Pedalling Propaganda by the paddy
October 14, 1994
It seemed an image of rural harmony in developing Asia – a woman riding a pushbike beside a paddy field where peasants were harvesting rice. But in communist North Korea, nothing is as it seems.
This cyclist had fitted to her bicycle two oversized loudspeakers blaring a jaunty revolutionary song: “Kim Jong-il, you are our supreme commander; with you we will win a great victory”. With the tune etched on to a crude metal tape, her revolutionary task was to ride up and down this one-kilometre stretch of road outside Pyongyang for eight hours a day, every day. The “Dear Leader”, Kim Jong-il, the man expected to take over as North Korean President after 100 days of mourning the death in July of his father, directs that the song spur the peasants on to greater productivity.
The speed of her pedalling was directly related to the tune of the song, like a dynamo powering a headlight. If she slowed, the song slurred, and in North Korea nothing is permitted to stop the revolution.
It is impossible to escape the mark of the Great and Dear Leaders in North Korea.
For example, I was proudly shown what I was told was a “typical” high school, the Pyongyang June 9 Senior Middle School – June 9 being the day in 1969 when the Great Leader apparently directed his education authorities to build a new school.
The main entrance is dominated by two-metre by two-metre portraits of the two men, flanked by oil paintings of their respective birthplaces, flanked again by etched writings of their fabled “on-the-spot guidance”.
The headmistress explained that the co-educational school’s main curriculum comprised the Revolutionary History of Kim Il-sung, the Revolutionary History of Kim Jong-il and Communistic Virtue.
Electronics and Biology are also taught, but even then not without the family’s touch.
In the electronics class, students were being taught the miracle of television, fiddling with the insides of a contraption that Logie Baird might have trouble recognising until they got a picture. An image appeared through the fuzz – of the latest Worker’s Party congress.
It’s a similar story in Biology, where students examine organ isms beneath crude microscopes. The subject is the cellular structure of the kimjongilia, the national plant created for and named after the Dear Leader.
(Fences are of wrought iron in the style of the kimjongilia and the kimilsungia).
Later, the school put on a show for me and a group of Chinese tourists from Tianjin.
The show opened with a little girl in a pink and purple tutu bursting into tears, crying that “with a filial mind we must turn our grief into strength and support the Dear Leader Supreme Commander Comrade Kim Jong-il”.
A band strikes up and so does she, into full voice, her colleagues swaying in the background: “Who gives us happiness? Dear Leader Comrade Kim Jong-il.
“Who gives us hope? Dear Leader Comrade Kim Jong-il.
“We are living a happy life of gladness in the bosom of the party and Dear Leader Comrade Kim Jong-il.”
In the Kim family’s North Korea, the Cultural Revolution has never ended.
It seems clear Kim Jong-il, a pudgy-faced man with a bad hair cut, will take over from his father, the late “Great Leader” President Kim Il-sung, after October 15, when the official 100-day mourning period finishes.
Diplomats in Pyongyang say he has spent the past three months shoring up military, intellectual and propaganda support for his rule.
“Kim Il-sung is Kim Jong-il,” Pyongyang Radio said last week, confirming that the world’s first communist dynastic succession seems to be proceeding smoothly.
“Whatever trials and difficulties may confront us, we’ll carry on with the great task of Juche (self-reliance) revolution, and complete it by upholding high the will of Kim Il-sung, and faithfully follow the ideology and leadership of Kim Jong-il,” the radio said.
In the Korean National Art Museum, the first works have begun to appear since Kim senior’s death. In splendid social-realism, they show grief-stricken Koreans comforted by an athletic Kim junior at the foot of his father’s giant bronze statue in central Pyongyang.
Another shows Kim junior astride a prancing steed rodeo-style atop a mountain overlooking the military demarcation line that separates North and South Korea at the Korean War truce village of Panmunjon. The sky on the north side is clear and sunny, on the south stormy.
However, diplomats say it seems that it hasn’t all been smooth sailing for the mysterious Kim Jong-il, about whom very little is known.
The true test of his accession to power will come when North Koreans start wearing his image on the little badges they are required to wear on their left side above their heart.
The badge they wear now is still that of the Great Leader, and diplomats say that attempts to issue Dear Leader badges were stopped after only three days about six weeks ago.
Koreans wear these badges with fear and pride.
Two attempts by this correspondent to buy one in back lanes, both times pressing $US1,100 – two year’s average salary – into people’s hands, were repelled. The first said nothing could separate him from the Great Leader; the second pointed to an adjacent building and gestured like a policeman.
Dr Han S. Park, a Korean-American scholar and President Jimmy Carter’s liaison man with the Pyongyang regime, has had higher contact with North officials than most in recent months, as he tries to broker a peace deal between Washington and Pyongyang over the nuclear stand-off.
Interviewed by The Australian Financial Review in Beijing after a week in Pyongyang, Dr Park said: “Kim Jong-il’s power base is more extensive than we are led to believe.
“Since his father’s death, he has consolidated his grip over the military and the intellectual side.
“His fate is dependant on the performance of the economy. I don’t think the system will collapse Eastern European-style. People are not prosperous but they are not starving. They are thoroughly brain-washed. Almost all Koreans think the rest of the world lives under the Great Leader’s philosophy.
“That’s why there are all those museums devoted to his teachings, with gifts from foreign so-called dignitaries.”
I visited the biggest of these museums, the International Friendship Exhibition centre, about three hours north of Pyongyang. In a huge eight-storey building in traditional Korean architecture, there are displayed 73,035 gifts to Kim Il-sung and 29,831 to Kim Jong-il as at 18 months ago. A new museum is being built alongside to house the new gifts.
Visiting the centre is a near-religious experience, a monument to bad taste, a shrine to the Kims and to the despots of the world. There are even a few Australian gifts.