Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (50 page)

[Kim] discovered a symptom of a dangerous plot by some impure elements. He found that some party officials were leading an unwholesome life as party members. They were not sincere in their party work, ignoring party rules and concealing each other’s irregularities. … It appeared to Kim Jong-il that there was something shady about their lives and so he made a close study of their defects and shortcomings in all fields of their activities. As a result, he discovered that an official holding a high post in the party was behind the irregularities. … He discovered this when he read a certain book and when he noticed in it a passage denying the purity of the revolutionary tradition of the party. Many people read the book, but there was none who pointed out this fact. Only he saw in it an attempt to slander party policy and deny the purity of its revolutionary tradition. He lost no time in examining publications related to that book. His concern proved right, as he found not a few books which advocated bourgeois ideas, revisionist and Confucian ideas and lifestyles. … A handful of people, centered on a high-ranking party official, were spreading unwholesome ideas systematically and in an organized “way in the backstage, while pretending on the surface to support the ideas of the party
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No name is given for this wicked Korean version of China’s Deng Xiaoping, but the high-ranking official whom the young loyalist zealot was pursuing appears to have been Kim To-man. Chosen in 1966 as party secretary in charge of propaganda and agitation, Kim To-man was the only one of the ten people given secretary rank at that time who could not boast of either experience as a partisan general or blood ties to partisan leaders.
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Kim Jong-il went after him and his followers, who had influence in “literary and artistic circles”—that is, party propaganda. The young inquisitor became particularly exercised over a play called
An Act of Sincerity.
He argued that the play was intended to gloss over the flaws of people he believed or suspected had not fought the good fight against the Japanese. The play, says a biographer of Kim Jong-il,

was written to enable schemers and ambitious people to utilize an “autobiography” to make themselves appear like “revolutionaries”. … However, when the revolution faced a difficult phase, those who could not endure it raised their heads as impure and vacillating elements. Many of them had unknown careers. Nevertheless the party and President Kim Il-sung took a careful and generous attitude to them so as to allow them to hold responsible posts in the party and the state, expecting that when trusted and entrusted with heavy responsibilities, they would repay the generous treatment with sincere efforts. However, they betrayed the trust reposed in them, and as
they were given leading posts and as their positions rose higher, they became arrogant, and later came to take an overbearing attitude, bent on achieving their own personal purposes in the party.

This was a case in which Kim Il-sung was rooting out perceived rivals from within the partisan group and the military—perhaps on account of their criticism of his new, extreme policies
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rather than their views on literature— and his son enthusiastically piled on. In part the younger Kim was seeking to prove his loyalty to his father. But according to Hwang Jang-yop, Kim Jong-il also had his own axe to grind: he hoped to push aside high-level supporters of his uncle within those then-powerful groups.
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“Already aware of their moves,” the elder Kim called a party Central Committee plenary meeting for May of 1967 “to smash the schemes of the bourgeois and revisionist elements.” Before that meeting was held, the Great Leader started an “ideological struggle.” However, “at first, participants in the struggle did not understand the seriousness of the situation.” Kim Jong-il, coming to the rescue, “unveiled the nature of anti-party counter-revolutionary elements who had raised their heads whenever the party faced a trial.”

That started the ball rolling, and soon others joined in, spying upon and denouncing the target elements. For example,

a certain official discovered an impure “directive” issued by an anti-party element written down in his notebook, and with an awakened eye he saw that it could serve as evidence to expose the criminal act of the anti-party element, and unhesitatingly participated in the struggle against the factionalists. Then many other party members exposed the criminal acts of anti-party elements by pointing out similar facts. The ideological struggle intensified. … After the plenary meeting the schemers who wanted to spread anti-party counter-revolutionary ideas within the party were systematically liquidated.
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Kim To-man and several colleagues were purged at that meeting.
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More purges were yet to come.

Hwang Jang-yop has explained in plain language what much of the literary purge entailed. Earlier Kim Il-sung had permitted, even encouraged, his old partisan comrades to publish their own memoirs. The regime’s ghost-writers made sure those volumes included plenty of flattering references to Kim. “But when Kim Jong-il entered the central party in the late 1960s, he called back all the memoirs,” according to Hwang. “Kim Jong-il was concerned that the memoirs detracted from the Kim Il-sung personality cult and created legends about partisans other than Kim Il-sung.” By the late 1960s, North Korean textbooks were devoid of references to “many heroic figures. …”
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Taking the witch hunt on the road, in July 1967 Kim Jong-il went to South Hamgyong Province and got involved in some rough local politics. He “worked hard there to eradicate the tendencies of factionalism, parochialism and nepotism which were still found in some party organizations.” In that province and South Pyongan Province, say officially sanctioned biographers, he “worked energetically to carry through the party policy of eradicating the effect of unwholesome ideas and promoting economic and defense construction simultaneously”
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The latter was the euphemism for Kim Il-sung’s policy of militarization. According to an unofficial North Korean spokesman in Tokyo, Kim Jong-il “struggled against local opponents who attempted to weaken the party leadership” and afterward “emerged as a leading theoretician.
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Hwang Jang-yop, who worked from 1958 to 1965 as Kim’s ideological secretary, seems to have found himself eclipsed in ideological work as the junior Kim’s star ascended. While continuing to rank as one of the country’s leading intellectuals, Hwang was shifted to a number of often less important jobs before he defected, in 1997, to South Korea.

Hwang was relatively fortunate in that he survived. After his defection he told of Baek Nam-woon, who, although “respected as the father of left--wing scholars, was purged by Kim Jong-il at the end of the 1960s. I heard Kim Byeong-ha, then Minister of National Security, boast that his men had taken Baek to the [concentration camp]. … As a scholar, Baek had not participated actively in the campaign against Kim Il-sung. He probably made a few comments that were picked up through wire-tapping and construed as complaints. Baek died in the concentration camp.”
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More than is the case with the often fanciful-sounding accounts of his birth, childhood and youth, in my reading stories officially told about Kim Jong-il’s deeds following his university graduation tend to have the feel of being based on actual incidents. It appears that his hagiographers went out in the late 1970s or early 1980s and interviewed people he had been in contact with earlier, asking them for accounts of the meetings. Perhaps the original tellers— and certainly the sycophantic retellers—made any necessary adjustments so that the accounts would conform to the formula established earlier, in which the young man invariably left his listeners scratching their heads at their own stupidity and carelessness but full of admiration for his genius and his great love for the people.

A gut reaction to such stories is that most of the people involved must have been at least normally intelligent folk. Some of them probably were smarter than he was. But it seems likely that either they felt at the time that they must play dumb in the actual meetings or, later, they allowed themselves to be portrayed as fools in order to flatter the leader’s eldest son.

To someone raised on the United States’ unceremonious, no-nonsense egalitarianism, it is numbing to read volume after volume of accounts such as one that describes Kim Jong-il’s summoning of officials in charge of scientific and educational work. When they arrived at the meeting he let them know they were there to resolve theoretical questions, regarding which “opinions varied in the academic world at that time.” He did the talking, of course. As the twenty-five-year-old rambled on, “the officials wrote down every one of Kim Jong-il’s words in their notebooks.” They “felt their mental horizons broadening.” When he had finished, they felt confident that the academic controversies he had addressed “had come to an end.” They believed that “they could open the eyes of anyone who was confused on the subject. … When Kim Jong-il finished his explanation, all the officials rose to their feet. ‘He’s truly a genius of ideas, and genius of theory!’—This is what every one of them felt. Greatly moved, they expressed their infinite respect for Kim Jong-il.”
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Indeed, according to Hwang, Kim Jong-il “tends to dominate meetings and conferences and to lead all discussion to conclusions congruent with his own.
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My guess is that those poor officials whom the biographers describe really did abase themselves to some such depth of fawning servility, feeling they had no other choice. Eventually the official stories had been repeated so often inside the country that many younger North Koreans—never having heard him utter more than a phrase, and having no source of information about him except the regime’s teachings—truly believed that Kim Jong-il was an exalted being, quite different from ordinary people. Thus, there might be less need for conscious dissembling and acting on their part. But again the question arises of-why if he possessed any sensitivity, the junior Kim not only permitted but almost certainly gave the order that such accounts be translated from the Korean for foreign readers—to many of-whom he himself-was inevitably made to appear the fatuous one.

In his new role as propagandist and “theoretician,” Kim Jong-il sought to promote unthinking devotion to one-man rule. He arranged for the manufacture of plaster busts of Kim Il-sung, which he placed in study halls all over the country—changing the name from Study Hall of the History of the Workers’ Party of Korea to Study Hall of Comrade Kim Il-sung’s Revolutionary History. That made it clear that the leader now had primacy over even the party. The young Kim also ordered a new compilation of historical photographs to place in those study halls, “knowing that the existing pictorial records were not edited so as to center on the greatness of the President.
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Hagiographers exaggerated and fabricated to inflate Kim Il-sung’s creditable achievements into a titanic image.
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In the 1960s, official Pyongyang
biographer Baik Bong described Kim as “a legendary hero … who is capable of commanding heavens and earth, an unrivalled brilliant commander who, as it were, can shrink a long range of steep mountains at a stroke and smash the swarming hordes of enemies with one blow.”
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Such a magical figure’s spiritual origins naturally had to be matched with a heroic physical birth, so his hagiographers described Kim Il-sung as issuing from the bosom of a revolutionary holy family. Biographer Baik credited Kim’s father, Kim Hyong-jik, with such colossal achievements as having founded, in 1917, the underground Korean National Association, largest of the anti-Japanese organizations of the time.
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When the propagandists ran short on exaggerations and inventions, they stole. In people’s homes were placed copies of a slogan attributed to Kim: “Fish cannot live out of water. The people cannot live without the People’s Army.— Kim Il-sung.” The real author of the phrase was, of course, Mao Zedong.
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Publishing a third edition of Kim Il-sung’s
Selected Works
along with volumes of commentary and biography, backing them up with audiovisual materials and developing revolutionary historical sites for mass tours, Kim Jong-il enforced systematic, daily study. The goal was to “make all party members think and act in unison according to the leader’s intentions and teachings,” to make people “have absolute trust in the President as their spiritual support.”

Kim Jong-il was tireless in his efforts “to lead people to the way of faithfulness.” One of his acquaintances, for example, had a brother who got in a spot of trouble with the authorities. Kim Jong-il was able to have the brother’s case reexamined. It turned out that some “vicious elements” were responsible for the transgression and had shifted the blame. Afterward, young Kim advised the grateful acquaintance, in effect, that his whole family should go and sin no more: “If a man is deprived of his political life, or the trust of the party, he is nothing. Therefore, it is necessary to do everything in your power to keep your political life, given by the great leader, and work hard to prove worthy of his trust. Not only yourself, but all your family members and relatives must be armed with the unitary idea of the party and be educated to be faithful to the leader. You must live according to the leader’s teachings anywhere, anytime, whatever you do, and judge by his teachings as a yardstick, and fight unhesitatingly against anything deviating from his teachings.”
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When a draft document for a party congress listed several top party officials, with Kim Il-sung’s name at the top, his son ordered that it be retyped to leave a space between the Great Leader’s name and the rest of the list. His underlings did that, but a few days later he called an official in and asked him to print Kim Il-sung’s name in larger type, as well. “Think. It’s because the sun shines that the planets shed their light, isn’t it?” he explained to the puzzled official. “As we could not draw the sun and the planets in the same size, so we would never write down the name of the leader and the names of his
men in the same size.” The official now understood what Kim Jong-il had in mind, and “bowed deeply to his noble loyalty.” (The idea actually was lifted from Stalin’s personality cult.)
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It was for that same party congress, in 1970, that Kim Jong-il personally designed the first lapel badges with his father’s portrait and had them passed out to delegates.
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