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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In 1866, the S.S. General Sherman, an ironclad schooner recommissioned for use in the China trade after service for the Union as a blockade runner in the Civil War, came sailing across the Yellow Sea and entered the mouth of the Taedong River on the west coast of the Korean peninsula. What the ship's commander, a Captain Preston, was after--trade or spying or pillage, or all three--remains a matter of speculation. Korea, a feudal kingdom ruled according to a strictly paternalistic Confucian code, was notoriously hostile to foreigners, and with reason. While a single dynasty had held the throne for five hundred years, the country--the size of North and South Carolina combined--had been incessantly squeezed and serially invaded by bigger, more powerful neighbors. Korea was the most racially homogeneous nation in Asia, and yearned to believe that it was self-sufficient. But, although its borders were sealed, it could not fend for itself, and Korea's kings had submitted to Chinese suzerainty, paying regular tribute to China's emperors in the Forbidden City, in exchange for being protected and otherwise left alone. To Western traders and missionaries, encouraged by the opening of Japan in 1854, Korea's xenophobic reputation as the last "hermit kingdom" exerted an immense temptation. Tales circulated of unseen wonders: miniature horses, giant birds, and tombs of solid gold encasing cadavers littered with precious gems. Never mind that French Jesuits who had infiltrated Korea from China had never been heard from again. Captain Preston set out to be the first American to carry his flag into Korea, and, by all accounts, he was.
As Preston and his crew (three Americans, an English missionary, and some twenty Chinese and Malay seamen) sailed up the Taedong, ignoring local demands to turn back, the Regent of Korea decreed that the invaders be driven out or killed. The battle was met not far from Pyongyang, now the capital of North Korea, where a war party had gathered on the riverbanks. The Sherman's cannons were deadlier than the Koreans' flaming arrows, and its armor was impervious to their heavier missiles, but the ship soon ran aground and would not come free. After four days of fighting, a Korean officer named Pak launched burning barges against its hull and set it aflame, forcing all aboard to throw themselves into the river, where they were captured by Korean fighters and either hacked to death at once or brought to shore for dismemberment by the jubilant crowds. Body parts were carried off as trophies, and Pak was acclaimed as a savior of the nation. In 1905, a Daily Mail correspondent, F. A. McKenzie, was shown the Sherman's anchor chains hanging from the gates of Pyongyang, "as a warning to all men of the fate awaiting those who would dare to disturb the peace of the Land of the Morning Calm."
By McKenzie's time, however, Korea had been cracked open to the outside world--initially by diplomacy, through defensive treaties with expansive Western powers, and then by force--and the warning of the rusty chains rang with Ozymandian self-delusion. America was the first non-Asian country to win the welcome of the Korean court. In a Treaty of Amity and Commerce, signed in 1882, Washington pledged its "good offices" if Korea was threatened from abroad, and the king was said to have danced with delight when an American diplomat was posted to Seoul. Yet twenty years later President Teddy Roosevelt stood by when tsarist Russia, looking south from its booming Pacific frontier at Vladivostok, saw warm-water ports and Chinese weakness in Korea and moved troops into the peninsula. The Russians were soon driven out by imperial Japan, whose subsequent domination of Korea was brokered by Roosevelt in a deal that ultimately won him a Nobel Peace Prize. In this way, buffeted by the same foreign powers that its destiny still depends on, the antique kingdom of Korea was dragged into the twentieth century as a subject nation. When liberation came, with the Japanese surrender in the Second World War, the Soviet Union occupied the North and America the South, and, in a hasty move that was meant to be temporary, the country was cut roughly in half at the waist, along the thirty-eighth parallel.
The destruction of the Sherman might well have been forgotten were it not for official North Korean historians, who insist that the true hero of the great defense of the nation against the American imperialist buccaneers wasn't the officer Pak but, rather, a man named Kim Ung-u, a tenant farmer who begat a son named Kim Bo-hyon, a leader of the anti-Japanese resistance, who begat a son named Kim Hyong-jik, another freedom-fighting scourge to the colonial oppressor, who begat a son named Kim Song-ju, who became a partisan leader, and--begetting himself all over again under the nom de guerre of Kim Il Sung--fulfilled his
family's destiny and the nation's by finally driving the imperialist foe from Korea, establishing the supreme revolutionary state of North Korea and begetting a son named Yuri, who also re-begat himself, as Kim Jong Il.
These are the generations of the Kims that virtually every North Korean knows, at least sketchily. They make for a stirring tale of patriotic patrimony, yet the battlefield exploits that North Korea's court hagiographers attribute to Kim Il Sung's ancestors are entirely fictitious, and his own are fantastically exaggerated. In the nineteen-thirties, in Manchuria, where his father had run an herbal pharmacy, Kim Il Sung did fight as a Communist partisan, and for a time he even led his own small band of guerrillas there, distinguishing himself sufficiently to earn the highest honor from the Japanese--a price on his head. But at the outset of the Second World War he retreated to the Soviet Union, and he spent the rest of the war years at a Red Army garrison near the Siberian city of Khabarovsk, where Kim Jong Il was born (hence the Russian name, Yuri). Although North Korean historians say that it was Kim Il Sung and his fighters who defeated the Japanese, and not the Americans, he didn't return to Korea until a month after its liberation, and he arrived in the uniform of the foreign occupier, as an officer in the Soviet Army. In fact, what is most remarkable about Kim Il Sung's ascent to the position of absolute power which he soon enjoyed in North Korea, and which Kim Jong Il has inherited by dynastic succession, is that there was nothing about his lineage or early career that marked him for such a future when he turned up in Pyongyang in 1945. As Dae-Sook Suh, a Korean-American historian of North Korea and biographer of Kim Il Sung, observes, "Contrary to the efforts to build Kim's image as a person coming from a long revolutionary tradition and dedicated parents, his image may be more resplendent if he is described as he was: 'a dragon from an ordinary well,' so to speak. At least that would be closer to the truth."
In North Korea, however, the truth has never been a matter of fact so much as an expression of the Kims' whim--father and son. The great preponderance of this so-called truth is a confection of outright lies--not merely false but, more perniciously, a form of unreality, imposed with such relentlessness and violence on a people hermetically sealed from any alternative sources of information that it has become their only reality. A North Korean who does not believe the state's every claim is left with the void of dumb disbelief, for it is impossible in Kim Il Sung Nation--as the North is sometimes described in its own proclamations--to find anything else to believe in. "The people are my god," Kim Il Sung said, but it is before his towering statues that the people bow down and weep, his name that they must not take in vain, and his teachings that they must live by--even now--lest they be destroyed.
Kim Il Sung's formal schooling ended in the eighth grade. After that, he lived in a realm of extremity, made up in equal measures of violence and Marxist-Leninist indoctrination, and he was convinced that with the right mix of these measures one could make one's world as one wanted it to be. It was crush or be crushed. As he consolidated his control of the ruling Korean Workers Party in the late nineteen-forties, he set about lobbying his patron, Stalin, who had by then withdrawn Soviet forces from Korea, to consent to his taking over South Korea as well. Stalin urged Kim to be patient, but eventually gave him the nod. No sooner did the North begin to pour its army into the sleeping South, shortly before dawn on June 25, 1950, than Kim Il Sung proclaimed that the opposite had happened: America and its South Korean puppets had invaded, necessitating defensive action. Or, as the Party History Institute of the Central Committee put it, "Comrade Kim Il Sung, the ever-victorious iron-willed brilliant commander, military strategic genius," went on the radio and called upon the Korean people "to rise as one in the sacred struggle for wiping out the U.S. imperialist armed invaders and their stooges."
The North overran the South until America mustered a United Nations mandate to repel the aggression and drove the People's Army back, overrunning the North all the way to the Chinese frontier, at which point Mao sent a million "volunteers" into the fight, and Stalin dispatched his air force and told Kim, who was ready to give up and sue for peace, to keep fighting. Three years and as many as three million war deaths later, Korea was right where it began: split along the thirty-eighth parallel. A cease-fire was signed, and a two-and-a-half-mile-wide demilitarized zone was carved across the peninsula along the line of partition. But there was no formal peace treaty. The Korean War had no winner, and fifty years later it is still not over.
Kim Il Sung declared victory nonetheless, and boasted of "inflicting an ignominious defeat on U.S. imperialism and its running dogs." That was the line: North Korea had smashed the foreign invaders, killing three hundred and ninety-seven thousand American troops in the war (the actual number was thirty-six thousand), and, what was more, it had done so entirely on its own, "under the correct leadership." The war was, in fact, a considerable victory for Kim Il Sung, but only domestically, insofar as it provided him with a pretext for tightening his control of the Party and the Party's control of every aspect of his subjects' existence. Throughout the nineteen-fifties, in purge after purge, people accused of harboring even a flicker of "anti-Party, counter-revolutionary" disloyalty risked being killed, or imprisoned (usually with their families) in labor camps from which most did not return.
It was Hitler who remarked that the masses "will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one." The supreme fiction of North Korean propaganda, to which all other mystifications must conform, is the Kim dynasty's account of the Korean War: attacked, defended, triumphant, unassisted. Surely, enough North Koreans saw enough of the war to know that it wasn't so. Their young men had rolled into the South virtually unresisted, Seoul was captured in three days, then the Chinese were everywhere, Russian MiGs and their pilots had fallen from the sky, and exactly what had been attained? But who would risk being crushed to speak such memories?
"My husband told me that Seoul was empty when he marched through, and he thought that was strange because he thought the U.S. and South Korea started the war," Lee Young-suk, a former North Korean nurse who escaped to China during the great famine of the nineteen-nineties, told me in Seoul. "Even though he was in the military he believed that." Lee had reached the South after a grim ordeal as an illegal asylum seeker in China. At one point, her whole family had been arrested and handed back across the border to North Korean security agents, who singled her out for abuse because she was carrying a Bible. She had bribed her way out again with the rings from her fingers. Lee was small and strong, and her hands, which were in constant motion when she talked, were heavily stacked with gold rings--as a reminder and for security, should she find herself in such a fix again.
Although Seoul is just thirty miles from the DMZ, Lee finds it bewilderingly unfamiliar--hyper-modern, a sprawling megalopolis of more than ten million people (close to half the population of the North), a gray and hazy place of blinking neon reflecting dully off facades of steel and glass, an engine of wealth, churning with commerce and high-tech gadgetry, where children chatter on cell phones in the subway, where more homes have broadband Internet service than anywhere else on earth, where you can say and hear and see and do and buy pretty much anything and everything you please. As a defector, one of just three thousand North Koreans to have reached the South out of hundreds of thousands who escaped to China, Lee had been given her apartment in Seoul by the government, a tiny one-bedroom in a poured-concrete apartment block, where she lives with her seven-year-old granddaughter. Although the furniture was cheap and mostly secondhand--a fact she'd tried to disguise by draping it with lace--she could not get over the ease and abundance she had found in her old age. "I have everything," she said. But when she recalled her life in North Korea her voice carried the anger of someone who has been robbed of everything.
Lee is sixty-seven years old....
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