The Cleanest Race

by B. R. Myers

  The myth of an America quaking in constant terror of the DPRK has enabled the regime to explain away food aid shipments, which began arriving in the mid-1990s, in terms of reparations.49 The Yankees are also depicted (and not without a basis in truth) as paying in grain for the right to undertake fruitless inspections of suspected nuclear sites.50

  “Excellency! We in the (US) Department of Defense hope to have your military facility at Kŭmch’angni revealed to us, no matter what it takes. Please tell us the price of viewing it.”

  Pong Myǒng-ju looked down on Dunne with a dignified smile. “Due to your economic blockade and natural disasters we are now going through … difficulties. Looking at things from a humanitarian aspect, and in view of the consequences of our conflict with you, we regard 700 thousand tons of grain as appropriate.”51

  This propaganda line is the reason why North Korean citizens are permitted to use aid sacks, including those emblazoned with the US flag, as carry-alls.

  For most of the 1990s, the regime’s desire to pose as both an invincible superpower and an aggrieved victim of American slander forced the Text into an almost comical vagueness. The masses were told only that Washington had trumped up “some so-called nuclear problem,” and so on. Things became less complicated after Pyongyang explicitly acknowledged the existence of a “deterrent to nuclear war” in 2003. Since the testing of this deterrent in October 2006—followed by another American “surrender,” i.e. a return to talks—less attention has been devoted to the back-story of the nuclear saga, which, quite apart from its logical holes, now seems rather dull in comparison.

  Since 2006 the propaganda apparatus has engaged in all-out acclamation of the “military-first” policy that made the DPRK a nuclear power. (Only the Great Leader’s liberation of the peninsula now occupies a more important place in the national history.) The masses are to believe that America now has even greater respect and fear of its adversary, a message unwittingly confirmed by the superpower’s recent peace overtures, such as the New York Philharmonic’s visit to the DPRK in February 2008. When former president Bill Clinton flew to Pyongyang in August 2009 to win the release of two detained US journalists, the official media made much of the deference and contrition shown to the Great Ruler by his erstwhile foe. (It was also claimed, though the US State Department denied it, that Clinton had conveyed an oral message from President Obama.)52 The Korean bomb is even said to have intimidated the Yankees into assuming a lower profile in their colony to the south. On theater stages, clowns with noses enlarged by putty play GI’s bumbling around amidst the increasingly rebellious South Koreans. In a recent comic strip, US military officers ask a passing local to take their picture. Promising the perfect backdrop, he leads them to the UN cemetery.53

  But America is too important a scapegoat for the regime ever to claim to have defeated it once and for all. To do so would be to raise public expectations of a drastic improvement in living standards, the immediate reunification of the peninsula, and everything else that Washington is now accused of preventing.

  The enemy must therefore always be shown reneging on the terms of its latest surrender.54 Lest anyone think that nuclear talks might lead to a different relationship with the US, Kim Jong Il himself is quoted as saying, “The Yankees are the eternal enemies of our masses; we cannot live under the same sky with them.”55 A common way to whip up anger during periods of lesser tension is to demand vengeance for America’s historical crimes against the race.56

  The poem “To Grow Up Quickly, Quickly,” (2004) aims to instill this thirst for revenge in children by reminding them of the alleged American massacre at Sinch’ŏn during the Korean War:

  How bitter [General Kim Jong Il] must have felt

  To remain so long

  Before the grave of the 102 children

  Clenching his fists in silence.

  The Father General must have come

  To Sinch’ǒn, where all children my age died

  To make sure that in this land,

  There would never be another bloody Sinch’ǒn …

  So, taking that resolve to my own heart,

  I am going to join the army;

  I will take two guns, three guns

  And shoot down all the American bastards

  Ah, to grow up quickly

  To grow up quickly, quickly.57

  There is much talk of this “blood reckoning” that the nation’s elders expect the younger generation to execute. “Our masses have already imposed a death sentence on US imperialism,” a literary journal intoned in 2006. “We will certainly carry it out.”58

  Yet the rhetoric usually stops just short of demanding an offensive invasion of the South. The standard message can be reduced to the following nutshell: We will destroy the Yankees and their lackeys, re-uniting the motherland in the process, if they dare attack or provoke us.59 But the regime’s notion of what constitutes an act of war against it—economic sanctions, attempts to inspect its ships, etc—grows ever broader. Posters now threaten America and Japan with a devastating reprisal if they so much as insult the republic. One caption: “We will reckon decisively with anyone, anywhere who meddles with our self-respect.”60 There is no discounting the possibility that the armed forces receive an even more bellicose form of the Text than the population at large.

  Ideologies that divide a virtuous in-group from an evil outside world always do an excellent job of unifying the in-group. “Hatred is probably the most spontaneous and common sentiment,” Jacques Ellul wrote. “Propaganda of agitation succeeds each time it designates someone as the source of all misery, provided he is not too powerful.”61 The Americans are still vilified in precisely those terms, as they never were in Soviet propaganda. The line, “The Yankees are the source of all our masses’ misery and suffering” is belabored especially often in June and July, which, due to the anniversaries of the war’s beginning and end, are to anti-US invective what February, March and April are for the Kim cults.62

  The anti-American short story “Jackals” (1951) was simultaneously republished in three magazines in August 2003, just as the Six Party Talks were due to begin. Above, the story’s missionary-villain in one of the accompanying illustrations.

  To Bruce Cumings and other left-leaning observers, these expressions of anti-Americanism reflect a more or less popular and untutored anger at US outrages in the Korean War. I happen to agree with Cumings that the bombing of the DPRK (which included plentiful use of napalm) was carried out with enough indifference to the lives of civilians to constitute a war crime. Let us bear in mind, however, that a) no other bombed-out country has borne a grudge with such fervor for so long, b) that anti-American propaganda was hardly less intense before the Korean War than after it and c) that Jackals (1951), the Text’s main anti-American tale, is not about the war but about missionary child-killers: a tale, in other words, with one obvious root in nineteenth-century peasant rumor and another in fascist Japan’s anti-Christianity campaign.

  It is no coincidence that a poster illustrating that story’s central crime—the caption: “100,000 times revenge on the Yankee vampires”—appeared in 1999, when North Korea was the Clinton administration’s main aid-recipient in Asia.63 Nor was it by accident that Jackals was simultaneously republished, complete with racist caricatures, in three magazines in August 2003, just before and during the first round of the six-party talks.64 Ever since Kim Jong Il proclaimed his “military-first” government, effectively shaking off responsibility for the country’s economic ruin, declines in real-world tension between Pyongyang and Washington have seen an intensification of anti-Americanism, not a lessening of it. Only one conclusion is possible: The regime is worried that the masses might cease to perceive the US as an enemy, thus leaving it with no way to justify its rule—or even to justify the existence of the DPRK as a separate state.

  † The Jews’ baleful influence on American politics is mentioned in Ryǒksa ŭi taeha, 226, Ch’ŏngddae, 262, while in Yŏngsaeng, 253, Kim Il Sung tell
s Jimmy Carter (whose reaction is not given) that the Jews are treacherous.

  † Ch’ǒllima, inside back cover, May 1999. In 2002 I visited a re-settlement facility for refugees near Seoul, where I was eyed with open hostility. When I finally managed to engage a teenager in conversation, she said, “Americans did bad things in Korea.” When I asked her to elaborate, she told me haltingly about missionaries in the colonial era who killed a child for—she put her head to one side—was it taking fruit from their orchard?

  ‡ The South Korean writer Hwang Sŏk-yŏng’s novel Sonnim (The Guest, 2001), based on eyewitness accounts of the massacre, inspired an MBC television documentary in 2002, which confirmed Hwang’s assertion that the killings had taken place just before the arrival of American troops.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE YANKEE COLONY

  The regime’s discussion of South Korea—or “south Korea” as its English-language organs prefer to call it—has always differed starkly from the Sozialkritik that East Germany once brought to bear on its rival. Faced with a porous border to West Berlin and constant infiltration by Western television and radio broadcasts, the GDR had no choice but to concede the outward signs of affluence and freedom in the Federal Republic. Propaganda sought to persuade the East German people that the glittering exterior masked “contradictions” in the capitalist system that doomed it to ruin. As the West’s economy pulled further ahead, the communists found it ever harder to get this message across; the rest is history. Kim Il Sung, in contrast, had little problem keeping heterodox influences out of his domain. By the mid-1960s he had sealed his citizens off even from the socialist bloc. As a result his propaganda apparatus was free to depict South Korea as the impoverished antipode to the North’s “paradise on earth”: a “living hell” where children rummaged for food in trash heaps while American soldiers shot at them for target practice.1

  The rapid deterioration of the information cordon in the latter 1990s forced Kim Il Sung’s successor to drop that propaganda line, and admit that South Koreans had come to enjoy a higher standard of living than their brethren in the DPRK. If the masses took this revelation in stride, as they appear to have done, it was because the “Yankee colony” had always been condemned more on nationalist and moralist than on Marxist-Leninist grounds.

  After the North-South summit in June 2000, the KCNA and the Rodong sinmun newspaper cut back on their coverage of the South and refrained completely from direct attacks on Kim Dae Jung, thus conveying the impression of a Sunshine-induced thaw in relations. There were also carefully worded editorials that welcomed North-South “exchanges” while stopping short of recognizing the South’s right to exist. Anti-ROK propaganda in these high-profile sources was largely reduced to: the ironic use of quotation marks when referring to the country’s official name (“Han’guk”) and institutions (“government,” “national assembly,” etc); the one-sided if sober reporting of bad news from the South (diseases, accidents, etc) and the histrionic condemnation of its conservative opposition.

  Meanwhile a hard-line anti-South message continued to be spread by schoolbooks, novels, oral propaganda, party lecture materials, and other forms of propaganda that the outside world was rightly expected to overlook.

  A brief summary of the myth of the “Yankee colony”:

  In 1945, just after the Great Leader Kim Il Sung had defeated the Japanese, the Yankees took advantage of the temporary chaos to occupy the southern half of the peninsula. Setting up a puppet regime in Seoul under the traitor Syngman Rhee, they brutally crushed the people’s councils that had sprung up across the south—killing tens of thousands of people on Cheju Island alone—and reinstated pro-Japanese collaborators to positions of power and influence. Rejecting the Great Leader’s call for a pan-Korean election, Rhee proclaimed the “Republic of Korea” in 1948.

  In June 25, 1950 the Yankees and their stooges launched a surprise attack on the DPRK, but were repelled, and finally surrendered on July 27, 1953. Thwarted in their scheme to destroy Korean socialism, the Yankees set about exploiting their puppet state with renewed vengeance, all the while waiting for another opportunity to attack the DPRK. For decades the southern brethren were forced to live in abject poverty, suffering the brutal oppression of the puppet dictatorship and enduring the crimes and outrages committed by rampaging US troops. In 1980 the Yankees and the Chun Doo Hwan clique colluded in the massacre of young demonstrators in Kwangju, but the forces of freedom and democracy would not be silenced. Again and again they took to the streets, finally forcing the “Republic of Korea,” in desperation, to claim that military rule had ended.

  A civilian “government” was “elected,” but behind the façade of “democracy” the Yankees continued pulling the strings. Fortunately the military-first policy of General Kim Jong Il has so frightened and confounded the Yankees that they dare not oppress their colony as heavy-handedly as before. In 2000 the puppet “government” had no choice but to yield to the southern masses’ demands for inter-Korean cooperation. At a meeting that year in Pyongyang the Dear Leader had the south Korean “president” sign an agreement pledging to pursue unification without American intervention. In the following years inter-Korean economic cooperation flourished, leading to a rapid improvement in the quality of life in the Yankee colony. The southern masses are acutely aware that were it not for the DPRK’s military-first policy, the Yankees would long since have plunged them into another ruinous war. They owe their material comfort to the self-sacrifice not only of the Dear Leader, but of all the heroic citizens of the DPRK. To be sure, this material comfort is but paltry compensation for the Yankee’s defiling presence. The south Koreans’ most fervent wish, now as before, is to live in a free and united nation under the Dear Leader’s rule. Unfortunately the drive for unification suffered a setback in 2008, when the traitor Lee Myung Bak took over as the new “president” of the puppet state, vowing to turn back the clock on inter-Korean cooperation …2

  Because the ROK is now condemned almost exclusively on ethnocentric and moralistic grounds, the Text is free not only to concede the rival state’s economic affluence but even to exaggerate it, the evident aim being to inoculate the masses against future revelations. No amount of wealth, the message runs, can still the southern brethren’s yearning for freedom and purification. The typical “south Korean” in the visual arts is thus no longer a starving child on a junk heap but a handsome man in a suit waving the so-called unification flag (the peninsula in blue against a white background) or a fashionably dressed college girl thrilled by the projected image of Kim Jong Il’s signature.3 The novel Encounter (Mannam, 2001) introduces readers to a young journalist in Seoul who can somehow afford both a flashy car and a house in the city center. His free time is spent wandering with his girlfriend “from cinema to video room and theater, zoo, botanical gardens, Mount Chiri and Mount Sǒrak, discotheque and beach.”4

  Of course, this superficial affluence masks a world of ethnic contaminations. In contrast to the DPRK, where the people are “as pure as the water they drink,” the South is polluted in every sense. In Encounter a south Korean girl says:

  ‘Han’guk’ [the South Korean word for Korea—BRM] is making its world debut as the flashiest of American colonies, so much so that the Americans tout it as a model. But look under the silk encasing, and you see the body of what has degenerated to a foul whore of America. Here and there covered in bruises from where it has been kicked black and blue by the American soldiers’ boots, or decaying from where the American sewage has seeped in. And out of all of that has come a rotten “president,” a rotten “government,” rotten media.… [I]t turns the stomach just to imagine it.5

  The regime attributes the influx of heterodox culture to a US scheme to destabilize the country; in fact, the most popular DVDs and videos in the DPRK are of South Korean origin.

  Plenty of attention is devoted to the dangers of life in the South. The following excerpt from the novel Ah, Motherland (A, choguk, 2004) refers to South Korea under
Kim Dae Jung’s rule.

  Here in this accident-filled “republic,” with its traffic accidents and collapsing buildings, this country that likes putting its former presidents in prison, the media does not enlighten people about the world so much as keep them in the dark.… Do you know how many cars are stolen every year? The place is full of thieves. 120 people disappear every day, everywhere there are assaults, violent gangs, the subway is a hell-way.… You know the only thing this South Korea leads the world in? In indictments and reports to the police it’s number one. It’s five, ten times the level of other countries, so mightn’t one just as well say that the whole country consists of snitches and police detectives? Where else can one find such a disgraceful state of affairs?6

  Just what America seeks to achieve in its colony is left unclear, as is the extent and nature of its control. The Text wants to present a colony groaning under the Yankee yoke, but it also wants to mock the occupying power’s failure to control its subjects. It indulges the latter urge more often; nothing is more contemptible to the North Korean worldview than weakness. South Korea’s rulers (including the dictator Park Chung Hee) are more likely to be shown scraping obsequiously before their foreign masters than cracking down on basic freedoms. The lowest ranking representatives of the colonial power come in for the brunt of vilification. Straw-haired, beak-nosed GI’s, often in dark glasses or Military Police helmets, are shown harassing women on darkened streets or committing outrages against local children: running them over for a laugh, say, or “adopting” them for use as house-slaves.7 These are rather tame allegations compared to propaganda disseminated before the mid-1990s. The public’s growing awareness of the real South Korea has made it impossible for the Text to keep claiming (for example) that the Yankees use children for shooting practice. One is to believe that the “military-first” policy has frightened the Americans into behaving better. Every week the Rodong sinmun quotes half-identified South Koreans (“a Mr. Kim in Seoul,” “a professor in Busan”) who express their gratitude to the Dear Leader for his “super-hardline” stance.8