The Screen

would have to run over to the neighbor's house. The kids found solace in Christianity and attended church every Sunday. The family also prized education, and around the turn of the century, Kim Il Sung's father, then just a small boy, enrolled in class at a modest one room schoolhouse topped with a thatched roof. The young Kim was the class monitor, something of a teacher's pet. His lecturer, however, was a

notorious drunk. Each day, the teacher held court in front of class, swaying back and forth as he drained the bottles of wine. He'd frequently finished the glass and point at the young Kim, sending him to fetch more. Kimil Song's father meekly obliged, but one day after class, the young boy spied his teacher walking down the street. The man could barely stand, his legs wobbling as he tried

to maintain balance. Suddenly, the teacher swayed forward, his legs unable to keep up, and he tumbled base first into a muddy ditch. The boy blushed an embarrassment. A few days later, as the young Kim sat in class, the teacher point it in his direction and asked him to make the familiar trip for wine. The customary filial piety extended to teachers after all. Kim collected his instructor's money

and slipped out for the market. But Kim couldn't shake the shameful image of his drunken teacher lying on the ground, face soaked in mud, and then an idea. He gripped his teacher's bottle and heaved it against the rock. Shards of glass burst over the dirt. The boy returned to class, broken bottle in hand, clothing stained with wine, gasping for air, and told the teacher an elaborate story about how he

had been chased by a tiger. He had run for his life and tripped, shattering the bottle who the teacher listened with horror. This time, he turned red and shame. Later that day, the young Kim returned home and told his father what had happened. The family elder listened to his son's story and nodded in pride. Then he leaned forward and said something that would cement itself into North Korean lore. If pupils peep into their teacher's private life frequently,

they lose their awe of him. The teacher must give his pupils a firm belief that their teacher neither eats nor urinates. Only then can he maintain his authority at school. So teachers should set up a screen and live behind it. Set up a screen and live behind it. Years later, the young Kim would share that advice with his own son, Kim il Sung, the future Supreme Leader, would find the anecdote so stirring, so wise, that he had included in

his official memoirs. Its lessons would become central to his philosophy on life and leadership. Today, the story of the teacher still serves as a model for the Kim family. If an authority wants to maintain his grip on power, his divine god given right to rule over others, then he must find a way to hide all faults. Anyone who compromises or desecrates that carefully calibrated image, whether it's a journalist or a movie made by Sony or even your own son, is threatening to do more than merely

damage a man's ego. They challenge the very structure, the very foundation of authority itself. The screen, in other words, must be protected at all costs. I'm eaten Lee, and in this episode we explore the extreme lengths the North Korean regime will go to to protect its image, and how the country's obsession with that very image led not only to its downfall but to Kim Jong nams as well. But what the North Korean regime did is they really emphasized Korean as. They said, we are going to be

the most Korean of the two Koreas. These people would be publicly executed and their families sent to labor in central political detention facilities. Many North Korean defectors say the leadership, it's like the sun. You don't want to get too close because you're room. You don't want to get too far because you'll be freezing. And he was too close

and was scorched by it. This is big brother after the Tokyo Disneyland incident, pundits and went wild with speculation Kim Jong Nam, who was being groomed to inherit North Korea's communist dynasty, was unceremoniously kicked out of Japan yesterday after he tried to sneak into the country with his family for a trip to Tokyo Disneyland. It was two

thousand and one. This was one of the first times a member of North Korea's royal family had been seen outside the country in public Journalists flocked to Tokyo and analysts poured over images, searching for hidden meaning in everything from Kim Jong Nam's goal to wristwatch to his trendy around glasses. Years later, analysts would suggest that Kim Jong Nam was kicked out of North Korea and sent to the gambling mecca of Macau all because of the Tokyo

Disneyland incident. It was, after all, an international embarrassment. Here was the son of the world's most famous living communist dictator trying to cross international borders to visit what is probably the most unabashedly capitalist organization on the planet. But many experts we interviewed, including the North Korea watcher Michael Madden, I think these pundits are wrong. You know, you know,

it's an easier narrative. I think for some people to say that Kim jong nam was the successor and because he happened to want to go to Tokyo Disney Resort with his family in two thousand one, well, lo and behold he got passed over for succession. Then that's just not true. Why. Well, because the Kims are frankly hypocrites. The royal family has been visiting disney resorts for decades. Years before the incident, Kim Jong un and his mother

went to Tokyo to ride those same teacups. Nor was Kim jong nam exiled for using a fake Dominican passport. Kim Jong un and his immediate family routinely use fake Brazilian passports to travel abroad all the time, so did the rest of a family. Kim Jong Il wasn't angry that his son went to Japan or that he wanted to go to Disney. He was angry that his son got caught. Kim Jong Il was obsessed with the family's privacy. He sincerely felt that his legitimacy depended on maintaining the

so called screen. In fact, most North Koreans didn't even know that dear Leader had children at all. The fact that Kim jong Nam attracted so much attention to himself did more than puncture the all powerful, very private world of Kim Jong Il. It had broken precedent. Kim children historically were neither seen nor heard, but Kim jong Nam had drawn attention to himself and had essentially snubbed the leader. This put the entire system at risk, and that's because

the Kim regime controls the flow of information. Every radio, every television must be registered with the police and can only pick up domestics state sponsored channels. Loudspeakers are sprinkled across cities and towns, playing patriotic Kim's every morning and relaying public service announcements. Of course, activists outside of the

country try to break through this wall of propaganda. That's why the thirty parallel the line separating North and South Korea see some of the most intense radio jamming activity in the world. In two thousand one, as news agencies buzzed about Kim Jong Nam's deportation, Kim Jong Il could do little more than cross his fingers and hope this barricade of propaganda would hold. In other words, the Tokyo Disneyland incident created a lot of unnecessary stress for Kim

Jong NAMA's father. But was that the reason he was passed over as successor? Was that why he was kicked out of the country. Maybe, But there's another theory, because a few years earlier, the people who had raised Kim jong nam had done the unthinkable, and then he began having ideas that not only threatened the stability of the regime, it threatened the life of his father. In the early nineteen nineties, just as Kim jong Nam was gaining prominence

in the regime, Residence Number fifteen was in turmoil. All over. Members of Cheng Nam's family were defecting at an alarming rate. The exodus started in two when Kim's cousin I Hanyon had been studying in Switzerland. One day, the cousin made a fateful call to the South Korean embassy and asked for asylum. According to Dr Sung Yun Lee, he would

do everything to hide from the game. This person changed his name, underwent cosmetic surgery so that he would not be recognized by North Korean spies and the North Korean state. Back in Kiongyang, news of ease defection became a closely guarded secret. A member of the royal family defecting to the South. It was an embarrassing disgrace, the kind that could stay Kim Jong Il's reputation. The problem was he

did not keep a low profile. By the nineties, he was struggling to make money, so he began leaking news to the press, earning an income by telling stories about the regime. He often talked about Kim Jong Nam's mother, who had been exiled to Russia. He was also making regular calls to his mother, Kim Jong Nam's aunt, and after just two months of conversations, he convinced her to defect as well. And then sometime in the mid ninety nineties, this nephew of Kim Jong wrote an expose a book

on the royal family, which embarrassed Kim Jong. He published a tell all book about life behind the palace walls, a book you should know that became the source for a lot of palace intrigue you've heard in this podcast. But despite changing his name and his appearance, he could not escape the regime's wrath. He was standing outside his home when gunshots reign. He was assassinated by North Korean agents in Seoul, just one day before Kim Jong his birthday,

which is a major national holiday. News of his murder shocked everybody who had once lived in Residence Number fifteen. He's mother, who had defected while visiting Geneva a year earlier, went into hiding in the European countryside. Like her son, she too would write a book that embarrassed the regime. In it, she compared palace life to jail. Even if there were plenty of books and I could take twelve baths a day and eat all kinds of delicacies, the

residents was a prison to me. To this day, nobody knows where she is or if she's dead or alive. But the most shocking defection was the escape of Kim Jong Nam's childhood playmate Inamo. She fled the country and in a great risk to her own life, she too wrote a memoir detailing the ins and outs of palace life. I was terrified of being found and taken back to North Korea, of being taken home in the bag. I would have preferred to be killed on the spot rather

than suffer alife in the minds or the countryside. By the countryside, she means a prison camp. As far as we know, Ena Walk remains in hiding, probably somewhere in France. Even sleuthing journalists like Na Fifield have had trouble reaching her. I was not able to speak with Na Mock. She declined to talk to me. I did speak to her husband several times, who said to me, you know, she fears for her life. Her half or her cousin, who

was really like her brother, has been assassinated. Her own brother had been assassinated in South Korea, so she did not see any benefit to speaking about the North Korean regime in public. As Ena Walk put in her last public interview, being exposed means death to our family way, and she's right. In North Korea, having a single defector in your family can leave a deadly stain one your family cannot escape, and by the late nineties, Kim Jong

Nam had at least three. If you do something that's wrong, your entire family will also pay the price. That's Dr Sandra Fahey, I'm an associate professor at Carlton University. She's been studying North Korea's human rights abuses for decades, and as she explains, it punishes and prevents defectors in a unique way. North Korea operates something that others produous love abuse. They will take the fact that you care for others

and they will use that against you. So you care for your family, and that is a great way to control what you do. So you might want to leave North Korea, but you can't do that because if you do, your freedom comes at the cost of the life sometimes of others. In other words, if you defect, your loved ones will get sent to a prison camp. It will also tarnish your entire bloodline. Thanks to a cast system

invented by Kim Il sung. This houngboon system I translated to mean like political ingredients, as if your politics is in your DNA and it's something that you inherit. This Houngboon is a system of classification. Rather than separating people by economic class, it separates citizens by their loyalty to the regime, and it's treated as natural as if it's ingrained in your DNA. This DNA cannot be altered, no

amount of bribing, no amount of connections. Today, a computer database tracks every single person in North Korea, classifying them into fifty one different categories which determine whether they are loyal, wavering, or hostile. You're a place within this hungboun determines everything.

This sung bun system determines what type of job you can get, what individuals you can marry, where you can live, and the worst part is people can do little to change their Basically, if your family had any connections with the South Koreans um or with the Japanese the Americans during the Korean War, then you are considered a collaborator, a trader, suspicious and of course your children would inherit this classification too. Today, most North Koreans live in the

terrifying middle zone. Classified as wavering, who are considered hostile are sent straight to re education camps or to prison camps. Kim jong Nam was lucky. He was born to the strongest hungband possible. But after three close family members, especially those who had raised him as a child, had defected, his hungband status was permanently marked by an asterisk if loyalty was ingrained in DNA. What did that say about Kim Jong Nam? If his family could not be trusted.

Could anybody trust the prince himself? It appears that in the upper echelons of North Korean society the answer was no. I've been trying. I've been trying to get this out

for years. That again is Michael Madden, the North Korea Watcher, and he claims that in the early two thousand's rumor spread that somebody in the regime was out to get Kim Jong nams first assassination plot against Kim Jong nab the first credible threat on his life was in two thousand four, okay, And so that basically tells us that there were other North Korean elites that were a threat. But here's the question. Who were these elites trying to kill Kim Jong nam? And why? Was it because his

trip to Disneyland had jeopardized the so called screen? Was it because of his family's history of defecting, or was there another reason one that might put the whole regime at risk. Kiml Song never intended it to be this way, at least not in the beginning. There was never supposed to be a cast system in North Korea. The DPRK, after all, was supposed to be a class free utopia. And there was a reason communism was such an attractive

option to Koreans in the early nine hundreds. For centuries, the peninsula was arguably the most class divided region on the planet. The entire society was divided into hereditary ranks, the land owning aristocrats or young bun on top, the white collar bureaucrats or tongueing in the middle, the peasants and so called commoners or tongue men, and chung men

near the bottom. And below all that the pick jung, the untouchables thrust into this hierarchy where the Doobe people stuck in what was the world's longest running system of chattel slavery in Korea, slavery acid for more than one thousand, five hundred uninterrupted years. By its height in the sixteen hundreds, slaves were estimated to make up thirty percent of the peninsula's population. In Slavery was legally abolished and the class

system in eighteen nine, but culturally little changed. So you can probably understand why in the early twentieth century the promise of a classless communist society held such a lure. These socialist sympathies were only heightened by a rising tide of nationalism. By the time Cameo Song came around, the Korean Peninsula had been colonized and brutalized by Japanese settlers for decades leading up to World War Two. The Japanese occupation still stirs resentment in both the North and south.

The Japanese were horrific to Koreans. That again is Dr Benjamin Young. They had made Koreans learn their non native language, They made them adopt Japanese name, They made them basically kind of get rid of their Korean nous. Koreans were forced to worship at Shinto shrines and watched helplessly as the Japanese destroyed thousands of cultural artifacts and historical documents. Native trees and plants were leveled to make room for non native species. The Royal Palace In's home, which had

been erected in the thirteen hundreds, was partially destroyed. The human cost was jarring. Nearly a million Koreans were sent to Japan and forced into labor. Resistors were executed back home. Taxas skyrocketed, forcing Korean landowners to give up ancestral land. Japanese settlers swooped in and by the nineteen thirties controlled majority of the country's farmland. Millions of Koreans would be denied basic rights from rations to meal delivery simply because

they had the wrong names. Untold numbers would starve. During World War Two, the Imperial Japanese Army would force up to four hundred thousand Korean girls and women into sex slavery as so called comfort women. In nineteen when Kimio Song was just six years old, he saw the brutality of the Japanese occupation first hand. His father had been arrested and imprisoned for joining a pro Korean organization. On the day of his father's release, the young Kim waited

anxiously outside the prison. His father emerged from the seal gates, his body covered in wounds and bruises. He could barely walk. According to Chimio Sung's official memoirs, his father vowed to take revenge. The enemy must be made to pay for our blood, even if we must die. Kimilsung's father wouldn't be the first or last family member abused in prison. In one of Kimil Song's uncles joined three men and

ambushed a Japanese police officer, shooting and killing him. After the murder, the men ran to a family friend in desperation for a place to hide. The friend graciously offered the fugitives a place to lie low as the Japanese searched, but it didn't take much time before the authority showed up at the door and put the assailants in handcuffs. The men had been duped. The family friend, it turns out,

was an informant, a secret agent for the Japanese. As a result, Chimiel Sung's uncle would die in prison at the age of thirty one. The memory of that one man's betrayal would bake into a young Chimiel Sung's consciousness, and the resulting paranoia, the idea that nobody, not even your closest friends, could ever be trusted, would become a hallmark of the North Korean state. Chimiel Song put it

this way. Even now, I say that it is good to believe in people, but that it is mistaken to harbor illusions about them, and that would become the other central part of the Kim family, so called screen. Chimiel Song realized that good pr was not enough. He would have to exterminate every untrustworthy element of society. From root to branch, even if that meant his own close friends and family in Kim jong Nam was rising through the

ranks of the North Korean regime. Many of his family members had defected to Europe and South Korea, but he stayed home, ever loyal to his father. And then the rains came. The downpour was relentless. One area saw eighteen inches of rain in a single day, the equivalent of three Hurricane Katrina's. Coal mines flooded, water crushed hydro electric plants. Flooding wiped out nearly a million acres of farmland, causing fifteen billion dollars in damage nearly two million tons of

grain gone. The next year, the rains fell again, and the year after that, like a cruel joke, there was a hellish drought. The result famine mass famine. The nineties exacerbated UH many of these chronic instability issues. Around six people die, Others put the number as high as two million people or of the population. By the late nineties, North Korea plunged into an epic humanitarian crisis. By the famine's peak, the country's gross national product would be cut

almost in half. This was not the North Korea Kim Jong Nam's grandfather had imagined decades earlier. Kim Il sung had built up North Korea by riding on a deep resentment of the Japanese and a rising tide of nationalism. He painted his Korea as the real Korea. But what the North Korean regime did is they really emphasized Korean as. They said, we are going to actually be the legitimate Korean state. We are going to be the most Korean of the two Koreas. It helped that Kim Il sung

was a bona fide folk hero Korean Davy Crockett. He was born in poverty, a humble church organist who bravely fought the Japanese and climbed the ranks to become one of the fiercest fighters in the rebellion. And the truth is it made Kim Il sung immediately popular. Better Yet, Kim, being a good communist, promised to give the oppressed Korean underclass land. At the time of his installment, low class peasants made up sev of North Korea's population. He gave

them land in just three weeks. The reform was one of the most abrupt surges of upward mobility in human history, health care and schooling became free, and universal literacy practically vanished. A law upholding the quote triple subordination of women was repealed, allowing people to marry outside their traditional class. The centrally planned economy. It worked for quite a long period of

time in North Korea. When the German American journalists Bernard Krisher visited North Korea, he was shocked to find well supported citizens living lives of happy simplicity. He described it as quote one big kibbutz. This is a period that was looked upon quite finally by many North Koreans because they had their three bowls of rice a day, and they had a roof to live under. After decades of oppression from a foreign power, many North Koreans had experienced

a genuine uplift. The economy was roaring too. In um the nineteen sixties, you could say that North Korea's economic output was ahead of South Korea. North Korea's standard of living would beat South Korea and China for decades. North Korea's gross national product would continue to wallop South Korea until the country used twice as much energy per capita in the South. It's citizens even consumed more calories per

day than those in the South. It helped that North Korea sat on a pile of natural resources gold, tungsten, iron, and anthra site It's heavy industry could build top of the line hydroelectric and manufacturing plants. If you could look past the cartoonish propaganda and psychotically sycophantic leader worship, North Korea looked like one of the fastest, growing, most advanced countries in East Asia. But Kim Il sung, so called screen,

could only conceal so much a lot. This was also, you know, quite shallow in terms of North Korea's self reliance and Koreans because they were receiving huge amounts of developmental aid from the Soviet Union into a lesser extent, China. North Korea's success was bankrolled by two of the world's largest communist superpowers, and that created issues because in the late nineteen fifties, the USSR and China began quarreling about how to move communism forward. Kemel sung did not want

to be stuck between the two. North Korea had a painful history of colonization, and he didn't want to be pushed around by anybody, so he made a decision. He laid out a new political philosophy, a hodgepodge of Marxism, Latinism, Confucianism, Stalinism, and nationalism that he believed would help North Korea maintain its independence. It was called to It's impossible to overstate just how important Toute was and is to North Korea's approach to well everything. Some say it's a really central

to how North Korea orient itself in the world. It's also impossible to overstate how this ideology would cripple the country. Touche meant independence in all matters, political, economic, and cultural, and that meant North Korea wouldn't depend on Russia or China for protection. To Che compelled Chemio Sung to institute a military first policy, prompting the state to pour endless amounts of money into its military at the expense of

every other institution. Funds that once bolstered the Workers Party social programs are feeding and housing people were redirected into defense. North Korea would eventually allocate an obscene of its GDP into its military. For comparison, the US bends three point seven percent. The regime began blowing funds on parades, palaces,

and statues, and then Mr teared down this roar. The Berlin Wall fell, and so too did any financial support North Korea received from the Soviets, and North Korea got a taste of what self reliance was really like, and it didn't go down easily. Imports and exports dropped dramatically. The country's oil reserves plummeted, its ability to make steel practically vanished, the country's one strong chemical industry nearly collapsed, Factories closed, farmland laid to waste, and then when the

rains came, any relics of communism were essentially destroyed. Socialism became more rhetoric and a slogan rather than the official practices. Underground black market started to spring up in North Korea. Years later, the government would remove any mention of communism from its constitution to check and military first became the new official guiding principles. And Kim Jong Nam was stuck in the middle of all of it. He was born during and had heard about North Korea's Golden Age, a

time of growth and prosperity. But now in his twenties, just as he was allowed to explore beyond the walls of his palace prison, he was watching his country at its lowest point. He watched as North Korea starved to death, its industries crumbling, It's peaceful farming co ops breaking down. To Kim jong Nam, it was obvious the system was outdated, broken, defunct, and he couldn't stomach it. Kim jong Nam was tasked with punishing people who were desperately trying to flee the

country in search of food. According to Michael Madden, the job required Kim jong Nam to hand pick people for execution. These people would be publicly executed and their families sent to labor and central political detention facilities, and so Kim jong Nam being a member of the family was a part of that. But that kind of ruthlessness, that kind of brutality just wasn't in Kim jong Nam's dn A. He did not. He just did not have the personality or temperament to do that kind of stuff. I think

it kind of broke his heart. If he had political aspirations before, they just sort of surrendered. The kind of died with him having to go through that. But when Kim jong Nam looked around his own country, he saw leaders more interested in feeding his dad's personality cult than feeding the people. Kim jong nam knew things could be different. China had opened up its economy, so had Vietnam, and both were enjoying rapid growth. So Kim jong nam approached

his father with a plan. Maybe it was time to reconsider che to reinspect the country's military first policy. Maybe it was time to open up North Korea. In other words, he was suggesting that his father lift the screen. It's unclear what exactly happened next. According to Hong Kong based weekly, Kim jong nam had been inspired by the reforms he had read about in other communist countries. At a forum, he spelled it out plainly. My father has asked me

to reorganize the state economy somewhat. I think there's no other way to revive the economy than Chinese style reform and opening. We should first set up corporations and after that set up subsidiaries under them. If we bring about such development, would it not lead to capitalism. It's unclear how his father, Kim jong il, reacted to this suggestion,

but it appears he responded coldly. Years later, Kim jong nam told a Japanese journalist, I grew further apart from my father because SCI insisted on reform and market opening and was eventually viewed with suspicion. In fact, Kim Jong ill began to regret sending his firstborn son to Switzerland. He believed it had contaminated Kim Jong Nam's mind. And when he felt that I turned into a capitalist after living abroad for years, he shortened the overseas education of

my brothers and sister. And that raises new questions. Maybe Kim jong Nam wasn't passed over for the successorship because he was caught trying to go to an amusement park, or even because his close family had skipped town and spilled family secrets. Was he passed over and that because he wanted to open up the country. The basic fact is that if North Korea ever took Kim Jong Nam's advice to truly open up, regular North Koreans would see life outside their her make kingdom and realize just how

oppressed they really are. If the Kim family ever dropped the screen, the Korean people would discover that they've been fed lies. The economy might rebound, but Kim Jong Il's head it would be on a pike. In that case, Kim Jong Nam didn't just have a bad idea. He was a threat to the stability of the entire regime. So father and son made an agreement. Told his father told him, look, if you can get married, find a wife here in North Korea, then you can leave the country.

But when you leave the country, you're going to be loyal to me, and you're going to do favors for me. You're still going to work for me. Okay, and Kim jong Nam found a home in Macao, and and that's how Kim jong Nam ended up where he did in Macau with his family. It's because he made an agreement with his father. But that doesn't mean Kim jong nam was powerless. It seems that his father did take up some of his ideas. The country normalized relations with thirteen

Western European countries. In two thousand one, Kim Jong il was quoted in a party newspaper apparently admitting that change was needed. Things are not what they used to be in the nineteen sixties, so no one should follow the way people used to do things in the past. More startling was in the fall of two thousand two, Kim Jong ille tried to court an office zone of northwest North Korea, near the border of China to establish an

economic zone where in North Korean's could practice capitalism. Were those ideas coming from Kim Jong Nam? There's no way to tell, but evidence suggests that although the young Prince was no longer living at home, he wasn't living in exile either. The question is what was he doing next? Time? On Big Brother, Kim Jong Nam strikes up a friendship with an unlikely character, laying his cards on the table

and his life on the line. Big Brother is a production of School of Humans and I Heart Radio and hosted by me even Le Lucas. Riley is our writer, co director and associate producer. Amelia Brock is our senior producer, co director and at A er. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, Else Crowley, and Jason English. Our fact checker is Aaron Blakemore. Music composed by Jason Todd Shannon and

Tune Weathers. Original score mixed by Vick Stafford, Audio editing by Jesse Nice Swanger Sound design and mixed by Harper W. Harris. Audio correction by Josh Fisher. Voice acting by Mark Chung, June Une, Mike Coscarelli, Daniel Kim, Sage, Kim Gray, Jennifer sun Bell, and Daniel's he Hung Kim. Special sound credit to Quama two of freesound dot org. Special thanks to Ryan Murdoch and Will Pearson. Sound license from the Ronald

Reagan Presidential Library and freesound dot org. If you're enjoying the podcast, help us get the word out by leaving a rating in your favorite podcast app. Until next time, I'm Eden Lee. School of Humans