Michael Batson

Korea is two lands with a penchant for the greatest choreographed spectacles on Earth, big industries and the world’s largest weddings, all divided by the world’s most heavily fortified military zone and one of only two last vestiges of the Cold War.

The Korean people appear polar opposites divided politically, militarily and ideologically between north and south but they’re much closer than they think, culturally aligned and both sharing a propensity for cults of personality.

The Democratic Republic of North Korea (DPRK) is one of the world’s most secretive and internationally isolated states. Today barely 1,500 people a year visit North Korea. Only special guided trips, arranged for tourists are permitted by Pyongyang. Travelers are accompanied by official guides, only permitted in certain areas, and can be asked to delete "objectionable" photos from their digital cameras.

From its artificial creation after World War Two following division of the Korean peninsula along a line drawn arbitrarily by the US military, the DPRK has been ruled militarily by the Kim family with their cult-of-personality and its gulags (Amnesty International estimates some 200,000 people sit in various detention facilities there).

Until the 1980s, the South was dominated by brutal military rule, corruption, and rabid anti-communism, a trait shared with its captains of industry, and religion, such as the Unification Church, or the Moonies.

From the time of the generals to the present, and beyond, the South has witnessed phenomenal economic transformation, unprecedented in human history. Not for nothing is Seoul referred to as the “Han River miracle”.

In the North economically by comparison, there is widespread deprivation, comparative poverty, and at times, famine. The World Food Programme estimates a third of the population will go hungry in 2010 without emergency aid.

The North trumpets state-sponsored cult of personality around the “Great Leader” the late Kim Il-sung, still revered but never surpassed doubtless to their chagrin by his protégés, his son and the current DPKR leader, Kim Jong-il, and in turn his son and soon-to-be successor, Kim Jong-un. The country’s landscape is dominated by some 25,000 statues of the Great Leader, his portrait dominates every public institution and most homes and songs are sung across the nation praising his achievements, but of his off-spring, well, they pale by comparison.

Meanwhile in the South, there are the giant industrial conglomerates, the chaebol, such as Samsung, Hyundai and the like, family run industrial behemoths that drive South Korea’s export dominated economy. The running of these powerhouses is passed down from father to son, or, in some cases like that of Samsung, the daughter. The generals built the South’s economy on a policy of the state backing private economic winners.

The North meanwhile has very little in the way of industry, there being even less in the way of electricity to run a modern economy.

So while in the North, political and industrial control is state-controlled and centralised, in the South it’s de-centralised to a point and privatised but dominates the lives of the country’s citizens no less. Blind adherence by employees to the company in the South is everything, as loyalty to the Great Leader is demanded in the North, or subservience in the case of the Unification Church’s acolytes.

University graduates compete aggressively to gain entry to positions within the big companies, passing excruciating examinations to secure jobs in what is a highly competitive society anyway, a lifelong process which begins with which high school and university students attend.

As for exotic religion, Christianity took hold in Korea in a way that it did not in Japan or China.  In 1945, barely two percent were Catholics but now about 25 percent of the population in South Korea, with most growth since 1970, and has risen in alignment with the growth of the middle-class where most adherents reside.

For his part, Reverend Sun Myung Moon ran a sect called the Israel Church and was imprisoned for fornication and adultery during 1948-49. Moon, who says he was 15 when Jesus Christ called upon him to carry out his unfinished work, has courted controversy and criticism since founding the Unification Church in Seoul in 1954.

Moon was born in 1920 in northern Korea and named Yong Myung Moon,  one of 13 children, his name later changed to Sun Myung Moon. Moon says that he is the Messiah and the second coming of Christ, claims which are generally believed by Unification Church members, much like the widespread faith North Koreans have in their “Great Leader”, and his successors.

Moon's main teachings are contained in his book ‘Divine Principle’. He is referred to by church members as Moon Father among other titles, and his wife as Mother Moon.

Polar opposite from the ideology found in the North, Moon founded in 1980 the anti-communist organization Causa International, the Confederation of the Associations for the Unification of the Societies of the Americas (which is also Spanish for "cause."), which amongst other activities promoted Contra, or anti-Sandinista activities on behalf of the Reagan Administration.

In October, the Moonies staged a nuptial spectacular. The ceremony was broadcast live online and by satellite television to 194 countries. The couples threw up their hands and cheered "Hurrah!" in unison. The church apparently did not schedule the ceremony for the novelty of the 10.10.10 dateline.

Critics say the mass weddings prove the church brainwashes its followers. They are said routinely to let Moon pick their spouses in the belief that he has divine insight and many meet their spouses for the first time at the mass weddings.

Moon held his first mass wedding in the early 1960s, arranging the marriages of 24 couples himself and renewing the vows of 12 married couples. Over the next two decades, they grew in scale and involved followers from Japan, Europe, Africa, Latin America, the US and elsewhere.
In 1982, Moon moved his spectacle off-shore with a mass wedding at Madison Square Garden in New York, the first held outside South Korea, which drew tens of thousands of participants – and protesters.

The second generation Kim is often viewed as a comical character in the foreign media, and has been parodied in film. Life in North Korea is viewed abroad in Orwellian terms, oppressive in nature, savage against dissent, and widely seen as having brainwashed its population into accepting an all-enveloping cult-of-personality around the Kim family.

Until recently, Kim, the third and youngest son of Kim Jong-il, North Korea’s current leader, was all but unknown, both to the outside world and inside his secretive homeland. But with his ailing father, Kim Jong-il, who is believed to have suffered a stroke in 2008 and who now walks with a pronounced limp, desperate to ensure that a third generation of the Kim family succeeds him, the Swiss-educated Kim Jong-un, has risen rapidly in North Korea's hierarchy. Kim stood alongside his father as they reviewed a huge military parade comprising massed ranks of goose-stepping in the capital Pyongyang held to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the founding of the ruling Workers Party of Korea.

Last month, he was appointed as a 4-star general, despite having no military experience; ironic in a country where compulsory military service for conscripts runs to an astonishing seven years, and as vice-chairman of the Workers Party's central military commission. He looks likely to succeed his father as Supreme leader of North Korea, Chairman of the National Defense Commission, General Secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea, and as Supreme Commander of the Korean People's Army.

Despite Kim Jong-un's lack of experience in government, his succession seems to have been approved by China, North Korea's only true ally, which fears instability in the DPRK will lead to a flood of refugees across its borders. The younger Kim's appearance in front of thousands of goose-stepping soldiers and crowds of cheering civilians came in mid-October two days after Yang Hyong-sop, a senior Workers Party official, appeared to confirm that he would be the secretive state's next leader.

Their great feats accepted without question domestically, reach the farcical overseas.

In 2004, it is alleged that the first time Kim Jong-il played a round of golf on the country’s only golf course, he shot 38-under par, including 5 hole-in-ones, a feat widely reported by the government controlled media. He routinely shoots 3 or 4 hole-in-ones every time out.

Recently, he has supposedly taken to offering his “expertise” to other matters, personally provided "on-site guidance" during the construction of a huge new wing at Okryugwan (The Jade Stream Pavilion), the most famous restaurant in the country, at least according to the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

Moon courts controversy and has also established a dynastic reign. In 1971, he moved to the United States. He openly supported Richard Nixon during Watergate. In the late 1970s, the church was subject to a US Congressional investigation, the Fraser Commission, which concluded the church was a vehicle for Korean intelligence activities abroad. He was also accused of financial corruption, armaments manufacture, and through the church-owned Tongil Group has business interests in, among other things, pharmaceuticals, publishing and real estate.

It is reported that former US President George H W Bush accepted millions of dollars from Moon's Women’s Federation for World Peace to speak on Moon's behalf around the world.

In 1994 the New York Times reported about Moon that, "outside investigators and onetime insiders … give a picture of a theocratic powerhouse that is pouring foreign fortunes into conservative causes in the United States. Reverend Moon has also made controversial statements on Jews and the Holocaust and, homosexuality.

Like the Kims, Moon has his own dynastic lineage mapped out. Like Kim he has sidestepped primogeniture. After his eldest son eveloped long-term problems with substance abuse, infidelity, and violence; and the second-eldest died in 1984, Hyun Jin Moon - the next oldest living son, a Princeton graduate - is widely expected to become Moon's successor

The Koreas; a brief history since 1945:

The DPRK was proclaimed on 9 September 1948, three weeks after the Republic of Korea was formed in Seoul. In the South, the US installed the brutally corrupt Syngman Rhee as ruler. The only credentials that America sought to establish for the prospective masters of South Korea were their hostility to communism and willingness to do business with the Americans.

In the North, Kim Il-Sung set up a people’s republic with early Russian support. Thereafter Stalin showed little interest. Neither regime was democratic by western standards. The North instigated agrarian reform, promoted education and women’s rights. The South did none of these and life in both was hard.

US military rule in Korea (1945-48) was misguided, ignoring widespread Korean demands to overhaul colonial legacies. While the Russians seemed happy to turn Korea over to the Koreans, the Americans, however, were not. Korea thus heralded policies later followed throughout the world, where Americans came to defend any group calling itself anti-communist, because the alternative was thought to be worse.

UN intervention in Korea was a fluke of history, the then 58-members being largely US-allied. Militarily, the Korean War largely resembled trench warfare on the Somme. Civilian casualties were appalling, over two million were killed. Douglas MacArthur ordered a wasteland (he wanted to use atomic bombs), so US bombers destroyed every structure in the North, including irrigation dams, ruining harvests causing famine.

The tragedy was the war solved nothing, only the status quo ante was restored. Today the tensions and the problems remain.

When Rhee’s excesses became too much for even the US, he fiddled every “election” and murdered opponents by the thousands, he was spirited into exile by the CIA in 1960. After a brief interlude of democracy, the military took over, ruling in a series of brutal regimes until 1987, when elections were held. While North Korea is an economic basket case, the South has gone from impoverishment after the ceasefire in 1953, to the fourth-largest economy in Asia and the world’s eleventh-largest by 2011.