Mick Hartley

Yesterday was the 96th birthday of the Great Leader, and a national holiday in North Korea.

It’s estimated that 40% of the national budget is spent on the glorification of the Kims, father and son. There’s the body itself, of course:

In June 1995, 11 months after his death, the Mt. Keumsoo Assembly Hall that was once used as his private office was renovated and transformed into the Mt. Keumsoo Memorial Palace to preserve his body permanently according to Kim Jong Il’s order.

A Russian biological research institute was contracted preserve the body, the same institute in charge of preserving Lenin’s body.

Kim Il Sung’s body became the 9th eternally-preserved corpse among the former socialist countries’ leaders, including Lenin (1924) and Stalin (1953) of the former U.S.S.R., Dimitrov (1949) of Bulgaria, Gottwald (1953) of former Czechoslovakia, Ho Chi Minh (1969) of Vietnam, Neto (1979) Angola, Burnham (1985) of Guyana and Mao Tse-tung (1976) of China.

The maintenance of the body as well as the process of mummification is painstaking. The body usually lays on an altar covered by a glass box, however it must be treated twice a week to with a coat of antiseptic on the face, hands and other exposed body parts, and soaked in a tub of embalming fluid two or three times a year. The cost of preserving the body is enormous.

Moscow News (Imperial Russia) published on July 7, 1995, said that “the corpse preservation project was completed by 7 Russian engineers, with expenses reaching a million dollars,” not to mention the cost of on-going maintenance.

Then there are the statues:

Not only is the approximate number of statues not exact, but because the cost also depends on the size and the materials used to manufacture each one, it is difficult to estimate the total value. Also, because the statues of Kim Il Sung are gold plated, it is rumored that several hundred tons of gold are needed to manufacture them.

A gold spray is used to coat the statues. Because the structure is made of bronze, it can corrode in the rain and wind. Therefore, every two years each figure is recoated with gold spray.

However, there is one part of the structure that is manufactured in solid gold. To keep the statue from being struck by lightening, there is a rod of gold inserted in the center. There is a story told of a man who extracted a gold rod from one of the revered commemorative statues of Kim Il Sung during the extreme food shortage in 1997 and sold it to China. His deed was discovered and it is said that half way through his trial, the man committed suicide by hanging himself.

The spray used to coat the statues is brought in from Germany at a very high cost. Because of this, it is said that the spray is only used on the statues of Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, and Kim Hyung Jik. Seen this way, from the cost of raw materials to the cost of management, the production expenses add up to an enormous sum of money that transcends imagination.

Also, according to the U.S. daily publication, Christian Science, management of the Kim father and son propaganda paraphernalia takes up 40% of North Korea’s national budget. The country’s most representative structure of idolization is the Mt. Keumsoo Memorial Palace, which enshrines the remains of Kim Il Sung. Its construction costed 890 million dollars. For the several million people that starved to death in North Korea in the mid-1990s, this money could have afforded 6 million tons of corn.

In addition to the Palace, other structures dedicated to the adoration of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il include all kinds of statues, a revolutionary ideology research institute, historical sites, old battle fields and local monuments, “eternal life towers”, slogan trees, slogans carved on natural rocks. The propagandistic symbols erected for idolization of the Kim’s family all together come to a total of approximately 140,000 structures.

[The picture is from this report of an 8-day visit to North Korea by Tan Wee Cheng from Singapore]