Bradley K. Martin - Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty

NORTH KOREA AND
THE KIM DYNASTY

BRADLEY K. MARTIN

Thomas Dunne Books
St. Martins Press New York

THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martins Press.

UNDER THE LOVINGCARE OF THE FATHERLY LEADER. Copyright 2004 by .Bradley K. Martin. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martins Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

ISBN 0-312-32221-6
EAN 978-0312-32221-2

First Edition: September 2004

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is dedicated to the memory of my parents,

Bradley K. Martin Sr. and Christine Logan Martin.

For them, loving care never became a propaganda slogan.

Here and there among the greenery were palace-like buildings. Communism, said I to myself. There were no hedges, no signs of proprietary rights, no agriculture. The shop, the advertisement, traffic, all that commerce which constitutes the body of our world, was gone. It was natural on that golden evening that I should jump at the idea of a social paradise.

H. G. WELLS, THE TIME MACHINE

Alas, as Wellss time traveler soon discovered, man had not remained one species, but had differentiated into two distinct animals. The first Eloi specimen he encountered was indescribably frail. His flushed face reminded me of the more beautiful kind of consumptive.

The Eloi were a gentle, childlike people who stood perhaps four feet high. In their eyes the traveler detected a certain lack of the interest I might have expected in them. The question had come into my mind abruptly: were these creatures fools? You see, I had always anticipated that the people of the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousandodd would be incredibly in front of us in knowledge, art, everything. Then one of them suddenly asked me a question that showed him to be on the intellectual level of one of our five-year-old children.

The Eloi proved to be descendants of the wealthier classes of humans. However, all the activity, all the traditions, the complex organizations, the nations, languages, literatures, aspirations, even the mere memory of Man as I knew him, had been swept out of existence. Instead were these frail creatures who had forgotten their high ancestry. Still, [h]owever great their intellectual degradation, the Eloi had kept too much of the human form not to claim my sympathy, and to make me perforce a sharer in their degradation and their Fear.

The dominant species, the Morlocks, had evolved from the working class. Morlocks lived and worked underground, where they kept the machinery that gave them their power. Clever, they treated the Eloi like domesticated herds and lived off them. They were carnivorous, nocturnal. Beneath my feet then the earth must be tunneled enormously, and these tunnelings were the habitat of the New Race.

In Wellss imagination it had taken 800 millennia for humanity to change so drastically. In North Korea a remarkably similar evolution took only a half-century The North Korean changes, not likely to be reversed quickly or easily, were largely the work of two men: Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il (whose gigantic personal movie library no doubt included both the 1960 and 2002 Hollywood versions of Wellss classic).

This is the story of how they did it.

Reading about the personality cult of the North Korean leader had not fully prepared me for what I found when I arrived in Pyongyang in April 1979, as a member of the first large contingent of Americans to visit since the Korean War. Since I was encountering an economy and society almost unimaginably different from any I had known, the stay was full of surprises. But next to the astonishing all-pervasiveness of leader-worship the rest seemed mere detail.

Everyone sprinkled his speech with straight-faced references to our Respected and Beloved Leader, our Great Leader, our Fatherly Leader. Everyone wore a portrait of the round-faced, unsmiling Kim Il-sung on a gold-framed, enameled badge pinned to the left breast. Larger portraits and statues of the Leader were everywhere.

It gradually became apparent that this was a religion. To North Koreans, Kim Il-sung was more than just a leader. He showered his people with fatherly love. If I could believe what my ears were hearing he might even be immortal, able to provide his followers eternal life. The realization grew during my first few days in Pyongyang. It crystallized as I sat in the Mansudae Art Theater watching a performance of Song of Paradise, a musical drama lavishly staged on the scale of a grand opera or Broadway musical.

The curtain rises to reveal a nighttime view of downtown Pyongyang. Holiday crowds enjoy themselves as neon signs and fireworks light up the citys impressive skyline of tall buildings and monuments. Son-hui, a journalist played by a buxom soprano, is about to depart on a trip around the country to gather material fora series of articles on the glories of the workers paradise. She is unaware that the Great Leader, meanwhile, has commissioned a search for the orphaned daughter of a Korean War hero. The crowd-chorus, overcome with joy at the wonders of socialist construction, unleashes a mighty, soaring, swelling hymn worthy of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir: With the Leader who unfolded this paradise, we shall live for generations to come.

Paradise? To a first-time visitor, North Korea seemed to be providing its people the basic necessities of life. But there was little sign of opulence and I never saw anyone cutting loose and having a really good time. Even on the May Day holiday people seemed to be workingas actors, posing as merrymakers and sub-way passengers for the benefit of foreign visitors. A group of little boys in the uniform of the childrens corps sat cross-legged in a circle on the ground in a park, playing a game. A couple of hours later they still sat in the same position, playing the same game, confounding the collective wisdom of the outside world regarding attention spans of unsupervised eight-year-olds.

In the deeply dug, sparkling-clean Pyongyang Metro, with its glittering chandeliers and its imposing murals honoring Kim Il-sung, I saw passengers exit the station via the escalator and then turn around and go back in for another ridetheir repetitive all-day assignment, I supposed. Trains composed of only two cars each stopped for several minutes at each station, and the tracks showed enough rust to suggest that impressing visitors was a more important consideration than transporting people in a city where buses could glide quickly through nearly empty streets.