When the Berlin Wall and then the Soviet Union fell in 1989 and 1991, it looked to many that North Korea would not be far behind.
In April 1991, with the USSR’s dissolution in full swing, Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, quipped: “I’m running out of villains. I’m down to Castro and Kim Il Sung.”
But Kim would hang on until his death in 1994, handing control to his son.
Roughly a decade later in 2003, John Bolton, George W. Bush’s ambassador to the U.N., answered a reporter’s question about North Korea policy after it withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty by plucking a book, The End of North Korea, off his shelf and slamming it on the table. “That,” Bolton said, “is our policy.”
As we now know, North Korea’s Kim family has not only defied such tough talk but managed to extend its rule into a third generation. Along the way, North Korea conducted six nuclear tests and launched an array of sophisticated missiles that have made it a nuclear state in all but name.
How to explain this? Few now underestimate the country’s scientific and military prowess—its chief bulwark against foreign pressure. Domestically, Kim Il Sung and his descendants have perfected the levers of hard power—surveillance, repression, and the like.
But while the state is capable of and often does use force to impose its will, its true strength lies in the power of ideology and ritual—that is, its personality cult.
This may not strike you as a novel insight. The glorification of the Kim clan, of course, hasn’t exactly gone unnoticed. But, when it isn’t being ridiculed and memed (an easy target, I’ll grant you), the personality cult is often dismissed as a sideshow to, say, the nuclear issue.
That’s not how Kim Il Sung saw it. Even before he founded the North Korean state in 1948, Kim presided over the construction of more than 10,000 “propaganda halls” across the country that he compared to churches—referring perhaps to the Sundays he had spent decades earlier in Presbyterian services just outside Pyongyang.
The propaganda halls, Kim told cadres in a June 1952 speech later published by North Korea, “must be run well so that people come there with interest. To attract young men and women, Christian pastors…got them to sing songs when they came to the church. After rousing their interest in this way, they gradually preached the Christian doctrine.”
Over the decades, those halls would be rechristened Kim Il Sung study halls, and multiply to the point that a New York Times reporter, traveling across the country in 1972, found in “every town, village, factory, school and army barrack…an elaborate ‘study hall,’ where young and old alike…gather to discuss, for the nth time, the ‘guidance offered by the beloved and respected leader.’”
As Pyongyang’s party newspaper proclaimed in 1996: “Some countries are known for their economic prosperity and others for military strength…But our country is the only country known for its ideological power.”
Also posted on LinkedIn.