Who doesn't get a little curious about North Korea and the stories that come out of the rogue hermit state, from the humorously oddball to the horrifyingly obscene?
For every fun story about something funny, like the disinherited heir's passion for Disneyland (or reform—a claim from Kim Jong-nam I was initially skeptical about, but am more open to believing after researching), there's a horrifying story about the use of a nerve agent like VX to enable his assassination. For every funny story about Trump saying he and Kim Jong Un "fell in love" exchanging letters, like some 18th century long-distance courtship, there's the reality of his brutality: officials killed by antiaircraft guns to obliterate all remains—the "sheer power" Trump found "fascinating" per Angela Merkel.
The kind of faux power no one should have.*
The case of Choi Eun-hee and Shin Sang-ok is similar: the story is, on its surface, absurd to the point of laughable disbelief. But it happened. And the absurdity made the trauma of enduring those crimes, if anything, even worse—questions and doubts about the pair's story could not have been easy to endure. And as the author discusses: verification was often difficult, especially given the paucity of sources and ability to verify facts within North Korea.
Articles around the time even seem to have treated the story with skepticism—which led to author Paul Fischer commissioning a translation of a memoir the pair wrote together (with heavy "help"/ghostwriting from the South Korean security apparatus, to ensure nothing classified got out) and trying to track down and verify each source he could find, to the limited extent he could.
But, in essence, the book tells the story of Choi and Shin—South Korea's most famous actress and director, respectively, as well as divorced spouses—and how Kim Jong-Il, a film buff, had them kidnapped and brought to North Korea in order to indoctrinate and then force them to make propaganda films.
Their personal story is touching and heartbreaking, but it also could use some proper placement as, at least where I went to school, the Korean War isn't particularly well-covered. Most times it kinda seems to fall forgotten between WWII and Vietnam. This is pretty ironic considering North Korea's lingering pariah status.
Anyway, in 1950, Kim Il Sung (the 'Great Leader') invaded South Korea with the support of Stalin and hopes of aid from China—where the Civil War had recently finished and left Mao and the Communists in power. At the time, it didn't help that North Korea was significantly more advanced than the more agricultural South Korea, which really had the deck stacked against it due to how the Japanese Empire had apportioned the Korean Peninsula while it was under their control.
The Korean War is where MacArthur really went off the deep end and showed a bizarre desire to play chicken and get ourselves into a nuclear war with quite possibly China and the whole Soviet Union while Truman had to deal with the massive blowback and the headache of MacArthur's determination to piss off both the US and the UN at every turn—anyway, The General vs. the President is a great read by HW Brands.
The war itself involves a lot of back and forth, with even Northern capital Pyongyang captured and Southern capital Seoul changing hands I believe 4 times in less than a year? My numbers may be wrong. Ultimately, the war left North and South Korea separated with the DMZ between them but they remain technically at war.
From there, North and South Korea also took divergent paths: despite the recent attempt at a coup in South Korea that is still baffling to me, the nation went from a brutal military dictatorship to democratization in the late 80s and has stayed on that path.
North Korea has struggled extensively since the fall of the Soviet Union, in part because it can no longer play off the two big Communist powers in the area for aid (China and Russia had an alliance, but Communism took different forms in each nation and therefore tensions grew. While Stalin believed in a vanguard to control the revolution, Mao turned more to the peasantry as seen in things like the Cultural Revolution. The rift between the two states would deepen after Khrushchev took over, as Mao was not a fan of him and neither was Kim [they wanted a Stalin-esque cult of personality, which Khrushchev was eschewing]; Kim also took issue with, I believe, Mao's Cultural Revolution).
In the long run, this allowed North Korea to play China and Russia off each other by leaning toward whichever camp would provide better assistance at the moment—with the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War, however, things took a different turn and thus North Korea was thrust into the brutal famine of the nineties. This is why Kim Jong-Il is not as fondly remembered as his father: he hadn't fought the Japanese Empire and their occupation or spent decades molding a cult of personality, he inherited power, had odd peccadilloes like his penchant for film, and the nation was immediately plunged into a famine, in the eyes of many.
This also left North Korea dependent more and more on international aid and other such assistance—conditions were brutal, after all, with the severe starvation of the nineties leading to dark rumors of cannibalism. Just as bad: instead of properly distributing these supplies, they were used to 'buy' the loyalty of those in power, as is so often the case with corrupt governments.
This leads to bizarre situations: in Dear Leader, Jang Jin-sung recounts receiving packets of formula with his rations—despite being a single man with no baby who would need formula. On the flip side, in The Aquariums of Pyongyang, Kang Chol-hwan discusses his family's time in a prison camp, where they get advice on how a man who was able to attract enough rats to 'feast' on them, as they are high in protein and considered good eatin' in a prison camp.
Both books give an idea of how trivial the crimes that can get a family—three generations of a family, in fact, as your children and parents and even distant cousins go with you—locked up. In Dear Leader, it was forgetting a book on the bus. Outside literature is, after all, forbidden to North Koreans (he worked in the propaganda department and was allowed a glimpse at the outside world's media in a very Winston Smith "rewrite it for Big Brother" kind of way).
Other disturbing things come out about the search for freedom: many women who escape into China might end up being kept as sex slaves, sold into human trafficking, or just turned back over to North Korea by Chinese authorities, the last two applying to every escapee. Come on, it's the Chinese government; they're not exactly well-known for their dedication to human rights and transparency, some of the incidents in Richard McGregor's The Party come to mind, and at almost fifteen years old and written pre-Xi and the Uyghur concentration camps: I'm sure China's only gotten worse.
But it's not just China: it's us, too, sometimes, unfortunately. The US and other allied nations who like to discuss our dedication to equal rights and opportunity and freedom and all of that good stuff: well, for starters, you're going to be heavily scrutinized. Defectors could be potential spies, or they could exaggerate their stories—standard-fare doubting the victim's story. Sometimes, there's a question of how valuable a defector's information could be, by the US in particular: a government official like Jang in Dear Leader can get by, but if you're just some poor peasant, things probably aren't looking so great for options.
Depending on the country, sometimes there are issues with finding asylum at all: North Koreans have to hope for luck in finding a 'broker' in China, generally, who will help them get to a country with an embassy they can use. Escape through the DMZ is effectively a suicide mission, after all.
I digress: with a bit of a baseline, we can situate A Kim Jong-Il Production in the late seventies, a few years after the nation has started to falter. The kidnappings occur in 1978, two years after the failure of a Six-Year Plan ending in 1976, but Room 39—the illicit program involved in everything from narcotics to counterfeit cash to international fraud to running the Pyongyang restaurant chain in order to provide the Kim family and other leadership with spending cash—was already in operation, allowing for eccentric, quixotic ventures.
Among these: Kim Jong-Il was apparently a big fan of cinema (not as unprecedented as you might think; Stalin was big into cowboy movies, believe it or not), so Choi ("the Elizabeth Taylor of Asia," per author Paul Fischer) and Shin were kidnapped due to him wanting to make a name for North Korea in the film industry (and win awards!). He is mentioned to have had a catalogue of over ten thousand films.
Both are kidnapped from Hong Kong—Choi under a ruse, and Shin while searching for her. The two were kept apart for years, until brainwashing and torture were believed to have effectively made them loyal to the regime. This might have happened sooner if not for Shin's escape attempts, which landed him in a brutal North Korea prison to break his will. This would also later lead to his death, as unclean medical equipment would lead to an infection from a biopsy that must've been nasty because it would ultimately require two liver transplants—he did not survive the second.
After roughly five years, the two are reintroduced at a party and Kim Jong-Il more or less 'directs' their real lives as if a child playing with action figures, seen both in him reuniting the pair and, later, in ordering them to kiss, like Mike Tyson with a pair of pigeons.
Kim discloses a desire to enter a film from North Korea into international film festivals and win an award—which is the purpose of having the duo there. Shin is able to use this to make a string of movie and, arguably, to subvert the regime's control, to some extent. After all, some of the demands of North Korea's hyper-nationalist juche ("Self-reliance") ideology wouldn't be palatable to international audiences, so if he wants to win awards...
As a result of this, Shin and Choi make a string of films that break conventions for North Korea. The most well-known of these is pictured on the cover and usually gets the most attention: Pulgasari, or, North Korea's Godzilla knockoff. Paul Fischer, the author, raises an interesting point about how this could be viewed as a subversive reading of North Korean history, a bit like Godzilla being symbolic of nuclear devastation.
Pulgasari tells the story of a monster created by peasants and villagers to overthrow evil landlords—but which then turns on the people it was called on to protect. Not too dissimilar to how Kim Il-Sung was seen as a revolutionary hero for fighting against Japanese occupation, but once the Japanese were pushed out at the end of WWII and he was restrained in the Korean War, Il-Sung turned to consolidating power, purging his own party, and hurting the people he was supposed to be helping. A monster called upon to help becomes a menace there to harm.
Other films break conventions for North Korean cinema as well, as Fischer points out, by introducing concepts like romantic love instead of focusing on a more 'Socialist realism' approach of love for the state and its leader, or by giving each character unique dialogue rather than speaking as a generic stand-in for the citizenry as a mass, and incorporating footage from abroad—shattering the illusion within North Korea that the outside was a wasteland after WWII.
This final point is one of interest, as more recent documentaries and some books speak to the value of seeing the world from a lens other than the state-approved one. A few PBS documentaries—which, admittedly, have to be taken with a pinch of salt given our Western origin and biases—discuss how groups flying over flash drives with Western TV shows and films make a significant difference.
One documentary even included grainy footage of a pair watching South Korean television and remarking how they "wished [they] could live somewhere like that" as the cameraman steps back, tilts the camera up, and shows the government-mandated pictures of Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il looking down in faux-benign ignorance. It's an interesting, hopeful glimpse at a new dawn that could, with luck, rise in North Korea.
On a bizarre but kinda brighter ending, the lack of human presence in the DMZ has apparently led to it becoming a wildlife haven that is home to 91 endangered species.** Bit of a silver lining.
—
*I referred to Kim Jong Un as having "faux power." Let me explain.
In a great Frontline documentary released about a decade ago, it's discussed that Un's leadership is, or at least was, quite shaky. There were splits in the leadership structure of North Korea. He was so desperate he'd eliminated almost half of the top brass in the military because he was so unsure of his insecure hold on power. He was even going after family, as this is when the infamous story of his uncle's execution came out.
Wider context: dictators like Gaddafi were taken down by their own enraged citizens, sick of being mistreated; Ukraine had its Revolution of Dignity and sent Yanukoyvich fleeing to Putin in Russia with his tail tucked firmly between his legs, things were not looking good for authoritarians on the international stage and the stress of this, along with internal issues, meant Kim Jong-Un had to rely on a reign of terror to hold onto a semblance of power.
Then some spray-tanned dipshit went over there, fell right into Un's traps like a real-life-but-dumber Dave Skylark who doesn't realize the ploy, and started going off about how he "fell in love" with Un. I'm sure Un turning sixty years of anti-US propaganda and fake videos about how they're gonna nuke the US mainland (first country since the end of the Cold War to do so) into the sitting President of the US eating out of his hand like a dog on a leash went over well with the North Korean indoctrination machine. Yeah, I imagine that gave him some serious propaganda material to cement his grip on power and they didn't even have to fake it with shitty CGI!
With any luck, the toppling of Assad has Un on edge instead of even more eager to get a nuke to solidify his grip on power and ability to stalemate the world with a Mexican standoff—but it's hard to predict a reaction when someone feels cornered.
**Don't recognize the source, Arirang? Neither did I; they appear to be reliable, checking credibility is important (Murrow: “To be persuasive, we must be believable; to be believable, we must be credible; to be credible, we must be truthful.”).
—One important thing to note about North Korea: it certainly is possible to visit North Korea, as we know from the Otto Warmbier case. I cannot recall specifically which countries are and aren't allowed to visit North Korea, I know as an American I am not but that there are 'workarounds,' such as the one Warmbier found. Warmbier also is a horrifying example of why you do not use workarounds.
—Juche ideology has led to some whacky things, one of the more interesting is arguably vinylon, if you've ever wondered what that kinda unique and implacable but universal fabric is that North Koreans wear in pictures that looks somewhere between track and business suit and probably has the worst of both worlds for comfort and warmth.
Juche's fierce, nationalistic ideology, combined with the cult of personality around the Kim dynasty, and the country's focus on individuals instead of institutions leads to some of the bizarre, quasi-religious, cultish aspects of North Korean society that make news and get poked fun at.
—At one point during a Frontline PBS documentary, the stark contrast is pointed out between the lives of orphans, shivering and starving in the cold, with the elite life in capital Pyongyang. This is painful to see—but it's also painful to think that similar could be argued for us.
Parts of Kentucky live in third world conditions with dirt floors, for instance. Mitch McConnell, one of Kentucky's Senators and the nineteenth wealthiest member of the Senate is worth $34.1 million dollars, give or take. His wife appears to have engaged in some good ol' fashioned corruption as Trump's former Secretary of Transportation and his house could be easily described as "maybe not mine, but definitely a dream kinda home." But you know who I bet sees none of the benefits of that cash?
The people he was elected to serve. See, McConnell has been in the Senate since 1985. And he's had a stranglehold on how republicans vote in the Senate with rare exception for the last decade or more. I despise the man, but he's effective. He could be just as effective at ensuring the wealth he stewards properly "trickled down" and that he lived the hollow slogans of republican economic policy and helping uplift people. He doesn't. He could use his stranglehold on the republican party to strategically pressure members in safe districts to vote a certain way, or actually come to the table with ideas for a compromise instead of throwing a monkey wrench into the workings of government. He could, himself, vote for programs that would fund critical infrastructure and safety nets in Kentucky—as well as across the nation—that could help lift people out of poverty; as investors, and republicans are big into economics allegedly, would know, "A rising tide lifts all boats."
If he doesn't believe in government intervention for these purposes, he's got $34.1 million himself and plenty of connections with the rich and powerful to help on an individual level and live up to his small government philosophy. A more literate, prosperous society is beneficial for everyone, after all.
We had a real thriving middle class when we invested in infrastructure and the middle class after WWII—sure, Europe was devastated, which gave us a leg up, but we also had the GI Bill to encourage veterans to go to college; we had the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways (which would probably be considered socialism today) because he remembered a difficult convoy he'd endured in the military due to no universal roads to cross the nation, compared it with what he saw for transport lines in Europe, and then figured out a solution. That created jobs across the nation. We had strong unions—we didn't see companies with record profits and unions that would slink away with, "Guys, we went in for a raise, they offered a lower-than-usual COLA, and we took it!"
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold..."
We had government, and politicians that gave a damn about people—FDR fucked up big time with the Japanese internment camps, do not get me wrong. Easily one of the worst decisions in American history by any president.
But he also personally touched McConnell's life. McConnell had polio as a child and he was treated at Warm Springs. Warm Springs was a property acquired by FDR after his own polio and his desperate search for a way to walk like before again (he could walk to a very limited extent but it was quite painful to my knowledge).
That is an example of using your individual wealth for good when faced with a situation where the government is unable or unwilling to help. But we don't have Roosevelts anymore—not the ones that protect National Parks and push for progressivism, nor those who lift us out of economic Depressions and live on as a traitor to their class for helping the downtrodden—we've got McConnells and Trumps: government by the wealthy, for the wealthy.
Not too different from that other regime that puts on false wrappings of an ideology to mask power lust.
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