Sino-NK

Preface: Although a handful of more orthodox PRC intellectuals have remotely encouraged him to make his mark in print, Kim Jong Un has virtually no paper trail to speak of.  Analysts, however, are fortunate to have access to a huge body of work by his two predecessors.  If one thing has been made clear since December 24, it has been that the works and life — and even the handwriting — of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Song are, at least in terms of domestic propaganda in the DPRK, more important than ever.

In the coming weeks, SinoNK will be running a series of “Foundations” posts highlighting excerpts from the works of both Kims relevant to the present situation.  These elements of the Works, we believe, should have some bearing on the present debates within and about North Korea.  The DPRK is hardly a tabula rasa, and its ruling system should not be treated as such.  If in fact the current cabal is going to lean upon tradition, it behooves us to note that even tradition is not without its dangers. — Ed. 

Quote: “If you cannot see the serious realities of the class struggle and are infected with revisionism, you may make mistakes such as forgetting your class origin and making compromises with the hostile class, even though you are the sons and daughters of revolutionaries.  The leader has said that sons do not become revolutionaries of their own accord because their fathers have conducted the revolution.”

Citation: Kim Jong Il, “Children of the Revolutionary Martyrs Must Become Political and Ideological Bodyguards Protecting and Defending the Leader: A Talk to Children of Revolutionary Martyrs Graduated from the Mangyongdae Revolutionary School,” October 12, 1967, in Kim Jong Il Selected Works, Vol. 1 [pp. 305-313], p. 312.

Comment: It is hardly coincidental that the Workers’ Party of Korea, in its first major rally in Pyongyang after Kim Jong Il’s funeral, emphasized the role of youth so heavily.  While Western news agencies tended to run the same old captions, treating the rally as if it were just North Korea getting back to its goose-stepping ways, it is worth noting that Rodong Sinmun’s photographs emphasized the role of university students [청년대학생/青年大学生], particularly those uniting around the writing brush.  If the Party is making a virtue of necessity by emphasizing youth and vitality in the propaganda surrounding Kim Jong Un, it is also probably busily scrounging through the Works of both late great leaders for justification and indications that this is the natural order of things.  Quotes like the above, and even apparently innocuous quotations from historical poetry present in published materials in the DPRK, are now potentially seditious if said in public.  Even the bulwarks of orthodoxy are a bit of a minefield.

Pyongyang, Jan. 3, via Xinhua