being, quite different from ordinary people. Thus, there might be less need for conscious dissembling and acting on their part. But again the question arises of-why if he possessed any sensitivity, the junior Kim not only permitted but almost certainly gave the order that such accounts be translated from the Korean for foreign readers—to many of-whom he himself-was inevitably made to appear the fatuous one.
In his new role as propagandist and “theoretician,” Kim Jong-il sought to promote unthinking devotion to one-man rule. He arranged for the manufacture of plaster busts of Kim Il-sung, which he placed in study halls all over the country—changing the name from Study Hall of the History of the Workers’ Party of Korea to Study Hall of Comrade Kim Il-sung’s Revolutionary History. That made it clear that the leader now had primacy over even the party. The young Kim also ordered a new compilation of historical photographs to place in those study halls, “knowing that the existing pictorial records were not edited so as to center on the greatness of the President.30
Hagiographers exaggerated and fabricated to inflate Kim Il-sung’s creditable achievements into a titanic image.31 In the 1960s, official Pyongyang biographer Baik Bong described Kim as “a legendary hero … who is capable of commanding heavens and earth, an unrivalled brilliant commander who, as it were, can shrink a long range of steep mountains at a stroke and smash the swarming hordes of enemies with one blow.”32
Such a magical figure’s spiritual origins naturally had to be matched with a heroic physical birth, so his hagiographers described Kim Il-sung as issuing from the bosom of a revolutionary holy family. Biographer Baik credited Kim’s father, Kim Hyong-jik, with such colossal achievements as having founded, in 1917, the underground Korean National Association, largest of the anti-Japanese organizations of the time.33
When the propagandists ran short on exaggerations and inventions, they stole. In people’s homes were placed copies of a slogan attributed to Kim: “Fish cannot live out of water. The people cannot live without the People’s Army.— Kim Il-sung.” The real author of the phrase was, of course, Mao Zedong.34
Publishing a third edition of Kim Il-sung’s Selected Works along with volumes of commentary and biography, backing them up with audiovisual materials and developing revolutionary historical sites for mass tours, Kim Jong-il enforced systematic, daily study. The goal was to “make all party members think and act in unison according to the leader’s intentions and teachings,” to make people “have absolute trust in the President as their spiritual support.”
Kim Jong-il was tireless in his efforts “to lead people to the way of faithfulness.” One of his acquaintances, for example, had a brother who got in a spot of trouble with the authorities. Kim Jong-il was able to have the brother’s case reexamined. It turned out that some “vicious elements” were responsible for the transgression and had shifted the blame. Afterward, young Kim advised the grateful acquaintance, in effect, that his whole family should go and sin no more: “If a man is deprived of his political life, or the trust of the party, he is nothing. Therefore, it is necessary to do everything in your power to keep your political life, given by the great leader, and work hard to prove worthy of his trust. Not only yourself, but all your family members and relatives must be armed with the unitary idea of the party and be educated to be faithful to the leader. You must live according to the leader’s teachings anywhere, anytime, whatever you do, and judge by his teachings as a yardstick, and fight unhesitatingly against anything deviating from his teachings.”35
When a draft document for a party congress listed several top party officials, with Kim Il-sung’s name at the top, his son ordered that it be retyped to leave a space between the Great Leader’s name and the rest of the list. His underlings did that, but a few days later he called an official in and asked him to print Kim Il-sung’s name in larger type, as well. “Think. It’s because the sun shines that the planets shed their light, isn’t it?” he explained to the puzzled official. “As we could not draw the sun and the planets in the same size, so we would never write down the name of the leader and the names of his men in the same size.” The official now understood what Kim Jong-il had in mind, and “bowed deeply to his noble loyalty.” (The idea actually was lifted from Stalin’s personality cult.)36 It was for that same party congress, in 1970, that Kim Jong-il personally designed the first lapel badges with his father’s portrait and had them passed out to delegates.37
Kim Jong-il had been fascinated with movies from his childhood, brought up on viewing sessions in his
father’s mansion that leaned heavily toward Russian movies. As that fascination converged with his interest in women, the avid film buff had begun hanging around Pyongyang’s film studios, dating actresses.38
According to an official account, he told his father as early as 1964—the year of his university graduation—that all was not well in North Korea’s tin-seltown. Kim Il-sung thereupon called a party politburo meeting at the Korean Film Studio, with the studio staff in attendance. There the elder Kim gave a speech complaining that opportunists within the communist movement were kowtowing to a cultural offensive launched by the imperialists. He wanted a radical change. The industry must produce many high-quality movies, artistic yet ideologically compelling. Filmmakers must chart a straight path, repudiating two extremes: “the art-for-art’s sake doctrine of the revisionists and the leftist tendency to stress only ideology while ignoring artistry.” The themes of the films must fall into three categories: (1) Kim Il-sung’s anti-Japanese struggle, (2) the Korean War and (3) inspiration for workers to make “great revolutionary advances in socialist construction.”
After the speech, the audience “gave a standing ovation for a long time, looking up at President Kim Il-sung and Comrade Kim Jong-il. … It was from that time onwards that Kim Jong-il’s energetic guidance of cinematic development began.”39
While still in his twenties Kim Jong-il rose in the party Central Committee hierarchy to become deputy director of the propaganda and agitation department (under his friend Kim Guk-tae again, according to some reports) and then department director. Working as a propagandist gave the Great Leader’s son an official excuse to continue his interest in the cinema— which eventually would prove a virtual obsession. On one level, he simply wanted better quality from a young and struggling back-water movie industry that was far from meeting the technical standards of Moscow, much less Hollywood. On another level, he was determined to root out of the movie industry the counterrevolutionary, bourgeois, feudalistic, revisionist, flunkeyist influences that those wicked fellows purged in 1967 had planted in earlier years to distract the people from worshipping Kim Il-sung with the proper single-hearted, single-minded unity. This would be a flip-side version of the Hollywood blacklist.
Kim Jong-il started by abolishing an annual January convention of filmmakers from all over the country to evaluate the previous year’s film output from the standpoint of artistry. Kim decried the esthetic review for its failure to stick strictly to pushing the ideology of one-man rule. He called it a “platform which was utilized by the babblers in order to demonstrate their intelligence.” Anti-party counterrevolutionaries in charge of cinema development for the party had dreamed up the session in a plot to “restore outdated self-indulgence, so as to liberalize’ cinematic creation.” Instead of studying Kim Il-sung’s thoughts on art and literature, speakers at the meeting had dwelled on theories from outside. They had even gone to the length of “suggesting the introduction of so-and-so’s system of direction and so-and-so’s system of acting from Europe.”
Officials hearing his complaints were “bewildered,” never having seen any harm in the get-togethers. But, now that he mentioned it, they “felt as if their vision was opening up.” Kim Jong-il then opened their vision a little wider, decreeing that “from now on you must not use the words ‘esthetic review.’ Instead we must hold a meeting for the study of the great leader’s artistic and literary thoughts.” Now they got the picture, and “the officials and artists left the room, bitterly reflecting on their inability to distinguish right from wrong.”
Some days later Kim Jong-il presided over the first meeting for the study of the Great Leader’s thought on juche-oriented art and literature, convened in a movie studio. He humiliated the first speaker who took the floor, attacking the man’s use of foreign words such as the “moral” of a story and “suspense” when there were perfectly good words in Korean to get the meaning across. Bidding the “bewildered” speaker to sit down, he expressed disgust that “the flunkeyist and dogmatic habit is even repeated in this place where we are studying the Great Leader’s juche-oriented art and literary thoughts. It is appalling.” Without discarding that habit of “parroting” others, the filmmakers would “never be able to make films which will genuinely do a great deal for the Korean revolution, films which will be loved by the Korean people.”
In order to make a clean sweep of past errors, “Kim Jong-il sternly ordered that all the files on the ‘art review’ meetings be burned. All those present at the meeting were struck by the intelligent leadership of Kim Jong-il.” After the meeting, all the papers and reports presented at previous “esthetic reviews” were indeed burned, so that a new start could be made based on the theories of Kim Il-sung.40
Although Kim Il-sung had staged skits and plays and disseminated tracts during his anti-Japanese struggle, he had not made movies. Thus, the pickings were slim for filmmakers looking for guidance from the Great Leader’s holy writ. Kim Jong-il was happy to step into the breach and propound his own theories, always describing them as developments of his father’s ideas.
At the first meeting for the study of the Great Leader’s thought on juche-oriented art and literature, according to official accounts, and on other occasions as well, the junior Kim laid out his chongja or “seed” theory. He had “discovered for the first time in history the seed of the work of art, its nucleus.41 In fact his demand that writers and directors “grasp the seed” of a work was another way of directing them to choose a theme that could be expressed in just a few words and stick to it. To that extent, of course, Kim Jong-il’s idea was by no means new. But the principle of focusing tightly on a clear theme probably is the one that writers—professionals included— most often forget. (I, myself, while reading his thoughts on the “seed,” realized that parts of my manuscript lacked focus and needed re-writing. Thanks, Dear Leader, for the useful reminder.) Kim’s dwelling on the principle could only be a positive influence on North Korean screen-writing and film direction and editing, from the technical standpoint.
Content was a different matter. Kim Jong-il wanted artistic people to grasp seeds that would promote the regime’s ideology, especially one-man rule. Talking to the makers of the film Five Guerrilla Brothers in 1968, he complained that they had killed off a character, making him the victim of an enemy plot to poison the guerrillas’ salt supply. That went against what was or should have been the seed of the work: “that the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army would be ever-victorious as long as the headquarters of the revolution existed.”
Kim Jong-il also complained that the real prototype of the character the filmmakers had killed off did not in fact die in the salt incident. And he insisted that “our literature and arts must portray historical facts strictly in accordance with the principles of maintaining party loyalty and of being historically accurate.” (Note that party loyalty was to take precedence over historical accuracy.) “You must not fake, in a careless manner, what is not found in life, and present scenes that vary from the truth, simply for the sake of the arts. In dealing with historical facts, you must discard, as a matter of course, what is of no substance; but you must not discard-what is of essential significance, interpret it as you please or invent something.”
That is good advice. I think it was taken to heart, to some extent, in the factual basis apparent in many of the stories told about Kim senior and junior in books the regime published from the 1980s on, at least until Kim Il-sung’s death in 1994.
But Kim Jong-il only selectively followed his own advice. The “headquarters of the revolution” to which he referred in his critique of Five Guerrilla Brothers was meant to be understood as the seat of Gen. Kim Il-sung, that lofty being destined to become North Korea’s Great Leader. In historical fact, Kim Il-sung’s headquarters was no more the headquarters of the revolution than were the headquarters of any of a number of other guerrilla fighters and political leaders, based in other parts of Manchuria, in China proper, in Korea itself or elsewhere, who were
Kim’s revolutionary equals or betters.
The unspoken rule seems to have been that writers should avoid lies about small, easily ascertainable facts and stick to Big Lies—such as Kim Il-sung’s purported leadership of the entire “revolution” from the 1930s on and South Korea’s invasion of the North to start the Korean War. Kim Jong-il did not in so many words, for publication, address the importance of the Big Lie for the regime. However, he did endorse fictionalizing historical facts: “The arts, even though based on actual situations, must not reproduce facts and instances automatically; they must identify those which are of essential significance and generalize them,” he said, in the same talk in which he had emphasized fidelity to the facts. Unfortunately, he said, the unimaginative moviemakers he was addressing were “unable to make full use of this wonderful creative capacity”42
What his seemingly conflicting advice may have boiled down to is: Stick to the facts if fabrication would be easily detected—but if a lie would serve the maintenance of the regime, then tell the lie and overcome people’s disbelief through dramatic force and constant repetition.
To get the filmmakers headed in the right direction, Kim Jong-il decided to lead them in making films based on some works—plays or skits—from the period of the anti-Japanese struggle in Manchuria. In each case those were works whose original authorship was ascribed to Kim Il-sung. The first of those was Sea of Blood, which is