North Korea's Cultural Revolution in 1972
The first line of order was to transform the entire discourse and historiography of Kim Il Sung's leadership in the country through new modes of cultural production. By hyperbolising Kim Il Sung's anti-Japanese exploits during the colonial period, a new historical narrative was developed.
Although the US's bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended World War II on the Pacific front and forced Japan to surrender its colonies, North Korea rewrote its history to have Kim Il Sung as the one who drove out the Japanese. In Chapter 3, Article 35, it says, ‘In the DPRK, all of the people study, and the socialist national culture is completely enlightened and developed, referring to the need to study this new historiography. This was the beginning of the DPRK's historiographical transformation in public discourse.The transformation of public discourse required a completely new structure in the education system. It increased compulsory education from elementary school to high school, providing the people with an 11-year compulsory education. In Chapter 3, Article 41, it says, ‘The state shall implement a universal 10-year compulsory education for all generations growing until working age. The state will teach the students for free’. Then, in Chapter 3, Article 43, it says, ‘The state shall implement a 1-year compulsory education for all children’, referring to the kindergarteners. Thus, in the DPRK, the state provided free education to children in the structure of 5-3-3 (five years of primary education, including kindergarten, three years of middle school, and three years of high school).[340]
This new educational system was drastically different from South Korea’s compulsory education. While primary and middle school education were compulsory in South Korea, middle and high school were not free. In South Korea, free middle school education began in 1985 in farming and fishing areas.
In that sense, North Korea achieved one of the greatest accomplishments compared to its counterpart in 1972. North Korea was compelled to take larger strides than South Korea, particularly when Kim Il Sung realised that Park Chung Hee was not prepared to unify the two countries. After the historic July 4th Joint Communique between North and South Korea in 1972, the DPRK realised that Park Chung Hee’s Yusin System would impede on the process of unification.[341] North Korea had had its eye on Seoul before the Korean War, as the city represents the capital and unification of the divided nation. With the inclusion of DPRK’s Pledge of Allegiance in this revised Constitution, it called on the citizens for absolute loyalty to the state and the decision-making of the leader. The war was not over until unification happened. Both countries resumed slandering each other and blaming the other for resisting peace on the peninsula. By the end of 1972, both countries revised their constitutions: the Yusin Constitution for South Korea and the Socialist Constitution for North Korea. In the 1972 Socialist Constitution, Chapter 11, Article 149, it declared Pyongyang as the capital of the DPRK, effectively severing ties with South Korea indefinitely. In short, the new education system in North Korea happened by differentiating itself from South Korea in every aspect.At school, North Korean students were expected to learn the sciences, literature, and history as they were based on Juche. The advancement of technology, as underscored by the Three Revolutions, required scientific endeavour from the Soviet Union and East Germany. According to Mark Hallam, a team of East German engineers and construction specialists were dispatched, working in Hamhung between 1954 and 1962. As North Korea cooperated with the German Democratic Republic during the national reconstruction era, North Korean students studied abroad in East Germany and the Soviet Union and were provided with the latest scientific textbooks to improve the conditions in North Korea.
Textbooks and equipment were brought in from these countries, and then they were modified to fit the ideology and political narrative of the DPRK.In addition to scientific textbooks, works of humanities and history were also rewritten to accentuate the revolutionary exploits of Kim Il Sung. As Lankov states, ‘In the late 1960s and 1970s, such thrilling subjects as “The Revolutionary History of Kim Il Sung” and “The Revolutionary Activity of Kim Jong Il” were added to the curriculum’.[342] In Chapter 3, Article 45, it says, ‘The state shall develop a Juche-oriented, revolutionary art and literature, national in form and socialist in content’ The purpose of these works of the leaders was to promote the Juche ideology, instill a great sense of nationalism, and learn the socialist discourse. It would become evident that the socialist discourse disappeared from public consciousness and was replaced with the veneration of the leaders and socialism in North Korea's style.
The concept of transforming the education system in North Korea meant that other industrial and cultural modes of production needed to be installed and improved upon. It began with building hundreds of new schools across the country to ensure that all students have easy access to the local schools. Kim Il Sung says,
The population of our country is growing by hundreds of thousands every year. If we are to introduce ten-year compulsory education, we need classrooms for one million additional pupils. We cannot allow ourselves to have too many children in a classroom because we are short of school accommodation.[343]
This task required growth in the industrial sector - steel, iron, and cement, among other raw materials. It also called on the timber industry and the paper mill industry to produce more paper for textbooks, newspapers, journals, and other printed materials. The shortage of teachers was another concern, so Kim Il Sung established teacher training programmes to produce large numbers of teachers across the country.[344] For Kim Il Sung, revamping the education system correlated with bolstering the economy through means of cultural production.
Hence, the Three Revolutions (ideology, technology, and culture) functioned in unison to achieve the advancement of the country.At the monumental meeting on 15 April 1967, the Party announced that the entire country would enter a new phase of public cultural discourse - the formal initiation of Kim Il Sung's cult of personality. All forms of print materials had to centre Kim Il Sung as the great leader of the DPRK either in obsequious or venerable language. Since the pivotal Fifteenth Plenary Meeting in 1967, a new language, a unitary language, was to be used in every aspect of the North Korean culture: fiction, songs, poetry, newspapers, journals, television and radio programmes, artworks, and so on.[345] Writers had to include statements such as, ‘According to the Great Leader Kim Il Sung.or ‘The Great Leader Kim Il Sung told us...' Newspapers started to have Kim Il Sung on the front page, every day. Songs and poetry glorified Kim Il Sung for his revolutionary exploits, and the word choices used to describe the leader were that of elevating a deity. This kind of writing practice had to become normalised throughout the country and throughout the literary culture.
One thing must be made clear, though, not all literature in North Korea glorifies its leaders. The Writer's Union has a separate group of writers called the April 15th Literary Production Unit (LPU) that is committed to writing only about the lives of the leaders. These writers are selected from a rigorous process of evaluating their loyalty to the country. The LPU was first conceived in the mid- 1960s by Kim Jong Il to honour his father as the writers were commissioned to create a novel about his father on his 60th birthday in 1972.[346] This group continues to write about the leaders even after their death. The series for Kim Il Sung is called Immortal History; the series for Kim Jong Il is called Immortal Leadership; and the series for Kim Jong Un is called Immortal Journey.
Writers who are not members of the LPU do write about the leaders in their works, but this is not general practice as outsiders assume. Mentioning the leaders in passing (as the majority of writers do in their works) and novelising the life of the leaders (as in the LPU) are two different endeavours. However, even mentioning the leaders in passing has become a literary/cultural practice in North Korea, which is outlined in the Constitution in Chapter 3, Article 45 where it says, ‘The state shall encourage the creative activities of writers and artists’. The phrase ‘creative activities’ here is referring to the new way of writing literature, which entails the exultation of Kim Il Sung.Starting from the early 1970s, Kim Jong Il serialised a set of speeches which would eventually become his magnum opus treatise called On the Art of the Cinema (1973). Here, Kim Jong Il outlined what he considered to be the correct method of Juche-based filmmaking (directing, lighting, sounding, etc), screenplay, acting, and song writing. He contrived a neologism called ‘seed theory’ which refers to the ideological content at the core of every film. The seed had to contain the Party’s directives, the Juche ideology, and nationalism. In part, the seed theory was no different from the theme of the film’s narrative trajectory. Kim Jong Il allegedly directed Sea of Blood (1969) and Flower Girl (1972), which he touted as masterpieces of North Korean cinema. These films were supposedly adapted from revolutionary operas that Kim Il Sung had created during the colonial period in the 1930s. Kim Jong Il added that all films in North Korea ought to emulate these masterpieces and maintain a high standard of excellence and ideological message.
In North Korea, the screenwriter is elevated above the director. This is because the screenwriter constructs a narrative that is based on the nation’s ideology and Party directives. In this way, a screenplay is called ‘film literature’ as it ought to deliver a strong didactic message as novels do.
Much like novelists, poets, and songwriters, the screenwriter has to bear the burden of constructing an ideological film narrative that would educate the audience of the Party’s intentions. The expected outcome is for the audience to learn and live by the Party’s political consciousness and further the socialist development of the nation.However, Kim Jong Il’s seed theory is as vague as Kim Il Sung’s Juche ideology, and the 300-plus pages of On the Art of the Cinema adds little to the clarification of the seed theory.[347] Statements such as ‘The correct analysis and understanding of the seed of the literary work is fundamental to the process by which the director establishes a fresh and distinctive plan of work’, or ‘Since the seed which exists in the characters’ lives is only revealed through their action, the director must teach the actors to understand both the seed of the production and the personality of the characters, and make perfectly clear to them the parts their characters play in unfolding the potentialities of the seed’[348] do not enable the filmmakers to correctly understand the seed theory any more than before it had been implemented into the North Korean film industry in the early 1970s. Although Kim Jong Il’s text attempts to emulate theoretical principles of drama such as Aristotle’s Poetics and practical (or at times obvious) advice on filmmaking, Kim’s seed theory is obscure and contentious for filmmakers to integrate into their art.[349] What is certain is that Kim Jong Il created a new filmic culture much like he did with the literary field and other cultural aspects of North Korean society by the time the 1972 Constitution was written.
Chapter 4 of the 1972 Constitution delves further into the cultural life of the citizens under the title of Fundamental Rights and Duties of Citizens. The guise of providing rights and freedoms to its citizens appears to be similar to other countries’ legal rights. However, these rights need to be understood in the context of North Korea’s cultural revolution. In Article 49, it uses the phrase ‘all for one and one for all’ made famous by Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers (1844). The idea of this phrase is to call on the North Koreans to act collectively through the thick and thin of the nation’s economy. Yet, the call to action is to stay loyal to Kim Il Sung, the Party, and the Juche ideology despite what happens within the country or outside of it. The subsequent fundamental freedoms - right to vote, freedom of speech, press, assembly, organisations, religion, petition, right to work, right to take leave of absence, free medical care, right to education, etc - are in relation to the Three Revolutions, as it is described in Article 51: ‘Citizens have universal rights in all fields of state and social life, including in politics, economy, and culture’ (emphasis added). In other words, these universal rights apply to the citizens under the condition that they live according to the Party’s directives of the spirit of the Three Revolutions.
One of the additions to the fundamental rights in the 1972 Constitution that was not present in the 1948 Constitution is the emphasis on the family. Article 63 says, ‘Marriage and the family shall be protected by the state. The state shall pay great consideration to solidify the family, the basic cell of society’. The concept of the family as the basic cell of society is referring to loyalty to the state. If one family goes awry, it is considered to be a cancerous cell which can cause harm to the greater body of the country. North Korea needed to monitor, control, and impose its authority over every aspect of society through the close watching of the family. For North Korea, educating the people begins in the family, specifically the mother. In Article 62, the state provides equal rights to women and protects mothers by offering maternity leave and reduction of working hours to spend more time with her children. The concept is that mothers are the ones who can educate their children according to Party directives at an early age before the children go off to state-funded schools. The onus is on mothers to raise revolutionary children for the state, as this is their duty as public servants to the nation.
The responsibilities of mothers are aligned with the collective spirit and devotion to the state. In Article 68, it says, ‘Citizens must increase the collectivist spirit. Citizens must love their groups and organizations’. The organisations mentioned here are referring to the multiple bodies of groups to which North Koreans belong on a daily basis, or what is called organisational life (jojik saenghwal). Andrei Lankov says, ‘[Organizational life] is a standard reference to a highly formalised array of surveillance and indoctrination practices that are conducted within a set of networks, each run by a particular government-controlled organization’.[350] One of the most effective ways in which the North Korean Government monitors its people is through the organisational life conducted across the country, in every town, workplace, school, etc. Every North Korean is a member of an organisational life, and in the group the citizens study the works of Kim Il Sung, read the latest news from the Party, plan for future events, criticise each other, and various other kinds of activities. Mothers or housewives have their own organisational group that monitors their children’s education at school and at home, very much like a Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) in the United States. Every organisational group in North Korea studies the political ideology, the latest technology or ways to work more efficiently and effectively, and culture. These groups are essentially cultural groups that monitor each other through surveillance and political indoctrination.
At the end of Chapter 4 on Fundamental Rights, in Article 72, the Constitution calls on the citizens to protect and defend the country otherwise it is considered to be a betrayal of the country. The citizens’ rights are coupled with surveillance and loyalty to the Party - each person is to watch, observe, and report if another person is not following the ideological principles of the Government. Jae Hyun Cho says, ‘However, North Korea’s human rights and fundamental rights do not have a defensive nature against the state. It exists in a charitable nature that is either forced for the state or society or recognised only through the state and society’.[351] In short, North Korea’s ‘rights’ are to serve the state; it was not designed for or to protect the individual. Hence, the judicial system enforces a severe punishment to those who betray or are disloyal to the Party. In order to remain loyal, the state continues to indoctrinate its people through cultural materials and organisational life to this day. In many ways, North Korea’s cultural revolution was achievable because of the cultural and organisational life that dominates individuals’ daily lives, and the 1972 Constitution was the legal document that egitimized the state’s jurisdiction over its people.
IV.