Leader Symbols and Personality Cult in North Korea

The Leader State

Jae-Cheon Lim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138831421
• eBook ISBN: 9781317567400
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The legitimacy of the North Korean state is based solely on the leaders' personal legitimacy, and is maintained by the indoctrination of people with leader symbols and the enactment of leadership cults in daily life. It can thus be dubbed a "leader state". The frequency of leader symbols and the richness and scale of leader-symbol-making in North Korea are simply unrivalled. Furthermore, the personality cults of North Korean leaders are central to people's daily activity, critically affecting their minds and emotions. Both leader symbols and cult activities are profoundly entrenched in the institutions and daily life, and if separated and cancelled, the North Korean state would be transformed.

This book analyses North Korea as a "leader state", focusing on two elements, leader symbols and cult activities. It argues that these elements have been, and continue to be, the backbone of North Korea, shaping North Korean culture. To reveal the "leader state" character, the book specifically examines North Korea's leadership cults, its use of leader symbols in these cults, and the nature of the symbolism involved. How has the North Korean state developed the cult of the Kim Il Sung family? How does the state use leader symbols to perpetuate this cult? How has the state developed myths and rituals that sustain the cult in daily life? What leader images has state propaganda manufactured? How does the state's manipulation of leader symbols affect the symbolism that is assigned to the leader's actions? In answering these questions, this book sheds new light on the strength and resilience of the North Korean state, and shows how it has been able to survive even the most difficult economic period of the mid-1990s.

Leader Symbols and Personality Cult in North Korea will be essential reading for students and scholars of North Korea, Korean politics, Asian politics, political sociology and visual politics.

1 Leader symbols in North Korea

On December 19, 2011, North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency announced that the Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, had died of heart failure on his armored train at 8:30 a.m. on December 17, while on his way to give a guidance tour. Upon this announcement, North Koreans rushed to mourning altars in order to pay their homage. The entire state remained deep in a fanatical form of mourning until the national funeral service finally ended on December 28. Tidal waves of people screaming and beating their chests often appeared in the North Korean media during these ten days of mourning.

On December 28, as the snow fell softly in Pyongyang, much of the city’s population came out on to the streets to bid farewell to the deceased leader during his funeral procession. While the citizens wailed, the designated hereditary heir, Kim Jong Un, was exposed to the media and walked for some time alongside the casket during the procession, symbolizing that he would now rule the dynastic totalitarian state in the post-Kim Jong Il era. Some days after the mourning period, North Korea announced that Kim Jong Il’s body was to be embalmed and put in the Kŭmsusan Memorial Palace (or Kŭmsusan Sun Palace), where his father Kim Il Sung’s body had also been preserved. With the two Kims lying there together, the Kŭmsusan Memorial Palace had become the mausoleum for the Kim family and a center for North Korean pilgrimages.

The mass hysteria of the North Korean people that was evident during the state funeral was, however, not a new phenomenon. When the Great Leader Kim Il Sung died in July 1994, the people’s response to the death of their state founder had looked, if anything, still more dramatic than their response to the death of the Dear Leader in December 2011. The mourning period for Kim Il Sung was also longer than that for Kim Jong Il, as the former lasted for thirteen days rather than ten. For the people, the death of the Great Leader was unbelievable because he was regarded as a living god. The statement of former North Korean commando Kim Sin-jo, who was arrested in Seoul in January 1968, goes some way to demonstrating the status of Kim Il Sung: Sin-jo says that he “respected Kim Il Sung more than my parents” and that “he was the center of my thoughts and I was not able to think about myself without considering him.”¹ The fanatical cults surrounding Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, as demonstrated at the two funerals, are enigmatic to outside observers and may be the most unusual of North Korean phenomena, distinct as they are from any other modern political phenomena. However, the cult of personality, as a social phenomenon, has endured throughout human history, although the extent of its reach has varied depending on the context and time in which it has been situated. Jane F. Gardner explains the cult of personality as follows:

… [it is] a complex phenomenon: the persistent tendency, in different periods and in societies with widely differing constitutions, to create and maintain – and, moreover, to justify – a situation in which, whatever the nominal constitutional position, an individual can be made to stand out as both the possessor of authority and thereby the appropriate object for the respect and deference of his fellow citizens. It seems as though authority in the abstract is not enough; the human mind seems to demand a personification of that authority as the focus for his respect and reverence, and prefers to honor the ruler, rather than the rule of law. The connection with the religious impulse is obvious and, as will be seen, this tendency produced at times an assertion of the divinity, or at least divine sponsorship, of the ruler.²

Although there are cult phenomena in every society, the degree and scope of the cults of the North Korean leaders are too extreme and too pervasive to be compared with the cults that have existed in other societies, in both modern and pre-modern times.

The leadership cults that exist in North Korea are a consequence of the long-term nature of the Kims’ dictatorial rule. Since its founding in 1948, the North Korean state has been ruled exclusively by the Kim family. Kim Il Sung ruled from 1948 to 1994, after which his son Kim Jong Il ruled from 1994 to 2011. While the extensive time span of this family dictatorship has made the leadership cults possible, these same cults, on the other hand, have contributed to promoting the state’s political legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens and justifying its use of hereditary succession, originally from Kim Il Sung to Kim Jong Il, and later from Kim Jong Il to his son Kim Jong Un.

Specifically, the ultimate goals of the family cult include the maintenance of the leaders’ perceived political legitimacy and the justification of the system of hereditary succession. The cult has been greatly devoted to the development of what David Easton terms the leaders’ “personal legitimacy.” Easton maintains that a leader’s personal qualities can become a source of their political legitimacy and that “whether or not the authorities in a system will be considered right and proper may depend not on their conformity to an accepted regime but upon the extent to which the members see the occupants of authority as personally, in their behavior and symbolism, worthy of moral approval.”³ For several decades, by using leader symbols, North Korea has developed a highly refined cult system to such a degree that the leaders’ personal legitimacy is identical to the state legitimacy. The leadership cult has not only helped the leaders to secure the allegiance of their people, but also has made it possible to transfer the impression of legitimacy from Kim Il Sung to Kim Jong Il and then to Kim Jong Un, through the emotional and magnetic appeal of their manufactured images. As Charles K. Armstrong indicates, the Kim family cult, although influenced by the cults of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, has gone beyond any of its forebears “in its pervasiveness, longevity, and extension beyond the individual to the family of the Great Leader himself.”⁴

The origins of the personality cult of Kim Il Sung can be traced back to as early as the post-liberation period, when the Soviet occupation forces attempted to build a charismatic image of Kim, who was at that point relatively unknown to Koreans. The Soviets who occupied the North between 1945 and 1948 attempted to make Kim a Korean Stalin in order to legitimize his rule in the North through idealized image-making. The personality cult developed aggressively in the mid-1950s, after Kim had carried out a largescale purge of his political opponents through a power struggle. This notwithstanding, the personality cult of Kim Jong Il really became fully fledged only in the 1980s, after the state declared that the first hereditary succession from Kim Il Sung to Kim Jong Il had been prepared, at the Sixth Congress of the Korean Workers’ Party (KWP) in October 1980. The cult of the Kim family has since gone on to be used as a means of vindicating the second hereditary succession, that from Kim Jong Il to Kim Jong Un in the 2010s.

When Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il were alive, the North Korean people revered them as sacrosanct figures. Through their long-standing leadership cult, the state elevated the two Kims to the level of demigods. From childhood to adulthood, the people were educated to know no other leaders but the two Kims. All symbols of the two leaders, such as badges, statues, and portraits, were to be treated with extreme care. Whatever the two leaders said was believed to be right and true. Moreover, all state institutions were demanded to fulfill the leaders’ commands, and all organizational meetings were initiated by quoting the two leaders’ instructions as if they were religious doctrines. Kim Pyŏng-lo emphasizes that these fanatical cult activities made the North Korean society pseudo-religious, similar in identity to an early Christian society.⁵ The effects of the leadership cult at all levels of social life are simply too pervasive and intense to explain in every detail.

While developing the leadership cult, the state has produced and reproduced a myriad of leader symbols by exercising its infinite symbol-making power. The government has spent a great deal of its resources on building the leader symbols necessary for cult propaganda. Although it is almost impossible to quantify these fully, leader symbols have been one of the most voluminous, constantly produced, and reproduced aspects of North Korean society. The state did not stop establishing leader symbols even when it suffered from the economic disasters of the mid-1990s. Rather, the leader symbols, particularly those surrounding Kim Il Sung, helped Kim Jong Il to maintain his regime and likewise played a significant role in upholding the unity between Kim Jong Il and the people during the period of economic disaster.

As they are omnipresent, it is difficult to imagine what North Korean society would be without leader symbols. North Koreans have contact with these symbols in their daily lives at home, school, and work. They have become used to living with them and may even feel uneasy without them. Travelling to the North, we can find these symbols even in the deep mountainous areas. Figuratively speaking, the North Korean people live in a forest of leader symbols.

The ubiquity of these symbols, supported by the state’s limitless symbol-making power, has a strong effect on North Koreans’ psyche. According to Jae Jean Suh, the effect of the North Korean leadership cult endures in the minds of even those North Korean defectors who have escaped to South Korea and have thus left the leadership cult behind.⁶ Suh’s study shows that leader symbols are deeply carved into the minds and emotions of North Koreans, to such an extent that they occupy a central role in their psychological experiences. Consequently, these leader symbols cannot be easily forgotten and will have a reach that is far longer-lasting and more pervasive than the actual cult system within which they are found.

In conclusion, North Korea can be symbolically dubbed a “leader state” whose legitimacy is based solely on the leaders’ personal legitimacy and is maintained mainly by the indoctrination of people with leader symbols and the enactment of leadership cults in daily life. I designate the North as a “leader state” for two reasons. First, the frequency of leader symbols and the richness and sca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1. Leader symbols in North Korea
• 2. Leader symbols, the cult, and its impact on political succession
• 3. Myth- and ritual-making in Kim Il Sung’s anti-Japanese struggle
• 4. The Kims: image-making
• 5. Symbolic leadership: the leader’s guidance tour as a symbolic act
• 6. Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index