Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader Quotes

“In North Korea a person has two lives, natural and political. But once you get sent to a prison camp your political life is over and you have only your natural life. You’re nothing, an animal, a savage. The guards have the right to kill you without penalty because you’re just an animal. If you disobey them or talk back, the guards hit you. It’s human nature then to fight back, but if you do they’ll shoot you. In one year’s time they would stage public executions fifteen or twenty times. People who tried to escape and didn’t get far were simply shot on the spot. But if you cost the guards a lot of time and trouble before they recaptured you, they would have a public execution.”
― Bradley K. Martin, Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty

“European who served for many years as a diplomat in Pyongyang, with postings there off and on from the 1970s into the 1990s, likened North Korea to a Catholic state in the Middle Ages. He estimated that around 90 percent really believed in the regime and its teachings—while the other 10 percent had no choice but to pretend that they believed. As opposed to other communist countries, where jokes about leaders such as the Soviet Union’s Brezhnev and East Germany’s Erich Honecker were a staple of conversation, there were no jokes about Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il, the diplomat said.”
― Bradley K. Martin, Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty

“In Hwang’s view, the Pyongyang leadership “used the feudalistic idea of filial piety to justify absolutism of the Great Leader. Filial piety in feudalism demands that children regard their parents as their benefactors and masters because they would not have existed without their parents. Taking care of your parents, the people who gave you life—in other words, being dutiful children—is the ultimate goal in life and the highest moral code. The state is a unity of families, and the head of all these families is none other than the king.” Hence the role that the leadership devised for Kim Il-sung: father of the people. In the same way that a person’s physical life came from his parents, his sociopolitical life came from the Great Leader. And the regime maintained that this sociopolitical life was far more precious than mere physical existence, which even animals possessed.”
― Bradley K. Martin, Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty

“In the early 1970s the regime dropped a very clear official hint that a close relative would become Kim Il-sung’s successor. The 1970 edition of North Korea’s Dictionary of Political Terminologies had included this critical definition: Hereditary succession is a reactionary custom of exploitative societies whereby certain positions or riches may be legally inherited. Originally a product of slave societies, it was later adopted by feudal lords as a means to perpetuate dictatorial rule. The definition failed to appear in the 1972 edition of the dictionary.”
― Bradley K. Martin, Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty