The Cleanest Race

by B. R. Myers

  The regime in Pyongyang is often accused of “brainwashing” its subjects, as if the former secretly believed something very different, and the latter were passive or even unwilling victims of indoctrination. Perhaps this misperception derives from the mistaken belief that the personality cult—which looks much harder to swallow when regarded in isolation—forms the basis of the official worldview. In fact, as we can see from the above summary, the personality cult proceeds from myths about the race and its history that cannot but exert a strong appeal on the North Korean masses. In his classic book The Denial of Death (1973), the social anthropologist Ernest Becker concluded that man’s fear of death and insignificance makes him look to his country for an “immortality project,” a myth that will make him feel “vital to the universe, immortal in some way.”9 The notion of every citizen’s sacred mission to reunite the pure race and move it to the center of the world stage does a very good job of filling the North Koreans’ need for significance, not least because everyone is given a role to play.

  As discussed in the preceding chapter, it was the Japanese who taught the Koreans to see themselves as part of a uniquely pure and virtuous race. All the Kim Il Sung regime did was to expel the Japanese from that race and transpose the familiar Japanese symbols into Korean ones—replacing the divine racial founder Jimmu with the homegrown Tan’gun, Mount Fuji with Mount Paektu, and so on. History books now treat the Tan’gun myth, including the story of his birth on Paektu, as fact. In 1993 the regime claimed to have excavated the great man’s tomb near Pyongyang.10 This is not the place to discuss whether Tan’gun really existed, or whether Korea’s history was as traumatic as all that. As Walker Connor pointed out, “it is seldom what is that is of political importance, but what people think is.”11 Much the same myths (sans the Kim cult, of course) are widely believed in the southern half of the peninsula too, despite the freedom of speech and information enjoyed there. The main difference is that North Korea regards the country’s history as a long foreshadowing to Kim Il Sung, much as Christians see everything before the birth of Jesus as a Vorgeschichte or pre-history.

  In the late 1940s, propaganda began celebrating Mount Paektu, hitherto known merely as Korea’s highest peak, as a sacred racial symbol à la Mount Fuji. South Korean veneration of Mount Paektu did not begin until decades later.

  Also unique to the DPRK is the effort to puff up Pyongyang’s historical importance at Seoul’s expense.12 The capital is second only to the snow-capped, lake-filled crater of Mount Paektu as the national landmark and geographical symbol of racial purity. The destruction of the original city by American bombs enabled the regime to re-design it from scratch as a grand and enduring work of propaganda in its own right: enormous monuments, most of them constructed in the Soviet-subsidized golden age of the 1970s and 1980s, face each other across wide plazas and boulevards. These include the giant bronze statue of Kim Il Sung, which would dwarf any Mao statue in China; the Arch of Triumph, far larger than its obvious Parisian model; the monument of the winged Ch’ŏllima horse; and, on the other side of the Taedong River, the Juche Tower, complete with a ruby-red electric flame on top that lights up at night; and the monument to the Workers’ Party, i.e. gigantic stone renderings of a hoe (for the farmers), a hammer (for industrial workers) and a writing brush (for the white collar workers). Foreigners sneer at the kitsch of these things, cluck about the money spent on their construction, and assume—as is falsely assumed of Nazi buildings—that their imposing size is meant to make people feel insignificant. But propaganda is never a mere waste of money, and its whole point is to make people feel as significant as possible. No doubt North Koreans feel as much pride in these enduring monuments of strength and unity as Americans feel at the sight of the Lincoln Memorial.

  White is the dominant color in Pyongyang: white concrete plazas, white or at least blonde-stoned buildings and white statues of virginal maidens in long gowns abound, as could only be possible in a city with none of the heavy industry that Stalin and Mao allowed to develop in urban centers. Pyongyang is often photographed or depicted under snow, a favored symbol of purity in itself.

  The snowstorm rendered Pyongyang—this city steeped in the five-thousand year old, jade-like spirit of the race, imbued with the proudly lonely life-breath of the world’s cleanest, most civilized people—free of the slightest blemish … covering everything in a thick white veil of purity.13

  White is made much of throughout the official culture. There is constant reference to the child race’s legendary preference for white clothes. In a painting dealing with what the regime calls the Homeland Liberation War (1950-1953) a camouflaged river-raft and its military cargo are steered by a girl in a dazzling white chŏgori or traditional blouse.14 In an equally improbable painting Kim Il Sung’s female partisans wash their whites in a creek, while others hang theirs where they can be seen for miles around. (No men are in sight; in the DPRK, washing is women’s work.)15

  It goes without saying that this propaganda could not be further removed from a Marxist worldview. There is, after all, a great difference between patriotic or state-nationalist communism à la Tito’s Yugoslavia, and the North Koreans’ belief in their innate moral superiority to all other peoples. But for obvious reasons the regime does not advance its race theory explicitly enough to offend its dwindling group of foreign friends. It has little need to be explicit, however, for there is no other worldview inside North Korea against which it must assert itself.16† Occasionally Kim Il Sung will be quoted as having said, for example, “Korea’s citizens are homogenous; therefore they have strong brotherly love,” or his son quoted as saying that “our people is … the purest and cleanest in the world.”17 But the official race theory is generally propagated more through omission and implication. By stressing that Koreans exhibited “lofty moral attitudes” from the earliest stages of their civilization, and by leaving out the positive mention of formative influences on the national character—Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity and shamanism are all denounced—the masses are given no choice but to infer that they are born virtuous.18

  No physical superiority over other races is claimed. Propaganda freely acknowledges, for example, that Americans are much taller.19 Nor is superior intelligence asserted with any real conviction, though Kim Jong Il has described Koreans as “sensible” and “prudent,” and propaganda acclaims the will power they show in the face of adversity.20 To be uniquely virtuous in an evil world but not uniquely cunning or strong is to be as vulnerable as a child, and indeed, history books convey the image of a perennial child-nation on the world stage, wanting only to be left in peace yet subjected to endless abuse and contamination from outsiders. Films and novels routinely show invaders mistreating Korean children. A standard image of the colonial era is of an exhausted little girl turning a rotary grain mill.21

  The race’s historical vulnerability to attack is ascribed to the absence of a great leader who could turn its purity into a source of unity and strength. Since the advent of Kim Il Sung, Koreans can and should indulge their pure childlike instincts. For this reason the party poses as a nurturing, protective mother. The Rodong sinmun newspaper explained the metaphor in 2003:

  The Great Ruler Comrade Kim Jong Il has remarked, “Building the party into a mother party means that just as a mother deeply loves her children and cares warmly for them, so must the party take responsibility for the fate of the people, looking after them even in the smallest matters, and become a true guide and protector of the masses.”22

  Accordingly, citizens are expected to behave like children. The following is an excerpt from “Mother” (Ǒmŏni), one of the country’s best-known poems.

  Ah, Korean Workers’ Party

  At whose breast only

  My life begins and ends;

  Be I buried in the ground or strewn to the wind

  I remain your son, and again return to your breast!

  Entrusting my body to your affectionate gaze,

  Your loving outstretc
hed hand,

  I will forever cry out in the voice of a child,

  Mother! I can’t live without Mother!23

  It goes without saying that this state-sponsored infantilism exerts a strong psychological appeal. Erich Fromm wrote of how man’s fear of emerging from the warm security of the family keeps him “in the prison of the motherly racial-national-religious fixation.”24 No less obvious is the incompatibility of this propaganda with Marxism-Leninism. Believing that “the people is an eternal child,” as the French revolutionary Saint-Just famously remarked, Lenin saw the communist party’s raison d’être in forcing it to grow up.25 The Soviet party posed as an educating father, as did the dictator who so famously talked of the need to “re-engineer” the human soul. A leading American scholar of Stalinist culture has shown that the so-called spontaneity-consciousness dialectic forms the master plot of socialist realist fiction.26 Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered (Kak zakalyalas’ stal’, 1936), for example, tells how a party cadre, armed with the teachings of Lenin and Stalin, educates a headstrong youth into a politically conscious “positive hero.”

  In contrast, the DPRK’s propaganda is notably averse to scenes of intellectual discipline. Because Koreans are born pure and selfless, they can and should heed their instincts. Often they are shown breaking out of intellectual constraints in a mad spree of violence against the foreign or land-owning enemy.27 Cadres are expected to nurture, not teach, and bookworms are negative characters. In short: where Stalinism put the intellect over the instincts, North Korean culture does the opposite. When a sympathetic British documentary about life in the DPRK entitled A State of Mind (2004) was shown in Pyongyang, the authorities changed the title to “Maŭm ŭi nara,” or The Country of Heart.28

  How do artists depict this spontaneous child race? The men in posters are robust but boyish, with somewhat swarthy complexions, thick eyebrows, square jaws and full lips, the women plump but girlish, with round pale faces and low nose bridges. For all the stylization the faces are recognizably Korean, and although replicating the ideal is more difficult in movies than in posters, most of the country’s film stars come close.29 The men’s hair is always short, the women’s usually above the shoulders and permed. Little boys’ heads are shaven on the sides while young girls sport neat bobs. (To counter the infiltration of South Korean hairstyles, the propaganda apparatus emphasizes the advantages of a very short “military-first” cut.)30

  The physiognomic ideal admits of little variation. A worker in one painting appears much like a farmer or a soldier in another, while the children pictured in school textbooks are virtually identical.31 We have all seen clips of the Arirang mass games in which scores of children of the same height, body type and hairstyle dance and leap in unison. These games are not the grim Stalinist exercises in anti-individualism that foreigners (such as the makers of the aforementioned documentary) often misperceive them as, but joyous celebrations of the pure-bloodedness and homogeneity from which the race’s superiority derives.

  The term “military first” does not mean that the armed forces lead the party; rather it is the party which, in accordance with Kim Jong Il’s will, puts the military first. It is also the party’s own propaganda that puts the armed forces on a high pedestal. Yet this glorification is often so extravagant as to make it appear that the party is abdicating at least part of its traditional role. Visual depictions of the new society tend to show a soldier (massive forearm outstretched, mouth open in a shout) leading the way for factory workers, farmers and scientists. The TV evening news often quotes Kim Jong Il as calling the military “the university of the revolution,” and “a magnificent school of ideological, intellectual and physical training.”32 (One wonders where this leaves the nation’s women, most of whom do not go through this school.) The soldier is also held up as a model for all to emulate, which is not necessarily the case with the party cadre. (The latter is a much less prominent and heroic figure in North Korean narrative than in the socialist realism of the old East Bloc.)33 Kim Jong Il is said to “love warriors most of all.”34

  The DPRK’s cult of military life is different from its Prussian or Japanese counterparts in that training is seen as going with and not against the grain of the recruit’s instincts. Discipline is all well and good, but must never diminish the race’s unique spontaneity. Indeed, in one “historical” novel from the 1950s, Kim Il Sung commands the headstrong young protagonist to stay away from the guerilla fighting in the hope that this order will be disregarded!35 The film The Youths of the SS Seagull (Kalmaegiho ch’ǒngnyǒndŭl, 1961) invites the audience to side with the boyish hero as he cheerfully flouts the rules of his ship, annoying superiors no end. Needless to say, he does so for the sake of the collective, overstaying his shore leave to win a prize pig for his crewmates’ dinner, and so on. Still, such a story would have been inconceivable in the USSR.

  Even in war, soldiers are depicted as overgrown children. A tank driver in the story Tank No. 214 (Ttangkǔ 214 ho, 1953):

  The skin was dark, but the face was both noble and adorable, like the face of a small child. Chǒn Ki-ryǒn’s expression didn’t even change when he rolled over the enemy.… Chǒn was a twenty one year old boy. A voice within Comrade Sǒ suddenly called out, “You kill people with a smile, you little rascal, you were born to beat the enemy!”36

  For all the army-as-school rhetoric, depictions of life in uniform dwell more on its healthy fraternal joys than its intellectual or physical rigors.37 Boisterousness is smiled upon as the mark of truly Korean naivety and innocence. In 2006 a magazine article told approvingly of soldiers who vaulted a fence in a mad rush to welcome Kim Jong Il’s sedan.38 There has been no shortage of historical incidents—from the Panmunjom axe-killings of 1976 to the recent shooting of a South Korean tourist at the Kumgangsan resort, to say nothing of the army’s maraudings during the famine—which indicate that this celebration of instinctive behavior has affected the culture of the real-life military. This in turn seems to have contributed to a certain friction between the military and the civilian population. At the very least, the latter is not unenvious of the special position accorded to the former. Hence the media’s constant and strident emphasis on the need for unity and cooperation between soldiers and civilians.39

  At the time of writing (autumn 2009), a so-called “100 Day Battle” is in progress. Enthusiasm campaigns to boost production were a fixture in the socialist bloc too, but in North Korea economic growth is less an end in itself than a means to strengthen the country. (The parallel to the German Wehrwirtschaft and the Japanese “self-defense state” of the 1930s is obvious.)40 To get the masses in the proper spirit, the regime compares workers to warriors, and, if the nightly news is anything to go by, hangs signs reading “battleground” in factories.

  Whether soldiers, workers or farmers, the heroes in official narratives differ from other characters only in degree: they are that little bit more Korean—more virtuous and pure—than everyone else. Despite the growing focus on the armed forces, which remain predominantly male, young females are still more common in propaganda stories than men. This is not because women are considered fully equal, let alone superior, to men, but because they are more natural symbols of chastity and purity and thus of Koreanness. The most popular character in the peninsula’s folk tradition is Ch’unhyang, a girl punished for refusing to yield to a lecherous official. Her story has been filmed several times in North as in South Korea.41 Girls have the added advantage of being able to embody both the childlike attitude of the model subject and the nurturing, maternal attitude expected from authority figures. Nurses and female doctors are common heroines. The Text usually shows them as having grown up in fatherless and therefore more spontaneous surroundings. They behave girlishly even in adulthood, blushing at the drop of a hat and covering their mouths when they smile. Squeaky-clean teasing about boyfriends results in giggling mock-chases.42 One could not be further removed from the tough, emancipated heroines of socialist realist fictio
n.

  Soviet narratives made much of the exertions and austerities of work life, the better to show “the new man” triumphing over his baser urges, but being inherently unselfish, Koreans take pleasure even in the hardest work. Kim Il Sung spoke of the nation’s workers as “laboring for the nation and society as well as for their own happiness, taking joy in their labor.”43 Collective farming is presented as the continuation and intensification of the (highly mythologized) Korean tradition of village labor pools.44 Whether baking in front of a smelting furnace or gripping shovels in the icy cold, workers are usually shown smiling or laughing.45

  Obligatory in tales of work life are invocations of the campaign slogans of the day, but these tend to be extraneous to variations of the same morality tale about a model worker inspiring his or her comrades, surmounting this or that bureaucratic obstacle or material shortage, and perhaps shaming a mildly bad egg into reform. Since the latter half of the 1980s a whole genre of “hidden hero” narratives has arisen to celebrate those who toil in unglamorous jobs in remote locales. This propaganda is also meant to reconcile the provincial populace to country life and to encourage city women to marry rural husbands. In City Girl, Come and Get Married (Tosi ch’ǒ’nyǒ sijip wayo, 1993), for example, a beauty from Pyongyang falls in love with a duck farmer.46 But the Text’s glorification of country life as the repository of pure ethnic values undoubtedly has much to do with the fact that Korea experienced urbanization at foreign hands; similar tendencies, are obvious in South Korean culture. In Soviet and Chinese narrative, in contrast, the countryside was often depicted as a place of ignorance and reaction.47

  The explicit ideological content of North Korean narratives has always been much lower than foreigners have assumed. Though often praised in passing, Juche Thought is rarely espoused or explained; having been conceived primarily for the benefit of foreign audiences, its universal-humanist principles—“man is the master of all things,” etc—are too difficult to reconcile with the de facto ideology of paranoid nationalism. The personality cult is not always front and center either; some movies contain only one or two explicit references to the Leader. Much of the country’s visual art may appear completely apolitical to the foreign eye. The North Korean is trained to “read” these works differently. Happiness (Haengbok, 1978), for example, shows a girl asleep in bed, her well-groomed head resting on a lace-edged pillow as she clutches a present too precious to unwrap. While the average American may respond by thinking, “Isn’t she sweet?” the North Korean is meant to think, “Aren’t our children sweet?” and “Aren’t we lucky to live so well under the Leader?” (For the gift is of course from none other.)