The Hidden People of North Korea (12 page)

The annual Kimilsungia festival is also held around the time of Kim Il-sung’s birthday. On his visit to Indonesia in 1965, Kim admired a purple Indonesian-bred orchid, which President Sukarno renamed in Kim’s honor. Ten years later, when the Kimilsungia (also known in North Korea as the “flower of loyalty”) was ready for general cultivation, a sample was sent to North Korea, where it has been grown in greenhouses throughout the country. Since 1999, a Kimilsungia festival has been held every year with a large display of the potted flowers in an exhibition hall. Organizations throughout the country (and even a few foreign ones) display their prize Kimilsungias, and crowds of visitors view the flowers arranged in front of giant paintings of Kim, with music playing in the background.

Kim Jong-il, too, has his own flower and flower show. A Japanese botanist introduced the Kimjongilia, a large, red South American begonia, as a gift in 1988, and it is displayed at its own festival around the time of Kim Jongil’s birthday in February. The flower is said to be grown in at least sixty countries “to be loved by hundreds of millions of people around the world.”
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The point of these cult displays honoring the two Kims is not to exhibit flowers but to show how much the people and the international community worship North Korea’s leaders.

In the tradition of Chinese emperors, to whom delegations of foreigners brought gifts from afar, the gifts that Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il have received from foreign visitors are displayed in the two buildings (the smaller one is for Kim Jong-il’s gifts) comprising the International Friendship Exhibition at Mt. Myohyang outside of Pyongyang. By 2006, the number of gifts was said to total 160,000, including many offered to Kim Il-sung posthumously. Visitors to the exhibits must cover their shoes with plastic socks to avoid scuffing the teakwood floors, and they are supposed to bow in front of a lifelike wax replica of Kim Il-sung. The featured gifts for the two Kims include automobiles from Stalin and Mao, an alligator-skin bag from Castro, a piece of pottery from Rev. Billy Graham, and from U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a basketball autographed by Michael Jordan (Kim Jongil’s two younger sons are avid basketball players).

The number of references to Kim Il-sung in the North Korean press has declined over the years. On what would have been his ninety-first birthday in 2003, the long-running KCBS sign-on, “Long live the revolutionary thought of Great Leader Comrade Kim Il-sung; long live the glorious Workers’ Party of Korea,” was replaced with “Long live our glorious fatherland, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea; long live the Workers’ Party of Korea, the organizer and guide of all the victories for the Korean people.”
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Mention of Kim Il-sung’s name in the annual New Year’s Day message has dropped from about two dozen instances in the last years of his life to fewer than a half dozen since 2000. In recent years, it has been Kim Jong-il’s birthday on February 16 that nature supposedly celebrates. For example, in 2001, KCBS reported that thunder, lightning, and a rainbow appeared during a snowstorm on his birthday, causing residents to say, “Even nature seemed to congratulate Kim Jong-il, illustrious commander born of heaven, on his birthday.”
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However, the North Korean press is building up the importance of the year 2012, the centenary of Kim Il-sung’s birth, by which date the country is supposed to have become an economic power.

Kim is even credited with some of the magical powers his father was said to have (some references to Kim Il-sung in the North Korean media claimed he could transcend time and space). In 2006
Nodong Sinmun
published an article titled “Military-First Teleporting” claiming that Kim Jong-il, “the extraordinary master commander who has been chosen by the heavens,” appears in one place and then suddenly appears in another “like a flash of lightning,” so quickly that the American satellites overhead cannot track his movements.
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As the years passed and people’s memories dimmed, propagandists became bolder in rewriting Kim Jong-il’s biography. By 2002, North Korean radio could make the claim that “Great Comrade Kim Jong-il already earned the people’s admiration as early as the 1940s and the 1950s of the last century [he was born in 1942]. He spearheaded our people’s struggle to complete the
Juche
cause, undertaking all the heavy tasks of the revolution all by himself in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.”
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Kim Jong-il is now credited with all the attributes of his father, including his father’s military abilities. To extend Kim’s nonexistent military career into the past, he is now described as being at his father’s side during the Korean War, helping him to plan battles, although at the time he would have been only eleven years old: “Sometimes he sat up all night together with Comrade Kim Il-sung at the table for mapping out a plan of operation, asking about the situation of the front, thinking of how to frustrate the intention of the enemy and learning Comrade Kim Il-sung’s outstanding commanding art.”
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Kim Jong-il’s distinctive military-first politics, first mentioned in the press in the late 1990s, is now said to have originated with a visit by the eighteen-year-old Kim to a military base on August 25, 1960.
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In point of fact, the closest Kim has ever come to fighting a war was his declaration of a “semiwartime state” in response to American pressure over the nuclear issue in 1993. However, his lack of combat experience has not prevented the North Korean propagandists from making Kim out to be a war hero. In North Korea’s long-running cold war with the United States, Kim is said to have taken a very active part: “Not escorted by tanks or armored cars, he has passed the ridge [Chol Ridge, site of a Korean War battle] and crossed the rivers for forefronts without eating or sleeping. By doing so, he has devotedly tided over the crisis of the country and the revolution, winning one victory after another in the war without gunshot.”
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And then there is Kim Jong-il’s vaunted benevolence. Until recently, North Koreans were taught from childhood to think of his father as their father, like the Russians were taught to love “Papa Stalin.” Children thanked Kim Il-sung for everything good that came their way. Now the thanks go to Kim’s son. An article in a propaganda magazine targeting foreigners says that children and students in the DPRK “liken the embrace of the leader Kim Jong-il, who takes good care of them and has their dreams fully realized, to that of father.”
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The article quotes the first verse of a touching children’s song titled “I Will Tell Him Everything”:

When I said I wanted to become a doctor or general
My friends laughed at me and said I was greedy.
I will tell the General about it when I meet him.
Then they will not laugh at me any more.

Most of the propaganda boasting of Kim Jong-il’s benevolence is made out of whole cloth. He is portrayed as a man who understands the suffering of the people and suffers for them: “Day and night, I always think about ways to have our people live more affluently.”
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Nodong Sinmun
says that while he was being driven through the countryside during the 1990s’ famine, “his thought, heartrending as it was, went to people said to be ranging hill and dale to pick wild spinach in an effort to stave off hunger. He had to bring his car to a halt to pull himself together before resuming the trip.”
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The myth of Kim’s benevolence is designed in part to make all North Koreans, even those stigmatized as members of the wavering and hostile political classes, feel that they are part of the same national family. Kim’s image of benevolence is also intended to persuade the South Korean people that they could live happily in a unified Korea under his leadership. Even in North Korea few people have been convinced by this propaganda because since Kim came to power, economic conditions have gone from bad to worse, and instead of helping the people, Kim has elevated the army. In private, people say, “Kim Il-sung took the people’s train, but Kim Jong-il takes the military train.”

According to the cult propaganda, there is nothing that Kim does not know or is not good at. At the university, in contrast to recollections of former students who say he was not a serious student, the press now claims that Kim authored more than fourteen hundred works.
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His memory supposedly enables him to remember “all the exploits performed by the famous men of all ages and countries, all the political events, big and small, and the significant creations of humankind and their detailed figures. He also remembers the names, ages, and birthdays of all the people he has met.”
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Kyongje Yongu
, which is as much a propaganda journal as the country’s leading economics journal, claims that Kim’s
Juche
ideology “includes all areas of economic theory, and is an economic ideology with perfect features as the most correct directional guide of economic activity for realizing independence in the relationship with nature.”
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According to another article, when the “genius of geniuses” visited a computer laboratory in the North Korean Academy of Sciences in 1998, he taught the academy’s staff about computer memory capacity and processing speed and understood the computer programs “better than experts.”
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Scientific articles in North Korean scientific journals often begin with a nod to the wisdom of Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il. For example, an article titled “On the Vortex Method of Pulverized Coal Gasification (Part One)” leads off with a quotation from Kim Il-sung, after which the authors can safely say, “In respectful accordance with the instructions of the Great Leader we have advanced the study of fluid flow characteristics”—certainly a good way to get one’s manuscript accepted by journal editors.

Not to put too fine a point on the matter, Kim (and the party) are never supposed to be wrong about anything, no matter how badly things turn out:

Today [2004], our nerve center of the revolution [i.e., Kim Jong-il] is leading the new century with the most accurate ideas and lines. The correctness, scientific accuracy, truth, and invincible vitality of all the ideas and lines put forth by the respected and beloved Comrade Kim Jong-il, including the line of party- and state-building, the line of military development, and the line of economic and cultural development, have been clearly proved in the course of the arduous and prolonged struggle that we waged over the past decades [i.e., during a period when hundreds of thousands of people died of hunger].
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Kim Jong-il has been honored with many titles in North Korea. After he succeeded his father in the early 1970s, but before he was presented to the public, the press referred to him as the (anonymous) “party center.”
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In the late 1970s, he was variously referred to as “dear leader,” “sagacious leader,” and “esteemed leader.” After he was introduced to the public as his father’s successor at the 1980 party congress, the press began to refer to him as Secretary Kim Jong-il, including both his title and his name. He also became the
yongdoja
or
jidoja
(“leader”), whereas his father was and is the
suryong
(“top leader”).
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After he was appointed to head the military in the early 1990s, he gained the title of “supreme commander.” Since the mid-1990s, the press has favored the phrase title “respected and beloved general,” and he is the only person in North Korea who can simply be called “the general,” although the KPA has some fourteen hundred officers of that rank. Kim Jongil is also referred to in the press as the “nerve center,” the “supreme brain,” and the “heart” of the North Korean people, as well as their “mother,” as in “The people follow the great general—the mother of the revolution—who takes charge of and looks after his children’s destiny and future by devoting his whole life.”
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The Kim cult embraces other Kim family members, except for those who are out of favor. The reputation of Kim’s mother, Kim Jong-suk, who died in 1949, grows stronger by the year. Although historical records suggest that she merely performed housekeeping chores in the guerrilla group led by her husband, the North Korean press touts her as one of the “three generals of Mount Paektu” (the other two being Kim Jong-il and his father). An internal propaganda document from 2004 describes her as “a famous master shot, a seasoned intelligence agent, and a determined communist who would not give in to any cruel challenge or difficult obstacle.”
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According to words attributed to Kim Il-sung, his wife was “his most valuable and closest comrade,” and “the greatest meritorious deed that she left behind in the revolution” was “having raised Comrade Kim Jong-il as the leader of the future and putting him up before the party and the fatherland.” In short, she is described as the kind of person that Kim wishes all North Koreans would be—people who think first of protecting the leader.

Kim Jong-il’s grandfather on his father’s side—the schoolteacher, clerk, and herbal pharmacist—is portrayed as an “indomitable revolutionary fighter.”
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Kim Jong-il’s paternal grandmother is described as a patriot who defied the Japanese when they were chasing her son, Kim Il-sung, and who told him that he would have to take the cause of independence over from his father; thus, the line of revolutionaries continues in the Kim family from one generation to the next.
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Koreans who believe such accounts may become used to the idea of being ruled by a member of the Kim family, as if that is a defining characteristic of their country. This hereditary lineage not only confers legitimacy on Kim Jong-il but prepares the groundwork for one of his sons to succeed him.