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Kim Il-sung
Kim Jong-il was the son of Kim Il-sung and the leader of North Korea from his father’s death in 1994 until his own demise in 2011. When Kim Jong-il took control of the country, North Korea was already in the throes of a severe food shortage. But under his corrupt leadership, which continued to demonize commerce and hammer home the importance of isolationist politics, the country found itself in a full-blown famine. Estimates suggest that millions of North Koreans lost their lives over the course of Kim Jong-il’s reign. Though the regime insisted the people revere him as a Christlike or godlike figure—the perfect son of his perfect father—many North Koreans saw Kim Jong-il as responsible for the scarcity and starvation that came to define their lives and held him in much lower esteem than they had his father. Kim Jong-il was notorious for his crackdowns on desperate people who turned to the black market to make money or attempted to defect, throwing more and more citizens into labor camps and gulags. Kim Jong-il purged the country’s military to weed out those who were lenient about surveilling and punishing merchants, defectors, and ordinary citizens who accidentally or purposefully leaked anti-state sentiment. Demick depicts Kim Jong-il as a ruthless leader determined to live up to—and even overshadow—his father’s legacy, even as he ignored his people’s suffering in pursuit of consolidating absolute power.
Kim Jong-il Quotes in Nothing to Envy
The Nothing to Envy quotes below are all either spoken by Kim Jong-il or refer to Kim Jong-il. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 1 Quotes
The red letters leap out of the gray landscape with urgency. They march across the fields, preside over the granite cliffs of the mountains, punctuate the main roads like mileage markers, and dance on top of railroad stations and other public buildings.
LONG LIVE KIM IL-SUNG.
KIM JONG-IL, SUN OF THE 21ST CENTURY.
LET’S LIVE OUR OWN WAY.
WE WILL DO AS THE PARTY TELLS US.
WE HAVE NOTHING TO ENVY IN THE WORLD.
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Chapter 12 Quotes
"The food problem is creating anarchy," Kim Jong-il complained in a December 1996 speech delivered at Kim Il-sung University. […] As well as any of the world's strongmen, he understood perfectly the cliché that an absolutist regime needs absolute power. Everything good in life was to be bequeathed by the government. He couldn't tolerate people going off to gather their own food or buying rice with their own money. "Telling people to solve the food problem on their own only increases the number of farmers' markets and peddlers. In addition, this creates egoism among people, and the base of the party's class may come to collapse.”
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Kim Jong-il Character Timeline in Nothing to Envy
The timeline below shows where the character Kim Jong-il appears in Nothing to Envy. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1
...The posters glorify Kim Il-sung, the first Great Leader of North Korea, and his son, Kim Jong-il . “We will do as the party tells us,” many posters say; “we have nothing...
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...loved the cinema from a young age. Though outside media is banned in North Korea, Kim Jong-il ’s love of film—and his crucial role, beginning in the 1970s while his father Kim...
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Chapter 2
...camp before going to Pyongyang to serve on the “personal staff” of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il . Mi-ran wasn’t recruited, and the rejection stung. Mi-ran and her siblings began to realize...
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Chapter 3
...He began positioning himself as a godlike figure capable of supernatural feats—and presented his son, Kim Jong-il , as a Christ figure who possessed similar powers. As Demick explains Kim Il-sung’s coordinated...
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...all homes in the country were required to keep framed portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il on their walls—but forbidden from hanging any other images. Inspectors from a special police force,...
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...got a TV preloaded with government channels that broadcast state propaganda and movies produced by Kim Jong-il at all hours. They often allowed neighbors over to watch the television. One evening, while...
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Chapter 4
...1953, the North Korea of the early 1990s had over 1 million military servicemembers. When Kim Jong-il assumed control of the military in 1991, he introduced the concept of songun, or “military...
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Chapter 6
...farm. His death was not announced for over 30 hours while Pyongyang prepared to announce Kim Jong-il as his father’s successor. Though Kim Il-sung had been ill for years, no one in...
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...happened, she simply returned to her own apartment to fix lunch. As the media announced Kim Jong-il as his father’s successor, Oak-hee began to cry tears of self-pity—Chang-bo had always warned her...
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...of war—but in the courtyard, a female voice on a loudspeaker delivered the news that Kim Jong-il had died. As Jun-sang’s classmates fell to the ground weeping, he mirrored their movements even...
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Chapter 8
...an hour to her new school, where happy signs and pictures of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il hung in each classroom—even though the school had no paper, no heating, no uniforms, and...
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...trying to overtake their “beautiful fatherland.” Mi-ran read to her students from Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il ’s many published books. Every lesson, no matter the subject, was peppered with references to...
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...the year of Kim Il-sung’s birth. The year was not 1994, but Juche 84. Though Kim Jong-il was now the head of state, Kim Il-sung was named the “eternal president” of the...
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...a kind of shrine to Kim Il-sung, was instructed to build a similar room for Kim Jong-il , a group of teachers devised a plan to take a trip to the port...
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Chapter 10
...spirit. People became fishmongers, butchers, and bakers, selling their wares on the black market—even though Kim Jong-il had taken an even harder line against the illegal buying and selling of goods than...
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Chapter 12
As the food shortage stabilized, Kim Jong-il decided that he needed to be less “tolerant” of those who had resorted to buying...
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Kim Jong-il also purged the 6th Army, a division of the military stationed in Chongjin, and replaced...
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Chapter 13
...was surprised to hear that the child replaced Kim Il-sung’s name in the lyrics with Kim Jong-il ’s. Jun-sang pitied the child who sang a song glorifying his benevolent father even as...
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Chapter 17
...like in China and South Korea. As Oak-hee explained how rich other countries were—and how Kim Jong-il had “turned [his people] into idiots”—her family grew both excited and apprehensive. They knew what...
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Epilogue
At noon on December 19th, 2011, the North Korean regime broadcasted a news bulletin: Kim Jong-il was dead of heart failure. The government and the people, Demick writes, followed the precise...
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