At Sahngnoksoo, we have no consensus position on North Korea. However, we do have a shared commitment to anti-militarism and anti-imperialism. We believe in people’s right to self-determination, and to live free from violence and oppression. In the case of North Korea, one thing is clear. Like other Communist and Socialist nations, particularly in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the United States has so isolated and vilified North Korea, both within the United States and in the global community, that it is impossible as Americans to tell what is true and what is not. Here are some statements and resources that we find useful on the passage of North Korean President Kim Jong-Il.
Please check out these three very different pieces:
- A poem from Matt Blesse
- An op-ed from the Korea Policy Institute
- Reflections from Terry Park
1. A poem from Matt Blesse:
When a dictator dies…
I cannot be curious or excited
when it feels like tourism from someone born on the privileged end
of a TV remote flipping through the news channels
I cannot pray for or on behalf of a people
when the sentences keep ending with “new markets for capitalism”
I cannot ask if one is from the north or south
or east or west
when a border does not define a human being
I cannot use the term dictator
When dictator is a term we only use to label our enemies
who were sometimes our friends before they were our enemies
I cannot wave justice like a flag
when I believe I can find it in the full of a body bag
I cannot act in a peoples’ best interests
when my best interests sound like too many screaming in silence
I cannot muse about what this event means for my life
When I do not know the desperate alchemy of trying to feed a family
I cannot be one drum, one pair of clapping hands, or one jeering mouth,
I cannot celebrate death
ever
I cannot be afraid of what the next man will do, or what country will rise
when I have questioned into the hallow of that logic time and time again
And love is the only thing
that has ever answered back
“stay whole”
2. Op-ed from the Korea Policy Institute:
The Death of General Secretary Kim Jong Il
On Saturday, December 17, 2011, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, 69 years old, passed away while traveling on a train to a field visit. According to the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), North Korea’s official international news organ, Kim suffered a fatal heart attack. A period of national mourning has been declared, and the official funeral is set for December 28.
Although his death was sudden, speculation around Kim Jong Il’s mortality in international media commentary has dogged the North Korean leader since he suffered an apparent stroke in 2008. Within North Korea, succession plans for Kim Jong Il’s youngest son, Kim Jong Un, believed to be in his late 20s, have been in place for at least the past three years. For the past two years, Kim Jong Un accompanied his father to all major official gatherings, including a visit to China last year where he is said to have received the support of the government there.
Despite conjecture that Kim Jong Il’s passing will lead to political instability, what is clear is that the succession plan has strong internal and Chinese sanction. Signs of the changing of leadership, including endorsement of experienced leaders from the Workers’ Party and the military, were clear at the Workers’ Party conference in September 2010. Kim Jong Un also appears to have support from within the Kim family. Kim Jong Il’s sister, Kim Kyung Hee, and brother-in-law, Jang Song Taek, are expected to help mentor the younger Kim as he assumes leadership. Kim Kyung Hee heads North Korea’s light industries and has helped spearhead the country’s economic reforms. Jang Song Taek is Vice-chair of the National Defense Commission. Both are high-ranking members of the Workers’ Party of Korea.
Although Kim Jong Il was selected as Kim Il Sung’s successor in the mid-1970s, he did not officially assume power until three years after the death and mourning of his father in 1994. Kim Jong Il’s leadership coincided with the most difficult times North Korea has faced since the Korean War, including the collapse of the socialist bloc in the early 1990s, the depletion of its energy reserves, and the great famine known in the North as the “arduous march” in which some 600,000 to 2 million North Koreans died in the mid-1990s. In 2002, U.S. President George W. Bush labeled North Korea part of an “axis of evil” and identified that country as a possible target for pre-emptive nuclear strike, setting U.S.-North Korea relations on a downward spiral from which it has yet to recover.
While there is no doubt that North Korea has experienced serial setbacks in realizing its ambitious goal of achieving prosperity by 2012, public support of Kim Jong Il’s pursuit of normalization of relations with the U.S. as an integral part of denuclearization negotiations appears to be unshaken. While there are reports of disillusionment within the society over economic reforms or lack thereof, there has been no visible discord with regard to the issue of maintaining the country’s sovereignty. This task now falls to Kim Jong Un and the upcoming generation of North Koreans.
The critical issue for North Korea—one that defined Kim Jong Il’s leadership—has been maintaining sovereignty while breaking out of its diplomatic isolation from the West. Relative to that task, Kim Jong Il, as the late South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun remarked upon meeting him in Pyongyang in 2007, was “the most flexible man in North Korea.”
Kim Jong Il’s death comes just as tensions in U.S.-North Korea relations appear to be easing. Agreements between the two countries were reached this past weekend in Beijing. It is expected that the United States will soon announce that it will send 240,000 tons of food aid to North Korea in exchange for North Korea’s agreement to suspend work on its nuclear enrichment program. This is the first significant diplomatic breakthrough in four years, a welcome sign of engagement between the two countries that could lead to improved relations between the U.S. and North Korea as well as North and South Korea.
3. Reflections from Terry Park
On the Great Leader and Dear Leader
This is a reflection piece I wrote after I participated on the DPRK Education and Exposure Program (DEEP) in 2007. Renamed KEEP-D, it is a peace delegation organized by Nodutdol for Korean Community Development that brings Korean diasporic activists, artists, academics, and others to the DPRK, or north Korea. It is preceded by several months of intensive study sessions on the history, politics, and culture of both Koreas. After our 10-day tour of the northern half of our ancestral homeland, I chose to write on Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. It’s a bit dated, but I hope it’s still somewhat relevant given what has happened in the DPRK.
***
By the end, they were known as “Iggy and Ziggy.” I wanted to call them “2pac and Biggie” but didn’t think anyone would go for it. In our hotel rooms we sometimes used “you know who” or “KIS and KJI.” Time Magazine called the son “Dr. Evil.” But in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, “The Great Leader” and “The Dear Leader” are anything but.
So it wasn’t a surprise that on our very first day in Pyongyang, we went straight from the airport to the massive Kim Il-sung statue that towers over the Taedong River. It was a shock to be suddenly surrounded by hundreds of government workers, students, and soldiers, as if we had been thrown into a CNN news report—we were actually in north Korea, among north Koreans, and now we were standing before their eternal, beloved leader, on the day before the anniversary of his death! Yet, despite the massive crowd, the atmosphere was completely absent of sound and chaos. It was as if the entire city of Pyongyang were a holy place, an urban temple, and we were at its main shrine.
When it was our turn, we laid some flowers, bowed our heads in respect, and left. This is something all foreigners do when they visit the DPRK. But what may come as a surprise is that our visit was not mandatory. Our main guide, who we ended up adoring for her tireless dedication and genuine, ajumma-like affection for our group, told our coordinator that we didn’t have to go. She knew that we had traveled long and far and asked us if we would prefer to just go straight to our hotel to rest. One could say her question was a test of our revolutionary commitment; rather, I think it points to something one of the other north Korean representatives said to us—that they know that the ubiquitous presence and singular reverence for the Great Leader and the Dear Leader is something that is very difficult for outsiders to understand. This, more than anything, is what sets the DPRK apart from every other society on earth. And precisely because of that fact, they asked us to try to understand this unique aspect of north Korean society, that if we can have a better understanding of the place of their leaders in the hearts and minds of north Koreans, then we can have a better understanding of north Koreans themselves. So I think our main guide’s concern was more of an acknowledgement that seeing the bronzed hero of the Korean revolution might be a little too much to handle on our first day in the DPRK.
Indeed, in the U.S., ever since 9/11, we have been looking for heroes. Look at the recent resurgence of superhero movies—Superman, Spiderman, Batman, or one of the most popular television shows right now, Heroes. Or the popularity of war movies in the last ten years, such as Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down, that glorify the heroism of the common soldier. Or how we remember the horrific events of 9/11, through countless documentaries, films, and speeches that elevate firefighters and airline passengers to the status of heroes. 9/11 was a day when many Americans, used to feeling strong, suddenly felt weak and lost. That’s certainly how I felt when I saw those two planes change the skyline of a city I used to call home. We have been without heroes from the government, and since the assassinations of MLK and Malcolm X, from the Left, for a long time. If Americans have felt this lost and leaderless in the past few years, I cannot imagine what Koreans felt for over fifty years—to see your beloved country brutally colonized, then divided, then ripped apart in civil war. To see more bombs dropped in the north alone than in all of Europe during World War II. To see entire towns wiped off the map and Pyongyang reduced to rubble. Or to see napalm used on civilians for the first time. Or to witness a mass slaughter of unarmed civilians in a small, rural province, recognized by international human rights groups but ignored in the U.S. And this doesn’t include the hundreds of years of entrenched poverty and countless invasions by the many powers that have hungrily gazed upon the Korean peninsula.
So it makes sense that in a situation as dire and hopeless as this, north Koreans would turn to a young guerilla leader fighting the Japanese imperialists in Manchuria and gradually make him a hero, to elevate him to the level of a deity even. A hero who’s one of them, flesh and blood, Korean, poor, who represents the hopes and desires of a people—the dogged struggle for national independence and the determination to create an equitable, just society against overwhelming odds. By honoring the Great Leader and the Dear Leader, they are honoring themselves, their past and potential. That is the role of any hero. We don’t want them to be flawed—we want them to be perfect, because we want to be perfect, we want to rise, like a bronze statue, above war, above suffering, above loss, above death itself. Like father figures, we want them to always be near, guiding us towards a better future, reminding us that we are not alone in our hardships. And that’s why the DPRK is like a family. Or to be more accurate, members of a family that desperately want to peacefully reunite with the rest of its family. I think that’s something many of us can understand.
sahngnoksoo 
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