Infiltrating North Korea Part 8: The Cult of Kim

by Neil Woodburn on

“Comrad Kim Il Sung is worshipped by the Korean people, not only as the liberator of the Korean nation, but also as the genuine father and teacher who provided them with all rights and benefits which are indistinguishable to independent beings” –Pyongyang Review

The cult of Kim permeates North Korea.

From the moment we arrived at the Pyongyang airport and were greeted with a large smiling mosaic of Kim Il Sung on the outside of the terminal, there was hardly a moment when the face of either the leader or his son were not staring down on us in one form or another. “The Great Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung will always be with us!” is the most popular of political slogans in the North, and perhaps the most accurate as well.

Kim Il Sung was North Korea’s first leader following the defeat of the Japanese in World War II. He was trained under the Red Army and handpicked by the Soviets to take control of their newest colony. And he did not disappoint. The new leader quickly whipped the North Koreans into a communist stronghold that actually outpaced South Korea with rebuilding and economic growth in the immediate years following the war.

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In the process, Kim established himself as an omnipotent, iron-fisted ruler who tolerated no dissent, exiled opponents and naysayers to concentration camps, and cut off the population from international contact. A pervasive secret police force bolstered by an invasive network of personal informants further ensured that everyone toed the party line.

Like all communist leaders worth their salt, Kim patterned himself as the nation’s messiah. Through a carefully orchestrated combination of nonstop propaganda, brainwashing, and continuous re-education, North Korea has emerged as the world’s largest cult and Kim Il Sung as its glorified leader.

Kim is integrated into all aspects of life: children sing praises to him at school and workers honor him with shrines at their factories. Kim’s portrait is also hanging in every classroom, train station, public square and on the front of every official building. As if that’s not enough, every single North Korean adult is also required to wear a pin of his likeness on their lapel. “Korean people revere him as their father,” Pyongyang Review says, “and deem it their duty and their loftiest moral obligation to hold him, the man who fed and led them, high and loyal.”

Since Kim’s death in 1994, his son, Kim Jong Il, has assumed the throne and is now featured prominently in state propaganda standing beside the Great Leader (who has posthumously been promoted to Eternal President) or gloriously leading the nation forward on his own. In what is undoubtedly the only choice North Koreans have had in deciding a leader, they can now pick between their pins of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il to decide which leader they will affix to their lapel.

There is simply no escaping the Kims when traveling through North Korea. The above gallery is just a small selection of the never ending flood of statues, mosaics, photographs, and other Kim iconography we encountered during our five days embedded in the world’s largest cult.

Yesterday: The Mass Games
Tomorrow: Worshipping at the Altar of Kim

Infiltrating North Korea Part 7: The Mass Games

by Neil Woodburn on

Infiltrating North Korea is a two-week series exploring the world’s most reclusive nation and its bizarre, anachronistic way of life. To start reading at the beginning of the series, be sure to click here.

My trip to North Korea was only the second time since the Korean War that Americans were allowed into the country. The reason for this rare exception was the Mass Games.

The Mass Games is a wild spectacle of dancers and performers that takes place in Pyongyang’s 150,000-seat May Day Stadium, one of the largest in the world. While the games can loosely be described as a “Super Bowl half time show on steroids,” such an analogy fails to capture even a sliver of the energy and uniqueness that is the Mass Games.

For starters, over 100,000 performers participate in the event. This includes some 20,000 students holding up placards with militaristic precision that puts to shame the student section of any American college football stadium. And they’re not just flipping cards that spell out simple slogans either. The North Korean students create rich, detailed landscapes and portraits often enriched with flowing animation.
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Although the card show is impressive on its own, the 240,000 square-foot stadium floor is where the real show takes place. This is where thousands of performers tell the story of how, according to the Mass Games program, “the Arirang nation [Korea], once a colonized tragic people, has become the master of their destiny and faces the world as a dignified nation.”

The result, spread over four acts, combines elements from rhythmic gymnastics, Broadway musicals, and Cirque du Soleil. A rash of brightly-colored costumes and a booming soundtrack enhance the spectacle even further. The most amazing aspect of the whole production, however, is the jaw-dropping, grand scale of thousands of performers working in complete unison, as though a single body.

This is, after all, the philosophy behind the Mass Games. Like the socialist system which created this spectacle, the Mass Games emphasize the group over the individual and illustrates how working together for the common good can produce such works of perfection.

From a Western perspective, the Mass Games are indeed a microcosm of the North Korean nation where everything is perfectly regulated with no room for error or misinterpretation–a place where the individual is lost to the collective amidst a colorful fantasyland where everything appears perfectly wonderful but nothing is really true.

The North Koreans aren’t the only ones to implement such propaganda on such a grand scale. Other communist nations did so as well–such as Czechoslovakia’s Sokol performances that were held in the world’s largest stadium until 1990. Like communism, however, the mass gymnastic movement eventually disappeared from the face of the earth with the sole exception of North Korea.

One day too, it will disappear from Pyongyang as well.

This was my one chance to witness a truly endangered performance and I was therefore eager to purchase the best seats I could. In a typically un-socialist move, however, foreigners are charged mind-numbingly higher prices than locals. If you go, be prepared for only two ticket prices: $150 and $300. I opted for the more expensive tickets–the most I’ve ever paid to see any show–and ended up sitting where Madeline Albright sat when she came to visit. This was the best seat in the house–except for the open area just to my right where Kim Jong Il would have sat had he attended.

When the lights finally dimmed and the Mass Games started, it took only a moment to realize I had made the right choice to come so far and spend so much. The show was as spectacular as I had hoped and I sat through its entirety wondering how so many people could be so perfectly synchronized and expertly choreographed.

And then I remembered where I was.

Yesterday: Art and Culture, Pyongyang Style
Tomorrow: The Cult of Kim