Pyongyang propaganda concedes hardship

DVDs and arts materials trickle steadily out of the North; a healthy market in books, magazines, and film exists among North Koreans in Japan, and make their way to the South.

Available are made-for-TV movies like one where two men in their 30s are leaving the Army, and looking for wives. They complain there's not enough to eat, but say that Kim is also suffering. In "People of Chagang Province" poor mountain folk, despite being hungry, build a hydroelectric plant.

Experts say that greater honesty may be designed as a safety valve for anger at conditions. Refugees from the North do report more unhappy whispering inside the closed regime. Frankness in art and film may help bind North Koreans more closely to their leader, by placing him in their imaginations, even as he dominates the overt propaganda of daily life.

"Without a new [propaganda] strategy, the leadership knows they can't sustain the system," says Haksoon Paik, a North Korea specialist at the Sejong Institute in Seoul. "They have come to the point where they must adjust to the environment, and new realities."

Yet after 50 years of socialist realism, and with a national ideology that demands radical devotion to Kim, there may be unintended consequences.

This is "a risky strategy," says Myers. "For all their claims to omniscience, dictators through history have benefited from the perception of ignorance about their country's problems. Many die-hard communists in Russia and China still believe Stalin and Mao were kept in the dark about devastating famines ... Kim Jong Il can no longer benefit from that kind of mind-set. This strategy has made the North Korean personality cult vulnerable as it has never been before."

To be sure, the US, often described as "strangling" Korea, gets the main propaganda blame for hunger (the US is actually the North's largest food donor). Also blamed are drought and floods, which have not caused famine in food-rich South Korea.

But the propaganda guns are also turning inward - on sleazy apparatchiks, or a general slackness and lack of revolutionary zeal. In this way, Kim is removed from responsibility for economic troubles. Yet as Myers points out, it also implies that the current Kim is not the all-knowing leader his father was.

"By claiming that military affairs leave Kim Jong Il little time to worry about the economy, that he himself frets at the country's inability to implement his father's legacy, North Korea's official media and culture are indirectly acknowledging that Kim Jong Il is not of his father's stature," Myers says.

"As a close North Korea watcher, I feel that it is Kim Jong Il and his core group who best understand the North," says Mr. Paik. "They are politicians, and they make political decisions within a rigid and unfavorable structure."

Circumstantial evidence suggests many North Koreans don't believe the propaganda. The idea that Kim eats gruel, apart from being discounted by a Russian diplomat who told of live seafood delivered to Kim's Moscow-bound train, seems hard for ordinary Koreans to believe when they see photos of the leader and his Panda-like paunch.

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