Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il

by Michael Malice

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  DEAR READER

  DEAR READER

  THE UNAUTHORIZED

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF

  KIM JONG IL

  MICHAEL MALICE

  “When the word leader, or leadership, returns to current use, it connotes a relapse into barbarism. For a civilized people, it is the most ominous word in any language.”

  Isabel Paterson, 1943

  Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il Michael Malice

  Publisher information Copyright information Cataloging information ISBN-10 1234567890 ISBN-13 978-1234567890

  Table of Contents

  1.

  Korea is Lost

  2. Korea is Won

  3. Korea is One

  4.

  Fighting Flunkeyism

  5. Defeating Dogmatism

  6.

  Facing Factionalism

  7.

  The Pueblo Incident

  8.

  Planting Seeds

  9. Taking a Bow

  10. Commandments

  11. Axes of Evil

  12. Construction Time

  13. The Red Balloon

  14. Flights of Fancy

  15. The Thaw

  16. The Great Loss

  17. The Red Death

  18. Me and a Gun

  19. Delivering Diplomacy

  20. Korea is Two

  21. My Three Sons

  Chapter 1

  Korea is Lost

  Iremember the day that I was born perfectly.

  Over the northernmost part of Korea towers Mt. Paektu. Its majesty has fascinated mankind for centuries. The mountains around Mt. Paektu are covered with whitish pumice stone, giving them a snow-capped appearance even in summer. Mt. Paektu itself is topped not by a peak but by Lake Chon, enormous and mysterious. Though many artists have captured Mt. Paektu’s solemn and noble image, none have been able to communicate its soul. When the sun rises on Mt. Paektu, the entire expanse of Korea becomes full of vitality.

  This ancestral mountain of the Korean people encompasses the entire nation’s spirit—and it was also where I was born. Mt. Paektu is located at 42 degrees north latitude, and I was born in 1942. The mountain known as General Peak stands exactly 216 meters away, and I was born on 2/16. There are too many significant facts associated with my birth for them all to be a mere coincidence.

  There was something mysterious about the weather on the day of my birth, like a wonder from heaven. Normally, violent snowstorms accompanied the mid-February temperature of around -40 degrees. But on the day that I was born, snowflakes began dancing like flowers on the summit of General Peak. The morning sun shone so strongly that the thick ice covering Lake Chon began to break. The cracking sound resounded through the mountains, as if the great fortune of Korea was gushing out from the bottom of the lake.

  The greatest wonders of Mt. Paektu were at the base, where stood the secret base camp of the Korean revolution’s central leadership. It was in that humble log cabin that I was born. My name came from my parents: The “Jong” is after my mother, anti-Japanese heroine Kim Jong Suk, while the “Il” came from my father. Father was not there to greet me on the day of my birth, for General Kim Il Sung was leading the Korean revolution. The labor that he was engaged in that day was part of a process far longer and more difficult. He was giving birth to a free, liberated Korea.

  At the time of my birth, there was no “North Korea” or “South Korea.” There was Korea and only Korea, and the idea of such a nation being split in half was an absurdity. Korea had been one unified nation for over 5,000 years. The ancient Koreans had lived on the same Korean peninsula since the Neolithic era. At the beginning of the third millennium B.C., the Korean state of Chosun was established by King Tangun in Pyongyang—the very city which remains the capital today. Indeed, Chosun was the first political state in the world.

  Each state on earth has undergone a complicated formation process. Some were formed by merging two or more clans or races. Others were founded by a foreign conqueror. Still others were dominated and reigned over by foreign invaders, who were either repulsed or assimilated as history progressed. All of the other states in the world merged multiracial communities into one nation over a long period of time. Only Korea went through a course of steady growth as one single nation, maintaining her unity since the dawn of history.

  The nation had a long and proud history under the Chosun dynasty, one of the longest-lived monarchies of all time. Not once in Korea’s 5,000-year history did the Korean people commit aggression against any other country. Unfortunately, the same could not be said for her neighbors. Korea suffered innumerable acts of aggression from foreign forces over and over again throughout the centuries, with varying results.

  As time went on, Korea’s feudal government grew increasingly oppressive. The peasantry began to revolt by the end of the nineteenth century. Terrified, the authorities called in their Qing Chinese allies for assistance. Seeing an opportunity to strike, the Japanese invaded Korea under the pretext of “helping” and “protecting” the Korean people against the Chinese. They drove out the Chinese—but they never left.

  In 1895, Japanese mercenaries raided the Royal Palace. There, they found Queen Min hiding in the corner of her bedroom. The Jap bastards slashed her repeatedly with their swords before burning her to death and taking King Min hostage. Now it was Russia, Japan’s ardent enemy, who saw an opportunity. They rescued and reinstated King Min. The two states’ growing conflict led to Japan unleashing the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, in an attempt to seize total control of both Korea and the northeast Chinese area of Manchuria.

  The Japanese imperialists plundered Korea in the military’s name. The Korean people were reduced to no more than slaves, forced to carry supplies and lay railways for the imperialist Japanese army. In the process, thousands upon thousands of Koreans were killed by Japanese soldiers. Those who weren’t worked to death were instead shot at the slightest provocation.

  The Jap devils successfully achieved their goal, driving out all the Chinese and Russian forces from the Korean peninsula. Japan then proclaimed a “treaty” with Korea in 1905. The king of Korea refused to sign the document, but there was nothing else that he could do. The Japs took control of Korea’s internal affairs and imposed their own rule, depriving Korea of any diplomatic rights. Korea was no longer an independent nation, but instead a colony completely ruled by Japan.

  The following decade was a period of ordeals, darkness and starvation for the Korean nation. The country was reduced to a huge prison, with a terrorist administration unseen since the medieval era. As the popular saying goes: “ruined people are little better than a dog in a house of grief.” The people were forced into absolute submission and deprived of all their freedoms, including freedom of speech, assembly and association. The natural beauty of the Korean homeland was mercilessly downtrodden by the military jackboots and cannon wheels of Japan. Korea became a hell on earth.

  Internationally, Korea was regarded as a weak nation and mocked as a backward feudal state. In 1907, for example, the world community held their second international peace conference in the Hague. The Korean envoy was refused the right to participate, which drove the man to commit suicide by disembowelment. If any salvation was going to come for Korea, it wouldn’t be coming from abroad. It would h
ave to come from the Korean people themselves.

  The Korean people attempted to fight back under the auspices of the anti-Japanese Righteous Volunteers movement. The Righteous Volunteers successfully demonstrated that the patriotic spirit of the Korean nation still thrived. But they were unorganized and lacked weaponry, tactics and strategy. They couldn’t withstand the Japanese offensives, and their struggle ended in failure.

  Learning from such mistakes, my grandfather Kim Hyong Jik and several other independence campaigners organized the Korean National Association on March 23, 1917 in Pyongyang. This underground revolutionary organization drew its membership from people from all walks of life: workers, peasants, teachers, students, soldiers, merchants and artisans. In order to maintain secrecy, the KNA only admitted carefully selected and well-prepared patriots. Its documents were compiled in cipher, and they used code words for communications between its members. Yet despite all these precautions, the Japanese imperialists managed to conduct a crackdown on the secret organization in the autumn of 1917. More than 100 people were arrested, including my grandfather—and though he was only five years old, Father was there to witness the whole thing.

  It seemed as if the Korean people were doomed to an eternity of torment. Later uprisings, like those of March 1, 1919 and June 10, 1926, were also brutally suppressed, with many Koreans bayoneted in the street. The Korean people couldn’t win, because a mass of people without a leader is no more than a crowd. They desperately wished for an outstanding revolutionary leader to come, someone who could lead them to victory over the Jap bastards.

  The answer to the Korean people’s most heartfelt wish came in the form of my father: Kim Il Sung.

  I didn’t fall asleep to bedtime stories when I was a baby. No, I was raised on my mother telling me all about Father and his upbringing. These weren’t mere family tales intended to increase bonds between father and son. What Mother wanted to do was to foster my conscious and purposeful loyalty to Father as a political leader. She taught me about the validity of the revolutionary cause and its inevitable victory. She described the glory and happiness of fighting for the cause. She inculcated in me a sense of devotion, a self-sacrificing spirit and a sense of responsibility, qualities necessary for the attainment of the cause. Most importantly, she wanted me to follow in Father’s revolutionary footsteps when I grew up.

  “Your father was born as Kim Song Ju on April 15, 1912 in Mangyongdae, Pyongyang,” she told me. “One day, when he was a very little boy, he climbed an ash tree outside his house. Then he reached his arms out as far as he could so that he could catch the rainbow. That’s how ambitious, good-hearted and virtuous the General was, even as a child only several years older than you.”

  It had always been clear to Grandfather that Father was not a regular child, for even in his youth he was full of revolutionary consciousness. Father honed his marksmanship skills by shooting Jap policemen in the eyes with a slingshot. Father despised the landlords who were oppressing the Korean people, and he resented the Christian missionaries who preached “turning the other cheek”—a surefire way for a nation to fall. Father always gave a hard time to the children of such types, never passing up an opportunity to shove them into the Daedong River.

  When Grandfather was released from prison in 1918, he took Father with him to live in Manchuria, then the seat of revolutionary activity. After several years, it became clearer and clearer to Grandfather that a great destiny awaited his son. “The wealthy landowners are sending their sons abroad to study,” he told Father in 1923. “They believe that the United States or Japan are the places where one should seek modern civilization and education. But I believe in Korea, and that a man of Korea should have a good knowledge of his nation. You must experience the misery that the Korean people are living. Go study in Korea from now on. Then you will know what you need to do.”

  Only eleven years of age, Father walked 1,000 ri (250 miles) back to Mangyongdae. This journey of learning taught him much about how the Korean people were being exploited. After two years of study, he heard that Grandfather had been arrested once again, and felt that enough was enough. Standing at the gate to his family home, Father took one last look at the place where he’d been born. “I won’t return,” he vowed, “until my country has been liberated from the Jap bastards!”

  In early 1925, Father began a 1,000 ri journey for national liberation back to Manchuria. Much of his trip was through steep mountains, where wild beasts roamed freely even during the day. But though he was not yet thirteen years old, Father had no fear. Eventually he came to the Amnok River that bordered Korea and Manchuria. Without a moment’s hesitation, he crossed the river by walking on fallen leaves and officially began his quest to liberate his motherland. When Grandfather passed away in 1926, Father was more determined than ever to complete the mission that his own father had begun.

  Once in Manchuria, Father discovered that the Korean revolution was under the command of the communists and the nationalists. To his dismay, both groups were more interested in trying to control a tiny movement than in uniting the people. Father knew that it was the masses who were the masters of the revolution, not some faction. For a revolution to work, revolutionaries needed to go into the masses to educate them, organize them and arouse them into revolutionary struggle. Mother always stressed this last point repeatedly. Some thought revolution was inevitable, but it was very clear that Mother felt otherwise. Without Father, she insisted, it would have been the same failed rebellions over and over again.

  On June 30, 1930, after years of organizing, Father was finally ready to set out his strategy for reclaiming Korea from the evil Japanese. He convened a meeting of leading cadres in Kalun and mapped out what he foresaw as the precise course of the Korean revolution. Father emphasized that the revolution had to be carried out on one’s own responsibility and with one’s own conviction, without asking for approval or directives from others. To suit the Korean situation, the Korean revolution needed to be carried out by Koreans themselves at all times. This was a great idea, and it was an unprecedented idea.

  It was the Juche idea.

  “Korea has been conquered through Japan’s force of arms,” Father went on, “and that is how she will be freed. Rioting and demonstrations are all well and good, but the Japanese oppression calls for armed struggle. Violence should be countered with violence, and arms should be countered with arms.”

  Many of the cadres were concerned. The Japs had far more men and far greater technology. They pointed out that armed struggle seemed like suicide—and they were right. Direct armed struggle would have been suicide. Yet there was one method by which a small number of men could defeat a larger, more powerful foe: guerrilla warfare.

  In 1932, at the age of twenty, Father organized what would become the Korean People’s Revolutionary Army. At that time, there was no liberated zone anywhere in Korea, nor was there any foreign assistance. No rich man offered war funds. Not a single missionary provided support. Yet none of that mattered. Father believed in the Korean people, and so he and his guerrillas organized the masses themselves. They helped farmers, sweeping their backyards and splitting firewood. They worked on the farms, conducting political education in plain words. Activists carried mimeograph machines on their backs, printing publications. Wherever they went, the guerrillas actively developed political work among the people. And whenever they could, they fought the Jap bastards.

  Under Father’s leadership, the KPRA became a powerful force in a few short years. His brilliant knowledge and indomitable iron will were unprecedented in the history of world military affairs. His Juche-oriented strategy and superb command were wholly original, with nothing like them to be found in any book on military science anywhere in any era. The guerrillas wrested weapons from the enemy and armed themselves with them. Making the most of their familiar terrain, the KPRA frustrated the Japanese imperialists at every turn. Father’s men grew so fond of him that they renamed him “Kim Il Sung,” meaning “the sun to
come.” His new name reflected the people’s desire that he become Korea’s savior, shining across the entire peninsula.

  In 1936, General Kim Il Sung and the KPRA built their secret headquarters at the foot of Mt. Paektu. Now they had a base from which to launch attacks, which they constantly did. On a localized level, such successful skirmishes destroyed the myth of Japanese invincibility—which was replaced by the myth of General Kim Il Sung. The people began to say that he was gifted with second sight, that he applied a magical method of contracting space, that he was a commander sent from heaven to liberate Korea. But due to the strict news blackout imposed by the Japs, his military successes were never established as the truth. In fact, the Japanese censorship was so successful and pervasive that no contemporary accounts of General Kim Il Sung’s activities exist.

  Though the people believed in General Kim Il Sung and desperately wanted the KPRA to win, after three decades of Japanese rule many still believed that victory was impossible. The Japanese were simply too strong. The guerrillas needed to demonstrate that they could actually accomplish what they had set out to.