Kim Young Hwan came away with three conclusions
from his 17-days in North Korea:
First, based on the heavy-handed manner in
which superior officials all seemed to treat their subordinates, it was easy to surmise
how authoritarian the place must be.Second, he saw no sign of the element
of the Juche ideology that he found most significant: human
creativity. Talking with North Korean scholars, he found they tended to repeat the
same things, from which he inferred not that they weren’t personally creative, but that
they weren’t permitted to research creatively.Third, there was no energy. The society felt dead; people had fixed expressions and everything felt dark.
When he tried to talk to a person on the street in Pyongyang, he was stopped by his North Korean minder.
In sum, Kim’s visit to North Korea was an
unalloyed disappointment.
Since his release from prison two years earlier in 1989,
Kim had focused more on the North Korean environment and its supposed sense of humanity than on economic
issues. During his earlier years at Seoul National University he had believed that
per-capita GNP in both states was around $2000 USD, but ever since the Seoul Olympics of 1988 had been forced to accept that the North
could no longer compete with the South economically. Nevertheless, Kim clung to the vague fantasy that even if the North Korean economy was lagging behind, they had
the advantage in terms of environmental protection and humanity in society;
compared with the zooming, hyper-competitive society of South Korea, how could it not be so? He firmly believed that Juche was the way forward: to overcoming the wealth
gap and achieving reunification. He hoped it would serve as the wellspring of a new
paradigm for the future.
 Kim Young Hwan was shocked to find very little human warmth or creativity among the people of North Korea. He soon worked out why. | Image: Destination Pyongyang |
But instead, Kim went to North Korea and, entirely
contrary to his rather hopeful imaginings, found absolutely no effort to
protect the environment. Nor did he find many touches of humanity; with
the exception of Yoon Taek Rim’s family, no one showed him an ounce of human
warmth. From the grim expressions of people on the street, it was plain for all
to see that North Korea had not achieved societal harmony. Quite the opposite.
(Although communism stresses theoretical investigation,
one of the other most important virtues of any revolutionary is a deep-seated
humanity: calling each other “comrade” at all times and looking out
for one another without any of the ruthlessness of capitalist
relations. This same kind of brotherly affection is also important for fostering
devotion to a cause. The life of an underground student activist and NDRP
member was neither secure nor comfortable; nothing like the life of a
white-collar worker drawing a monthly salary. If caught, severe hardships follow: to request such devotion and self-sacrifice required a
great deal of humanity and brotherly support.)
In any case, even though Kim had seen communism in
Eastern Europe collapse, he retained the hope that the Juche idea could be the way to overcome both the void left by Marxism and the alienation endemic to capitalism and rapid industrialization.
But when he finally made it to North Korea, observed society and tried to
engage its scholars in debate, he realized that, to the contrary, it would be the
hardest place in the world to develop such philosophical ideas. He was sure there was potential in researching and advancing the Juche idea, but could see
that academics in the North weren’t going to be the ones to do it. Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il
had both anti-imperialist theory and Juche at their disposal, and yet they
had become nothing but dictators; oppressing their people, totally indifferent
to theoretical nuance.
Kim now knew that the paradigm he dreamed of wasn’t a good match for North Korea. He stood at a crossroads. If that were the case, he
would have to either change his paradigm, or give up on North Korea completely. He
concluded that he must develop the Juche ideology. The paradigm won. He determined to slowly move
the NDRP away from pursuing communist revolution according to the North Korean
model, and eventually disband it.
 Hwang Jang Yop speaking at a party in 2008 for members of the Seoul-based North Korean human rights community. Kim Young Hwan is on Hwang’s left. | Image: Daily NK |
• North
Korean Juche and Hwang Jang Yop’s Anthropocentric Philosophy
The term “Juche”
first was used with a political meaning in a speech given by Kim Il Sung on
December 28, 1955. Three years later in 1958, the same speech was incorporated into a book of Kim’s
writings.
However, the “Juche” Kim spoke of in the speech didn’t have the meaning it
would later take on in the term “Juche ideology” or “Juche idea.” Rather, it just
amounted to Kim urging independence from the burgeoning Sino-Soviet
rivalry. Conversely, the first time “Juche” and “ideology” first
appeared together as a single term was after the 4th Chosun Workers’ Party Congress in 1961. At the time, Kim Il Sung laid out four policy
strands for practical independence: in the areas of ideology, politics,
the economy, and defense. This became the basis of the “Juche
ideology,” and from this point on the term itself became standard in North
Korean society.
The first time the Juche ideology became
known outside North Korea was much later, in September 1972, when the Japanese daily Mainichi
Shimbun published a piece in which Kim Il Sung took a Q&A and offered
the first definition of the “Juche Ideology” to an external audience.
Kim alleged that Juche is the rather simple (albeit false) proposition that the people are the owners of the
revolution and the ones building society, and that the strength to advance
these goals also lies with the people. He went on to say that Juche is the idea that,
“I am the owner of my own fate, and the strength to develop my fate also
lies with me.”
The scholar responsible for the
philosophical system that underpinned Kim’s claim was Hwang Jang Yop, the former dean of Kim
Il Sung University. At the end of the 1960s, Hwang spent three years working on the foundations of his “anthropocentric philosophy,” which
defined the fundamental characteristics of human beings as independence, creativity,
and social cooperation. From this basis, he formulated a systematic view of the
world, social history, and life. Unfortunately, however, the fruits of his labors were received by the state and promptly given to the propaganda
department with instructions to, in effect, take the important parts and rework
them to justify the Suryeongist dictatorship then being built on the ground.
Thus, today the “official” (North Korean state version) Juche ideology consists of philosophical principles, socio-historical
principles, and abstract guiding principles; the core is the deification of Kim Il Sung
and the theory behind the absolutist Suryeong dictatorship. Because of this,
it reads overall as a jumbled assortment of Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat,
Kimist Suryeong absolutism, and Hwang Jang Yop’s original anthropocentric philosophy.
Even though the three prescriptions are in no way compatible, the North Korean
authorities cobbled them together and used them as such. Specifically, they
used Suryeong absolutism with the North Korean people, and to those
dissatisfied with Marxism they propagated elements of anthropocentric philosophy.
This amorphous, impenetrable “Juche ideology” spread widely on South Korean
university campuses in the mid-80s, but there was no way of
knowing that it was actually an incoherent melange of three ideologies. The person who realized that
Hwang’s anthropocentric philosophy was an independent philosophical idea within the wider construct was
Kim Young Hwan. He was proved right in 1997, when Hwang defected to South Korea and attested to the
development of the ideology and the changes it went through.
Hwang went on to publish
several formal works on his anthropocentric philosophy, objecting continuously at the official North Korean distortion of his ideas right up until his death in 2010.
