Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (154 page)

81.
Higgins,
War in Korea,
pp. 209–211.

Noble (“Seoul Under the Communists”) wrote that the first occupation was “so bitter a lesson that although nearly the whole population stayed behind in June, 1950, the next winter when it appeared that Seoul would be captured again by the communists, despite the snow and ice and bitter cold, well over a million people left the city and scarcely a hundred thousand remained a second time. …”

82.
Scalapino and Lee write that, as the war came to an end, South Korea was “one of the most staunchly anti-Communist societies in the world. On the other hand, every speech and action of the North Korean officials reflected their deep anxiety regarding the loyalty of their own people and the deplorable conditions prevailing throughout their country”
(Communism in Korea,
p. 462).

Cumings
(Origins
II, p. 669) acknowledges that South Koreans retained horrible memories of the Northern occupation, but he questions whether their memories were true ones: “In the early days of the new regime, the released prisoners settled scores with their antagonists who had abused and jailed them, mainly members of the Korean National Police and the rightist youth groups. People’s courts arraigned and denounced them, after which summary executions took place. This experience has led to a general judgment, reinforced by American propaganda, that the occupation of the south was a living hell for those who experienced it. I myself seem always to be running into Koreans who say the experience was terrible, while also saying they successfully hid out during the entire three months. Evidence from the time, including interviews with ROK officials who fled Seoul, does not suggest that the occupation was politically
onerous for the majority of Seoul’s citizens, although generalized fear, food shortages and the American bombing made it an often hellish experience.”

83.
Higgins,
War in Korea,
pp. 209–211.

84.
Halliday and Cumings,
Korea,
p. 143.

85.
Ibid., p. 132.

86.
The communists’ redistribution was carried out “in every province outside the Pusan perimeter; although it was hasty and done in wartime conditions, it cleared away class structures and power that later made possible Rhee’s land-redistribution programme—because the Americans would not fight merely to restore land to this class that had ruled Korea for centuries” (Halliday and Cumings,
Korea,
p. 87). Also see Cumings,
Origins
II, pp. 471–472 and, especially, p. 760, where the author observes that the war “transformed South Korea; it was the partial equivalent of the revolution its social structure demanded but did not get in the previous five years. The revolution was capitalist and the war foreshortened and hastened it, above all by ending landlordism.”

87.
Gregory Henderson, “Korea, 1950,” in James Cotton and Ian Neary eds.,
The Korean War in History
(.Manchester: .Manchester University Press, 1989), pp.
175–176.
In the Seoul of 1948, in contrast, Henderson wrote, “those leaning northward and those serving the south had then a kind of intimacy they no longer have. One was not quite so abruptly communist or anti-communist then. There was middle ground. All of the [South Korean security forces’] officers personally knew those who had either chosen the other side or leaned in some way toward it. Nor had they always disliked them. The fact that the—as we say in the United States—‘Southern way of life’ was a little more on the collabora-tory side while the North was steelier, more Spartan, more hard-bitten, more ideological and less yielding and opportunistic, all this was known and recognized although not usually thus baldly articulated.”

88.
Baik II, p. 315.

One film, according to an official description, told of Jo Ok-hi, a woman party member who joined a partisan force opposing the occupying UN troops in her county. American troops supposedly captured her and “subjected her to every kind of torture in an attempt to wring out of her secrets about the partisan detachment. They pulled out all her fingernails. But the enemy always got the same answers: ‘You fools! No one gets secrets from a Workers’ Party member!’ The bloodthirsty U.S. cannibals … gouged out her eyeballs, burned her with a red hot iron and cut off her breasts”
(History of the Just War for the Liberation of the Fatherland of the Korean People
[Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961], pp. 133–134, cited by Kiwon Chung, “The North Korean People’s Army and the Party,” in Scalapino,
Korea Today,
p. 117).

89.
Hong Soon-il, “Refugee Village,”
Korea Times,
April 20, 1994.

90.
“Despite the war-time destructiveness and psychological strains there
’were
few signs of social malaise in North Korea at the end of the war. There appeared to be little murder, theft and personal violence, although there
’were
growing signs of sexual license, especially among the young. Thus, while there were points of popular dissatisfaction, basic [Korean Workers’ Party] control over the people of North Korea was not in jeopardy. The Communist version of how the war began was still widely believed” (Paige and Lee, “Post-War Politics,” p. 19).

91.
“The war-time experience was accompanied by the development of certain unfavourable attitudes toward the KWP and the Soviet Union as
’well
as by the
growth of certain favorable attitudes toward Communist China. The principal discontent with the KWP was that it had not been vigorous enough in its relief and reconstruction work. It was popularly regarded in this respect as the ‘do-nothing’ party. The Soviet Union suffered in popular esteem because it had not given greater assistance to the North Korean war effort. The North Koreans were aware that South Korea was free from Communist air attack and therefore hoped for direct retaliation by Soviet airpower against American attacks upon the North. The knowledge that Russian fighter pilots were flying defensively over North Korean territory and that the Russians
’were
providing military and relief supplies did not satisfy the demand for deeper Soviet military commitment, including the participation of Soviet infantry divisions. By contrast, the North Koreans
’were
favorably impressed by Chinese military assistance. Mao Tse-tung’s injunction to the Chinese soldiers in Korea to love the Korean Democratic People’s Republic, the Korean Workers’ Party, and the Korean people as your own government, party, and people—and treasure every mountain, every stream, every tree, and every blade of grass the same,’ was widely respected and appreciated. This did not mean, however, that Korean-Chinese relations were without points of friction. There was some evidence of professional jealousy, for example, among North Korean army officers who had to take orders from Chinese commanders” (Paige and Lee, “Post-War Politics,” pp. 18–19).

92.
Baik II, pp. 400, 405. To portray North Korea as the victor, Baik uses American military leaders’ public expressions of regret over their side’s failures. See pp. 404–405.

93.
Kiwon Chung, “North Korean People’s Army” p. 112.

94.
Kim,
With the Century,
vol. 3, p. 255.

6. With the Leader Who Unfolded Paradise.

1.
Baik II (see chap. 4, n. 24), pp. 428–430, provides the meeting-hall anecdote. Baik says (pp. 421–422) that Kim “considered that golden opportunities offered by the armistice should be fully used to promote the socialist revolution and socialist construction at full speed, in order to provide a firm guarantee for consolidating peace and completing the historic cause of the unification of the nation.”

2.
Scalapino and Lee,
Communism in Korea
(see chap. 2, n. 28), p. 425.

3.
Hankuk Ilbo,
November 16, 1990, in Seiler,
Kim Il-song 1941–1948
(see chap. 2, n. 18).

4.
Hankuk Ilbo,
November 18, 1990.

5.
Baik II, p. 369.

6.
Hankuk Ilbo,
November 18, 1990.

7.
See Baik II, pp. 308, 388.

8.
Suh,
Kim Il Sung
(see chap. 2, n. 25) , pp. 105–108, 127–136.

9.
“The trials provided the supreme rationalization for defeat,” as Scalapino and Lee say. The North’s tribulations could be portrayed as “due not to the mistakes of the Kim group, but because traitors from within had given overt assistance to the enemy”
(Communism in Korea,
p. 451).

10.
Chay Pyung-gil, Following the Conclusion of the Serialization ‘Yu Song-ch’ol’s Testimony,’ ” Hankuk Ilbo, December 1, 1990, translated in Seiler, Kim Il-song 1941–1948.

Bruce Cumings
(Origins
II [see chap. 3, n. 43], p. 830, n. 26) discusses the importance of this group:

“To my knowledge only one source in all the published and unpublished literature on North Korea grasps the central importance of Kim’s peculiar style of leadership, and that is the formerly classified study done in the early 1960s by Evelyn McCune for the U.S. State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (‘Leadership in North Korea: Groupings and .Motivations,’ 1963). She correctly terms the relationship between Kim and his close allies ‘a semi-chivalrous, irrevocable and unconditional bond … under iron discipline.’ It is a ‘deeply personal’ system, ‘fundamentally hostile to complex bureaucracy’ Kim and his allies
’were
generalists, jacks-of-all-trades who could run the government or command the army, show a peasant how to use new seeds or cuddle children in a school; Kim would dispatch them as loyal observers of officials and experts or specialists outside the inner core, that is, in the realm of impersonal bureaucracy. McCune thought correctly that the powerful glue holding the Kim group together made it much more formidable than typical Korean political factions, based on weaker patron-client relations and given to splintering in power struggles and personal competition; thus it was able to assert dominance over rival groups rather easily. She also understood the concentric circle metaphor, providing a chart of the leadership radiating outward from Kim.”

11.
Kim Il-sung,
Selected Works,
vol. 1 (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1976), cited in Lim Un,
Founding of a Dynasty
(see chap. 2, n. 59), pp. 221–222. Kim’s philosophy of life was, “Don’t trust strangers,” Lim observes. Thus, Kim not only purged his opposition “but precluded the entire potential of any possible formation of new opposition. For instance, once he pinpointed an object of elimination, he hunted its fellow travelers and collaborators and purged all of them. He further eradicated their relatives, business contacts, and even acquaintances. When an army general was purged so were his relatives, relatives on his wife’s side, his leaders, staff, adjutants, drivers, and all relatives of these people, persons from the same home town and schoolmates, and so forth. The extent of the victimization spread like a creeping potato vine.”

12.
Baik II, pp. 378–380.

13.
Ibid., p. 456.

14.
Yoon T. Kuark, “North Korea’s Industrial Development During the Post-War Period,” in Robert A. Scalapino, ed.,
North Korea Today
(New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1963), p. 54.

15.
“[B]etween 1946 and 1965 the share of industry and agriculture as components of national income was almost exactly reversed: from 16.8 percent and 63.5 percent to 64.2 percent and 18.3 percent” (Aidan Foster-Carter, “North Korea. Development and Self Reliance: A Critical Appraisal,” in Gavan McCormack and John Gittings, eds.,
Crisis in Korea
[London, Spokesman Books, 1977], p. 81).

16.
Joseph Sang-hoon Chung,
The North Korean Economy: Structure and Development
(Stanford, Calif: Hoover Institution Press, 1974), p. 145.

17.
Kuark, “Industrial Development,” p. 61.

18.
Van Ree,
Socialism in One Zone
(see chap. 4, n. 1), p. 182.

Suh
(Kim Il Sung,
p. 140) mentions a Soviet loan of 1 billion rubles in 1953, along with an extension of repayment time for previous Soviet loans. The same year the Chinese provided a loan of 8 trillion yuan. “The Chinese
’were
more generous than the Soviet Union and canceled all North Korean debts to China,
including materials supplied by the Chinese during the Korean War from 1950 to 1953.”

19.
“North Korea has been generally free from the kind of factionalism, frequent revolutions, corruption, ineptitude, inflation, unemployment, and so on that demoralized and undermined many an emerging economy” (Chung,
The North Korean Economy,
p. 158). Chung says Kim’s tight dictatorial control brought a stability that probably contributed to economic development even as it dampened private incentives.

20.
Baik II, p. 448.

21.
Although in 1945 Kim was reported to have asked to be called by the plain title
dongmoo
(comrade), Paige and Lee report that in the 1950s “[a]t least one high official has been fired from his post” for referring to Kim as
dongmoo
instead of
t’ongji,
the honorific version (“Post-War Politics” [see chap. 5, n. 58], p. 28).

22.
“In the nine years since the fighting stopped, North Korea has become something of a showcase, with plenty of window-dressing and propaganda for Communism in Asia” (Kuark, “Industrial Development,” p. 51).