NORTH KOREA’S JUCHE MYTH (Sthele Press, 2015)
INTRODUCTION
With minor variations from writer to writer, the Western version of North Korea’s ideological history goes like this:
In 1955, seven years into his rule, Kim Il Sung proclaimed the nationalist ideology that had been guiding him all along. Instead of mimicking the USSR, he said, Korea had to establish Juche — which is usually translated as self-reliance, but means much more than that. Although Kim did not mention Juche for the next few years, he formalized it in 1965 on a visit to Indonesia. In 1972 its central maxim, “man is the master of all things,” was revealed to a delegation of Japanese journalists. But by that time Juche had already replaced Marxism-Leninism as North Korea’s official ideology, intensifying the country’s obsession with self-reliance. Unfortunately, this only made it more dependent on aid. While pragmatism is now on the rise in Pyongyang, ideologues inside the elite try to reassert their influence by provoking the outside world. A proper grasp of Juche therefore remains necessary if one is to understand the country’s behavior. Alas, we foreigners cannot hope to get past its impenetrable, ever-receding name.
It’s a tall tale indeed; one needs only an open mind to see the holes and implausibilities. Yet it continues to inform the assumption that in 1955 North Korea’s goal changed from the unification of the peninsula to the establishment of Juche above the thirty-eighth parallel. We are therefore told not to take its bellicose rhetoric too seriously; the country really just wants the United States “to keep the South from swallowing it. Sooner or later an American president will come to understand this, the crisis will end, embassies will be exchanged,” etc.1 Whatever the North Koreans may understand by self-reliance, then, their commitment to it is in itself quite harmless. The problem lies in the counter-productive excitability with which they react to perceived encroachments on their quasi-religious mission. Nuclear armament, periodic attacks on South Korean troops, talk of a “holy war” of unification: such things are but the Juche state’s way of asking for peace and respect.2
Although this foreign consensus served the dictatorship well for decades, the country has finally grown powerful enough to want to be feared — particularly by South Korea, which, rationally enough, it would rather bully into submission than have to fight. Now as in 1950, its goal, though no longer a short-term one, is unification on its own terms.3 The world’s underestimation of the regime’s seriousness only results in more dramatic demonstrations of it. The Juche fallacy is therefore more than just a cautionary example of academic groupthink. It induces so gross a misunderstanding of this rising nuclear state as to be downright dangerous. In the following pages I will try to lay it to rest.
The state of research need not detain us long. Bruce Cumings, who is by my count the authority cited most often, has for decades asserted that “the closer one gets to [Juche’s] meaning, the more it slips away.”4 Authors of ostensibly comprehensive tomes on the country get around the topic by claiming it has been researched enough already: “There have been many books written by political scientists about this bizarre ideology.”5 South Korean books, certainly; our own political scientists have yet to come up with one. The occasional scholar who promises to supply the deficiency can be counted on to deal with the DPRK’s foreign policy instead, or some other presumed example of Juche in action. Journalists looking for answers about the doctrine per se end up with lists of ingredients: humanism, Christianity, Confucianism, even shamanism.6
If the convention is to stress Juche’s ideological centrality while dodging explanation of the thing itself, I aim in this book to do the opposite, namely, to demonstrate its peripherality to North Korean ideology by tracing its history in detail and explaining its content as thoroughly as necessary. I do not deny that the Juche myth — the myth of a guiding ideology or philosophy conceived by Kim Il Sung — has done great service for the personality cult. My point is that the content of the thing in question has never played a significant role in policy-making or even domestic propaganda. It exists to be praised and not studied, let alone implemented.
The Juche myth’s other main function has been to decoy the world’s attention away from the de facto ideology of radical race-nationalism.7 This is not the only state compelled by foreign-policy considerations to dissimulate its unifying obsessions; Saudi Arabia and Iran come to mind at once. More relevant to North Korea, however, are historical examples of secular taqiyya. Mussolini espoused his thuggish fascism to the Italian masses while presenting a more sophisticated, ethically-minded doctrine to intellectuals abroad, with no small success. Even Hannah Arendt took the “ideology for export,” as Dante Germino called it, for the real one.8 In comparable fashion the Nazi propaganda apparatus whipped up xenophobia and anti-Semitism on the home front while Hitler reassured Europe with his Friedensreden.9 The pretense of being guided by something high-minded or abstruse may enhance a dictator’s standing even with his own people, and inhibit them from judging the discrepancy between official intentions and performance. The key is that the “front-stage” message — to borrow a term from Cas Mudde’s discussion of right-wing parties in pluralist societies — must never be espoused urgently enough to interfere with the “back-stage” one.10
It is harder than ever these days to keep a national mission secret, but invoking it only in the indigenous language while making cant available in English (and online, if possible) tends to keep the world’s attention where one wants it. Being in on the game, the man on the street knows what to say around foreigners. Should the regime be called to account for its back-stage propaganda, it can always speak of errors down the line of command, or the need to address the masses in their own crude terms. Such excuses are accepted more readily than one might think. Whenever an exotic government or movement professes two contradictory ideologies at once, the urbane Westerner will assure himself that the more moderate one is operative.
Granted, the communist states of old were no models of transparency either. China’s Red Guards used to rough up foreign visitors caught reading wall-poster criticisms of top officials.11 But what they sought to hide was the disparity between ideology and reality, not the ideology itself. The Moscow Olympics of 1980 were meant to convey much the same message to everyone: the USSR was the only peace-loving superpower, its system the best for helping man fulfill his potential, and so on. The Berlin Olympics of 1936, in contrast, saw Germans unite in an elaborate effort to hide core Nazi values.12
Although North Korea is no Nazi Germany, it too is a far-right state, by which I mean one that derives support mainly from the public’s perception of its strength, resolve, and commitment to enhancing the stature of the race. A communist state on the other hand, be it ever so nationalist or well-armed, asks to be judged by its performance on the socio-economic front. Political scientists who lump the DPRK in with Ceausescu’s Romania and Hoxha’s Albania, perhaps under the clunky term “national Stalinist,”13 are overlooking the very reason why only this regime — the one with the worst economic record of them all — is still going strong. They also fail to understand how different nationalism in the literal and North Korean sense is from mere loyalty to a multi-ethnic state.14 I am not wedded to the terms far left and far right for their own sake. We can say “square” and “round” for all I care, so long as we understand how different the two kinds of state are, and how differently they must therefore be dealt with. The one cannot yield on matters which to the other are only of secondary importance.
In 2004, when I wrote of North Korea in this vein in The Atlantic, liberal readers thought I just wanted to paint the regime in the worst possible colors. By printing my article, Chalmers Johnson wrote, the magazine had itself moved closer to fascism.15 I suspect that what bothered these people most was the inference to be drawn from the piece, namely, that one cannot reason with a dictator whose legitimacy derives from a pose of implacable hostility to a race enemy. To grasp North Korea as a far-right state is to admit the futility of engagement, something many remain reluctant to do. Even the Stalinist label is thought preferable, despite its evocation of a far more murderous regime, because it holds out hope for a thaw.
The last ten years have confirmed my assessment, however, just as Kim Jong Il’s successor has so far fulfilled the prediction I made at the end of The Cleanest Race (2009) — which was drowned out at the time by cheerier talk — that he would stay on the Military-First road, regardless of what happened in the economic sphere. Judged by the percentage of citizens in uniform, North Korea is now a more highly-militarized society than Italy and Nazi Germany were in the 1930s. The more its economy resembles the rival state’s, the more it must show its superiority on far-right grounds. (Those who keep calling on the DPRK to take the “pragmatic” road to reform are yet to explain how a poor man’s version of South Korea could hope to maintain public support.)16 Already Kim Jong Un has had more belligerent and racist notes struck in exoteric propaganda than were heard during his father’s rule. Take, for example, the description of President Obama recently published by the Korean Central News Agency:
That blackish mug, the vacant, ash-colored eyes, the gaping nostrils: the more I study all this, the more he appears the spitting image of a monkey in an African jungle.17
But much of this book deals with the Kim Il Sung era, when the regime tried to keep its worldview under wraps in order to maintain the communist camp’s support and protection. The extremes of left and right being neighbors on a circular spectrum, dissimulation was not as hard as all that. The language barrier helped enormously. But Kim soon realized that if he was to succeed in marginalizing Seoul, his republic had to be seen as the better Korea by non-aligned countries too. Thus did the front-stage ideology change in the early 1970s from bloc-conform Marxism-Leninism into the people-first uplift of Juche, the relationship of which to communism had to be kept uninterpretable.18
A former South Korean dissident has dismissed Juche as being on the intellectual level of “if you raise a lot of chickens, you will get a lot of eggs.”19 I couldn’t agree more, but I see no reason to dwell on its triteness. As Henry David Aiken summed up Lenin’s insight, ideology is a form of thought
meant to focus, guide and energize the minds of men in society….[It] is the role, not the content, which determines whether a theory or doctrine is working ideologically.20
Before I am accused of ignoring the compromises and dilutions every ideology must put up with, let me make clear that I have judged Juche by the loosest possible definitions of focusing, guiding and energizing minds. Even so, I have had to conclude that it was never meant to work ideologically.
Others figured this out long before I did. Communist states’ refusal to criticize Juche — an attitude the former East German ambassador says he found “astonishing”21 — suggests that they knew it was not being preached in earnest. In 1978, the West German Sinologist Helmut Martin stated that “Kim’s writings are not invoked as a means of legitimation,” and that his “biography has the central function in the canon.”22 (Voilà tout.) In 1986, Alfred Pfabigan, an Austrian professor who studied the doctrine at the official Juche Institute, pointedly noted “the randomness of its formulae.”23 After defecting to South Korea, Hwang Jang Yop, who served for many years as Party Secretary for Juche, made clear that it was conceived to enhance the DPRK’s reputation abroad.24 The leader of South Korea’s own Juche movement, Kim Young-hwan, finally met Kim Il Sung in 1991, only to find him ignorant of the doctrine and uninterested in discussing it. Now a critic of Pyongyang, the ex-dissident repeatedly asserts, “Juche and North Korean ideology are two different things.”25
I have argued that last point on and off for the past ten years, to little avail.26 One still comes across sentences such as:
There is no dispute that [Juche] has over the decades become the dominant leitmotiv that shapes the ways in which the North’s political, social and economic activities are organized.27
Judging from citations I read here and there, I have at least made headway against the myth that Kim Il Sung’s speech to propagandists in 1955 marked a watershed in the republic’s history. The unfortunate result is that Juche’s emergence is often projected back to an even earlier time.
I concentrate in this book on the West’s Juche fallacy, because debunking the version current in the ROK (where I live) would entail emphasizing very different things. South Korean scholars at least know the relevant primary materials well enough to discuss Juche at length. Depending on their own politics, they either chew solemnly over assertions that man is the master of all things, born with creativity, and so on, or have a field day mocking their claim to profundity. Either way they regard the doctrine as the basis of North Korean life.28
In contrast, Western observers reduce Juche to an ideology of self-reliance before boiling it down further to Korean nationalism. It means “putting Korea first in everything,” it is a “passionate and unrestrained cri de coeur against centuries of perceived incursion,” and so on.29 If this were a mere matter of applying the wrong name to a properly understood nationalism, I would not complain. After all, average citizens of the DPRK have long used the term to denote the de facto ideology, not Juche doctrine, of which they know almost as little as our Pyongyang watchers do. A woman who had taught high school near the border to China once told my students in Busan how she had had to interrupt her mathematics classes for excursions into chuch’e sasang. I asked for specifics. “Well, I would praise Kim Il Sung, or condemn the Yankees’ crimes.” Thus is the name of the leader’s doctrine applied to the ultra-nationalist personality cult that preceded it by a quarter of a century. The latter is so forceful and appealing an affair that truisms like “man is the master of all things” barely register beside it.
The problem is that foreigners insist on viewing North Korean nationalism through Juche’s cosmetic haze.30 Instead of realizing that the republic’s mission has always been the unification of the race, they take its nationalism for an inward-directed kind. Here too we are dealing with that exasperating Western confusion of nationalism with loyalty to a state.31 Yes, North Koreans are loyal to their state; but their nationalism — like their state’s — entails a commitment to the entire peninsula, not just the part the Yankees pushed them back up on.
Last year a researcher asked me rather testily why I want to debunk something the field has tacitly abandoned. It is true that Juche is not referred to as often as it used to be, but isn’t that because the conventional wisdom has become so familiar? The Kim Il Sung era is still looked back upon as a broadening of Juche from precedent to precedent.32 The New York Times and other newspapers still refer to the country’s “ideology of ‘juche’ — or self-reliance.”33 Even the current Sŏn’gun or Military-First doctrine is derived from Juche, and denatured accordingly.34 That’s not the worst part. Because today’s North Korea is equally uninterested in communism and self-reliance, more and more observers, mistaking this for a new development, assume that ideology has dwindled down to a “residual” role in the country, which they call a “reactive” state.35 According to two journalists’ recent book, ideology “no longer matters” there.36 The old Juche myth thus inspires a new misperception from which the regime can benefit.
The consensus that Juche is central to North Korean ideology (if not necessarily to the state as a whole) has always accommodated a wide range of varying opinions. Conservatives have demonized the doctrine as a cynical rationale for one-man rule.37 The softliners who dominate academia, on the other hand, tend to take even its claim to humanism seriously. Some people use the word Juche as a name for the personality cult. Others apply it to the entirety of Kim Il Sung’s discourse, or to all political discussion under his rule after 1955. A few imagine it as a written canon consulted before big decisions, but most talk in broader terms of an all-pervading commitment to self-reliance. That last word — which has no direct Korean equivalent38 — is itself subjected to different interpretations. Some Pyongyang watchers think in terms of literal self-sufficiency.39 Others thin it out to independence, autonomy or a hankering after more respect; this allows them to concede the DPRK’s chronic dependence on aid while still granting it points for self-reliance.
It is telling that these differences are not considered worth resolving. But whether or not the fallacy has become a matter of mere lip service, it must still be ruthlessly cleared away. Only then can we come to terms with the regime’s true ideology, and the dangerous role it still plays.
Each chapter of this book refutes one or more elements of the over-arching fallacy: that Kim began showing his feisty autarkic spirit during the 1940s, that he proclaimed a new ideology in 1955, which supplanted Marxism-Leninism in the 1960s, and so on. Why a chronological approach? Because this is a classic case, to borrow what Nietzsche said about another myth, of “the historical refutation as the final one.”40 Not for nothing are our traditionalists so desperate to date the advent of the Juche era back to 1955, when much of Pyongyang was still in ruins. Only then can the doctrine plausibly be said to have shaped the DPRK. Date it to 1967 or 1972, and there is no dodging the question of which ideology prevailed in the country’s formative years, and what (if any) assignable changes Juche wrought thereafter. I will also analyze the main doctrinal texts, which contain much the sort of thing one would expect from something issued during a charm offensive. Later chapters will show how the Juche myth has influenced Western perceptions of North Korea’s nuclear program, its economic woes and its attacks on the rival state, usually to the dictatorship’s benefit.
In the course of this book I will make frequent reference to North Korea’s multi-track discourse. There are more tracks and track-internal gradations than I need to deal with here. It is enough if the reader keeps in mind a distinction between a) the inner track, by which I mean propaganda intended for North Koreans only, b) the outer track, which is propaganda written for domestic consumption in the constraining awareness of outside monitors, and c) the export track, or propaganda for outsiders. This last, which includes statements made in negotiations, can in turn be divided into the kind aimed at South Koreans and the kind aimed at foreigners. The man on the street knows that the inner track is where the ideological action is. This is not to imply that he ignores or disbelieves the outer one. (The existence of an export track does not appear to be widely known.) We are not so different; we nod in approval when spokesmen for our in-groups tone down our views for out-group consumption. In any case, the North Korean gets more of an inner-track message from the outer track than most Pyongyang watchers do, because he knows how to read it in context.
He knows, for example, that the formal commitment to “peaceful unification” reflects the hope that the DPRK need not fight the South Korean masses again; the inner track acknowledges the likely need for a preliminary South Korean uprising, and vows revenge on the Yankee enemy no matter what. It also raises the possibility of a straightforward war of unification.41
Although I cannot assert the currency of a fallacy without citing examples, too exclusive a focus on the top spreaders of the Juche myth will make readers think I am carrying out a vendetta. On the other hand, if I give equal attention to researchers of economics, culture, etc, who have merely followed those authorities’ lead, I will be accused of making things too easy for myself. I have therefore opted for a middle course, which will no doubt result in my being criticized on both counts. It should go without saying, however, that disagreeing with people about a certain point, even one as important as this, is not the same as dismissing their research as a whole. Of the many scholars I cite critically in this book, there are only a few from whom I have not learned much of value. I approach no one’s work from a presumed position of infallibility, having made enough mistakes of my own — not least in regard to Juche, which I too used to take at its orthodox valuation. Like every book this one will have its errors. I am confident that they will not nullify my argument.
Before going on, I would like to discuss the keyword juche (주체), or chuch’e as it is written according to the McCune-Reischauer system. Standard Western practice is to repeat and at the same time disparage the translation of it as self-reliance, while hinting at a world of additional meaning one lacks the space to go into. Chuch’e is “often rendered as self-reliance, but such a translation is woefully inadequate”; it “is usually described in shorthand as self-reliance, but there is much more to it than that,”42 and so on. It is also common for writers to dilate on the ancient meanings of the constituent characters 主 (main) and 體 (body), leaving readers to assume that the compound, “unique to Korea,” sprang out of deep indigenous soil.43 One scholar claims it “has been in use as long as the Korean language itself.”44 Others assert or imply that it was an obscure or archaic word until Kim Il Sung breathed new life into it; still others seem to regard it as his invention.45
In fact chuch’e comes from the Sino-Japanese compound shutai (主體), which first appeared in 1887 in a book entitled The Basics of Philosophy (Tetsugaku yōryō).46 The author, Inoue Enryō, used the word to translate the German word Subjekt, i.e., the entity perceiving or acting upon an object or environment. By 1903 Chinese residents of Japan were using it in their own discussions of Kant, in which the relevant compound was pronounced zhuti.47 The word found its way into Korean at about the same time. The nationalist-anarchist Sin Ch’ae-ho used it a few times in 1908 in a polemical text, under the apparent assumption that readers either knew it already or would grasp its meaning from the self-explanatory ideograms.48 Such Japanese loanwords are very common in modern Korean and Chinese.49
J. Victor Koschmann has explained how the philosopher Nishida Kitarō employed the words shukan (主觀) and shutai in the early 1900s to distinguish between the passive and active senses of Subjekt. While the older word shukan “took on the connotations of contemplative consciousness… shutai referred to the ethical, practical subject theorized by Kierkegaard and Marx.”50 This distinction too was adopted by the Koreans.
The above may confuse speakers of Western languages. English and French complicate matters by using the word subject / sujet more often in the sense of an entity under another’s control. The anti-monarchist slogan “Citizens, not subjects,” which I saw recently on a pop star’s guitar, shows how far from the average Anglophone’s mind the other sense of the word is. We also refer to the subject of an article or sentence. Few of us, therefore, would immediately grasp the statement “The proletariat is the subject of history” to mean, “The proletariat is the central force of history.”
Even philosophy majors would have a moment’s trouble with “Progress in science demands a subjective attitude,” so accustomed are we to use the adjective to mean “emanating from a person’s prejudices or partiality.” But if it is rendered into the right one of the two Korean words for subjective (namely chuch’ejŏk and not chugwanjŏk), any teenager on the street in Seoul will readily understand that we must take the initiative as the protagonists of scientific progress. In short, the ambiguity lies not in the Korean word, as so many outsiders seem to think, but in its English equivalent. (Andy Warhol: “My mind always drifts when I hear words like ‘subjective’…. I never know what people are talking about.”)51
The words shutai and chuch’e were used by bilingual Koreans throughout the colonial period in a variety of contexts. Those who read Marx in Japanese encountered the compound in a few of his works.52 (Kim Jong Il or his ghostwriter acknowledged its appearance in “antecedent classics” of socialism.)53 When Yŏ Un-hyŏng accepted the transfer of [police] power from Japanese authorities in August 1945, it was under the condition that Korea “subjectively” (chuch’ejŏgŭro) manage its own security.54 The following year he said publicly, “because we are Koreans to the end, we are the masters of Korea and the subject [chuch’e] of Korean politics.”55 A former member of the Seoul-based Workers’ Party has said that it used the word after liberation in a vain effort to assert indigenous communists’ primacy over Koreans arriving from China and the USSR.56 Early North Korean editions of Marx used the word too. All this being so, it was too current for Kim Il Sung’s belated mentions of it in 1955 to make it his own, especially since he did not recur to it for years.
Until the mid-1960s use of the word chuch’e and its cognates chuch’ejŏk (subjective) and chuch’esŏng (subjectivity) was more of a South Korean thing. Cho Pong-am ran for president in 1956 on a platform advocating development of the country’s “subjective capabilities.”57 Calls for “national subjectivity” were common among intellectuals during the turbulent term of the premier Chang Myŏn (1960-1961).58 Park Chung Hee spoke of chuch’esŏng more often in his first three years in power (1961-1964) than Kim Il Sung had done in his first fifteen.59 If the West failed to notice, it was because Park’s translators put his words into plain English: “We must grasp the subjectivity of the Korean nation.”60 When he created a rubber-stamp electoral college in 1972, he called it T’ongil chuch’e kungmin hoeŭi, which literally means Unification Subject Citizens’ Assembly.
 유신체제-장충체육관… 정통성 없는 정권의 ...](https://i2.wp.com/img.khan.co.kr/newsmaker/1130/20150623_37_01.jpg?w=840&ssl=1)
The word chuch’e thus made it into the South Korean constitution first. It featured during the memorial service for Park in 1979, when a taped excerpt from one of his speeches boomed out from loudspeakers: “The spirit of autonomy means the awareness that we are the masters of this country and the subject [chuch’e] that creates history.”61
The word’s popularity in the DPRK has never been held against it by the South Korean right. During the ROK presidential campaign in 2012, both candidates referred to the country’s “main economic actors” or kyŏngje chuch’e. All this is in contrast to foreigners’ assumption that if North Korea did not create the word, it effectively took it over.62
Not wanting us to trust our instincts when reading its propaganda, the regime in Pyongyang has left the word chuch’e untranslated in foreign-language texts: from 1961-1964 as Jooche, then as Juche.63 In this way the reader is given an impression of Kim-trademarked abstruseness quite unlike the impression Koreans get. Western scholars and translators should stop following that practice when rendering North Korean texts into English. It is also high-time that the pan-Korean word chuch’esŏng were translated as “subjectivity” or “agency” instead of “Juche-ness.”64 To avoid confusion, I make sure in the rest of the book to use the English words subject, subjective and subjectivity only in the sense corresponding to chuch’e, chuch’ejŏk and chuch’esŏng.
Let us turn now to sasang (思想), the word with which chuch’e is so often linked in the DPRK. Of the two this poses more difficulty for the translator, because it can refer either to an idea or a body of thought. Official use of the phrase chuch’e sasang or “subject(ive) thought” in the 1960s shows that it was understood much as the Chinese understood Mao Zedong sixiang, i.e., to mean guidelines for the country-specific application of Marxism-Leninism.65 It made no claim to being a stand-alone ideology. The Workers’ Party treated it as its collective product until Kim’s purge of top officials in 1967. From then on, chuch’e sasang was touted as his personal conception. In English-language propaganda it was referred to, with uncharacteristic modesty, as “the Juche idea,” so that foreigners could praise it without appearing to betray their own creeds.
Not being bound by official conventions, I can translate chuch’e sasang as I like. Unfortunately no English equivalent fits the bill entirely. I have decided to translate its use inside quotes and excerpts as “Subject Thought” – “subject(ive) thought” in texts written before its exclusive attribution to Kim – so as to convey the un-exotic and dry feel the words convey to native speakers. I reluctantly use the realia chuch’e sasang in order to distinguish the prop in the domestic personality cult from the “Juche idea” exported for public-diplomatic purposes. Instead of talking of a pseudo-ideology or pseudo-anything I will be referring to a doctrine, this word being applicable to any body of teaching, regardless of its content, scope, function, originality or sincerity.
I use the McCune-Reischauer system of transliteration with the customary exception of Korean words and names (Kim Il Sung, Pyongyang) better known under other spellings. Unfortunately there are various ways to write the one I use the most often: namely juche and, in more academic texts, chuch’e, each appearing with and without a capital letter, in plain and italic script. Inexplicably, juch’e and Juché have also been introduced. I trust I can replicate various spellings in quotations of secondary literature without confusing the reader.
