Dear Leader

There is a Korean saying that if you tell a lie one hundred times, even the person who made up the lie will eventually come to believe it.

Jang Jin-Sung

Dear Leader is Jang Jin-Sung's fascinating account of his defection from North Korea. Disturbing of course, but well worth reading.

Jang Jin-sung is the pseudonym of a North Korean defector and former elite propagandist who served as a state poet under Kim Jong-il before escaping to South Korea in 2004.[1][2]Employed in the United Front Department of the Workers' Party of Korea, Jang composed officially sanctioned poetry extolling the Kim regime, which granted him privileged access to Pyongyang's inner circles and the moniker of poet laureate.[1][3] His defection followed a personal crisis involving unauthorized possession of South Korean media, prompting a clandestine border crossing via China that exposed him to risks of recapture and execution.

The book primarily covers the Kim Jong-il regime, describing the bizarre nature of the regime and Jang's defection with a friend across the frozen Tumen River to China. It's an interesting account because in spite of his young age, Jang was an elite propagandist, in North Korean terms life was good. 

What seems to have pushed him into defecting was partly his unauthorised use of South Korean literature, but also a fascination with the outside world. As a propagandist he came to know the outside world in a way which was strictly forbidden to North Korean citizens. Another motive for defecting was the fanatically restrictive nature of all North Korean art, literature and music, his main interests in life.

Anyone who composes a work that has not been assigned to the writer through this chain of command is by definition guilty of treason. All written works in North Korea must be initiated in response to a specific request from the Workers’ Party.

Jang gives Byron's poetry as an example of his access to literature beyond North Korea, part of a policy of disguising the source of North Korean propaganda covertly circulated in the outside world.

The book was the Collected Works of Lord Byron. As part of North Korea’s ‘Hundred-Copy Collection’, the print run of this book was restricted to one hundred copies. In North Korea, the circulation of foreign books is restricted in this way so that only the ruling Kim and his family, his closest associates and select members of North Korea’s elite have access to them. Each of the books in a hundred-copy set has a stamped number on the first page to show which of the hundred copies it is.

Before encountering Byron’s poetry, I had thought that adjectives such as ‘Dear’ and ‘Respected’ were a special form of pronoun in the Korean language reserved for Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. Along with ‘Great’, which is always seen in one of the terms referring to Kim Il-sung as ‘Great Leader’, I had assumed that these adjectives were names just like Kim and therefore etymologically and purely Korean.