Free The Reluctant Communist by Charles Robert Jenkins, Jim Frederick Page B

a telephone pole outside.
    Like every other North Korean household, we were assigned a leader. I had too many leaders to count over forty years. As members of the North Korean Workers’ Party (which we usually just called “the Organization”), leaders were responsible for keeping an eye on our every move, making sure we behaved and that we lived according to “correct ideology.” Depending on where I was living and with whom, the leader (or leaders) would sometimes live in the same house as I, while at other times he would live in a house nearby. A leader’s contact with me was nearly constant, especially at the beginning, and even in later years, rarely a day went by that I didn’t see, talk to, get criticized by, or get into a fight with my leader. Leaders oversaw our propaganda indoctrination—the hours of forced study and memorization of Kim Il-sung’s teaching that we endured—and they administered the special self-criticism sessions we underwent whenever they believed that we had committed some sort of infraction, as well as the regularly scheduled self-criticism sessions held once a week.
    Self-criticism is a way of life in North Korea. Everybody has to do it, even the highest party members. Our sessions were once a week on Monday mornings. All through the week, we were supposed to keep a diary, where we wrote about the times we failed to live up to Kim Il-sung’s teachings. Perhaps we left the house one day without permission, or perhaps the front door broke because we had not tended to its upkeep well enough—both of those would be good entries for the diary. Then we used those diary entries for our criticism. There are variations to the selfcriticism session, but basically you stand at attention and confess all your failings to those superiors present. The weekly sessions, which we called “sum up,” were pretty formulaic, and once we got the hang of it, they were not that difficult, though they could get extremely stressful when a leader decided to prove a point and got in your face and yelled at you for hours on end. Even so, the key is to detach your mind from the experience as much as possible, to treat it as if none of the words that you are saying and none of the proceedings you are participating in have any meaning at all—which happens to be the truth.
    Usually, you started by citing a teaching of Kim Il-sung’s, something like: “Our Great Leader Kim Il-sung taught as follows. The first and foremost task of a revolutionary is to study. If the revolutionary fails to study properly, he will fail to successfully create the revolution.” Some of these teaching-recitations could go on for a few minutes, and you better not screw up even a single word or you’d have to start over or get in more trouble. After that, you would read your failings from your sum-up book. My self-criticism formula was almost always to admit to not being as diligent about studying as I should have been. There were a lot of Monday mornings when we realized we hadn’t kept our diaries, so we would scramble to remember things we had done wrong. Often we’d just invent them or copy them from previous weeks. Other times, we would do something we knew we weren’t supposed to, like steal some peaches, and we’d say, “That’s one for the sum-up book.” After reading all the things you did wrong, you’d express regret that your revolutionary ideology was not sufficiently honed or whatever to uphold Kim Il-sung’s teachings, and then you’d say you were sorry you let the party and Kim Il-sung down. And finally, you’d finish by listing all the ways through more committed thinking and conduct you were going to do better next time. Once a month, we had to submit a written confession, at least four pages long. And any time we did something the cadres considered serious, we could be called in for a special session.
    Leaders never operated independently, though. In North Korea, even the watchers were being watched. A