The Hidden People of North Korea (34 page)

Hidden Thoughts

What is in the minds of North Koreans as they go about their daily lives? What motivates them? What do they love and hate, hope and fear? Have years of indoctrination brainwashed them? Do they believe the propaganda that proclaims, “Our leader is the best, our ideology is the best, our army is the best, and our system is the best”?
¹
Or are their minds filled with contradictions, frustration, and resentment? The short answer to such questions is that the minds of North Koreans are in conflict, but they do not dwell on it. Their minds are filled with the teachings of the Kim regime, but they are guided in everyday life by beliefs of an opposite and far more practical nature. They heavily discount the official propaganda claiming that the North Korean economy is merely going through a bad patch on the road to socialist paradise, and they are beginning to doubt that the rest of the international community holds Kim Jong-il and the North Korean state in high esteem. With each passing year, they put less faith in the regime’s teachings, but they have no coherent set of alternative values to guide them to a better future.

Values—that is, a culture’s ideas about what is good and bad—provide very basic guidelines for behavior, although people do not always follow them, and they are usually open to interpretation and modification according to circumstances. For example, Americans value efficiency, hard work, freedom of choice, individualism, a judicious degree of conformity to social norms, and the rights of minorities. All cultures share these American values, largely inherited from European culture, with varying degrees of emphasis on each. Even traditionally collective societies, like those of the Japanese and Koreans, are today quite individualistic. North Koreans subscribe to most of these values as well, although they place more weight on social conformity and less on individualism than do most modern societies.

Attitudes—positive and negative feelings about objects as diverse as guns, carrots, and democracy, along with knowledge and beliefs about those objects—are a more precise guide to behavior than are values. Knowing something about a person’s attitudes makes it easier to predict behavior. As it happens, attitudes may sometimes be formed as a
consequence
of behavior, as in the case of rationalizations, but once formed, attitudes guide people as they navigate a world of choices, suggesting what to approach and what to avoid. People also use attitudes to define themselves, as in “I am a proud North Korean.”

Attitudes are transmitted by teachers, by the media, and by the people we respect. For over half a century, the Kim regime has devoted prodigious efforts to teaching a set of socialist, loyalist, and nationalist values and attitudes. Attitudes, and to a lesser extent values, are also formed by experience; in fact, the strongest attitudes are learned in the school of hard knocks. Every day, North Koreans face a harsh contradiction between attitudes they have been taught and attitudes they learn from direct experience with life. For example, the Arduous March of the late 1990s taught the lesson that the state would no longer look out for its citizens, even while the propaganda press told people to keep their faith in state socialism. Those who remained faithful to socialist principles became society’s losers, while those who went into business for themselves survived.

It is difficult to describe the beliefs of people living in a totalitarian society, where many thoughts must be hidden from all but family members and a few close friends, and no public opinion surveys are conducted. Instead, we must rely on material gathered from individual interviews and surveys of North Koreans who have already left the country, realizing that these people are not a representative sample of North Koreans and that their postdefection thoughts may color and even crowd out the thoughts they had while living in their homeland. Much of the material for this chapter comes from two surveys of defectors conducted by South Korean organizations and from two hundred defector interviews conducted since the late 1990s by the book’s second author, Kongdan Oh.

An Ideology “in Our Own Style”

The Kim regime is inordinately proud of its ideology. “Some countries are known for their economic prosperity and others for military strength and still others for rich cultural assets. But our country is the only country known for its ideological power.”
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From cradle to grave, North Koreans are exposed to this ideology, and a good place to begin studying what they think is to look at what they have been taught.

An ideology is a collection of mutually consistent values and attitudes on which a political system is based. The Kimist ideology, borrowing heavily from Confucianism, Stalinism, and Maoism, stresses the value of the family as a model for society, with the leader as the father figure and each citizen-family member having his or her own role to play. According to Confucianism, the leader in turn has obligations to his national family, and when those obligations are not met, the leader loses his ruling mandate and should expect to be replaced. Of course, in practice it is as difficult to remove the leader of a state as it is for a family to replace its father. Chinese dynasties were passed on from parent to child for generations. In North Korea’s dynasty, through good years and bad, Kim Il-sung ruled for almost fifty years as the “father-leader” (
oboi suryongnim
).

The point in common between Confucianism and the various forms of communism is the autocratic nature of governance. Kim Il-sung borrowed many ideas from Marxism-Leninism as it was practiced in the 1930s and 1940s, including an emphasis on collectivism and on the perpetual revolution. Even in the 1940s it was difficult for many people living under communism to take this ideology seriously because it was obvious that their leaders were determined that the dictatorship of the
nomenklatura
should never give way to the dictatorship of the proletariat. By the twenty-first century, communist totalitarianism had become an anachronism found only in North Korea and Cuba, although communist parties in China and Vietnam continued to monopolize politics and guide their respective economies.

A truly socialist or communist society can succeed only if its people are remolded into citizens who place community above personal interests. In Stalinist Russia, the utopian citizen was called the “new man,” and this new man is the ideal in North Korea as well. Party lectures, newspaper articles, radio and television programs, and movies and plays teach people that egotism has no place in their society. Unfortunately, this teaching goes against universal norms and may well violate biological survival instincts. Only when faced with a community emergency are people willing to put aside individual goals; the rest of the time, they revert to their own self-interest, none more enthusiastically than the communist elites.

Communism is acknowledged to be a work in progress. Because some people cling to the old individualistic values, the transition from socialism to communism is painfully slow. In fact, North Korea is all about transitions: year after year the propaganda press proclaims that a foundation has been laid or a turning point reached in achieving economic goals, but as with a mirage, those goals are never reached. Nothing gets built on the foundation, and one turning point simply leads to another, until the economy comes full circle in failure for the simple reason that the problem is not the economy but the political system that controls it. Given the transitional nature of communist society, it is especially difficult to get people to adopt a communitarian outlook when some are working for the community while others are working for themselves. The existence of so many free riders gives people the feeling that they are not being adequately compensated for their selflessness.

The Kim regime’s ideology rests on a few key themes, some developed early on by Kim Il-sung and his ideological advisors, and others added by Kim Jong-il and his advisors. The senior Kim began with Marxism-Leninism; however, in the mid-1950s, facing the task of recovering from the Korean War and consolidating his hold on power, Kim needed a new ideology. Rather than rule as North Korea’s representative of international communism, Kim wanted to be the originator and interpreter of his own ideology. In a speech he gave to Korean Workers’ Party (KWP) propaganda and agitation workers in December 1955, Kim introduced the concept of
Juche
in its modern context, saying, “We are not engaged in any other country’s revolution, but solely in the Korean revolution.”
³

Juche
symbolized independence from the Soviet Union and China and conveyed a determination not to let Korea fall under the influence of foreigners, as it had done so often in the past. Subscribing to Marxism-Leninism would have put North Korea’s ideology under the authority of foreign theorists, and although Kim appreciated the value of domestic unity, he was not so keen on international communist brotherhood except when he was asking for foreign aid. As North Korea’s national ideology,
Juche
eventually supplanted Marxism-Leninism, mention of which was dropped from the 1980 charter of the KWP and the 1992 revision of the state constitution. But Kim could not afford to separate North Korea completely from his communist benefactors in Russia, Eastern Europe, and China, although it helped that in China, Chairman Mao was also distancing himself from Moscow’s authority. The political ideologies of North Korea, China, and the Soviet Union may have diverged, but they shared the principle that the few should control the many under the guise of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Juche
can be roughly translated as national pride and self-reliance. It prescribes doing things in a manner suited to North Korean conditions (as interpreted by the Kims) and not mindlessly imitating others, even if others (e.g., South Koreans) are more successful. A half century after Kim introduced the idea,
Juche
remained the guiding ideology: “Achieving the strengthening and prosperity of the country and people is an arduous task. It can never be accomplished if we abandon our style and shift to another people’s style to escape from ordeals and difficulties, or if we turn to another people for help without trusting our own strength.”
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Consistent with
Juche
principles, the North Korean press routinely warns of the evil intentions behind U.S. foreign aid, which is often characterized as a type of psychological military operation: “The purpose of the United States’ ‘aid operation’ lies in the paralysis of anti-U.S., independent consciousness by creating a fantasy about the United States in people and encouraging pro-U.S. flunkeyism that depends on the United States.”
⁵
Juche
has not, however, prevented the Kim regime from soliciting billions of dollars in foreign aid over the years, including over $1 billion (mostly in World Food Program donations and compensatory oil shipments) from the American government.
⁶
Of course, the
Juche
economy was a lie from the very beginning. To maintain the myth of self-reliance, considerate foreign governments sometimes pretend that aid to North Korea is a loan. North-South Korea talks about aid are called “economic cooperation talks,” and aid from the United States, when it is acknowledged by the North Koreans, is sometimes described in lectures to the people as tribute forced from the United States by the great general, Kim Jong-il. The regime also uses
Juche
as a propaganda weapon against South Korea by emphasizing the fact that although Chinese and Soviet troops had left the North by the late 1950s, American and UN troops remained in the South.

In the 1950s and 1960s, conveniently overlooking his own years of service in the Chinese and Soviet armies, Kim Il-sung skillfully employed
Juche
to purge his political rivals by suggesting that those who had connections with South Korea, China, Japan, and Russia could not have the best interests of North Korea at heart. Hundreds of top officials, thousands of their followers, and hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens were banished to the countryside, imprisoned, or executed for words or deeds that could even remotely be interpreted as praising or imitating another country or denigrating North Korea, although the real reason for their downfall was that they were viewed as being insufficiently loyal to Kim. Following the example of Stalin, who eventually eliminated almost everyone in the upper echelons of the Soviet Union’s party, government, and military, Kim began his purges with attacks on leaders of rival political factions and then moved to purge rivals within his own faction.

Any exposure to the outside world puts a North Korean under a cloud of suspicion. People on the street are cautious about engaging in conversation with foreign visitors. Immigrants from the North Korean community in Japan are relegated to the hostile political class. Among the top cadres, one famous example of a tainted official was Kim Dal-hyon, North Korea’s competent minister of external economic affairs in the early 1990s and a frequent traveler to foreign lands, who, after returning from an official visit to South Korea, lost his government position and spent the rest of his days out of sight as a local official. Several years later the top official in charge of external economic affairs, Kim Chong-u, failed to show up for a meeting with a foreign delegation and was never heard from again. On a broader scale, in the aftermath of what some foreigners believe was a coup attempt around 1992, hundreds of North Korean army officers who had studied at Moscow’s Frunze Military Academy were purged simply because a few of their number had participated in the coup attempt.

Juche
was revised under the stewardship of Kim Jong-il, who from the early days of his political career had shown a marked interest in ideology. One of Kim’s first jobs was in the KWP’s Propaganda and Agitation Department, where he proceeded to make
Juche
the ideological bulwark of the regime by enshrining loyalty to his father as the ideology’s cornerstone. In 1974 the Ten-Point Principle (Ten Principles) for Solidifying the Party’s Monolithic Ideological System became the supreme political (in contrast to legal) set of commandments. The first principle stated, “All society must be dyed with Kim Il-sung’s revolutionary ideology,” and the other nine principles merely repeated or elaborated on this.