In 1992, two years before his death, Kim Il Sung, the "Great Leader"
of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea),
began to publish a compendium of reminiscences about his life and
times. Although he inhabited a society that automatically acclaimed
his every utterance for its immortal wisdom, the old man--the only
ruler the state had ever known until then--could rightly believe that
nonetheless he had an epic story to tell.
This former Soviet Red Army officer, after all, had survived dire
perils and had gone on to savor triumphs of historic proportion. In
1950 he launched the Korean War in the mistaken hope of quickly
overrunning and absorbing the Republic of Korea (ROK, or South
Korea). Although his grave miscalculation led to an international
embroilment that devastated his country, he managed to emerge from
the disaster intact and unbowed. The world's greatest power, the
United States, had fought against him for three years and had been
unable to defeat him.
In contradistinction to other communist governments (whose doctrines
regarded dynastic succession as inherently counterrevolutionary), Kim
openly founded a socialist dynasty in North Korea, with his brother
and then later his son designated as heir to, and vanguard of, the
revolutionary tradition. And he originated a quasi-religious
philosophy, juche-thought. Juche's twenty million avowed
adherents--the entire populace of his country--had been taught that
the destiny and salvation of the Korean people, who had been
partitioned between two separate and mutually hostile states through
the settlements of World War II, would lie in an eventual
reunification beneath an independent, socialist government--that is
to say, Kim's own government, directed by Kim's own family.
