Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il

by Michael Malice

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, take one of the first days of tunneling this past winter. The whole pit suddenly became submerged.”

  “Which could have ruined the whole project.”

  “That’s correct. Understanding this, the soldiers jumped into the water and eventually they blocked the hole. Unfortunately, being in the freezing water caused some of the men to grow quite ill.”

  I looked at the officer’s face, and I understood that this wasn’t the worst of it. He’d been gauging my reaction, afraid to tell the me the whole truth. “Go on. What other things have happened?”

  “A section of the roof collapsed once when a unit was digging an incline, trapping the soldiers. Even without a single drop of available drinking water, even though it was hard to breathe, they still continued their construction work. Their comrades tried to give them rice balls through a tube, but they told us to save the food for those who needed it more. They simply wanted compressed air so that they could continue working, as air was free and plentiful. At the end, almost all of them survived the incident.”

  I winced. “How many were lost?”

  “Just the one, comrade. He’d been critically injured during the collapse. You’ll be pleased to know that he was singing revolutionary songs until the last moment of his life, encouraging his colleagues on to greater feats of construction. He died a soldier battling to achieve modern civilization.”

  I’d have been more pleased if he’d still lived as a soldier battling to achieve modern civilization. I’d be more pleased if more people were living all throughout Korea in general. But I couldn’t focus on such things in that moment. I was there to validate the soldiers’ hard work and courage, and that’s why I needed to do what I could. “In the decades to come,” I boomed, “they will say that the revolutionary soldier spirit was born here, at the Anbyon Youth Power Station!”

  As one, the soldiers began to sing “No Motherland Without You,” a wonderful song that had been written in my honor. I applauded vigorously when they were done, knowing that it was I who should have been singing their praises instead. “It’s almost time for lunch,” I finally pointed out.

  Instantly the atmosphere became one of fear, even terror. The commanding officer nodded with great strain. “...Of course, comrade,” he said.

  The soldier-builders looked at one another, not knowing what to do, desperately hoping that somehow food would appear from somewhere. They’d obviously not expected my visit to last as long as it had.

  “You know what food I’d enjoy more than any other?” I quickly said. “Rice balls. Those same rice balls that the trapped soldiers had refused, ones just like those will suit me fine.”

  “We can’t serve you rice balls!” the officer exclaimed.

  “Oh, come now. I ate rice balls during the years of the Fatherland Liberation War and in the days of postwar reconstruction. All our people did. When I was in school, I used to wrap rice balls in paper and thrust them into my pocket so that I could eat them with my friends on the grass during a break from class. I still love to eat them now and then, to remember the difficult bygone days and to gain strength from their successful resolution. In fact, rice balls are the ideal food for us revolutionaries when we travel.”

  “No, comrade. We can’t serve you rice balls because we have none to offer you. I’m very, very sorry.” Then and there, the man began to cry.

  I walked over and patted him on the back. “That’s fine, that’s fine. Don’t worry about me. I’ll have whatever you’re having, everyone the same. I don’t even need but a small portion since I’m in a rush. You know how it is, I often go without solid or timely meals. What will we be having, then?”

  The officer once again straightened up into a semblance of attention. “We have kimchi, comrade.”

  “Oh, wonderful!” I quickly said. “Kimchi is my favorite. That’s even better than rice balls, I was going to suggest kimchi but didn’t, because I wasn’t sure you had any. Did you know that the Korean people lack a certain digestive enzyme, one which is provided by kimchi? This is terrific. What a wonderful treat.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I noticed one of the soldier-builders trying to catch the commanding officer’s attention. The young man was attempting to be sly about the matter but was apparently better suited for construction than for guile; I couldn’t help but notice him. The commanding officer glared at him to remain quiet, but I motioned for the young soldier to speak anyway. Unsure of what to do, the soldier’s gaze bounced back and forth between the two of us. Finally he worked up the courage to say what he wanted to. “We have something else to eat, comrade.”

  Now the commanding officer blatantly yelled at the soldier. “I’m sure you are mistaken!”

  “I’m sure he’s not,” I interjected. “What else do you have to share? I know it will taste superb, simply due to the company that I’m keeping.” The young solider drew himself up, strong and tall. “We also have gruel.”

  “Gruel?”

  “Gruel,” he nodded. This young soldier was simply offering all that he had to his Dear Leader. He obviously didn’t mean to offer gruel to the “gruel lord” and didn’t understand the implications of what he was saying—but if his commanding officer did.

  Suddenly I started smiling. With no effort on my part, my mouth pulled back into a grimace. The situation at the Anbyon Youth Power Station was absurd, just as the situation in all of the DPRK was absurd. Nothing was operating as it should have been. If I couldn’t be blamed for causing the horrors, then surely I could be blamed for not fixing them. “Comrades,” I sighed, “I think I’ll pass on lunch after all. I have many other sites to inspect and I don’t want the day to get ahead of me.”

  “Yes, comrade.”

  I turned and walked briskly to my car, my entourage following at my heels. We drove away in silence, with none of them understanding what to make of my mood. Thirty very quiet minutes later, we began to pass an overgrown field. “Stop the vehicle!” I told the driver.

  “Right away, comrade.” He gradually brought the car to a halt and then pulled over by the side of the road.

  “Everyone get out!” I ordered. Quizzically, the men followed me onto the highway, standing in the middle of nowhere for no apparent reason. “Take a look around you, a good look. What do you see?”

  They were all smart men, so they understood this was some sort of test. Yet none of them could even begin to hazard a guess, as there was nothing of interest about our location whatsoever. “I see the beauty of Juche Korea?” one of them said, completely unsure.

  “You know what I see?” I said, my voice growing strained. “I see grass, all around us. Yet this is what passes for food in Korea nowadays. Our people are hungry, starving and dying by the thousands, by the hundreds of thousands if not millions, and no one knows what to do. No one! Do you? Or you? Do any of you?”

  “The Juche farming method initiated by President Kim Il Sung,” one recited, “is the basis of the agricultural policy of Korea. It stresses improvement of seeds and two-crop farming a year so as to make maximum use of the limited cropland, as well as cultivation of the right crop on the right soil and in the right time. Particularly noteworthy is the promotion of diversified farming and the increased production of organic fertilizer.”

  I had succeeded in establishing a monolithic ideology in the Party, and here was my consequence: Everyone had one idea and only one idea. No one could think of anything else to say, for even considering such a thing would be evidence of disloyalty. I couldn’t count on anyone else for help. No one in all of Korea had to be as self-reliant as I did.

  I stepped back into the car by myself. Then I rolled up the dark windows and locked the doors. I sat there for quite a while, breathing deeply, my shoulders trembling. I tried to regain my composure but my grief was based on a simple reality: I was powerless to help the victims of this famine. Eventually I took out my handkerchief and managed to wipe my cheeks dry. I put on my shaded sunglasse
s so that none of the men could see how red my eyes had become. Then I rolled the window back down and called out to them. “I need to return home at once.”

  “What about the meetings later this afternoon?” asked my secretary. “Cancel them. Cancel them all.”

  When the car pulled up to my home, I walked in and went straight to my bedroom. I called my staff and gave strict orders not to be disturbed under any circumstances. Then I locked the door and sat on my bed. I reached over to a small box that I had on my nightstand, turned the key and opened the lid. There, lying cold against plush velvet, were the two guns that I’d received from each of my parents when I had been a boy.

  I took out Mother’s gun and then placed it back; I doubted it would ever fire. Then I took out the gun handed to me by the Great Leader and looked it over. All the parts still spun smoothly and easily. Maybe, I thought, this gun was my answer. It would be very easy to simply pull the trigger, and then all this misery would go away forever. It was an unimaginable choice, but I was in an impossible situation. If I asked for more international assistance, my show of weakness would invite war. If I didn’t ask for any assistance, my show of strength would invite famine. In either case, it meant death on a level unseen in Korea in decades— perhaps ever.

  I recalled what General Kim Il Sung had said when he’d handed me that very gun: “You must bear in mind that a gun is the revolutionary’s eternal companion. A gun never betrays its master, though everything else in the world should change. It will help you guarantee victory like nothing else will.”

  He’d been right. He’d always been right. It wasn’t simply my mother who had saved General Kim Il Sung; it was her gun. It wasn’t simply the General and his guerrillas who drove the Japanese out of Korea; it was his gun and it was theirs—just as the guns of the glorious Korean People’s Army had repulsed the Americans’ assault during the Fatherland Liberation War.

  The gun was truly the answer to all of my problems. It was the answer to all of Korea’s problems. I hadn’t become the leader in order to abolish the revolution. No, I was meant to fulfill it! I put the gun back and locked the box again. With a smile on my face, I stood up and left my bedroom. I had work to do, millions of lives to save, a nation to preserve and the Juche idea of President Kim Il Sung to uphold.

  It didn’t matter if my officials had no solutions to offer, no fixes or panaceas of any kind. I didn’t need any of them to help me. I didn’t need anyone at all. I was armed, and I was armed with the most powerful ideology of all time: the ideology of the gun.

  Chapter 18

  Me and a Gun

  The food problem facing the DPRK wasn’t a problem of production or a problem of distribution. No, it was a problem of ideology. A leader can only successfully administer affairs of state when he develops his own philosophy. If he is to lead the revolution, he must develop his philosophy into a political doctrine. He needs to determine the main force of the revolution—something neither immutable nor absolute in any era or in any society.

  It took me quite a while to determine it, but I grew convinced that my leadership philosophy had to be the philosophy of the gun. The only way for the DPRK to survive would be to meet foreign domination with arms. The victory of socialism would exist on the army’s bayonets. That meant that in the modern era, the Korean People’s Army was the most essential force in the revolution. All our problems would be solved by giving precedence to military affairs. Going forward, the rifle needed to stand above the hammer and sickle. The DPRK could live without candy, but we couldn’t live without bullets.

  ON THE SONGUN IDEA

  I called my newly systematized leadership philosophy Songun (“military first”) politics. My growing understanding was based on the fact that the armed forces in Korea were founded long before the Party and the state. I recognized that this wasn’t simply a matter of chronology—it was a matter of strategy. The military had come first in terms of its existence, but it also came first in terms of importance. Indeed, General Kim Il Sung himself had consistently prioritized military affairs throughout his life.

  Imperialists claim that wars break out when tensions escalate between nations. This is untrue. Two nations might engage in the most bitter disagreement, but war will never break out if they’re both strong and committed to peace. Historically speaking, imperialists decide on aggression when tensions relax, not when they increase. The Japs had intensified their peace offensive prior to Pearl Harbor. Likewise, their ally Hitler appealed to the Soviets for friendship before invading them.

  I was well aware that the US imperialists greatly preferred defeating the DPRK without having to fire a shot, and I was further aware that my conflict with them was just as much about ideas as it was about military might. It’s far easier to destroy a nation with ideology than even with nuclear weapons. The power of a military strike is finite, but an ideology has no limit. After all, it’s not weapons that fight a war. Weapons without human beings are no more than pieces of steel. A fearful army cannot be strong, no matter how advanced its weaponry may be.

  My soldier-centered view of war was Juche’s man-centered doctrine applied to a military context. That made the KPA fundamentally different from all other armed forces. No other leader on earth put such stress on developing the ideological power of his soldiers as I began to.

  Giving ideological prominence to the military didn’t mean lowering the status of the masses. Quite the opposite: It provided a guarantee for their position. In the DPRK, the army and the people didn’t have an antagonistic relationship as they did in some other nations. The people were parents to the army and the army were the people’s children. Commanders cherished their soldiers just as much as their real siblings, and soldiers trusted and followed their commanders like their older brothers and sisters. The KPA and the masses were quite literally one family.

  This unity between the people and the army traced its roots to the comradeship of the anti-Japanese guerrillas, and was what made a “military regime” impossible in the DPRK. My politics were based on the independence of the people, not on misanthropy and national chauvinism. The leader could never therefore become a “Fuhrer”; the two had absolutely nothing in common.

  Gaining a clear perspective on how to handle Korea’s situation still didn’t make it easy to implement the solution. The military buildup that I envisioned required a huge investment of both money and manpower. Yes, our armed forces gave back more than what it took in. Our defense industry had heavy industry as its core, with the greatest concentration of modern science and technology anywhere in Korea. Its growth spurred on a great deal of scientific and technological growth throughout every other sector. But that was a long-term benefit. In the immediate term, my decision to build up the military while many starved was an enormously difficult choice. I only hoped that our eventual victory would demonstrate to the people why they had to tighten their belts.

  My first steps were to use the KPA to shore up key industries—such as coal-mining, power and rail transport—as well as to further develop agriculture. Fortunately, the KPA was good at everything. They happily built whatever was necessary, from highways and docks to factories and monuments. They went to the power stations to increase electrical generation when it was in short supply; they mined coal when it wasn’t supplied in time; they helped peasants in farming so as to solve the food problem. Whenever people died in a train station while waiting for the train to arrive, it was KPA patrol trucks that carted the bodies away. The soldiers’ cheerful demeanor kept the Juche spirit alive as the next plagues began to hit Korea.

  The loss of electricity wreaked havoc with sanitation: pumps failed, causing waste to flow into the drinking-water systems. Even I don’t know how much damage that caused. Malaria was also reported. Then, when the summer came, people weakened by malnourishment fell victim to cholera. The Ministry of Public Health even recorded a handful of cases of polio.

  As with the shortage of food, so did we face a shortage of medical supplies. Despe
rate, I gave orders for the ill to be treated with traditional Koryo medicine instead. We used watermelon and beer to reduce swelling. Animals were hunted for their curative properties. Instead of surgically removing tumors—we had no anesthesia—doctors administered an extract of ginseng and mushrooms. According to tradition, such an extract enhanced a patient’s natural healing ability and changed malignant tumors into benign ones. All these procedures worked exactly as well as one might expect.

  In the autumn came tidal waves, striking furiously at coastal areas and severely damaged the crops there. Determined to win, I launched a war against the elements themselves. Under my Songun leadership, the military was there to protect the precious grains. All up and down the coast, soldiers carried bags filled with dirt through waist-deep mud. When parts of the embankment gave way, the soldiers held back the water with their own bodies. They kept working even as the nights grew dark, feeling with their hands and fixing any leaks as needed.

  It wasn’t only physical barriers that were breaking down throughout Korea: Our walls of order were increasingly turning porous as well. Traitors began to cross the border into China, bringing news of our travails to the outside world. Thankfully, the foreigners scoffed at the famine statistics; the figures sounded too inflated to be possible. It was far easier for them to dismiss the data as yet more hysterical north Korean propaganda.

  Then came the thievery. Antirevolutionary elements began to steal from farms or the PDS centers. Highwaymen began to rob Koreans distributing goods from one area to another. In all these cases, the military took care of the offenders. The worst of the thieves were executed publicly, educating hundreds and thousands by striking down one. Such punishments taught an important lesson to those who witnessed them: antisocial behavior was a function of the mind, not of the stomach. These class enemies were choosing to commit crimes against the masses, so the soldiers always aimed for the traitors’ corrupt brains.