The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History by Don Oberdorfer, Robert Carlin Read Free Book Online

institute was established in Pyongyang to concentrate on the aging process of this one man, with doctors and medical specialists monitoring his every move and special fruits andvegetables produced solely for his consumption. When Kim traveled to Berlin on his 1984 European trip, according to a former East German diplomat who helped arrange the visit, Kim’s aides arranged for a special bed to be flown ahead for his sleeping comfort (as was often the case with Ronald Reagan as US president). In addition, they brought a special toilet with built-in monitoring equipment that instantly analyzed whatever the Great Leader eliminated for any sign of health problems. The former German diplomat said that medical specialists from different friendly countries were assigned primary responsibility for consultation on different parts of the leader’s body, with East German doctors being given responsibility for Kim’s head and neck, including the large but benign tumor on the back of his neck that had been visible since the early 1970s.
    From his education in Chinese schools and his four years in a Soviet military camp, Kim was fluent in Chinese and conversant in Russian. His complex relationship with the two giants of communism—his neighbors, sponsors, and, for most of his life, his allies—was central to nearly all that he did or said. To a large extent, he owed his career as well as his country’s well-being to China and Russia, yet he was always wary of their dominant power. In a tradition practiced by Koreans throughout their history, Kim went to extraordinary lengths to gain and maintain as much independence as possible.
    Oleg Rakhmanin, a former Soviet official who had extensive meetings with Kim over a twenty-five-year period, said that when Kim was being actively wooed to take Moscow’s side against Beijing, he was “careful and prudent, weighing his every word. He was afraid the Chinese would learn what he said to us. . . . [Kim was] a calculating character—a chess player who calculates his every move.” Another former Soviet official, who had been posted in the Soviet Embassy in Pyongyang, described Kim as “a flexible and pragmatic politician, an Oriental Talleyrand. He would agree with our leaders and give a lot of promises, but afterward he would pursue the same line, his own line.”
    Due perhaps to his limited formal education, Kim was not a book reader and could not be fairly described as an intellectual. In deference to the intellect, he added a pen to the traditional communist hammer-and-sickle as North Korea’s official emblem, but in personal conversations he rarely referred to world history or to any work of serious literature. “He knows a lot of Confucianism and a smattering of Marx, Lenin, Hegel, and such,” said a former communist diplomat who dealt with Kim extensively.
    Most of his government’s philosophical utterances dealt with “the juche idea,” which was hailed in North Korea as Kim’s original, brilliant, and revolutionary contribution to national and international thought. But Kim acknowledged on occasion that juche was not original with him. Although the fact was rarely mentioned in the North, the term and conceptgo back at least to Korean scholars in the early years of the twentieth century. Kim explained that “I have just laid special emphasis on it.”
    Kim’s version of juche , emanating from North Korea’s militant nationalism, is usually described in shorthand as “self-reliance,” but there is much more to it. According to Han S. Park of the University of Georgia, a leading American expert on juche as a philosophical system and state religion, “ Juche views Korea as a chosen land, as people are told consistently that world civilization originated from the Korean peninsula.”
    Beyond its sanctification of Kim’s decisions, juche was a declaration of political independence from his two communist sponsors. Although it was originally called “a creative application of