5-20-06, 9:45 am

Editor's note: We present here the third installment of a four part extended memoir by Philip Bonosky on a trip he took to Asia in the late 1950s. This portion focuses on his brief stay in North Korea in the summer of 1959. The full essay was written during and immediately after the trip, and parts of it may no longer reflect the author's thinking. It is, however, important for its recording of historical information generally ignored by mainstream sources.

For Part I, click here For Part II, click here

–7–

We jolted our way over the dusty roads to a collective farm some hour’s drive outside of Pyongyang. Along the way groups of boys and girls would draw up stiffly, when they saw us coming, their hands straight along their sides and bow their heads.

'Why do they do that?' I asked Sung Chun.

'Because of respect,' he replied.

'Do they think we are important officials?'

He nodded.

'Wouldn’t they be surprised if they knew there was an American riding in the car. Would they show respect?'

I had progressed so far with Sung Chun that I could banter with him, although my American English baffled him often enough, as he confessed later. His boyishness and enthusiasm charmed me; I was impressed by his patriotism as well.

Once, as we passed another woman striding along with a bundle set squarely on her head and a baby strapped to her back, I said: 'How is it that I never see a man here carrying anything?'

'It is not custom.'

'Well, if I were a woman,' I said, 'I’d soon make it custom.'

Custom dictated many forms of behavior that would outrage US notions of equality and democracy. Respect for officials, for instance, form the young. Actually it seemed to me to be a Japanese left-over, as indeed I could plainly hear Japanese tones in Sung Chun’s English. He would say, for instance: 'We are indignate-at-South Korean treatment of peoples!' He delivered his statements in staccato, emphatic tones, with inflexion rising at the end of each sentence or phrase.

Everywhere we went we encountered the face of Kim Il Sung. In fact, the emphasis upon Kim Il sung in every aspect of Korean life made me uneasy, especially since the experience fo Stalin, which this duplicated, was still so fresh in our memories. Kim Il Sung was quite young, – not fifty yet. He had had a life devoted completely to the revolutionary movement in Korea, and had led the anti-Japanese guerrilla forces, based in the mountains of North Korea and China; and his forces combined with the Soviet forces to destroy the Japanese. He headed the new government, and quite naturally the people looked on him as the embodiment of their new freedom and the living symbol of their long struggle for freedom from the Japanese – a 35-year struggle. But to cite his words as the final truth on all phenomena could only lead to complications, eventually. To be worshipped – and this is the word – by millions of people as though he were a god was dangerous. It was anti-Marxist; it was of course the Korean example of the cult of the individual.

I had no doubt at all that modifications in the cult of Kim Il Sung had been made since the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, but not to de-emphasizing his person to the extent of discouraging the deification of the man in his life-time. There were too many statues of him, too many paintings showing him in commanding poses, to many references to him in speeches; and I spoke about this on various occasions.

They denied generally that the same mistakes were being committee in connection with Kim Il Sung as had been committed with Stalin. In China, too, it had been pointed out to me that Mao Tse-tung’s style of work was entirely different form Stalin’s. I had no rigid opinions on this question, since it seemed to me that a certain phase in the people’s liberation struggle, to fasten upon a leader’s personality is quite natural, and perhaps inevitable. The positive results of this are tremendous. A leader helps to organize the national sentiment of the people. In a certain sense he represents a short-cut to mobilizing people whose experience has not yet risen to the point of maturity where they can exert their best efforts without the need of a living symbol.

But if the positive results can be tremendous, the negative can also be great. In any case, sooner or later, the attention of the people has to be moved form the individual to the class, to the forces, to the peoples themselves as the real makers of history. To elevate one human being above the mass is to belittle the mass.

At the moment it was obvious that the Korean people were in no mood to de-emphasize the personal role that Kim Il Sung played. While I was in Korea I read a book of Kim Il Sung’s speeches and statements, and was tremendously impressed by the grasp he showed of Korea’s problems, and his style of attacking them and analyzing them smacked of Stalin’s style at its best. Kim Il Sung was a Bolshevik. He was admirably fulfilling his role of leader and teacher and inspirer of the nation as the results all around me amply proved. But the world-wide reaction to the revelations about Stalin’s last years was still too fresh in the minds of all of us, and the damage was too widespread and devastating to pass over this phenomenon silently wherever we encountered it.

–8–

But it was not our business to make an issue of it, of course; merely to comment on it form the point of view of another Marxist.

We drove between the fields of rice which impressed even me with their obvious flourishing state. This was due, I was to learn later, to the method called the 'cold-bed seedling' method which had been introduced only shortly before and had begun to prove itself dramatically. But the production of rice in North Korea, which had never before been able to feed its population, had so increased in the last year or two that there was an actual surplus which could be exported. Such a fact if historic; it is linked to the further fact that imperialism no longer can impose its will on colonial countries freely. The victory of the Koreans in the war against the US invasion of their country is the same victory as the victory over hunger. South Korea starves, even though a billion dollars has been poured into that area by the Americans; that vast fortune which could solve all of the main problems faced by the South Koreans has been poured down the rat-hole of armaments and to pay off the huge army of sycophants, chisellers and parasites that inevitably rise in such situation and cannot be eliminated. For the US to remain in South Korea they must bribe many thousands of Korean bureaucrats and businessmen who had prospered under the Japanese rule and simply shifted their allegiance to the Americans who now were in power and doled out the gold.

This description of reality in South Korea is not mine; it comes form the US press. Even casual flipping of the back pages of the New York Times will reveal episodes of murder, chicanery, bribery, outright robbery, prostitution, unemployment, and vast human misery absolutely unknown in the North.

–9–

We drove along a winding road to the top of a hill where we got out and set up a table for a picnic. The view from this pine-covered plateau was breathtaking. Below us ran a river, which divided at one point and flowed around a flat area in which I could see cows grazing. The view for miles was peacefully bucolic. The chair of the cooperative who had come with us explained to me that the US military had reached to this point on their march to the Yalu. He had fought in the army, but was now the chair of the agricultural and dairy farm. He urged me to eat the tomatoes and apples piled on the table, and then poured me a glass of milk with great ceremony, as though it were a delicacy. I knew by this time that milk was indeed a delicacy. I had asked for milk to go with my morning coffee assuming milk was easily available but couldn’t get any in the hotel, at first. Now the chair explained to me proudly that this milk had been obtained from their own cows – and that dairy farming was only two years old in Korea! They had never raised cows for milk and butter before; milk had been almost unknown in the country. He was equally proud of the tomatoes which he served to me covered with sugar. The milk too had been sweetened with sugar. They were also proud of their apples. So we ate apples, sugared tomatoes and sweet milk, also some candy. We sat under the pine trees and looked over the valley and the river in the warm summer day and talked about the problems they had faced in bringing the cooperative to its prosperous state. He told me that the farm already owned several cars but was planning to buy more; they were building homes and schools and were introducing electricity to their villages. They planned too to enlarge their herd of milk cows rapidly.

The man I was speaking to had all the marks of an able, intelligent leader. He was fairly tall, well-built, and reminded me somehow of an American Westerner with some Indian blood in him.

As I sat there talking I felt in my whole being the strangeness of the moment. The day could not have been more peaceful, dreamy, further removed from US reality. The Koreans sitting with me and talking so amiably were only yesterday the objects of our fantastic power to kill. We had killed innumerable numbers of those marvelously alive children we had met on the roads and that I could see everywhere around us, with their black hair, high-cheeked bones and good-natured eyes that were so bright and intelligent. Such juxtaposition of myself with this fact overwhelmed me.

What kind of moral blindness could exist that would permit the deliberate deaths of human beings? What ends were gained form the deaths of these people who, for the first time in years upon years, were free to dig the ground as they wished, build their own homes, raise their own children according to their heart’s desire?

A policy which demanded of me – personally – that I should accept the murder of the people sitting beside me as national policy, was barbarous; a policy which defined Americanism as this kind of barbarism offended one’s very marrow. I felt guilty toward these people; I could not help feeling that they sat here with me only because they were lucky enough to have survived the saturation bombing of this country which I had already seen and would see more evidence as I traveled.

–10–

Sung Chun, though merry enough at times, also had a sad expression in his eyes that made me wonder about his life. Comrade Kim, who accompanied us, was a writer of children’s stories, and ad the faint air of, I thought, an intellectual, or even an aristocrat. He could speak English somewhat, and had been abroad; he had several children.

The country was poor, but not defeated nor demoralized. This was not the poverty of the inefficient, the weak or the diseased and ignorant. It was the poverty of our own American pioneers who wrested a living form the stubborn soil, and were proud of it; Korean character was formed in this struggle against nature and against the devastation of the war. I saw a nation coming to birth. I saw a people’s character developing. Just as one of the indestructible elements in the formation of the American character was the struggle against Great Britain in the revolutionary war, sop is the same basic element present in the Korean character formed in the struggle against us – Americans.

Let this fact console us, if it can. Just as so many peoples of the world are finding their true selves in the struggle against Great Britain’s hold on them, so too are other people’s developing their national consciousness in the struggle against us. Who ever knew what a Korean was before he fought the Americans? Or a Vietnamese before he defeated the French?

One does not see among the North Koreans many shiftless or drunken types, sycophants, beggars, the whole sorry spectrum of types which an oppressed and poor people inevitably exhibit and which, in the absence of others who struggle, come to represent the country and determine its national character.

Instead, one got the impression of a people who worked hard, out of inner drive of their own, connected with a personal and national vision. They were modest but also proud. They were extremely intelligent, and later, when I visited a school and asked the principal what provisions were made for backward students, he answered, I think quite sincerely that there are no backward children in Korea!

I came to believe him before I left.

We rode back down the winding dirt trail to the main road again, and the chair went with us part way. We stopped at a field where rice had been planted experimentally according to the cold-bed seedling method, and he invited us out to take a closer look at it. We slid down the bank and made our way, like tight-rope walkers, along the raised dirt ditches of the patty field. Water gurgled through the irrigation ditches. The rice stood in foot-deep water.

We came finally to a section roped off from the other fields. The rice here stood remarkably higher than in the other areas; it was more densely planted and was already ripening whereas the rice planted by old methods was lagging behind. The chair was especially pleased with what he showed us. Obviously the harvest from these jungbo planted to rice would be several times greater than those planted in the traditional way.

North Korea does not have too much land that is arable. Much of its area is mountainous and cannot be cultivated. The problem that it faced therefore was to increase the yield per jungbo, and directly after the hostilities ceased in 1953, the people went to work to meet the demands of the country for food. Dry-field cultivators methods were introduced in those areas soon to other than rice crops, and new crops were introduced, like maize, for the first time.

With their manpower literally decimated by the war, as John Foster Dulles accurately boasted, and with priority given to the construction of heavy industry, the reconstruction of the completely devastated cities and towns, the struggle in the countryside must have seemed, in the beginning, particularly heartbreaking. The system of irrigation that has been developed before the war had been completely ruined by the Americans. The land had been seeded with bombs, which kept exploding even for long periods afterwards; the fields were pockmarked with deep shell holes. The villages were reduced to ruins. The people, as a whole, had been driven literally underground, into caves, from which they emerged, after the cessation of hostilities, like half-blinded survivors form an unspeakable horror. They literally had nothing to eat, except what was sent to them form friendly countries, although, during the war, the Koreans managed to cultivate crops at night. Their fields were masses of ploughed-up earth; their forests were destroyed, literally shorn to the roots; dams had been blown up and whatever sources for electrical power that had existed formerly had also been destroyed.

If, faced with such a landscape from which all living things had perished, scorched by fire and bomb, the Korean people had collapsed with misery and hopelessness, it could have been understood by anyone who saw the problem they were faced with. But under the leadership of Kim Il Sung, the Korean Workers Party issued a call to the people to rebuild and reconstruct their martyred homeland, and burying their dead and comforting their maimed and wounded and drying the tears for those members of the family caught and isolated in South Korea, they set to work. What they accomplished I now saw: this alone made me conscious of a mass heroism which is almost unprecedented in human history. I envied them such courage, such devotion to the common cause, on behalf of my own people, which once upon a time also showed evidence of similar characteristics; but now, certainly not now.

They had solved the food question. They had built, in less than ten years, housing for thousands fo families, and were building more and more houses which eventually would provide decent living conditions for the entire population. They were building schools and hospitals, factories and bridges and dams, and theaters and opera houses: but they were not building, as far as I could see, churches and temples. The Americans had destroyed them, and with them had destroyed both the capitalist God and the feudal one – both Jehovah and Buddha died under napalm made in the USA.

For Part IV, click here

--Philip Bonosky is a contributing editor of Political Affairs, a former international correspondent for the People’s World, and the author of several books including Afghanistan: Washington’s Secret War, Brother Bill McKie: Building the Union at Ford (International Publishers), the novels Burning Valley (University of Illinois Press) and The Magic Fern (International Publishers), and two collections of short stories.