B00BY4HXME EBOK (10 page)

Kim Il Sung was never presented in such a way. North Korean propaganda of the early 1950s sometimes referred to Kim Il Sung as “Stalin’s loyal disciple,” but this was done in the times when the alleged primacy of the Soviet Union still remained a core element of the regime’s ideological discourse. Such references disappeared by the late 1950s.

In later eras, some ideological indebtedness to Marx and Lenin was begrudgingly admitted, so their portraits could sometimes be seen in North Korea as well (it seems that the last publicly displayed portrait of
Marx was removed in April 2012, when the country celebrated the dynastic succession of Kim Jong Un). But these references were to a large extent intended for overseas consumption—devices used to placate visiting dignitaries from other Communist countries or to forge better ties with politically useful Western progressives. For domestic audiences, Kim Il Sung was not presented as an heir to, a disciple of, or the recipient of the guidance of any foreign leader, philosopher, or thinker. He was the founding father in his own right, the creator of the “Immortal Juche Idea” and the Greatest Man in the Five Thousand Years of Korean History. “National solipsism” (to borrow the words of Bruce Cumings), the tendency to see Korea as the decisive element of the entire world system, has always been an important feature of the North Korean worldview, so this later statement essentially implied that Kim Il Sung was the greatest human being to ever live.

Since 1972, all North Koreans above 16 years of age were required to sport a badge with Kim Il Sung’s visage when they left their homes. Kim Il Sung portraits needed to be placed at every office and every house; from around 1980 portraits of his son and successor Kim Jong Il were displayed alongside the father (in the 1990s, the portrait of Kim Ch
ǒ
ng-suk, Kim Il Sung’s wife and Kim Jong Il’s mother, was added). There were (and still are) complex regulations that prescribe how the pristine condition of the sacred images should be maintained. If the portraits were damaged, such an incident would be carefully investigated and the people responsible for the maintenance of the portraits would be punished if found guilty of neglect. The North Korean media was (and still is) full of stories about the heroic deeds of North Korean citizens who willingly sacrificed their lives to save portraits of the Great Leader and his son.

Kim Il Sung’s statues were erected across the country, with the largest statue being built on Mansu Hill in Pyongyang in 1972 (it is 22 meters high and initially was gilded with gold leaf). The statues were made centers of elaborate rituals. For example, on the Great Leader’s birthday and some other major official holidays, every North Korean was supposed to go to the nearest statue and after a deep bow lay flowers at the feet of the great man’s visage.

Names of Kim Il Sung and, eventually, Kim Jong Il are to be typed in bold script in North Korean publications (Kim Jong Un’s name began to be typed in bold in late December 2011, a few days after his father’s death). Every major article needs to start with a proper quote from either Kim Il Sung or Kim Jong Il. No exception is made for purely academic publications, including, say, works of liquid state physics or molecular biology. Fortunately for scientists, in his long life Kim Il Sung delivered many speeches and signed many articles, so a proper quote can always be found.

The list of titles of Kim Il Sung and his immediate family members was formalized in the 1970s. Thus, every North Korean knows how to distinguish between the “Great Leader” (Kim Il Sung) and “Dear Leader” (Kim Jong Il) and is also aware that “three Great Generals of the Paekdu Mountain” are Kim Il Sung, his wife Kim Jong Suk, and their son Kim Jong Il. After Kim Jong Il’s death and the ascendency of his son, Kim Jong Un, the latter was given the title of “Supreme Leader.”

Official propaganda established that the Kim family had played a major role in the last 150 years of Korean history. For example, in the 1970s schools began to teach North Korean students that the March 1st Uprising of 1919, the largest outbreak of anti-Japanese, pro-independence sentiment, started in Pyongyang (not in Seoul, as actually was the case) and that its major leader was, of course, Kim Il Sung’s father Kim Hy
ǒ
ng-jik. They also claim that Kim Il Sung, then merely seven years old, took part in the March First rally. In real life Kim Hy
ǒ
ng-jik, like a majority of the educated Koreans of the era, was indeed sympathetic toward the independence movement and was even briefly detained for participation in anti-Japanese activities. Nonetheless, he was by no means a prominent activist, let alone a leader, of the nationalist movement.

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.

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.