Dynasty, North Korean-style
PUSAN, South Korea – Kim Jong Un can count himself lucky that his first birthday in power falls today, on a Sunday, obviating the need for a new national holiday to be created at an awkward time. But the ease with which the new “supreme leader” has taken over North Korea has little to do with luck. For one thing, the propaganda apparatus did its job well. We now know why Kim was such a peripheral figure on the evening news until his father’s death: so that North Koreans’ first long look at the pampered young man would be at the rarest of times – a time when he was suffering more than anyone.
More important, though, is the fact that his succession makes perfect sense in North Korea’s ethnonationalist personality cult. People who value racial purity always consider some bloodlines purer than others, and in “the Kim Il Sung race,” as North Koreans call themselves, no bloodline is purer than the eternal president’s. Kim Jong Un’s increasingly obvious efforts to copy his revered grandfather’s appearance and mannerisms (right down to his signature) are naturally meant to show that – as a Korean saying goes – blood doesn’t lie.
Membership in the great family is also thought to provide greater access to the elders’ wisdom. This makes the time Kim Jong Un spent away in a Swiss school especially problematic, but the propaganda apparatus may be planning to ignore that part of his life altogether. (The latest reports suggest that he is now being credited with having written, at the age of 16, a treatise on his grandfather’s thought, presumably while in Pyongyang, the capital.) In any case, the notion that army generals or any other important faction would object to Kim’s takeover was an improbable one to begin with; no North Korean could oppose the hereditary succession without being opposed to the state itself. Such an attitude is unlikely to be held by anyone in the ruling elite.
Unfortunately, the West seems determined to continue paying as little attention to North Korean ideology as possible. In the past few weeks the country’s propaganda has been quoted more for comic relief than anything else. (A few over-literal readings of its flowery imagery have made it seem even more bizarre than it is.) Meanwhile the race-thinking pervading the official rhetoric has been ignored, as has the imperial-japanese provenance of so much of it, like the talk in recent weeks of defending Kim with “human bombs” if necessary.
Most of the news media around the world continue viewing North Korea as it does not view itself, namely as a Communist state. The result has been a lot of old-school Kremlinological fuss about the power hierarchy. Several reporters have asked for my opinion on whether Kim’s main string-puller will be his uncle, Jang Song Taek, or Vice Marshal Ri Yong Ho, though no one has yet been able to explain to me why the question matters. After all, there is no evidence of significant disagreement inside the ruling elite in regard to any issue.
By Communist standards, the North Korean masses would have to judge both the government’s economic performance and the succession in the harshest possible terms. It is because they judge them by very different standards that Kim was able to take over so effortlessly while promising to budge “not an inch” from his father’s line. We should therefore not make too much of the fraudulence of all that on-screen wailing. Just because North Korean TV never films anything before rehearsing all spontaneity out of it does not mean the average citizen was unmoved. By ultra-nationalist, militarist criteria, which have more to do with North Koreans’ perception of where the country stands in the world than material living conditions, the Dear Leader did a very good job indeed: the Korean Central News Agency may well be correct in saying he made the country virtually impregnable.
That very boast, however, makes things harder for Kim Jong Il’s successor. Though he appears secure inside the elite, the state as a whole must continue showing the masses that it is worthy of its beloved founder. If nuclear armament is to be seen as a closed victorious chapter, the new leader must approach the final tasks in his grandfather’s to-do list, as impossible as they may seem from an outsider’s perspective: drastic economic growth and national reunification. Perhaps we can discount the rumor – reported in 2010 – that internal Workers’ Party memorandums have described unification as a requisite for prosperity, because in the latest official New Year’s editorial, at least, reunification is thought possible in the near future only if the enemy “dares to infringe upon our dignity and sovereignty.” Even so, there is no reason to assume that the government’s interest in economic matters will reduce tension on the peninsula. Judging from the stale voluntarism espoused in North Korea this month – the same old calls to emulate this or that heroic factory, to make better use of available resources and so on – Kim Jong Un will not be advocating any significant reforms. Whether North Korea continues muddling along on Chinese life support, or grows fast enough to start resembling South Korea circa 1980, the military-first government must still justify its separate existence alongside the rival state.
How can it do this, except through more displays of military strength and superiority? When the new leadership vaunts its adherence to the old leadership’s policies, it is merely trying to make a virtue out of necessity.
B.R. Myers is the director of the international studies department at Dongseo University and the author of “The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves – and Why It Matters.”