The Cleanest Race (17 page)

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:

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.

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.

Sensing what is in store for him, the captive tries to run away, but the Korean 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
.

In 1945, while Kim Il Sung was busy routing the Japanese, the Yankees took advantage of the confusion to occupy the southern part of the peninsula, where they massacred democratic forces and installed a puppet government under “president” Syngman Rhee. On June 25, 1950 the Yankees and their lackeys launched a surprise attack on the DPRK, but the heroic People’s Army drove them back. In desperation the Yankees resorted to the indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets, but still the Korean people refused to yield, and finally, on July 27 1953, the United States was forced to sign an abject surrender
.

It was the first in a long string of Yankee defeats. In 1968 an American spy ship ventured brazenly into DPRK waters; it was captured at once and its crew held until the US issued a servile apology. A year later an American spy plane was shot down over Korean territory, but for all Washington’s saber-rattling, which included the threat of nuclear attack, it ŭltimately did nothing. In 1976 People’s Army soldiers at the DMZ were ambushed by
axe-wielding Yankee troops; the Koreans wrested the axes from their attackers and killed two of them. Again Washington’s bark proved worse than its bite
.