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Kim Il-sung’s goal wasn’t merely to build a new country; he wanted to build better people, to reshape human nature. To that end, he created his own philosophical system, juche, which is commonly translated as “self-reliance.”
He instructed North Koreans that their power as human beings came from subsuming their individual will to that of the collective.
To a certain extent, all dictatorships are alike. From Stalin’s Soviet Union to Mao’s China, from Ceaus¸escu’s Romania to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, all these regimes had the same trappings: the statues looming over every town square, the portraits hung in every office, the wristwatches with the dictator’s face on the dial.
We laugh at the excesses of the propaganda and the gullibility of the people. But consider that their indoctrination began in infancy, during the fourteen-hour days spent in factory day-care centers; that for the subsequent fifty years, every song, film, newspaper article, and billboard was designed to deify Kim Il-sung; that the country was hermetically sealed to keep out anything that might cast doubt on Kim Il-sung’s divinity.
Kim Il-sung also discouraged early marriages, giving a “special instruction” in 1971 that men should marry at thirty and women should marry at twenty-eight.
a North Korean newspaper reported, “The Motherland and nation hope and believe that the youngsters will uphold the beautiful tradition of marrying only after they have done enough for the country and people.”
Mi-ran knew of a family in her neighborhood who had been forced to move from Pyongyang because one of the sons suffered from dwarfism.
“Charity begins with a full stomach,” the North Koreans like to say; you can’t feed somebody else’s kids if your own are starving.
South Korea holds itself out as the rightful government of the entire Korean peninsula, which means that all of its people—including North Koreans—are automatically citizens.
In late 2009, the government abruptly invalidated all of the country’s currency as a way of reining in the markets, a move which spurred months of chaos and near-riots.
