ONE
LIFE IN EARTH’S PARADISE
The Land of Avatars
Whenever a North Korean is asked by a foreign journalist or visitor what life is like inside North Korea, the reply is that the country’s citizens live in an earthly paradise for one reason: the care given to them by the Supreme Leader. He is their father and provider. They lack for nothing, nor do they desire anything else. The Supreme Leader makes sure they are totally happy. Just like the Heavenly Father in Christianity, it is the living head of the Kim family that makes everything possible in North Korea.
This is a total lie. Except for the super-elites who are bound inextricably with the regime, including the crème de la crème of the party, armed forces, security agencies, and hard-currency-making enterprises, the vast majority of North Koreans must fend for themselves.
Life was not always like this in North Korea. While it’s impossible to imagine today, North Korea had a higher GDP than South Korea until the early 1970s. In 2017, South Korea’s GDP was $1.5 trillion, whereas North Korea’s was $33 billion; per capita GDP was $30,000 and $1,300, respectively.1
Still, North Koreans are routinely told that South Korea is filled with beggars and only a tiny percentage of corrupt capitalists live well; the rest of the population ekes out the barest of livings in squalid conditions. Because the country is a stooge of the American imperialists, South Korean women are constantly raped by American soldiers, Pyongyang’s propagandists claim, and the people are yearning for liberation by North Korea. Even the government-funded Russian international television network RT, which has prided itself as a mouthpiece of the Putin regime, believes that North Korean propaganda has gone a step too far. A 2017 RT documentary called The Happiest People on Earth: North Korea: The Rulers, the People and the Official Narrative offers the outside world a peek into the nation.2
A factory manager recounts her emotions when Kim Jong Un made an on-site inspection visit in January 2016. “When the Great Marshal Kim Jong Un opened the doors and walked in, we beheld his sun-like image. It was like a dream, as if I was the only one who enjoyed this great honor.” She continues with a straight face, “The entire factory and workshop filled with sunlight when the Great Marshal arrived!”
The film crew captures a scene of students studying in the famous Kim Chaek University of Technology. Since most North Korean men have to spend ten years in the army before they can enroll at a university, male students at Kim Chaek are typically in their late twenties or early thirties. One student says, “Thanks to the Great Leader and the Marshal General’s revolutionary course, our country became the strongest country in the world!” With a big smile, the student goes on to say, “All stooges who dare attack our sovereignty are our enemies.”
Each year the nation busies itself preparing for the celebration of Kim Il Sung’s birthday on April 15, called the Day of the Sun. The film crew captured citizens gathering in a plaza to pledge their loyalty to Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. After they take their vows, first-grade children goose-step to martial music, and the child leading the formation raises her right arm in a 45-degree salute, just like the goose-stepping members of the armed forces.
A middle-school orphanage official tells the film crew that the Great Marshal Kim Jong Un spent two hours visiting the school. In the entrance, you see a giant mural depicting the floor plan of the orphanage. The point where Kim began his inspection is marked with a red star, and his footsteps are marked in red arrows. An entire room is devoted to pictures and relics of his visit. The red and yellow blanket that Kim touched and the white chair with a blue cushion he sat in are boxed in glass. Everything he touches is preserved as a holy remnant, just as was done with anything his father or grandfather touched.
This is how the state wants to portray the average North Korean: filled with undying love for the Kim family, finding truth only in the teachings of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, and receiving guidance in everything from the current Supreme Leader, Kim Jong Un.
The truth is, every North Korean has an avatar, because how the avatar behaves can mean the difference between life and death.
The avatar is for public consumption—what is shown to most friends, relatives, and co-workers. A North Korean can show his or her innermost secrets to just a handful of people, perhaps immediate family members, trustworthy relatives, and best friends who have committed a common crime—like watching a South Korean movie.
The dark side of North Korea, the state argues, is simply “fake news”: conjured up by the capitalist West and enemies of the state. But right beneath the veneer of 25 million smiling North Koreans lies a darkness that fills every square meter of the DPRK.
There are at least four gulags in North Korea where between 200,000 and 300,000 political prisoners and their families are held. Officially the state says there are no political prisoners. Ahn Myong Chol was a guard in Camp 22 (no longer in operation) and one of the few guards who escaped to South Korea. He was trained to see prisoners not as human beings but as animals. In fact, prisoners got smaller rations than the dogs reared by guards.
“Prisoners shouldn’t make eye contact with instructors,” recalls Ahn (“instructor” is the euphemism used in the camps for guards). “If they do or look up, they will, again, be beaten but that isn’t always the case. Depending on the day’s mood, you can make up pretexts and be harsher on them.”3
Camp 22 was a gulag for family members of those who had committed offenses. The individuals who were directly responsible were sent to even more dismal camps, like Camp 15 in Yodok. There prisoners died regularly, from forced labor, starvation, disease, torture, beating, or execution. In North Korea, families and relatives of political prisoners are also shipped off to be punished for crimes by association. If your cousin defects to the South, for example, not only is that person’s immediate family sent to reeducation camps, prisons, or gulags, but you and other similarly distant relatives may also be caught up. If an office or factory worker is accused of a serious offense, his or her superiors and co-workers can also be carted off. Students are taught to watch their parents; they’re supposed to report them for infractions or impure thoughts.
Deep inside, everyone in North Korea knows he or she must live a double life. The older a person gets, the more attention he must pay to his avatar. If he doesn’t, the avatar will slip up somehow—perhaps tell a joke on a forbidden subject, tell a party apparatchik of alternative options, or simply nod off during a gathering of hundreds or even thousands of citizens.
The most serious crime a North Korean can be charged with is contravening one or more of the Ten Principles in the Establishment of the Monolithic Ideology of the Party (Table 1). Not by coincidence, these principles are like the Ten Commandments. First introduced by Kim Jong Il in 1974 just as the personality cult surrounding Kim Il Sung and the Kim family was reaching new heights, it was revised by Kim Jong Un in 2013. Every North Korean must memorize the principles and repeat them when asked.
Almost any act can be considered as violating one or more of the Ten Principles. In November 2017, the South Korean National Intelligence Service (NIS) reported to the National Assembly’s Intelligence Oversight Committee that several members of the North Korean party daily newspaper Rodong Sinmun had been “revolutionized” (that is, reeducated) for not putting a story about the successful testing of a ballistic missile on the front page.4 If Kim Jong Un saw that an official didn’t write down his every word or if someone didn’t bow her head to 45 degrees in front of his grandfather’s or father’s statue, that could be interpreted as going against one of the Ten Principles.
In his documentary Under the Sun (2015), Russian director Vitaly Mansky’s goal was to provide the world with a glimpse of the life of an ordinary North Korean schoolchild, eight-year-old Ri Zin Mi. The North Korean government allowed only Mansky, his cinematographer, Alexandria Ivanova, and a sound assistant into Pyongyang, and Mansky was obliged to shoot just scripted scenes prepared by North Korean handlers. Unbeknownst to the North Koreans, however, the sound assistant was a Russian who was fluent in Korean, and Mansky left his cameras running all the time, not just during the scripted scenes. According to the Los Angeles Times, “At the end of each day, the North Koreans would go through the day’s shoot, but in a risky move, in a country where foreigners who act out sometimes spend years in jail, the crew kept duplicate memory cards of all footage, that they then snuck out of North Korea.”5 Throughout Mansky’s finished movie, one can hear North Korean handlers who shout “Action!” and then “Cut!”
In the film, Zin Mi is shown right before she joins the Children’s Union on the Day of the Shining Star (the late Kim Jong Il’s birthday), one of the holiest days in North Korea. The camera zooms in on her classroom. She is dressed in a well-pressed blue Mao suit. That day’s lesson is about the anti-Japanese and anti-imperialist struggles of the Great Leader, Kim Il Sung.
“What did the Generalissimo Great Leader Kim Il Sung teach us about the wretched Japanese?” asks the teacher. All the students raise their right arm at a 90-degree angle with their left arm across their chest, a signal that they want to answer.
“To remember how much they mistreated the Korean people!” says one student.
“Yes, that’s right!” the teacher responds.
From nursery school on, North Korean children are taught to worship the Supreme Leader and the two former Great Leaders. They sing songs praising the Kims’ leadership, although at that age they don’t have the faintest clue what they are singing about.
Zin Mi’s father, in real life, is a print journalist. For the party handlers who were responsible for the film shoot, however, a print journalist was deemed too low in the social hierarchy, so they made him into an engineer at an exemplary garment factory. Her mother, who works in a cafeteria, is instead shown as working in a model soy milk factory. Of course, the three of them are shown living in a very nice apartment, one that Mansky was not sure actually belonged to them. In a scene in which the family sits down for breakfast on the heated floor, as is customary in Korea, Mansky shows the family being made to run through their lines several times, in an effort to sound as natural as possible, before the final take is approved.
TABLE 1
NORTH KOREA’S TEN COMMANDMENTS
1. Fight, with all your strength, to make the whole society the Kimilsung-Kimjongilist one.
2. Venerate the Great respected comrades Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il as the Great Leaders of the Party and of the People, as the Eternal Suns of Juche.
3. Make the authority of the respected comrades Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il and of the Party the absolute one. Be ready to defend them.
4. Arm yourself with revolutionary ideas of the Great respected comrades Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il and with the fulfillment of their ideas: the line and the policy of the Party.
5. Defend the principle following unconditionally the commandments of the Great respected comrades Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il as well as Party line and its policy.
6. Reinforce further the ideological willful and revolutionary unity of the whole Party around the figure of its Leader(s).
7. Learn after the Great respected comrades Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, have a high moral and ethical image, use the revolutionary methods of action and the people’s model of action.
8. Venerate the political aspect of life, bestowed by the Leader and by the Party, respond to it by having a high political consciousness and real successes in doing your job.
9. Establish a strict organizational discipline in a wholehearted movement of the whole Party, whole state, and whole army under the Party’s sole leadership.
10. Inherit and fulfill the great deed of the Juche revolution, the great deed of the Songun revolution, started by the Great Leader respected comrade Kim Il Sung, and guided by the Great respected comrades Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, which continues from generation to generation.6
“Zin Mi, you must eat a lot of kimchi because it is our national food,” her father instructs. “And if you eat kimchi daily, it provides you with half the daily intake of vitamins.”
“Yes!” replies Zin Mi. “If I eat kimchi, it also prevents aging and cancer!” Her father praises her knowledge.
Once this scene was completed, the camera shows the family moving the dining table back to the kitchen. It is full of foods that average North Koreans will never see in their daily lives: scrambled eggs, beef sausages, white rice, cooked vegetables, beef broth soup, and sweet rice cakes.
In another staged scene, the camera focuses on Zin Mi’s mother, who is standing in line with her co-workers (whom, in reality, she had never met before). The script has an official telling the assembled workers to congratulate Zin Mi’s mother because her daughter has joined the Children’s Union. Mansky films the handler saying, “Try not to think about the camera. Can you do that?” But the eight women workers and their supervisor look anything but natural. “Everyone smile when the comrade speaks to you!” they’re told.
At the end of the movie, Zin Mi is asked for her thoughts about joining the Children’s Union. Instinctively, she delves into a self-criticism session: she decries her shortcomings and promises to work harder for the Great Leader, tears flowing down her cheeks. The handlers can be heard saying, “Calm her down. Tell her everything will be all right.”
“Try to think of something good,” one suggests to her.
“Like what?” Zin Mi replies sadly.
Eventually the handlers ask her to recite a poem, and after wiping away her tears, Zin Mi is back on track:
Founded by Great Leader Kim Il Sung,
Kindled by Great Brilliant Commander Kim Jong Il,
Led by Respected Leader Kim Jong Un,
I joined the glorious Children’s Union and swear,
Always and everywhere,
To think and act in the spirit of the Great Generalissimos
And the teachings of Respected Leader Kim Jong Un
In order to become a reliable reservist of the
Revolutionary Juche movement for the building of Communism
Continuing from generation to generation,
I swear!
Copyright © 2019 by Chung Min Lee
