Kim Jong Il Quotes

High School students in America debate why President Roosevelt didn't bomb the rail lines to Hitler's camps. Their children may ask, a generation from now, why the West stared at far clearer satellite images of Kim Jong Il's camps, and did nothing.

Not since North Korean media declared Kim Jong-il to be the reincarnation of Kim Il Sung has there been such a blatant attempt to create a necrocracy, or perhaps mausolocracy, in which a living claimant assumes the fleshly mantle of the departed.

[I]n a place with absolutely no private or personal life, with the incessant worship of a mediocre career-sadist as the only culture, where all citizens are the permanent property of the state, the highest form of pointlessness has been achieved.

Because I'm on the phone, Mom!" "Fooling around with your friends again! Who is that?" "Ahmadinejad." "Oh, my goodness! What is he saying?" "That he wants to see Jeezy at the Beacon tonight. Putin's going too. He scalped a ticket from Kim Jong Il. All tha gangstas are going." "Don't be so fresh, young man!" "Gotta go," he says to me. "Enemy forces have dropped a Momshell." "Fall back, solider. Over and out.

Religion is a totalitarian belief. It is the wish to be a slave. It is the desire that there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority who can convict you of thought crime while you are asleep, who can subject you to total surveillance around the clock every waking and sleeping minute of your life, before you're born and, even worse and where the real fun begins, after you're dead. A celestial North Korea. Who wants this to be true? Who but a slave desires such a ghastly fate? I've been to North Korea. It has a dead man as its president, Kim Jong-Il is only head of the party and head of the army. He's not head of the state. That office belongs to his deceased father, Kim Il-Sung. It's a necrocracy, a thanatocracy. It's one short of a trinity I might add. The son is the reincarnation of the father. It is the most revolting and utter and absolute and heartless tyranny the human species has ever evolved. But at least you can f#$%ing die and leave North Korea!

High school students in America debate why President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t bomb the rail lines to Hitler’s camps,” the editorial concluded. “Their children may ask, a generation from now, why the West stared at far clearer satellite images of Kim Jong Il’s camps, and did nothing.

You have Kim Jong Il, and you have his brother, Menta Lee Il.

Man is a social being with independence, creativity and consciousness.

Nobody knows how many North Koreans have died or are dying in the famine—some estimates by foreign-aid groups run as high as three million in the period from 1995 to 1998 alone—but the rotund, jowly face of Kim Il Sung still beams down contentedly from every wall, and the 58-year-old son looks as chubby as ever, even as his slenderized subjects are mustered to applaud him.

The fervor and single-mindedness of this deification probably have no precedent in history. It's not like Duvalier or Assad passing the torch to the son and heir. It surpasses anything I have read about the Roman or Babylonian or even Pharaonic excesses. An estimated $2.68 billion was spent on ceremonies and monuments in the aftermath of Kim Il Sung's death. The concept is not that his son is his successor, but that his son is his reincarnation. North Korea has an equivalent of Mount Fuji—a mountain sacred to all Koreans. It's called Mount Paekdu, a beautiful peak with a deep blue lake, on the Chinese border. Here, according to the new mythology, Kim Jong Il was born on February 16, 1942. His birth was attended by a double rainbow and by songs of praise (in human voice) uttered by the local birds. In fact, in February 1942 his father and mother were hiding under Stalin's protection in the dank Russian city of Khabarovsk, but as with all miraculous births it's considered best not to allow the facts to get in the way of a good story.

North Korea is an atheist state. Anyone caught in possession of a Bible faces execution or a life in the gulag. Kim worship is the only permitted outlet for spiritual fervour. Shamans and fortune-tellers, too, are outlawed, but high cadres of the regime consult them. We’d heard that even Kim Jong-il himself sought their advice

Sanctions make a substantial contribution to power based on privation, and they have never hurt a single despot in the whole history of their use.

Kim Jong Il, incidentally, has been made head of the party and of the army, but the office of the presidency is still 'eternally' held by his adored and departed dad, who died on July 8, 1994, at 82. (The Kim is dead. Long live the Kim.) This makes North Korea the only state in the world with a dead president. What would be the right term for this? A necrocracy? A thanatocracy? A mortocracy? A mausolocracy? Anyway, grimly appropriate for a morbid system so many of whose children have died with grass in their mouths.

Micro-regulation is micro-tyranny, a slithering, serpentine network of insinuating Ceaucescu and Kim Jong-Il mini-me's. It's time for the mass rejection of their diktats. A political order that subjects you to the caprices of faceless bureaucrats or crusading "judges" merits no respect. To counter the Bureau of Compliance, we need an Alliance of Non-Compliance to help once free people roll back the regulatory state.

Religion is a totalitarian belief. It is the wish to be a slave. It is the desire that there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority who can convict you of thought crime while you are asleep, who can subject you to total surveillance around the clock every waking and sleeping minute of your life, before you're born and, even worse and where the real fun begins, after you're dead. A celestial North Korea. Who wants this to be true? Who but a slave desires such a ghastly fate? I've been to North Korea. It has a dead man as its president, Kim Jong-Il is only head of the party and head of the army. He's not head of the state. That office belongs to his deceased father, Kim Il-Sung. It's a necrocracy, a thanatocracy. It's one short of a trinity I might add. The son is the reincarnation of the father. It is the most revolting and utter and absolute and heartless tyranny the human species has ever evolved. But at least you can fucking die and leave North Korea!

What is opposed to communism is not nationalism in general but bourgeois nationalism, national egoism, and national chauvinism, which subordinates the common interests of the nation to the interests of a handful of the exploiting class, in the guise of nationalism.

Censorship became so stringent that even a scene in which a character complained too strongly about the weather could be considered “antisocial” and ordered removed.

A struggle in the sphere of ideology is the prelude to a political struggle, and naturally develops into a struggle for power.

Kim Jong Il grumbled publicly, saying, ‘Frankly the state has no money, but individuals have two years’ budget worth.’2

Kim Jong Il: Hans Brix? Oh no! Oh, herro. Great to see you again, Hans! Hans Blix: Mr. Il, I was supposed to be allowed to inspect your palace today, but your guards won't let me enter certain areas. Kim Jong Il: Hans, Hans, Hans! We've been frew this a dozen times. I don't have any weapons of mass destwuction, OK Hans? Hans Blix: Then let me look around, so I can ease the UN's collective mind. I'm sorry, but the UN must be firm with you. Let me in, or else. Kim Jong Il: Or else what? Hans Blix: Or else we will be very angry with you... and we will write you a letter, telling you how angry we are.

I saw exactly one picture of Marx and one of Lenin in my whole stay, but it's been a long time since ideology had anything to do with it. Not without cunning, Fat Man and Little Boy gradually mutated the whole state belief system into a debased form of Confucianism, in which traditional ancestor worship and respect for order become blended with extreme nationalism and xenophobia. Near the southernmost city of Kaesong, captured by the North in 1951, I was taken to see the beautifully preserved tombs of King and Queen Kongmin. Their significance in F.M.-L.B. cosmology is that they reigned over a then unified Korea in the 14th century, and that they were Confucian and dynastic and left many lavish memorials to themselves. The tombs are built on one hillside, and legend has it that the king sent one of his courtiers to pick the site. Second-guessing his underling, he then climbed the opposite hill. He gave instructions that if the chosen site did not please him he would wave his white handkerchief. On this signal, the courtier was to be slain. The king actually found that the site was ideal. But it was a warm day and he forgetfully mopped his brow with the white handkerchief. On coming downhill he was confronted with the courtier's fresh cadaver and exclaimed, 'Oh dear.' And ever since, my escorts told me, the opposite peak has been known as 'Oh Dear Hill.' I thought this was a perfect illustration of the caprice and cruelty of absolute leadership, and began to phrase a little pun about Kim Jong Il being the 'Oh Dear Leader,' but it died on my lips.

I was able to believe that Kim Jong Il lived in luxurious mansions while his people starved. But I could not accept that it was his father, the Great Leader Kim Il Sung, and not the evil Yankee and South Korean invaders, who started the Korean War in 1950. For a long time, I simply refused to believe it. Assuming that North Korea was always the victim of imperialist aggression was part of my identity. It’s not easy to give up a worldview that is built into your bones and imprinted on your brain like the sound of your own father’s voice. Besides, if everything I had been taught before was a lie, how could I know these people weren’t lying, too? It was impossible to trust anyone in authority.

coercive leaders are Adolf Hitler in Germany, the Taliban leaders in Afghanistan, Jim Jones in Guyana, and North Korea’s Supreme Leader Kim Jong-il, each of whom has used power and restraint to force followers to engage in extreme behaviors.

It was at school in Hamhung that I received my initiation into ‘life purification time’, or self-criticism sessions. These have been a basic feature of life in North Korea since they were introduced by Kim Jong-il in 1974, and are the occasions almost everyone

Playing pool with Korean officials one evening in the Koryo Hotel, which has become the nightspot for foreign businessmen and an increasing number of diplomats (to say nothing of the burgeoning number of spies and journalists traveling under second identities), I was handed that day's edition of the Pyongyang Times. At first glance it seemed too laughable for words: endless pictures of the 'Dear Leader'—Little Boy's exalted title—as he was garlanded by adoring schoolchildren and heroic tractor drivers. Yet even in these turgid pages there were nuggets: a telegram congratulating the winner of the Serbian elections; a candid reference to the 'hardship period' through which the country had been passing; an assurance that a certain nuclear power plant would be closed as part of a deal with Washington. Tiny cracks, to be sure. But a complete and rigid edifice cannot afford fissures, however small. There appear to be no hookers, as yet, in Pyongyang. Yet if casinos come, can working girls be far behind? One perhaps ought not to wish for hookers, but there are circumstances when corruption is the only hope.

I was hungry when I left Pyongyang. I wasn't hungry just for a bookshop that sold books that weren't about Fat Man and Little Boy. I wasn't ravenous just for a newspaper that had no pictures of F.M. and L.B. I wasn't starving just for a TV program or a piece of music or theater or cinema that wasn't cultist and hero-worshiping. I was hungry. I got off the North Korean plane in Shenyang, one of the provincial capitals of Manchuria, and the airport buffet looked like a cornucopia. I fell on the food, only to find that I couldn't do it justice, because my stomach had shrunk. And as a foreign tourist in North Korea, under the care of vigilant minders who wanted me to see only the best, I had enjoyed the finest fare available.

High school students in America debate why President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t bomb the rail lines to Hitler’s camps,” the editorial concluded. “Their children may ask, a generation from now, why the West stared at far clearer satellite images of Kim Jong Il’s camps, and did nothing.” Shin’s

Sooner or later, all talk among foreigners in Pyongyang turns to one imponderable subject. Do the locals really believe what they are told, and do they truly revere Fat Man and Little Boy? I have been a visiting writer in several authoritarian and totalitarian states, and usually the question answers itself. Someone in a café makes an offhand remark. A piece of ironic graffiti is scrawled in the men's room. Some group at the university issues some improvised leaflet. The glacier begins to melt; a joke makes the rounds and the apparently immovable regime suddenly looks vulnerable and absurd. But it's almost impossible to convey the extent to which North Korea just isn't like that. South Koreans who met with long-lost family members after the June rapprochement were thunderstruck at the way their shabby and thin northern relatives extolled Fat Man and Little Boy. Of course, they had been handpicked, but they stuck to their line. There's a possible reason for the existence of this level of denial, which is backed up by an indescribable degree of surveillance and indoctrination. A North Korean citizen who decided that it was all a lie and a waste would have to face the fact that his life had been a lie and a waste also. The scenes of hysterical grief when Fat Man died were not all feigned; there might be a collective nervous breakdown if it was suddenly announced that the Great Leader had been a verbose and arrogant fraud. Picture, if you will, the abrupt deprogramming of more than 20 million Moonies or Jonestowners, who are suddenly informed that it was all a cruel joke and there's no longer anybody to tell them what to do. There wouldn't be enough Kool-Aid to go round. I often wondered how my guides kept straight faces. The streetlights are turned out all over Pyongyang—which is the most favored city in the country—every night. And the most prominent building on the skyline, in a town committed to hysterical architectural excess, is the Ryugyong Hotel. It's 105 floors high, and from a distance looks like a grotesquely enlarged version of the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco (or like a vast and cumbersome missile on a launchpad). The crane at its summit hasn't moved in years; it's a grandiose and incomplete ruin in the making. 'Under construction,' say the guides without a trace of irony. I suppose they just keep two sets of mental books and live with the contradiction for now.

[Religious belief] is a totalitarian belief. It is the wish to be a slave. It is the desire that there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority who can convict you of thought crime while you are asleep, who can subject you - who must, indeed, subject you - to total surveillance around the clock every waking and sleeping minute of your life - I say, of your life - before you're born and, even worse and where the real fun begins, after you're dead. A celestial North Korea. Who wants this to be true? Who but a slave desires such a ghastly fate? I've been to North Korea. It has a dead man as its president, Kim Jong-Il is only head of the party and head of the army. He's not head of the state. That office belongs to his deceased father, Kim Il-Sung. It's a necrocracy, a thanatocracy. It's one short of a trinity I might add. The son is the reincarnation of the father. It is the most revolting and utter and absolute and heartless tyranny the human species has ever evolved. But at least you can fucking die and leave North Korea!

Man is a social being who works independently, creatively and consciously.

Whether one has a correct outlook on the revolution or not is revealed particularly at a time of severe trials. People reveal their true nature in adverse circumstances.

Every day the same things came up; the work was never done, and the tedium of it began to weigh on me. Part of what made English a difficult subject for Korean students was the lack of a more active principle in their learning. They were accustomed to receiving, recording, and memorizing. That's the Confucian mode. As a student, you're not supposed to question a teacher; you should avoid asking for explanations because that might reveal a lack of knowledge, which can be seen as an insult to the teacher's efforts. You don't have an open, free exchange with teachers as we often have here in the West. And further, under this design, a student doesn't do much in the way of improvisation or interpretation. This approach might work well for some pursuits, may even be preferred--indeed, I was often amazed by the way Koreans learned crafts and skills, everything from basketball to calligraphy, for example, by methodically studying and reproducing a defined set of steps (a BBC report explained how the North Korean leader Kim Jong Il had his minions rigorously study the pizza-making techniques used by Italian chefs so that he could get a good pie at home, even as thousands of his subjects starved)--but foreign-language learning, the actual speaking component most of all, has to be more spontaneous and less rigid. We all saw this played out before our eyes and quickly discerned the problem. A student cannot hope to sit in a class and have a language handed over to him on sheets of paper.

As the history of revolutionary wars shows, a revolutionary army which is in firm politico-ideological readiness, though armed with inferior weapons, can fight and defeat an enemy equipped with the latest arms.

Unlike in capitalist society where every realm of social life is based on individualism, a socialist society is a collective society where all the people work together sharing a common goal and common interests.

As the hours went on, it got colder and colder, and I started doubting that any of us would make it. I thought about dying out here in the desert. Would anyone find my bones or mark my grave? Or would I be lost and forgotten, as if I had never existed? To realize I was completely alone in this world was the scariest thing I’ve felt in my life, and the saddest. I also started hating the dictator Kim Jong Il that night. I hadn’t thought that much about it before, but now I blamed him for our suffering. I finally allowed myself to think bad thoughts about him because even if he could read my mind, I was probably going to die out here anyway. What could he do, kill me again? But even in the face of death, betraying the Dear Leader was probably the hardest thing I had ever done. I was beyond the reach of his revenge, yet it felt like his hand was following me everywhere I went, trying to pull me back.

Fundamentally speaking, the working-class party is a party of the popular masses themselves, which fights in defense of their interests. Therefore, if the working masses oppose the working-class party, it means they are opposing themselves.

Rolf Ekeus came round to my apartment one day and showed me the name of the Iraqi diplomat who had visited the little West African country of Niger: a statelet famous only for its production of yellowcake uranium. The name was Wissam Zahawi. He was the brother of my louche gay part-Kurdish friend, the by-now late Mazen. He was also, or had been at the time of his trip to Niger, Saddam Hussein's ambassador to the Vatican. I expressed incomprehension. What was an envoy to the Holy See doing in Niger? Obviously he was not taking a vacation. Rolf then explained two things to me. The first was that Wissam Zahawi had, when Rolf was at the United Nations, been one of Saddam Hussein's chief envoys for discussions on nuclear matters (this at a time when the Iraqis had functioning reactors). The second was that, during the period of sanctions that followed the Kuwait war, no Western European country had full diplomatic relations with Baghdad. TheVatican was the sole exception, so it was sent a very senior Iraqi envoy to act as a listening post. And this man, a specialist in nuclear matters, had made a discreet side trip to Niger. This was to suggest exactly what most right-thinking people were convinced was not the case: namely that British intelligence was on to something when it said that Saddam had not ceased seeking nuclear materials in Africa. I published a few columns on this, drawing at one point an angry email from Ambassador Zahawi that very satisfyingly blustered and bluffed on what he'd really been up to. I also received—this is what sometimes makes journalism worthwhile—a letter from a BBC correspondent named Gordon Correa who had been writing a book about A.Q. Khan. This was the Pakistani proprietor of the nuclear black market that had supplied fissile material to Libya, North Korea, very probably to Syria, and was open for business with any member of the 'rogue states' club. (Saddam's people, we already knew for sure, had been meeting North Korean missile salesmen in Damascus until just before the invasion, when Kim Jong Il's mercenary bargainers took fright and went home.) It turned out, said the highly interested Mr. Correa, that his man Khan had also been in Niger, and at about the same time that Zahawi had. The likelihood of the senior Iraqi diplomat in Europe and the senior Pakistani nuclear black-marketeer both choosing an off-season holiday in chic little uranium-rich Niger… well, you have to admit that it makes an affecting picture. But you must be ready to credit something as ridiculous as that if your touching belief is that Saddam Hussein was already 'contained,' and that Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair were acting on panic reports, fabricated in turn by self-interested provocateurs.

The manoeuvres of the US imperialists for 'globalization' and 'integration' are aimed at turning the world into what they call a 'free' and 'democratic' world styled after the United States, and thus bringing all countries and nations under their domination and subordination.

The class nature of the imperialists and reactionaries makes them antagonistic to the masses of the people. Accordingly they are afraid of the word "people" itself. Frequently using, the word "nation", they try to cover the class confrontation and conflict of capitalist society.

The North Korean capital, Pyongyang, is a city consecrated to the worship of a father-son dynasty. (I came to think of them, with their nuclear-family implications, as 'Fat Man and Little Boy.') And a river runs through it. And on this river, the Taedong River, is moored the only American naval vessel in captivity. It was in January 1968 that the U.S.S. Pueblo strayed into North Korean waters, and was boarded and captured. One sailor was killed; the rest were held for nearly a year before being released. I looked over the spy ship, its radio antennae and surveillance equipment still intact, and found photographs of the captain and crew with their hands on their heads in gestures of abject surrender. Copies of their groveling 'confessions,' written in tremulous script, were also on show. So was a humiliating document from the United States government, admitting wrongdoing in the penetration of North Korean waters and petitioning the 'D.P.R.K.' (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) for 'lenience.' Kim Il Sung ('Fat Man') was eventually lenient about the men, but not about the ship. Madeleine Albright didn't ask to see the vessel on her visit last October, during which she described the gruesome, depopulated vistas of Pyongyang as 'beautiful.' As I got back onto the wharf, I noticed a refreshment cart, staffed by two women under a frayed umbrella. It didn't look like much—one of its three wheels was missing and a piece of brick was propping it up—but it was the only such cart I'd see. What toothsome local snacks might the ladies be offering? The choices turned out to be slices of dry bread and cups of warm water. Nor did Madeleine Albright visit the absurdly misnamed 'Demilitarized Zone,' one of the most heavily militarized strips of land on earth. Across the waist of the Korean peninsula lies a wasteland, roughly following the 38th parallel, and packed with a titanic concentration of potential violence. It is four kilometers wide (I have now looked apprehensively at it from both sides) and very near to the capital cities of both North and South. On the day I spent on the northern side, I met a group of aging Chinese veterans, all from Szechuan, touring the old battlefields and reliving a war they helped North Korea nearly win (China sacrificed perhaps a million soldiers in that campaign, including Mao Anying, son of Mao himself). Across the frontier are 37,000 United States soldiers. Their arsenal, which has included undeclared nuclear weapons, is the reason given by Washington for its refusal to sign the land-mines treaty. In August 1976, U.S. officers entered the neutral zone to trim a tree that was obscuring the view of an observation post. A posse of North Koreans came after them, and one, seizing the ax with which the trimming was to be done, hacked two U.S. servicemen to death with it. I visited the ax also; it's proudly displayed in a glass case on the North Korean side.

In this chapter, I want to focus on the really big crimes that have been committed by atheist groups and governments. In the past hundred years or so, the most powerful atheist regimes—Communist Russia, Communist China, and Nazi Germany—have wiped out people in astronomical numbers. Stalin was responsible for around twenty million deaths, produced through mass slayings, forced labor camps, show trials followed by firing squads, population relocation and starvation, and so on. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s authoritative recent study Mao: The Unknown Story attributes to Mao Zedong’s regime a staggering seventy million deaths.4 Some China scholars think Chang and Halliday’s numbers are a bit high, but the authors present convincing evidence that Mao’s atheist regime was the most murderous in world history. Stalin’s and Mao’s killings—unlike those of, say, the Crusades or the Thirty Years’ War—were done in peacetime and were performed on their fellow countrymen. Hitler comes in a distant third with around ten million murders, six million of them Jews. So far, I haven’t even counted the assassinations and slayings ordered by other Soviet dictators like Lenin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and so on. Nor have I included a host of “lesser” atheist tyrants: Pol Pot, Enver Hoxha, Nicolae Ceaus̹escu, Fidel Castro, Kim Jong-il. Even these “minor league” despots killed a lot of people. Consider Pol Pot, who was the leader of the Khmer Rouge, the Communist Party faction that ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. Within this four-year period Pol Pot and his revolutionary ideologues engaged in systematic mass relocations and killings that eliminated approximately one-fifth of the Cambodian population, an estimated 1.5 million to 2 million people. In fact, Pol Pot killed a larger percentage of his countrymen than Stalin and Mao killed of theirs.5 Even so, focusing only on the big three—Stalin, Hitler, and Mao—we have to recognize that atheist regimes have in a single century murdered more than one hundred million people.

As capitalism developed and the bourgeoisie became the reactionary ruling class after victorious bourgeois revolutions in various countries, nationalism was used as a means of defending the interests of the bourgeois class. The bourgeoisie disguised their class interests as national interests, and used nationalism as an ideological instrument for solidifying their class domination.

The fact that a brush is depicted in the Party emblem together with a hammer and sickle clearly shows that our party defines intellectuals as an integral part along with workers and peasants. It was our Party alone which regarded intellectuals as a part of the main revolutionary force from the first days of revolution and depicted a brush in its emblem along with a hammer and a sickle.

In capitalist society, where the future of the younger generations depends on their parents' purse, they cannot avoid falling victim to social inequality and social evils. Due to the aggression and intervention of the imperialists and the plunder of the exploiter class, many of the young generation throughout the world lose their lives or are maimed by war, social conflict, disease and hunger or they wander about the streets, committing crimes and degenerating.

when Shin needed special-effects scale models to achieve a shot of an exploding train for the climax of Runaway, he asked, tongue-in-cheek, whether Kim wouldn’t just give him instead a real train to blow up. To his surprise, an actual, functioning train was delivered to the set, loaded to the brim with explosives. Shin had only one take to get it right, but that was a lovely problem to have. Runaway’s final train explosion became one of North Korean cinema’s iconic images.

According to the religious, idealist view, which regards man as a purely spiritual being, man is a product of a certain supernatural, mysterious being and his destiny is also decided by the latter. By means of their religious, idealist view of man, the reactionary ruling class and its spokesmen preached that the miserable lot of the working masses who suffered exploitation and oppression was their unavoidable fate and therefore, they had to submit to their predestined lot.

Democratic centralism is a principle of the organizational life of our Party and working people's organizations. In a politico-organizational life there is neither a superior nor a subordinate; everyone exercises his rights and performs his duties on an equal basis. Democratic suggestions made by Party members and the working people through their Party and working people's organizations are incorporated into Party and state policies, and it is on the strength of their creative initiative that these policies are carried out.

Stalin and Kim made human idols of themselves because they believed, as utopian idealists always do, in the ultimate goodness of themselves and the unchallengeable rightness of their decisions. There was no higher power, and so there could be no higher law. If people disagreed with them, it was because those people were in some way defective--insane, malignant, or mercenary. The rulers could not tolerate actual religion, because they could not tolerate any rival authority or any rival source or judge of goodness, gratitude, and justice.

It is clear that if socialist ownership is dissolved and converted into private ownership, the means of production, having been privatized, will be concentrated, sooner or later, in the hands of privileged people, speculators and a handful of other exploiters, no matter what the method of privatization may be. It is not long since privatization was carried out in those countries in which socialism had collapsed, but millionaires have already appeared while the vast majority of the working people are suffering because of unemployment and poverty.

Society, based on private ownership and its product, individualism, inevitably splits into hostile classes, produces class antagonism and social inequality, and is accompanied by the exploitation and oppression of the popular masses by a small ruling class. History shows that independence for the masses cannot be realized in a society based on individualism. A historical review of the development of human society proves that, in order to realize the masses' independence, a society based on individualism must be replaced by a society based on collectivism, by socialism and communism.

A capitalist society is ruled by egoism which sets the interests of the community against those of individuals, and places the interests of individuals above those of the community. Egoism inevitably results in social inequality and an increasing imbalance between rich and poor, and it produces conflicting relations among people. Egoism conflicts with the intrinsic nature of man as a social being. Because he is a social being capable of shaping his destiny only within the social community, man has an intrinsic need for collectivism. The Juche idea has made clear that the masses, and not an individual, are the driving force of the revolution and that collectivism, and not egoism, is an intrinsic requirement of man. The basic requirement of collectivism is that the interests of the collective should be placed above those of individuals, that the two types of interests should be harmonized and that the interests of individuals should be realized through the realization of those of the collective. That which is contrary to collectivism is not the individual interests themselves but egoism which seeks to satisfy only individual interests at the expense of collective interests.

Rule 1: Keep your winning coalition as small as possible. A small coalition allows a leader to rely on very few people to stay in power. Fewer essentials equals more control and contributes to more discretion over expenditures. Bravo for Kim Jong Il of North Korea. He is a contemporary master at ensuring dependence on a small coalition. Rule 2: Keep your nominal selectorate as large as possible. Maintain a large selectorate of interchangeables and you can easily replace any troublemakers in your coalition, influentials and essentials alike. After all, a large selectorate permits a big supply of substitute supporters to put the essentials on notice that they should be loyal and well behaved or else face being replaced. Bravo to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin for introducing universal adult suffrage in Russia’s old rigged election system. Lenin mastered the art of creating a vast supply of interchangeables. Rule 3: Control the flow of revenue. It’s always better for a ruler to determine who eats than it is to have a larger pie from which the people can feed themselves. The most effective cash flow for leaders is one that makes lots of people poor and redistributes money to keep select people—their supporters—wealthy. Bravo to Pakistan’s president Asif Ali Zardari, estimated to be worth up to $4 billion even as he governs a country near the world’s bottom in per capita income.

As the leader instructed, with regard to the propositions or formulas of the established theories, one must apply them to conform with one's specific conditions and peculiarities after taking into consideration the demands of the time they reflect and the premises they are based on. A theory that does not conform with the specific revolutionary practice is useless. In the guidance of the revolutionary struggle and construction work, the starting point is not the propositions or formulas of the established theories, but the actual realities. The point is not whether something conforms with the established theories but whether it conforms with the demands and interests of the masses and the subjective and objective conditions of a given period.

Natural environments and social conditions have a great effect on human activity. Whether natural environments are good or bad and, in particular, whether the political and economic systems of society are progressive or reactionary - these factors may favourably affect human endeavour to remake nature and develop society or limit and restrict that activity. But man does not merely adapt himself to environments and conditions. By his independent, creative and conscious activity, man continuously transforms nature and society, changing as he desires what does not meet his needs, and replacing what is outdated and reactionary with what is new and progressive. This is man's endeavour and struggle to change and transform the world in to one that serves man better.

Our socialist society grants the working people the full right to labour. Our working people are provided by the state with stable jobs in accordance with their abilities and aptitudes. The word “unemployment” has no place in the vocabulary of our people. Only in our socialist society which treats man as the most precious being is this true. A capitalist society, which regards man as the object of exploitation and as a producer of surplus value, cannot provide the working people with stable jobs. Capitalists use unemployment as a lever for speed-up and for exploiting the labour force at a lower cost. In a capitalist society a large number of unemployed and semi-unemployed people wander the streets, and even employed people have the constant fear of being dismissed.

The phrase "the masses of the people" assumes a class character in class society. An exploiter society is divided into the exploiter class and the exploited class, or the ruling class and the ruled class, depending on who owns the means of production and who controls state power. The exploited class, the ruled class, forms the majority of the masses of the people. The class structure of the masses of the people is not immutable. It changes as social history develops. In capitalist society, not only workers and peasants, but also working intellectuals and many other classes and strata which champion and struggle for independence, form the masses of the people. In socialist society, all people are transformed into socialist working people, so everyone is a member of the masses of the people.

Of course, the capitalist class takes an interest in developing the productive forces in order to gain more profit, but capitalists do not create material wealth with their own hands. The masses create ideological and cultural wealth directly, and also produce progressive thinkers, prominent scientists and talented men of art and literature. The exploiter class also put forward their own ideological and cultural mouthpieces, but the ideas and culture they produce obstruct a moral social life and development. The masses transform society. The reactionary exploiter class is only interested in maintaining and consolidating the outmoded exploitative system, not in social transformation. The farce of "reform" staged by the ruling bourgeoisie is essentially aimed at extricating themselves from the crisis of capitalism.

Socialist ideology develops the masses into independent people who are conscious of their independence and creative ability, while reactionary bourgeois ideas reduce them to servants who obey the domination of capital, to ideological and mental cripples. In capitalist society–where reactionary bourgeois rule, and exploitation and oppression by capital hold sway–the masses’ consciousness of their independence is suppressed. Their aspirations and demands are trampled underfoot and their creative wisdom and talents are held back and deformed. By resorting to every kind of falsehood and deception, imperialists and reactionaries benumb the masses’ uncorrupted minds and spread reactionary bourgeois ideas and the corrupt bourgeois way of life among them. This is the very ideological suppression which stops the development of people’s consciousness of their independence. It is criminal ideological indoctrination, which forces reactionary ideas on people. Under socialism, the popular masses should firmly equip themselves with socialist ideology. Only then can they free themselves once and for all from the influence and shackles of all kinds of outmoded ideas, to meet their demand for independence.

In any society, the ruling class tries to bring about the unchallenged predominance of its own ideology. In capitalist society, where the society is split into classes and people’s interests’ conflict, one ideology cannot hold undivided sway and it is inevitable that different ideas exist. The imperialists and their mouthpieces claim the existence of these ideas is a source of pride for the “free world”. However, progressive ideas can never develop freely in capitalist society, where the means of propaganda and education such as the mass media are in the hands of monopoly capitalists and reactionary rulers. The reactionary bourgeois ruling class tolerates progressive ideas to some extent, to make capitalist society seem democratic; but when they are considered the slightest threat to its ruling system, it mercilessly suppresses them. Outwardly, different thoughts appear to be tolerated in capitalist society, but all kinds of thoughts throughout it are, without exception, none other than various forms and expressions of bourgeois ideology. The “freedom” of ideology talked about by imperialists is a deceptive slogan to dress up–under the signpost of “freedom”–their oppression of progressive ideas in capitalist society and their resorting to every method to propagate reactionary bourgeois ideas. It is a deceptive slogan to justify their ideological and cultural infiltration into other countries.

Thanks to the popular policies of our Party and the Government of our Republic, all our people are provided by the state and society with all the practical conditions they need for adequate food, clothing and housing and enjoy an equally happy life. They are supplied by the state with provisions virtually free of charge and receive the benefits of free education, free medical care and all the conditions they need for adequate food, clothing and housing. Moreover, as a result of the abolition of taxation, this word has disappeared from their vocabulary. In our country the state takes responsible care of the old and disabled people and children who have no means of support. In our country preferential, social treatment is accorded to merited people, including veterans who have been disabled in the fight for the noble cause of the fatherland and the people, and the Party and the state take warm care of them. Our people receive many benefits from the Party and the state. The popular policies of our Party and the Government of the Republic are eloquent proof of the advantages of our socialist system which is centred upon the popular masses. The “welfare policies” pursued in capitalist countries are fundamentally different from the popular policies of a socialist society. They are aimed at disguising the class contradictions in that society and at pacifying the resistance of the working masses. Even if the “welfare policies” are enforced, this is done only in name and cannot improve the life of the working people.

The bourgeois democracy which the imperialists and reactionaries try to force upon other people is anti-popular “democracy” which allows a handful of exploiting class members to exercise the full scope of democracy and dictatorship over the working masses. Bourgeois democracy, which harshly suppresses the struggle of the broad working masses for democratic freedom and the right to survive, can never be true democracy. The imperialists and reactionaries are advertising the bourgeois parliamentary system and the bourgeois multi-party system as “democracy”. However, in such systems big monopolists are the real behind-the-scenes manipulators of politics. When they find even the formal parliamentary system or the multi-party system to be an obstacle to their reactionary rule, the imperialists and reactionaries immediately overthrow it and resort to overt fascist rule. There is clear historical evidence of this. The popular character of socialist democracy and the anti-popular character of bourgeois democracy are manifest with regard to human rights. In our socialist society, which regards man as most precious, human rights are fully guaranteed by law; not the slightest practice infringing upon them is tolerated. In our country full rights for the people, ranging from the rights to employment, food, clothing and housing to the rights to education and medical care, are guaranteed. No other such country can be found in the world. The imperialists and reactionaries, posing as the “champions of human rights”, are now vilifying socialism, but it is they alone who are violating human rights. The imperialists and reactionaries who commit political terrorism against innocent people and social figures demanding freedom and democracy, and who deprive the working people of their elementary democratic freedom and right to exist, have no entitlement to talk about human rights.

He who does not regret the breakup of the Soviet Union has no heart. He who wants to revive it in its previous form has no head.

Ten Principles for the Establishment of a One-Ideology System were officially announced by Kim Jong-Il in 1974 for all North Korean citizens to memorize and live by.

Kim Il-sung understood the power of religion. His maternal uncle was a Protestant minister back in the pre-Communist days when Pyongyang had such a vibrant Christian community that it was called the “Jerusalem of the East.” Once in power, Kim Il-sung closed the churches, banned the Bible, deported believers to the hinterlands, and appropriated Christian imagery and dogma for the purpose of self-promotion. Broadcasters would speak of Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il breathlessly, in the manner of Pentecostal preachers. North Korean newspapers carried tales of supernatural phenomena. Stormy seas were said to be calmed when sailors clinging to a sinking ship sang songs in praise of Kim Il-sung. When Kim Jong-il went to the DMZ, a mysterious fog descended to protect him from lurking South Korean snipers. He caused trees to bloom and snow to melt. If Kim Il-sung was God, then Kim Jong-il was the son of God. Like Jesus Christ, Kim Jong-il’s birth was said to have been heralded by a radiant star in the sky and the appearance of a beautiful double rainbow. A swallow descended from heaven to sing of the birth of a “general who will rule the world.

Although there was no doubt that Kim Jong-il was the head of state, his deferral of the presidential title to his father demonstrated his filial loyalty while allowing him to wield power in the name of a father who was genuinely revered and far more popular than himself. Prior to 1996 he banned statues of himself, discouraged portraits, and avoided public appearances, but after his father’s death he began to assume a higher profile. That year, the Ministry of Education issued orders for schools around the country to set up Kim Jong-il Research Institutes. They would be just like the special rooms for his father, except in place of the humble village of Mangyongdae, the room would have a model of Mount Paektu, the volcanic mountain straddling the Chinese–North Korean border where the younger Kim’s birth was claimed to have been heralded by a double rainbow. Mount Paektu was a good choice: Koreans have long revered it as the birthplace of the mythological figure Tangun, the son of a god and a she-bear who was said to have established the first Korean kingdom in 2333 B.C. No matter that Soviet records showed Kim Jong-il was actually born near Khabarovsk, in the Russian Far East, while his father was fighting with the Red Army. Reinventing history and erecting myths was easy enough in North Korea; much more difficult in 1996 was actually putting up a building. The

(Later in 1978, the Chinese premier Deng Xiaoping visited Pyongyang and, upon seeing the shining gold idol, expressed concern over how Beijing’s money was being spent. The gold covering was stripped and replaced by an equally shiny copper.) She

Kim Jong-il also invented the hamburger. Almost touchingly, North Koreans have a lot of pride in their heritage, though it’s for absurd reasons. The few foreigners who have been permitted to tour North Korea report bizarre trivia passed on to them by some pretty unironic local tour guides: Koreans are such a glorious race that they created not only the world’s great technological innovations but also the spoon. Though

Kim Jong-il had real cultural ambitions. He was a known cinephile who fancied himself a rare blend of canny Hollywood producer and serious film auteur—even authoring a film theory book called The Art of Cinema in 1973, followed by The Cinema and the Art of Directing in 1987. He offers such insights as “Language is extremely important in literature” and “Compose the plot correctly.” Dissatisfied

European who served for many years as a diplomat in Pyongyang, with postings there off and on from the 1970s into the 1990s, likened North Korea to a Catholic state in the Middle Ages. He estimated that around 90 percent really believed in the regime and its teachings—while the other 10 percent had no choice but to pretend that they believed. As opposed to other communist countries, where jokes about leaders such as the Soviet Union’s Brezhnev and East Germany’s Erich Honecker were a staple of conversation, there were no jokes about Kim Il-sung or Kim Jong-il, the diplomat said.

The public executions began immediately after the plenum. The Party put up posters throughout Pyongyang, announcing the wonderful events. I attended each and every one of them, and from the size of the crowds it seemed as if everybody in the city was there as well. Entire families made a day of it, with the youngsters even missing school. As the class enemies met their fates, the crowd erupted in huge cheers. The applause was so loud it was as if the people were competing to see who could make the most noise.

The Great Leader loved museums. He had so many built that North Korea even has a Museum of the Construction of the Museum of the Construction of the Metro.

Rather than a state of equal brotherhood and sisterhood, Kim had introduced an elaborate social order in which the eleven million ordinary North Korean citizens were classified according to their perceived political reliability. The songbun system, as it was known, ruthlessly reorganized the entire social system of North Korea into a communistic pseudofeudal system, with every individual put through eight separate background checks, their family history taken into account as far back as their grandparents and second cousins. Your final rating, or songbun, put you in one of fifty-one grades, divided into three broad categories, from top to bottom: the core class, the wavering class, and the hostile class. The hostile class included vast swathes of society, from the politically suspect (“people from families of wealthy farmers, merchants, industrialists, landowners; pro-Japan and pro-U.S. people; reactionary bureaucrats; defectors from the South; Buddhists, Catholics, expelled public officials”) to kiaesaeng (the Korean equivalent of geishas) and mudang (rural shamans). Although North Koreans weren’t informed of their new classification, it quickly became clear to most people what class they had been assigned. North Koreans of the hostile class were banned from living in Pyongyang or in the most fertile areas of the countryside, and they were excluded from any good jobs. There was virtually no upward mobility—once hostile, forever hostile—but plenty downward. If you were found to be doing anything that was illegal or frowned upon by the regime, you and your family’s songbun would suffer. Personal files were kept locked away in local offices, and were backed up in the offices of the Ministry for the Protection of State Security and in a blast-resistant vault in the mountains of Yanggang province. There was no way to tamper with your status, and no way to escape it. The most cunning part of it all was that Kim Il-Sung came up with a way for his subjects to enforce their own oppression by organizing the people into inminban (“people’s groups”), cooperatives of twenty or so families per neighborhood whose duty it was to keep tabs on one another and to inform on any potentially criminal or subversive behavior. These were complemented by kyuch’aldae, mobile police units on constant lookout for infringers, who had the authority to burst into your home or office at any time of day or night. Offenses included using more than your allocated quota of electricity, wearing blue jeans, wearing clothes bearing Roman writing (a “capitalist indulgence”) and allowing your hair to grow longer than the authorized length. Worse still, Kim decreed that any one person’s guilt also made that person’s family, three generations of it, guilty of the same crime. Opposing the regime meant risking your grandparents, your wife, your children—no matter how young—being imprisoned and tortured with you. Historically, Koreans had been subject to a caste system similar to India’s and equally as rigid. In the early years of the DPRK, the North Korean people felt this was just a modernized revitalization of that traditional social structure. By the time they realized something was awfully wrong, that a pyramid had been built, and that at the top of it, on the very narrow peak, sat Kim Il-Sung, alone, perched on the people’s broken backs, on their murdered families and friends, on their destroyed lives—by the time they paused and dared to contemplate that their liberator, their savior, was betraying them—in fact, had always betrayed them—it was already much, much too late.

Jong-Il understood that his father would not choose as his successor the man who promised to be best for North Korea or for the people. His father would choose the man who promised to be best for Kim Il-Sung, even after Kim Il-Sung himself was dead.

Sometimes the police would shut down the electricity early, knowing that tapes and DVDs couldn’t be ejected without power, then raid every home in the neighborhood, arresting anyone found with a foreign movie still in their player. DVD smugglers and salespeople were arrested and executed.

A team of Soviet biochemists, who called themselves the Mausoleum Laboratory and had carried out the mummifications of Lenin, Stalin, and Ho Chi Minh,

The country’s entire frog population was eaten to extinction within a year.

A bodyguard had to apply to his supervisor for marriage, and if the application was approved—likely this decision was Jong-Il’s—the bodyguard would be called to his supervisor’s office on the Third Floor. Twenty photographs were placed on the supervisor’s desk, facedown. Blindly the bodyguard would pick a picture, which the supervisor would then flip over. The woman in the photograph would be the man’s wife.

Gibbs was assigned to roust the president. I had left my room so hastily that my hair was standing straight up in the air. When Obama arrived, perfectly groomed, and saw me, he also saw his perfect, unwitting foil. “Axe, I see you decided to dress up as Kim Jong-Il for the occasion,” he said, a reference to the North Korean leader with the famously bizarre hairstyle.

The militant atheists lament that religion is the foremost source of the world’s violence is contradicted by three realities: Most religious organizations do not foster violence; many nonreligious groups do engage in violence; and many religious moral precepts encourage nonvio lence. Indeed, we can confidently assert that if religion was the sole or primary force behind wars, then secular ideologies should be relatively benign by comparison, which history teaches us has not been the case. Revealingly, in his Encyclopedia of Wars, Charles Phillips chronicled a total of 1,763 conflicts throughout history, of which just 123 were categorized as religious. And it is important to note further that over the last century the most brutality has been perpetrated by nonreligious cult figures (Hitler, Stalin, Kim Jong-Il, Mao Zedong, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Fidel Castro, Slobodan Milosevic, Robert Mugabe—you get the picture). Thus to attribute the impetus behind violence mainly to religious sentiments is a highly simplistic interpretation of history.

A family’s life is more important than an individual’s life; a nation’s life is more important than a family’s; the human race is more important than a nation.

He had been the leader of his country for forty-six years. He had outlived Mao by nearly twenty years and Stalin by forty; his reign had seen off nine U.S. presidents, twenty-one Japanese prime ministers, and six South Korean presidents. And he had succeeded in passing the reins of power to his son. *

Thank you for coming, Madame Choi,” he said. “You must be exhausted from the journey. Welcome. I am Kim Jong-Il.

his mother. A little like Laurence Olivier, who always felt he was acting for his beloved

Jong-Il’s elite team of bodyguards was one of the most sinister, intriguing aspects of his way of life. He kept 120 of them and preferred them to be orphans; once hired they were not permitted to visit home or to ever leave the Leader’s side. If they wanted to marry, they were only allowed to marry a typist or secretary from a specific unit of the Party, and the matchmaking procedure itself was bizarre. A bodyguard had to apply to his supervisor for marriage, and if the application was approved—likely this decision was Jong-Il’s—the bodyguard would be called to his supervisor’s office on the Third Floor. Twenty photographs were placed on the supervisor’s desk, facedown. Blindly the bodyguard would pick a picture, which the supervisor would then flip over. The woman in the photograph would be the man’s wife. If the bodyguard refused to marry the stranger, he would have to wait another two years before being able to reapply—and this time he would have to marry the girl whose photograph he had blindly drawn, whether he liked the look of her or not, at risk of being dismissed.

The North Korean news followed up with a documentary about a greedy man whose stomach burst from eating too much food, suggesting that starving was actually good for you. There is no record of how that tactic was received.

The people are still required, under pain of imprisonment, to thank Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il every morning for their food, even though Kim Il-Sung is dead and they have no food.

Shrimp among whales we may be, but some of us refuse to accept the whales as the masters of our own fate. Looking at Choi Eun-Hee, there is a lot to be said for that.

one of Jong-Il’s mottos was “If the enemy gives you a problem, yell louder than him, and he will back down.

Every so often the authorities registered voters in order to find out who was missing and why. I had turned eighteen and was old enough to vote in North Korea’s ‘elections’, which always returned Kim Jong-il, with a hundred per cent approval.

Kim Jong-il’s hold on power was tenuous at best. After the death of Kim Il-sung, the leading members of the party changed allegiance and took off to South Korea. And then the leading members of the military who were close to Kim Il-sung disappeared too. Kim Jong-il knew all the talk of unification was just a farce. He cared only that he was on the world stage and that he was finally being taken seriously.

In a capitalist society a carefree life for the working people is inconceivable. In this society even those who are fairly well-to-do are always fearful of sudden bankruptcy, job-loss and poverty. Living a prosperous life in idleness without any thought for others cannot be regarded as a genuine human life.

I was starting to look different from my Democratic rivals in more ways than the obvious one. During a debate in late July, I was shown images of Fidel Castro, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, and a couple of other despots and asked if I’d be prepared to meet with any of them during my first year in office. Without hesitation, I said yes—I’d meet with any world leader if I thought it could advance U.S. interests. Well, you would have thought I had said the world was flat. When the debate was over, Clinton, Edwards, and a bunch of the other candidates pounced, accusing me of being naïve, insisting that a meeting with the American president was a privilege to be earned. The press corps in large part seemed to agree. Perhaps even a few months earlier I might have gotten wobbly, second-guessing my choice of words and issuing a clarifying statement afterward. But I had my legs beneath me now and was convinced I was right, particularly on the more general principle that America shouldn’t be afraid to engage its adversaries or push for diplomatic solutions to conflict. As far as I was concerned, it was this disregard for diplomacy that had led Hillary and the rest—not to mention the mainstream press—to follow George W. Bush into war.

Of course, society, too, changes and develops in accordance with a certain law, not by man’s own will. But the action of law in society is fundamentally different from that of the law of nature.

For Ki-young, who had just graduated from the Operations Class of Kim Jong Il University of Political and Military Science, commonly called Liaison Office 130, the man's defeatist attitude was surprising. How could he live in enemy territory without being alert? How could he let go of his animosity toward the South, where the great enemy Chun Doo Swan massacred thousands of people in Kwangju in broad daylight? Later, he realized the South specialized in lifelessness and defeatism. Indiscriminate weariness was prevalent. Ki-yong knew what ennui was, but this was the first time he personally observed it. At home, it was an abstract idea batted about when criticizing capitalism. Of course, there was ennui back home, too. But in a socialist society it was closer to boredom. And it was really a matter of inadequate motivation; a bit of stimulation could change the feeling of boredom. But the prototypical capitalist ennui Ki-yong encountered for the first time in the South was heavy and voluminous. Like poisonous gas, it suffocated and suppressed life. Mere exposure to it prompted the growth of fear. Sometimes you encountered people who inspired in you an immediate primal caution, something that made you say, I don't want to live like that. That civil servant in the office had this effect on Ki-yong. He represented depression, emptiness, cynicism.

-Kim Jong-Il was able to walk at 3 weeks old. He could speak fluent Korean at 2 months old.

When Kim Jong-Il first played golf, he somehow managed to hit 11 holes in one on an 18-hole course.

We should distinguish clearly between true nationalism that loves the nation and defends its interests and bourgeois nationalism that advocates the interests of the bourgeois class. Bourgeois nationalism reveals itself as national egoism, national exclusivism and big- power chauvinism in the relationship between countries and nations; it is reactionary in that it creates antagonism and disagreement between countries and nations, and checks the development of friendly relations between the various peoples of the world.

When Kim Jong-Il turned 3 years old, he was taken to a gun range, where he proceeded to shoot multiple bull’s eyes in the targets.

South Koreans fear that the collapse of Kim Jong-il’s regime will see their country overrun by 23 million people in need of food and shelter. Although political correctness dictates that all Koreans yearn for their missing kin (“reunification is our desire, even in our dreams,” South Korean schoolchildren dutifully sing), some view the prospect with dread. Think tanks in Seoul regularly churn out reports estimating how much it would cost to reunify, with figures ranging from $300 billion to $1.8 trillion.

I actually believed that our Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, could read my mind, and I would be punished for my bad thoughts. And if he didn’t hear me, spies were everywhere, listening at the windows and watching in the school yard.