Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty by Bradley K. Martin Page A
Authors: Bradley K. Martin
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our people.”
I asked whether rock-’n’-roll music would be an acceptable import. That stopped my otherwise very competent interpreter.
“What is rock-and-roll music?” he asked me. “Do you mean jazz?”
I explained, and he passed along my explanation to Lee, but Lee replied that he like-wise had never heard of rock-and-roll music.
In addition to music, Lee said, “we develop modern fine arts based on [traditional] Korean paintings.” Those tended toward group efforts, however, as individualism was one of the bad old traits the regime was trying to root out. Pictures embroidered in silk, for example, were produced by teams. Different teams had responsibility for design and the actual embroidery, as I found on a visit to Pyongyang’s Embroidery Research Institute.
I was curious about one of the finest of traditional Korean arts, pottery making. Sadly for connoisseurs of celadon and other famous varieties of Korean pottery ceramics as an art had become truly a thing of the past. “To meet the needs of the people we produce by industrial means, not by handicraft,” Lee told me, although he assured me that “artistic features are used in the pottery and some hand touches remain, such as hand-drawn pictures on the pottery.”
The health-care system offered a case study in the ways North Korea combined various threads of the country’s ideology—socialism, modernization and crash development, nationalism and national self-sufficiency the Kim Il-sung personality cult.
The official literature around the time of my 1979 visit held up healthcare workers and especially physicians as examples of what the regime asked of its subjects. The doctors were expected literally to cut themselves to pieces for their patients. There was the story, told in the newspaper
Nodong Shinmun,
of a surgeon in a small hospital in a place called Ryongsong who felt sorry for a youthful polio victim. To correct a bad limp, the child needed a bone graft. The doctor cut out a chunk of his own bone and implanted it in the child’s leg.
Similar stories of doctors giving their own blood and flesh to their patients had flowed regularly from the North Korean propaganda machine since the start of the Chollima movement in the late 1950s. They included cases of physicians donating skin to burn victims, and even one case of an eye surgeon who was preparing to transplant his own corneal tissue to a patient until the doctor’s wife and daughter agreed to be the donors. In the latter case, when the bandages were removed and the surgery proved successful, the transplant recipient was reported to have shed tears “for the happy socialist system and the good care of the Great Leader.” Whether true or not, those stories were one of the means the regime used in seeking to obliterate the last traces of pre-revolutionary thinking and acting in order to create a new type of man—unselfish, nationalistic and dedicated to the achievement of a socialist paradise on earth. Such people were “new communist human beings safely reared under the ’warm care of Comrade Kim Il-sung.” 33
The stories illustrated the conflict between old and new ways. Although no places of religious worship remained—officials claimed that U.S. bombs had destroyed every single Christian church during the Korean War—still old customs based on both Eastern and Western religious beliefs persisted. One of those customs was that the dead were to be dressed in new clothing, placed in coffins and buried. Removing tissue or complete organs from a cadaver was taboo. The repeated tales of doctors literally giving of themselves to their patients confronted the old religious taboo indirectly even as officials pleaded with selected bereaved families to confront it directly by permittingorgan donations. This may explain why the officially spread stories were vague on the question of-why the surgeons did not use whalebone or pigskin, for example.
The doctors’ self-sacrifice stories came
I asked whether rock-’n’-roll music would be an acceptable import. That stopped my otherwise very competent interpreter.
“What is rock-and-roll music?” he asked me. “Do you mean jazz?”
I explained, and he passed along my explanation to Lee, but Lee replied that he like-wise had never heard of rock-and-roll music.
In addition to music, Lee said, “we develop modern fine arts based on [traditional] Korean paintings.” Those tended toward group efforts, however, as individualism was one of the bad old traits the regime was trying to root out. Pictures embroidered in silk, for example, were produced by teams. Different teams had responsibility for design and the actual embroidery, as I found on a visit to Pyongyang’s Embroidery Research Institute.
I was curious about one of the finest of traditional Korean arts, pottery making. Sadly for connoisseurs of celadon and other famous varieties of Korean pottery ceramics as an art had become truly a thing of the past. “To meet the needs of the people we produce by industrial means, not by handicraft,” Lee told me, although he assured me that “artistic features are used in the pottery and some hand touches remain, such as hand-drawn pictures on the pottery.”
The health-care system offered a case study in the ways North Korea combined various threads of the country’s ideology—socialism, modernization and crash development, nationalism and national self-sufficiency the Kim Il-sung personality cult.
The official literature around the time of my 1979 visit held up healthcare workers and especially physicians as examples of what the regime asked of its subjects. The doctors were expected literally to cut themselves to pieces for their patients. There was the story, told in the newspaper
Nodong Shinmun,
of a surgeon in a small hospital in a place called Ryongsong who felt sorry for a youthful polio victim. To correct a bad limp, the child needed a bone graft. The doctor cut out a chunk of his own bone and implanted it in the child’s leg.
Similar stories of doctors giving their own blood and flesh to their patients had flowed regularly from the North Korean propaganda machine since the start of the Chollima movement in the late 1950s. They included cases of physicians donating skin to burn victims, and even one case of an eye surgeon who was preparing to transplant his own corneal tissue to a patient until the doctor’s wife and daughter agreed to be the donors. In the latter case, when the bandages were removed and the surgery proved successful, the transplant recipient was reported to have shed tears “for the happy socialist system and the good care of the Great Leader.” Whether true or not, those stories were one of the means the regime used in seeking to obliterate the last traces of pre-revolutionary thinking and acting in order to create a new type of man—unselfish, nationalistic and dedicated to the achievement of a socialist paradise on earth. Such people were “new communist human beings safely reared under the ’warm care of Comrade Kim Il-sung.” 33
The stories illustrated the conflict between old and new ways. Although no places of religious worship remained—officials claimed that U.S. bombs had destroyed every single Christian church during the Korean War—still old customs based on both Eastern and Western religious beliefs persisted. One of those customs was that the dead were to be dressed in new clothing, placed in coffins and buried. Removing tissue or complete organs from a cadaver was taboo. The repeated tales of doctors literally giving of themselves to their patients confronted the old religious taboo indirectly even as officials pleaded with selected bereaved families to confront it directly by permittingorgan donations. This may explain why the officially spread stories were vague on the question of-why the surgeons did not use whalebone or pigskin, for example.
The doctors’ self-sacrifice stories came
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