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"Heaven and Earth Shake with Cheers
for Kim Jong-il!"
North
Korea as a Religious State
By GARY LEUPP
All three countries labeled "the
Axis of Evil" by President Bush in 2002 are presently religious
states. Iran is of course a Shiite theocracy, while the government
of formerly secularist Iraq---to the extent it has a government
at all---is dominated by Shiite fundamentalists. North Korea
has long practiced its state religion, Kim Il-songism.
According to North Korean scriptures, when the Great Leader Kim
Il-song died in 1994, thousands of cranes descended from Heaven
to fetch him, and his portrait appeared high in the firmament.
Immediately villages and towns throughout the nation began to
construct Towers of Eternal Life, the main one rising 93 meters
over Kim's mausoleum in Pyongyang. The Great Leader's son, the
Dear Leader Kim Jong-il, took power, declining to assume the
title of President. The Constitution of the Democratic People's
Republic of Korea restricts that title forever to the Great Leader,
whom the Dear Leader has proclaimed, "will always be with
us." The Dear Leader himself was born on Mt. Paektu, the
highest mountain in Korea and Manchuria long revered by Koreans
as sacred and the birthplace of their nation, in 1942. (Unbelievers
say he was born in 1941 in Vyatskoye, in Siberia, in the Soviet
Union.) His birth in a humble log cabin brought joy to the cosmos:
a double rainbow appeared over the peak, a new star rose in the
heavens, and a swallow descended to herald his birth. (Thus he
is called, among other monikers, the Heaven-Descended General.)
When he was 32 years old, the Workers' Party of Korea and the
people of Korea unanimously elected him their leader. When he
visited Panmunjom, a fog descended to protect him from South
Korean snipers, but when he was out of danger, the mist dramatically
listed and glorious sunlight shone all around him. . . You get
the idea.
Now, how did it come about
that a socialist republic established by a Marxist-Leninist party
in 1948 came under the spell of this state religion and its peculiar
mythology? Some might say that Marxism-Leninism is itself a religion,
but they misapply the term. "Religion" proper doesn't
refer to just any ideology or thought system, but only to those
that posit supernatural phenomena such as life after death, miracles
and the existence of deities. Marxism as a variant of philosophical
materialism explicitly rejects such phenomena. Some socialist
societies have surely produced personality cults, distorted or
fabricated histories, dogmatism and fanaticism. And of course
when a leader dies, the party has said, "He will always
be with us" in a metaphorical sense. The Soviets early on
adopted the custom of embalming revolutionary leaders, and the
Chinese, Vietnamese and Koreans have followed suite. But what
we see in the DPRK is more than a personality cult. It seems
to me more akin to the State Shinto imposed on the Korean peninsula
by the Japanese imperialists after 1905.
State Shinto, itself developed after 1868 in specific emulation
of European state churches, emphasized the divine origins of
the Japanese emperors, descended in an unbroken family line from
the establishment of the Empire by Jinmu, great-great-grandson
of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu. State Shinto emphasized the kokutai
or "national essence," the unbreakable unity of
the Japanese islands (born from the bodies of the kami or
gods), the Japanese people, their divine emperor, and all the
kami with the Sun Goddess at their head. It was a vague
concept that boiled down to obedience to state authority and
to that solar disk national flag. (We find this sun worship meme
in Kim Il-songism too. The DPRK Constitution states, "The
great leader Comrade Kim Il Sung is the sun of the nation and
the lodestar of the reunification of the fatherland." A
monumental artwork called "the Figure of the Sun" erected
to mark the 100-day memorial service for Kim in 1994, adorns
a hill overlooking Pyongyang.)
The Meiji-era reformers who
created Japan's state religion were well-educated men who probably
didn't believe the mythology literally, but thought it would
allow for the effective control of the indoctrinated masses.
It did in fact work fairly well, up until Japan's crushing defeat
in 1945. The U.S. Occupation then abolished it (leaving "folk
Shinto" as opposed to State Shinto alone), and forced Emperor
Hirohito to publicly renounce any claim to divinity. He could
have been tried for war crimes; the Allies could have ended the
myth-shrouded monarchy right then. But the U.S. Occupation authorities
found the residual aura of sanctity surrounding the office useful.
Hirohito was, to Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the "queen bee"
whose cooperation would ensure mass compliance with Occupation
objectives. The emperor remains a sacerdotal figure, the High
Priest of the Shinto faith, enthroned in a religious ceremony,
offering prayers on behalf of the nation to the gods.
Growing up under Japanese occupation,
Kim Il-song could have observed the usages of a state religion
in the service of a hereditary monarchy linked to Heaven. Maybe
these observations subconsciously affected the evolution of his
thinking. Once in power in North Korea, from 1945, he increasingly
built a personality cult, initially modeled after Stalin's but
by the 1970s plainly monarchical in nature. It integrated Confucian
values of filial piety and obedience, and glorified the entire
family of the Great Leader, including especially the crown prince
Jong-il.
Tens of thousands of "research
rooms" have been constructed throughout the country, which
persons are required to visit at regular intervals, bowing to
the portraits of the two Kims the way that all Japanese (and
colonized Koreans and Taiwanese) used to have to bow to the Japanese
emperor's portrait.
As Hwang Jang Yop, once International Secretary of the Korean
Workers' Party, has written, "Kim Jong Il went to great
lengths to create the Kim Il Sung personality cult, and Kim Il
Sung led the efforts to turn Kim Jong Il into a god." (It
is perhaps not surprising that the Great Leader warmly welcomed
the Rev. Billy Graham to Pyongyang in 1992 and 1994, where he
preached his brand of Christianity in Protestant and Catholic
churches and at Kim Il-song University. Kim was no doubt appreciative
of the power of religion, having created his own.)
The Chinese communists (when
they were communists) referred poetically to "heaven,"
as in the 1970s expression "There is great disorder under
heaven, the situation is excellent." Chinese Confucianism
and Daoism both allude to Heaven (Tian) in the sense of
a moral cosmic order that confers its mandate on successive dynasties
of Chinese rulers. The word occurs in Chinese literature in so
many contexts that it's natural for Chinese Marxists to use it
metaphorically. But Kim Il-song chose "believing in the
people as in heaven" as his motto, implying perhaps that
one should believe in both; and wrote a poem on the occasion
of his beloved son's 50th birthday: "Heaven and earth shake
with the resounding cheers of all the people united in praising
him." He really seems to have wanted the people to believe
in a celestial realm conferring its mandate on his dynasty.
In a Tungusic myth, the ancient
Korean nation of Choson was founded by the son of a bear who
had been transformed into a woman by Hwanung, ruler of a divine
city on Mt. Paektu, and a tiger. I've read that this myth has
been reworked to suggest to North Korean school children that
the Kims came down from heaven to the top of the sacred mountain,
where they were transformed into human beings. (There may be
some shared memes with Shinto here. In the Japanese myth, the
grandson of the Sun Goddess descends to earth, to a mountain
peak in Kyushu, marries the daughter of an earthly deity, loses
his immortality, and begets two sons one of whom sires the first
emperor, Jinmu, by a sea princess who turns out to be a dragon.
The Japanese imperial family also came down from heaven, and
became human.) Heaven clearly plays a role in Kim Il-songism
as it did in State Shinto.
Where does Marxism-Leninism
fit in here? According to one report, while there are portraits
of the Great and Dear Leaders all over Pyongyang, "there
are only two public pictures in Pyongyang of people who do not
belong to the Kim family--in the main square are two smallish
images, one of Marx and one of Lenin."
That suggests at least some
small formal deference to the communist pioneers. But the Dear
Leader stated in a major speech in 1990:
"We could not literally
accept the Marxist theory which had been advanced on the premises
of the socio-historic conditions of the developed European capitalist
countries, or the Leninist theory presented in the situation
of Russia where capitalism was developed to the second grade.
We had had to find a solution to every problem arising in the
revolution from the standpoint of Juche."
This is the supposedly brilliant
idea of "self-reliance" or as the Great Leader put
it, the principle that "man is the master of everything
and decides everything." (The "standpoint" of
course sounds rather trite and vague at worst, while not overtly
religious. But born out of Kim's brain supposedly when he was
only 18 years old, it is the faith of the masses and the ideological
basis for the state---rather like kokutai in prewar and
wartime Japan.) The DPRK's new (1998) Constitution omits any
reference to Marxism-Leninism whatsoever. Rather the document
"embodies Comrade Kim Il-song's Juche state construction
ideology."
Still, those portraits of Marx
and Lenin are there in Pyongyang. DPRK propaganda continues to
describe the late Kim as "a thoroughgoing Marxist-Leninist."
Juche is described as a "creative application of Marxism-Leninism."
The Korean Workers' Party continues to cultivate ties with more
traditional, perhaps more "legitimate," Marxist-Leninist
parties including the (Maoist) Communist Party of the Philippines.
Some material by Marx, Engels
and Lenin circulates in North Korea, and the Marxist dictum,
"Religion is the opium of the masses" is universally
known. But according to a Russian study in 1995, "the works
by Marx, Engels, and Lenin are not only excluded from the standard
[school] curriculum, but are generally forbidden for lay readers.
Almost all the classical works of Marxism-Leninism, as well as
foreign works on the Marxist (that is, other than [Juche]) philosophy
are keptin special depositories, along with other kinds
of subversive literature. Such works are accessible only to specialists
with special permits." (One thinks of the Catholic Church
in the Middle Ages restricting Bible reading to the trusted clergy,
and discouraging it among the masses.)
I imagine some with those special
permits are able to read Marx's famous 1844 essay in which the
"opium of the masses" phrase occurs:
"Religious distress is
at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest
against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed
creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit
of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The
abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people
is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the
illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition
which needs illusions."
Maybe the rare North Korean
student of Marxism, acquiring some real understanding of the
Marxist view of religion, can see all around him or her conditions
which require mass illusions and delusions in order to continue.
There are some signs of resistance here and there to the Kim
cult, which would seem to be a good thing.
Having said that (and always
trying to think dialectically), I don't believe that life in
the DPRK is quite the hell---another religious concept---that
the mainstream media would have us believe it is. One should
try to look at things in perspective. We hear much of the terrible
famine that lasted from about 1995 to 2001, killing hundreds
of thousands if not millions. But North Korea was not always
a disaster. As of 1980, infant mortality in the north was lower
than in the south, life expectancy was higher, and per capita
energy usage was actually double that in the south (Boston
Globe, Dec. 31, 2003). Even after the famine and accompanying
problems, a visitor to Pyongyang in 2002 declared:
"Housing in Pyongyang
is of surprising quality. In the past 30 years--and mostly in
the past 20--hundreds of huge apartment houses have been built.
Pyongyang is a city of high-rises, with probably the highest
average building height of any city in the world. Although the
quality is below that of the West, it is far above that found
in the former Soviet Union. Buildings are finished and painted
and there is at least a pretense of maintenance; even older buildings
do not look neglected. Nothing looks as though it is on the verge
of falling down. . .
"Although a bit dreary,
the shops in Pyongyang are far from empty. Each apartment building
has some sort of shop on the main floor, and food shops can usually
be found within one or two buildings from any given home. Apart
from these basic, Soviet-style shops, there are a few department
stores carrying a wide range of goods. . . "While not snappy
dressers, North Koreans are certainly clean and tidy, and exceptionally
well dressed. . . There is no shortage of clothing, and clothing
stores and fabric shops are open daily."
There's apparently one hotel
disco and some karaoke bars in Pyongyang. No doubt Kim Il-songism
can provide some with the "illusory happiness" about
which Marx wrote, and it is possible that genuine popular feelings
as well as feelings orchestrated from above have contributed
to the production of the North Korean faith. The DPRK might not
be all distress and oppression. But neither is it a socialist
society in any sense Marx or Lenin would have recognized, to
say nothing of a classless, communist society. It is among other
things a religious society in a world where nations led by religious
nuts are facing off, some seemingly hell-bent on producing a
prophesized apocalypse. I find no cause for either comfort or
particular alarm in the Dear Leader's October 9 nuclear blast;
if it deters a U.S. attack it's achieved its purpose, and however
bizarre Jong-il may be he's probably not crazy enough to provoke
his nation's destruction by an attack on the U.S. or Japan. I'm
more concerned that Bush will do something stupid in response
to the test.
In any case, the confrontation
here isn't between "freedom" and "one of the world's
last communist regimes," nor even between fundamentalist
Christian Bush and Kim Il-songist Kim Jong-il. It's between a
weird hermetic regime under threat and determined to survive
in its small space, using a cult to control its people, and a
weird much more dangerous regime under the delusion that God
wants it to smite His enemies and to control the whole world.
Both are in the business of peddling "illusions of happiness."
Neither is much concerned about the "real happiness"
of people. Both ought to be changed---by those they oppress,
demanding an end to conditions requiring illusions.
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