The Hidden People of North Korea (30 page)

An ongoing series of novels, including
Song of Desire for Reunification
,
Wealth
, and
40 Years in My Memory
, are based on the reminiscences of each of the sixty-three North Korean spies repatriated by the ROK government in 2000. These works purportedly show how these men “maintained their faith for scores of years in South Korea, undaunted by brutal torture, appeasement and deception, trusting only in Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il.”
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On their return to the North, the spies were given a hero’s welcome and have been featured ever since in propaganda campaigns illustrating the loyalty of North Koreans. Unfortunately, the ROK government did not insist that the DPRK release any of the South Korean prisoners of war or abducted civilians that it has been holding for decades.

Films

North Koreans may not have access to many books, but they do like to go to the movies, whose primary function is to propagandize for the regime. Films are particularly well suited to a collectivist society because people watch them as a group, and for that matter, the films are produced not by individuals but by production companies, so both the production and consumption can be kept under the watchful eyes of the authorities.
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Popular film themes include the adulation of the Kim family, the perennial conflict between socialism and capitalism, and the dangers posed by foreign culture.
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Many films have historical anti-Japanese themes, with perhaps the most famous being the Kim Jong-il production from the late 1960s titled
Sea of Blood
, about a woman farmer who became a revolutionary and fought the Japanese colonialists in the 1930s. Another famous Kim film from that period is
Flower Girl
, about a peasant girl who receives a beating from a greedy landlord.

Korean propagandists say that Kim first showed an interest in films at the age of seven, when he supposedly commented that the snow in one movie looked too much like cotton.
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A wall chart at the Korean Feature Film Studio outside of Pyongyang tallies 1,724 visits and 10,487 instructions made by Kim up to the year 1993.
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Throughout the studio, large photos show Kim in the act of supervising, while much smaller photos show actors and directors at their work.
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In his 450-page treatise on film titled
On the Art of the Cinema
, Kim covers all facets of filmmaking and emphasizes the importance of the director’s role (presumably in life as well as in film).
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Two of the book’s chapters are titled “The Director Is the Commander of the Creative Group” and “The Quality of Acting Depends on the Director.” As he took on more responsibilities for running the country beginning in the 1980s, Kim had less time to devote to the film industry, but his interest in film remained strong.

The North Korean film industry fell on hard times as the economy shrank, with film output declining to only about a half dozen major films per year in the 1990s, down from a full dozen in the 1980s. Multimillion-dollar film productions are now out of the question, and technology is so limited that films are routinely dubbed with sound after they have been shot. The poor production values and didactic quality of North Korean films goes a long way toward explaining why South Korean films smuggled into the country are so popular. The one bright spot in the film industry is animation: North Korean studios have established a good reputation for producing animated films on contract for the export market.

For want of anything more entertaining in the domestic market, the public likes melodramas-with-a-message in which individuals struggle against social and physical obstacles in order to follow the socialist path and in the process achieve their personal goals, including sometimes love. A modern example is the 1997 film
Myself in the Distant Future
, in which a lazy young man falls in love with a girl working on a construction brigade. The girl is not interested in the selfish suitor, and after her brigade has been disbanded, she returns to her village to serve the party as a farmworker. The young man follows her and, after failing to win her back on his own lazy merits, sees the light and invents a method to run farm tractors on wood instead of scarce gasoline. He performs a heroic deed with his wood-burning tractor, is awarded a medal, and finally gets the girl.
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Out-of-Home Media

North Korean buildings are plastered with hand-painted propaganda posters and banners that urge people to commit themselves to the
Juche
ideology and military-first politics and to be loyal to Kim Jong-il: “Let’s Become Young Heroes in the Worthwhile Struggle to Glorify the
Songun
[Military-First] Era!”; “Let’s Consolidate Our Political and Ideological Position Like Steel”; “All Working Class! Let’s Vigorously Display the Example and Spirit of the DPRK Working Class of the Military-First Era!”; “Let the Functionaries Lead the Ranks Like the People’s Army Commanders!” Other slogans address civic responsibilities: “Let’s Plant Trees through the Entire Country”; “More of Our-Style Stockbreeding!”; “Let’s Achieve Heroic Feats in the Construction of Hydroelectric Power Plants!”; “Let’s Turn Our Villages into a Socialist Fairyland Where Crops Are Abundant!”

About 80 percent of the northern part of the Korean Peninsula is mountainous. This is bad for farming but good for rock carving. It has been estimated that over forty thousand characters (words and syllables) have been carved on rocks, especially in the scenic mountain regions around Mt. Kum-gang and Mt. Paektu.
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Although Koreans have a long tradition of rock carving, the propaganda cult carvings of the Kim regime did not begin to appear until around 1972 to celebrate Kim Il-sung’s sixtieth birthday, and the initial carving project can probably be attributed to Kim Jong-il. Most slogans either praise or quote one of the three Kims. Carvings of Kim Il-sung’s sayings are painted in red. In the Mt. Kumgang tourist area, some forty-five hundred characters are said to be carved on the jagged cliffs for which the mountains are famous. One of the most prominent of the carvings quotes Kim Il-sung: “ ‘Kumgang is the celebrated mountain of Choson,’ [signed] Kim Il-sung, September 27, 1947.” The characters forming the words are twenty meters high and sixteen meters wide.
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The phrase “Heaven-Sent Brilliant General Kim Jong Il” was carved in characters of similar size to honor Kim Jong-il’s sixtieth birthday.
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Internal Documents

There exists a hidden universe of North Korean documents sent down from the party to provide lecture material at political study sessions. The internal documents, labeled “for internal use only” or “secret,” are supposed to be collected after use, but thanks to the widespread corruption of cadres and the wide dissemination of the documents, it is hardly surprising that some of them end up in the hands of defector groups and foreign news media.

The value of these documents for foreign analysts lies in what they say about reality in North Korea. In a country supposedly without corruption, how is it that the fight against corruption is a perennial theme? Instructions on how to stamp out crime reveal much about its nature in North Korea, and lectures on preventing defections provide valuable information about how people defect. The lectures repeat what is presented in the mass media but cite social problems more concretely, whereas the newspapers tend to avoid any specific mention of problems in order to preserve the illusion that North Korea is a model society. The internal documents are also blunter in their language; for example, Americans and Japanese are routinely referred to as “bastards.”

The documents follow a standard format. The first section introduces the issue to be discussed, the second explains why the issue is important, and the third discusses how to deal with the issue. Political instructors are urged to include local examples in order to relate the lecture to the audience’s immediate concerns and experiences. Defectors report that people do not take these lectures seriously but are forced to attend and answer questions about them. It is highly likely that the instructors do not take the lectures seriously either, for it must be demoralizing to give the same lecture year after year, only to see the problems it addresses, such as the spread of capitalism, worsen rather than improve.

In lecture material distributed in 2002 titled “On Intensively Waging the Struggle to Smash the Capitalists’ Ideological and Cultural Infiltration,” marked “For Party’s Internal Use Only,” examples of capitalist infiltration include “reactionary and erotic” videotapes, American films, photo albums, picture books, novels, and Bibles. The videotapes in question are said to be circulated among friends and relatives, reproduced, sold, and rented in shops and in the markets, and viewed not just by individuals but by entire groups. The lecture also warns against possessing radio and television sets whose dials are not fixed to the authorized channels; singing South Korean songs; composing “bad songs and even replacing those elegant words of our great songs with vulgar and bad words” (presumably parodies); wearing “disheveled hair styles” and Western clothing styles, such as short skirts and “ugly pants that cling to the body”; using makeup in an “extremely grotesque manner”; getting divorced; engaging in superstitious behavior, including astrology and fortune-telling; believing in religion; and spreading false rumors.
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This pretty much covers the gamut of the antisocialist “sins” prevalent in North Korean society.

In the introductory section to this same lecture, the “U.S. imperialists” are said to be intensifying their “slanders” of the DPRK with the help of the “Japanese reactionaries” and “South Korean puppet bastards.” The lecture warns that “people will ideologically degenerate and weaken, cracks will develop in our socialist ideological position, and in the end, our socialism will helplessly collapse,” as happened in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. It is claimed that people and the party bureaucrats are “going ideologically slack and becoming habituated to the bourgeois ideological and cultural infiltration.” Even bureaucrats in the Central Party organizations are said to be “infected with capitalist germs.”

The lecture outlines four measures to “smash” this capitalist infiltration. First, North Koreans must “firmly equip [them]selves with the respected and beloved general’s revolutionary ideology.” The great irony here is that Kim Jong-il’s behavior exemplifies almost all the cultural vices mentioned in the lecture, including viewing foreign films and divorcing one’s wife. The lecture also advises people to follow the model of the Korean People’s Army, where “bourgeois ideology and culture can never set foot.” However, it is clear from other internal documents that exactly these same practices have taken root in the military—and the people surely know this.

The second means suggested to combat infiltration is to block the channels of communication by having radio dials fixed and asking people to surrender forbidden materials such as videotapes voluntarily. People are also told not even to look at such materials or to inquire about them because they may be seduced even by a glance. Instead, people should live “in a revolutionary manner.” “Undisciplined life is a space where bourgeois ideology and culture can set foot and can spawn”—the North Korean version of the old Western saying “Idleness is the devil’s playground.”

A third anti-infiltration measure calls upon the assistance of party and government bureaucrats and police officers to be vigilant in finding and eliminating foreign materials: “Many of the functionaries have never seriously taken issue with it [the infiltration of foreign materials], even when capitalist elements [i.e., materials] were appearing around them; they pretended not to know about it.” It is in fact widely recognized that many of these officials are avid consumers of forbidden materials and can best afford them.

Finally, the lecture warns that those caught with bourgeois cultural materials should be “punished in the name of the party and the law” (notice that the party comes before the law). According to Article 193 of the 2004 North Korean criminal code, “Whoever, without authorization, brings in from other countries or makes or spreads music, dances, paintings, photographs, books, videos, or memory media such as CD-ROMs reflecting decadence, sexuality, and obscenity in content shall be sentenced to two years or less of labor discipline. In case the degree of culpability is serious, the offender shall be sentenced to four years or less of labor correction.” Article 194 specifies two to five years of imprisonment for anyone listening to or viewing such materials. Article 195 provides for two to five years of imprisonment for listening to foreign broadcasts.

Three years after this lecture was written, the same themes were still being lectured on. A 2005 document titled “On Completely Destroying the Schemes of Our Enemies Who Are Spreading Exotic Lifestyles” condemns those who lead a “slovenly, corrupt, and rotten lifestyle,” watch “unhealthy and decadent movies and recorded cassettes,” and get divorced or live together outside of marriage. Koreans are urged to wear Korean-style clothing and traditional hairstyles, “make and eat lots of [Korean] food,” and address each other with traditional greetings.
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As a KCBS broadcast says, “When we sing, we have to sing with our own tunes, and when we dance, we have to dance with our own rhythm, and we have to positively preserve our national traditions and customs, including attire, food, and etiquette.”
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Civilian and military lectures urge audiences to block illegal imports along the border with China. “Let Us Vigorously Wage the Struggle to Uproot Acts of Smuggling,” dated 2003, blames smuggling on “South Korean puppet ‘intelligence agent’ bastards” who operate along the borders of “neighboring countries” (i.e., China) and instigate people to get involved.
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