One of the only ways into North Korea is through China. From Beijing there are daily flights on Air Koryo, the North Korean state-run airline. The planes they operate, at least for these daily flights to Pyonyang, are fairly new and modern, built in the 1990’s, and they feel just like any Boing 737 or Airbus A320 you may have recently boarded. But they are not. They are Russian-made Tupolev 204′s. We sat in the back mysteriously curtained-off quarter of the plane, which appeared to be reserved for westerners but I’ve been told that’s not the case and that it is not unusual to sit among the natives on these flights.
The first thing you notice in this section of the plane is the presence of two uniformed government security officers. They don’t try to be discrete. They want you to know they are there and what purpose they serve. They observe you intensely throughout the entire flight. What are you reading? Are you taking pictures? Of what?
It’s such a strange sensation to feel this watched. Our section of the plane wasn’t filled so my two travel companions and I each had a row of three seats to ourselves. One of the security officers sat down next to me about an hour into the flight as I was taking some pictures and video inside the cabin. He didn’t overtly object to anything I was doing but it did feel a bit intrusive and while he was there I became very self-conscious. We surmised their actions were meant to just send the message that eyes were upon us and we shouldn’t forget it.
A North Korean Air Koryo attendant wears a pin showing portraits of the late North Korean leaders Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, while she prepares the cabin before take off for Pyongyang from Beijing, China.Upon boarding, the odd and the curious began to stand out to me. Every North Korean on the plane, from the flight attendants to military personnel to the “businessmen” was wearing a lapel pin displaying the portrait of Kim Il-Sung, the founder and deceased eternal President of the country. Some pins also included the portrait of also-deceased former ruler Kim Il-Sung’s son, Kim Jong-Il. The pins are such a presence in the country that we almost never saw someone who wasn’t wearing one. To not wear a pin regularly might almost be seen as an act of disloyalty – and given that anyone’s friends and neighbors might report them for such acts, ordinary citizens tend to publicly overstate their devotion to the regime at every opportunity. I began to think of the entire North Korean society as a bit sect-like. And as on a commune where everyone might be referred to as brother this or sister that, North Koreans refer to each other as “comrade” and they generously salt their conversations with references to the Dear Leader. As in…
“How was your day?”
“It was hard, but not nearly as hard as that of the Dear Leader who has the weight of the Korean People’s future on his great and mighty shoulders.”
These pins are not available to foreigners. You can’t buy them and they aren’t given as gifts. They are not trivialized. You are meant to be North Korean to own one and you’d better not go more than two days in a row without wearing one if you know what’s good for you! They are worn on the lapel of respectable clothing. Citizens are excused from sporting one if they are dressed for hard manual labor.
The next thing I noticed was what was playing on the plane’s TV monitors. It was like bad 70′s TV variety show esthetics mixed with Stalinist patriotic propaganda. Idealistic scenes of North Koreans with happy and fulfilling lives wash across the screens. Young lovers walking among the flowers and beautiful landscapes of North Korean paradise are intermixed with shots of military parades and trainings meant to display the country’s readiness for anything. This is all set to music. Pop music? Rock music? No way. The country is on a pretty strict diet of hymn-like anthems and marches.
It’s not that the people don’t love pop, rock, blues, soul, and funk. It’s that they’ve never even been exposed to it. Bruce Springsteen? They’ve never heard the name. Elvis? Michael Jackson? Nope. How about the recent pop sensation Psy from South Korea who sings Gangnam Style in their language? The song shocked one of our minders when we played it for him. He had never heard it or anything like it and didn’t seem too thrilled to hear of a South Korean who had become world famous – although, a friend of mine who travels to North Korea frequently tells me that most North Koreans are vicariously proud of the South’s international achievements and that the minders are a bit more versed in international pop culture than the average citizen, who would certainly be completely clueless.
It’s easy and lazy to simply return from a trip to North Korea and relate the surreal reality. I’d love to (and will) recount experiences and conversations I had and I’ll do my best to make it an entertaining and informative read. But if you know anything about North Korea you already know the anecdotes about the isolationism, the lack of knowledge of the outside, the orchestrated, contrived, and sometimes staged tours given to foreigners who are adventurous enough to get approved for visas and travel to the hermit kingdom.
North Korea fascinates me. It’s potentially a nuclear-armed nation with a temperamental, thin-skinned regime that has a hair-trigger and a complicated relationship with reality.
But after consuming all the documentaries, Vice episodes (including those featuring Dennis Rodman), and reading the accounts of recent visitors, I hungered to get past the staring-and-scoffing stage. I aspired to more. I wanted to understand the root causes of the madness. Having moved to Spain just 10 years beyond that country’s emergence from a right-wing dictatorship, I know there are layers of complexity to any country’s politics, economics, culture, and relationships with the outside. I know that if we can’t comprehend how North Korea views itself and how it understands the world we can’t begin to predict its behavior or even engage it constructively.
So before I delve into my own experiences and observations in upcoming posts, I want to set the stage in this post with what brought North Korea to its current situation. I’ll keep it light and short.
Beginning in 1910, all of Korea was occupied by the Japanese and the Japanese were brutal occupiers. Many Koreans fled to Manchuria to escape the brutality including a particular family by the name of Kim. After Japan lost World War II, the Soviet Union and the western allies (led by the US) split Korea across the middle and forced Japan out. Although the United Nations had a plan to unify the country and hold elections, before they could do so the Soviet Union recognized the northern half as a sovereign country and installed the son of the Kim family – who subscribed to communist ideals and had proven to be an effective leader – as the vetted ruler.
Kim Il Sung (surnames come first in Korean) quickly organized his military and set his sights on reunifying all of Korea under his new government. With the help of Soviet and Chinese espionage services, Kim Il Sung reached the erroneous conclusion that the United States would not intervene if the North invaded the South. And so the Korean war began in June of 1950 with Kim Il Sung launching an invasion.
Pyongyang, North Korea after allied bombing during Korean War
At first it looked good for Kim Il Sung but after nearly accomplishing his goal of conquering the entire peninsula, the United Nations interceded and the United Stated provided almost 90% of the 341,000 troops that drove Kim’s forces back deep into the North, almost back to China. Between 1950 and 1952, the US dropped more conventional ordinance and napalm on North Korea than they dropped throughout all of the Pacific campaign of World War II. In fact, not a single building of any significance was left standing in North Korea. You can imagine the public sentiment toward the US that provoked in the North.
In order to help Kim Il Sung prevent a complete loss, China stepped in with large numbers of troops and the Soviet Union began providing technical and strategic assistance. They pushed the United Nations-backed allies back toward the original lines where things stagnated resulting in a tactical stalemate.
That Chinese-and-Soviet-assisted comeback essentially restored the line between the North and South at the 38th parallel (where it had been prior to the North’s invasion) and caused the US to propose a cease-fire, which was signed in July of 1953. The cease-fire remains in place today but technically the war has not ended. The US today maintains roughly 28,500 soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines in South Korea to counter-balance the North.
Immediately, Kim Il Sung led a massive rebuilding campaign in the North and began establishing one of the most successful-ever cults of personality. He began calling himself the “Great Leader” and had statues and monuments built in his honor. He established a centrally organized economy with state-owned industry and collective farms in the traditional Marxist fashion.
One of the most important tenants of his power involved contriving the narrative that he actually won the war. The narrative points to the fact that the South had provoked skirmishes along the border and the persistence of rumors that it was actually the South that was about to invade the North and try to unify all of Korea under the South’s rule. Thus, according to this narrative, the North’s invasion was actually provoked and was a defensive measure. Holding the line at the 38th parallel, creating a stalemate, forcing heavy losses among the Americans, and forcing the US to request the armistice agreement counted as a victory for Kim Il Sung.
Kim Il Sung created one of the most successful cults-of-personality in human history
That was his story and he stuck to it. It’s the narrative that is taught as gospel in the North, officially known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). To North Koreans, the United States is the unprovoked country that ruthlessly bombed them into the Stone Age. To strengthen his grip on power, Kim Il Sung claimed that the US deliberately spread diseases among the North Korean population. Though both Moscow and Beijing later determined these claims to be false, they helped spread the rumors for many years to come.
Rebuilding was a herculean task and Kim Il Sung drove the country forward by imbuing a staunch culture of self reliance. This idea of the masses being the masters of their destiny, counting only on their own resources, became known as “Juche” (pronounced joot-chay).
By the early 1990’s North Korea was mostly isolated from the rest of the world except occasional contact and trade with Russia, China, Cuba, and Vietnam. The country had over-spent on arms and its agriculture sector was unable to produce enough food to feed the population. The state-run media continued to contribute to the cult-of-personality Kim Il Sung had built. In 1994, Kim Il Sung died of a sudden heart attack and his son, Kim Jong Il assumed power.
Kim Jong Il inherited his father’s cult of personality when he succeeded him in 1994
Kim Jong Il mostly continued the policies of his father and inherited the cult of personality. Both he and his father are essentially deified in public education and many North Koreans believed that Kim Jong Il had magical powers to control the weather based upon his mood. Due to the collapse of the communist block in the rest of the world, North Korea lost its trading partners and became even more isolated. Floods, droughts, and famine in the 90’s worsened its conditions and up to 3.5 million people are believed to have died of starvation. Foreign aid sent by many countries, including the US, is believed to have fallen into the hands of the ruling class and was undistributed to the masses.
Kim Jong Il’s government was reputed to be the most repressive in the world, at one time having over 200,000 political prisoners, held mostly in harsh labor and mining camps where life expectancy was often measured in months. Under Kim Jong Il there was no freedom of the press, religion, or equal education.
There are over 500 statues of his father, Kim Il Sung in North Korea. Some are as large as the Statue of Liberty. Statues of Kim Jong Il, who died in 2011 have now been erected as well. When Kim Jong Il died, his 27 year old (aprox) son, Kim Jong Un assumed power and remains the country’s leader today.
Kim Jong Un, the grandson of Kim Il Sung & son of Kim Jong Il is the current leader of North Korea (officially, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea)
Meanwhile, in the South, a right wing government took hold and although it too went through rough times, over the decades the country has found prosperity – first through a burgeoning textile industry and later through heavy industry and technology. South Korea is a democratic nation today with worldwide-known brands such as Daewoo, Hyundai, and Samsung and has even spawned an international pop star (Psy – Gangnam Style).
North Korea on the other hand, remains firmly intent on the idea of reunification. In fact, a frequent slogan officially posted across the country decries “Single Minded Unity”. Yet the likelihood of any kind of reunification remains remote at best. Despite that, everyone I asked stated firmly that reunification would indeed occur and that in fact it was near. Everyone asserted this would occur peacefully and only required the US to withdraw its troops from the South in order to give the North the opportunity to “convince” the South of the reasonableness of their reunification position.
Single-Minded Unity: A frequently seen image in DPRK denoting “Korea Is One”
The North maintains the 4th largest standing army in the world and its population largely foregoes luxuries like hot water in homes so that the state can develop nuclear weapons, maintain a large military complex and continue to foment the cult of personality of its leaders.
Occasionally, North Korea threatens the west (and the US in particular) with nuclear strikes and it continues to develop and test long-range missiles and nuclear warheads. In decades past, it is believed the North sent occasional specialized paramilitary teams onto Japan’s mainland to kidnap doctors and other professionals and hold them in North Korea to practice their trades and teach at the universities. In Japan, these people simply disappeared and were never heard from again. Only occasionally were there intelligence leaks indicating they were alive and well living inside the DPRK.
It is also believed that North Korea is the largest producer of falsified US currency, a leading exporter of methamphetamine, and secretly tries to export its nuclear knowledge to generate much-needed cash.
Since the beginning of the rule of the young Kim Jong Un the country has opened a bit more. Travel restrictions to the country have eased though foreign visitors are not free to roam the country and must be accompanied by guides / minders. Economic investment from China has increased. Despite that, several Americans who were traveling there have been detained and two remain in custody today, the latest was detained while I was in the country and I’ll recount that anecdote in a future post.
That essentially brings us to the present time and provides the backdrop for my trip to the DPRK.
Mike McCready 
