Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty by Bradley K. Martin
Authors: Bradley K. Martin
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the old and bringing the new into being.” 28
The country’s 1972 constitution called for just such a cultural revolution. Unlike the Japanese, Kim with his nationalist background knew that trying to extirpate Korean tradition completely would only alienate the people. He compromised based on Stalin’s “Socialism in one country” formula, which had revised the original utopian notion of communist internationalism so as to allow for the reality of national differences. This cultural policy Kim eventually bundled into his overall
juche
philosophy of national self-reliance. 29
Culture in North Korea would be “socialist in content, national in form. 30 In other words, old novels, plays, songs and poems unsuitable for the indoctrination of the masses might be consigned to libraries and filing cabinets accessible only to a handful of specialists—but the regime would recycle elements of the old Korean forms to support the new, approved content. In my talk with Lee Sang-tae, I observed that this content seemed limited—mainly praising socialism and Kim Il-sung. Lee did not disagree, but explained, “We think that the main function and purpose of literature and art is, firstly, describing and also depicting the sentimental, general life of the people. Secondly, they should also be means of educating the people. We educate them to love the fatherland and their socialist system and to revere the Leader and to have sound morality and sound life and to have a noble human feeling and civilized feeling and life.”
Lee’s organization was in charge of making sure writers and artists did their duty, assigning and enforcing production quotas on behalf of the Culture and Arts Division of the Workers’ Party 31 Having been tamed by purges of creative people in 1952, 1956, 1961, 1963 and 1964 (plus others, following Kim Jong-il’s takeover of culture, as we shall see in chapter 13),those remaining in the field presumably had a proper respect for authority and were ready to comply.
And what were the results? In many cases, Lee told me, the regime had produced new versions of folk songs whose original versions were no longer sung. The traditional elements provided “interest and flavor.” He hummed a few bars of one such recent product, a song called “Moranbong.” Sure enough, it did come through with the nasal sound and the catch in the voice that I associated with East Asian folk music. Lee said the old folk melody might be used as the basis for a more “modern” sound—an example, in
Song of Paradise,
being the dance and grand ensemble “Let Us Boast of Our Bumper Harvest to the Whole World,” which sounded to my ear somewhere between Indian raga and American bluegrass. 32
Still, I said to Lee, most of
Song of Paradise
seemed Western in feeling. Did the use of the gigantic choirs possibly trace back to the church music brought in by Western missionaries from the late nineteenth century? Absolutely not, Lee replied. “We have had no such influence from the missionaries. We developed our songs based on our traditional heritage. Before liberation we had religions—Buddhism, Christianity—but after liberation the influence of those disappeared.”
I saw or heard little in the way of overtly foreign cultural offerings, but Lee assured me the works of the likes of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky were studied and performed by “specialists.” He added that there had been two series of translations of foreign literary classics, one in 1955 and a second in 1977. Shakespeare, Balzac, Jack London, Mark Twain, Homer, Goethe, Byron, Gorky and Tolstoy were names he mentioned of authors he said were generally available to North Korean readers. As for movies, such relatively tame offerings as
Cleopatra
and
Spartacus
had been imported for general distribution—but the regime drew the line at the more recent, sexier offerings of Hollywood. Nudity and sexual permissiveness, Lee said, were alien to the “traditional way of life of
The country’s 1972 constitution called for just such a cultural revolution. Unlike the Japanese, Kim with his nationalist background knew that trying to extirpate Korean tradition completely would only alienate the people. He compromised based on Stalin’s “Socialism in one country” formula, which had revised the original utopian notion of communist internationalism so as to allow for the reality of national differences. This cultural policy Kim eventually bundled into his overall
juche
philosophy of national self-reliance. 29
Culture in North Korea would be “socialist in content, national in form. 30 In other words, old novels, plays, songs and poems unsuitable for the indoctrination of the masses might be consigned to libraries and filing cabinets accessible only to a handful of specialists—but the regime would recycle elements of the old Korean forms to support the new, approved content. In my talk with Lee Sang-tae, I observed that this content seemed limited—mainly praising socialism and Kim Il-sung. Lee did not disagree, but explained, “We think that the main function and purpose of literature and art is, firstly, describing and also depicting the sentimental, general life of the people. Secondly, they should also be means of educating the people. We educate them to love the fatherland and their socialist system and to revere the Leader and to have sound morality and sound life and to have a noble human feeling and civilized feeling and life.”
Lee’s organization was in charge of making sure writers and artists did their duty, assigning and enforcing production quotas on behalf of the Culture and Arts Division of the Workers’ Party 31 Having been tamed by purges of creative people in 1952, 1956, 1961, 1963 and 1964 (plus others, following Kim Jong-il’s takeover of culture, as we shall see in chapter 13),those remaining in the field presumably had a proper respect for authority and were ready to comply.
And what were the results? In many cases, Lee told me, the regime had produced new versions of folk songs whose original versions were no longer sung. The traditional elements provided “interest and flavor.” He hummed a few bars of one such recent product, a song called “Moranbong.” Sure enough, it did come through with the nasal sound and the catch in the voice that I associated with East Asian folk music. Lee said the old folk melody might be used as the basis for a more “modern” sound—an example, in
Song of Paradise,
being the dance and grand ensemble “Let Us Boast of Our Bumper Harvest to the Whole World,” which sounded to my ear somewhere between Indian raga and American bluegrass. 32
Still, I said to Lee, most of
Song of Paradise
seemed Western in feeling. Did the use of the gigantic choirs possibly trace back to the church music brought in by Western missionaries from the late nineteenth century? Absolutely not, Lee replied. “We have had no such influence from the missionaries. We developed our songs based on our traditional heritage. Before liberation we had religions—Buddhism, Christianity—but after liberation the influence of those disappeared.”
I saw or heard little in the way of overtly foreign cultural offerings, but Lee assured me the works of the likes of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky were studied and performed by “specialists.” He added that there had been two series of translations of foreign literary classics, one in 1955 and a second in 1977. Shakespeare, Balzac, Jack London, Mark Twain, Homer, Goethe, Byron, Gorky and Tolstoy were names he mentioned of authors he said were generally available to North Korean readers. As for movies, such relatively tame offerings as
Cleopatra
and
Spartacus
had been imported for general distribution—but the regime drew the line at the more recent, sexier offerings of Hollywood. Nudity and sexual permissiveness, Lee said, were alien to the “traditional way of life of
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