The Genealogy of a Totalitarian Kingdom

Historian Aleks Shtromas identifies a key element in common between various regimes that commit mass atrocities, writing that such regimes often tote ideologies that declare “a possession of absolute and/or finite truth and wisdom.” Despite this commonality, many dictatorships have become synonymous with certain flavors of oppression that it specializes particularly well in - systematic rape, enslavement, genocide, mass starvation, death squads, torture, child soldiers.

Indeed, officially orchestrated acts of brutality reveal underlying parts of a regime’s core ideology: Stalin’s war against Ukrainian peasant culture was the end result of his utopian agricultural experiment to collectivize land; Hitler’s nationalist policy of Lebensraumfor German colonists could only become a reality with the elimination of the people who lived in Poland.

Not to be outdone, North Korea follows its own internal logic of madness with its policy of inter-generational collective punishment - known as yongoje- which dominates all aspects of North Korean life.

Any individual crime leads to immediate discrimination against the perpetrator’s entire family, especially the worst crime of all: lack of fealty to the Leader. For example, if any pictures of the Kim family encounter dust, if its corners or sections are worn or torn, or if the picture is discarded in an unceremonious manner, the perpetrator can be publicly beaten along with their mother, father, children, cousins, and grandparents.

For the DPRK, yongojeis a highly effective form of social control. Even those with little to lose endure unbelievable hardships for the sake of their family. Those who do escape the regime as defectors report that they harbor deep psychological guilt over those left behind, burdened with the knowledge that their entire family will be sent to a concentration camp.

Although collective punishment is hardly unique, North Korea manages to stay ahead of the oppression curve by applying yongojeto its maximal conclusion. North Korea maintains an elaborate bureaucracy that keeps detailed records on family bloodlines and their respective transgressions against the state. In fact, the degree and number of transgressions constitute the framework of North Korea’s political classification system, dividing society into 51 sub-classes made up of three main groups: the core class, the wavering class, and the hostile class.

The majority of North Korea’s citizens are in either the wavering or the hostile class, while members of the core class, regardless of occupation, receive higher promotions, ideal housing, larger food rations and top medical services. One’s status in the classification system is entirely dependent on the family bloodline’s loyalty to the Kim regime, resulting in extensive genealogical research done by the state to determine if there are any unreliable traits in the family. If a incident is discovered, the perpetrator’s family will have the crime written in their record, shifting the entire family line into another class. In many cases, unearthed crimes relate to a distant family member’s innocuous relationship with South Korea, particularly during the Korean war.

Kong Dang Oh’s book, North Korea Through the Looking Glass, illustrates how even Jucheis subordinate to the blood-based class system:

“A former officer in the KPA (Korean People’s Army) relates how, by surreptitiously gaining access to his security file, he discovered that the reason he was unable to gain further promotions was that one of his father’s cousins, who was a government official in South Korea during the Korean war, was subsequently arrested and killed by the Communists... In his file, he was classified as a member of the hostile class, even though he had risen to a fairly responsible position in the military and considered himself a loyal North Korean.”

The DPRK’s blood-based class system has dark origins. Once the medical discovery of blood-types had been perverted by the Nazis, eugenics and blood superiority theories became very popular with Germany’s expansionist-minded ally, Japan. By the 1930s, Tokyo’s militarist government espoused a blood-based superiority doctrine over its colonies, including, most notably, the Korean peninsula. Imperial Japan was quick to promote policies of racial division between ethnic Koreans and Japanese based on blood as a means of social control, thus beginning the policy of closely monitoring blood type. [1]

Japan’s doctrine of blood-based difference remains an influence on the Korean peninsula to this day. [2] In the North, the Kim regime has managed to further deform an already perverse doctrine into something even more fundamentally backwards. However, to claim that these depraved policies were only (and are) synonymous acts of arbitrary violence and mass death does not allow us to distinguish between the variant kinds of totalitarianism and their causes. This is not an indecent exercise in comparative human suffering, but an investigation into the nature and historical marrow of these crimes.

To better understand how North Korea sees itself, how it has inherited and internalized its brand of oppression and how it functions, enables us to better formulate a resistance. North Korea’s citizens will not light up the skies like Egypt or Tunisia’s uprisings, because the KPA will have no compunctions about emptying chamber upon chamber of bullets to suppress a protest and downgrade generations of its own citizens to the hostile class. The unique depravity of the North’s policies of social control calls for a masterstroke plan of liberation that has yet to be seen in history.

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[1] Today, although often lost in the hateful rhetoric towards the United States, North Korea still passionately despises Japan because of its former occupation of the Korean peninsula. Some of the most grandiose myths about Kim II Sung are based on his supposed leadership of a small group of vastly outnumbered guerrilla warriors fighting the Japanese in occupied Manchuria.

[2] In the South, a more benign version of blood difference exists called hyeolaek-hyeong, the belief that your blood type determines your personality. The Western analogue would be astrological zodiac signs, save for the fact that the link between personality and blood is taken muchmoreseriouslyin South Korea. Japan, of course, continues their tradition of blood-typingas well.