Bradley K. Martin – Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea & the Kim Dynasty

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), or North Korea, was established in its current form not long after WW2, when competing US/Soviet interests split the peninsula into two halves. Within the space of a few short years, a former anti-Japanese guerilla fighter who styled himself Kim Il-sung had risen to take control over the fledgling nation. American journalist Bradley K. Martin, armed with decades of experience reporting on East Asian affairs, as well as several trips into DPRK himself, explores how the country has become one of the most fascinating, cruel, tyrannical and stubborn regimes the world has ever known. Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader (2004) hopes to pull back the screen from behind North Korea and to illuminate this vile, enigmatic regime. The popular narrative about North Korea is well established in the popular mindset by now: the brainwashed, uniformed masses, indoctrinated from birth to deify and revere their “Dear Leader” Kim Il-sung and his successor, son Kim Jong-il. Statues of the leader adorn squares across the nation’s capital, Pyongyang; children learn to repeat by rote his name and wisdom in school; Christmas is not celebrated but the Dear Leader’s birthday is a national holiday; citizens must wear a badge of the Dear Leader’s face on their clothing; and all media is state-provided, such that all films, all television, and all books are about the Dear Leader and his achievements in North Korea. Outside influences are strictly frowned upon. There is much truth to all of this, and what Martin also reveals in his illuminating book is what lies behind the bizarre facade: prison camps, gulags, forced labour, torture, disappearances and widespread state brutality. It is distinctly possible that the modern state of North Korea represents the most perfect and hermetic totalitarianism that the imagination of man has yet conceived.

Martin relies on many interviews with state defectors during his book, building up a picture of what life is like inside the deeply stratified society. Only the elite are permitted to live in Pyongyang, which is perhaps best thought of as a showcase for foreign eyes. Most of what little money North Korea has is poured into elaborate building projects in Pyongyang: the world’s tallest hotel, for example. Or another statue dedicated to Kim Jong-il and the “socialist paradise” he and his father have created. Or the five-lane highways (cars are notoriously expensive and scarce in DPRK) in which the middle lane is reserved especially for use of the Dear Leader. The old, the crippled and those from “bad” family backgrounds (read: those with anything less than perfect loyalty to the regime) live in the rural, remote parts of the country, where state-distributed food rations are often scarce and families often resort to living of berries and sometimes tree bark for survival. Any criticism of the regime is punished strictly – the prisoner herself and, until recently, her entire family would be carted off to some gulag in the mountains for anything up to ten years (Kim certainly seems to have picked up a thing or two from those early days with Stalin), and Martin recounts interviews with former prisoners who talk of near-stavation, of being forced to sit, straight-backed and fists held out, for over ten hours a day. While in recent years it seems that public executions have halted, and the families of political prisoners and defectors are no longer punished (ascertaining accurate information about the most secretive state in the world is never easy), the country remains both cruel and unusual. Meanwhile, of course, the Dear Leader lives in the most resplendent luxury: owns more than a dozen palaces, has concubines to spare (picked up from the street to audition – their parents merely informed that their daughter has gone to “serve the state”), and there is even an anecdote that each grain of rice eaten by Kim Il-sung was individually chosen and washed.

Of course, North Korea is now over fifty years old, and things have changed. Martin talks the reader through the economic, political and social evolution of the state; from its initial status as little more than Stalinist lap-dog, through its 1950-53 war with South Korea (Kim Il-sung invaded, although that was not the message given to DPRK citizens, who have always been taught that South Korea and its ally, the USA, represent an aggressive imperialist threat), the thorny nuclear issue (which in the 1990s seemed to halt promising talks with South Korea), and the stuttering “reforms” begun in recent years by Kim Jong-il, who was historically reluctant to follow the path of China and embrace market forces, having witnessed the collapse of Communism both in Russia and in Eastern Europe. It seems, in recent times, that private black markets have begun to organically emerge in some parts of the country; the last resort of a people with no alternative. It may be these black markets which save  the people of North Korea. Rice rations have been historically extremely unreliable; DPRK is a country rife with malnutrition and pellagra. Reunification with the South remains the great obsession of the Kim regime and its states ultimate goal, although, as Martin points out on more than one occasion, the South itself is currently less than keen on the idea; facing the prospect of absorbing a failed state with an emerging economy would not be in the best interests of South Korea at this point.

While Martin briefly touches upon some of the ideological and philosophical traditions that have helped form the modern DPRK, I would have liked to see more of this. North Korea cannot be understood without grasping the concept of juche, a specifically Korean form of nationalist self-reliance propounded by Kim Il-sung which has been largely responsible for the country’s isolationism and inward-looking nature. This idea of juche, combined with a feverish dedication to Communist ideals, and – as Martin suggests all too tantalisingly – combined with the Confucianism which permits dynastic succession, is the mindset which helps form North Korea. There are many hard-won details in this book which will inform and educate anyone who wishes to learn about DPRK; the role it has played, and continues to play in the world, as part of George W. Bush’s famous “axis of evil” (along with Iran and Iraq). It is a superb achievement, and will no doubt lead to further reading on my part on the subject of North Korea.

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