North Korea’s isolationist government seeks to instill the ideal of juche—an untranslatable ethos that relates to self-reliance and total independence—in its people at every turn. Juche combines elements of Marxism, Confucianism, and nationalism in order to depict the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as a separate, special, and even divinely-chosen state. In particular, Barbara Demick argues that the North Korean government uses the language of juche to convince its people that suffering is noble, that other nations are evil and insignificant, and that there is “nothing to envy” about what the rest of the world has to offer. In other words, the North Korean regime’s strength stems from the way it uses juche rhetoric to isolate its citizens from the outside world.
Demick shows how the idea of juche was specifically created to turn the North Korean people against almost the entirety of the outside world, isolating them entirely. Following the arbitrary division of the Korean Peninsula in the wake of World War II, the Korean War, which began in 1950, marked North Korea’s attempt to enforce what it believed was a legitimate claim to be the sole government of the peninsula. American troops intervened to stop the Sino-Korean push southward, and the peninsula remained divided around the 38th parallel. With a parcel of the peninsula containing only 20% arable land, the North Korean regime knew that to maintain power in the wake of an embarrassing defeat—and to keep people dedicated to the regime no matter what food struggles loomed on the horizon—they needed to come up with a concept that would unify the country. Kim Il-sung, the leader of North Korea, introduced the philosophical system of juche—a hybrid ideology drawing on the self-determination of man and a deadly serious brand of Korean nationalism. North Koreans internalized juche and rejected the idea that they should be dependent on any other country—even powerful neighbors like China and Russia—for aid. Demick writes that juche was especially “seductive to a proud people whose dignity had been trampled by its neighbors for centuries.” Demick is careful to explain the ideology behind juche in detail in order to set up how dearly North Korean people were encouraged to cling to it. Kim Il-sung, revered as a divine leader, convinced his people to see the entire outside world as one giant enemy. By hammering home the importance of self-reliance, he was attempting to head off the major issues that would plague North Korea in the decades to come.
Demick then goes on to enumerate the ways in which the government uses the rhetoric of juche to subjugate North Korean citizens and keep them isolated physically and ideologically—even as government elites hypocritically enjoy comfort, luxury, and contact with the outside world. Though juche was the government’s primary tool for encouraging the masses to blindly weather the terrible famine of the 1990s, Demick shows how profoundly dangerous an ethos of self-reliance is in times when there are no resources or support upon which to rely. The famine was the result of two major factors: floods and droughts which devastated North Korea’s already tiny percentage of arable land, illustrating that North Korea could not rely on its own soil to sustain its people. The second factor was deteriorating relationships with other socialist regimes, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union. North Korea relied on other governments like it for support and solidarity, claiming that relying on like-minded governments was acceptable—when that fell apart, North Korea had nowhere to turn. Just as the North Korean propaganda machine thrives by alienating citizens from objective truth, the North Korean regime remains in total control by lying. The regime, Demick illustrates, elevates values of independence, self-reliance, and exceptionalism—even as it hypocritically begs foreign aid in order to keep the political and military elite pampered while allowing common citizens to starve. During the worst of the famine, between 1996 and 2005, North Korea received $2.4 billion in aid from countries around the world. Though the regime accepted the offers of food, they made sure to house the representatives from aid agencies who arrived in North Korea in the showcase capital of Pyongyang, putting fake fruit in shop windows and lining the streets with members of the elite to project an image of health, prosperity, and self-sufficiency. Foreign aid workers, whose job it was to evaluate just how bad things were in North Korea and how much help they needed both monetarily and materially, were confused by reports of starvation that didn’t line up with the false, propagandistic image they were being shown in Pyongyang. As a result, large aid packages began to slow to a trickle. This incident demonstrates the ways in which juche, while used to convince North Korean citizens to suffer in silence and to continue working for the collective even as individual food rations ceased, was ultimately a sham meant to control the masses and keep them in the dark about the depths of what was going on. While spouting a motto of self-reliance and nationalism—and presenting a false face to the world—the North Korean government sought to bring in aid that the people who most needed it would never see.
Demick suggests that while juche was perhaps once meant to unify the North Korean people, it is now used as a stubborn and destructive rejection of the rest of the world and a tool of control and brainwashing. By committing to a national ethos of exceptionalism and extreme isolation, North Korea has become a place of scarcity and stalled progress. Juche, Demick ultimately argues, is no longer a rallying cry—it is a death sentence.
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Isolationism and Self-Reliance Quotes in Nothing to Envy
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.
Yet for all their wealth, the Japanese Koreans occupied a lowly position in the North Korean hierarchy. No matter that they were avowed Communists who gave up comfortable lives in Japan, they were lumped in with the hostile class. The regime couldn't trust anyone with money who wasn't a member of the Workers' Party. They were among the few North Koreans permitted to have contact with the outside, and that in itself made them unreliable; the strength of the regime came from its ability to isolate its own citizens completely.
The propaganda machine launched a new campaign, playing up Korean pride by recalling a largely apocryphal fable from 1938-39 in which Kim Il-sung commanded a small band of anti-Japanese guerrillas "fighting against thousands of enemies in 20 degrees below zero, braving through a heavy snowfall and starvation." […] The Arduous March, as they called it, would later become a metaphor for the famine. […] Enduring hunger became part of one's patriotic duty. Billboards went up in Pyongyang touting the new slogan, "Let's Ear Two Meals a Day." North Korean television ran a documentary about a man whose stomach burst, it was claimed, from eating too much rice.
Now, surrounded by sobbing students, Jun-sang wondered: If everybody else felt such genuine love for Kim Il-sung and he did nor, how would he possibly fit in? […] He was alone, completely alone in his indifference. He always thought he had close friends at the university, but now he realized he didn't know them at all. […]
This revelation was quickly followed by another, equally momentous: his entire future depended on his ability to cry. Not just his career and his membership in the Workers' Party, his very survival was at stake. It was a matter of life and death. Jun-sang was terrified.
Our father, we have nothing to envy in the world.
Our house is within the embrace of the Workers' Party.
We are all brothers and sisters.
Even if a sea of fire comes toward us, sweet children do not need to be afraid,
Our father is here.
We have nothing to envy in this world.
It is axiomatic that one death is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic. So it was for Mi-ran. What she didn't realize is that her indifference was an acquired survival skill. In order to get through the 1990s alive, one had to suppress any impulse to share food. To avoid going insane, one had to learn to stop caring. In time, Mi-ran would learn how to walk around a dead body on the street without paying much notice. She could pass a five-year-old on the verge of death without feeling obliged to help. If she wasn't going to share her food with her favorite pupil, she certainly wasn't going to help a perfect stranger.
ln 1997 a few aid officials were allowed entry to Chongjin, with even greater restrictions than in Pyongyang. An aid worker […] wrote in a journal that she was not allowed to leave the Chonmason Hotel. […] The agency pulled out soon afterward, reporting that it could not verify that aid was getting to the intended recipients. […] While big ships laden with donated grains from the U.N. World Food Programme started docking at Chongjin's port in 1998, the relief was offloaded into trucks by the military and driven away. […] Much of it ended up in military stockpiles or sold on the black market.
"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.”
Listening to South Korean television was like looking in the mirror for the first time in your life and realizing you were unattractive. North Koreans were always told theirs was the proudest country in the world, but the rest of the world considered it a pathetic, bankrupt regime. Jun-sang knew people were starving. He knew that people were dragged off to labor camps; but he had never before heard these figures. Surely South Korean news reports were exaggerated, just like North Korean propaganda?
Mi-ran told herself they were going just for a short trip to make the telephone call, but in her heart, she knew she might never come back. […] After they were gone, they would be denounced as traitors. "She received an education through the benevolence of the party and she betrayed the fatherland," she could almost hear the party secretary saying. She didn't want her guilt to rub off on Jun-sang. After she was gone […] he could find himself a suitable wife, join the Workers' Party, and spend the rest of his life in Pyongyang as a scientist.
He'll forgive me, he'll understand, she told herself. It's in his best interest.
She thought of Chang-bo especially when she was eating. How that man loved to eat! He would have so enjoyed the sausage. […] Then her thoughts drifted to her son. Her memories were so tinged with guilt and shame that she couldn't even speak about him. So strong, so handsome—such a tragedy to have lost him at twenty-five. How much life he had missed. How much they had all missed, herself too, her daughters, locked away in North Korea, working themselves to death. For what? We will do as the party tells us. We will die for the general. We have nothing to envy. We will go our own way. She had believed it all and wasted her life. Or maybe not.
Deep down, however, Mi-ran was the same person who had occupied the lowest rung of North Korean society, the poor, female progeny of tainted blood. She had been shaped by a thorough indoctrination and then suffered the pain of betrayal; she'd spent years in fear of speaking her mind, of harboring illicit thoughts. She had steeled herself to walk by the bodies of the dead without breaking stride. She had learned to eat her lunch, down to the last kernel of corn or grain of rice, without pausing to grieve for the children she taught who would soon die of starvation. She was racked with guilt.
While the persistence of North Korea is a curiosity for the rest of the world, it is a tragedy for North Koreans, even those who have managed to escape. Jun-sang has no chance of seeing his parents, now entering their seventies, unless the regime collapses within their lifetime. If that happens, he would like to return to North Korea to do something to help rebuild his country. Since the birth of her second child, a daughter, in 2007, Mi-ran has been pursuing a graduate degree in education in the hope that she can play a part in reforming the North Korean school system should the country open up.
I have found that, over time, the North Korean defectors I know in South Korea become more reticent. They worry about spies within the defector community who might try to blackmail them. They fear that speaking on the human rights circuit or giving interviews to journalists will result in retaliation. One can leave but never completely escape the terror that is North Korea.
