Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (53 page)

The biggest test of his early career was managing the festivities marking the year when Kim Il-sung turned sixty. For that, Kim Jong-il gave some lyricists and composers their marching orders fifteen months in advance. They were to come up with a hymn entitled “Long Life and Good Health to the Leader,” to be sung at a banquet on New Year’s Day 1972. They set to work. “Many songs were written but none of them appealed to Kim Jong-il.”

With the deadline approaching, Kim Jong-il visited the composers late at night, listened to their latest offerings, but was exasperated that they still did not get it. “I trust and cherish you at heart,” he told them. “Why don’t you understand me? Think, the leader will be sixty years old in the new year. So I made up my mind to present him with this song on the morning of New Year’s Day, but you seem to be far from understanding me.” The composers, of course, dropped their eyes, feeling ashamed. Then Kim Jong-il continued:

You do not know what great pain and burdens our leader has to bear all his life and the hardships he has overcome. Our leader has experienced all the trials, sorrows and agonies which man has ever undergone and has risked his life on countless occasions. He has shed many a tear taking in his arms his dying comrades who fell on the road of the revolution and even today he cannot sleep, thinking of them. Has our leader ever enjoyed a rest with peace of mind? He spent twenty years or more in the snow and rain of the Manchurian wilderness and worked sitting up at night to build a new country after liberation and he underwent untold trials in the three years of war. After the war he fought against the vicious sectarians and, tightening his belt along with the people, he has spent his days on the road carrying out personal inspections, missing his meals.

Kim Jong-il paused, seemingly “unable to contain himself,” and the con-posers’ “eyes grew moist.” Despite all those sacrifices by the Great Leader, “they had not yet produced a single song which would pray for his long life.” Kim Jong-il continued:

He is the leader of the people who has dedicated all his life to bringing them the rich life which they enjoy today. Their happiness today has come and has flowered under the care of the fatherly leader. For this reason our people are following him until the end of the sun and the moon, holding him in high esteem and ardently praying for his long life and good health. If you express these feelings and emotions in your verses and melody that will make the song we are so anxious to see—a song which will become highly popular. This song must not be a mere ballad; it should be a hymn of the entire people expressing their ardent hopes and wishes.

Bingo! The writers “felt inspiration taking hold of them.” They rushed into their rooms and started writing. Soon they came up with these lyrics:

Every moment our leader’s life is devoted
To bringing a fuller, richer life to the people.
Our happiness is great; our ardor knows no bounds.
You take us to your heart with never-failing love.

To the distant ends of the earth we’ll follow you.
Till the sun and the moon grow cold we’ll stay with you.
Your kindliness is great, we’ll sing forever.
We’ll always remain loyal to you, great leader.

That you may live long in good health, our leader, our father,
   Is the wish of the people in our joyous land.

The tune was “immeasurably gentle and echoed the thoughts of the words.” Kim Jong-il pronounced the hymn “flawless” and had it circulated to the public even before the big day. The New Year arrived and the singers went on stage at the banquet hall, excited that they were about to sing it for the first time in Kim Il-sung’s presence.

To grasp what followed, it is important to understand that Koreans tend to be emotional people, given to public displays of grief and hysteria. In South Korea, by way of illustration, Protestant Christian evangelicals with their emotional confessions of faith have made major inroads; the fastest-growing Christian group of all in the South has been the extremely demonstrative Pen-tecostals, known for “speaking in tongues.” In North Korea, with proselytizing
for other religions forbidden, the promoters of the official faith, Kimilsungism, sought to appeal to that same emotional streak.

Now let us resume the story of the New Year’s Day banquet as related by one of Kim Jong-il’s official biographers.

The performers stood to sing, and followed the soft orchestral opening by singing the first few lines of the song. But then, overcome by emotion, the singers went out of tune with the orchestra and gradually stopped singing. The singers tried to start again but could not, they were sobbing so hard.

Both the conductor and the orchestra were similarly affected and everyone at the banquet gave way to tears. Dear Comrade Kim Jong-il, who was in the audience, called in several other singers and had them resume the interrupted song. Soon the song was resumed but the voices of these singers also faltered and the audience, who were standing up, began to join them, singing between their sobs. The whole house plunged into a whirl-wind of excitement. It overflowed with the hymn praying for the good health and long life of the fatherly leader—-which was a song from the hearts of the whole nation, which was a paean of the loyal people. Soon afterwards the song ended but those present did not sit down; the sound of-weeping could be heard everywhere. The fatherly leader put a handkerchief to his eyelids and, taking hands of veteran fighters who were standing beside him, said: “Thank you, thank you. Come, don’t cry, sit down, sit down.” The eyes of Kim Jong-il, as he heard his words and looked at him, also glistened.
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Indeed. That brilliantly outrageous display of showmanship on New Year’s Day launched a year of sixtieth birthday tributes during which the junior Kim proved himself flatterer—or “loyalist,” in the regime’s term—beyond compare. At one of the celebrations, Kim Jong-il unveiled the new magic acts that he had pressed the Pyongyang Circus’s previously lackluster magicians to perfect. They produced a basket of flowers hung with a streamer whose inscription wished long life and good health to the Great Leader. Doves flew out of the basket and circled it. When Kim Il-sung praised the magicians, “their sight went blurred.” Kim Jong-il told them to keep improving until they could “take the lead in world conjuring.” After further work, they went on to win top prizes in the International Modern Magic Festival, including “Magic King of the World.”

Kim Jong-il was credited with an “original theory” of the leader. In the spring of 1965, he supposedly related his theory to another Central Committee official in these words:

The question of the leader is the core of the revolution. The desire of the masses of the people alone is not sufficient for a revolution. There should be the ideological and theoretical brain, the center of unity, to give ideas and work out strategy and tactics and unite the masses. And that is the leader. To win in the revolution without the leader is like waiting for a flower to bloom without sunlight.

The masses of the people were required, in his theory “to be firmly united with a single idea.”
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Whether or not the twenty-three-year-old Kim Jong-il single-handedly devised that theory there is no doubt that as the years passed he became its chief promoter and enforcer. “Kim Jong-il had a correct view of how to revere the leader,” we are told. “To be loyal to the leader was the purpose of all his efforts and his life itself.”
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Scholars debate the extent to which Western and traditional East Asian models influenced North Korea’s exaltation of the leader’s role. “For sustained institutionalization of personal rule,” argues Australian diplomat/historian Adrian Buzo, “only Stalin’s system at its height can remotely compare with the authority exercised by Kim Il-sung from 1967 to his death in 1994.” The Korean political tradition offers no antecedents for the “cult of the fatherly leader, reliance on charismatic leadership and cult of personality in politics,” not to mention “militarism, executive activism and pervasive government intrusion into what was previously the highly self-regulatory realm of clan and family life,” Buzo writes. “They are, however, features of Stalinism.”
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In Buzo’s analysis, the North Korean system melded generic Stalinism with “the tastes, prejudices and experiences of the Manchurian guerilla mind-set—militaristic, Spartan, ruthless, conspiratorial, anti-intellectual, anti-bureaucratic and insular.”
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On the other hand, Hwang Jang-yop, who studied in Stalin’s Moscow to prepare for his ideological duties in Pyongyang, argues that North Korea— with Kim Jong-il in the lead—turned Stalinism and Marxism-Leninism on their heads by reverting to Confucian notions. “Stalinism acknowledged the necessity of dictatorship of the highest leader, but maintained that the highest leader had to serve the party, working class and people,” Hwang writes. Stalin’s system “was an extension of Marxism, which emphasized the need for dictatorship of the working class,” and thus Stalin’s “orders and instructions were not considered coming from an individual but from the working class.” In North Korea, “things work the other way around. The Great Leader does not live for the people. It is the people who live for the Great Leader.”

In Hwang’s view, the Pyongyang leadership “used the feudalistic idea of filial piety to justify absolutism of the Great Leader. Filial piety in feudalism demands that children regard their parents as their benefactors and masters because they would not have existed without their parents. Taking care of
your parents, the people who gave you life—in other words, being dutiful children—is the ultimate goal in life and the highest moral code. The state is a unity of families, and the head of all these families is none other than the king.” Hence the role that the leadership devised for Kim Il-sung: father of the people. In the same way that a person’s physical life came from his parents, his sociopolitical life came from the Great Leader. And the regime maintained that this sociopolitical life was far more precious than mere physical existence, which even animals possessed.

Whatever future historians might end up concluding about the system’s antecedents, according to Hwang there was one point in particular where the regime’s propaganda agreed with the truth: The new way of looking at the Great Leader “was the work of Kim Jong-il rather than Kim Il-sung himself.”
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Among the differences between what happened in North Korea and China starting in the mid-1960s and ’70s, the most important is that in China the Cultural Revolution and related movements were a spent force after little more than a decade. Jiang Qing was arrested in 1976, shortly after Mao’s death. I was in Beijing covering the proceedings at the end of 1980 and the beginning of 1981 as she and her infamous Gang of Four were tried and sentenced. Their chief target, Deng Xiaoping, triumphed. Red Guards, having spent their youth revolting instead of studying, came to their senses and faced the bleak reality of their stunted careers and wasted lives. Jiang Qing had her fun at the trial, spitting out her contempt for her accusers and judges even as they derided her as a “white-boned evil spirit.” But after her death penalty was suspended, in deference to the memory of her late husband, she found life in prison not to her liking. In 1991, she hanged herself in her cell.

North Korea’s version of the Cultural Revolution, on the other hand, would rage on for decades with its original leader, Kim Jong-il, in charge. In 1972, the year when the junior Kim feted his father’s sixtieth birthday, a new constitution legally enshrined unlimited personal rule by the Great Leader. Gone was any chance of nagging interference by such institutions as legislatures and courts.

By the late 1970s, when China was dismantling the Mao Zedong cult, discussion of the Great Leader was in terms such as these, from the issue of
Nodong Shinmun
for his birthday, April 15, 1977:

All through the passage of time since men came into being and history began on this earth, no one has equaled Comrade Kim Il-sung, an eminent hero revered by all people; he is the greatest genius in ideology, the genius of leadership and the driving force for revolution who distinguished himself by his exceptional intelligence, the genius
of philosophical thought and theoretical activity, scientific insight, invincible art of military campaign, infinite dedication to the task of liberating mankind, vigorous revolutionary prowess, lofty virtues, and fervent love of man. He erected a shining and immortal tower of history for assiduously promoting the Korean revolution and world revolution with unprecedentedly broad scope and depth to embody all of these assets of his.
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It is no exaggeration to say the Kim Il-sung personality cult operated as a religion. People were encouraged to sob, “like children,” at the merciful kindness of the Leader, just as at a Protestant Christian revival meeting the penitents give tearful thanks for their salvation. The regime’s stories about Kim constantly told of people shedding tears upon learning of some kindness or another.

A European who served for many years as a diplomat in Pyongyang, with postings there off and on from the 1970s into the 1990s, likened North Korea to a Catholic state in the Middle Ages. He estimated that around 90 percent really believed in the regime and its teachings—-while the other 10 percent had no choice but to pretend that they believed. As opposed to other communist countries, where jokes about leaders such as the Soviet Union’s Brezhnev and East Germany’s Erich Honecker were a staple of conversation, there were no jokes about Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il, the diplomat said.
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