This book, an 8 years labor of love, by international journalist Bradley K. Martin, is a detailed history
of the human condition in
North Korea. Martin seems to suggest, credibly, that the history of the
Kim Il Sung family and North Korea are at the most important level the same. .
The Kim family first appear in the North Korean village of Mangyongdae as village sextons. In 1919 Il Sung's father Hyong Jik, a christian and anti-Japanese nationalist, migrated to Manchuria. He was literate and imbued his son with a love for Korea and basic education. After Hyong Jik’s death, Il Sung enthusiastically joined Korean nationalists in Manchurian exile. He led a band of Chinese backed communist guerrillas, and when Japan finally overran them, he took his band to Siberia and served in a Red Army Korean unit. When the Soviets occupied northern Korea following Japan’s defeat, Kim’s drive and charisma made him, though young, the favored Soviet candidate for advancement. Quickly replacing older non-communist nationalist leader Cho Man Shik, Il Sung consolidated power in the North with a concerted propaganda campaign.
He attacked the South, correctly anticipating the unpreparedness of South Korean and American forces. Inchon, retreat and the Chinese invasion followed and most fighting ended with the 1953 armistice. Kim began an earnest and particular program to remake the Party, the State and the Military. Effectively using his propaganda skills, considerable personal charm and evanescent good common sense, he promoted land reform and industrial development. For two decades after the Korean war conditions in the North were considerably better for the average person than in the South. Kim kept his old revolutionary partisans about him and strove to see the people’s basic needs met. However, very early he also allowed the development of a very strong Kim Il Sung personality cult. Together with dogmatic self reliance this constituted the Juche movement. Potential rivals or those who simply espoused different goals were exiled internally if not liquidated.
Il Sung’s eldest son, Jong Il, an avid cinema fan became active in government in the 1960's after university graduation. Il Sung had supported basic literacy but had not encouraged the arts. In the 1970’s, Jong Il combined propaganda with significantly higher production values in several artistic media to cement the popularity of the regime, suppress dissent and protect his status as heir apparent. Jong Il outmaneuvered his step mother and some of his father’s guerilla comrades to obtain key party and military posts. When Il Sung died in 1994, Jong Il was firmly in control of North Korea.
Due to limitation of access to luxuries and more than a few essentials to the elite, the fall of powerful, generous communist benefactors like the Soviet Union, inadvisable management of farmlands, and outdated industrial policy, the North Korean economy collapsed during the last decade of Il Sung’s life, and general living conditions became unbearable. Simultaneously, South Korea became rich and established relations with the North’s former benefactors. Il Sung, worried for his revolutionary legacy, began considering limited though inadequate reforms. Jong Il, lacking his father’s charisma and hero’s reputation, spent that period shoring up his support and destroying opposition, but neglecting the economic crisis. In the 1990’s Jong Il felt strong enough to experiment with reforms, but skeptical of the liberalization in China he limited them, seeking thus to protect his family and supporters from an East German fate, or worse, Rumanian, fate. He and his generals also worried that army logistics had deteriorated, so various strategems were employed to boost performance and morale without triggering the army into a disastrous war. Jong Il also followed a complex, confusing policy of serial Western engagement, receipt of aid and nuclear brinksmanship that continued as of publication in 2004.
Martin writes in the first third of his book much as he speaks in person, which is entertaining. This was doubtless a conscious effort to aid and encourage the non-academic reader journeying through the strange, exotic, and often inaccessible materials and to forge those materials into an engaging story of a tragically flawed but eminently robust dynasty. Martin derives much material from defector interviews he conducted or read in the 1990’s. He was castigated by some (not all) Western academics specializing in Korean history for relying on defectors whose self interests, they felt, were irredeemably biased. Martin’s treatment of defector testimony, however, was scrupulous in the extreme and it is here the academy that errs (some of his more strident critics did not even read it).
Academics of whatever persuasion of late are so driven by the need to justify cherished academic dogma, so desperately enslaved by the increasing lack of critical faculty among academics to the need to validate a currents of thought popular in this day and age, that they no longer seem to possess the ability to comprehend events in non-dogmatic way. Those who dissent are treated as crackpots or, if their social credentials allow, as charmingly but dangerously out of touch. Martin’s work is refreshingly free of dogma, his own or that of others, it is not biased for or against North Korea and will be taken seriously by those who really want to know the way of things. Robert Graves appellation of the barbaric scholar capable of only one idea is becoming sadly less metaphorical and more literal.