Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (168 page)

3.
South Korean critics had argued since at least the 1970s that North Korean workers were exhausted from their hopped-up labors. “After the desperate struggle to strengthen the ruling system and to achieve economic growth through the system, North Korea must now work to meet the demands of the labor-exhausted people” (Chay Pyung-gil, “The Policy Directions of the North Korea Regime”
Vantage Point
[November 1978]: p. 12).

4.
China’s “official data seriously underestimate China’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product) by a factor of three,” said a report by the East Asia Analytical Unit of Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, cited in a Reuters report on page 7 of
Korea Times,
December 18, 1992. Tripling China’s official per capita GDP figure of $370 as the Australian analysts suggested would yield a sum in the range of most estimates of the North Korean per capita figure. The latter estimates, in turn, may have failed to reflect economic shrinkage.

5.
Kim Il-sung rode in an American-made limousine.

6.
A South Korean professor had predicted this bind in 1979: “In North Korea the mental character of a man is organized by means of formulating the official level of aspiration. The objects of the basic needs and desires of North Koreans are food, clothing and shelter. Their needs and desires beyond them are restrained and disapproved. They are trained to compare today’s living standards with those of long past, thus inducing them to be content with the apparent and meager improvement in the misrepresented reality. … [N]orth Korea does not permit the generation of desires above a certain prescribed level. … Discovery of a new object of desire may prove a major impact. If North Koreans are exposed to household appliances and housing facilities used by people of better-off countries, they are bound to be impressed and feel discontented” (Prof. Koh Young-bok, “The Structure and Nature of North Korean Society,”
Vantage Point
[December 1979], pp. 7–8).

7.
North Korea walked out of rescheduling talks in 1987, whereupon two syndicates comprising 140 Japanese, Australian and European banks declared Pyongyang in default on the amount owing to them: $770 million.

8.
Kim Il-sung himself voiced a similar complaint in his memoirs
(With the Century
[see chap. 2, n. 2], vol. 2, p. 99), in the remark I quote in chapter 3 that “[s]ome people say that communists are devoid of human feelings and know neither life nor love that is worthy of human beings. But such people are totally ignorant of what communists are like.”

9.
Official historian Baik Bong complains that, as a November 1946 election held to ratify nominations for the provincial, city, and county people’s committees approached, “political enthusiasm increased among all the people, but at the same time, maneuverings by reactionaries assumed increasingly open proportions. Manipulated by the U.S. imperialists, the reactionaries pretended to be ‘friends of believers’ in an attempt to lead Christians to stay away from the election. They also spread slanderous and misleading statements such as ‘The election has no meaning,’ ‘The election is certain to become a one-man show for one particular party,’ and ‘We will get land back for you.’ They used all possible malicious tactics, including the instigation of what is called the ‘black box’ campaign. But all the subversive activities of the revolutionaries failed to deceive the people” (Baik II, p. 180). (Black box was for no votes, white for yes.)

10.
Kim,
With the Century,
vol. 1, p. 362. Kim wrote, “Their immaculate religious faith was always associated with patriotism, and their desire to build a peaceful, harmonious and free paradise found expression invariably in their patriotic struggle for national liberation.”

Richard Read, a correspondent of
The Oregonian
who was in Pyongyang to cover the festival, visited the Catholic church and noticed churchgoers depositing their Kim Il-sung badges in a bowl as they entered, “telling me that something genuine or at least different was going on. A student from Kim Il-sung University interpreted my interview with the priest. The interpreter’s English was good, and he seemed relatively sophisticated. The priest, it materialized, drove a .Mercedes and made more money than the highest-ranking party member I’d been allowed to meet. Toward the end I asked: Who’s more important to you, Kim Il-sung or God? The interpreter looked thoroughly confused for the first time in the interview. Who’s God?’ he asked” (e-mail to the author, May 31, 2003).

Thomas J. Belke in
Juche: A Christian Study of North Korea’s State Religion
(Bartlesville, Oklahoma: Living Sacrifice Book Company, 1999, p. 1) writes: “In fact, Juche’s approximately 23 million adherents, who worship their current and former dictators, outnumber those of more well-known world religions such as Judaism, Sikhism, Jainism, Bahaism, and Zoroastrianism.”

11.
Hwang Jang-yop,
Problems of Human Rights (3).

12.
Kang Myong-do, son-in-law of Premier Kang Son-san, told me in a 1995 interview that the Pochonbo band was part of the Happy Corps. The Pochonbo band members by 1989 were along in years, he noted; thus their appearance at more-or-less public performances such as the one I had attended. Kim Jong-il had a new band made up of yet younger women, the still-secret Hwangjae-san Band, the members of which were likewise Happy Corps members available to him for sex on demand, Kang said.

20. Wherever You Go in My Homeland.

1.
Kim Jong-su did drop what, in retrospect, I recognize as hints that food might have been a problem. He told me of the traditional wedding custom of presenting
food to whoever might care to attend. “Now we have to train people not to be so lavish at weddings,” he said. Later he said, “See how we’re wasting food here? I tell my son, ‘Think of the starving people in Africa. Don’t waste food.’”

2.
When I saw such soil I was reminded again of my home region of northwestern Georgia, these days considered largely unfit for agricultural uses more demanding than pasture or forest.

3.
Director Kim said annual rice harvests
’were
up from around seven metric tons per 10,000 square meters ten years before to 8.5 and corn production was up from 6.5 tons to eight tons per 10,000 square meters. The great leader’s “precious teachings” played a key role in all this, the director said: Kim Il-sung had personally visited the farm eighteen times, giving such advice as “Use more fertilizer.” I asked how the country’s president had become such an expert on farming. “The Great Leader and the Dear Leader are political activists,” farm director Kim explained patiently. “They are clear in economic fields, and the Great Leader in particular cultivated some crops himself to develop production power.”

4.
Tak, Kim, and Pak,
Great Leader Kim Jong Il,
vol. 1 (see chap. 5, n. 15), pp. 198–199.

5.
Choe In Su,
Kim Jong Il,
vol. 2 (see chap. 10, n. 43), pp. 96–97.

6.
Kim,
With the Century,
vol. 2, p. 172.

7.
Foreign observers doubted it ever would be completed and considered it a white elephant.

8.
That was Bruce Cumings, who recounts the story as follows: “In the mid-1980s, the American embassy in Seoul had the hallucination that my work was one cause of the incessantly anti-American student demonstrations of the period. This is pure nonsense, but it flew back into my face so many times that it may be pertinent to our story. The first volume of my Korean War study [see chap. 2, n. 25] circulated as an English-language
samizdat
in the early 1980s and then was translated (badly) by publishers who pirated the copyright, only to find the book banned by [South Korean dictator] Chun Doo Hwan. Nevertheless, it was usually available in the right bookstores.

“In 1987 and 1988 I kept getting calls from the Voice of America or the U.S. Information Agency, asking me for taped interviews that would then be broadcast in Korea. My work was being distorted by the students, they said, and I should clear the record. The American director of the Fulbright program told me that I ought to come out to Korea and disabuse the students of their false impressions. Other American historians were invited under these or other auspices to travel to Korea and set the record straight on the Korean War and other things; a couple of them did not hesitate to please the powers that be by denouncing me as a radical if not a pro–North Korean sympathizer.

“I never agreed to any of the official entreaties. Usually I would just not return their calls, but once or twice I opined that if Americans stopped backing dictators and began treating Koreans with dignity, the problem would go away and I would sink back into my ordinary obscurity” (Cumings,
Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History
[New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997], pp. 385–386).

Kim Chullbaum
(The Truth About the Korean War
[see chap. 5, n. 5], p. viii) describes the problem that many older South Koreans perceived: “[A]fter 1980, in our society, as far as the factional leaders who were pushed close to Marx-Leninism were concerned, the faction of young scholars who leaned toward the
left wing and the radical students accepted the assertions of the revisionist scholars and, while calling for the war of national liberation promoted by Kim Il Sung, it is a fact that they aggravated the confusion of ideology and thought.”

Historiographer James I. Matray in “Korea’s Partition” (see chap.
4,
n. 1) notes that Cumings and co-author Jon Halliday in
Korea: The Unknown War
(see chap.
4,
n. 60) “insist that South Korea initiated the Korean War, contending that the ‘Fierce Tiger’ unit of the ROK’s Seventeenth Regiment on the Ongjin Peninsula launched an assault northward at around 0200 on 25 June 1950. Reviving [I. F.] Stone’s interpretation, Halliday and Cumings claim that Rhee set a trap for North Korea. The South Korean attack would provoke a communist invasion and bring US military intervention, thereby setting the stage for the ROK conquest of North Korea. Cumings presents a detailed explanation of this trap theory’—and much more—in the second volume of his
Origins of the Korean War.
Despite the testimony of former communist military leaders, the North Koreans always have maintained that the ROK attacked first and initiated the war.”

While Western scholars’ left-revisionism continued to inspire the anti-American left in South Korea, Matray says that in scholarly circles from around 1985 the movement had “peaked in popularity and begun to lose adherents.” He notes that John Merrill (see chap.
4,
n. 80) “observed in 1989 that the question of who started the Korean War no longer was a matter of debate. The size and scope of the North Korean offensive argued powerfully that Pyongyang planned the invasion in advance. William Stueck agrees, emphasizing the international dimensions of the conflict in the most recent full-length account of the Korean War.” This last is a reference to Stueck,
The Korean War: An International History
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

9.
Hwang Jang-yop,
Problems of Human Rights (3).

10.
“As Korean people we have this great Leader. But our compatriots in South Korea are undergoing all sorts of terrible suffering, under the colonial rule of the U.S. imperialists, and looking to our great Leader, they are enduring hardships and struggling valiantly, thinking of the days when they too will be able to live happily with the fatherland reunited” (Baik II [see chap.
4,
n. 24], p.
4).

11.
While a student in Jilin, Kim wrote in his memoirs, he and his comrades made a major alteration in communist doctrine. Instead of workers (and peasants) as the vanguard of the revolution, as .Marxist-Leninist teachings had held, “we defined the young people and students as constituting the fully-fledged main force of the revolution.” The correctness of this view is shown by the importance of young people and students in social and political movements since the March 1 (1919) uprising. And, added Kim, “Young people and students are the main force of the revolution in South Korea, too.” He cited the April 19 uprising of 1960, the Kwangju uprising of 1980, and the popular protests that culminated in the 1987 government decision to resume free elections for president.

12.
In North and South Korea certain important social indicators, as reported by their respective governments, were virtually identical in the 1980s. Life expectancy at birth, in 1985, was 68 in the North and 69 in the South. In 1986 about 65 percent of each population lived in urban areas. Adult literacy rates over 98 percent were recorded in both Koreas in 1988 (Byoung-lo Philo Kim,
Two Koreas in Development
[see chap. 1, n. 2], pp. 88–91).

13.
Author’s conversation with one of the group’s American hosts, June 1989.

14.
In view of his obvious intelligence and ability, it is interesting to speculate that Kim Jong-su might have been the otherwise unidentified elder son from a “previous marriage” referred to in the succession rumor, mentioned in chapter 15, that Swedish Ambassador Cornell
(North Korea Under Communism
[see chap. 9, n. 3], p. 124) heard from East European diplomats in Pyongyang in the mid-1970s. Although I was not aware of that rumor at the time I talked with my source, I did ask then whether Kim Jong-su was Kim Il-sung’s firstborn. “There are probably a couple older than he is,” the former official replied.

15.
During his UN assignment Kim Jong-su did stay in touch with at least one other journalist-researcher, Selig Harrison—and in situations that suggested once again that Kim had access to top leadership in Pyongyang. After speaking with Kim Jong-su, Harrison was invited to his second meeting with Kim Il-sung (Harrison,
Korean End Game
[see chap. 8, n. 3], pp. 211–212 and 221–222).