The Cleanest Race (16 page)
Authors: B.R. Myers
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.
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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.
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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 standing 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.
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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.”
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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 …”
“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.
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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.”
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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.
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In the most explicit indication of the extent of the food shortage, the writer describes her as “gaunt from loss of
weight.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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 …”
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He is also increasingly referred to as “our parent,” though the fixed epithet Parent Leader is evidently still reserved for Kim Il Sung.
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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!
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