Rim Su Gyong never mentioned how reporters were obliged to wear gas-masks when covering the news in pollution-ridden Seoul. She never discussed how American soldiers committed murder, rape and other crimes of violence with impunity, because of the humiliating administrative agreement signed between south Korea and the United States. Nor did she point out that over 50% of the south Korean population was infected with tuberculosis—and that they were the lucky ones, since 4.5 million of them had hepatitis. Worse, south Korea had the highest incidence of AIDS in the world. The US army had dispatched a special unit of AIDS-infested servicemen to infect as many people as possible, in order to test using the virus as a biological weapon. No, Rim Su Gyong never mentioned such matters. All she wanted was for the Korean nation to live as one, as we had for the five thousand years prior to the US imperialists.
The Olympic achievement had caused a hardening in Seoul’s mood. At this point, President Kim Il Sung had been advocating for one nation, one state and two systems for close to a decade. The south was now strongly urging one nation, two states and two systems. They demanded cross-recognition and separate entry for both parts of Korea into the United Nations. Obviously, getting the north and the south recognized as different states by the major powers would lead to permanent division, not reunification.
Despite all this, the festival was an enormous success by every other standard. For eight days, three thousand events of all kinds—political meetings, cultural performances and sports events—took place in more than five hundred different venues. Every scene was more impressive than the one prior: From the mass gymnastics Korea Today display staged by fifty thousand youth to the five-thousand-strong Song of Joy performance to the Song of Festival art show put on by seventy thousand young people. Such monumental masterpieces were never before seen in the festival’s long history.
The world lavished praise, calling the event “a perfect festival going beyond human imagination” and “the greatest festival, unprecedented in the history of the festival movement.” The Song of Festival in particular was called “virtually the brightest star in the history of artistic creation” and was commended for its ideological content, carrying forth the festival’s motto “For Anti-Imperialist Solidarity, Peace and Friendship!” The festival events literally enraptured people, and I couldn’t have been prouder. The festival should have been the start of something wonderful and unprecedented in the history of mankind. It was supposed to be the DPRK’s turn to step out shining onto the world stage.
But that’s not what happened.
Rim Su Gyong was rebuffed when she said she intended to return south via Panmunjom. She went on a hunger strike to gain the south’s approval, but again they refused. Finally, over a month after the festival’s completion, she went to the DMZ and decided to cross over anyway.
Immediately an US solider yelled at her through a megaphone. “You are now illegally coming to the south! Go back to the north at once!”
In front of the many cameras chronicling her journey, the Flower of Reunification waved her passport and ID card. “I am a national of the ‘Republic of Korea’ and a Seoul citizen!” she yelled back. “Why should I go back to the north?”
“I am telling you again! You can go back to the north even now. Otherwise, if you take one more step, you will be arrested and taken into custody!”
Rim Su Gyong took one more step, and Rim Su Gyong was arrested and taken into custody. For having dared to step foot into the DPRK, she was sentenced to five years in prison—while the woman who’d admitted to blowing up a plane had received a presidential pardon.
Nor was the Ryugyong Hotel was ever completed. It simply stood as an unfinished edifice, far taller than anything else in Pyongyang, for years. At the very top, one hundred stories above the ground, a lone crane hung in space, rusting. There it would remain for decades.
Yes, the festival should have been a bright beginning for Korea. But if it was the beginning of anything, it was the beginning of the end.
I’d been enormously suspicious of Mikhail Gorbachev since he took over the Soviet Union’s top position in March 1985. A cunning opportunist of agronomist background, Gorbachev was so far afield that he made Khrushchev look like Stalin. His gang of advisors soon kicked up a swirl of “reform” and “restructuring,” advertising a “new way of thinking.” It was a new way of thinking for the Soviet Union all right: they were thinking of complete surrender and submission to the imperialists. Every action that they took did accelerated the degeneration of the Soviet working-class party and the socialist government.
Gorbachev and his fellow proponents of “perestroika” called for “welfare society” as a “third way,” combining the alleged efficiency of the capitalist economy with socialist social measures. From this it was apparent that they didn’t believe in socialism even in theory, let alone in practice. It was as plain as day that this “third way” could only mean a restoration of capitalism.
These advocates of modern “social democracy” explicitly cited Sweden as their model. But Gorbachev and his minions had things precisely in reverse. If they wanted to look to other nations for advice, the advice would be for more socialism, not less. The United States introduced the socialist methods of the New Deal when faced with the Great Depression, saving capitalism and laying the basis for future prosperity. Britain—where Karl Marx had studied capitalism and imperialism—had also introduced the socialist welfare state, turned into a model “from-cradle-to-grave” government. It was socialism that was the answer—and not just any socialism, but socialism correctly understood and applied.
The Soviet Union had built socialism according to a material-centered principle, not the human-centered Juche idea. When faced with difficulties, the Soviets had accordingly put their entire stress on increasing production and material wealth. They hadn’t bothered to work on the masses’ ideological remolding. By stressing the material, they had failed to check their society’s penetration by imperialist ideologies—and the subversion that came with it. Gorbachev’s attempts to motivate the masses with material incentives, with money, was contrary to the nature of socialist society. This was a capitalist method, and inevitably would and did lead to a capitalist revival.
Just as I foresaw, the military and economic superpower that was the Soviet Union collapsed overnight. It didn’t require much insight to predict such a turn of events, given the Soviet leadership. The Soviet army, a three-million-strong force with world-class armaments, failed to defend the Party and socialism. It was unable to maintain its existence in a time of peace, not in the day of war. The reason was clear: The ranks had disintegrated philosophically because they hadn’t been molded by the Soviet leadership. Intoxicated by Gorbachev’s poisonous liquor, the veteran army that had beaten Hitler fell into the pitiful lot of a beggar.
Ever since their invasion of Korea, the US imperialists had put forth their “domino theory” to justify aggression and plunder in Asia and throughout the world. The argument was that one nation turning socialist would make it that much easier for the following one to do the same. Soon, such momentum would be unstoppable. Little did the Yanks realize that they weren’t predicting the rise of communism, but its fall.
As the Cold War concluded in the late 1980s, a series of coups d’etat took place throughout socialist Eastern Europe. One after another, governments were disrupted and brought down in Hungary, Poland, East Germany, Albania, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia. The yellow wind of capitalism spread like a narcotic among the people of the socialist countries, paralyzing their sound thinking. Working-class parties were ruined everywhere.
Perhaps the worst domino of all was the one which hit Romania. No world leader was as similar to President Kim Il Sung as Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu. Ceausescu styled himself as the leader of his own nation, and explicitly followed Juche Korea’s lead in many, many other ways.
One day in late December 1989, I was watching the news reports with the Great Leader. Ceausescu and his wife had
been overthrown and been put on “trial.” Only it wasn’t a trial but a farce: The “defense” actually broke ranks at one point and assisted the prosecution! The couple were then put up against a wall and executed, their bodies left on display, slumped on the ground, for the whole world to see. President Kim Il Sung and I just stared at one another. The images and what they implied for Korea—and for both of us personally—spoke for themselves.
“...This is Europe,” I said, with more than a little hesitation. “They’re not the same as us.”
The Great Leader shook his head. “I’ve always said that the people are my god. But gods are fickle, and they are violent, and they are dangerous.” The parties in power in Romania and other Eastern European nations had never developed into “mother parties.” Rather, over the years they’d degenerated into parties of bureaucrats who wielded and abused their power. Our Party, on the other hand, had been a great mother to the masses, holding beautiful flowers and hopes in her bosom and being their most reliable guide to life. The DPRK probably wasn’t in danger. But I still wanted to make absolutely certain that what was occurring in Eastern Europe would never happen in Korea.
I immediately called in all the Party cadres that I could. Every state institution was represented, including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of People’s Armed Forces, the Ministry of People’s Security and the Department of State Security. For far too long, the Great Leader and myself had borne the weight of the revolution and construction. The fact that we had performed so well and achieved so many great accomplishments had left many of these cadres secure in their positions. They knew that we would do any work that they couldn’t.
Those days were now officially over.
As the men gathered around a long conference table, I had a television brought in and played them the footage of what had happened in Romania. Though they were all revolutionaries to the core, watching the scenes made them disquieted and even nauseated. “Do you see this?” I yelled at them. “Do you see how even Ceausescu, the Romanian leader, was killed by the masses like a dog in the street? If they ever rise up in Korea many of us will be hanged—and those in this room will be the first ones!” I squeezed my hand around my throat, so that they could see how serious this matter was.
“We are far closer to China than we ever were to the Europeans,” said one official. “And the Chinese tanks took care of a similar situation quite handily this summer.”
“You’re correct,” I said. “We are not Europeans. But neither are we Chinese. We are Koreans, living in the Juche era. We have the power and ability to make certain that this never happens on our land—but we do have to make that certain. The consequences would be unimaginable. All of you must immediately redouble your efforts in guiding the masses.”
I summoned them all in again every single day that week. And I played that same Romanian footage for them, every single day that week. I wanted the images of the dead Ceausescus to haunt them in their dreams as well as haunting them in their waking hours. To make absolutely certain that such noxious ideas wouldn’t seep into the DPRK, I sent many cadres to the enlightenment centers. Anyone who had spend time in Eastern Europe was too suspect to be allowed to roam free, fomenting dissent.
After Romania came the next domino. Since the end of the Korean War, China had consistently blocked south Korea’s admission into the United Nations as its own nation. But in 1991, the Chinese established diplomatic relations with the “Republic of Korea,” publicly and internationally humiliating the DPRK. We then had no choice but to join the UN ourselves, as a member state distinct from “South Korea.” It seemed as if north Korea had no true allies left—and we did still need allies.
No one—not me, not the Great Leader—had ever denied that building a completely self-reliant economy would take a very long time. By 1990, the DPRK had made tremendous progress toward that goal but hadn’t completely achieved it yet. We still conducted barter trade with the other socialist countries. Our internal economy was conducted with the Korean won, but internationally we traded goods. How that worked was that we received “friendship prices,” with goods being exchanged below the capitalist, for-profit price. As a result of this, we didn’t need dollars or yen; we never really used them.
But beginning in 1991, nations such as Russia, Cuba, Vietnam and China insisted on future payment in hard currency. “We don’t want your goods or your money,” they told us. “We want dollars!” It was American-style capitalism condensed into one slogan. Juche Korea could create virtually anything: art, construction, weaponry. But we’d never be able to create American dollars under any circumstances. As the saying goes, “An empty purse cuts off the ties of friendship.” The DPRK began to face a shortage of raw materials as well as energy. The rate of factory operations began to sharply decrease, which meant less production, which meant all sorts of very unpleasant consequences indeed. A vicious cycle was introduced into the economy.
Despite all of this, I still looked at the bright side of affairs. Maybe, just maybe, this temporary setback in the inevitable path of socialist victory would lead to positive consequences in the short term. During the Cold War, the dominant order in the world was based on the great strength of the United States and the Soviet Union. Each held sway over the other countries in their respective camps. Korea was oftentimes like a shrimp among whales because of her strategic location.
With the conclusion of the Cold War, there no longer was any need for the two countries to challenge each other, trampling the rights of smaller nations in the process. It could have been, it should have been, an occasion for realizing independence throughout the world. There was no longer any excuse for the United States to use its military strength to dominate and interfere with smaller countries.
Yet that’s not what happened. A new specter haunted the world— the specter of “Pax Americana,” a new world order under the complete control of the United States. No one had a better understanding of an unchecked imperialist America than I did. The DPRK had many museums to remember the war atrocities committed by the Yankees.
In September 1991, after decades of Koreans living under a nuclear threat, President George H. W. Bush announced that he would be withdrawing tactical nuclear weapons from south Korea. The news seemed as wonderful as it was unexpected—and long overdue. Most Americans at the time were unaware it was the US that had introduced nuclear weapons to the Korean peninsula in the aftermath of the war, turning the south into the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.
Further, in January 1992, Bush announced the suspension of the Team Spirit joint military exercises, which had been held annually since 1976’s Panmunjom tree incident. These war-simulation exercises had been a constant source of provocation and tension between Korea and the United States. These gestures were not done from magnanimity, of course. The Americans had grossly miscalculated, assuming that Korea would implode like the other socialist nations. When that didn’t happen, they feared that we would seek nuclear weapons. In fact, word soon came from our diplomats that the American were requesting nuclear inspections as a quid pro quo.
Usually, I would immediately reject anything that the US imperialists desired. But in this case they weren’t asking for anything of value, since I knew that their fear was unfounded. North Korea had joined the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1976 and signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1985. We primarily signed because we wanted a world free of nuclear weapons—but we also signed because the treaty established a balance between all its signatories. The agreement was that smaller nations would give up their sovereign right to pursue nuclear weapons, while the nuclear powers promised to never use the nuclear threat against non-nuclear nations.
I concluded that if the Americans wanted peace—and that is what President Bush’s steps suggested—then I could certainly work with them. We accordingly signed the IAEA’s Nuclear Safeguards Accord on January 30, 1992, hoping that it would lead to peace and reunification. I agreed to allow inspect
ors to come visit suspected areas and see that nuclear testing was not underway.
It was all a trap, and I fell for it. The United States released spy satellite photographs in which some buildings and transmission lines weren’t visible. In other words, they didn’t offer pictures of weapons and reactors—they offered pictures of a lack of weapons and a lack of reactors. Since they couldn’t see anything, the Americans claimed that we must have been hiding something.
The reaction was as hysterical as if a UFO were attacking the earth: “The intention to develop nuclear weapons is clear!” I agreed to further inspections, to expose the US imperialists’ slanders. Beginning in May 1992, the IAEA came and performed not one, not two, but a total of five rounds of ad hoc inspections of suspected nuclear facilities. In fact, to calm the fears that the United States had drummed up, I ordered that the inspectors be shown several underground facilities that they hadn’t even been aware of!
Finally, as 1992 came to a close, the inspectors were due to return to Korea for a sixth ad hoc inspection. I thought nothing of it, since the five other inspections had all been unremarkable. Yet the DPRK’s IAEA liaison came in to speak with me, and his demeanor was entirely different that it had been before.
“They want more inspections,” he blurted out.
“What do you mean, a seventh one?”
“No,” he said. “Comrade, they’re asking for special inspections.” He showed me the papers with information from the IAEA, describing the new locations that were now under suspicion.
At a glance, I knew exactly what the papers were referring to. “Those are military installations. No country would allow such information to be made public. This is nothing more an unbearable infringement upon Korea’s sovereignty. The IAEA is making demands that we can’t possibly accede to. Tell me, has any other nation ever undergone these ‘special inspections’?”
Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il Page 26
