The Hidden People of North Korea (38 page)

Belief and Consequences

People are generally reluctant to abandon the values, beliefs, and attitudes that have guided their lives—even if their lives have not been very satisfying or successful. It is interesting to note that defectors often hold on to their positive attitudes toward Kim Il-sung even after learning how much he lied to them and how much damage he did to North Korea. A growing number of Koreans in the North can see that they have been given the wrong road-map for life, but they do not know where to get a more accurate one. In contrast, a (dramatically shrinking) number of North Koreans maintain implicit faith in the mapmaker (by whom they usually mean Kim Il-sung, not Kim Jong-il) and believe that by following his teachings they will eventually make it to a socialist paradise.

The mental life of North Koreans is as bankrupt as their material life (we refer here to their beliefs about the economy, politics, and the world outside their country, not to their beliefs and emotions about self and family, which they hold in common with people of all cultures and countries). The Kim regime has failed in its effort to create a “new man” who is a Kim loyalist and a committed communist. Although most North Koreans no longer believe in socialism, that doesn’t mean they like or understand capitalism. One of the great attractions of communism—but also an important reason why it does not succeed in the long run—is that people do not have to take personal responsibility for their life choices; they only have to follow the commands of the party. After defectors arrive in South Korea, most of the responsibility for their success or failure rests on their shoulders, and they find this experience troubling.

Surely one can find no other post–Cold War society where such a wide gap exists between propaganda and reality, between what one is supposed to do and what actually works. In particular, the North Korean elites, who know more about their country and about the outside world than ordinary North Koreans, confront a serious contradiction. On the one hand, their leader and his media say that North Korea is the best country in the world to live in; on the other hand, they know that domestic conditions are bad and that conditions outside North Korea are much better. Do the elites tolerate this contradiction in their minds, or do they somehow resolve it? Citizens of the former communist regimes in Eastern Europe faced a similar dilemma.

As one of Mikhail Gorbachev’s aides recounted, “Gorbachev, me, all of us, we were double-thinkers, we had to balance truth and propaganda in our minds all the time.”
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In our first North Korea book, written in the late 1990s, we concluded that the North Korean elites were indeed double-thinkers, although most of the time they did not dwell on contradictions. It appears that over the last several years, double-thinking has spread to the majority of North Koreans. As the saying goes, they are “daytime socialists and nighttime capitalists.” People are still forced to attend political indoctrination sessions and hang portraits of the Kim family on their walls, but their thoughts are about the market economy. North Koreans lead a double mental life in another respect. In the narrow world of their personal experience, they have developed rudimentary knowledge about how to survive within the constraints of a ruined economy, but they are ignorant of the larger sphere of economics and politics. As a consequence, their newfound beliefs can guide their dayto-day affairs but cannot help them address the underlying macroeconomic and political problems that restrict them to the pursuit of a kind of precarious cottage capitalism. They do not know how things could be better; nor do they have the opportunity to protest against the way things are now.

How does a North Korean respond if socially prescribed means of success—such as going to work at a factory and joining the party—do not lead to a better life or to any life that is tolerable? Sociologist Robert K. Merton studied what people do when society’s norms conflict with social reality.
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In Merton’s terminology, those who do what society dictates, even when aware that they are failing to achieve the goals that society promises, are
conformists
.
Ritualists
are those who follow the rules without even thinking about what goals they are trying to achieve.
Innovators
employ socially unacceptable (e.g., illegal) means to reach socially approved goals, while
retreatists
reject both the means and goals that society prescribes in favor of alternative lifestyles.
Rebels
also reject both means and goals, but like the early communists, they actively try to change society. In North Korea, many of the conformists and ritualists didn’t survive the hard times of the 1990s. A relatively small number of retreatists fled to China. No one has rebelled. The majority, after years of conforming, have become innovators who are stealthily building a new economy and culture.

The anthropological work of James C. Scott, who studied how Indonesian peasants responded to the oppression of their employers and their employer-friendly government, suggests a somewhat similar way to describe how North Koreans have responded to the widening gap between what they are taught and what they must do to survive.
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Scott observed that the Indonesian elites (like the North Korean elites) shaped the official ideology, and the Indonesian peasants (like North Korean workers) made no attempt to dispute that ideology or to rebel, even though their experience told them that the official ideology was false, and its promised goals were unobtainable for them.

Like the powerless in many places and at many times in history, the Indonesian peasants used the “weapons of the weak” to protect their interests and protest against conditions. These weapons included malingering at work, lying to superiors, and pretending to be ignorant of their duties. Peasants also resorted to pilfering and absenteeism, and in extreme cases, they committed sabotage and arson. None of these responses openly challenged their superiors or the government authorities; all of these responses are found today in North Korea. North Koreans occasionally grumble or, in recent years, even raise their voices at local meetings, but for the most part each person takes care of his or her own business, with the collective result being a kind of silent rebellion that holds back the socialist economy and makes a mockery of the regime’s politics.

Like the Indonesian ruling class in Scott’s study, the North Korean cadres pretend that everything is working. They hesitate to report crimes or failure to achieve economic goals because to do so would show them in a bad light to their superiors in Pyongyang. Instead, they send up rosy reports, and the people at the top do not ask questions because they do not want to be held accountable for failure either. At the very top, Kim Jong-il may be partly aware of how rotten North Korean society is, but there is little he can do about it, short of instituting the kind of reforms that would threaten to disrupt a half century of Kim family rule. And while the propagandists continue to grind out editorials and political lectures that fall on deaf ears, the people go about constructing their own reality—not a coherent ideology or world-view but a rough-and-ready guide to everyday survival.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Law, Political Class, and Human Rights

The Kim regime’s poor treatment of its people is a key element of its governing style. It is not a symptom of “system malfunction” or the “collapse of discipline and lack of control by the central government,” as one South Korean professor has suggested.
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Just as a democracy cannot exist without free elections, a dictatorship cannot exist without political oppression. The individual liberties fundamental to the Western concept of human rights confer power on the people that directly competes with the power of a leader. Simply put, the Kim regime is built on the violation of human rights—and not only the right to individual liberties but also the right to food, work, and safety. Only Kim enjoys the freedom to eat what he wants, live and travel where he wants, and read what he wants. North Koreans are granted these rights by the constitution, but in practice anyone who tries to exercise them will end up in prison.

North Korea is a society with many laws, but it is not a society
of
law as liberal democracies define it: “Rule by law basically refers to the use of law as a tool to communicate and enforce the will of a powerful subset of a society on the remainder of the society. Rule of law, on the other hand, refers to the concept that not only individual citizens but also the government itself is subject to and is limited by the law, and that certain human rights are protected by the law against infringement by other individuals or the government itself.”
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In an apparent attempt to convince the international community that it is a lawful society that protects human rights and the rights of foreign business enterprises, the government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) now publishes many of its criminal and commercial laws.
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In August 2004 the government published a collection of 112 laws, including the Law on the National Flag, the State Funeral Law, the Fruit Culture Law, the Library Law, and the Law on Fish Breeding.
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As the titles indicate, most of these laws are state and party guidelines for how things are supposed to be done, with the added bonus for the regime that more laws are available to punish people for political mistakes.

The North Korean legal system is under the control of the party, as is stated plainly in Chapter 1, Article 11 of the 1998 constitution: “The DPRK shall carry out all of its activities under the leadership of the KWP [Korean Workers’ Party].” Common to all dictatorships, the law is a tool to consolidate the ruling party and the authority of the ruling class, while at the same time providing a patina of legitimacy for the government. In a collective society like North Korea’s, one should not expect the law to protect the rights of the individual; rather, it is the society as represented by the party and the leader that warrants protection. As Kim Il-sung said, “Our judicial organs are a weapon for carrying out the functions of the dictatorship of the proletariat.”
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North Korea’s controlling legal code is not even a state law but rather a list of party principles in the form of the Ten-Point Principle (Ten Principles) for Solidifying the Party’s Monolithic Ideological System, mentioned in chapter 6. The principles appeared in 1974 and were attributed to Kim Jongil during the days when he was making a reputation as the interpreter and enforcer of his father’s
Juche
theory.
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The first principle reads, “All society must be dyed with Kim Il-sung’s revolutionary ideology,” and the entire list can be paraphrased in the following manner:

Accept the ideology of Kim Il-sung.
Respect, revere, and be loyal to Kim.
Make Kim’s authority absolute.
Believe in Kim’s ideology.
Carry out Kim’s instructions with unconditional loyalty.
Strengthen the party’s unity and solidarity around Kim.
Imitate Kim’s personality and work methods.
Repay Kim in loyalty for the political life he has given you.
Establish strong discipline such that everyone uniformly follows Kim’s
   lead.
See to it that future generations inherit Kim’s revolutionary task.

To promote the illusion that the DPRK is a democratic country, periodic elections are held that are wholly typical of totalitarian communist systems; that is, they are forced votes of confidence in the party. On the advice and consent of higher levels, the members of the local party election committee choose one candidate for each office. In the run-up to election day, which is a national holiday, the media try to generate excitement. Banners with slogans like “Let us consolidate revolutionary sovereignty as firm as a rock by participating in the elections” are hung on buildings, and on election day agitprop teams beat drums and sing and shout outside the polling places to create a festive atmosphere.

The voting is anticlimactic. First thing in the morning, people of voting age (seventeen and older) proceed to their local polling places, where their registration cards are checked. After bowing to portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, they receive a ballot with the name of the party’s candidate. For a yes vote, the ballot is dropped into the ballot box. If anyone were foolish enough to vote
against
the candidate, it would be necessary to pick up a pencil and cross out the candidate’s name before dropping the ballot into the box. Since a police officer, security agent, or party official is present at every polling place, a no voter would be immediately investigated. Everyone who is healthy enough to get to a polling place is required to vote, and those unable to make it to the polls can cast a ballot in a mobile ballot box or by proxy. A special problem concerns the thousands of North Koreans who have illegally left their homes for other towns or to cross over into China. If the entire family has departed, the local authorities can list them as deceased, but if some family members remain, they are held accountable for their missing members and will have to pay a hefty bribe to local party and police investigators to register the missing persons as dead. Otherwise, the missing family members would be classified as traitors to the state, and the entire family would be in trouble.
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After voting, people are supposed to spend the rest of the day singing and dancing to show support for the regime and the election process. Election results are announced the same day and are always the same: a voter turnout above 99 percent (99.98 percent in the 2009 election for the Supreme People’s Assembly) and 100 percent approval of the party’s candidates. The media celebrate the election as a great victory for Kim Jong-il and the nation: “The election of deputies to the local power bodies [in the July 2007 nationwide local elections] marked an important occasion in reinforcing as firm as a rock the revolutionary government of the DPRK led by Kim Jong-il and further increasing the function and role of the people’s power by electing persons of ability, who have devotedly worked for the party and the leader, the country and the people, in the local power bodies.”
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