The Cleanest Race (21 page)
Authors: B.R. Myers
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
Especially interesting are North Korea’s efforts to discredit President Kim Dae Jung, the architect of the accomodationist Sunshine Policy. In real life a left-wing nationalist sympathetic to Pyongyang, he is depicted as traveling to the summit in June 2000 with the sinister goal of dragging the DPRK into the “free world.” (The scare quotes are the Text’s.) He even rehearses the talks beforehand with Kim Jong Il impersonators or
kagemusha
, the better to sharpen his skills of persuasion.
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(The Japanese word underscores the un-Korean deviousness of the exercise.) Days before the trip, his men trumpet their anti-communism in the “national assembly.” They will dangle aid in front of the North Koreans in the hope that the country’s economic difficulties will make them yield to the South’s proposals.
The plan backfires. Arriving at the airport in Pyongyang, Kim Dae Jung is stunned to find the smiling General waiting
to greet him. Unmanned by this unprecedented departure from North Korean protocol, the doddering “president” cuts an even more pathetic figure than usual. In the following excerpt, which retains the bold font use of the original text, a journalist from Seoul remembers with embarrassment how Kim Dae Jung reviewed the DPRK’s honor guard:
The forest of serried bayonets gleaming in the sunshine! The “president” hobbling along on his ailing legs!!… We were used to seeing him walking with effort.… But at that moment we felt sorry for him … sad. uneasy. Because it looked as if the old “president” was flustered. But I felt something shooting up inside me when I saw National Defense Council Chairman
Kim Jong Il
walking at a deeply considerate pace behind him, saw his courteous, polite form.…
10
The two men get into a limousine that takes them into Pyongyang down a road lined with crowds shouting the Dear Leader’s (and only his) name. Later, at a banquet, the “president”‘s wife sits at a remove from the two men; the novel contrives to imply that all is not well in the south Koreans’ marriage. The Dear Leader asks her to come and join them. “We can’t be having divided families even in the banquet hall,” he jokes, as the room erupts in laughter.
11
On another occasion he peremptorily calls out “Come here, ministers!” to the top-ranking members of the south Korean delegation. The Text claims that schoolteachers in Seoul now use the phrase when summoning their little charges: “The kids get a kick out of it.”
12
The “president” is described as having been thwarted by the genius and charisma of the Dear Leader, who, instead of
yielding to Seoul in return for handouts, demanded economic
cooperation
—and got it. He demanded a joint declaration of the need for autonomy and unification—and got that too.
13
Of course, to say that the south Korean officials had been persuaded by rational argument would be to imply that they a) were reasonable people, b) had the autonomy to sign inter-Korean agreements as they saw fit, and c) might henceforth agree with the DPRK on some issues. These are all potentially subversive notions. One is therefore to believe that the visitors were somehow dazzled and befuddled into signing on the dotted line, then “came to” during the return to Seoul, where popular “Kim Jong Il mania” kept them from reneging on the agreement.
†
In short, the Dear Leader won this zero-sum game and the “president” lost. The south Korean journalist sums up:
“We conducted all manner of preparation and research to pull the North into the ‘free world.’ But in the event, not only we but the whole of ‘Han’guk’ were unexpectedly swept up in Kim Jong Il mania. There’s no knowing what power it was that turned everything on its head in a moment.… [W]e cannot but admit that our ‘peace strategy’ has suffered a total defeat at the hands of the North’s autonomy strategy.”
14
This is not pure fantasy. Judging from the South Koreans photographed at the summit, whose star-struck faces would not look out of place on a Pyongyang subway mural, the Leader did indeed succeed in charming his guests. He won over millions of television-watchers in the ROK too. (Schoolgirls there began describing him as “cute.”)
15
But there was nothing like the mass frenzy described in the novel,
which talks of young Seoulites adopting the General’s spartan work uniform, plum-tinted glasses selling like hotcakes, and crowds piling raucously into restaurants to eat Pyongyang-style noodles.
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Young lovers take advantage of the auspicious event to get married, posing for wedding photographs before backdrops of People’s Army soldiers.
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One man drives around with the DPRK’s flag fluttering from his hood.
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(When it suits the North to exaggerate the freedom of expression enjoyed in the South, it does so; in the real ROK, flying the red star of the rival state remains a punishable offense.) No one spares a thought for the feeble “president.” Truly, the summit was “a meeting between the Dear Leader and the 40 million-strong masses (minjung) of the south.”
19
Propaganda now concedes South Korea’s superior material wealth while still claiming that people there yearn to live under Pyongyang’s rule. Above, a street in Seoul erupts in joy at televised footage of Kim Jong Il.
As with the American enemy, the South Korean government’s gestures of good will are attributed to fear of the DPRK’s superior might and resolve. Kim Dae Jung’s repatriation of North Korean spies after the 2000 summit is a case in point: “The [southern] authorities bowed to pressure from the Republic’s government.”
20
The following excerpt from the oft-reprinted novel
World of Stars
(Pyŏl ŭi segye, 2002) recounts the Dear Leader’s response to the news.
Comrade Kim Jong Il quickly skimmed the report. For a moment a smile crossed his face. “They had no choice. Hm. Well, take a look. They’re finally bowing down.” All eyes turned to the document. Soon their faces, too—faces that had been taut with excitement and tension—were wreathed in smiles.… “Comrade Supreme Commander, the bastards, their backs against the wall, made this decision out of fear, didn’t they?” “Yes, it’s true,” someone cried. “It looks like they were
frightened of us, all right.” Comrade Kim Jong Il just kept on smiling.
21
At another point in the novel, the South (now under Kim Dae Jung’s rule) requests that the North do a little repatriating of its own. One of the Dear Leader’s officials is stunned by this presumption:
“General,” he said falteringly. “They’re saying they’re going to apply their principle of ‘reciprocity’ even to the issue of the long-term prisoners they couldn’t convert, so it looks like once again we’re going to have to.…” [Kim Jong Il:] “Make them eat another hard blow? Of course we have to do that.”
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The Text continues to remind the public of how much North Korea’s heroic returnees suffered in captivity.
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Always the unchanging nature of the Yankee colony is stressed: “The ‘government’ can change ten, twenty times, and America will still be calling the shots,” according to
The Letter
(2005).
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And yet this line never prevented the regime from claiming, especially in material aimed at South Korean readers, that an accession to power by the right-wing Grand National Party would plunge the peninsula into another ruinous war. These “Yankee lackeys” are described in the Text as a lunatic fringe able to wield political influence only due to their close ties to Washington. The election of a conservative to the South Korean presidency in 2007 thus forced the propaganda apparatus to claim that “the traitor Lee Myung Bak” had deceived voters about his true intentions. The following is from the KCNA’s English-language service:
Propaganda celebrated the defeat of the South Korean right in regional elections on April 29, 2009, but President Lee Myung Bak, shown here in the noose, had already begun rising in opinion polls—much to the DPRK’s consternation.
As far as Lee Myung Bak is concerned, he is a conservative political charlatan who took the office of mayor of Seoul from the ticket of the GNP after doing business since the period of the “Yusin” fascist dictatorial regime
[of Park Chung Hee—BRM]
. No wonder he revealed his true colors as a sycophant towards the US and anti-north confrontation advocator as soon as he came to power.
25
Though massive street protests in Seoul against American beef imports in 2008 seemed to confirm this propaganda line for a while, they were quick to fade away, and Lee’s approval ratings have since climbed steadily. A popular conservative president in the South, and the information cordon too full of holes to keep the North Korean masses ignorant of him: the propaganda apparatus seems at a loss to deal with this unprecedented state of affairs. In apparent desperation it has reverted to preposterous, pre-2000 style claims of widespread South Korean poverty.
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Thus does the regime run the risk of forfeiting the credibility it managed to maintain for so long, but what choice does it have? Even if Lee’s popularity declines again, it is but a matter of time before most North Koreans realize that the southern brethren are proud of their state, indifferent to the Dear Leader’s very existence, and content to postpone reunification indefinitely. Such revelations may not bring down the regime at once, but they will certainly bring down the Text.