B00BY4HXME EBOK Page 8

  The official North Korean historiography didn’t admit the role played by the Korean Communist Party in spreading Marxism in Korea in the 1920s. This is not surprising since nearly all of the founders of this party were eventually purged by Kim Il Sung. According to the North Korean official narrative, the history of Korean Communism began when Kim Il Sung in 1926 founded the Anti-Imperialist Union. This means that Kim Il Sung single-handedly launched the Korean Communist movement at the age of 14—but nobody in Korea would dare not suspend one’s disbelief when it comes to claims of the superhuman qualities of Kim’s family.

  One of the recurring features of this official narrative is an attempt to play down or conceal the foreign influences and connections of Kim Il Sung and his family.

  As part of this systemic manipulation, the official narrative does not admit that Kim Jong Il was born in the Soviet Union on a military base in the vicinity of Khabarovsk. After all, the successor to the Juche Revolutionary Cause and future head of the ultra-nationalist state could not possibly have been born on foreign soil! North Korean propagandists therefore invented a secret guerrilla camp that allegedly existed on the slopes of Mount Paekdu in the early 1940s, claiming Kim Jong Il was born there.

  In an interesting twist, in the 1990s, when the Soviet Union was safely dead and Soviet influence was no longer seen as a danger, North Korean official media finally admitted that Kim Il Sung did spend the early 1940s in the Soviet Union. However, this admission did not lead to disavowal of the Paekdu Camp story, which by that time had become a cornerstone of the official propaganda. Nowadays, a North Korean is supposed to believe that in the early 1940s, Kim Il Sung lived in Soviet exile but still personally led daring guerrilla raids into North Korea (Soviet documents indicate that this was not the case). Allegedly, he did so in the company of his pregnant wife and she thus gave birth to their first child on the sacral—and purely Korean—slopes of Mount Paekdu. To support these improbable claims the North Korean authorities built a “replica” of the Paekdu Secret Camp complete with a log cabin where Kim Jong Il was allegedly born, and made it a site of obligatory pilgrimage.

  The complete control over information flows within society, combined with isolation from the outside world, gave North Korea’s propagandists opportunities their worldwide peers could not dream of. They could successfully hide from the populace even things that would be considered common knowledge in many other societies. At the same time, they could exaggerate or create nonevents with impunity.

  In the media of Kim Il Sung’s era, North Korea was presented as a People’s Paradise, a place where the entire population continually lived in the state of unimaginable happiness. The North Korean cultural products of the period—unlike, for instance, the works of Soviet art of Stalin period—seldom if ever mentioned the existence of internal enemies. Rather, all North Koreans were presented as happy children living under the fatherly care of the omniscient Great Leader. In a remarkable gesture, North Korean banknotes bore the motto “We have nothing to envy,” thus reminding the North Koreans that they were, after all, the happiest nation under heaven.

  THEIR MAJESTIES AND THEIR WOMEN

  As is the case in any dynastic state, the personal and sexual lives of the rulers are by definition political. All candidates for the top job are chosen by their predecessors, and this means that family affairs are difficult to distinguish from the affairs of state.

  The personal lives of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il are quite convoluted and full of unexpected drama. TV producers should be happy about this since stories of passion and jealousy in Kim-era Pyongyang will likely achieve high ratings for the foreseeable future.

  Kim Il Sung was married three times. Not much is known about his very first wife—even her existence is sometimes questioned. She is believed to have been another guerrilla, and most think that the first marriage was childless.

  By the late 1930s, Kim Il Sung had entered his second union, with a girl named Kim Jong Suk. She was also a guerrilla, and she crossed the Soviet frontier in late 1940 together with Kim Il Sung. Barely literate, but kind to and popular with her comrades, she gave birth to three children. Their first son was Kim Jong Il, who would eventually become the North Korean leader.

  Kim Jong Suk died in childbirth in 1949. Soon afterward, Kim Il Sung married Kim Song-ae, who worked at his office at the time. Kim Song-ae remained invisible in North Korean politics until the late 1960s, when she briefly made an attempt to position herself in public politics. She was soon eclipsed by the rise of her stepson, Kim Jong Il. Kim Song-ae bore three children. When Kim Jong Il was finally chosen as successor, they were sent to prestigious diplomatic jobs far away from Pyongyang—a move that provided them with an agreeable lifestyle while rendering them politically harmless (Kim Song-ae’s eldest son serves as North Korea’s ambassador to Poland).

  In his youth, Kim Jong Il had the reputation of a playboy. Indeed, he was popular with girls—not only because he was a crown prince but also because he seems to have been charming (at least if available sources are to be believed). He had a good sense of humor, knew much about cinema and popular culture, and, in spite of being slightly overweight, loved riding motorbikes.

  It seems that Kim Jong Il never formally registered a marriage, so the line between a proper wife and a live-in girlfriend was blurry. However, of all of Kim Jong Il’s women, only two have significance as far as dynastic policy is concerned.

  Kim Jong Il’s first known partner was Song Hye-rim, a stunning movie star who had to divorce in order to move in with Kim Jong Il. In 1971 she gave birth to Kim Jong Nam, the Dear Leader’s first son. However, Song Hye-rim never managed to win the approval of Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il’s mighty father—obviously because she was a daughter of South Korean Communists, whom Kim Il Sung never trusted. At any rate, Song Hye-rim’s relationship with Kim Jong Il collapsed in the early 1970s. Song Hye-rim was sent to a comfortable exile in Moscow, where she died in 2002.

  Her son, Kim Jong Nam, also developed uneasy relations with the rest of the family. Since the early 2000s he has been living in Macao, and occasionally did not act to his father’s liking (including granting remarkably frank interviews to foreign journalists).

  Meanwhile, Kim Jong Il would fall in love with another beauty, Ko Yǒng–hǔi, a dancer from a family of ethnic Koreans in Japan. She had two sons, Kim Jong Chol and Kim Jong Un. For a while in the late 1990s Ko acquired minor political clout, but like her predecessor she died at a relatively young age in 2004.

  After Ko Yǒng–hǔi death, Kim Jong Il reputedly developed relations with the strong-minded and ambitious Kim Ok, his former secretary. Her somewhat special standing was confirmed when Kim Ok appeared at some funeral ceremonies after Kim Jong Il’s death in December 2011.

  It was against such a backdrop that in late 2008, Kim Jong Il finally chose his third son, Kim Jong Un, as his successor. At the time of writing it appears that Kim Kyong Hee, Kim Jong Il’s younger sister, and her husband are expected to act as regents if the Dear Leader dies too soon. But such arrangements are always a murky business and the same can be said about dynastic politics in general.

  Finally, Kim Jong Un broke with all conventions when in July 2012 he began to appear in public with his young and stunningly beautiful wife Ri Sol Ju, of whose background not much is known (it is, however, known that she loves expensive Dior handbags).

  Much in line with this old approach, in 2011 the North Korean media published a worldwide rating of happiness. It stated that the happiest people live in China, with North Koreans coming in second (obviously, they were so moderate in their claims because by that time North Koreans became aware that China had much higher standards of living). Needless to say, the two lowest places in this curious rating were taken by the United States and South Korea.

  Indeed, there was a striking contrast between Korea and the outside world. Predictably, the Communist nations were assumed to be relatively prosperous. Even so, the propaganda of Kim Il Sung’s era did not spend
much time eulogizing the achievements of Soviet cosmonauts or Hungarian milkmaids. In this regard it was remarkably different from other nations of the Communist bloc: as we remember, Kim Il Sung’s leadership saw other Communist countries as dangerously liberal, a source of ideological corruption, and hence did not want to encourage excessive attention to their real or alleged achievements.

  Propagandists also presented the countries of the Third World, especially those who styled themselves as Socialist, in a favorable light. When it covered the developing world, the North Korean media loved to dwell on the great popularity of the Juche Idea across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. If Nodong sinmun of the 1970s was to be believed, perusing works of Kim Il Sung was a favorite pastime of many an African villager.

  For a brief while, attempts to create a worldwide Jucheist movement were an important part of North Korea’s internal and external propaganda. Nearly all of these propaganda operations took place in the Third World. In the developed West such an ideological offering would have few takers, while maintaining such a movement there would be costly. In the Communist bloc, Juche propaganda had an even lower chance of success than in London or Geneva. After all, the surveillance apparatus in these Communist countries was powerful enough to ensure obedience to the most correct brand of Communist ideology—that is, the brand currently accepted by the local leaders. Ordinary people in Communist countries also tended to be unsympathetic toward Juche, which they typically saw as a rude caricature of their own official ideologies.

  Thus, North Korean diplomats and spies concentrated their efforts in the developing world. In the 1970s they created a network of study groups and research institutes there, dedicated to the propagation of Kim Il Sung’s ideology and heavily subsidized by Pyongyang. It soon became clear, however, that the scheme did not work as intended: many entrepreneurial activists were happy to receive cash, but their commitment to the Great Leader was doubtful, as was their ability to influence the politics of their home countries. Nonetheless, the subsidies for the worldwide Juche movement, while reduced around 1980, were never completely stopped since the movement was all too useful for domestic purposes. The North Korean leadership understood that it would be good to expose the North Koreans to the sight of exotic foreigners who allegedly come to Korea to lay flowers at the statues of the Dear Leader and confess their unwavering admiration for the Greatest Man on Earth. The government of North Korea had to pay for return air tickets and accommodation, but in domestic policy terms it might have been a good investment.

  During the Kim Il Sung era, the media would report that inhabitants of the Communist bloc and Third World were doing relatively well, but remained inferior to the North Koreans. Things were different in the countries of the West—above all in the United States, the embodiment of all things evil. The United States was a country of aggressors who made a living by robbing the world of its resources, a nation of blood-thirsty warmongers and sadists. Since kindergarten, the North Koreans were exposed to endless tales about acts of sadistic brutality perpetrated by the disgusting Yankees during the Korean War. They were also reminded that the same acts were still committed in South Korea by these evil monsters (one of the most common sobriquets used for Americans in the North Korean media was “the American imperialists, the two-legged wolves”).

  Indeed, the worst place on earth to live was South Korea, “a land without light, a land without air.” Until the late 1990s, South Korea was presented as a destitute American colony, whose population lived in abject poverty. In movies and paintings of that period, the South Korean cityscape looked positively hellish. People dressed in rags, lived in shacks, and looked for edible garbage at the dumping grounds near US military bases. Those disgusting “Yankees” were often present in the picture as well—fat American soldiers, with hugely protruding noses and ugly, caricatured features, riding in jeeps (if such a jeep hit a Korean girl, they would be laughing approvingly) or standing on the major crossroads with automatic rifles, always ready to kill innocent Koreans.

  The Year One textbook presents North Korea’s children with an enlightening picture: “A school principal in South Korea beats and drives from school a child who cannot pay his monthly fee on time.”29 In high school they learn that “Nowadays, South Korea is swamped with seven million unemployed. Countless people stand in queues in front of employment centers, but not even a small number of jobs is forthcoming. The factories are closing one after another, and in such a situation even people who have work do not know when they will be ousted from their position.”30 Needless to say, these horror stories are pure fabrications—primary education is free in South Korea and even in the worst times of economic crisis there were never “seven million unemployed.”

  Of course, there was resistance. Heroic South Koreans were secretly publishing works of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, holding revolutionary meetings in basement rooms adorned with portraits of the Great and Dear Leaders and, while imprisoned, professing their loyalties to the Juche Idea in spite of the unspeakable tortures inflicted upon them by the pro-American puppet police.

  The explicit assumption was that an overwhelming majority of South Koreans envied their prosperous and happy brethren in the North and dreamt about a day when they too would enjoy life at the bosom of the Great Leader. Only a large US military presence and an iron-fist rule by a handful of shameless collaborators prevented this great dream from coming true.

  To what extent did the average North Koreans of Kim Il Sung’s days believe these propaganda messages? By the late 1980s, a majority of the North Korean population had no personal memory of times when things were seriously different and had no access to alternative sources of information. There must have been some skeptics, especially among better-educated people or among those who had some exposure to overseas life. But, these people were wise enough to remain silent. In North Korea, the unusual intensity of propaganda was combined with the self-imposed information blockade and decades-long consistency of the ideological message. This ensured that the official worldview remained unquestioned by a majority. After all, the people had their own lives to live and were not that much concerned about how sincere in their statements Juche worshippers from Venezuela or Zimbabwe really were.

  BE READY FOR BODY COUNT

  Considering the North Korean regime’s habit of politicizing everything, one should not expect North Korean math textbooks to be free from politics.

  Let’s have a brief look through the Year Two math textbook for North Korean primary schools, published in 2003 (or officially Year 91 of the Juche Era). This textbook is a masterpiece of politicized math and I would like to introduce some representative gems of this treasure chest.

  Admittedly, the majority of the questions in the textbook are not political—indeed they have no backstory at all. Kids are required to deal with abstract numbers and areas. However, some 20 percent of all questions are different—they include a story, to make the math appear more interesting and relevant. Some of the stories are quite innocent—about a train’s timetable or kids’ games. But some are not.

  For instance, take an engaging quiz from page 17: “During the Fatherland Liberation War [North Korea’s official name for the Korean War] the brave uncles of Korean People’s Army killed 265 American Imperial bastards in the first battle. In the second battle they killed 70 more bastards than they had in the first battle. How many bastards did they kill in the second battle? How many bastards did they kill all together?”

  On page 24, the “American imperialist bastards” fared better and were lucky to survive the pious slaughter: “During the Fatherland Liberation War the brave uncles of the Korean People’s Army in one battle killed 374 American imperial bastards, who are brutal robbers. The number of prisoners taken was 133 more than the number of American imperial bastards killed. How many bastards were taken prisoner?”

  The use of math for body counts is quite popular—there are four or five more questions like this in the textbook. As every North Korean c
hild is supposed to believe, his South Korean peers also spend days and nights fighting the American imperialist bastards. Thus, this also creates a good opportunity to apply simple math.

  On page 138 one can find the following question: “South Korean boys, who are fighting against the American imperialist wolves and their henchmen, handed out 45 bundles of leaflets with 150 leaflets in each bundle. They also stuck 50 bundles with 50 leaflets in each bundle. How many leaflets were used?”

  Page 131 also provides kids with a revision question about leaflet dissemination: “Chadori lives in South Korea which is being suppressed by the American Imperial Wolves. In one day he handed out 5 bundles of leaflets, each bundle containing 185 leaflets. How many leaflets were handed out by boy Chadori?”

  That said, North Korean children are not supposed to be too optimistic. Life in South Korea is not just composed of heroic struggle but also great suffering. On page 47 they can find the following question: “In one South Korean village which is suffering under the heel of the American imperialist wolf bastards, a flood destroyed 78 houses. The number of houses damaged was 15 more than the number destroyed. How many houses were damaged or destroyed in this South Korean village all together?”

  These sufferings are nicely contrasted with the prosperity enjoyed by the happy North Koreans. On the same page, the question about destroyed South Korean houses is immediately followed by this question: “In the village where Yong-shik lives, they are building many new houses. 120 of these houses have 2 floors. The number of houses with 3 floors is 60 more than the number of houses with two floors. How many houses have been built in Yong-shik’s village?”

  Indeed, feats of productive labor often become topics of North Korean questions, with robots, tractors, TV sets, and houses being mentioned most frequently. Interestingly, in some cases questions might produce results that were clearly not intended by the compilers. For example, on page 116 one can find the following question: “In one factory workers produced 27 washing machines in 3 days. Assuming that they produce the same number of washing machines every day, how many machines do they produce in one day?” One has to struggle hard to imagine a factory that manages to produce merely nine washing machines a day, but the irony clearly escapes the textbook’s authors (after all, a washing machine is a very rare luxury item in North Korea).