The Cleanest Race

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The Cleanest Race Page 9

by B. R. Myers


  † I say “current,” because the myths have changed over the decades. It was not until the mid-1960s, for example, that the Text began claiming Kim Il Sung had defeated the Japanese and the Americans without foreign assistance.

  † The bold-print rule applies to all ostensibly authentic statements from Kim Il Sung, his parents, his wife and (of course) his son Jong Il.

  † In an article entitled “Brilliant Life Dedicated to Country and Nation,” it is written, “A foreigner said that … he believed in Kim Il Sung like God. [sic]” KCNA, July 6, 2007. Propaganda about the Dear Leader is similar: it is reported that many foreigners and religious South Koreans regard him as God/a god. In the novel Gun Barrel for example, a visiting American concludes that Kim Jong Il is the Messiah. Many foreign researchers mistakenly believe that the North Koreans themselves acclaim their leader as a God. See for example Noland, Avoiding the Apocalypse, 62. See also Ch’ŏngddae, 2003, page 462.

  Visual documents of pre-liberation history hardly look like photographs at all, though they are referred to as such. Left: Kim Il Sung as a schoolboy in exile. Right: Kim with his wife, Kim Chŏng-suk, in their guerrilla days. The crudeness of these forgeries is no mere matter of technical ineptitude; a country that can forge US currency can do much better than this. The regime seems to want to present its creation myth as a grand, epic past that must be believed on its own terms.

  The Torch of Poch’ŏnbo (1948), one of the earliest pictorial depictions of Kim Il Sung, shows the “general” and his guerrillas after their famous victory against a Japanese border outpost. While the battle itself is recorded fact, the quality of the uniforms shown here attests to the personality cult’s indifference to the dictates of realism.

  Kim Il Sung, his wife Kim Chŏng-suk and their son Kim Jong Il ride horses near the liberation army’s secret camp on Mount Paektu. Note how the color of the uniforms differs from the earlier depiction.

  Kim Il Sung greets the adoring masses; behind him, the DPRK’s coat of arms, a red star shining down on a hydroelectric power plant. The personality cult has never hid the corpulence of either of the Kims; on the contrary, it is seen as a sign of their spontaneous and easy-going nature. Yankee villains, in contrast, are often beanpole-thin.

  Kim Il Sung “visits kindergarten in a mountain village.” Propaganda likes to associate both leaders with snow, a symbol of purity, and with carefree children, symbols of the innocent spontaneity of the race.

  Kim Il Sung “visits a school on the first day of compulsory 11-year education.” Here too the leader seems not to be talking at all, instead simply exuding benevolent solicitude and good cheer; this is no traditional Confucian educator, let alone a Marxist-Leninist one à la Stalin or Mao, but an indulgent parent on the side of the instincts.

  The Workers’ Party symbol shows a hoe for farm laborers, a hammer for industrial workers, and (a rarity in the symbols of socialist parties) a writing brush for the higher-educated or white collar class. This last has helped keep casual foreign observers from recognizing the DPRK’s intense anti-intellectualism.

  Kim Il Sung on one of his countless “on-the-spot guidance” visits. (In his depiction of the leader’s coat and hat, the artist has rather unwisely worked from a real photograph.) These visits, as the written records of them make clear, are not about imparting knowledge or revolutionary consciousness; the content of Kim’s guidance is less important than the trouble he took—often, as here, in the dead of winter—to administer it.

  While some landscapes are painted in a kitschy, extravagant manner, others, like this one, are done in a more subdued and traditional style. Either way, what is celebrated is not nature in general but the nature of the motherland. With its rugged, lofty peaks and pure mountain streams, the Korean landscape is thought to reflect the characteristics of the race itself.

  Kim Jong Il is often depicted as having spent his school years in the 1950s enlightening fellow students about his father’s Juche Thought. In fact, the sham doctrine was not even spoken of until the cultural revolution of the mid-1960s, with the first books on the subject appearing several years after that.

  Demobilized soldiers, still carrying their military-issue knapsacks, are welcomed with flowers by the workplace to which they have been assigned. While Soviet painters played up the heroic exertions and sacrifices of industrial laborers, the better to show them “tempering” their spontaneity, the DPRK’s propaganda depicts collective work as something joyful to which Koreans are instinctively inclined.

  Kim Jong Il comforts a distraught nation after his father’s death on July 8, 1994. In the background is the 66 ft. high bronze statue of the Great Leader that was erected on Mansu Hill in Pyongyang in 1972. Dark skies in depictions of this period symbolize the growing threat from without.

  The myth of Kim’s tireless, never-ending inspection of the country’s defenses is meant to absolve him of responsibility for the DPRK’s economic woes.

  The Dear Leader stands guard as the waves of a hostile world crash ineffectually against the rocks.

  Kim Jong Il and Bill Clinton pose for a photograph after their meeting on August 4, 2009. The choice of background was no accident: waves breaking on the rocky coast symbolize the futility of the world’s harassment of the motherland.

  South Korean cooperation with the North is often misrepresented as a shared effort to drive out the American enemy, shown here in standard hook-nosed form. The legend reads: “Working together as national brethren, let’s reckon with the US imperialists and unite Korea!”

  Since the proclamation of a “military-first” policy in 1995, the Supreme Commander’s five-pointed star has become as prominent a propaganda motif as the national flag itself. Standard are depictions of a square-jawed soldier leading the way to a strong and prosperous country, while the rest of society—here a laborer and a white collar worker with one of Kim Jong Il’s works—follows closely behind. But outsiders who think the military has been placed over the party should note that the legend reads, “Let us loyally venerate the party’s military-first leadership.” (Emphasis mine) It is the party, in other words, that puts the military first.

  In a depiction of the near future, joyous Koreans praise Kim Jong Il for having brought about national reunification. The vertical banner over the peninsula reads: “Long live General Kim, the Sun of Unification!”

  For decades South Korea was depicted as the “living hell” to the North’s “paradise on earth”; the collapse of the information cordon in the mid-1990s made the regime take a more nuanced propaganda line.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE DEAR LEADER

  Regardless of whether Kim Jong Il ever intended to pose as his father’s equal, the DPRK’s fall from Soviet-subsidized grace in the early 1990s made such a strategy impracticable. The Text implicitly admits, therefore, that although the Dear Leader is the greatest man alive, he is not quite the man the Great Leader was. When père and fils are pictured together in paintings the focal point is always the older, taller, better-looking man.1 Where Kim Il Sung was the effortless master of all sectors of public life, his son is the military-first “General,” compelled by the Yankee threat to concentrate on national defense at the expense of economic matters. Since this is not a Marxist-Leninist state committed to the improvement of material living standards, but rather a nationalist one in which the leader’s main function is to embody Korean virtues—which are not seen to include intellectual brilliance anyway—the relative inferiority of Kim Jong Il’s genius troubles propagandists less than an outsider might assume. It is in no small part because he appears more human and vulnerable than Kim Il Sung, and thus a more convincing embodiment of the child race itself, that the Dear Leader is so dear to his people, even if he is not as fervently venerated as his father.

  We already saw that the Text recounts only Kim Il Sung’s life before 1945 as a coherent story, reducing the history of his rule to a jumble of “on-the-spot guidance” anecdotes. It does the opposite with the Kim Jong Il cu
lt, telescoping the man’s younger years while treating his rule as a linear legend in progress. The mythobiography can be summarized as follows:

  It was on February 16 1942, in a snowcapped log cabin at Kim Il Sung’s guerilla base on Mount Paektu, that Kim Chŏng-suk gave birth to the Dear Leader Kim Jong Il. Overjoyed partisans celebrated the great event by carving his name into thousands of tree trunks. Although the little boy was often cold and hungry, he never complained, anxious even at that age not to trouble his parents. Alas, no sooner had the Great Leader succeeded in liberating the nation than his loyal wife, weakened by decades of self-sacrifice, fell seriously ill. She passed away in 1949. Before her son had overcome this blow, he was forced to witness first-hand the destruction caused by the American invasion. The experience left him with a lasting hatred of Yankee imperialism. Never one to seek special treatment, he participated directly in the reconstruction of Pyongyang before entering Kim Il Sung University in 1960, where he organized fellow students into Juche study groups.

  At the age of 22 he went to work in the party’s central committee. For decades he played a vital role in the implementation of the Great Leader’s policies and issued brilliant treatises on the Juchefication of the arts. All the while he traveled ceaselessly to farms, factories and military bases around the country, bestowing his motherly love on the masses and earning their love in return.

  In the early 1990s the USSR surrendered to the forces of imperialism without a shot. Emboldened, the Yankees stepped up efforts to destroy Korean-style socialism, claiming a nonexistent “nuclear problem” as a pretext for imposing suffocating sanctions on the DPRK. In response Kim Jong Il, who in 1991 had become Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army, rallied the troops in a spectacular show of resolve, at the same time dispatching diplomatic warriors around the world to make clear that the DPRK would never back down.

  In July 1994 Kim Il Sung passed away, plunging the entire nation into mourning. Though his heart was breaking, Kim Jong Il manfully hid his grief from the masses. Again the Yankees smelled victory. Boastfully predicting that the DPRK would not survive for long without the Great Leader, they redoubled their efforts to crush Korean-style socialism. To make matters worse, a freakish combination of natural disasters destroyed one harvest after another. Though in dire straits the masses never complained, trusting instead that the Dear Leader would lead them through this second Arduous March just as his father had led partisans through the first. Aware that the Yankees would stop at nothing, the General announced a military-first government and embarked on a ceaseless tour of army outposts. Wherever he went he moved soldiers to tears by insisting on eating the same meager fare as they.

  By the end of the 1990s the worst was over. With a renewed joy and confidence sweeping the nation, the General ushered in a glorious new era by announcing the “Strong and Prosperous Nation” campaign. Shortly thereafter he concluded an agreement with the southern masses to expedite unification by strengthening economic and cultural ties. But that was not all: in 2006 the Dear General successfully oversaw the acquisition of a nuclear deterrent that would protect the Korean race forever. Truly, the son had proven himself worthy of his great father.2

  Although the regime uses the title “Dear Leader” in English publications, a practice I reluctantly follow in this book, the Korean original should more accurately be translated as “Dear Ruler,” for it is not the word “great” but the word “leader” (suryǒng) that is reserved for his father; Kim Jong Il is often called Great Ruler (widaehan yǒngdoja), as he was in North Korean coverage of his meeting with Bill Clinton in August 2009.

  But as the reader can gather from the foregoing summary, there is much more common ground between the myths of the two Kims than there are significant differences. Like his father before him, the Dear Leader embodies Korean virtues and is therefore the greatest man alive. (He too was born with these virtues, as the talk of his angelic toddlerhood is meant to attest.) But to counter the assumption that the boy had an easy time growing up, the Text stresses that he was “born and bred in … difficult circumstances,”3 extracting plenty of pathos from the death of his young mother: “No matter how he called and cried, [she] still did not come home.”4 Tales abound of his aversion to receiving special treatment.5 In one novel it is claimed that he always called Kim Il Sung “Leader,” “General,” etc, refusing to claim special filial status for himself.6 He is often shown fussing over his father’s health, warding off those who would trouble him unnecessarily, and doing all he can to disseminate Juche Thought.7

  Never is he shown simply enjoying himself. His clothes are simple and austere, usually a zip-up tunic and matching pants in a drab brown; unlike his father he never wears suits. Artists like to portray the youthful Jong Il in solitude, often at a site associated with the anti-Japanese struggle, or looking on with a wistful smile as his father greets adoring citizens.8 The message: For Kim Jong Il so loved the Korean people that he gave them his only parent.

  Still, this is rather thin stuff to be making a personality cult out of, and one can only wonder how the public would have responded to the Dear Leader’s accession had the nuclear crisis of the early 1990s not fitted him out with his own myth of national rescue. (We will discuss the conflict with America in the following chapter.) Even now the regime evidently feels the need for the dead Parent Leader to remind the masses what “enormous luck” they enjoy in having his son around, and that they must venerate the General “no matter what wind may blow in the future.”9 They must also take good care of his health, making sure that he gets enough rest, etc.10 The regime seems to have an endless supply of these remarkably topical-sounding quotes, only a few of which can be traced back to Kim Il Sung’s collected works.11 It would appear that for all the propaganda apparatus’s hard work, the Dear Leader is still far from enjoying the popularity that his father did. This problem is certainly not unconnected with the appearance of the real-life Kim Jong Il, a short, homely and now wizened man given to wearing sunglasses—eyewear often associated with Yankee villains—even in indoor photo-ops. (His voice is not particularly pleasant either, judging from South Korean footage of the 2000 summit, though like his father’s voice—and Hirohito’s until Japan’s surrender—it is not heard in public.) But the masses’ perception of his father as the greater of the two men undoubtedly has more to do with the power of the national liberation myth and the higher living standard they enjoyed under his rule.

  This is not to imply that they blame Kim Jong Il for the famine of the mid-1990s. The propaganda apparatus has done far too good a job of blaming this second “Arduous March” (Kim Il Sung having led partisans on the alleged original march of that name) on other factors. Typical is Pak Il-myŏng’s “Transition,” which appeared in June 1999.12 This is one of many short stories in which everything the Leader thinks, does and says is meant to be understood as a product of the writer’s imagination, yet true to the essence of the great man. “Transition” opens with the Leader seated behind a desk in an undisclosed location.

  The Kim Jong Il regime has always enjoyed a higher degree of uncoerced mass support than the outside world is willing to recognize.

  They say time flows like a river, and indeed, a year had somehow already been borne past as if on a swift current. Soon it would dawn on a new year, Juche 86 (1997). The drizzle that had begun the day before showed signs of abating, only to turn into an untidy downpour. In the unseasonal rain the earth, which was usually frozen rock-solid at this time of year, now squelched underfoot. Having given on-the-spot guidance and inspections to the People’s Army troops right up until the end of the year, the Great Ruler Kim Jong Il had a short while before returned to his desk and, without a moment’s rest, set about reading the manuscript of the collectively-penned editorial that would be printed in the new year’s party, military and youth newspapers.13

  While Kim Il Sung was and still is associated in the arts with sunshine and blue skies, his son is often pictured in inclement weather, or stan
ding on the seashore as waves crash against the rocks. In “Transition,” too, he is introduced amidst references to mud and rain—a reminder that he faces even more challenging circumstances than his father did.

  It had been a hard year. The continuation of the imperialists’ political and economic blockade, and, on the world’s stage, war and strife, starvation and extreme poverty, historically unprecedented oppression threatening all mankind—it had been a year in which these things had enveloped the earth like a black cloud.14

  Note that blame for the republic’s problems is placed on factors beyond Kim’s control: the imperialist blockade and a worldwide increase in general misery. Significant is also the implication that things are worse in other countries. (The official media have always made much of the worst famines and natural disasters in Africa and elsewhere.)

  Enter the Watson-like sidekick, a fixture of all stories of this kind. Kyŏng’u, a party official, has just returned from a fact-finding trip to the countryside. Knowing that the Dear Leader prizes honesty above all else, he reveals that while the state expects regions to supply their own fertilizer, “the actual results … fall far short of the plan.”15

  Kim Jong Il responds:

  “Long ago the Leader [i.e. Kim Il Sung] was already calling agriculture the foundation of the universe … But we have not farmed well in recent years, and we have failed to implement his teachings properly. To make matters worse, we have suffered damages from floods and drought, so that now the people are enduring difficulty because of the food problem. But still no one complains. Even while eating gruel they are steadfastly surmounting difficulties. They’re worried they might otherwise cause me pain, you see. When I think how much the Leader wanted to give our people white rice and meat soup, I find it hard to bear …”

 

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