Kim Jong-il: “The people must be hungry. When the people are full, they will make greater demands from us. You should feed them just enough to prevent them from dying. They will follow us better if they are hungry. This is because when the people are full, they think of other things (democracy).”
(Remarks made during the Arduous March when people were starving to death one after another) “”When the people decrease, they do not dry up. “As long as there is land, water, and I, the people will multiply again.”
“It is convenient for me to quickly eliminate the sick and laborless people. As long as we have a tightly united military and 3 million party members, our republic will be strong no matter what happens” (Kim Jong-il’s chef, Kenji Fujimoto’s testimony).
Kim Jong-un “Look at this.” My father has an iron rule. People think of other things when their stomachs are full. If you think about what to eat the next day every day, you won’t be able to think about anything else. When my stomach is full, my head is filled with empty air and I try to think of ways to imitate the South Korean wind. We will soon be stained by the yellow wind of capitalism. Then, you will be reduced to a sloppy traitor who betrays socialism. People need to be hungry. Joseon also had a very large population.””
This is an intentional starvation by the Kim family to strengthen their power base. Kim Jong-il himself said, ‘People must be hungry so that they don’t think about other things (civil revolution, democracy, freedom, etc.).’ (For reference, it is common sense that has existed since ancient Rome that citizens must be able to live in abundance so that they do not develop resistance to dictatorship.) In front of Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il said, “”If the people are full, they will make bigger demands from us. We must feed them only enough so that they do not die.” That’s about it. The market was also created after stubborn resistance from residents, and although there are people who do not starve in the aftermath of marketization, suppression of market activities has been intensifying since 2020. They prevent rice from being displayed in the market, and they also interfere with the transportation of trucks called ‘servi trucks’. Thanks to this, along with the crackdown on ‘smuggling’ in the name of Corona, it is said that people are starving again one after another.
Even something like this happened during Kim Il-sung’s time.
In 1977, Kim Il-sung met East German leader Erich Honecker and said, “As the standard of living increases, the people become ideologically lazier and their actions become more distracted.” In fact, during the Arduous March, when a rumor spread in North Korea about a pastor who had achieved a good harvest in three years using the farming methods he taught, the pastor was suddenly kicked out by order of the central government. Lee Min-bok, a researcher from the North Korean Academy of Agricultural Sciences, discovered that individual farms were 500-700% more efficient than collective farms and sent the first letter to Kim Il-sung. It is said that there was a time when they were accused of being reactionaries. Even in the policy issued by the central government to the Socialist Patriotic Youth League in late March 2024, there is a passage criticizing North Korean youth, saying, “Young people who should be armed with socialist beliefs and overflowing with loyalty to the party and the country are only interested in personal economic stability and making money.”