The Cleanest Race

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The Cleanest Race Page 10

by B. R. Myers


  “We have not properly taken on the work you gave us to do, General,” Kyŏng’u said as he hung his head.

  So a food shortage is admitted, if not a famine, and ascribed to a combination of natural disasters and the general failure to implement Kim Il Sung’s teachings. Kyŏng’u’s shamefacedness makes clear that the people have let the Leader down, not vice versa. The cadre then makes bitter reference to the Schadenfreude of western news agencies, which are predicting more difficult times for the DPRK.

  Kim’s reply:

  “More difficult, eh … It’s possible. But … I think that instead of becoming more difficult, the situation will gradually resolve, just as the spring melts the snow. This faith comes from what I have felt while traveling around the past year. Of course the country’s economy is now in a very difficult state. But in the new year reform must take place in every part of the people’s economy. Can it be done? I think there is no end to what can be done. No matter how difficult the economic situation is now, it is completely different from the situation after the war, when socialist construction had to be launched on a pile of ashes. Now we have the foundation of a self-supporting economy that the Leader laid down for us.… I think it all depends on the workers themselves.16

  So Kim believes things will improve, but maybe they won’t. Everything depends on the workers—he thinks. His father never sounded so uncertain. The reader is left wondering just what role the Dear Leader sees for himself on the economic front. The image of snow melting in springtime suggests that it is not a very active one. All the same, he offers a solution to the fertilizer shortage:

  “Some cadres now think there can be no farming without fertilizer, but this is wrong. Did we ever complain about the lack of fertilizer after liberation? Even if you look at the international trend, it’s toward farming with less fertilizer.”

  These words brought Kyŏng’u to his senses at once. Had he not been one of those cadres, complaining about fertilizer when he should have been looking for a way out of the difficulties?

  “General, I thought wrongly.”17

  Granted, Kim Il Sung expressed himself on a comparably trite level, but it is one thing to call rainbow trout a tasty fish, and another to suggest, as Kim Jong Il does here, that his country should surmount the lack of something by using less of it. This is clearly a personality cult for straitened times.

  Our hero then proposes a drive into the countryside, with himself at the wheel. Soon he spots an elderly woman walking by the side of the road.

  “Someone coming back from the market would not be out alone this late. Judging from the difficulty she’s having walking, it is clear that she has either come a very long way or is exhausted with hunger.”

  Kim Jong Il felt a pang in his breast. He was seeing in the grandmother the pain being endured by the people.18

  In the most explicit indication of the extent of the food shortage, the writer describes her as “gaunt from loss of weight.”19 The General stops the sedan and offers to take her to her destination. Tales of one or the other Kim giving average citizens a ride are common in the Text, and the story plays out here in familiar fashion: the woman improbably fails to recognize who has picked her up, the cadre wrings his hands over her irreverence, and the Leader chuckles indulgently. As it turns out, the old woman has left her son’s home to live with her daughter, so disgusted is she with him. A party secretary at a coal mine, he can think of no response to the mine’s recent collapse than to brood in his office. She recounts the angry speech she made:

  Everyone talks about the Arduous March this, the Arduous March that, but how many people are really going through it? The only one is the General [Kim Jong Il] himself. Ask your conscience, am I talking hot air? You know from watching TV. Doesn’t our General go up and down steep mountain paths without a moment’s rest in order to visit with the People’s Army troops? He’s trying to keep watch over the Homeland, over all of us. And he always insists on eating just what the people are eating, maize rice and gruel.… Is it enough just to talk about taking care of him? We’ve got to dig a lot of coal, coal I tell you.20

  Such talk is standard. In the Text soldiers and veterans routinely burst into tears at the memory of how their units had to feed the visiting General gruel or millet instead of white rice.21 Artists and illustrators whip up guilt further by depicting Kim on especially arduous stations of his endless national tour: visiting military outposts during a storm or blizzard, or walking up to his trouser-clad knees in a canal.22

  But while the regime emphasizes the hardship of Kim’s life, it does not go so far as to depict him as ascetic, for that would imply a lack of Korean spontaneity. He is thus depicted as corpulent and cheerful, albeit not to the same degree of either quality as his father was and is still shown. He too indulges in the occasional cigarette.23 The main visual sign of his self-sacrifice is his drab and unassuming dress. The famous gray parka, which he allegedly designed himself, is as common in the visual arts as in newspaper photographs.24

  Just because Kim is exempted from criticism for the nation’s difficulties does not mean that he is denied credit for its successes. The difference to the Kim Il Sung cult is that the General’s leadership in non-military areas is presented mainly as a matter of inspiration by example. To return to the story we have been discussing, the Dear Leader neither visits the mine nor offers its party secretary any advice; much as economic problems pain him, the military comes first. And yet we learn at the end that the mine overcame the crisis when workers resolved to “fight for the General.”25 In similar fashion, athletes and entertainers who have done well overseas invariably ascribe their triumph, just as prominent Koreans once did under Hirohito, to the leader whose love gave them strength and fortitude.26

  One might well expect this “military-first” leader to cut a more masculine figure than Kim Il Sung, but he never looks more feminine than in the official portrait of him in a general’s uniform; the artist is clearly intent on counteracting the martial aspect of the clothes themselves. Though Kim is often referred to as “Father General,” reports of his visits to army bases focus on his fussy concern for the troops’ health and comfort. “[He] went round education rooms, bedrooms, mess halls and other places to acquaint himself with everything from the humidity of the bedrooms in the rainy season to the preparation of side-dishes …”27 He is also increasingly referred to as “our parent,” though the fixed epithet Parent Leader is evidently still reserved for Kim Il Sung.28 That is not all: on occasion he is explicitly referred to as a mother, and in martial contexts at that. The following excerpt, which is strikingly reminiscent of the imagery of Japanese wartime propaganda, puts the cult of the “military-first” leader in a nutshell.

  Held together not by a mere bond between a leader and his warriors but by the family tie between a mother and her children, who share the same blood and breath, Korea will prosper forever. Let the imperialist enemies come at us with their nuclear weapons, for there is no power on earth that can defeat our strength and love and the power of our belief, which thanks to the blood bond between mother and child create a fortress of single-heartedness. Our Great Mother, General Kim Jong Il!29

  An enormous sign held up in a recent parade, footage of which was shown on the television news in 2009 whenever “The Song of General Kim Jong Il” was played, bore the slogan, “We Cannot Live Away From His Breast.”30

  This is no empty rhetoric; the masses are reminded with increasing frequency that because the nation cannot survive without the leader who constitutes both its heart and its head, they must be ready to die to defend him. As if the logic were not in itself reminiscent of fascist Japan, the regime makes increasingly bold use of the very same terms—such as “resolve to die” (kyŏlsa) and “human bombs” (yukt’an)—that were so common in imperial Japanese and colonial Korean propaganda during the Pacific War.31 In the summer of 2009 the evening news periodically played a stirring anthem entitled “We Will Give Our Lives to Defend the Head of the Revolution
.” The text runs, “Ten million will become as guns and bombs … to give one’s life for the General is a soldier’s greatest honor.”32

  Kim Jong Il does not appear in the accompanying footage in person, but only through the banner of the Supreme Commander—an ornate five-pointed star on a red background—which now features as often in the visual arts as the flag of the republic itself. Has the Leader grown too visibly close to death himself for his physical appearance to move others to die for him? Perhaps, but this is not as big a problem as one might think. It cannot be stressed often enough that like his father, Kim Jong Il serves as the living symbol of the homeland; in acclaiming his perfect Koreanness, the masses acclaim themselves. Not for nothing does the suicidal anthem revel in images of soldiers goose-stepping in unison, and enormous crowds in torch-lit processions. For the average man these are far more seductive images than even the most impressive face could be; through their collective adulation of the Great Mother the masses regain what the psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel once called the “oceanic feeling” of the omnipotent’s parent’s love.33

  A wall poster, photographed by a Taiwanese tourist in September 2009, congratulates citizens on being “blessed” with “the young General Kim Jong Ŭn.” Below the legend is the panegyric “Stride.”

  The need to play up the hardship of the Dear Leader’s life has so far prevented the official media from acknowledging any of his wives, let alone showing a family portrait comparable to the ones in which Kim Jong Il appeared as a small boy. This may explain the uncharacteristic subtlety and coy vagueness of the current campaign to glorify Kim Jong Ŭn, the second son of Kim Jong Il’s third wife, who is evidently the next in line for the succession. From what we can gather from outside the country, this campaign is still in an early stage, consisting of little more than regular performances, singalongs and textual displays of a panegyric entitled Palgŏrŭm or “Stride.” A wall poster photographed in September 2009 bears the lyrics of the song under a legend congratulating the masses on being blessed not just with the General, but with “the young General Kim Jong Ŭn” as well. The latter, whose title is written with a different Korean word for general (taejang) than the one applied to his father (changgun), is described as carrying on both the “bloodline of Man’gyŏngdae,” i.e. of Kim Il Sung’s birthplace, and “the bloodline of Mount Paektu,” i.e. the birthplace of Kim Jong Il. This roundabout way of indicating his parentage seems to reflect the regime’s sense of awkwardness in celebrating someone whose very existence was kept secret for so long. The song itself, with its puerile onomatopoeic refrain, adds nothing to our knowledge of the young man. An excerpt:

  Tramp, tramp, tramp

  The footsteps of our General Kim

  Spreading the spirit of February

  Tramp, tramp, tramping onwards

  .…

  Bringing us closer to a brilliant future

  The lyric’s references to February may be allusions to Kim Jong Il’s birth-month, but may also refer to exploits of the “young General” himself. There is no point speculating further about a nascent personality cult which will likely have emerged into much sharper relief by the time this book is published. But the most important fact of the cult is already clear enough from its martial imagery: Although the transition to a successor presents a unique opportunity to retire the military-first policy without a loss of face, the regime does not plan to avail itself of it. The next leader’s image will be more in the mold of Kim Jong Il than Kim Il Sung.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  FOREIGNERS

  North Korea is often characterized as “solipsistic,” but racial pride always requires constant awareness of an inferior other. To the North Koreans the other is not just America, as so many foreigners believe, but the entire outside world, for if the child race is uniquely pure, it follows that no non-Koreans are to be regarded as equals.

  Friendly nations such as Laos are therefore presented almost exclusively as tributary states. Their main function in the Text is to be described as hosting Juche study conferences, sending eulogies to the Leader, congratulating the DPRK on important anniversaries, and so on. China remains a unique case inasmuch as the main news media describe it in favorable terms (albeit with virtually no coverage of Chinese life) without misrepresenting it as looking to Pyongyang for inspiration and guidance. Nor are visits from Chinese leaders and diplomats described, as all other visits from foreigners are, in terms of servile pilgrimages. Since the end of South Korea’s munificent Sunshine Policy in 2008, the propaganda apparatus has devoted unprecedented space and time to celebrating the Beijing-Pyongyang alliance, even if the growing scale of Chinese investment in the DPRK remains a taboo topic.

  But no amount of economic and military aid can earn a foreign country the sort of good will that extends to parts of the Text intended exclusively for domestic consumption. While Chinese visitors to the war museum in Pyongyang are shown exhibits acknowledging their country’s enormous sacrifice, locals are taken on another route where they see and hear no mention of it. A similar approach marks treatment of the DPRK’s neighbor to the north-east. Visits from Russian delegations and military choruses enjoy pride of place on the nightly news, while in less prominent sources of propaganda the USSR, for all its decades of patronage, is looked back on with contempt. Khrushchev is denounced as a “traitor,” one of the “fake communists” who betrayed world socialism.1 In a historical novel, Kim Il Sung chuckles about how he learned Soviet secrets by getting Brezhnev drunk.2 There are frequent (and for the foreign reader unsettling) sneers about how the USSR collapsed “without firing a shot.”3

  Typical of the disdain shown even to the friendliest foreigners is a panoramic painting of a procession of exultant visitors to 1989’s Pyongyang World Youth Games.4 Whatever direction they happen to be looking in, their faces are all partly obscured by a sinister shadow. A fat Caucasian woman wears a low-cut blouse, while a few African women sport what appear to be halter-tops: even in today’s DPRK such clothing is considered indecent. Here and there, unsavory-looking men show long sideburns and denim, more signs of Western decadence. The only well-groomed and attractive person in view, and the only one whose face is evenly lit, is the Korean guide—a girl, naturally—who leads the way in traditional dress. There are no Koreans in the procession proper; the pure race must be kept apart.5 On the rare occasions in the Text when foreigners and locals meet, the former employ highly respectful, sometimes obsequious Korean, while the latter respond informally as if to subordinates.6 Real fraternity between the pure and the impure is impossible; the DPRK’s so-called Friendship Museum contains only gifts given by foreigners—“offered up,” as the Text always puts it—to the Leaders.7

  While the Text strongly implies that all foreigners are inferior, and occasionally criticizes the Jews’ influence on world affairs, it subjects only the Japanese and Americans to routine vituperation.† As might be expected, the “Japs” (oenom) feature mainly in accounts of the colonial era. In contrast to Soviet depictions of the Germans in World War II, the Text does not distinguish between colonial-era Japanese according to class; all are inherently rapacious. It follows that they have no right to humane treatment. In this scene from a classic novel of the 1950s, one of Kim Il Sung’s guerillas exacts retribution on an unarmed prisoner.

  Kǔmch’ŏl could feel his bitter heart begin to open, the heart that could only open at the sight of Japs’ blood.… The Jap’s neck glistened greasily like a pig’s. When Kǔmch’ŏl saw it the fire in his breast raged intensely.… He yanked the bastard up by the neck and dragged him out of the box, where he fell down again. Seeing he had pissed on the papers in the box from fear, Kǔmch’ŏl spat on his pale mug.… Unable to speak, the Jap bowed his head and pressed his hands together, pleading soundlessly for mercy.

  “Son of a bitch! So you don’t want to die?”…. Kŭmchŏl wanted to cut the swine’s neck open with his own hands.”8

  Sensing what is in store for him, the captive tries to run away, but the Korea
n catches up to him and deals his skull a furious kick. “The eyeballs sprang out of their sockets as the skull splattered against the barrack wall.”9

  In recent years, however, individual Japanese women have occasionally been portrayed as sympathetic to the Korean people or as admirers of the Dear Leader. A recent example is the serial film The Country I Saw (Nae ga pon nara, 2009), which depicts a female Japanese professor who is impressed by the military-first regime’s string of victories over the United States.10

  Needless to say, far more time and resources are spent vilifying the US than Japan. The following is a summary of the relevant anti-American myths.

  Throughout its disgraceful history the United States has wrought misery on peace-loving people the world over. After wiping out their continent’s indigenous population and enslaving millions of Africans, the Yankees turned their attention to Korea, dispatching a gunship in 1866 to bully the proud nation into opening its markets. To the Yankees’ surprise the Koreans refused to yield; none other than the Parent Leader’s great-grandfather Kim Ung’u organized farmers into an attack force that sent the USS Sherman to the bottom of the Taedong River. Furious at this setback, the Yankees set about subverting the peninsula from within. Working first with landowners, then with the Japanese colonial administration, missionaries prowled the peninsula in search of converts for Christian churches, all the while committing unspeakable outrages against helpless children.

 

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